The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall

by Daphne Du Maurier

  Francis would return: he would come home. York House was the property of Tobie Matthew’s father, the Archbishop of York—it had been the residence of the Archbishops of York in old days—but was now leased out to the holder of the Great Seal. Yes, he would come home, but not until the bereaved family of the late Lord Keeper had time to adjust to the change. He remembered the indecent haste with which his mother had been obliged to pack her things and depart in order to give way to her husband’s successor thirty-eight years ago. This time courtesy would prevail, and that promise of an earldom to Lord Ellesmere’s son would help to temper sorrow.

  Meanwhile Francis and his wife must find somewhere to live. His train of followers would increase of necessity, as suitable to his new status. What had passed for an Attorney-General would not do for the Lord Keeper, who, with his Majesty absent on his progress to Scotland, as the principal officer of the kingdom would find himself presiding at the head of the Council table; indeed, with the King absent for several months all matters pertaining to government would be referred to him. He would be every day in the palace of Whitehall; he would, in all senses, stand in for the monarch. Rumour had it that the Queen, who was not accompanying his Majesty to Scotland, was disappointed that she had not been made regent so that she could conduct the business of the state herself. Perhaps. Homage and respect would be due to her, but it was a relief to the Lord Keeper that she had decided, with the Prince of Wales, to retire to her new house at Greenwich while the King was in the north; her courtiers and other members of the Council could attend her there.

  So where to live? Part of Salisbury House, where his cousin had lived, was available, but no, it was too small. Essex House? Overfull of memories. Dorset House, the property of the Earl of Dorset, was then offered him free until York House should become vacant. This should content his wife and her own swelling train for the time being, but first—and doubtless at her own request, prompted by her interfering mother—a warrant was drawn up for his Majesty’s signature declaring that ‘Lady Bacon shall be ranked in place and precedency in all places and at all meetings, as well public as private, next to the ladies or wives of the Barons of this our realm.’ Thus honoured, Alice could not play the shrew and complain that at Court functions she was ignored and overlooked.

  State business claimed Francis’s attention: a project to erect staple towns in Ireland for the export of wool; precautions to be taken against disorder in the city of London, for there had been too much of this of late, and trained bands must be increased to keep the peace; measures set in motion against piracy at sea, where sea-captains and merchants were suffering much damage to ships and cargoes, and must have protection, as well as the assistance, if possible, of the King of Spain, whose goodwill might depend upon the negotiations for the marriage of his daughter to the Prince of Wales…

  Six days at Gorhambury over the Easter break had renewed Francis’s energies. One of his new secretaries was Edward Sherburn, who had frequently corresponded with Dudley Carleton and John Chamberlain during the past year, and had reported most ably and accurately on the trial of the Earl of Somerset. Such young men, in touch with many sources of information, were useful to the new Lord Keeper.

  On May 7th 1617 Sir Francis Bacon, Keeper of the Great Seal and, until a successor should be appointed to the late Lord Ellesmere, representing the Lord Chancellor and the absent monarch, took his seat in the Court of Chancery and delivered his first speech of office. The gossips made fine play of the great occasion. ‘Our Lord Keeper,’ said one, ‘exceeds all his predecessors in the bravery and multitude of his servants. It amazes those that look on his beginnings, besides never so indulgent a master.’ (The correspondent appeared not to know that Francis Bacon held the office his father held.) ‘On the first day of term he appeared in his greatest glory; for to the Hall, besides his own retinue, did accompany him all the Lords of his Majesty’s Council and others, with all knights and gentlemen that could get horses and foot-cloths.’ And John Chamberlain reported, ‘There was a great deal more bravery and better show of horse than was expected in the King’s absence; but both Queen and Prince sent all their followers, and his other friends did their best to honour him. He made a speech in Chancery; the substance of which was some reformation in that court, not without glancing at his predecessor, whose beginnings he professed he would follow; but excepted against some of his latter courses; yet would not undo anything he had done. He pleased himself much in the flourishing of the law; and remarked that great lawyers’ sons have the way to succeed their fathers… The greatest part of his train dined with him that day, which dinner cost him, as is generally reported, £700.’

  The speech, which dealt throughout with legal matters pertaining to the Court of Chancery, included the following words: ‘Because justice is a sacred thing, and the end for which I am called to this place, and therefore is my way to heaven, and if it be shorter is never a whit the worse, I shall by the grace of God, as far as God shall give me strength, add the afternoon to the forenoon, and some fourth night of the vacation to the term, for the expediting and clearing of the causes of the court. Only the depth of the three long vacations I would reserve in some measure free for business of estate, and for studies, arts, and sciences, to which in my nature I am most inclined.’

  An interesting observation by that first correspondent, who had exclaimed at the multitude of the train which had followed the Lord Keeper into Palace Yard, was that he was dressed, as he had been at his wedding in 1606, in a suit of purple satin. Did Francis Bacon, at fifty-six, still cling to boyhood fantasy, the regal purple a remnant of an unconscious dream? If so, it was in total contrast to his other self, for the next day he wrote to the Earl of Buckingham, who was with the King on his progress, ‘Yesterday I took my place in Chancery, which I hold only from the King’s grace and favour, and your constant friendship. There was much ado, and a great deal of world. But this matter of pomp, which is heaven to some men, is hell to me, or purgatory at least.’ The magnificence and the splendour thus cloaked and concealed the inner man, or, as he had said in other words in his Redargutio Philosophiarum, ‘Every man of superior understanding in contact with his inferiors wears a mask.’

  It was not surprising that during the following week he was absent from the Council and the Star Chamber with a fit of the gout—or such was the excuse. Indisposition on becoming Solicitor-General. Indisposition on becoming Attorney-General. ‘Strangeness, clouds, inclined to superstition…’ His absence caused some talk amongst the gossips. ‘But in truth the general opinion is that he hath so tender a constitution both of body and mind,’ said John Chamberlain, ‘that he will hardly be able to undergo the burden of so much business as his place requires; and that if he do not rouse and force himself beyond his natural inclination, both private subjects and the commonwealth will suffer much.’

  Chamberlain need not have concerned himself. Fit of the gout or fit of the clouds, the Lord Keeper was able to compose a speech on the appointment of the new Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, Sir William Jones, in which he told him, ‘Ireland is the last ex filiis Europae which hath been reclaimed from desolation and a desert, in many parts, to population and plantation; and from savage and barbarous customs to humanity and civility… So as that kingdom, which once within these twenty years wise men were wont to doubt whether they would wish it to be in a pool, is like now to become almost a garden, and a younger sister to Great Britain… My last direction, though first in weight, is, that you do all good endeavours to proceed resolutely and constantly, and yet with due temperance and equality, in matters of religion; lest Ireland civil become more dangerous to us than Ireland savage.’

  It is unfortunate that greater heed was not taken of the Lord Keeper’s advice during succeeding years. They were certainly not the words of a man whose mind was in the clouds.

  When he did return to the Council in the third week in May it is very possible that he wished he could have prolonged his fit of the gout. He found that a furio
us altercation had been in progress between his old love Lady Hatton and her husband Sir Edward Coke. Accompanied by her brother Lord Burghley and a number of friends, she had come to the Council and flung a petition upon the table, accusing Coke of desiring to rob her of her personal estate, inherited from her first husband Sir William Hatton. It was said afterwards, by those present, that the actor ‘Burbage could not have acted better, she declaimed so bitterly against him’. Counsel for Sir Edward counter-charged that Lady Hatton ‘had disfurnished and taken away out of three of his houses all hangings, plate and household stuff, and also that she gave him to his face or by letter these unfit words of false treacherous villain’. The Lord Keeper may have been reminded of his description of Scylla in Cogitata et Visa—‘her loins were girt about with yelping hounds’. If so we have, alas, no private memoranda to tell us of it, nor any letter from the Lady Hatton warning her former suitor that she had given tongue and expected him to support her. He refused to become involved, and made a motion to the Council referring the whole matter to Lord Carew and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  The business was settled for the time being, but Francis Bacon was very well aware that trouble might break out again at any moment between husband and wife, and this time he himself would have to exercise the utmost discretion, or he would give offence to his young friend the Earl of Buckingham. The fact was that Buckingham’s elder brother, Sir John Villiers, had been negotiating a marriage with Frances, the younger of the two daughters of Sir Edward Coke and Lady Hatton. Coke was in favour of the match, for an alliance with the favourite’s brother would surely bring him back into favour with his Majesty. His wife, Lady Hatton, was against it. She had other plans for her daughter.

  It is exasperating, for the modern sleuth, that no letters have survived between Francis Bacon and Elizabeth Hatton; there must have been several in existence once, dating back to the original courtship in 1597—when the lady disdained the young lawyer from Gray’s Inn and married his rival—down to this period of 1617, when her own fifteen-year-old daughter, singularly enough named Frances, was sought in marriage by someone of whom she disapproved. Francis Bacon was no longer an impecunious lawyer. He was Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and as such could prove a most valuable ally in her cause. Had she some secret hold upon him? We shall never know.

  Someone who might have had access to letters at this time, if they existed, was the new secretary Edward Sherburn, for in early June John Chamberlain told his friend Dudley Carleton, ‘I saw not Master Sherburn these three weeks. He is grown so inward with his Lord that he is about him in his chamber, and during his indisposition hath waited at an inch; which I hope will turn to his good.’

  Possibly it was young Sherburn who was Chamberlain’s informant later that month about domestic trouble with the Lord Keeper’s in-laws. Alice Bacon’s mother, Lady Packington, was once again suing her husband Sir John, but, said the gossip, ‘The Lord Keeper deals very honourably in the matter, which though he could not compound being referred to him, yet he carries himself so indifferently that he wisheth her to yield, and tells her plainly and publicly that she must look for no countenance from him as long as she follows this course.’

  Disputes and squabbles between man and wife were something Francis Bacon could not stomach. Hence his discreet silence where his own wife was concerned. If, during the eleven years they had been married, there should have been anything untoward to report, assuredly John Chamberlain would have had wind of it. It was from him, and others, that we hear of the next round in the contest between Sir Edward Coke and Lady Hatton, and this time neither gout, nor clouds, nor matters of State could prevent the Lord Keeper from becoming involved.

  The actual date of the opening battle seems to be uncertain, but at some point in the latter part of June Sir Edward Coke informed his wife—who with their daughter Frances was living with him once again—that he had now settled the business of the marriage between Sir John Villiers and Frances: she should have a dowry of £10,000 and an allowance of £1,000 a year. Sir John was agreeable, and his mother Lady Compton satisfied. Arrangements for the wedding could be set in motion.

  All hell and fury were let loose. Never, never would Lady Hatton give her consent. Daughter Frances burst into tears. She did not want to marry a dull stick like Sir John Villiers. When she did marry, she would marry for love. How many days the storm lasted we are not told, but the resourceful Lady Hatton, still in the prime of life (she had not yet turned forty), had plans of her own. One night, when Sir Edward was asleep, she and her daughter left Stoke by coach for the house of her cousin, Sir Edmond Withipole, at Oatlands. They arrived at dawn, and were received kindly, if perhaps with embarrassment, by host and hostess, who promised secrecy.

  Lady Hatton then did rather a foolish thing. She decided she must have a rival claimant for her daughter’s hand, and one of equal, or rather higher, status than Sir John Villiers. Henry de Vere, Earl of Oxford, would do—his father’s first wife had been a cousin of hers. He was absent in Italy, and letters would take too long to reach him, but no matter: she would promise him two houses, and an income of £4,000 to £6,000 a year. She then set herself to persuade her daughter to favour the match, but, seeing that Frances was neither impressed nor very willing, she composed a letter, saying that it had come from the Earl of Oxford, asking for the honour of Frances’s hand. Such subterfuges had been in fashion once (possibly Lady Hatton remembered the time when her former suitor Francis Bacon had written a letter to the Earl of Essex, at the time of the earl’s disgrace, pretending that it came from his brother Anthony, hoping, by such means, to move the Queen). Her daughter showed some interest, on the strength of which Lady Hatton composed yet another document, which the naïve Frances signed, stating that she plighted her troth to Henry Vere, Earl of Oxford, and if she broke her vow she would beseech God that the earth might open and swallow her up.

  Certainly Lady Hatton had a vivid imagination. Acting in all those masques at Court had whetted her appetite for drama. But she had reckoned without her husband. Sir Edward Coke, as furious as his wife, applied to the Council for a warrant to recover his daughter from Oatlands. Here, once again, the dates are confusing. It seems to have been in the first week in July, and both the Lord Keeper and Sir Ralph Winwood, his Majesty’s Secretary of State, were at the Council table when the application for the warrant was received. The Lord Keeper refused to sign it. Sir Ralph Winwood, who was a friend of Sir Edward Coke, protested. There was mutual antipathy between the two men, but whether the question of the proposed marriage between Sir John Villiers and Coke’s daughter was discussed that day, and whether the right of Lady Hatton to keep her daughter at Oatlands led to words between them, we do not know.

  That there was trouble, but of a different kind, was reported not by the usual gossips but by a Bishop Goodman. ‘The difference fell out upon a very small occasion,’ says the prelate, ‘that Winwood did beat his dog from lying upon a stool, which Bacon seeing said that every gentleman did love a dog.’ A small occasion, indeed, but an instant impression is created of the Secretary of State, irritated, brushing the unfortunate animal from his seat, and the Lord Keeper looking upon him with his hazel eyes, coldly, contemptuously: ‘Every gentleman loves a dog’, with just the slightest emphasis on that word gentleman, calculated to sting the pride of Sir Ralph Winwood. And imagination goes further, to picture the many dogs there surely must have been at Gorhambury, to welcome their master’s return.

  Bishop Goodman continues, ‘This passed on; then at the same time having some business to sit upon, it should seem that Secretary Winwood sat too near my Lord Keeper, and his Lordship willed him either to keep or to know his distance. Whereupon he arose from table.’

  The upshot was that the Secretary of State, either then or shortly afterwards, signed the warrant for Sir Edward Coke to recover his daughter. It is possible he did not have the right of signature. If so, Sir Edward Coke disregarded the fact. Accompanied by his sons by his first marriage
and several attendants, he rode to Sir Edmond Withipole’s house at Oatlands. But the birds had flown. Someone must have warned Lady Hatton and her daughter that he was on his way. Who? We do not know. They had fled to a house at Hampton Court belonging to the Earl of Argyle. Someone, a servant perhaps from Oatlands, gave away their whereabouts, upon which Sir Edward rode straight to the new hiding-place, broke down the doors, discovered his wife and daughter hiding in a closet, and seizing his weeping daughter from her mother’s arms departed for Stoke Poges, his own estate.

  ‘His Lady was at his heels,’ reported Chamberlain, ‘and if her coach had not tired in the pursuit after him there was like to be strange tragedies.’ In fact, Lady Hatton’s coach either overturned or lost a wheel, which gave her ladyship time to think again. She must have realised that it would be useless to follow her husband and his train to Stoke; the doors would be barred, and alone she would achieve nothing. Her coach repaired, she decided to go straightway to London to see the only man who could help her—her friend and former suitor, the Lord Keeper. It was Saturday, July 12th. No report of this manoeuvre from the gossips, who would have seized upon it had they known. The source of information is Mrs. Sadler, one of Sir Edward Coke’s daughters by his first marriage.

  ‘At last to my Lord Keeper’s they come, but could not have instant access to him for that his people told them he was laid at rest, not being well. Then my Lady Hatton desired she might be in the next room where my Lord lay, that she might be the first that should speak with him after he was stirring. The door-keeper fulfilled her desire and in the meantime gave her a chair to rest herself in, and there left her alone; but not long after, she rose up and bounced against my Lord Keeper’s door, and waked him and affrighted him, that he called his men to him; and they opening the door, she thrust in with them, and desired his Lordship to pardon her boldness, but she was like a cow that had lost her calf.’