The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall

by Daphne Du Maurier

  On April 24th the Prince of Wales rose in the Upper House and handed over the letter of submission, which was read to the assembled peers. A committee was then formed to consider the letter. Both the Prince and the Marquis of Buckingham hoped the submission would be accepted and the matter ended without a formal sentence. Others were less lenient, the Earl of Suffolk amongst them. A debate followed, on the question of whether the Lord Chancellor should have a list of every charge sent to him, or whether he should be summoned to answer the charges in person. The House divided on this question, the majority being in favour of the charges being sent, doubtless the more lenient being anxious to spare the accused’s state of health. The list of the offences was therefore despatched to York House, despite the fact that the Lords had made no attempt to sift the evidence, to examine the legal aspect of the charges, or to investigate any mitigating circumstances. Nothing had been proved in open court, the witnesses and complainants having been examined in private.

  The roll of charges was returned by the Lord Chancellor on April 30th with these opening words, ‘Upon advised consideration of the charge, descending into my own conscience, and calling my memory to account so far as I am able, I do plainly and ingenuously confess that I am gulty of corruption; and do renounce all defence, and put myself upon the grace and mercy of your Lordships.’ The twenty-seven charges followed, to each of which he confessed, taking, one could almost swear, a perverse pleasure in his own humiliation. If a man must sink, then let him wallow in the mire. When formally asked, by a deputation from the Lords, whether the signature to his confession was in his own hand, he replied, ‘My Lords, it is my act, my hand, my heart. I beseech your Lordships, be merciful to a broken Lord.’

  The upper House accepted the confession. The next procedure was to decide the sentence. Had he been well enough to do so, the Lord Chancellor would have been ordered to appear to hear sentence pronounced, but he was still sick in bed, and it was thought he might not have long to live. By May 3rd the Lords were agreed upon their verdict, and the Lower House was informed. The Lords put on their robes. The Speaker came to the bar and, bowing low, demanded in the name of the lower House that the Lord Chief Justice should declare the judgement. This was as follows:

  That the Lord Viscount St. Alban, Lord Chancellor of England, shall undergo fine and ransom of forty thousand pounds.

  That he shall be imprisoned in the Tower during the King’s pleasure.

  That he shall for ever be incapable of any office, place, or employment in the State or Commonwealth.

  That he shall never sit in Parliament, nor come within the verge of the Court.

  How Francis Bacon heard the sentence we do not know. One of his close friends—and he had many in both Houses—must have brought it to his bedside, and would have surely told him how the upper House had been divided in their opinion, the Lords Sheffield, Richmond and Arundel not wishing him to be degraded, and the Marquis of Buckingham dissenting from all punishment. He cannot have been so sick that these names made no impression. And never to be employed again, ineligible for any office in State or Commonwealth—did the full implication of this penetrate his mind? Who was at his bedside? The chaplain Dr Rawley? The very able friend and secretary Thomas Meautys? His old friend and servant Henry Percy? His wife? We do not know.

  The Earl of Southampton, remembering his own two years’ imprisonment after the Essex rebellion in the time of Queen Elizabeth, asked the Lords in the upper House on May 12th why the Lord Chancellor had not yet been sent to the Tower. The Marquis of Buckingham, now Lord Admiral, informed him that, ‘The King hath respited his going to the Tower in this time of his great sickness.’ The answer did not satisfy those peers who, besides rejoicing in Viscount St. Alban’s downfall, were resentful of Buckingham’s own growing power in State affairs, and a warrant was sent committing the late Lord Chancellor to the Tower. The exact date of his imprisonment is uncertain, but that he was there on May 31st is known from his letter to Buckingham on that day, written from the Tower of London.

  ‘Good my Lord,

  ‘Procure the warrant for my discharge this day. Death, I thank God, is so far from being unwelcome to me, as I have called for it, as Christian resolution would permit, any time these two months. But to die before the time of his Majesty’s grace, and in this disgraceful place, is even the worst that could be; and when I am dead, he is gone that was always in one tenor, a true and perfect servant to his master, and one that was never author of any immoderate, no, nor unsafe, no—I will say it—nor unfortunate counsel; and one that no temptation could ever make other than a trusty, and honest, and thrice loving friend to your Lordship; and howsoever I acknowledge the sentence just, and for reformation sake fit, the justest Chancellor that hath been in the five changes since Sir Nicholas Bacon’s time. God bless and prosper your Lordship, whatsoever become of me.

  ‘Your Lordship’s true friend, living and dying,

  ‘Fr. St. Alban.’

  Imprisonment had reawakened the fighting spirit; and one is led to speculate whether his judges would have been of another mind, have given another sentence, if Francis Bacon had been sufficiently master of himself at the end of April to have gone to the upper House, confronted his accusers, and stood upon his defence. Skilled orator that he was, with a perfect command of language, he would surely have delivered a speech unsurpassed for eloquence that would have trounced his fellow peers. That he preferred silence is further proof of the extraordinary complexity of the man whose soul was truly, in his own words, ‘a stranger in the course of my pilgrimage.’ Not only to the world, but to himself as well.

  His appeal to Buckingham, and thence to the King, succeeded. By May 4th he was released from the Tower, and lodging at the house of Sir John Vaughan in Fulham. Sir John was Comptroller to the Prince of Wales, and that this house was immediately put at Bacon’s disposal showed that the Prince himself was sympathetic, as well as Buckingham and the King, to the former Keeper of the Great Seal and Lord Chancellor.

  On the day of his release Francis wrote letters of gratitude both to his Majesty and to the favourite. To the former, ‘Let me live to serve you, else life is but the shadow of death;’ to the latter, ‘Now my body is out, my mind nevertheless will be still in prison, till I may be on my feet to do his Majesty and your Lordship faithful service.’ And on June 7th there was a rather longer letter to the Prince of Wales, extolling his virtues and princely qualities, as well as his religious, moral and natural excellencies. The ‘sweet air’ of Fulham had ‘already much revived’ Francis’s languishing spirits, and he was itching to be at work again, on the King’s business, on State business—but of course this was denied him. Debarred from approaching his Majesty’s presence, he must attend to his own affairs. His creditors were pressing heavily upon him, more especially since his fall, and he was reminded of how it had been when the Earl of Essex was first disgraced, and brother Anthony was obliged to bolt his door against the tradesmen. What would become of York House, of all the servants, many of whom, had he chosen to do so, he could have blamed for his present state? Some of them must go, had already gone. He no longer had the wherewithal to pay their wages. There was no money, none. Poor Ned Sherburn had already been arrested for debt, whether his own or his master’s neither of them could say.

  In mid-June Francis petitioned his Majesty that he might stay in London until the end of July, to clear up his affairs, but his request could not be granted. Doubtless the King felt that clemency had gone far enough and that peers and Parliament might protest; so by June 23rd Francis Bacon was home at Gorhambury.

  ‘He is gone this day, as I hear,’ John Chamberlain wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton, ‘to his own house at Gorhambury, having, as should seem, no manner of feeling of his fall but continuing as vain and idle in all his humours as when he was at his highest, and his fine of £40,000 to the King is so far from hurting him, that it serves for a bulwark and protection against his creditors.’ Gossip about those who have lost position does no
t much alter through the centuries. The wording may differ, but the sneer remains.

  There was little that was either vain or idle where Francis Bacon was concerned during the next few months. A man who is no longer employed by his sovereign or by Parliament, with a fine hanging over his head and creditors snapping at his heels, must turn to work of a different kind to keep himself from stark ruin. And the ex-Lord Chancellor was a writer, first and foremost. He realised now that to continue immediately with the next part of his Instauratio Magna would not bring him in a penny—the publication of the Novum Organum was proof of this: a more popular work, written in English, was more likely to produce the cash. He had often considered writing a history of Henry VII, a monarch for whom he had always had a high regard, and who was, moreover, great-great-grandfather to the present King. This would surely please. He would set to work at once. Yet isolation down at Gorhambury, without access to papers, documents and everything else needed for such a task, made the undertaking well-nigh impossible, and by September he was once more imploring both his Majesty and the Marquis of Buckingham for permission to return to London, and for some financial aid to enable him at least to live. The ex-Lord Chancellor, who in the recent past had given good advice to the sovereign upon state finances, was now at his wit’s end how to manage his own. Verulam House was not completed, bills were outstanding.

  ‘As for my debts,’ he told Buckingham, ‘I showed them to your Lordship, when you saw the little house and the gallery, besides a little wood or desert, which you saw not.’ He knew only too well the gossip spoken of him, how he had squandered with a lavish hand, and at the State’s expense. ‘I never took penny for any benefice or ecclesiastical living, I never took penny for releasing any thing I stopped at the seal, I never took penny for any commission or things of that nature, I never shared with any servant for any second or inferior profit. My offences I have myself recorded, wherein I studied, as a good confessant, guiltiness and not excuse.’

  He thought back into history, and how another statesman, also Lord Chancellor and a cardinal of the church, had been disgraced almost a hundred years before. Had he not been brought up on the story of how his own great-grandfather, Sir William Fitzwilliam, had received the fallen prelate Wolsey at his home at Milton? He could not help thinking of this when he penned his letter to his Majesty on September 5th: ‘The misery I am fallen into hath put me below the means to subsist as I am… I have been the keeper of your seal, and now am your beadsman.’ He added in a postscript, ‘Cardinal Wolsey said, that if he had pleased God as he pleased the King, he had not been ruined. My conscience saith no such thing; for I know not but in serving you I have served God in one. But it may be, if I had pleased men as I have pleased you, it would have been better with me.’

  Familiar words, surely. The reader looks again, and turns to Act III, Scene II, and Cardinal Wolsey’s concluding speech in Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII.

  There take an Inventory of all I have,

  To the last peny, ’tis the Kings. My Robe,

  And my Integrity to Heaven, is all,

  I dare now call my owne. O Cromwel, Cromwel,

  Had I but serv’d my God, with halfe the Zeale

  I serv’d my King: he would not in mine Age

  Have left me naked to mine Enemies.

  Yet King Henry VIII, though acted on the stage, was not published until the First Folio in 1623. Curious…

  Francis’s letter so moved his Majesty that on September 16th he issued a licence permitting him to come to London and reside at Sir John Vaughan’s house once again for six weeks, and on the 20th of the month he was pleased to assign the fine imposed by Parliament to four trustees of Francis’s own choosing: Sir Richard Hutton, Justice of Assize; Sir Thomas Chamberlain, Justice of the King’s Bench; Sir Thomas Crewe, a barrister; and Sir Francis Barnham, Lady St. Alban’s cousin.

  The significance of this was that it made the trustees responsible for the £40,000 debt to the Crown, and meant in effect that it would not be exacted. Moreover, the trustees had authority to keep other creditors at bay, so that what the gossips had predicted back in June had proved correct.

  There remained one final hope, which was that Francis Bacon would be granted a full pardon; although he would never again be employed by King or Parliament, he would at least be free to travel as he wished, and when he wished, between London and Gorhambury, with the stigma of disgrace removed, no longer an exile from the world and from his friends.

  It seemed as if fortune was about to smile on him once more, for on October 12th his Majesty had desired the Attorney-General, Sir Thomas Coventry, to draw up a pardon, and present it to the new Lord Keeper of the Seal, the Bishop of Lincoln. The Lord Keeper was reluctant. Parliament might take offence, he must confer with the Council, there would inevitably be some delay. Francis, who had meanwhile worked at his usual pace and finished his History of Henry VII in a matter of weeks, sent a copy of it to the King, and at the same time pressed the Marquis of Buckingham to speak for him to the Lord Keeper about the pardon.

  There came an unexpected hitch. The Marquis, who had been so warmly in his favour throughout his impeachment and disgrace, turned suddenly cool. A misunderstanding had arisen. The truth of it seems to have been that Buckingham, believing that Viscount St. Alban, now fallen from office, would be content to live down at Gorhambury and when in London lodge in some smaller residence, wanted York House for himself. Francis, whose affection for his birthplace was even greater than it was for Gorhambury, demurred.

  His six weeks in London, some of which had actually been spent at York House, had come to an end, and he was back in Hertfordshire once more. Letters to the Marquis went unanswered. Nor had the King’s pardon received the official seal. ‘Twice now at my being in London, your Lordship did not vouchsafe to see me,’ Francis wrote to the favourite. ‘The cause of change is either in myself or your Lordship. I ought first to examine myself, which I have done, and God is my witness, I find all well, and that I have approved myself to your Lordship a true friend, both in the watery trial of prosperity and the fiery trial of adversity. If your Lordship take any insatisfaction touching York House, I pray think better of it… For that motion to me was a second sentence more grievous than the first as things then stood, and do yet stand.’

  He was referring, one supposes, to banishment from his London home; and when the King’s pardon received the seal in late November it seems to have been only partial, for he was still excluded from living in London, and letters from the Marquis of Buckingham remained cool.

  Perhaps a petition to the House of Lords would achieve success. Francis began to draft a note of what he might say, his mood obviously one of frustration and irritability. One can picture him in mid-December, staring out of the windows at Verulam House on a grey cold winter’s day, his digestion playing havoc, an attack of gout threatening, and somewhere, not far away, the plaintive sound of her ladyship’s voice.

  ‘I am old, weak, ruined, in want, a very subject of pity. My only suit to your Lordships is to show me your noble favour towards the release of my imprisonment, for so every confinement is, and to me, I protest, worse than the Tower. There I could have company, physicians, conference with my creditors and friends about my debts and the necessities of my estate, helps for my studies and the writings I have in hand. Here I live upon the sword-point of a sharp air, endangered if I go abroad, dulled if I stay within, solitary and comfortless without company, banished from all opportunities to treat with any to do myself good, and to help out my wrecks; and that which is one of my greatest griefs, my wife that hath been no partaker of my offending, must be partaker of this misery of my restraint.’

  Here was perhaps the crux. He could not get away from her, or she from him. The draft was never sent. Parliament was prorogued on December 19th. So it must be Christmas at Verulam House with no thought of festivity, no smiling at the table, his servants and attendants anxious to please but their very solicitude for his welfare irksome, hi
s lady tapping her foot and sighing. What a world away from the atmosphere a year ago, when he, and she, and all their friends were looking forward to the celebrations at York House on his sixtieth birthday and his Majesty was about to create him Viscount St. Alban.

  This is the state of Man; to day he puts forth

  The tender Leaves of Hopes, to morrow Blossoms

  And beares his blushing Honours thicke upon him:

  The third day, comes a Frost; a killing Frost,

  And when he thinks, good easie man, full surely

  His Greatness is a ripening, nips his Root,

  And then he falls as I do.

  Her ladyship, exchanging a glance with her steward, Mr. John Underhill, declared that she would go up to London immediately after the new year and approach the Marquis of Buckingham herself, to see whether she could achieve in person more than her husband could do by letter. So be it. Let her try. Meanwhile, he would wander about the passages at Verulam House, the pools beneath the windows thick with ice, as hard as the mirror that confronted him in the upper corridor.

  ‘I have been too long a debtor to you for a letter,’ he had written to Tobie Matthew after his disgrace, ‘and especially for such a letter, the words whereof were delivered by your hand, as if it had been in old gold. For it was not possible for entire affection to be more generously and effectually expressed… Your company was ever of contentment to me, and your absence of grief: but now it is of grief upon grief. I beseech you therefore haste hither, where you shall meet with as good a welcome as your own heart can wish.’

  Tobie Matthew, in fact, landed at Dover on December 29th.

  18

  Tobie Matthew’s banishment from his native land had ended. Permission had been granted for his return for good through the personal intervention of the Spanish ambassador, Count de Gondomar, and Lord Digby, who had both spoken to the King on his behalf. Lord Digby—soon to become Lord Bristol, and with twelve years’ experience as ambassador at Madrid—was greatly in favour of the marriage alliance between the Infanta of Spain and the Prince of Wales, and he had come to know Tobie well both at the Spanish court and in Brussels. Here was no hot-headed recusant, he told his Majesty, but a man of parts who would make an excellent diplomat and prove of inestimable worth in his sovereign’s service, both at home and abroad. If his Majesty would permit Matthew to return he, Lord Digby, would certainly vouch for his good conduct. Later he could be employed in the marriage negotiations, and when the moment was opportune be sent to Spain.