The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall

by Daphne Du Maurier

  ‘I know how unfit it is for me to write to your Lordship with any other hand than mine own; but in troth my fingers are so disjointed with this fit of sickness, that I cannot steadily hold a pen.’

  This is all that exists of that last letter. Chaplain Rawley must have been summoned to Highgate during the week, where he found the sick man far from better—indeed, rather worse, suffering from ‘a gentle fever, accidentally accompanied with a great cold, whereby the defluxion of rheum fell so plentifully upon his breast, that he died by suffocation…’

  Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, ex-Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, ex-Lord Chancellor, died on Easter Day, April 9th 1626, in the early morning, aged sixty-five years.

  ‘First I bequeath my soul and body into the hands of God by the blessed oblation of my Saviour, the one at the time of my dissolution, the other at the time of my resurrection. For my burial, I desire it may be in St. Michael’s church, near St. Albans; there was my mother buried, and it is the parish church of my mansion house at Gorhambury, and it is the only Christian church within the walls of old Verulam. I would have the charge of my funeral not to exceed three hundred pounds at the most.

  ‘For my name and memory, I leave it to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages…’

  Essay: Of Death

  Men fear Death, as Children fear to go in the dark: And as that Natural Fear in Children, is increased with Tales, so is the other. Certainly, the Contemplation of Death, as the wages of sin, and Passage to another world, is Holy, and Religious; but the Fear of it, as a Tribute due unto Nature, is weak. Yet in Religious Meditations, there is sometimes, Mixture of Vanity, and of Superstition. You shall read, in some of the Friars’ Books of Mortification, that a man should think with himself, what the Pain is, if he but have his Fingers end Pressed, or Tortured: And thereby imagine, what the Pains of Death are, when the whole Body, is corrupted and dissolved; when many times, Death passeth with less pain, than the Torture of a Limb: For the most vital parts, are not the quickest of Sense. And by him, that spake only as a Philosopher, and Natural Man, it was well said; Pompa Mortis Magis terret quàm Mors ipsa (The trappings of Death terrify, rather than Death itself). Groans and convulsions, and a discoloured Face, and Friends weeping, and Blacks and Obsequies, and the like, show Death Terrible. It is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in the mind of man, so weak, but it Mates, and Masters, the Fear of Death: And therefore Death, is no such terrible enemy, when a man hath so many Attendants, about him, that can win the combat of him.

  Revenge triumphs over Death; Love slights it; Honour aspireth to it; Grief flyeth to it; Fear pre-occupateth it; Nay we read, after Otto the Emperor had slain himself, Pity, which is the tenderest of Affections, provoked many to die, out of mere compassion to their Sovereign, and as the truest sort of Followers. Nay Seneca adds Niceness and satiety; a man would die, though he were neither valiant, nor miserable, only upon the weariness to do the same thing, so oft over and over. It is no less worthy to observe, how little Alteration, in good Spirits, the Approaches of Death make; For they appear, to be the same Men, till the last Instant.

  Augustus Caesar died in a Compliment; Tiberius in dissimulation; Vespasian in a jest, sitting upon the Stoole; Galba with a sentence ‘Strike, if it be for the good of Rome,’ holding forth his neck; Septimius Severus in dispatch; ‘Make haste, if there be more for me to do.’ And the like. Certainly, the Stoics bestowed too much cost upon Death, and by their great preparations, made it appear more fearful. Better, saith he, who accounts the close of life as one of nature’s blessings.

  It is as natural to die, as to be born; and to a little Infant, perhaps the one, is as painful as the other. He that dies in an earnest Pursuit, is like one that is wounded in hot Blood; who, for the time, scarce feels the Hurt; And therefore, a Mind fixt, and bent upon somewhat, that is good, doth avert the Dolours of Death. But above all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is, Nunc Dimittis; when a Man hath obtained worthy Ends, and Expectations.

  Death hath this also; That it openeth the Gate, to good Fame, and extinguishes Envy.

  Extinctus amabitur idem

  He that was envied living, shall be loved when he is gone.

  Epilogue

  Alice Bacon, Lady Verulam, Viscountess St. Alban, remained a widow for eleven days. Presumably she waited until her husband had been buried in St. Michael’s church. Then she married John Underhill. The wedding took place on April 20th, at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, where Francis Bacon had been baptised sixty-five years previously. On July 12th John Underhill was knighted at Oatlands, but for what services to his king and country we are not informed. It also happened to be the anniversary of the occasion when, in 1618, Francis Bacon had been created Baron Verulam. Extinctus amabitur idem…

  The Underhills continued to live at Gorhambury, but litigation began almost immediately, and continued for some years. The executors refused to prove the will, knowing the state of the testator’s finances. The debts amounted to £19,658. 4s. 4d. The will remained unexecuted until July 15th 1627, when powers of administration were granted to Sir. Thomas Meautys, Viscount St. Alban’s faithful friend and secretary, and to Sir. Thomas Rich, both representing the creditors. These gentlemen at once brought in a bill in Chancery against Sir. John and Lady Underhill, and the trustees of the various manors and lands. ‘Fraudulent conveyances and deeds of gift’ were mentioned, jewels, rings, stuffs, great quantities of plate, pictures, hangings; many such were taken by the Underhills, so the creditors claimed, for their own use, all of which should have been given up in payment of his late lordship’s debts.

  Lady Underhill, as defendant, made counter-claims. Many of the lands she had bought in with her own money, to increase her jointure, and because she had refused to join with her husband in selling land he had left her society. She ‘did not believe that the debts were as great as had been stated, they were largely claimed by his servants, some of whom by vicious courses did him great prejudice.’

  The trustees of the lands and manors then handed in their resignation to the Court. Finally, on June 12th 1632, the judge, who had failed up till then to find a purchaser for the lands and estates, sold them to Lord Dunsmore for £6,000, on condition that he should pay Lady Underhill £530 a year for her lifetime, and that she and her husband consented to quit Gorhambury at Michaelmas that same year. Certain fixtures were to be left intact, ‘tables of stone, an ancient picture hanging at the upper end of the hall, brewing vessels, images of wood and stone in the gardens,’ etc., etc. On February 17th 1633, Sir. Thomas Meautys was granted the manors and the estate of Gorhambury by Lord Dunsmore and his co-trustees, who declared that they had been acting in his interests all the time.

  Sir. John and Lady Underhill parted after thirteen years. Perhaps the yelping hounds of Scylla were still about her loins. On February 21st 1639, a deed of separation was signed. Lady Underhill remained childless, and spent much of her time with her mother at Eyeworth in Bedfordshire. Her mother had herself remarried twice since parting from her ‘Lusty’ Packington. Viscount Kilmorey was her third husband, and the Earl of Kellie her fourth.

  Lady Underhill died on June 29th 1650. She was fifty-eight years old. The parish register of burials for 1650 records that, ‘Alice Viscountess St. Alban, widow Dowager to Francis Viscount St. Alban, was buried in the Chancell of Eyeworth in the south side thereof on the 9th day of July 1650,’ and the inscription on the chancel floor reads, ‘Here lyeth the body of Dame Alice, baroness Verulam, viscountess St. Alban, one of the daughters of Benedict Barnham, Alderman of London. She departed this life the 29th June Anno Dni 1650.’ Her sister Dorothy Constable, who had died the year before, lay beneath the chancel floor beside her. Alice believed in taking precedence of rank over other ladies even in death.

  Sir. John Underhill lived to be eighty-six or eighty-seven, surviving the Civil War and the Restoration but suffering from ‘weakness of his eyes and infirmity in his head.’ He lived in
London, in St. Giles-in-the-Fields, where he died in April 1679, his executor being his ‘loving cousin Thomas Underhill of Oxhill,’ who, as a lad, had been a patient of Dr. Hall, son-in-law to Mr. William Shakespeare.

  Francis Bacon would have been happy to have known that Sir. Thomas Meautys succeeded him as owner of Gorhambury. In 1641 Sir. Thomas married Anne Bacon, the daughter of Sir. Nathaniel Bacon of Culford, Francis’s nephew and a well-known portrait painter of his day. Meautys settled upon her Verulam House and the manor of Redbourne. He also erected a fine monument to his former friend and employer in St. Michael’s church, St. Albans. The monument bears a Latin inscription, which translates as follows:

  Francis Bacon

  Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban

  or, by more conspicuous titles,

  of Science the Light, of Eloquence the Law,

  sat thus.

  Who after all Natural Wisdom

  And Secrets of Civil Life he had unfolded

  Nature’s Law fulfilled—

  Let Compounds be dissolved!

  In the year of our Lord 1626, aged 66.

  Of such a man, that the memory

  might remain,

  Thomas Meautys

  living his Attendant, dead his Admirer,

  places this Monument.

  Unfortunately Sir. Thomas did not live long to enjoy the property. He died in October 1649, and was buried in St. Michael’s church near to his patron. The ownership passed to his brother Henry Meautys, while his widow later married Sir. Harbottle Grimston, who became Master of the Rolls and Speaker of the House of Commons, and bought the estate from Henry Meautys.

  Anne Bacon, Lady Grimston, died in 1680. The estate passed on Sir. Harbottle’s death to his only surviving son by his first marriage, Samuel Grimston, 3rd Baronet, and so through successive generations to the present descendant of the Grimston family, Earl Verulam.

  Sir. Harbottle Grimston does not appear to have lived at Verulam House, but sold it in about 1665 or 1666 for £400 to two carpenters, who bought it for the materials. The old mansion of Gorhambury also gradually fell into decay. A new mansion, a short distance away, was built for the 3rd Viscount Grimston between the years 1777 and 1784, which holds today some of the possessions of Francis Bacon, brought from the original house: the portraits of his father and mother, Sir. Nicholas and Lady Bacon, the three busts that once stood in the long gallery, portraits by his nephew Sir. Nathaniel Bacon. There were also books from the library, perhaps most interesting of all—bound together in one volume, and now on loan to the Bodleian Library, Oxford—the following: Quarto of Richard II, 1614; Quarto of King Richard III, 1602; Quarto of King Henry IV, 1613; Quarto of King Lear, 1608; Quarto of Hamlet, 1605; Quarto of Titus Andronicus, 1611; Quarto of Romeo and Juliet, 1599; The Tragedy of Caesar & Pompey (no date); The Tragedy of Claudius Tiberius (no date); First and Second Parts of King John, 1611; King Edward IV by Heywood; Wonder of Women by Marston, 1606; Segaris by Ben Jonson, 1605; The Malcontent by Marston, 1604; Siege of Troy by Lydgate; Volpone by Ben Jonson, 1607.

  Owing to the refusal of the executors to handle Francis Bacon’s will at his death in 1626, it seems doubtful whether the remaining books, papers and unfinished works ever came into the hands of Sir. John Constable, as Francis had wished. Some were indeed handed over to the Mr. Bosvile who had been named with Sir. John as an executor at the time; this would have been in 1627 after Sir. Thomas Meautys had been granted letters of administration. These were mostly Latin works, and Mr. Bosvile, or Sir. William Boswell as he was later known when an agent for the United Provinces at The Hague, had them published in Amsterdam in 1653.

  Other works were entrusted to Viscount St. Alban’s chaplain William Rawley, and he could not have hoped for a more zealous or faithful editor. A year after his employer’s death, in 1627, Rawley published The New Atlantis along with Sylva Sylvarum (A Natural History), a series of scientific experiments. In 1629 appeared Certain Miscellany Works, and in 1638 Rawley’s own translation into Latin of the famous essays, with a dedication to King Charles. In 1657 came ‘Resusatatio, or bringing into publick Light several pieces of his Works hitherto sleeping… together with his Lordship’s Life,’ and in the following year the Latin translation of all these.

  William Rawley, rector of Lanbeach, died there in 1667. The remaining Bacon letters and papers then came into the possession of Thomas Tenison, later Archbishop of Canterbury, a close friend of William Rawley’s son, who had died of the plague in 1666. Bishop Tenison published Baconia, or Certain Genuine Remains of Lord Bacon, in 1679. Almost a century passed before the next appearance of the works and letters in 1765.

  Sir. Edward Coke, Francis Bacon’s lifelong rival in the legal and political field—and at one time in an affair of the heart—outlived him for just over eight years. He was still in full vigour when King Charles called his Third Parliament, in 1628, and he introduced the famous Petition of Right, which struck at the royal prerogative, and to which his Majesty was obliged to give a reluctant assent. Four years later Sir. Edward fell when riding round his estate at Stoke Poges. He was eighty-one years old, and never fully recovered his strength afterwards. He died on September 3rd 1634.

  His widow, the tireless Lady Hatton, at once laid claim to Stoke Park, and was living there at the start of the Civil War. Surprisingly, for one who had been a lively and brilliant member of Court society during most of her life, she was a passionate supporter of the Parliamentary cause, and entertained many of the Roundhead leaders under her roof. When London became almost a fortified city in 1643 Parliament allowed her undisputed possession of Hatton House.

  In June 1645, ten days before the King’s forces were defeated at the battle of Naseby, her unhappy daughter Frances died at Oxford. Lady Hatton, whose arguments and disputes with her daughter had never entirely ceased through the latter’s many trials and tribulations, was nevertheless devoted to her, and her death came as a considerable shock. Her time of activity was over; she passed the rest of the year sombrely at Hatton House, and in December, aged sixty-seven, made her will, in which she stated that, ‘My very being was a burthen to me untill the infinite mercyes of the auth’r of all comforts raysing my thoughts to an higher contemplation And opened myne understanding… that I might fly into his arms for refuge…’ She died on January 3rd 1646, and was buried in St. Andrew’s Church, Holborn, after lying in state in her home for nearly six weeks. Her ghost was long said to haunt the gardens of Hatton House before the diamond merchants trampled them into oblivion.

  Tobie Matthew survived his patron and friend Viscount St. Alban for twenty-nine years. Suspected of being a papal spy in 1640, he retired to Ghent, where he died on October 13th 1655. Five years later his collection of letters was published, including many from Francis Bacon. In his prefatory address to the reader he wrote, ‘It will go near to pose any other nation of Europe, to muster out in any age, four men, who in so many respects should excel four such as we are able to show them: Cardinal Wolsey, Sir. Thomas More, Sir. Philip Sidney and Sir. Francis Bacon. The fourth was a creature of incomparable abilities of mind, of a sharp and catching apprehension, large and faithful memory, plentiful and sprouting invention, deep and solid judgement, for as such as might concern the understanding part. A man so rare in knowledge, of so many several kinds endued with the facility and felicity of expressing it all in so elegant, significant, so abundant, and yet so choice and ravishing a way of words, of metaphors and allusions as, perhaps, the world hath not seen, since it was a world. I know this may seem a great hyperbole, and strange kind of excess of speech, but the best means of putting me to shame will be, for you to place any other man of yours by this of mine.’

  Appendix I

  Bacon’s Essays

  The original edition, published in 1597, contained ten essays:

  Of Study; Of Discourse; Of Ceremonies and Respects; Of Followers and Friends; Of Suitors; of Expense; Of Regiment of Health; Of Honour and Reputation; Of Faction; Of Negotiating.


  The second edition, published in 1612, contained thirty-eight essays: the original ten (with the exception of that on Honour and Reputation), altered and enlarged, plus twenty-nine new ones:

  Of Religion; Of Death; Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature; Of Cunning; Of Marriage and Single Life; Of Parents and Children; Of Nobility; Of Great Place; Of Empire; Of Counsel; Of Despatch; Of Love; Of Friendship; Of Atheism; Of Superstition; Of Wisdom for a Man’s Self; Of Regiment of Health; Of Expenses; Of Discourse; Of Seeming Wise; Of Riches; Of Ambition; Of Young Men and Age; Of Beauty; Of Deformity; Of Nature in Men; Of Custom and Education; Of Fortune; Of Studies; Of Ceremonies and Respects; Of Suitors; Of Followers; Of Negotiating; Of Faction; Of Praise; Of Indicature; Of Vain Glory; Of Greatness of Kingdoms.

  The third and last edition was published in 1625, the year before Bacon’s death. This contained fifty-eight essays—twenty new ones, and the earlier ones altered or enlarged.

  Of Truth; Of Death; Of Unity in Religion; Of Revenge; Of Adversity; Of Simulation and Dissimulation; Of Parents and Children; Of Marriage and Single Life; Of Envy; Of Love; Of Great Place; Of Boldness; Of Goodness, and Goodness of Nature; Of Nobility; Of Seditions and Troubles; Of Atheism; Of Superstition; Of Travail; Of Empire; Of Counsel; Of Delays; Of Cunning; Of Wisdom for a Man’s Self; Of Innovations; Of Despatch; Of Seeming Wise; Of Friendship; Of Expense; Of the true Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates; Of Regiment of Health; Of Suspicion; Of Discourse; Of Plantations; Of Riches; Of Prophecies; Of Ambition; Of Masks and Triumphs; Of Nature in Men; Of Custom and Education; Of Fortune; Of Usury; Of Youth and Age; Of Beauty; Of Deformity; Of Building; Of Gardens; Of Negotiating; Of Followers and Friends; Of Suitors; Of Studies; Of Faction; Of Ceremonies and Respects; Of Praise; Of Vain Glory; Of Honour and Reputation; Of Indicature; Of Anger; Of Vicissitude of Things.