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We have kept the one passion, because nature assisted us; we have lost the other, because—for the most honourable reasons—the gentlemen of England took it away. But in the days of Elizabeth it existed and it was a power, producing interior as well as exterior effects. It moved men’s thoughts and beliefs not only about the Queen but about themselves. There was in the Majesty of Elizabeth a kind of fate, and when it struck in anger men wondered if they were as guiltless as they themselves had supposed, and saw, again as a young lover sees in the averted face of the beloved, as Dante saw when Beatrice denied him her salutation, the wrath of the gods directed against them. She might be mistaken; she might be unjust. They protested against her injustice, but only as men protest, with sighs or oaths, against the supreme injustice of the universe.

No doubt in minds which were continually in close contact with hers, or were themselves rather rational than creative, this imagination flagged and disappeared. The vigilance of Cecil worked from it as upon a hypothesis justified by the results; the violence of Essex despised it as an offensive necessity. They controlled or attempted to control her and fretted beneath her obstinacy, her parsimony, her insatiable demands, and her secret fears. That coldness and hatred came on them which (men say) affects marriage and religion and all fulfilled romantic dreams. No doubt also, in proportion as sympathy with the Puritan fundamental of “no idolatry”—of statues, miracles, transubstantiations, or living men—grew stronger, the half-sacramental adoration of the crowned figure grew less. The monarch was a sinner, and his office at most but a necessary business of a sinful world. John Knox had already exhorted, rebuked, and denounced the Queen of Scotland. But in England the deposition of the monarch had to wait another thirty or forty years, and meanwhile to serve the Queen was to serve reputed divinity. To make love to the Queen was—anyhow in its first stages—at once a convention and an excitement. The Queen might be old and ugly. But gods were different from their worshippers. Men who have quarrelled with their women have been thrown off their balance; men who have made love to queens have been in peril; but to make love and then to quarrel with this adorned, fantastic, earthy and unearthy Majesty was to run the risk of being flung into a whirling void of phantasms in which the only truth was the edge of the axe turned towards the condemned traitor as he was conducted from the court of his peers.

Of that last overthrow Francis Bacon was never in danger. He was never allured to such intimacies as Essex with Elizabeth or Somerset with James. But he felt and believed in the image of royalty, and therefore he believed in the powers and graces of royalty. It would be too much to say that he believed in Majesty rather than in himself; but he was always prepared to submit to Majesty, because Majesty, and those whom Majesty loved, were likely to be right. His imagination did continual homage to its own vision of the wisdom of the Crown. He did not merely pretend that a particular woman or a particular man was set by God in authority, but without any special capacity for the high office. He believed that God meant the King to rule and furnished the King with necessary endowments. Nobody, certainly, believes either to-day, in spite of the continual passionate entreaties of the Churches. But then our contemporary imagination hears the noise of the passage of the King rather as Mr. Perker and the Pickwickians heard the cheering round the Honourable Samuel Slumkey when he kissed the six babies at the Town Arms of Eatanswill. The whole of the sources, channels, and flood of that passion are hidden from us.

But in that Elizabethan poem which the Elizabethan Spenser laid at the feet of “the most High, Mighty, and Magnificent Empress, renowned for piety, virtue, and all gracious government ... in all humility ... to live with the eternity of her fame,”^[2] there is another figure, besides Gloriana, which illuminates the imagination of the age, and that is Prince Arthur. Prince Arthur was to marry Gloriana. And “in the person of Prince Arthur I set forth magnificence in particular, which virtue for that (according to Aristotle and the rest) it is the perfection of all the rest, and containeth in it them all, therefore in the whole course I mention the deeds of Arthur applyable to that virtue which I write of in that book.” Magnificence in man was, no doubt, primarily a spiritual quality, but it had great earthly symbols. In that sense also Magnificence was a duty as well as an indulgence. A century earlier the Black Prince had been praised, in a poem written ten years after his death, for knowing well “the doctrine of largesse.” Nowadays we praise the dead (if possible) for generosity, and do not mean the same thing. Great men, under Elizabeth, were still supposed to be wise in “the doctrine of largesse.” Magnificence was to marry Glory, and all the earthly glories and magnificences were to attend on that supreme and superb bridal. Gloriana herself certainly was not much inclined to the doctrine of largesse; nor was Burleigh. But that did not alter the fact that she approved it in others, and the imagination of her age approved it everywhere. Kings and great lords were not praised and admired for leading simple lives; it would not have occurred to any one that they ought to lead simple lives. In 1599 Shakespeare’s Henry V asked Ceremony what it was, but only after an intense appreciation of Ceremony, “the farcèd title running ’fore the king, the throne he sits on, and the tide of pomp” that swells through so many of the plays.

Patrons were to behave magnificently to their clients. It was not an age of regular salaries. Men gave what they had and could; men took all that was offered. They took it in offices or houses or lands or money—money if it were possible. It is not likely that the Bishop of Durham to-day would send the Prime Minister £100 for favours received, but so much a former Bishop of Durham sent to Lord Burleigh. Bacon, writing in a fit of temper to Cecil, says that it is rumoured he has taken two thousand angels to help Sir Thomas Coventry to the Solicitorship. He obviously thinks Cecil has treated him very badly, but he does not think it a wrong or even improper act in itself. The ladies and gentlemen of that age, when they wanted anything, asked for it. They even let one another know of anything that was going which they could not themselves use. Francis wrote to his mother (18th February 1591/2) that Alderman Haywood had died, and that this would bring his son into the Court of Wards (of which the Lord Treasurer was Master). Lord Burleigh was often slow in disposing of his wards. It was hardly suitable for Anthony who had only just returned from abroad to ask anything of his uncle before they had met; Francis himself was reserving Burleigh’s patronage to make his way with the Queen. Why should not Lady Bacon ask for the wardship of the young heir? but she had better be quick about it. We do not know if Lady Bacon acted.

The fact was that magnificence cost money, and as they were not ashamed of magnificence so they were not ashamed of money. They were not ashamed of asking for it, of getting it, or (even more extremely) of being refused it. The Queen, if she were in displeasure with any one, might decline a jewel. Austere precisians might prefer, if they were on bad terms with any one, to maintain the quarrel at the expense of their income. But the normal method was to make up the quarrel and ask for the advantage. The memoirs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries read strangely to us after the letters of the sixteenth and seventeenth. Something is lacking in those later sedate volumes, some frank sound of human activity, of desire or necessity. If our later generations ask at all they do it in a quiet, dignified, self-respecting way—but how rarely they ask! The petitions of their fathers were not quiet, do not seem to us at all dignified, and hardly self-respecting. But self-respect has many modes, and quiet dignity is not certainly the chief virtue committed to man. The English had not then become proud of their reserve.

Ostentation as a virtue has disappeared from the galaxy, but in those days ostentation was the brightest of all. Whatever was kept secret was so hidden that even now we often cannot be certain of their motives and intentions. Whatever was shown was shown and spoken almost in the style of Tamburlaine himself. As artistic enjoyments meiosis and magniloquence are equal and opposite, and so as moral virtues. It is not certainly finer or wiser, though it may be safer, to say less than the truth than to say more. If the latter leads to looseness, diffusion, and insincerity, the former induces paralysis of speech and therefore often of thought. As in arts of decoration so in arts of expression, the Elizabethans were ostentatious. Rhetoric—even rant—was a courtesy—even a duty; they thought our simple tastes not merely rude but wrong. It is difficult, but healthful, to consider that they may have been right. Essex, while he was the Favourite of Elizabeth, meaning to assure James of Scotland of his devotion to the King’s interests, wrote as follows:

“Most gracious and renowned prince,

“If I should only regard the weakness of mine own merit, without having an eye unto the exceeding bounty, whereby your majesty hath quickened me to make a present of all that service, which my poor ability may perform, I should have forborn to have made this paper witness of my boldness. But in what manner could I have framed a plea in excuse of inexpiable ingratitude, if I had not by some lines given a taste of the affections of my heart, which breathe only after the prosperous success of a king of so much worth, whose servant I am born by nature, and by duty am obliged to exercise all the powers both of my mind and body in advancing his designs? Therefore such as I am, and all whatsoever I am (tho’ perhaps a subject of small price) I consecrate unto your regal throne; protesting, that what defect soever may be incident unto me, it shall appear more fitly to be set on the score of error than of wilfulness. And whereas I have presumed, out of the suddenness of my brain, to hatch a rude and indigested piece of work, most humbly I beseech your highness to overlook it with a favourable eye, and to conceive, that I took in hand to play the statesman rather out of the zeal I bore to so just a cause, than out of any overweening humour of mine own sufficiency. Neither do I doubt, that the minds of all my countrymen, being already in motion to betake themselves to a rightful cause, will jointly unite their hopes in your majesty’s noble person, as the only centre, wherein our rest and happiness consist. I refrain from presenting thanks in lieu of full payment; for I feel my forces unable to weigh with your highness’s magnificence. Therefore in this behalf I will imitate Timanthes, who covered those parts of his picture with a veil which he could not express lively by the art of his pencil, esteeming it more commendable to refer them to the imagination of others, than to bewray his own imperfections in colours. In like sort, while I want apt words to reveal the thoughts of my grateful heart, I am determined to shadow them with the veil of silence, until some happy revolution of time shall turn my inside outward, and give a public demonstration of my loyalty. In mean season I please myself with this hope, that being unable to present more, your accustomed grace will accept of my good will, which offers all that it can.

“Your majesty’s most humble and affectionate servant.

“7.

“London, May 17.”

Nor did ostentation apply only to politics; it applied to everything, intellectual or emotional. Bacon filled his speeches with his knowledge, as the pious filled theirs with quotations from the Bible. The Queen made an angry and impromptu speech in Latin to the Polish ambassador. Drake dined to music. They displayed their feelings. The Bishop of Lincoln wept in the House of Lords when he was accused by the Commons. Sir Edward Coke wept when he left the Court of Common Pleas for the King’s Bench, and so did his brethren and subordinates. Men exhibited their glory, their learning, their pathos; so also their cruelty and their hate. They made a display of pain, and where they could not display it, they confessed, formalized, and announced it. Few men at any time are not willing to cause pain to others in order to achieve their desires. But in our age the ostentatious causing of physical pain has, very fortunately, gone out of fashion. The pain we cause is normally interior, secret, and only half-acknowledged. It is always possible to explain that one’s victim has misunderstood a verbal cruelty, however exquisite; and even possible, so deceitful and transitory are the hellish moments of man, to believe that it was not meant. But it is hardly possible for executioner or victim to misunderstand the fire put to the bundle of wood or the steel that searches the entrails. The torch and the knife are meant for pain; if they are justified or defended, excused or forgotten, it is still as pain and only as pain.

The ostentation, not of pain—or that only in one instance—but of speech, concerns the movement of Bacon’s mind. Words themselves are ostentation, a showing forth, and he was a master of words. But, as all masters must be, he was to an extent the instrument of that which he controlled. Men capable of great phrases are, by their inevitable nature, sometimes subordinated to those phrases. We have thought so much of realism, of writing with “the eye on the object,” that we have forgotten that, though the eye may be on the object, the mind is elsewhere. It is, in fact, a truth which is only half the truth. To mean to put a thing in words is to mean, at most, to create an image of the thing, with the life of the image and not of the thing itself. It—whatever “it” is—is discovered only by its creation in words, and the exterior thing is but a nourishment or a medicine for the other more obscure life. One word thrusts another into being. But the care which a man will take over his creation if he means it to come before the world he may neglect in a familiar letter. He will not therefore be insincere. What is true of the poets and Majesty is true of any writer in passion. He creates, in writing, the thing in which he believes; it is desire manifested and fulfilled. That the outer world destroys it does not prove it untrue. In his great moments it is the last intelligence of man to be able to believe that a thing, so defined and created, is true eternally and yet may seem to change.

The privilege of those moments brings its corresponding falsehood, as all such moments do, casting not only their glory but their shadow on customary life. Where that customary life itself exists in a high style of rhetoric and imagined abandonment, the disproportion between the phrase and the thing grows more marked. The mind of Bacon may have seen a phrase as false even while he wrote it: was he singular? Yet where he wholly or partly wished it to be true, to strike it out would be to hasten its denial. He was content to lie—as all the servants of imagined devotion, in prose or poetry, have lied, and he prepared for himself—as they do—the future vengeance of the universe. Poets can write business letters; they can be commercially sincere. But where they need not be, they suffer for their inevitable and creative falsity: vicarious in their pain for the world that is nourished on their power.

Against the glory and ostentation of that age there was already present an enemy without and an opposition within. The first was an austerer power, soon to increase, a witness (as it declared itself) to another glory. The passion that, for no mortal gain, extinguished the lights on the altars, and tore the copes, and even the surplices, from the celebrants, and checked dances and revelry and merrymaking, and banished plays—all to give clear room to that sacred darkness in which the uncreated light could spiritually shine; the passion that abolished the ritual and denied the mystery of the Mass, and pierced the ensuing void with the sound of solitary voices preaching and praying, and either way proclaiming to men the awful Presence which no idolatrous mummery might pretend miraculously to control and enshrine—Puritanism was coming. The Puritan was a moment of man’s existence; his strength was that he was a moment of man’s experience of reality; his weakness that his own reality could not prolong that transcendant fact. But he was a witness to a glory inexpressible among earthly things: the least flash of the least diamond on mitre or stomacher was an offence to the bareness which alone properly reflected divinity. The creed rose into angry fanaticisms of destruction, as the creed it opposed had sunk into corrupt lethargies of superstition. It strained after the mystical abolition of man before Deity, and the secret knowledge of the saints was demanded as a profession of experience from the youngest in those aspiring schools. The illumination of Christendom has been more tender and more slow; as by a subtle working, without his own knowledge, the newborn child has been decoyed on to the heavenly way; the love of a man’s heart and the desire of his eyes have been touched with the soft light of eternity. But the few seconds of mortal life were too short for such tardiness in the minds of men who inherited the harsher side of the tradition of the Middle Ages, and the Limbo to which the Church consigned unbaptized children or the hell with which it threatened stubborn heretics brought forth a deeper darkness and a fiercer flame of spirit to consume its own branches. The purity of that fiery knowledge was often mingled with earthlier flame. Walsingham did not lose by his antagonism to Rome nor the City merchants diminish their greed by their creed. The Puritanism of Cecil was no nobler than the Catholicism of the Earl of Northampton, who was his chief rival. But where it existed in its integral devotion it was possessed by a vision of unearthly glory, and it despised as it opposed the glory of a king.

Those terrible antagonisms were to pass. The Church remained; the Puritan remained. But after centuries, in a less ostentatious age, the Church was to deprecate the acts of her ministers, and the Puritan to admit the beauty of holiness in his opponents. Meanwhile, however, they made more bitter the national warfare which was beginning—warfare between the nations and warfare within nations. It was not enough that men should promise not to do things; they must promise not to believe things. The preoccupied voice of Bacon proposed that the Roman party should be relieved from penalties if they would swear not to bear arms against the Queen. But no one took any notice. Saints and sinners under every Monarch died for their beliefs. Sir Thomas More and the holy monks of the Charterhouse years before had gone as the principals of a whole university of martyrs; doctors, masters, and scholars of agony following them for a century. The Kings of Europe smote their philosophical enemies with torment and death. It may at least be said for them that though they used they did not invent the habit; that also had come from of old.

In that war Magnificence, and the Magnificence of England, became a maze to protect itself. Treacheries were reduplicated till treachery had lost its own intelligence. Men grew uncertain whom they betrayed. The privacies of their ostentation coiled through every kind of duplicity. The secret service of Walsingham and the secret service of the Roman Church were intermingling in a subtle dance of conspiracies, martyrdoms, assassinations, and executions. In 1576, when Bacon went to Paris with Sir Amyas Paulet, Don John of Austria was sending an ambassador to the Queen to ask for shelter for his troopships if they were driven into an English port by storms, and at the same time proposing to use the troops to dethrone Elizabeth and free Mary Stuart; of whose marriage with Don John, Paulet wrote to Walsingham that he had heard by sounding the secretary of the Duke of Guise. The marriage of Alençon with Elizabeth, the intrigues in Scotland, occupied Paulet’s attention. With these there is nothing to show that the young Bacon had any direct business. But the English embassy at the Court of the Medici cannot have led even a junior member of its staff to think that great place was without its keyholes, its privy stairs, and its secret whispers.

On the edge, as it were, of Magnificence, figures remote from Gloriana and Prince Arthur, moved the obscure persons of Anthony and Francis Bacon. The death of their father left each of them to make his own career, with such aid only as their kindred would give them or they could procure themselves by proving their value. Anthony had one advantage over Francis: he had possessions and revenues—in Hertfordshire, the manors of Abbotsbury, Minchinbury, and Hores, of Colney Chapel, the farm of the manor of the priory of Redbourne, the site and demesnes of the manor of Redbourne, the farm of Charings; in Middlesex, the woods in Brent Heath, Brightfaith Woods, Merydan meads, and the farm of Pinner-stoke. He had therefore the possibility of determining his activity. He determined on foreign travel. Francis had returned to England in March. Anthony left later in the same year. He was abroad for some thirteen years, till February 1591/2. It is only after that date that the purpose, or at least the result, of his activity becomes clear. He returned to take up the direction of an English secret service abroad.

His travels took him to Paris, Bruges, Geneva, Toulouse, Lyons, Montpellier, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Montauban. At Bordeaux he was said to have contracted a friendship with Montaigne, to whom after his return he wrote. Unfortunately Montaigne died before he could answer the letter, and a correspondence of the most fascinating possibilities for us was cut short. At Geneva he lodged in the house of the famous Theodore Beza, who admired Lady Bacon so much, either on her son’s report or from her translation of Jewel, that he dedicated an edition of his Meditations to her. To him also Anthony wrote after his return, but apparently on his mother’s account. Lady Bacon would have sympathized more strongly than her son, especially a son who wrote to Montaigne, with Beza’s horror at discovering that there actually were people who wondered whether “that body which had antichrist for its head” might not be part of the true Church. But in those days the Pope felt the same almost physical horror at those who thought the body which had Elizabeth for its governor might be. At Bordeaux again Anthony was denounced by three priests—probably justly—on an accusation of being in the centre of Huguenot discontent, and using his pen and person to assist it; he was protected by the Governor—we dare not believe at Montaigne’s instigation. At Montauban he fell into a more serious difficulty; he made the wife of Philip de Mornay, the Huguenot leader, angry, partly by persuading her husband to send fifteen hundred crowns to a gentleman in England, partly by supporting the principal minister of the town, who had annoyed the lady (her name was Charlotte Arbaleste) by “censuring her scandalous excess in head-attire.” The breach which Charlotte Arbaleste caused between de Mornay and Anthony compelled him to borrow a thousand crowns from the friendly Bishop of Cahors. The bishop had heard favourably of Anthony from the great Marshal de Biron, and in some compensation for the thousand crowns got him to write to Burleigh asking for the release of two priests, then imprisoned at Westminster. Unfortunately, the only result was that a Mr. Lawson, Anthony’s servant, who carried that and other letters, was promptly imprisoned as well, largely at the urging of Lady Bacon, and kept in prison for almost a year.

Lady Bacon indeed was by this time furious with her son. He was consorting with Papists; he was endangering his soul. “My mother,” wrote Francis to him, “through passion and grief can scant endure to meddle in any your business.” Anthony got a soldier-friend of his to visit Burleigh and intercede for the unhappy Lawson. Burleigh sent him to Gorhambury, where Lady Bacon let herself go. “She let not to say that you are a traitor to God and your country; you have undone her; you seek her death; and when you have that you seek for, you shall have but a hundred pounds more than you have now.... She said you are cursed of God in all your actions, especially since Mr. Lawson’s being with you.... She wished you had been fairly buried, provided you had died in the Lord. In my simple judgment she spoke it in her passion and repented immediately her words.” It was perhaps excusable. According to her own showing Lady Bacon had spent her jewels and borrowed from “seven several persons” in order to send her son the money he kept begging for his necessary expenses, and (Mr. Beza apart) all she could see for it was commerce with Papists and servants suspected of Papistry coming with intercession for imprisoned priests. “Mr. Lawson is in great necessity, and your brother dares not help him, in respect of my Lady’s displeasure.” So Mr. Lawson remained in prison, a victim of a mother’s religious passion as was the paramour whom Monica, centuries before, had torn from Augustine and sent back to Ostia.

Anthony, however, had other correspondents—Nicholas Faunt, Walsingham’s Puritan secretary, and occasionally Walsingham himself. Certain of his letters were shown, secretly, to the Queen, who commended “his care and diligence.” Mr. Faunt wrote at length concerning state business, and at greater length concerning the displeasure Christ would no doubt show at the way the archbishop and others were treating the professors of the Word. He alluded picturesquely to those who, “having the mark of the beast, it is impossible they should know the necessity of that sweet food of the gospel”; he seems to mean the bishops. He entirely approved of Lady Bacon: “the Lord raise up many such matrons.” The loving-kindness of the Lord, however, goes even beyond Mr. Faunt’s guess; he limits the number. With Francis Mr. Faunt was not intimate. He called on him in Gray’s Inn, but was told he was not at leisure. “This strangeness” caused Mr. Faunt “to doubt that he greatly mistaketh me”; in a sentence of Elizabethan volubility running to eighty-nine more words Mr. Faunt explained his friendship. That he simply bored Francis stiff does not seem to have occurred to him.

Yet that was the growing division between the two types of mind. Neither Anthony abroad nor Francis at home spoke Lady Bacon’s language or Mr. Faunt’s. Anthony might lodge with Beza, or Francis go with his mother to hear Puritan lectures at the Temple. But their hearts were not in the quarrel between the religions. Francis’s God certainly was “the Father of lights,” but the two candles which burned upon the altar in the Queen’s chapel at Westminster and shocked the earnest professors of the Word were neither here nor there in that glory of descending revelations. We do not know much about Anthony’s God, but we know that he was concerned not with theology but diplomacy. The two brothers inherited war, but (as they saw it) it was a war of this world and not of another, or if of another then merely ex hypothesi, and the hypothesis was official, so that the supernatural argument was rather ex officio than anything else. Anthony wrote to one of his secret service correspondents (who was himself then a Roman) that certain rigours in a bill against recusancy were “of many misliked, namely, of us brothers, who will do our best against them.” It might certainly have been his correspondent’s religion which evoked this placability, but it is likely that Anthony was more preoccupied with the setting up of throne against throne than of altar against altar.

Francis was occupied with a work in which neither the ardent Protestant nor the devoted Papist would have felt much interest, despite its title which was, quite simply, Temporis Partus Maximus, The Greatest Birth of Time. After all, with an entire new revelation all of his own, Francis, young, passionate, and ambitious for his design and himself, could hardly be expected to do more than acknowledge the revelations of the past. Like that other young genius, now feeling his feet on the London stage, and about to hear his lines uttered aloud by his fellows, Francis wanted civil order and a quiet life, anyhow in externals; although Shakespeare, being perhaps himself temporis partus maximus, did not trouble to write anything so-called. Francis preceded him a little; it was about 1584 that he was devising this first study of the new idea; it was not till 1592 that Robert Greene complained of the “shake-scene” who was strutting in peacock’s feathers. The new young prophet, in the intervals of making a living, was busy in shaping the great new instauration: as the young imagination always attempts directly to do, and discovers only by experience at what a distance, by what unexpected methods, and in what different language, the thing as eventually done has to come about. He was then twenty-four or so, and there he was sitting down to announce the Greatest Birth of Time. Something of the solemn concern he felt with it had crept into his manner. Some one, perhaps several some ones, told Burleigh that his nephew was “stuck-up.” Burleigh, on ethical principles no doubt, but principles possibly accentuated by his own feelings about Francis, passed on the statement. Francis, in a stately and solemn letter, accepted the admonition, saying that as a matter of fact if he had a fault by nature it was being too bashful, and if there was anything that he hadn’t, it was arrogancy and overweeningness. If he thought well of himself at all, it was in being free from anything of that sort. No doubt his bashfulness had produced the lamentable misunderstanding. And he would mend his ways in future so that he appeared what he really was. And he remained his lordship’s most obedient, etc. etc.

The two things are not, in fact, incommensurable. Many young men think they are geniuses. Francis certainly thought he was. A conviction of genius does not, in the real genius, necessarily mean a personal arrogance, nor need it have done in Francis. But it probably did mean that he had no time to waste on people like Nicholas Faunt, and no hesitation in believing that his concern was more important than theirs. That he happened to be right was simply their ill-luck; they could not then know that so much of what they—Faunt and Burleigh and their like—did and said would have to be perpetually explained and excused through “future ages.” They could not know that future ages spoke to them in Francis’s slightly alien voice. It also meant that no one at that time was accusing him of subserviency; certainly not the great man’s great man, the Secretary of State’s secretary, who was turned away from the door of the unknown lawyer in Gray’s Inn.

It must not, however, be supposed that Burleigh had neglected his nephew. He had, it is true, been more occupied with helping on Edward Coke, who had by now gained a great legal reputation, without any nonsense of contemplative studies, had made a marriage which had brought him £30,000, and had in 1592 (he was then forty) become Solicitor-General. But Burleigh had also done something, if not so much, for Francis. In November 1584 he appointed him Member of Parliament for Gatton and also had him chosen Member for Melcombe, in Dorsetshire. This was almost a matter of course. In February 1585/6 he seems to have lent his influence to have him advanced among the lawyers at Gray’s Inn, apparently out of his due time. There is a paper on which Burleigh has noted Francis’s advantages; it is impossible not to think that the Lord Treasurer contemplated these privileges with satisfaction as showing that goodwill which (he assured Lady Bacon) he felt for his nephew. Indeed, they are considerable, especially in eyes which are used to the careful distinctions of a slow advance at Court. They are:

“Specially admitted to be out of commons; sending for beer, victuals, wine.

“Admitted of the Grand Company, whereby he hath won ancienty of forty, being but of three years’ continuance.

“Utter Barrister upon three years’ study.

“Admitted to the high table, where none are but Readers.”

What more could the boy want? However, five years afterwards, in 1589, the Lord Treasurer procured for his nephew if not a post at least the promise of a post. Francis was appointed to the reversion of the Clerkship of the Star Chamber. It is true the then occupant held it for another twenty years, during which time “it was like another man’s ground buttailing upon his house, which might mend his prospect but it did not fill his barn.” But such as it was, there it was.

All this was not what was wanted. About 1592 Francis addressed another letter to his uncle.

“My Lord,

“With as much confidence as mine own honest and faithful devotion unto your service and your honourable correspondence unto me and my poor estate can breed in a man, do I commend myself unto your Lordship. I wax now somewhat ancient; one-and-thirty years is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass. My health, I thank God, I find confirmed; and I do not fear that action shall impair it, because I account my ordinary course of study and meditation to be more painful than most parts of action are. I ever bare a mind (in some middle place that I could discharge) to serve her Majesty; not as a man born under Sol, that loveth honour; nor under Jupiter, that loveth business (for the contemplative planet carrieth me away wholly); but as a man born under an excellent Sovereign, that deserveth the dedication of all men’s abilities. Besides, I do not find in myself so much self-love, but that the greater parts of my thoughts are to deserve well (if I were able) of my friends, and namely of your Lordship; who being the Atlas of this commonwealth, the honour of my house, and the second founder of my poor estate, I am tied by all duties, both of a good patriot, and of an unworthy kinsman, and of an obliged servant, to employ whatsoever I am to do you service. Again, the meanness of my estate doth somewhat move me: for though I cannot accuse myself that I am either prodigal or slothful, yet my health is not to spend, nor my course to get. Lastly, I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends; for I have taken all knowledge to be my province; and if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries; the best state of that province. This, whether it be curiosity, or vain glory, or nature, or (if one take it favourably) philanthropia, is so fixed in my mind as it cannot be removed. And I do easily see, that place of any reasonable countenance doth bring commandment of more wits than of a man’s own; which is the thing I greatly affect. And for your Lordship, perhaps you shall not find more strength and less encounter in any other. And if your Lordship shall find now, or at any time, that I do seek or affect any place whereunto any that is nearer unto your Lordship shall be concurrent, say then, that I am a most dishonest man. And if your Lordship will not carry me on, I will not do as Anaxagoras did, who reduced himself with contemplation unto voluntary poverty: but this I will do; I will sell the inheritance that I have, and purchase some lease of quick revenue, or some office of gain that shall be executed by deputy, and so give over all care of service, and become some sorry book-maker, or a true pioneer in that mine of truth, which (he said) lay so deep. This which I have writ unto your Lordship is rather thoughts than words, being set down without all art, disguising, or reservation. Wherein I have done honour both to your Lordship’s wisdom, in judging that that will be best believed of your Lordship which is truest, and to your Lordship’s good nature, in retaining nothing from you. And even so I wish your Lordship all happiness, and to myself means and occasion to be added to my faithful desire to do you service. From my lodging at Gray’s Inn.”

There is nothing to show whether Burleigh took any notice of this or not; he had another piece of advancement in his mind. One that was nearer unto his Lordship, his son, Robert Cecil, was being inducted into Burleigh’s position. Walsingham was dead, and Robert Cecil was Secretary in all but name. Francis might send assurances that he would not compete; Burleigh did not suppose he would. But the mere assurance, and the taking all knowledge for his province, and the desire for place in order to command more wits, and the suggestion that action in such place was less trying to the health than Francis’s ordinary course of study and meditation—Burleigh’s lecture on arrogance did not seem to have produced any result.

But two things had happened by now. Francis had grown intimate with the Earl of Essex, and Anthony had returned to England. The combination deflected the young philosopher on to his third effort. His first movement had been thwarted by his father’s death; his second by his uncle’s indifference; his third was to end in division, antagonism, and destruction.

[2] Compare the dedication of Robert Bridges’s Testament of Beauty—“To the King.” The change is not entirely gain.