Bacon and Shakespeare 3

Bacon and Shakespeare 3

Bacon’s biographers have strained every effort in explaining and

excusing his action in the ensuing trials. Not only have they failed to

exculpate him, but themselves must realise the futility of their most

ingenious endeavours to clear his character of this foul blot. Abbott,

his impartial biographer, says: “We may acquit him of everything but

a cold-blooded indifference to his friend’s interest and a supreme

desire to pose (even at a friend’s cost) as a loyal and much-persecuted

servant of the Queen.” But, truly, the most that can be said in

extenuation of his behaviour, is little indeed, when the friend is a

man to whom he had written, “I do think myself more beholding to you

than to any man.”

 

What, however, are the facts? When the first proceedings were taken

against Essex in the Star Chamber, Bacon absented himself from the

Court, his excuse to the Queen being, he said, “Some indisposition of

body.” His actual letter to Elizabeth explains that his absence was

compelled by threats of violence on the part of the Earl’s followers,

whom he openly charges with a purpose to take the Queen’s life. “My

life has been threatened, and my name libelled. But these are the

practices of those ... that would put out all your Majesty’s lights,

and fall on reckoning how many years you have reigned.” Abbott

considers that we need not accuse Bacon of deliberately intending by

these words to poison the Queen’s mind against his former friend, while

Professor Gardiner adduces this imputation as a proof that Bacon was

liable to “occasional ill-temper.” Contemporary judgment did not so

interpret the wording of the excuse. The treacherous nature of the

insinuation provoked a feeling of amazement and anger. That his brother

Anthony believed Bacon to be capable of so great vileness is evident,

and even Lord Cecil, the Earl’s greatest enemy, wrote to Francis

begging him to be, as he himself was, “merely passive, and not active,”

in insuring the fallen Favourite’s utter ruin.

 

In the face of these warnings and remonstrances, Bacon wrote to the

Queen expressing his desire to serve her in the second stage of the

proceedings against Essex. He asked that an important rôle might be

assigned to him, but although he was only entrusted with a subsidiary

part, he performed his task so adroitly as to earn the deep resentment

of the friends of Essex. Within a fortnight of the Earl’s liberation

Bacon again offered his services to Essex, who accepted them!

 

What followed? Bacon devised a plan to secure the Earl’s re-instatement

in the Royal favour. The artifice employed was to bring before the

notice of Elizabeth, a correspondence--ostensibly between Essex and

his brother Anthony--exhibiting the loyalty and love of the former

for the Queen. The letters were composed by Bacon, and while they

are interesting as specimens of the author’s literary power, and are

illustrative of his “chameleonlike instinct of adapting his style

to his atmosphere,” they were calculated, by the interpolation of

artful passages, to advance the interests of Bacon, rather than those

of Essex, with the Queen. It is significant also that the demeanour

which Bacon in these letters caused the Earl to assume, he used against

him when Essex was subsequently arraigned for treason. Unless we are

prepared to accept the statements of Bacon in this connection, it is

impossible to view his participation in this second trial without a

feeling of the deepest abhorrence. Bacon had no right to be in Court at

all. As one of the “learned counsel,” his presence was not required,

but in the capacity of “friend of the accused,” his evidence could

not fail to be greatly damaging to the Earl’s case. He proffered his

evidence, not only with readiness, but with a ferocious efficacy. We

have no evidence beyond Bacon’s own word--the word of a man who was

striving to put the best complexion on a foul act of treachery--that

he deprecated the task. “Skilfully confusing together” the original

proposal, and the abortive execution of Essex’s outbreak, he insisted

that the rising, which in truth was a sudden after-thought, was

the result of three months’ deliberation, and he concentrated all

his efforts on proving that Essex was “not only a traitor, but a

hypocritical traitor.” No other piece of evidence adduced at the trial

had greater weight in procuring the verdict against the Earl. Bacon

subsequently pleaded in extenuation of his behaviour that he was acting

under pressure from the Crown, but we have the knowledge that on the

first occasion he had offered his services, and we can only conclude

that at the price of sacrificing the friend who had loaded him with

kindnesses, he had determined to make this trial a stepping-stone to

Royal favour. To serve this end, friendship, honour, obligation were

brushed aside; for, as Bacon has said in one of his essays, the man who

wishes to succeed “must know all the conditions of the serpent.” The

price Bacon received for the blood of Essex was £1,200, or £6,000 in

our currency. “The Queen,” he wrote to a friendly creditor, “hath done

somewhat for me, though not in the perfection I hoped.” Bacon had, it

is fair to infer from this remark, betrayed his friend; had, in fact,

delivered him to the headsman for the hope of pecuniary reward.

 

[Illustration: Fr. verulam Cano

 

_Vansomer._]

 

In what degree Bacon was responsible for the drawing up of a

_Declaration of the Treasons of Essex_, which Lord Clarendon described

as a “pestilent libel,” is impossible to decide. He tells us that his

task was little more than that of an amanuensis to the Council and the

Queen, but this excuse fails him in the case of his _Apology_, put

forth as a vindication of the author in the estimation of the nobles,

from the charge of having been false to the Earl of Essex. The paper

is admittedly full of inaccuracies, conveying to us the picture,

“not of his actual conduct, but of what he felt his conduct ought to

have been.” Dr. Abbott dismisses this literary and historical effort

as interesting only as a “psychological history of the manifold and

labyrinthine self-deception to which great men have been subjected.”

 

On the accession of James I., Bacon again threw himself into the

political arena, determined to neglect no chance of ingratiating

himself with the new Sovereign. He poured forth letters to any and

everybody who had the power to forward his cause. He dwelt in these

epistles upon the services of his brother Anthony, who had carried on

secret and intimate negotiations with Scotland. Sir Thomas Challoner,

the confirmed friend of Essex, received a letter from him; he appealed

to the Earl of Northumberland; and became the “humble and much devoted”

servant of Lord Southampton, on the eve of that nobleman’s release

from the Tower (where Bacon had helped to place him as an accomplice

of Essex). To each he turned with the same request that they would

bury the axe, and “further his Majesty’s good conceit and inclination

towards me.”

 

At this time, Bacon, desperately apprehensive of rebuff, was anxious

to conciliate all parties, and to secure friends at Court. He was

willing, nay, eager, to be Greek, Roman, or Hebrew, in order to attain

his object--even he would avow a gift of poesy to make his calling

and election sure. Writing to Sir John Davies, the poet, Bacon, the

politician and philosopher, who did not publish two lines of rhyme

until twenty-one years later, desired him to “be good to concealed

poets.” Reading this statement in connection with the other epistles

he indicted at the same crisis, we realise how little dependence can

be placed upon the implied confession that he had written anonymous

poetry. His letters to Southampton, to Michael Hickes (Cecil’s

confidential man), to David Foules and Sir Thomas Challoner, and to

the King himself, all betray the same feverish desire to be all things

to all men. He assured Hickes that Lord Cecil is “the person in the

State” whom he “loves most,” and at the same moment he placed his whole

services at the disposal of Cecil’s rival, the Earl of Northumberland!

When the star of Northumberland began to pale, Bacon importuned Cecil

to procure him a knighthood to gratify the ambition of an “Alderman’s

daughter, a handsome maiden,” whom he had found “to my liking.” But for

a while Bacon found the struggle for recognition unavailing. The King

found him an acquired taste--or rather a taste that his Majesty had

yet to acquire--and after grovelling to all and sundry, he desisted at

the moment from the attempt to gain the King’s grace, “because he had

completely failed, and for no other reason.”

 

But although Bacon went into retirement, he divided his leisure

between his literary labours and his quest for political advancement.

In all his political pamphlets, his one ambition was to divine and

reflect the Royal views. In 1590 he had nothing but condemnation for

the Nonconformist party; in 1604 he had strenuously pleaded the cause

of Nonconformity; in 1616 he as strenuously opposed the slightest

concession being made to the Nonconformers. In 1604 he was returned

to Parliament; three years later, his zeal in anticipating the King’s

wishes, and supporting his proposals, was rewarded by his appointment

to the Solicitor-Generalship. In the following year he was made

clerk of the Star Chamber, and immediately set himself to secure the

displacement of Hobart, the Attorney-General.

 

Bacon’s conduct towards the Earl of Essex has already been considered.

Had this been the only instance of the kind in his career, his

apologists would have achieved something more than public opinion can

grant them in their endeavours to explain it away. But his behaviour

towards Cecil is another lurid illustration of his duplicity and

ingratitude. During the last fourteen years of his life Cecil had

been the friend and patron of Bacon, whose letters to him are couched

in almost passionate terms of loyalty and “entire devotion.” In one

epistle he declares himself “empty of matter,” but “out of the fulness

of my love,” he writes to express “my continual and incessant love for

you, thirsting for your return.” Cecil was his refuge and deliverer in

1598, and again in 1603, when he was arrested for debt, and Bacon was

not empty of reason when he asserted in another letter, “I write to

myself in regard to my love to you, you being as near to me in heart’s

blood as in blood of descent.” In 1611, a short while before Cecil’s

death, he wrote this last profession of his affection:--

 

“I do protest before God, without compliment, that if I knew in what

course of life to do you best service, I would take it, and make my

thoughts, which now fly to many pieces, be reduced to that centre.”

 

In May of 1612 Cecil died. Within a week Bacon had proffered his

services to the King in the place of his cousin, of whom he wrote:--

 

“He (Cecil) was a fit man to keep things from growing worse, but no

very fit man to reduce things to be much better; for he loved to keep

the eyes of all Israel a little too much upon himself.”

 

To another, he wrote that Cecil “had a good method, if his means had

been upright,” and again to the King, on the same subject:--

 

“To have your wants, and necessities in particular, as it were hanged

up in two tablets before the eyes of your Lords and Commons, to be

talked of for four months together; to stir a number of projects and

then blast them, and leave your Majesty nothing but the scandal of

them; to pretend even carriage between your Majesty’s rights and the

ease of the people, and to satisfy neither--these courses, and others the like, I hope, are gone with the deviser of them.”