Bacon and Shakespeare 4

Bacon and Shakespeare 4

Less than a year before, Bacon had protested before God, “without

compliment,” his desire to serve Cecil, and now he protests to God

in this letter to the King, that when he noted “your zeal to deliver

the Majesty of God from the vain and indign comprehension of heresy

and degenerate philosophy ... _perculsit ilico animum_ that God would

shortly set upon you some visible favour; and let me not live if I

thought not of the taking away of that man”--the man as “near to me in

heart’s blood as in the blood of descent.”

 

[Illustration: _The Right Honble Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam and

Viscount St Albans, Lord High Chancellor of England._]

 

The King, who had grown weary of Cecil, may have accepted his death

as a visible favour of God, but the favour did not evidently embrace

the substitution of Bacon in his cousin’s stead. His application for

the vacant post of Lord Treasurer was passed over by the King, but

Bacon became Attorney-General in the following year.

 

 

 

 

_Bacon as the Creature of Buckingham._

 

 

Let us regard another trait in the character of this many-sided

statesman. To relieve the King’s pressing necessities it was proposed

that voluntary contributions should be made by the well-affected. The

contributions, commonly known as Benevolences, were rarely voluntary;

the “moral pressure” that was employed in their collection made them

in reality extortions, and, as such, they were the cause of national

dissatisfaction. During the search of the house of a clergyman named

Peacham, consequent on some ecclesiastical charge, a sermon was found

predicting an uprising of the people against this oppressive tax, and

foretelling that the King might die like Ananias or Nabal. The sermon

had neither been issued nor uttered, but the unfortunate rector, a very

old man, was indicted for conspiracy and, in contravention of the law,

put to the torture. Peacham had not been convicted of treason, though

Bacon “hopes that the end will be good;” or, in other words, that he

will be able to wring from the condemned man a confession to make good

the charge.

 

The wretched old clergyman, after being examined in Bacon’s presence,

“before torture, in torture, between torture, and after torture,” could

not be made to convict himself, and Bacon’s comment to the King is

that the man’s “raging devil seemeth to be turned into a dumb devil.”

It will be noted that this infamous act of illegality and Bacon’s

commentary are the deed and words of the man who is supposed by some to

have declared,

 

“The quality of mercy is not strain’d;

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath; it is twice bless’d;

It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes;

’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown.”

 

We have seen Bacon as the ingrate, and Bacon as the brute; let us

observe him “the meanest of mankind,” as Pope described him--who, as

Abbott admits, although he refuses Pope’s description, “on sufficient

occasion could creep like a very serpent.” The sufficient occasion

was the sudden advance into fame of George Villiers, afterwards Duke

of Buckingham. The disgrace and imprisonment of Robert Carr, Earl of

Somerset, whose conviction Bacon laboured so strenuously to accomplish,

doubtless inspired the Attorney-General with the hope of becoming the

chief adviser of the Sovereign. Great must have been his mortification

when he discovered the impregnability of Villiers in the favour of

the King. But although cast down, Bacon was not abashed. He had, on a

previous occasion of disappointment, declared that “service must creep

where it cannot go” (_i.e._, walk upright), and he at once determined

to creep into the King’s confidence through the medium of the rising

Favourite. Instantly, Bacon was on his knees to the new star. “I am

yours,” he wrote, with more servile want of restraint than he had

disclosed in his letters to Essex or Cecil, “surer to you than to my

own life.” In speech and behaviour he lived up to his protest. He

beslavered Villiers with flattery to his face, and he carolled his

praises to those whom he felt assured would repeat his words to the

spoiled Favourite. His reward was not long in the coming. In 1617

he was made Lord Keeper. He took his seat in Chancery with the most

extravagant pomp, his retinue exceeding all his predecessors, says

a correspondent of Carleton, “in the bravery and multitude of his

servants.” The following day he wrote of the ceremony to Villiers,

“There was much ado, and a great deal of the world. But this matter

of pomp, which is heaven to some men, is hell to me, or purgatory at

least.” This __EXPRESSION__, if not an affectation entirely, is, at least,

strangely inconsistent with the account of the vulgar pomp and display

of a _Feast of the Family_, which is described by Bacon with so much

detail in _The New Atlantis_.

 

[Illustration: THE MONUMENT OF LORD BACON IN St. MICHAEL’S CHURCH.]

 

In this year Bacon dared to interpose, for a fitful instant, between

Villiers and his desires; the next moment he is reduced to a state

of pathetic contrition. But the evanescent display of a spirit of

independence nearly cost the Lord Keeper his position at Court. For

purely personal reasons Bacon regarded, with aversion, the projected

marriage between Sir John Villiers, a brother of Buckingham, and

the daughter of his old rival and enemy, Sir Edward Coke. In a

letter to the Earl of Buckingham he so far forgot himself and his

repeated promises to hold himself as a mere instrument in the hands

of the King, as to protest against the proposed marriage. Realising

immediately the folly of this want of tact, he wrote to the King,

and to Buckingham, justifying, or rather excusing his temerity. The

King replied with a sharp rebuke, the Favourite in a short, angry

note. Further letters elicited additional curt corrections from the

angered Monarch, and from Buckingham. Bacon then, for the first time,

realised the enormity of his presumption. His position was in danger.

Excuse and justification were unavailing to conciliate his angry

masters; absolute submission was the only way out of his predicament.

Bacon submitted; he even offered to put his submission into writing

to the Favourite. Buckingham, in a pencilled note, couched in tones

in which arrogance is mixed with acrimonious reflection on “his

confused and childish” presumption, notified his forgiveness. In reply,

Bacon protested his gratitude to “my ever best Lord, now better than

yourself,” and concluded, “it is the line of my life, and not the lines

of my letter, that must express my thankfulness; wherein, if I fail,

then God fail me, and make me as miserable, as I think myself at this

time happy, by this reviver through his Majesty’s clemency and your

incomparable love and favour.”

 

His submission nullified his early resolve not to tolerate any attempts

to interfere with the course of law, and delivered him bodily into the

hands of Buckingham. The Favourite took the Lord Keeper at his word,

and although he put his loyalty to constant and severe tests, by making

frequent application to him in favour of chancery suitors, Bacon never

again forgot that “the lines of his life” must progress in undeviating

conformity with the Favourite’s will. It is not profitable here to

attempt to determine whether or not he gave verdicts against his own

judgment, but we have the letters to show that he listened, replied,

and complied with Buckingham’s requests, and in 1618 he was made Lord

Chancellor, doubtless by the influence, and on the advice, of the

Favourite.

 

During the period of Bacon’s temporary disgrace, “when the King and

Buckingham had set their faces against him, and all the courtiers

were yelping at his heels,” the only friend who remained staunch

and constant to him was Sir Henry Yelverton, the Attorney-General.

Yelverton, whose admiration for, and loyalty towards the Lord

Chancellor were unswerving, would truckle neither to the Favourite

nor to the King; although the former had assured him that those

who opposed him “should discern what favour he had by the power he

would use.” Within a year of Bacon’s restoration to favour Yelverton

came into collision with Buckingham, and the Attorney’s accidental

misconstruction of the King’s verbal instructions, served as an excuse

for an information to be laid against him in the Star Chamber. We have

seen how Bacon could repay friendship with ingratitude, and kindness

with baseness in the case of Essex and of Cecil, but, in the instance

of Yelverton, even his admirers are forced to admit that his behaviour

was “peculiarly cold-blooded and ungrateful.” But the “lines of his

life” had made him the serf of the Favourite, and “whatever other

resolutions Bacon may have broken, none can accuse him of breaking

this.” When the case came on, and when “the bill was opened by the

King’s Sergeant briefly, with tears in his eyes, and Mr. Attorney,

standing at the Bar, amid the ordinary Counsellors, with dejected

looks, weeping tears, and a brief, eloquent, and humble oration, made a

submission, acknowledging his error, but denying the corruption”--the

Lord Chancellor did his utmost to resist the merciful proposal of the

majority to submit the Attorney’s submission to the King. The King

declined to interfere, and the termination of the case was announced to

Buckingham by Bacon, in the following self-satisfied and congratulatory

note:--“Yesterday we made an end of Sir Henry Yelverton’s causes. I

have almost killed myself with sitting almost eight hours. But I was

resolved to sit it through.” He then gives the terms of the sentence,

and adds: “How I stirred the Court I leave it to others to speak; but

things passed to his Majesty’s great honour.” In other words, a blunt,

straightforward, and honourable man, who had refused to purchase his

office by bribes, or by flattery, had been condemned, on a charge of

corruption (of which his judges knew him to be guiltless), to a fine

of £4,000 and imprisonment during the King’s pleasure, for the offence

of refusing to cringe to Buckingham. These were the things that, in

Bacon’s judgment, “passed to his Majesty’s great honour.”

 

In 1618 Bacon became Baron Verulam of Verulam; three years later he

was created Viscount St. Alban, “with all the ceremonies of robes and

coronet.” But his disgrace and discomfiture were soon to come. “In a

few weeks,” writes Lord Macaulay, “was signally brought to the test the

value of those objects for which Bacon had sullied his integrity, had

resigned his independence, had violated the most sacred obligations of

friendship and gratitude, had flattered the worthless, had persecuted

the innocent, had tampered with judges, had tortured prisoners, had

plundered suitors, had wasted on paltry intrigue all the powers of the

most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever been bestowed

on any of the children of men.” On March the 14th, 1621, Bacon was

charged by a disappointed suitor with taking money for the dispatch

of his suit. On April the 30th, in the House of Lords, was read “the

confession and humble submission of me, the Lord Chancellor.” On

May the 3rd, the Lords came to a general conclusion that “the Lord

Chancellor is guilty of the matters wherewith he is charged,” and it

was resolved that he should be fined £40,000, imprisoned in the Tower

during the King’s pleasure, declared incapable of any office, place,

or employment in the State or Commonwealth, and that he should never

sit in Parliament, nor come within the verge of the Court. Five years

later, on April the 9th, 1626, he died at Highgate of a chill and

sudden sickness, contracted by exposure when stuffing a fowl with snow

to test the effect of snow in preserving flesh from putrefaction. He

wrote, on his death bed, to Lord Arundel, to whose house he had been

carried: “As for the experiment it succeeded exceeding well.”

 

[Illustration: SIR NICHOLAS BACON.

 

From the original of Zucchero, in the collection of His Grace the Duke of Bedford.]