Bacon's Essays, and Wisdom of the Ancients
made a pathetic appeal to his judges; Bacon showed he had not answered
his objections, and compared him to the Duke of Guise, the most odious
comparison he could have instituted. Essex was condemned; the Queen
wavered in her resolution to execute him; his friend’s intercession
might perhaps have been able to save Essex from an ignominious death.
Did Bacon, in his turn, “spend all his power, might, and amity?” The
Queen’s Counsel extraordinary might have offended his sovereign by
his importunity, and have been forgotten in the impending vacancy of
the office of Solicitor-General! Essex died on the scaffold. But the
execution rendered the Queen unpopular, and she was received with
mournful silence when she appeared in public. She ordered a pamphlet
to be written to justify the execution; she made choice of Bacon as
the writer; the courtier did not decline the task, but published _A
Declaration of the Practices and Treasons attempted and committed by
Robert, late Earle of Essex and his Complices, against her Maiestie and
her Kingdoms_. This faithless friend, to use the language of Macaulay,
“exerted his professional talents to shed the Earl’s blood, and his
literary talents to blacken the Earl’s memory.”
The memory of Essex suffered but little from the attack of the
pamphlet; the base pamphleteer’s memory is blackened forever, and
to his fair name of “the wisest, brightest,” has been appended the
“meanest of mankind.” But let us cast a pall over this act, this moral
murder, perpetrated by the now degraded orator, degraded philosopher,
the now most degraded of men.
Elizabeth died in 1601; and before the arrival of James, in England,
Bacon wrote him a pedantic letter, probably to gratify the taste of
the pedant king; but he did not forget in it, “his late dear sovereign
Mistress—a princess happy in all things, but most happy—in such a
successor.”
Bacon solicited the honor of knighthood, a distinction much lavished at
this period. At the King’s coronation, he knelt down in company with
above three hundred gentlemen; but “he rose Sir Francis.” He sought
the hand of a rich alderman’s daughter, Miss Barnham, who consented to
become Lady Bacon.
The Earl of Southampton, Shakspeare’s generous patron and friend, who
had been convicted of high treason in the late reign, now received the
King’s pardon. This called to all men’s minds the fate of the unhappy
Earl of Essex, and of his odiously ungrateful accuser; the latter
unadvisedly published the _Sir Francis Bacon, his Apologie in certaine
imputations concerning the late Earle of Essex_; a defence which, in
the estimation of one of his biographers, Lord Campbell, has injured
him more with posterity than all the attacks of his enemies.
In the new Parliament, he represented the borough of Ipswich; he spoke
frequently, and obtained the good graces of the King by the support he
gave to James’s favorite plan of a union of England and Scotland; a
measure by no means palatable to the King’s new subjects.
The object of all his hopes, the price, perhaps, of his conduct to
Essex, seemed in 1606 to be within his reach; but he was once more to
be disappointed. His old enemy, Sir Edward Coke, prevented the vacancy.
The following year, however, after long and humiliating solicitation,
he attained the office to which he had so long aspired, and was
appointed Solicitor-General to the Crown.
Official advancement was now the object nearest his heart, and he
longed to be Attorney-General.[13]
In 1613, by a master stroke of policy, he created a vacancy for himself
as Attorney-General, and managed at the same time to disserve his old
enemy, Coke, by getting him preferred in rank, but at the expense of
considerable pecuniary loss.
After his new appointment, he was reëlected to his seat in the House
of Commons; he had gained so much popularity there, that the House
admitted him, although it resolved to exclude future Attorneys-General;
a resolution rescinded by later Parliaments.
The Attorney-General, as may be supposed, did not lack zeal in his
master’s service and for his master’s prerogative. One case, in
particular, was atrocious. An aged clergyman, named Peacham, was
prosecuted for high treason for a sermon which he had neither preached
nor published; the unfortunate old man was apprehended, put to the
torture in presence of the Attorney-General, and as the latter himself
tells us, was examined “before torture, between torture, and after
torture,” although Bacon must have been fully aware that the laws of
England did not sanction torture to extort confession. Bacon tampered
with the judges, and obtained a conviction; but the government durst
not carry the sentence into execution. Peacham languished in prison
till the ensuing year, when Providence rescued him from the hands of
human justice.
In 1616, Bacon was offered the formal promise of the Chancellorship, or
an actual appointment as Privy Councillor; he was too prudent not to
prefer an appointment to a promise, and he was accordingly nominated
to the functions of member of the Privy Council. His present leisure
enabled him to prosecute vigorously his _Novum Organum_, but he turned
aside to occupy himself with a proposition for the amendment of the
laws of England, on which Lord Campbell, assuredly the most competent
of judges, passes a high encomium.
At length, in 1617, Sir Francis Bacon attained the end of the ambition
of his life, he became Lord Keeper of the Seals, with the functions,
though not the title, of Lord High Chancellor of England. His promotion
to this dignity gave general satisfaction; his own university,
Cambridge, congratulated him; Oxford imitated the example; the world
expected a perfect judge, formed from his own model in his Essay of
Judicature. He took his seat in the Court of Chancery with the utmost
pomp and parade.
The Lord Keeper now endeavored to “feed fat the ancient grudge” he
bore Coke. He deprived him of the office of Chief Justice, and erased
his name from the list of privy councillors. Coke imagined a plan
of raising his falling fortunes; he projected a marriage between
his daughter by his second wife, a very rich heiress, and Sir John
Villiers, the brother of Buckingham, the King’s favorite. Bacon was
alarmed, wrote to the King, and used expressions of disparagement
towards the favorite, his new patron, to whom he was indebted for the
Seals he held. The King and his minion were equally indignant; and
they did not conceal from him their resentment. On the return of the
court, Bacon hastened to the residence of Buckingham; being denied
admittance, he waited two whole days in the ante-chamber with the Great
Seal of England in his hand. When at length he obtained access, the
Lord Keeper threw himself and the Great Seal on the ground, kissed the
favorite’s feet, and vowed never to rise till he was forgiven! It must
after this have been difficult indeed for him to rise again in the
world’s esteem or his own.
Bacon was made to purchase at a dear price his reinstatement in the
good graces of Buckingham. The favorite constantly wrote to the judge
in behalf of one of the parties, and in the end, says Lord Campbell,
intimated that he was to dictate the decree. Nor did Bacon once
remonstrate against this unwarrantable interference on the part of
the man to whom he had himself recommended “by no means to interpose
himself, either by word or letter in any cause depending on any court
of justice.” The Lord Keeper received soon after, in 1618, the reward
of his “many faithful services” by the higher title of Lord High
Chancellor of England, and by the peerage with the name of Baron of
Verulam.
The new Minister of Justice lent himself with his wonted complaisance
to a most outrageous act of injustice, which Macaulay stigmatizes as a
“dastardly murder,” that of the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh, under
a sentence pronounced sixteen years before; Sir Walter having been in
the interval invested with the high command of Admiral of the fleet.
Such an act it was the imperative duty of the first magistrate of the
realm not to promote, but to resist to the full extent of his power;
and the Chancellor alone could issue the warrant for the execution!
In 1620, he published what is usually considered his greatest work, his
_Novum Organum_ (New Instrument or Method), which forms the second part
of the _Instauratio Magna_ (Great Restoration of the Sciences). This
work had occupied Bacon’s leisure for nearly thirty years. Such was
the care he bestowed on it, that Rawley, his chaplain and biographer,
states that he had seen about twelve autograph copies of it, corrected
and improved until it assumed the shape in which it appeared. Previous
to the publication of the _Novum Organum_, says the illustrious Sir
John Herschel, “natural philosophy, in any legitimate and extensive
sense of the word, could hardly be said to exist.”[14]
It cannot be expected that a work destined completely to change
the state of science, we had almost said of nature, should not be
assailed by that prejudice which is ever ready to raise its loud but
unmeaning voice against whatever is new, how great or good soever it
may be. Bacon’s doctrine was accused of being calculated to produce
“dangerous revolutions,” to “subvert governments and the authority of
religion.” Some called on the present age and posterity to rise high
in their resentment against “the Bacon-faced generation,” for so were
the experimentalists termed. The old cry of irreligion, nay, even of
atheism, was raised against the man who had said: “I would rather
believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran,
than that this universal frame is without a mind.”[15] But Bacon had
to encounter the prejudices even of the learned. Cuffe, the Earl of
Essex’s secretary, a man celebrated for his attainments, said of the
_Instauratio Magna_, “a fool could not have written such a book, and a
wise man would not.” King James said, it was “like the peace of God,
that surpasseth all understanding.” And even Harvey, the discoverer
of the circulation of the blood, said to Aubrey: “Bacon is no great
philosopher; he writes philosophy like a Lord Chancellor.” Rawley, his
secretary and his biographer, laments, some years after his friend’s
death, that “his fame is greater and sounds louder in foreign parts
abroad than at home in his own nation; thereby verifying that divine
sentence: A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country and
in his own house.” Bacon was for some time without honor “in his own
country and in his own house.” But truth on this, as on all other
occasions, triumphs in the end. Bacon’s assailants are forgotten; Bacon
will be remembered with gratitude and veneration forever.
He was again, in 1621, promoted in the peerage to be Viscount
Saint-Albans; his patent particularly celebrating his “integrity in the
administration of justice.”
In this same year the Parliament assembled. The House of Commons first
voted the subsidies demanded by the Crown, and next proceeded, as was
usual in those times, to the redress of grievances. A committee of the
House was appointed to inquire into “the abuses of Courts of Justice.”
A report of this committee charged the Lord Chancellor with corruption,
and specified two cases; in the first of which Aubrey, a suitor in his
court, stated that he had presented the Lord Chancellor with a hundred
pounds; and Egerton, another suitor in his court, with four hundred
pounds in addition to a former piece of plate of the value of fifty
pounds; in both cases decisions had been given against the parties
whose presents had been received. (Lord Campbell asserts that in the
case of Egerton both parties had made the Chancellor presents.)[16] His