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.”
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.”
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.
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,