Charles Williams - Bacon - A Biography of Sir Francis Bacon

BACON

A BIOGRAPHY OF SIR FRANCIS BACON

BY

CHARLES WILLIAMS

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CHARLES WILLIAMS

Charles Walter Stansby Williams was born in London in 1886. He dropped out of University College London in 1904, and was hired by Oxford University Press as a proof-reader, quickly rising to the position of editor. While there, arguably his greatest editorial achievement was the publication of the first major English-language edition of the works of the Danish philosopher Sren Kierkegaard.

Williams began writing in the twenties and went on to publish seven novels. Of these, the best-known are probably War in Heaven (1930), Descent into Hell (1937), and All Hallows' Eve (1945) all fantasies set in the contemporary world. He also published a vast body of well-received scholarship, including a study of Dante entitled The Figure of Beatrice (1944) which remains a standard reference text for academics today, and a highly unconventional history of the church, Descent of the Dove (1939). Williams garnered a number of well-known admirers, including T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and C. S. Lewis. Towards the end of his life, he gave lectures at Oxford University on John Milton, and received an honorary MA degree. Williams died almost exactly at the close of World War II, aged 58.

FRANCIS BACON AS A BOY

NOTE

The following pages derive from a Myth of Francis Bacon, written in verse for presentation at Downe House in July 1932, at the request of Miss Olive Willis. At that time it seemed that, in spite of the recent biographical flow, there was no convenient modern Life of Bacon, and the suggestion of Mr. Arthur Barker provoked my own inclination to attempt one. This book, therefore, was planned and partly written when the Life by Miss Sturt appeared. But the stresses here are quiet different from hers, and in any case Bacon is worth two, and will no doubt soon be worth at least ten, Lives. No one can be more aware than I how much there is in the Lord St. Alban which is not here, how many interests and how much interest. He was, in parts, more than a man.

In view of Miss Rebecca Wests recent book on St. Augustine, perhaps I ought also to say that the paragraph on St. Monica is derived from my own review of another (and much less interesting) Life published some years since.

C. W.

Easter, 1933.

CHAPTER I

VOCATION

THE Fortune of Francis Bacon determined that he should be born on the twenty-second of January 1560/1, at York House in the Strand. It laid him in a cradle among the rulers of kingdoms; the names of empires were to be his daily business, but it interfused with them another and invisible empire which was to belong to his holidays and his nights, the empire of man over nature. His Fortune prepared in him an energy which has protracted itself through three centuries, saluted and studied by such men as Descartes and Leibniz, and (in another kind) Voltaire; an energy which, by the scope of its vision and the vital lucidity of its speech, was to make even his enemies his debtors. There was in his lifetime but one other power of equal and superior greatness; in the year of Franciss birth John Shakespeare was chosen to serve Stratford as a chamberlain, while Nicholas Bacon held the Great Seal of England. Men have been so astonished at the separate glories of the two children that they have refused to believe that the richness of God could put them in the world together. Yet the one is in a sense the measure of the other. The mortal greatness of Francis lacked but one thinghe was not Shakespeare; his judgment lacked but one intelligencehe would not have supposed the subordination was on his side.

His Fortune gave him energy and lucidity, but also a body troubled by ill-health. It set his cradle close by the Throne, but on the left side. There had been but recently another cradle on the right, in which the slightly deformed body of his cousin, Robert Cecil, had lain. Offices and powers loomed below the Throne and over the cradles that stood, for the future as for the present, so near the purple. Franciss father was Lord Keeper; his grandfather had been governor to royalty; his uncle was Secretary and presently to be Treasurer. The two cousins might look forward to succeeding to such offices, or (if they preferred) to accepting convenient titles, large estates, and enormous houses, now being built for them, such as Burleigh House or Theobalds. Gorhambury was begun two years after Franciss birth. His Fortune seemed to promise him everything he could want at the cost of a little industry. In fact, for all his unceasing industry, it kept him waiting for nearly fifty years for what he did want, providing him with unsatisfactory substitutes meanwhile, and having at last given it, immediately took it back again.

He emerged from his cradle into the world, a distracted and dangerous world, about which the rumours and uncertainties of a new reign ran thickly, through London, and to and from the ports, and overseas to other centresThe Hague, Paris, Madrid, Rome. He beheld the gardens of York House, and Whitehall away on one side; on the other, towards Saint Pauls, among similar palaces, Essex House, where his elder brother Anthony was to sit, thirty-five years later, writing and dictating letters to those other centres of diplomacy. He grew vividly aware of his brother, dutifully aware of his mother and his father, of great personages; among them, greatest of all, of the Queen. She was thirty-seven when he was born; one day, by his deceitful Fortune, he was led to her feet, and presented. She asked him how old he was. I am three years younger than your Majestys happy reign, he said, and maintained the same tactful gravity and maturity during his further youthful intercourse with her whenever she teased him with questions, so that she laughed and was pleased and called him her young Lord Keeper. In Saint Jamess Fields, years afterwards, he knew of an echo; biography almost demands that he shall be supposed to have found it then, and that fancy shall invent and observe the young Lord Keeper listening to the echo in the Fields, as a mere convenient prophecy of his future as privy councillor to King James and to Nature. Probable conjectures, the Essays remark, many times turn themselves into prophecies; but any one who attended to the Essays could never write modern biography; let us pretend it happened. Add that there was, then or later, a conjurer, and all that was ever exposed of the Lord St. Albans childhood is known.

The household in which the small Francis walked was industrious and serious, concerned with statecraft and religion. He inherited both, with a difference. His father, Nicholas Bacon, after the death of his first wife, had married again, as wives and husbands so often did then; hardly any period of history is fuller of those second marriages which contributed to the making of estates and the enriching of the Families. Sir Nicholas chose a lady as distinguished in her way as he in his, who became the mother of two sonsAnthony and Francis. She was Anne Cooke, the daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, governor of Edward VI, the prince to whom Sir John Cheke, the brother of William Cecils first wife, had taught Greek. Anne Cooke had herself been a tutor to the young Majesty. Her sister Mildred, William Cecils second wife, was reported to be one of the two most learned women in England; the other was Lady Jane Grey. And as that group of Bacons, Cecils, and Cookes, with its connections, belonged to the learned among the learned, so they belonged also to the reformers among the Reformers, and to the rich among the rich. Nothing quite like it has been seen since among the governors of England: Gladstone, pious, well-read, well-to-do, is, of all people, the nearest example, and Gladstone had no brother-in-law or successor of his own rank.