Elizabeth (35 page)

The year of 1616 brought long-awaited advancements for Francis, who found James I more appreciative of his talents than Elizabeth had been. He prosecuted the famous trial of the Earl and Countess of Somerset, Robert Carr and Frances Howard, for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower, and won the King’s desired outcome: that the defendants plead guilty so they could be imprisoned and later discreetly released.

Francis also wrote a series of letters to James I’s new favourite, Sir George Villiers, later 1st Duke of Buckingham, advising him of his duties and responsibilities, as well as warning him of potential dangers. An appreciative Villiers supported Francis as a candidate to replace the elderly Lord Ellesmere as Lord Chancellor, and in March, Ellesmere, already ill, decided to retire. Francis made him a single payment of £8,000 and stepped into the position with the agreement of all parties. He was now Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, the post his father, Sir Nicholas, had held. Francis finally held
a position that would pay him a generous salary: perhaps £10,000 to 15,000 a year from the pay and perquisites.

Francis continued, for the most part, to stay in the King’s favour, although he almost fell out with him and Villiers over an incident that occurred in 1617. The former Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, having lost the King’s support, tried to regain it by offering his daughter, Frances, as a wife for Villiers’ dissolute and slow-witted brother. When the young lady and her mother, Lady Hatton, objected, Coke kidnapped his daughter and tried to force her to marry. Francis, who thoroughly disliked Coke, sided with his wife, falling foul of Villiers, who wanted the wealthy heiress for a sister-in-law, as well as the King, who wanted his favoured Villiers to have his way.

Francis immediately backed down and later nobly refrained from gloating when Lady Hatton refused to make her daughter heiress to her fortune, thereby not benefiting the Villiers family as they had hoped, and Frances herself promptly left her husband and ran off with another man. Despite this, Francis was made Lord Chancellor in early 1618, and in May was created Baron Verulam.

Throughout this time, Francis continued writing essays, publishing
Novum Organum
in 1620, his textbook on the application of ‘a new logic, teaching to invent and judge by deduction’.
²³
He believed that Man could not move forward as long as he based his reasoning exclusively on his own prejudices, common folklore and previous knowledge. Starting from the beginning, everything should be re-examined and tested. His status as a philosopher and thinker was much admired by his contemporaries. The poet George Herbert in his poem ‘The Temple’, called Francis ‘Truth’s High Priest’, ‘Liberator of Science’, and ‘Master of what’s real’.
²⁴

At Court, Francis advised, but stepped back when it seemed politic to do so. In February 1621, he received another sign of the
King’s favour when he was created Viscount St Albans. However, his successes would be transformed to public disgrace a month later when a series of claims were made in Parliament that Francis had taken bribes. Since the salaries of public officials were low, it was not uncommon for them to embellish their income by taking fees and favours; it was quite in order to accept a ‘gift’ from a successful applicant after the fact. It was not, however, acceptable to receive a gift before a judgement, which was what Francis was accused of by two clients who had subsequently lost their cases.

Francis could not deny that irregularities had taken place. He appealed to the King in the hope he would save him, but James I was already facing opposition to favours he had issued to benefit Villiers. On the King’s instruction, Francis surrendered the Great Seal and sent a letter of submission acknowledging the charges to the House of Lords. He confessed to corruption, responding to each of the 26 charges to indicate that most of them related to misunderstandings (for example, a gift had arrived on 1 January and had been recorded as a New Year present, not a gift relating to a case) or gifts given after a case had been decided. He was therefore confessing to a series of clerical errors, but not to actual bribery.

The Lords, some of whom held grudges against him, sentenced him to a fine of £40,000, imprisonment in the Tower at the King’s pleasure, disqualification from any state post, from standing as a Member of Parliament, and from coming to the Royal Court. He was briefly imprisoned in the Tower and then returned to his childhood home. He was not to stay there for long; Villiers let it be known that he wanted York House, and Francis’s pardon was delayed until he agreed to sell. Francis retired to Gorhambury.

For the rest of his life, Francis would devote his time to his academic work. He translated his earlier work
The Advancement of Learning (De Augmentis Scientiarum
) into Latin, revising and
improving the text. He worked on his only fictional book
The New Atlantis
, with its utopian civilization of experimentation, learning and knowledge. He also started a major work,
Historia Naturalis
, and began working on a chapter on the history of life and death, which looked into the possibility of extending life.

In 1625, the year in which James I died and was succeeded by Charles I (King of England and Ireland 1625–49), Francis published a translation of the psalms from Latin to English, dedicated to the poet George Herbert. He also published a second book of essays, adding new ones to those published in 1612 and improving some of the existing ones. It is this selection that has enjoyed the most popularity over the centuries.

In this work, small insights into the man himself appear, as in the section ‘Of Parents and Children’, in which the childless Francis wrote, ‘the noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men; which have thought to impress the images of their minds, where those of their bodies have failed.’
²⁵
In ‘Of Marriage and the Single Life’, he noted that single men were more likely to undertake great adventures and to make the best friends and masters. A hint of longing from a man perhaps not happily married? He wrote movingly on the subject of friendship, but his feelings on love indicate that all might not have been well with his wife.
²⁶

By the end of 1625, he was seriously ill. In December, he wrote his final will, adding a codicil that cancelled his bequests to his wife. He stipulated that she should only have as much as the law allowed to a widow from her husband’s estates. Four months after his death, Alice married her gentleman usher, Sir John Underhill.

Early in 1626, Francis was in London to attend Parliament, but was too sick to do so. He set off home for Gorhambury, but was taken ill on the way and stopped at the house of Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel, at Highgate, where he died on 9 April 1626, aged 65.
According to his wishes, he was buried quietly in the Church of St Michael’s near St Albans, and it is here that a magnificent monumental statue of Francis stands. A second statue stands in the Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge. He died with enormous debts; it seemed that he was as hopeless with money as his mother had warned.

Over the years Sir Francis Bacon has been the focus of much speculation. Some claim that he wrote the works published under the name of William Shakespeare, while others contend he had an even greater ‘concealed literary career’, writing under the names of John Lyly, George Peele, Stephen Gosson, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Kyd and Thomas Nashe (playwrights), Edmund Spenser, Geoffrey Whitney and William Webbe (poets), Timothy Bright and Robert Burton (writers on melancholy). It is also claimed that he translated all or part of the King James Bible and penned the novel
Don Quixote,
published in 1605 under the name of Miguel de Cervantes.

And as for the evidence of Francis being the illegitimate child of Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley? Apart from researchers attempting to interpret the codes and ciphers that Francis so loved and concluding that they can be decoded to show ‘that Francis was the elder son of a secret marriage between Queen Elizabeth and Lord Robert Dudley’ there is no conclusive evidence. Elizabeth certainly did not grant him the favours that she showed to other members of the Court, and in fact seemed to impede his advancement. It is possible that this may have been a calculated diversion to avoid drawing attention to her parenthood, but apart from Francis’s birth date there is little to indicate that he was the Queen’s illegitimate son. But if Francis was not Elizabeth and Robert’s son, who was?

I
n June 1587, a boat was intercepted off the northern Spanish coast and a young Englishman was taken in for questioning, suspected of being a spy. He was sent to be interviewed at the house of Sir Francis Englefield, who had been a Catholic politician under Mary I and had fled to Spain under Elizabeth I’s reign. What the captive had to say caused something of a stir, in Spain and later in England.

According to the young man, his name was Arthur Dudley. He was about 25 years old, which means he would have been born in about 1561. He had been brought up in a village near London in the household of Robert Southern, whose wife had been a servant to Kat Ashley. Arthur had lived as a normal member of the family until, at the age of five, he, alone among his brothers and sisters, was taken to London to be brought up as a gentleman. At the age of eight, Arthur was introduced to Sir John Ashley, Kat Ashley’s husband and Elizabeth’s senior gentleman attendant, who made Robert Southern his Deputy Controller of the Queen’s household at Enfield. This is where the boy spent his summers, while in winter he stayed in London and received an upper-class education, with classes in Latin, French, Italian, fencing, music, dancing and law.

When Arthur was about 15, he told Ashley and Southern that he wished to go abroad to study, but his request was declined.
Arthur stole a purse of silver coins from Southern and headed for Milford Haven, hoping to be taken on board a ship for Spain, a country he had longed to visit. He ended up taking refuge in the house of George Devereux, the brother of Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex; however, before he could get on a ship, Arthur was arrested by order of the local justices of the peace. The order for his detention had come from the Privy Council, which had instructed that Arthur was, under no circumstances, to be allowed to leave England. According to his interviewer Englefield’s notes, ‘This letter still remains in the castle of Llanfear, in the hands of George Devereux, and was seen and read by Richard Jones and John Ap Morgan, then magistrates of the town of Pembroke, who agreed that the respect thus shown to the lad by the Council proved him to be a different sort of person from what he had commonly been regarded.’
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Arthur was returned to London and taken to Pickering Place, where he was met by Sir Edward Wotton, the owner of the house; Sir Thomas Heneage, a favourite courtier of the Queen; and his guardian John Ashley, also close to the Queen, who all impressed on him that he must never do such a thing again. He was also told that it was Ashley, not Southern, who was paying for his education.

About four years later, after persistent pleading, Arthur was allowed to volunteer as a soldier to fight in the Netherlands under the protection of French Colonel de la Noue. In 1580, he was taken to de la Noue at Bruges in the care of a servant in the livery of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester. De la Noue was later captured, and Arthur went on his own to France, returning to England for a brief time for additional funds.

Late in 1583, while still in France, Arthur received a letter from home, telling him that his father was ill and wished to see him before he died as he had something important to tell him. Arthur returned home and found Robert Southern at Evesham, where he had become
an innkeeper. Before his death, he informed Arthur that he was not his father. He told him that in 1561, he had been sent for by Kat Ashley and ordered to go to Hampton Court. In a corridor leading to the Queen’s private rooms, he met Lady ‘Herington’ (possibly Isabella Harington, one of Elizabeth’s attendants), who gave him a newborn baby. He was told that the illegitimate child belonged to a lady at Court and its existence had to be concealed from the Queen. Southern took the infant to a mill at Molesey, where the miller’s wife acted as a wet nurse for the baby. Later Southern took the boy to his home, about 60 miles from London, and brought him up as his own child in the place of one of the Southern children who had died in infancy. Arthur, Southern told him, was the baby in question.

Southern refused to say who Arthur’s real parents were, and the young man left him in anger. He was called back by Mr Smyth, a local schoolmaster, and Southern finally agreed to reveal his parents’ true identity as the young man had good reason to know. He claimed that Elizabeth I herself was Arthur’s mother and Robert Dudley his father. In a state of understandable shock, Arthur fled to London, where he sought out Sir John Ashley. When he told Ashley and a Mr Drury (perhaps Sir Drew Drury, Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber and Lieutenant of the Tower) what Southern had told him, rather than deny it, the two gentlemen warned him to say nothing further about the matter. If he remained quiet, steps would be taken to provide for him in a fitting manner.