Sir Francis Bacon

SIR FRANCIS BACON ~ 1561-1626

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Francis Bacon


Sir Francis Bacon Tudor, 1st Viscount St Alban, Lord Verulam, William Shakespeare (1st cousin 13x removed)

1561–1626

BIRTH 22 JANUARY 1561 • The Strand, London, England

DEATH 9 APR 1626 • Highgate, London Borough of Camden, Greater London, England1st cousin 12x removed

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Right HonourableThe Viscount St AlbanPC
Portrait by Paul van Somer I, 1617
Lord High Chancellor of England
In office
7 March 1617 – 3 May 1621
MonarchJames I
Preceded bySir Thomas Egerton
Succeeded byJohn Williams
Attorney General of England and Wales
In office
26 October 1613 – 7 March 1617
MonarchJames I
Preceded bySir Henry Hobart
Succeeded bySir Henry Yelverton
Personal details
BornFrancis Bacon
22 January 1561
The Strand, London, England
Died9 April 1626 (aged 65)
Highgate, Middlesex, England
Resting placeSt. Michael’s Church, St. Albans
SpouseAlice Barnham ​(m. 1604)​
ParentsSir Nicholas Bacon (father)Lady Anne Bacon (mother)
EducationTrinity College, Cambridge (no degree)
Gray’s Inn (call to bar)
Notable worksWorks by Francis Bacon
Signature
Philosophy career
Other namesLord Verulam
Notable workNovum Organum
EraRenaissance philosophy17th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolEmpiricism
Main interestsNatural philosophyPhilosophical logic
Notable ideasshowList
showInfluences
showInfluenced
Francis-Bacon-Wikipedia

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban[a] PC, QC (/ˈbeɪkən/;[5] 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), also known as Lord Verulam, was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon led the advancement of both natural philosophy and the scientific method and his works remained influential even in the late stages of the Scientific Revolution.[6]

‘Rare images’ takes a brief pictorial look at some of the powerful evidence revealing Francis Bacon as Shakespeare & the Supreme Head of the Rosicrucian-Freemasonry Brotherhood.

Bacon has been called the father of empiricism.[7] He argued for the possibility of scientific knowledge based only upon inductive reasoning and careful observation of events in nature. He believed that science could be achieved by the use of a sceptical and methodical approach whereby scientists aim to avoid misleading themselves. Although his most specific proposals about such a method, the Baconian method, did not have long-lasting influence, the general idea of the importance and possibility of a sceptical methodology makes Bacon one of the later founders of the scientific method.

His portion of the method based in scepticism was a new rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, whose practical details are still central to debates on science and methodology. He is famous for his role in the scientific revolution, begun during the Middle Ages, promoting scientific experimentation as a way of glorifying God and fulfilling scripture. He was renowned as a politician in Elizabethan England, as he held the office of Lord Chancellor.

Bacon was a patron of libraries and developed a system for cataloguing books under three categories – history, poetry, and philosophy – which could further be divided into specific subjects and subheadings. About books he wrote, “Some books are to be tasted; others swallowed; and some few to be chewed and digested.”[8] The Shakespearean authorship thesis, which was first proposed in the mid-19th century, contends that Bacon wrote at least some and possibly all of the plays conventionally attributed to William Shakespeare.[9]

Bacon was educated at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where he rigorously followed the medieval curriculum, which was presented largely in Latin. He was the first recipient of the Queen’s counsel designation, conferred in 1597 when Elizabeth I reserved him as her legal advisor. After the accession of James I in 1603, Bacon was knighted, then created Baron Verulam in 1618[2] and Viscount St Alban in 1621.[1][b] He had no heirs and so both titles became extinct on his death in 1626 at the age of 65. He died of pneumonia, with one account by John Aubrey stating that he had contracted it while studying the effects of freezing on meat preservation. He is buried at St Michael’s Church, St Albans, Hertfordshire.[11]

Biography[edit]

Early life and education[edit]

See also: Anne Bacon and Nicholas Bacon (Lord Keeper)

A young Francis Bacon depicted in a National Portrait Gallery painting; the inscription around Bacon’s head reads: Si tabula daretur digna animum mallem, Latin for “If one could but paint his mind”.

The Italianate entry to York House, built around 1626 in Strand, the year of Bacon’s death

Francis Bacon was born on 22 January 1561 at York House near Strand in London, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon (Lord Keeper of the Great Seal) by his second wife, Anne (Cooke) Bacon, the daughter of the noted Renaissance humanist Anthony Cooke. His mother’s sister was married to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, making Burghley Bacon’s uncle.[12]

Biographers believe that Bacon was educated at home in his early years owing to poor health, which would plague him throughout his life. He received tuition from John Walsall, a graduate of Oxford with a strong leaning toward Puritanism. He attended Trinity College at the University of Cambridge on 5 April 1573 at the age of 12,[13] living there for three years along with his older brother Anthony Bacon under the personal tutelage of Dr John Whitgift, future Archbishop of Canterbury. Bacon’s education was conducted largely in Latin and followed the medieval curriculum. It was at Cambridge that Bacon first met Queen Elizabeth, who was impressed by his precocious intellect, and was accustomed to calling him “The young lord keeper”.[14]

His studies brought him to the belief that the methods and results of science as then practised were erroneous. His reverence for Aristotle conflicted with his rejection of Aristotelian philosophy, which seemed to him barren, argumentative and wrong in its objectives.

On 27 June 1576, he and Anthony entered de societate magistrorum at Gray’s Inn. A few months later, Francis went abroad with Sir Amias Paulet, the English ambassador at Paris, while Anthony continued his studies at home. The state of government and society in France under Henry III afforded him valuable political instruction.[15] For the next three years he visited Blois, Poitiers, Tours, Italy, and Spain.[16] There is no evidence that he studied at the University of Poitiers.[17] During his travels, Bacon studied language, statecraft, and civil law while performing routine diplomatic tasks. On at least one occasion he delivered diplomatic letters to England for Walsingham, Burghley, Leicester, and for the queen.[16]

The sudden death of his father in February 1579 prompted Bacon to return to England. Sir Nicholas had laid up a considerable sum of money to purchase an estate for his youngest son, but he died before doing so, and Francis was left with only a fifth of that money.[15] Having borrowed money, Bacon got into debt. To support himself, he took up his residence in law at Gray’s Inn in 1579,[15] his income being supplemented by a grant from his mother Lady Anne of the manor of Marks near Romford in Essex, which generated a rent of £46.[18]

Parliamentarian[edit]

Bacon’s statue at Gray’s Inn in London’s South Square

Bacon stated that he had three goals: to uncover truth, to serve his country, and to serve his church. He sought to achieve these goals by seeking a prestigious post. In 1580, through his uncle, Lord Burghley, he applied for a post at court that might enable him to pursue a life of learning, but his application failed. For two years he worked quietly at Gray’s Inn, until he was admitted as an outer barrister in 1582.[19]

His parliamentary career began when he was elected MP for Bossiney, Cornwall, in a by-election in 1581. In 1584 he took his seat in Parliament for Melcombe in Dorset, and in 1586 for Taunton. At this time, he began to write on the condition of parties in the church, as well as on the topic of philosophical reform in the lost tract Temporis Partus Maximus. Yet he failed to gain a position that he thought would lead him to success.[15] He showed signs of sympathy to Puritanism, attending the sermons of the Puritan chaplain of Gray’s Inn and accompanying his mother to the Temple Church to hear Walter Travers. This led to the publication of his earliest surviving tract, which criticized the English church’s suppression of the Puritan clergy. In the Parliament of 1586, he openly urged execution for the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots.

About this time, he again approached his powerful uncle for help; this move was followed by his rapid progress at the bar. He became a bencher in 1586 and was elected a Reader in 1587, delivering his first set of lectures in Lent the following year. In 1589, he received the valuable appointment of reversion to the Clerkship of the Star Chamber, although he did not formally take office until 1608; the post was worth £1,600 a year.[15][1]

In 1588 he became MP for Liverpool and then for Middlesex in 1593. He later sat three times for Ipswich (1597, 1601, 1604) and once for Cambridge University (1614).[20]

He became known as a liberal-minded reformer, eager to amend and simplify the law. Though a friend of the crown, he opposed feudal privileges and dictatorial powers. He spoke against religious persecution. He struck at the House of Lords in its usurpation of the Money Bills. He advocated for the union of England and Scotland, which made him a significant influence toward the consolidation of the United Kingdom; and he later would advocate for the integration of Ireland into the Union. Closer constitutional ties, he believed, would bring greater peace and strength to these countries.[21][22]

Final years of the Queen’s reign[edit]

Memorial to Bacon in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge

Bacon soon became acquainted with Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite.[23] By 1591 he acted as the earl’s confidential adviser.[15][23] In 1592, he was commissioned to write a tract in response to the Jesuit Robert Parson‘s anti-government polemic, which he titled Certain Observations Made upon a Libel, identifying England with the ideals of democratic Athens against the belligerence of Spain.[24] Bacon took his third parliamentary seat for Middlesex when in February 1593 Elizabeth summoned Parliament to investigate a Roman Catholic plot against her. Bacon’s opposition to a bill that would levy triple subsidies in half the usual time offended the Queen: opponents accused him of seeking popularity, and for a time the Court excluded him from favour.[25]

When the office of Attorney General fell vacant in 1594, Lord Essex’s influence was not enough to secure the position for Bacon and it was given to Sir Edward Coke. Likewise, Bacon failed to secure the lesser office of Solicitor General in 1595, the Queen pointedly snubbing him by appointing Sir Thomas Fleming instead.[1] To console him for these disappointments, Essex presented him with a property at Twickenham, which Bacon subsequently sold for £1,800.[26]

In 1597 Bacon became the first Queen’s Counsel designate, when Queen Elizabeth reserved him as her legal counsel.[27] In 1597, he was also given a patent, giving him precedence at the Bar.[28] Despite his designations, he was unable to gain the status and notoriety of others. In a plan to revive his position he unsuccessfully courted the wealthy young widow Lady Elizabeth Hatton.[29] 

His courtship failed after she broke off their relationship upon accepting marriage to Sir Edward Coke, a further spark of enmity between the men.[30] In 1598 Bacon was arrested for debt. Afterward, however, his standing in the Queen’s eyes improved. Gradually, Bacon earned the standing of one of the learned counsels.[31] His relationship with the Queen further improved when he severed ties with Essex—a shrewd move, as Essex would be executed for treason in 1601.[32]

With others, Bacon was appointed to investigate the charges against Essex. A number of Essex’s followers confessed that Essex had planned a rebellion against the Queen.[33] Bacon was subsequently a part of the legal team headed by the Attorney General Sir Edward Coke at Essex’s treason trial.[33] After the execution, the Queen ordered Bacon to write the official government account of the trial, which was later published as A DECLARATION of the Practices and Treasons attempted and committed by Robert late Earle of Essex and his Complices, against her Majestie and her Kingdoms … after Bacon’s first draft was heavily edited by the Queen and her ministers.[34][35]

According to his personal secretary and chaplain, William Rawley, as a judge Bacon was always tender-hearted, “looking upon the examples with the eye of severity, but upon the person with the eye of pity and compassion”. And also that “he was free from malice”, “no revenger of injuries”, and “no defamer of any man”.[36]

James I comes to the throne[edit]

Bacon, c. 1618

The succession of James I brought Bacon into greater favour. He was knighted in 1603. In another shrewd move, Bacon wrote his Apologies in defense of his proceedings in the case of Essex, as Essex had favoured James to succeed to the throne. The following year, during the course of the uneventful first parliament session, Bacon married Alice Barnham.[37] In June 1607, he was at last rewarded with the office of solicitor general[1] and, in 1608, he began working as the Clerkship of the Star Chamber. Despite a generous income, old debts still could not be paid. He sought further promotion and wealth by supporting King James and his arbitrary policies. In 1610, the fourth session of James’s first parliament met. Despite Bacon’s advice to him, James and the Commons found themselves at odds over royal prerogatives and the king’s embarrassing extravagance. The House was finally dissolved in February 1611. Throughout this period Bacon managed to stay in the favor of the king while retaining the confidence of the Commons.

In 1613, Bacon was finally appointed attorney general, after advising the king to shuffle judicial appointments. As attorney general, Bacon, by his zealous efforts—which included torture—to obtain the conviction of Edmund Peacham for treason, raised legal controversies of high constitutional importance;[38] and successfully prosecuted Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset, and his wife, Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, for murder in 1616.

The so-called Prince’s Parliament of April 1614 objected to Bacon’s presence in the seat for Cambridge and to the various royal plans that Bacon had supported. Although he was allowed to stay, parliament passed a law that forbade the attorney general to sit in parliament. His influence over the king had evidently inspired resentment or apprehension in many of his peers. Bacon, however, continued to receive the King’s favour, which led to his appointment in March 1617 as temporary Regent of England (for a period of a month), and in 1618 as Lord Chancellor. On 12 July 1618 the king created Bacon Baron Verulam, of Verulam, in the Peerage of England; he then became known as Francis, Lord Verulam.[1]

Bacon continued to use his influence with the king to mediate between the throne and Parliament, and in this capacity he was further elevated in the same peerage, as Viscount St Alban, on 27 January 1621.[citation needed]

Lord Chancellor and public disgrace[edit]

Bacon and members of Parliament on the day of his 1621 political fall

Bacon’s public career ended in disgrace in 1621. After he fell into debt, a parliamentary committee on the administration of the law charged him with 23 separate counts of corruption. His lifelong enemy, Sir Edward Coke, who had instigated these accusations,[39] was one of those appointed to prepare the charges against the chancellor.[40] To the lords, who sent a committee to enquire whether a confession was really his, he replied, “My lords, it is my act, my hand, and my heart; I beseech your lordships to be merciful to a broken reed.” He was sentenced to a fine of £40,000 and committed to the Tower of London at the king’s pleasure; the imprisonment lasted only a few days and the fine was remitted by the king.[41] More seriously, parliament declared Bacon incapable of holding future office or sitting in parliament. He narrowly escaped undergoing degradation, which would have stripped him of his titles of nobility. Subsequently, the disgraced viscount devoted himself to study and writing.

There seems little doubt that Bacon had accepted gifts from litigants, but this was an accepted custom of the time and not necessarily evidence of deeply corrupt behaviour.[42] While acknowledging that his conduct had been lax, he countered that he had never allowed gifts to influence his judgement and, indeed, he had on occasion given a verdict against those who had paid him. He even had an interview with King James in which he assured:

The law of nature teaches me to speak in my own defence: With respect to this charge of bribery I am as innocent as any man born on St. Innocents Day. I never had a bribe or reward in my eye or thought when pronouncing judgment or order… I am ready to make an oblation of myself to the King

— 17 April 1621[43]

He also wrote the following to Buckingham:

My mind is calm, for my fortune is not my felicity. I know I have clean hands and a clean heart, and I hope a clean house for friends or servants; but Job himself, or whoever was the justest judge, by such hunting for matters against him as hath been used against me, may for a time seem foul, especially in a time when greatness is the mark and accusation is the game.[44]

As the conduct of accepting gifts was ubiquitous and common practice, and the Commons was zealously inquiring into judicial corruption and malfeasance, it has been suggested that Bacon served as a scapegoat to divert attention from the clandestine and favorite of King James I own ill practice and alleged corruption.[45]

The true reason for his acknowledgement of guilt is the subject of debate, but some authors speculate that it may have been prompted by his sickness, or by a view that through his fame and the greatness of his office he would be spared harsh punishment. He may even have been blackmailed, with a threat to charge him with sodomy, into confession.[42][46]

The British jurist Basil Montagu wrote in Bacon’s defense, concerning the episode of his public disgrace:

Bacon has been accused of servility, of dissimulation, of various base motives, and their filthy brood of base actions, all unworthy of his high birth, and incompatible with his great wisdom, and the estimation in which he was held by the noblest spirits of the age. It is true that there were men in his own time, and will be men in all times, who are better pleased to count spots in the sun than to rejoice in its glorious brightness. Such men have openly libelled him, like Dewes and Weldon, whose falsehoods were detected as soon as uttered, or have fastened upon certain ceremonious compliments and dedications, the fashion of his day, as a sample of his servility, passing over his noble letters to the Queen, his lofty contempt for the Lord Keeper Puckering, his open dealing with Sir Robert Cecil, and with others, who, powerful when he was nothing, might have blighted his opening fortunes for ever, forgetting his advocacy of the rights of the people in the face of the court, and the true and honest counsels, always given by him, in times of great difficulty, both to Elizabeth and her successor. When was a “base sycophant” loved and honoured by piety such as that of Herbert, Tennison, and Rawley, by noble spirits like Hobbes, Ben Jonson, and Selden, or followed to the grave, and beyond it, with devoted affection such as that of Sir Thomas Meautys.[47]

Personal life[edit]

Religious beliefs[edit]

Bacon was a devout Anglican. He believed that philosophy and the natural world must be studied inductively, but argued that we can only study arguments for the existence of God. Information on his attributes (such as nature, action, and purposes) can only come from special revelation. Bacon also held that knowledge was cumulative, that study encompassed more than a simple preservation of the past. “Knowledge is the rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate,” he wrote. In his Essays, he affirms that “a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”[48]

Bacon’s idea of idols of the mind may have self-consciously represented an attempt to Christianize science at the same time as developing a new, reliable scientific method; Bacon gave worship of Neptune as an example of the idola tribus fallacy, hinting at the religious dimensions of his critique of the idols.[49]

Bacon was against the splintering within Christianity, believing that it would ultimately lead to the creation of atheism as a dominant worldview, as indicated with his quote that “The causes of atheism are: divisions in religion, if they be many; for any one main division, addeth zeal to both sides; but many divisions introduce atheism.”[50]

Marriage to Alice Barnham[edit]

See also: Alice Barnham

Engraving of Alice Barnham

When he was 36, Bacon courted Elizabeth Hatton, a young widow of 20. Reportedly, she broke off their relationship upon accepting marriage to a wealthier man, Bacon’s rival, Sir Edward Coke. Years later, Bacon still wrote of his regret that the marriage to Hatton had not taken place.[51]

At the age of 45, Bacon married Alice Barnham, the 13-year-old daughter of a well-connected London alderman and MP. Bacon wrote two sonnets proclaiming his love for Alice. The first was written during his courtship and the second on his wedding day, 10 May 1606. When Bacon was appointed lord chancellor, “by special Warrant of the King”, Lady Bacon was given precedence over all other Court ladies. Bacon’s personal secretary and chaplain, William Rawley, wrote in his biography of Bacon that his marriage was one of “much conjugal love and respect”, mentioning a robe of honour that he gave to Alice and which “she wore unto her dying day, being twenty years and more after his death”.[36]

However, an increasing number of reports circulated about friction in the marriage, with speculation that this may have been due to Alice’s making do with less money than she had once been accustomed to. It was said that she was strongly interested in fame and fortune, and when household finances dwindled, she complained bitterly. Bunten wrote in her Life of Alice Barnham [52] that, upon their descent into debt, she went on trips to ask for financial favours and assistance from their circle of friends. Bacon disinherited her upon discovering her secret romantic relationship with Sir John Underhill, rewriting his will (which had generously planned to leave her lands, goods, and income) and revoking her entirely as a beneficiary.

Sexuality[edit]

Several authors believe that, despite his marriage, Bacon was primarily attracted to men.[53][54] Forker,[55] for example, has explored the “historically documentable sexual preferences” of both Francis Bacon and King James I and concluded they were both oriented to “masculine love”, a contemporary term that “seems to have been used exclusively to refer to the sexual preference of men for members of their own gender.”[56]

The well-connected antiquary John Aubrey noted in his Brief Lives concerning Bacon, “He was a Pederast. His Ganimeds and Favourites tooke Bribes”.[57] (“Pederast” in Renaissance diction meant generally “homosexual” rather than specifically a lover of minors; “ganimed” derives from the mythical prince abducted by Zeus to be his cup-bearer and bed warmer.)

The Jacobean antiquarian Sir Simonds D’Ewes (Bacon’s fellow Member of Parliament) implied there had been a question of bringing him to trial for buggery,[58] which his brother Anthony Bacon had also been charged with.[59]

In his Autobiography and Correspondence, in the diary entry for 3 May 1621, the date of Bacon’s censure by Parliament, D’Ewes describes Bacon’s love for his Welsh serving-men, in particular Godrick, a “very effeminate-faced youth” whom he calls “his catamite and bedfellow”.[60]

This conclusion has been disputed by others, who point to lack of consistent evidence, and consider the sources to be more open to interpretation.[33][61][62][63][64] Publicly, at least, Bacon distanced himself from the idea of homosexuality. In his New Atlantis, he described his utopian island as being “the chastest nation under heaven”, and “as for masculine love, they have no touch of it”.[65]

Death[edit]

Monument to Bacon at his burial place in St Michael’s Church in St Albans

On 9 April 1626, Francis Bacon died of pneumonia while at Arundel mansion at Highgate outside London.[66] An influential account of the circumstances of his death was given by John Aubrey’s Brief Lives.[66] Aubrey’s vivid account, which portrays Bacon as a martyr to experimental scientific method, had him journeying to High-gate through the snow with the King’s physician when he is suddenly inspired by the possibility of using the snow to preserve meat:

They were resolved they would try the experiment presently. They alighted out of the coach and went into a poor woman’s house at the bottom of Highgate hill, and bought a fowl, and made the woman exenterate it.

After stuffing the fowl with snow, Bacon contracted a fatal case of pneumonia. Some people, including Aubrey, consider these two contiguous, possibly coincidental events as related and causative of his death:

The Snow so chilled him that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not return to his Lodging … but went to the Earle of Arundel’s house at Highgate, where they put him into … a damp bed that had not been layn-in … which gave him such a cold that in 2 or 3 days as I remember Mr Hobbes told me, he died of Suffocation.[67]

Aubrey has been criticized for his evident credulousness in this and other works; on the other hand, he knew Thomas Hobbes, Bacon’s fellow-philosopher and friend. Being unwittingly on his deathbed, the philosopher dictated his last letter to his absent host and friend Lord Arundel:

My very good Lord,—I was likely to have had the fortune of Caius Plinius the elder, who lost his life by trying an experiment about the burning of Mount Vesuvius; for I was also desirous to try an experiment or two touching the conservation and in-duration of bodies. As for the experiment itself, it succeeded excellently well; but in the journey between London and High-gate, I was taken with such a fit of casting as I know not whether it were the Stone, or some surfeit or cold, or indeed a touch of them all three. But when I came to your Lordship’s House, I was not able to go back, and therefore was forced to take up my lodging here, where your housekeeper is very careful and diligent about me, which I assure myself your Lordship will not only pardon towards him, but think the better of him for it. For indeed your Lordship’s House was happy to me, and I kiss your noble hands for the welcome which I am sure you give me to it. I know how unfit it is for me to write with any other hand than mine own, but by my troth my fingers are so disjointed with sickness that I cannot steadily hold a pen.[68]

Another account appears in a biography by William Rawley, Bacon’s personal secretary and chaplain:

He died on the ninth day of April in the year 1626, in the early morning of the day then celebrated for our Savior’s resurrection, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, at the Earl of Arundel’s house in Highgate, near London, to which place he casually repaired about a week before; God so ordaining that he should die there of a gentle fever, accidentally accompanied with a great cold, whereby the defluxion of rheum fell so plentifully upon his breast, that he died by suffocation.[69]

He was buried in St Michael’s church in St Albans. At the news of his death, over 30 great minds collected together their eulogies of him, which were then later published in Latin.[70] He left personal assets of about £7,000 and lands that realised £6,000 when sold.[71] His debts amounted to more than £23,000, equivalent to more than £4m at current value.[71][72]

Philosophy and works[edit]

Main article: Works by Francis Bacon

Sylva sylvarum, Bacon’s history of ten centuries

Front page of a 1651 copy of Sylva sylvarum

Francis Bacon’s philosophy is displayed in the vast and varied writings he left, which might be divided into three great branches:

  • Scientific works in which his ideas for a universal reform of knowledge into scientific methodology and the improvement of mankind’s state using the Scientific method are presented.
  • Religious and literary works in which he presents his moral philosophy and theological meditations.
  • Juridical works in which his reforms in English Law are proposed.

Influence and legacy[edit]

Science[edit]

See also: Baconian method and Idola fori

Statue of Bacon in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

National Portrait Gallery painting of the front cover of The History of Royal-Society of London, picturing Bacon (right) among the founding influences of Royal Society

Bacon’s seminal work Novum Organum was influential in the 1630s and 1650s among scholars, in particular Sir Thomas Browne, who in his encyclopedia Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646–72) frequently adheres to a Baconian approach to his scientific enquiries. This book entails the basis of the scientific method as a means of observation and induction.

According to Bacon, learning and knowledge all derive from the basis of inductive reasoning. Through his belief in experimental encounters, he theorised that all the knowledge that was necessary to fully understand a concept could be attained using induction. In order to get to the point of an inductive conclusion, one must consider the importance of observing the particulars (specific parts of nature). “Once these particulars have been gathered together, the interpretation of Nature proceeds by sorting them into a formal arrangement so that they may be presented to the understanding.”[73] Experimentation is essential to discovering the truths of Nature. When an experiment happens, parts of the tested hypothesis are started to be pieced together, forming a result and conclusion. Through this conclusion of particulars, an understanding of Nature can be formed. Now that an understanding of Nature has been arrived at, an inductive conclusion can be drawn. “For no one successfully investigates the nature of a thing in the thing itself; the inquiry must be enlarged to things that have more in common with it.”[74]

Bacon explains how we come to this understanding and knowledge because of this process in comprehending the complexities of nature. “Bacon sees nature as an extremely subtle complexity, which affords all the energy of the natural philosopher to disclose her secrets.”[75] Bacon described the evidence and proof revealed through taking a specific example from nature and expanding that example into a general, substantial claim of nature. Once we understand the particulars in nature, we can learn more about it and become surer of things occurring in nature, gaining knowledge and obtaining new information all the while. “It is nothing less than a revival of Bacon’s supremely confident belief that inductive methods can provide us with ultimate and infallible answers concerning the laws and nature of the universe.”[76] Bacon states that when we come to understand parts of nature, we can eventually understand nature better as a whole because of induction. Because of this, Bacon concludes that all learning and knowledge must be drawn from inductive reasoning.

During the Restoration, Bacon was commonly invoked as a guiding spirit of the Royal Society founded under Charles II in 1660.[77][78] During the 18th-century French Enlightenment, Bacon’s non-metaphysical approach to science became more influential than the dualism of his French contemporary Descartes, and was associated with criticism of the Ancien Régime. In 1733 Voltaire introduced him to a French audience as the “father” of the scientific method, an understanding which had become widespread by the 1750s.[79] In the 19th century his emphasis on induction was revived and developed by William Whewell, among others. He has been reputed as the “Father of Experimental Philosophy”.[80]

He also wrote a long treatise on Medicine, History of Life and Death,[81] with natural and experimental observations for the prolongation of life.

One of his biographers, the historian William Hepworth Dixon, states: “Bacon’s influence in the modern world is so great that every man who rides in a train, sends a telegram, follows a steam plough, sits in an easy chair, crosses the channel or the Atlantic, eats a good dinner, enjoys a beautiful garden, or undergoes a painless surgical operation, owes him something.”[82]

In 1902 Hugo von Hofmannsthal published a fictional letter, known as The Lord Chandos Letter, addressed to Bacon and dated 1603, about a writer who is experiencing a crisis of language.

North America[edit]

A Newfoundland stamp, which reads: “Lord Bacon – the guiding spirit in colonization scheme”

Bacon played a leading role in establishing the British colonies in North America, especially in Virginia, the Carolinas and Newfoundland in northeastern Canada. His government report on “The Virginia Colony” was submitted in 1609. In 1610 Bacon and his associates received a charter from the king to form the Tresurer and the Companye of Adventurers and planter of the Cittye of London and Bristoll for the Collonye or plantacon in Newfoundland, and sent John Guy to found a colony there.[83] Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, wrote: “Bacon, Locke and Newton. I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences“.[84]

In 1910, Newfoundland issued a postage stamp to commemorate Bacon’s role in establishing the colony. The stamp describes Bacon as “the guiding spirit in Colonization Schemes in 1610”.[51] Moreover, some scholars believe he was largely responsible for the drafting, in 1609 and 1612, of two charters of government for the Virginia Colony.[85] William Hepworth Dixon considered that Bacon’s name could be included in the list of Founders of the United States.[86]

Law[edit]

Although few of his proposals for law reform were adopted during his lifetime, Bacon’s legal legacy was considered by the magazine New Scientist in 1961 as having influenced the drafting of the Napoleonic Code as well as the law reforms introduced by 19th-century British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel.[87] The historian William Hepworth Dixon referred to the Napoleonic Code as “the sole embodiment of Bacon’s thought”, saying that Bacon’s legal work “has had more success abroad than it has found at home”, and that in France “it has blossomed and come into fruit”.[88]

Harvey Wheeler attributed to Bacon, in Francis Bacon’s Verulamium—the Common Law Template of The Modern in English Science and Culture, the creation of these distinguishing features of the modern common law system:

  • using cases as repositories of evidence about the “unwritten law”;
  • determining the relevance of precedents by exclusionary principles of evidence and logic;
  • treating opposing legal briefs as adversarial hypotheses about the application of the “unwritten law” to a new set of facts.

As late as the 18th century, some juries still declared the law rather than the facts, but already before the end of the 17th century Sir Matthew Hale explained modern common law adjudication procedure and acknowledged Bacon as the inventor of the process of discovering unwritten laws from the evidences of their applications. The method combined empiricism and inductivism in a new way that was to imprint its signature on many of the distinctive features of modern English society.[89] Paul H. Kocher writes that Bacon is considered by some jurists to be the father of modern Jurisprudence.[90]

Bacon is commemorated with a statue in Gray’s Inn, South Square in London where he received his legal training, and where he was elected Treasurer of the Inn in 1608.[91]

More recent scholarship on Bacon’s jurisprudence has focused on his advocating torture as a legal recourse for the crown.[92] Bacon himself was not a stranger to the torture chamber; in his various legal capacities in both Elizabeth I’s and James I’s reigns, Bacon was listed as a commissioner on five torture warrants. In 1613(?), in a letter addressed to King James I on the question of torture’s place within English law, Bacon identifies the scope of torture as a means to further the investigation of threats to the state: “In the cases of treasons, torture is used for discovery, and not for evidence.”[93] For Bacon, torture was not a punitive measure, an intended form of state repression, but instead offered a modus operandi for the government agent tasked with uncovering acts of treason.

Organization of knowledge[edit]

Francis Bacon developed the idea that a classification of knowledge must be universal while handling all possible resources. In his progressive view, humanity would be better if access to educational resources were provided to the public, hence the need to organise it. His approach to learning reshaped the Western view of knowledge theory from an individual to a social interest.

The original classification proposed by Bacon organised all types of knowledge into three general groups: history, poetry, and philosophy. He did that based on his understanding of how information is processed: memory, imagination, and reason, respectively. His methodical approach to the categorization of knowledge goes hand-in-hand with his principles of scientific methods. Bacon’s writings were the starting point for William Torrey Harris‘s classification system for libraries in the United States by the second half of the 1800s.

The phrase “scientia potentia est” (or “scientia est potentia“), meaning “knowledge is power“, is commonly attributed to Bacon: the expression “ipsa scientia potestas est” (“knowledge itself is power”) occurs in his Meditationes Sacrae (1597).

Historical debates[edit]

Bacon and Shakespeare[edit]

Main articles: Bacon’s cipher and Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship

See also: Prince Tudor theory

The Baconian hypothesis of Shakespearean authorship, first proposed in the mid-19th century, contends that Francis Bacon wrote some or even all of the plays conventionally attributed to William Shakespeare.[94]

Occult theories[edit]

Main article: Occult theories about Francis Bacon

See also: Idola theatri

An old volume of Bacon and a rose

Francis Bacon often gathered with the men at Gray’s Inn to discuss politics and philosophy, and to try out various theatrical scenes that he admitted writing.[95] Bacon’s alleged connection to the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons has been widely discussed by authors and scholars in many books.[62] However, others, including Daphne du Maurier in her biography of Bacon, have argued that there is no substantive evidence to support claims of involvement with the Rosicrucians.[96] Frances Yates[97] does not make the claim that Bacon was a Rosicrucian, but presents evidence that he was nevertheless involved in some of the more closed intellectual movements of his day. She argues that Bacon’s movement for the advancement of learning was closely connected with the German Rosicrucian movement, while Bacon’s New Atlantis portrays a land ruled by Rosicrucians. He apparently saw his own movement for the advancement of learning to be in conformity with Rosicrucian ideals.[98]

The link between Bacon’s work and the Rosicrucians’ ideals which Yates allegedly found was the conformity of the purposes expressed by the Rosicrucian Manifestos and Bacon’s plan of a “Great Instauration“,[98] for the two were calling for a reformation of both “divine and human understanding”,[c][99], as well as both, had in view the purpose of mankind’s return to the “state before the Fall”.[d][e]

Another major link is said to be the resemblance between Bacon’s New Atlantis and the German Rosicrucian Johann Valentin Andreae‘s Description of the Republic of Christianopolis (1619).[100] Andreae describes a utopic island in which Christian theosophy and applied science ruled, and in which the spiritual fulfilment and intellectual activity constituted the primary goals of each individual, the scientific pursuits being the highest intellectual calling—linked to the achievement of spiritual perfection. Andreae’s island also depicts a great advancement in technology, with many industries separated in different zones which supplied the population’s needs—which shows great resemblance to Bacon’s scientific methods and purposes.[101][102]

While rejecting occult conspiracy theories surrounding Bacon and the claim Bacon personally identified as a Rosicrucian, intellectual historian Paolo Rossi has argued for an occult influence on Bacon’s scientific and religious writing. He argues that Bacon was familiar with early modern alchemical texts and that Bacon’s ideas about the application of science had roots in Renaissance magical ideas about science and magic facilitating humanity’s domination of nature.[103] Rossi further interprets Bacon’s search for hidden meanings in myth and fables in such texts as The Wisdom of the Ancients as succeeding earlier occultist and Neoplatonic attempts to locate hidden wisdom in pre-Christian myths.[104] As indicated by the title of his study, however, Rossi claims Bacon ultimately rejected the philosophical foundations of occultism as he came to develop a form of modern science.[103]

Rossi’s analysis and claims have been extended by Jason Josephson-Storm in his study, The Myth of Disenchantment. Josephson-Storm also rejects conspiracy theories surrounding Bacon and does not make the claim that Bacon was an active Rosicrucian. However, he argues that Bacon’s “rejection” of magic actually constituted an attempt to purify magic of Catholic, demonic, and esoteric influences and to establish magic as a field of study and application paralleling Bacon’s vision of science. Furthermore, Josephson-Storm argues that Bacon drew on magical ideas when developing his experimental method.[105] Josephson-Storm finds evidence that Bacon considered nature a living entity, populated by spirits, and argues Bacon’s views on the human domination and application of nature actually depend on his spiritualism and personification of nature.[106]

The Rosicrucian organization AMORC claims that Bacon was the “Imperator” (leader) of the Rosicrucian Order in both England and the European continent, and would have directed it during his lifetime.[107]

Bacon’s influence can also be seen on a variety of religious and spiritual authors, and on groups that have utilized his writings in their own belief systems.[108][109][110][111][112]

Bibliography[edit]

Main article: Francis Bacon bibliography

See also: Essays (Francis Bacon), History of the Reign of King Henry VII, New Atlantis, Novum Organum, Salomon’s House, and The Advancement of Learning

Front page of a 1779 copy of Bacon’s Novum Organum, authored in 1620

Some of the more notable works by Bacon are:

  • Essays
    • 1st edition with 10 essays (1597)
    • 2nd edition with 38 essays (1612)
    • 3rd/final edition with 58 essays (1625)
  • The Advancement and Proficience of Learning Divine and Human (1605)
  • Instauratio magna (The Great Instauration) (1620) – a multi-part work including Distributio operis (Plan of the Work); Novum Organum (The New Organon); Parasceve ad historiam naturalem (Preparatory for Natural History) and Catalogus historiarum particularium (Catalogue of Particular Histories)[113]
  • De augmentis scientiarum (1623) – an enlargement of The Advancement of Learning translated into Latin
  • New Atlantis (1626)

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ There is confusion over the spelling of Bacon’s title. Some sources, such as the 2007 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, spell it “St. Alban”;[1][2] others, such as the Dictionary of National Biography (1885) and the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, spell the title “St. Albans”.[3][4]
  2. ^ Contemporary spelling, used by Bacon himself in his letter of thanks to the king for his elevation.[10]
  3. ^ “Howbeit we know after a time there wil now be a general reformation, both of divine and humane things, according to our desire, and the expectation of others: for it’s fitting, that before the rising of the Sun, there should appear and break forth Aurora, or some clearness, or divine light in the sky” – Fama Fraternitatis (sacred-texts.com Archived 14 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine)
  4. ^ “Like good and faithful guardians, we may yield up their fortune to mankind upon the emancipation and majority of their understanding, from which must necessarily follow an improvement of their estate […]. For man, by the fall, fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses however can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences. – Francis Bacon, Novum Organum
  5. ^ “We ought therefore here to observe well, and make it known unto everyone, that God hath certainly and most assuredly concluded to send and grant to the whole world before her end … such a truth, light, life, and glory, as the first man Adam had, which he lost in Paradise, after which his successors were put and driven, with him, to misery. Wherefore there shall cease all servitude, falsehood, lies, and darkness, which by little and little, with the great world’s revolution, was crept into all arts, works, and governments of men, and have darkened most part of them”. – Confessio Fraternitatis

References[edit]

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f Peltonen 2007.
  2. ^ Jump up to:a b Adamson 1878, p. 200.
  3. ^ Fowler 1885, p. 346.
  4. ^ Adamson & Mitchell 1911, p. 135.
  5. ^ “Bacon” Archived 15 June 2018 at the Wayback Machine entry in Collins English Dictionary.
  6. ^ Klein, Jürgen (2012), “Francis Bacon”, in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 17 January 2020
  7. ^ “Empiricism: The influence of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and David Hume”. Sweet Briar College. Archived from the original on 8 July 2013. Retrieved 21 October 2013.
  8. ^ Murray, Stuart (2009). The library : an illustrated history. Nicholas A. Basbanes, American Library Association. New York, New York. ISBN 978-1-60239-706-4. OCLC 277203534.
  9. ^ Dobson, Michael (2001). The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford University Press. p. 33.
  10. ^ Birch, Thomas (1763). Letters, Speeches, Charges, Advices, &c of Lord Chancellor Bacon. Vol. 6. London: Andrew Millar. pp. 271–272. OCLC 228676038.
  11. ^ Scott Wilson, Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3rd ed.: 2 (Kindle Locations 2105–2106). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
  12. ^ Pollard 1911, p. 816.
  13. ^ “Bacon, Francis (BCN573F)”. A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  14. ^ Collins, Arthur (1741). The English Baronetage: Containing a Genealogical and Historical Account of All the English Baronets, Now Existing: Their Descents, Marriages, and Issues; Memorable Actions, Both in War, and Peace; Religious and Charitable Donations; Deaths, Places of Burial and Monumental Inscriptions. Printed for Tho. Wotton at the Three Daggers and Queen’s Head. p. 5.
  15. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f Adamson & Mitchell 1911, p. 136.
  16. ^ Jump up to:a b Stephen Gaukroger (2001). Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, p. 46.
  17. ^ Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Clarendon Press, 1876, p. ix.
  18. ^ Spall, JEH (1971). “Francis Bacon’s connections with Marks Manor House”. Romford Record. Romford: Romford and District Historical Society. No. 4: 32–37.
  19. ^ Ellis, Robert. P. (27 April 2015). Francis Bacon: The Double-Edged Life of the Philosopher and Statesman. McFarland. p. 28.
  20. ^ “History of Parliament”. Retrieved 2 October 2011.
  21. ^ Spedding, James (1861). “The letters and life of Francis Bacon”.
  22. ^ “Sir Francis Bacon’s Letters, Tracts and Speech relating to Ireland”. Archived from the original on 7 August 2011. Retrieved 24 January 2013.
  23. ^ Jump up to:a b Paul E. J. Hammer (1999). “The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597”. p. 141. Cambridge University Press
  24. ^ Gustav Ungerer (1974). “A Spaniard in Elizabethan England: The Correspondence of Antonio Pérez’s Exile, Volume 1”. p. 207. Tamesis Books
  25. ^ Weir, Alison Elizabeth the Queen Pimlico 1999 p. 414
  26. ^ Bunten, Alice Chambers. Twickenham Park and Old Richmond Palace and Francis Bacon: Lord Verulam’s Connection with The, 1580–1608. R. Banks. p. 19.
  27. ^ Holdsworth, W. S. (1938). History of English Law. pp. vi 473–474.
  28. ^ Patent Rolls, 2 Jac I p. 12 m 10.
  29. ^ Longueville, Thomas (1909). The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck; A Scandal of the XVIIth Century. London: Longmans, Green and Co. p. 4.
  30. ^ Aughterson, Kate. “Hatton, Elizabeth, Lady Hatton [nee Lady Elizabeth Cecil] (1578–1646)”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography – via Oxford University Press.
  31. ^ Adamson & Mitchell 1911, p. 137.
  32. ^ Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. 2008. p. 636.
  33. ^ Jump up to:a b c Nieves Matthews, Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination (Yale University Press, 1996)
  34. ^ Adamson & Mitchell 1911, p. 138.
  35. ^ Matthews (1996: 56–57)
  36. ^ Jump up to:a b Rawley, William (1670). The Life of the Right Honorable Francis Bacon Baron of Verulam, Viscount ST. Alban. London: Thomas Johns. Archived from the original on 5 August 2019. Retrieved 4 February 2012.
  37. ^ Adamson & Mitchell 1911, p. 139.
  38. ^ Lee, Sidney (1895). “Peachem, Edmond”. The Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 44. Smith, Elder & Co.
  39. ^ Ousby, Ian (1996), The Cambridge Paperback Guide to Literature in English, Cambridge University Press, p. 22, ISBN 978-0-521-43627-4.
  40. ^ Zagorin, Perez (1999), Francis Bacon, Princeton University Press, p. 22, ISBN 978-0-691-00966-7.
  41. ^ Parris, Matthew; Maguire, Kevin (2004). “Francis Bacon – 1621”. Great Parliamentary Scandals. London: Chrysalis. pp. 8–9. ISBN 978-1-86105-736-5.
  42. ^ Jump up to:a b Zagorin, Perez (1999). Francis Bacon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 22–23. ISBN 978-0-691-00966-7.
  43. ^ Campbell, John; Baron Campbell (1818), J. Murray. “The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of England“
  44. ^ Fowler 1885, p. 347.
  45. ^ Express, Britain. “The Duke of Buckingham and Sir Francis Bacon”. Britain Express. Retrieved 31 October 2022.
  46. ^ A. L. Rowse, quoted in Parris; Maguire (2004: 8): “a charge of sodomy was… to be brought against the sixty-year-old Lord Chancellor”.
  47. ^ Montagu, Basil (1837). Essays and Selections. pp. 325–326. ISBN 978-1-4368-3777-4.
  48. ^ Bacon, Francis (1625). The Essayes Or Covnsels, Civill and Morall, of Francis Lo. Vervlam, Viscovnt St. Alban. London. p. 90. Retrieved 7 July 2019.
  49. ^ Josephson-Storm 2017, pp. 48–49.
  50. ^ Bacon, Francis (1909–1914). [Bartelby.com Essays, Civil and Moral. The Harvard Classics] (Vol III.Part 1 ed.). New York: PF Collier and Son. {{cite book}}: Check |url= value (help)
  51. ^ Jump up to:a b Alfred Dodd, Francis Bacon’s Personal Life Story’, Volume 2 – The Age of James, England: Rider & Co., 1949, 1986. pp. 157–158, 425, 502–503, 518–532
  52. ^ Alice Chambers Bunten, Life of Alice Barnham, Wife of Sir Francis Bacon, London: Oliphants Ltd. 1928.
  53. ^ A. L. Rowse, Homosexuals in History, New York: Carroll & Garf, 1977. p. 44
  54. ^ Jardine, Lisa; Stewart, Alan Hostage To Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon Hill & Wang, 1999. p. 148
  55. ^ Charles R. Forker, “‘Masculine Love’, Renaissance Writing, and the ‘New Invention’ of Homosexuality: An Addendum” in the Journal of Homosexuality (1996), Indiana University
  56. ^ Journal of Homosexuality, Volume: 31 Issue: 3, 1996, pp. 85–93, ISSN 0091-8369
  57. ^ Oliver Lawson Dick, ed. Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Edited from the Original Manuscripts, 1949, s.v. “Francis Bacon, Viscount of St. Albans” p. 11.
  58. ^ Fulton Anderson, Francis Bacon: His career and his thought, Los Angeles, 1962
  59. ^ du Maurier, Daphne (1975). Golden Lads: A Study of Anthony Bacon, Francis and Their Friends. London: Gollancz. ISBN 978-1-84408-073-1.
  60. ^ Aldrich, Robert; Wotherspoon, Gary (2005). Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History Vol.1: From Antiquity to the Mid-Twentieth Century. London and New York: Routledge. p. 33. ISBN 978-0-415-15982-1.
  61. ^ Ross Jackson, The Companion to Shaker of the Speare: The Francis Bacon Story, England: Book Guild Publishing, 2005. pp. 45–46
  62. ^ Jump up to:a b Bryan Bevan, The Real Francis Bacon, England: Centaur Press, 1960
  63. ^ Helen Veale, Son of England, India: Indo Polish Library, 1950
  64. ^ Peter Dawkins, Dedication to the Light, England: Francis Bacon Research Trust, 1984
  65. ^ Bacon, Francis. The New Atlantis. 1627
  66. ^ Jump up to:a b The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Prose. Broadview Press. 21 March 2001. p. 18.
  67. ^ Bowen, Catherine (1 January 1993). Francis Bacon: The Temper of a Man. Fordham University Press. p. 225.
  68. ^ Bacon, Francis (1825–1834). Montagu, Basil (ed.). The works of Francis Bacon, lord chancellor of England. Vol. 12. London: W. Pickering. p. 274.
  69. ^ Rawley, William (Bacon’s personal secretary and chaplain) (1657), Resuscitatio, or, Bringing into Publick Light Several Pieces of the Works, Civil, Historical, Philosophical, & Theological, Hitherto Sleeping; of the Right Honourable Francis Bacon. …Together with his Lordship’s Life, Francis Bacon, the glory of his age and nation, the adorner and ornament of learning, was born in York House, or York Place, in the Strand, on the two and twentieth day of January, in the year of our Lord 1560.
  70. ^ Gundry, W.G.C. (ed.), Manes Verulamani This important volume consists of 32 eulogies originally published in Latin shortly after Bacon’s funeral in 1626. Bacon’s peers refer to him as “a supreme poet” and “a concealed poet”, and also link him with the theatre.
  71. ^ Jump up to:a b Lovejoy, Benjamin (1888). Francis Bacon: A Critical Review. London: Unwin. p. 171. OCLC 79886184.
  72. ^ Officer, Lawrence; Williamson, Samuel. “Purchasing Power of British Pounds from 1264 to Present”. Measuring Worth. Retrieved 1 December 2021.
  73. ^ Turner, Henry S. (2013). “Francis Bacon’s Common Notion”. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. 13 (3): 7–32. doi:10.1353/jem.2013.0023. ISSN 1553-3786. S2CID 153693271.
  74. ^ Bacon, Francis (1902). Devey, Joseph (ed.). Novum Organum. New York: Collier. doi:10.5962/bhl.title.17510.
  75. ^ Brooks, Christopher (1993). “Daniel R. Coquillette. Francis Bacon. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 1992. Pp. x, 358. $39.50”. Albion. 25 (3): 484–485. doi:10.2307/4050890. ISSN 0095-1390. JSTOR 4050890.
  76. ^ Nisbet, H. B. (1967). “Herder and Francis Bacon”. The Modern Language Review. 62 (2): 267–283. doi:10.2307/3723840. ISSN 0026-7937. JSTOR 3723840.
  77. ^ Martin, Julian (1992). Francis Bacon: The State and the Reform of Natural Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-38249-6.[page needed]
  78. ^ Steel, Byron (1930). “Sir Francis Bacon: The First Modern Mind”. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co.
  79. ^ Hundert, EJ. (1987), “Enlightenment and the decay of common sense.” In: Frits van Holthoon & David R. Olson (Eds.), Common Sense: The Foundations for Social Science (pp. 133–154). Lanham, MD: University Press of America. p. 136.
  80. ^ Urbach, Peter (1987). Francis Bacon’s Philosophy of Science: An Account and a Reappraisal. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing Co. ISBN 978-0-912050-44-7. p. 192. “Bacon’s celebrity as a philosopher of science has sunk since the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when he earned the title of ‘Father of Experimental Philosophy'”.
  81. ^ Bacon, Francis (1 June 2003). History of Life and Death. ISBN 978-0-7661-6272-3.
  82. ^ Hepworth Dixon, William (1862). “The story of Lord Bacon’s Life” (1862).
  83. ^ “Lab” (law). 4. NF, CA: Heritage. 1701. Archived from the original on 21 October 2013.
  84. ^ Bacon, Locke, and Newton. “The Letters of Thomas Jefferson: 1743–1826”. Netherlands: RUG. Retrieved 13 June 2009. Bacon, Locke and Newton, whose pictures I will trouble you to have copied for me: and as I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical & Moral sciences
  85. ^ “FB life” (essay). UK: FBRT. Archived from the original on 31 January 2012.
  86. ^ Hepworth Dixon, William (1 February 2003). Personal History of Lord Bacon from Unpublished Papers. p. 200. ISBN 978-0-7661-2798-2.
  87. ^ Crowther, J. G. (19 January 1961). “Article about Francis Bacon”. New Scientist.
  88. ^ Hepworth Dixon, William (1861). Personal history of Lord Bacon: From unpublished papers. J. Murray. p. 35.
  89. ^ Wheeler, Harvey. Francis Bacon’s ‘Verulamium’: the Common Law Template of The Modern in English Science and Culture
  90. ^ Kocher, Paul (1957). “Francis Bacon and the Science of Jurisprudence”. Journal of the History of Ideas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 8 (1): 3–26. doi:10.2307/2707577. JSTOR 2707577.
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  92. ^ Hanson, Elizabeth (Spring 1991). “Torture and Truth in Renaissance England”. Representations. 34: 53–84. doi:10.1525/rep.1991.34.1.99p0046u.
  93. ^ Langbein, John H. (1976). Torture and the Law of Proof. The University of Chicago Press. p. 90.
  94. ^ Dobson, Michael (2001). The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford University Press. p. 33.
  95. ^ Frances Yates, Theatre of the World, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969
  96. ^ Daphne du Maurier, The Winding Stair, Biography of Bacon 1976.
  97. ^ Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, pp. 61–68, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979
  98. ^ Jump up to:a b Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972
  99. ^ Bacon, Francis. Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human
  100. ^ Andreae 1619.
  101. ^ Farrington, Benjamin (1951). Francis Bacon, philosopher of industrial science. New York. ISBN 978-0-374-92706-6.
  102. ^ “Literary criticism of Johann Valentin Andreae”. Enotes.com. Retrieved 21 October 2013.
  103. ^ Jump up to:a b Rossi 1968, Chapter 1.
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  105. ^ Josephson-Storm 2017, p. 46.
  106. ^ Josephson-Storm 2017, pp. 50–51.
  107. ^ “The Mastery of Life” (PDF). Rosicrucian.org. p. 31. Archived (PDF) from the original on 6 February 2004. Retrieved 21 October 2013.
  108. ^ Saint Germain Foundation. The History of the “I AM” Activity and Saint Germain Foundation. Schaumburg, Illinois: Saint Germain Press 2003
  109. ^ Luk, A.D.K.. Law of Life – Book II. Pueblo, Colorado: A.D. K. Luk Publications 1989, pp. 254–267
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  111. ^ Partridge, Christopher ed. New Religions: A Guide: New Religious Movements, Sects and Alternative Spiritualities Oxford University Press, United States 2004.
  112. ^ Schroeder, Werner Ascended Masters and Their Retreats Ascended Master Teaching Foundation 2004, pp. 250–255
  113. ^ Alban, Francis Bacon, Viscount St (1 January 1620), “Instauratio magna preliminaries”, in Rees (ed.), The Oxford Francis Bacon, Vol. 11: The Instauratio magna Part II: Novum organum and Associated Texts, Oxford University Press, pp. 2–495, doi:10.1093/oseo/instance.00007240, ISBN 978-0-19-924792-9

Sources[edit]

Primary sources[edit]

Secondary sources[edit]

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]

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Bacon’s Royal Parentage

(references prepared by Francis Carr & Lawrence Gerald)

https://sirbacon.org/links/parentage.htm

I see you withdraw your favour from me, and now I have lost many friends for your sake: I shall lose you, too. You have put me like one of those that the Frenchmen call Enfans perdu…(lost children); so have you put me into matters of envy without Place or Strength.- Francis Bacon to Queen Elizabeth, “Apologia”

You are my own son, but you, though truly royal, of fresh and masterly spirit shall rule nor England nor your mother, nor reign o’er subjects yet to be. –1577, Queen Elizabeth I in an angry tone to a 16 year old Francis right after she reveals to Francis the secret of his parentage

The fact of Francis Bacon’s Parentage–the legitimate son of Queen Elizabeth and therefore the legal heir to the Throne—is indubitable, supported as it is , not only by a mass of circumstantial evidence but by such direct testimony as Leicester’s letter to King Philip of Spain, which Mme Deventer von Kunow discovered among the Spanish State Archives, begging King Philip to use his influence with Queen Elizabeth to secure his public acknowledgment as Prince Consort……..No one can possibly follow Mme D. von Kunow’s revelations and remain unconvinced.–Williard Parker in the Foreword to Francis Bacon, Last of the Tudors

The 1895 edition of British “Dictionary of National Biography” Vol.16 p114 under the heading “Dudley” :

“Whatever were the Queen’s relations with Dudley before his wife’s death, they became closer after. It was reported that she was formally betrothed to him, and that she had secretly married him in Lord Pembroke’s house, and that she was a mother already.” – January, 1560-1.
“In 1562 the reports that Elizabeth had children by Dudley were revived. One Robert Brooks, of Devizes, was sent to prison for publishing the slander, and seven years later a man named Marsham, of Norwich, was punished for the same offence.”

“When Queen Victoria was staying at Wilton House, the Earl of Pembroke told her that in the muniment room was a document which formed written evidence that in 1560 Elizabeth I married the Earl of Leicester. The marriage was performed in secret oath of absolute secrecy. At the time of that marriage the Queen was pregnant by Lord Leicester. The French and Spanish ambassadors reported this and the death of Amy Robsart to their Courts. They also told the Queen that if this was confirmed by her marriage to Leicester, France and Spain would jointly invade England, to remove the Protestant Queen and replace her by a Catholic monarch. Queen Victoria demanded that this document should be produced, and, after she had examined it, she put it on the fire, saying, “one must not interfere with history.”
This information was given to me by the 15th Earl of Pembroke, the grandfather of the present Earl.- Andrew Lyell

“…..it is not my meaning to treat him {Francis} as a ward: Such a word is far from my Motherly feeling for him. I mean to do him good.” – Lady Anne Bacon in a letter to Anthony Bacon, April 18th, 1593

 1. See The Marriage of Elizabeth Tudor by Alfred Dodd

From the writing of Dr. William Rawley, Bacon’s secretary and chaplain:

“Francis Bacon, the glory of his age and nation, the adorner and ornament of learning, was born in York House, or York Place.”

York House was in the Strand, near the Watergate; York Place was a term used for Whitehall Palace (residence of Queen Elizabeth I). Surely Bacon’s own secretary, chaplain and biographer would know where he was born. But the term, York Place has since been disused and forgotten, so the hint–if that is what it is– it has not been taken up.

2. In the registry of births of St. Martin’s in the Fields Trafalgar Square, for January 26th, 1561, ‘Mr.’ has been interlineated in front of the name of Francis Bacon-added as an afterthought.

3. As a boy, and as a young man, Bacon was always persona grata at Court, although he had no official position and no title. In the Life of Francis Bacon, the first published biography of Bacon by Pierre Amboise, 1631 he writes :

“Francis Bacon saw himself destined one day to hold in his hands 

the Helm of the Kingdom. He was born of the Purple.“

4. Francis Bacon bore no resemblance to Sir Nicholas Bacon, but he did look like the Earl of Leicester, as shown in Hilliard’s miniatures.

5. When Nicholas Bacon died, in 1579, he left Francis, his second son, no money in his will. The will is in Somerset House. He assumed that Queen Elizabeth would provide for him instead.

6. Bacon did not go to Nicholas Bacon’s college in Cambridge, Corpus Christi, but to Trinity College, founded by Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth’s father.

7. Through Bacon’s personal letters and circumstances regarding Edward Coke; his long-time rival whose jealousy and malice toward him was based on his knowledge of being the Queen’s son or as Coke publicly slandered him, “the Queen’s bastard.”

8. For five years, from 1580 to 1585, Bacon continually petitioned the Queen and others, regarding his “suit.” Could this be recognition as the Queen’s son? In 1592 he wrote to his uncle Lord Burleigh (William Cecil) :

“My matter is an endless question. Her Majesty has, by set speech, more than once assured me of her intention to call me to her service; which I could not understand out of the place I had been named to. I do confess, primus amour, the first love will not easily be cast off.”

In another letter to Burleigh he wrote:

“I have been like a piece of stuff betoken in a shop.” Coming from a commoner, this would be regarded as gross impertinence. Another complaint was made about the Queen in a letter to Anthony Bacon: ” I receive so little thence, where I deserve the best.”

9. In 1584, at the age of 23, Bacon was made Member of Parliament for Melcombe Regis (Portland), a royal borough. In those days, M.P.’s were not paid. At the same time Bacon had no brief’s, as a barrister. Who paid his fees?

10. In 1593, while still poor, Bacon was given Twickenham Park, a villa with 87 acres of parkland, opposite the Queen’s Palace at Richmond. It was at this house that most of his great works were written.

11. It is accepted that Elizabeth and Leicester were lovers. Immediately on her accession to the throne, she made Leicester Master of the Horse, an important position then, and gave him a bedroom next to hers at Whitehall. They had both been prisoners in the Tower of London in 1554 and 1555. In “Francis Bacon: Last of the Tudors“ by D.von Kunow,( page.11) the Tower chronicle mentions, recording a marriage ceremony between Elizabeth and Leicester conducted by a visiting monk.

12. A.L. Rowse, in “The Elizabethan Renaissance” , vol.1:

“Of course, in the country and abroad, people talked about the Queen’s relations with Leicester. In 1581 Henry Hawkins said that my Lord Robert hath had five children by the Queen, and she never goeth in progress but to be delivered.” Other such references occur in the State Papers.”

Others who went on record as saying that Elizabeth had children by Leicester: Anne Dowe (Imprisoned), Thomas Playfair, who said that Elizabeth had two children, (imprisoned), Robert Gardner (pilloried), and Dionysia Deryck. (pilloried) See All Is Not Gold That Glisters

13. When the Queen came to the throne, the Act of Succession (1563) stated that the Crown after her death would go to the issue of her body “lawfully to be begotten.” Eight years later, in 1571, this phrase was changed, to read “the natural issue of her body.” The words; lawfully to be begotten ; were omitted.

 Bacon’s writing : In Happie Memorie of Elizabeth, Queen of England gives testimony to his and the Earl of Essex’s concealed Tudor identites.

In a letter to Essex, Bacon outlines the best approach for his brother to have with Elizabeth. The future of the Tudor dynasty depended on Essex heeding this advice. See The Two Brothers : Politics of the Royal Succession

14.While studying at Gray’s Inn his fees must have been paid by someone else, as Nicholas Bacon left him penniless in his will knowing that the Queen would take care of him.

15. In the Tower of London , in the Beauchamp Tower, in which Robert, Earl of Essex was imprisoned before his execution for treason, in 1601, there is an inscription carved into the stone wall which is still covered by a glass panel. It reads: “Robart Tidir”–the old spelling of Tudor. In the reference book in the Beauchamp Tower, this surname is twice deliberately misspelt Tider.

16. In Bacon’s first letter to the new King, James I, written in 1603 to put on record his allegiance, he used one suprising word, ‘sacrifice’ :

“not only to bring you peace- offerings, but to sacrifice himself a burnt-offering to your Majesty’s service.”

Another letter is quoted in ‘Baconiana’, a book published in 1679 (p.16) from Bacon to James I :

“I wish that I am the first, so I may be the last of sacrifices in your times.”

As far as we know, Bacon sacrificed nothing under the new monarch. He was knighted, given his first full-time office, and promoted to the office of Lord Chancellor by James.

17. In Canonbury Tower, Islington, in London, in the top room of the tower, there is an inscription on one of the walls, dating from the reign of Charles I. Bacon rented this house for nine years, from 1616 to 1625. In this inscription, all the kings and queens of England are listed, from William the Conqueror to Charles I . Between the names of Elizabeth and James I, there is a name that has been scratched out. The first letter may have been an F. What this name is, and why it was erased are two questions that remain unanswered.

18. Only three days after having been imprisoned in the Tower of London, after his trial for bribery, Bacon wrote this surprisingly peremptory letter to the Duke of Buckingham, the King’s chief minister :

May 31, 1621

“Good my Lord,

Procure the warrant for my discharge this day. To die before the time of his Majesty’s grace, and in this disgraceful place, is even the worst that could be.”

This indicates that there was a secret deal with the King, that he would be quickly released from the Tower. What was Bacon’s part of the deal? Perhaps his promise to continue to keep his mouth shut about his real identity. Four months later , his enormous fine of $40,000 pounds was canceled. (Read the “Martyrdom of Francis Bacon “ by Alfred Dodd)

19. No one knows where Bacon is buried. His tombstone monument is in St. Michael’s Church, St. Albans.

There is no account of his death, funeral, or burial. The vault beneath the monument has been sealed up. His monument in this church is unusual, in that he is portrayed wearing a hat in church. Is this a symbol of something being concealed, keeping something under his hat? He wears a hat in all the portraits of him in adult life. The Latin inscription on the monument contains this sentence: ” Composita Solvantur” – let compounds be dissolved. This does remind one of Hamlet’s exclamation,

“Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.”

And King Richard II says :

” O that I were a mockery King of Snow.”

Insightful commentary on Bacon’s Prayer written after he was forced to plead guilty to the bribery charges.

20. Bacon, and whoever wrote the Shakespeare plays have obviously taken pains not to leave any clear hint of their own places of birth and childhood surroundings. There is absolutely no case at all for saying the author to the plays must have been a Warwickshire man. Just as good a case could be made out for any other county- Hertfordshire or Middlesex for example. In the Shakespeare Concordance you will see how seldom any Warwickshire town or village is mentioned. Stratford -on -Avon is not mentioned once in 37 plays. St. Albans is mentioned 23 times. Why would William of Stratford deliberately cover his tracks like this? The only reference to the Forest of Arden, in As You Like It, are decided uncomplimentary :

“Is this the Forest of Arden?”
“Aye.”
Touchstone: ” I wish I were in another place, but we travellers must be content. “
And further on he tells the country yokel, William,
” All our writers do now consent that thou art not ipse, but I am he.”

21. There is no denying that the Shakespeare plays are the most regal ever written-regal both in content and style. The kings and queens in these plays number 27, and a recurrent theme is legitimacy. Not only is monarchy the setting and the subject of the plays; the circumstances of their first performances were often regal. A third of all the Shakespeare plays were first performed for a royal occasion. These include The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, Henry VIII, King Lear, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Othello. There is no record of William Shakespeare being presented either to Queen Elizabeth or to King James. If you ask people to say which, in their opinion, is Shakespeare’s greatest play, the majority will say Hamlet. The central character of this play is the heir to the throne- and one of his lines is ” but break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.” Great fiction is always autobiographical. Every great novelist and playwright writes about his own life. There is always a close connection between the written works of a great author and his own life. Dickens, Wilde, Byron, Chekov, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, all show this very clearly. One of Jane Austen’s friends, Mrs. Barrett, said that Anne Elliott , the heroine of Persuasion , was Jane herself.

22. Peter Dawkins has published the following two essays on his website Francis Bacon Research Trust

Francis Bacon Born in the Purple

Royal Birth FBRT | Secret Bacon: Sir Francis Bacon, poet, mystic, seer, Rosicrucian master

________

Shakespeare’s Two Houses

The former owner of New Place, the house Shakespeare bought for $60 pounds in Stratford in 1597, after only five years in London, was William Underhill, a kinsman of John Underhill, a gentleman usher to Francis Bacon. William Underhill’s stepbrother was William Hatton, whose widow, Elizabeth, in 1597 was courted by Bacon.***

Edward Johnson writes that Wil Shaksper asked to be given a house at Stratford after he was packed off to Stratford as a safeguard when Queen Elizabeth became infuriated over Richard II because the play renounced the divine right of kings. In 1597, the Queen sought to discover the author with the intention of bringing him to the rack. In 1598 a new edition of Richard II appeared with the name “William Shake-speare” on the title page. (The pseudonym Shake-speare relates to the Greek goddess Pallas Athena, with her spear, the divine symbol of wisdom and power and the patroness of learning.) Shaksper was given 1000 pounds and New Place (which formerly belonged to Lady Anne Russell, who was Francis Bacon’s aunt) and told to lie low, which he did until after Queen Elizabeth’s death. Bacon knew Will Shaksper at the theatre and in his dilemma came to an arrangement to use his name as the author, even though Bacon had used the signature William Shakspeare before he had ever heard of the actor. Bacon wished to be certain that Shaksper was going to keep his part of the bargain, so New Place was not formally transferred to Shaksper until some years afterwards.***

A previous owner of Shakespeare’s house in Blackfriar’s was Anne Bacon. (Francis’ stepmother) In 1604 her son, Matthew Bacon sold it to Henry Walker, who sold it in 1613 to William Shakesper. Matthew was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1597.***********

Did the Virgin Queen have a secret love child?

By SARAH CHALMERS, Daily Mail

Last updated at 09:20 14 June 2006

A new TV documentary reveals evidence that could shatter one of the enduring myths about the British monarchy – that Elizabeth I had a secret love child with her courtier Robert Dudley:

Unkempt and exhausted, 800 miles from England the shipwrecked young man prepared to meet his interrogators in a Madrid courtroom one June day in 1587. Suspected of spying after his ship ran aground just days earlier in the Bay of Biscay, the unshaven sailor feared for his life.

But it was not the threat of incarceration that troubled him, but the repercussions of the secret he was about to reveal. Asked to identify himself, he replied: “I am the bastard son of Queen Elizabeth of England and her lover Robert Dudley.”

At the time, his confession threatened to undermine the already-tense relationship between Catholic Spain and Protestant England, just a year before the Spanish Armada set sail, intent on conquering her enemy.

Courtiers moved swiftly to dismiss it as fantasy, part of a plot by the Roman Catholic interrogator – Sir Francis Englefield, an English exile in Spain – who recorded the

statement, to overthrow Elizabeth I. And there it might have remained, a footnote in history, were it not for a new investigation by an Oxford-educated historian and author of 70 historical novels.

During the course of his research, Dr Paul Doherty re-examined the original account of the so-called ‘bastard son’ and unearthed what he insists is corroborating evidence.

Could it really be true that the monarch known as The Virgin Queen carried out an illicit affair, bore her lover a child, then abandoned him – rather than face a public scandal?

In November 1558, Elizabeth, last surviving child of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, became England’s sovereign. The nation was on the verge of a religious war between Catholics and Protestants and needed peace and stability.

In the first week of her reign, the unmarried Elizabeth, aged just 25, sought to allay the

fears of her subjects by promising them her devotion, insisting there would be no marriage or children to distract her from duty.

Holding her coronation ring aloft, she declared: “Behold the pledge of this, my wedlock and marriage with my kingdom. And do not upbraid me with miserable lack of children: for every one of you, and as many as are Englishmen, are children and kinsmen to me.”

It was one of history’s most enduring images and set the stage for one of the most talked-about reigns in England. When the Queen died 45 years later, the coronation ring was so embedded in her skin that it had to be filed from her finger.

She knew only too well the dangers of being a woman ruler in a man’s world. Her own mother had been executed on suspicion of adultery, when Elizabeth was just two years old.

Rumours

Nevertheless, there were rumours of affairs even during her lifetime – the majority of which surrounded her intense friendship with Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, a cousin of the Queen’s and a friend from childhood.

Although Dudley married a woman called Amy Robsart – a union of convenience between two wealthy families – he and Elizabeth remained close in adulthood. In 1559 she had his bedchamber moved next to her personal apartments, further igniting rumours of a sexual liaison.

In a famous encounter, reported at the time, the Queen’s childhood governess Katherine Ashley begged her to prove she was still chaste and not involved with Dudley.

So worried were courtiers of an illicit relationship that William Cecil, the Queen’s most trusted adviser, wrote at the time that he feared the pair were planning to marry, and predicted the “ruin of the realm”.

“To say it was a platonic love is to use 21st-Century notions to describe 16th-Century practices,” says Doherty. “In the 16th Century, sex was seen as the expression of love, of chivalrous love and I don’t think Elizabeth was against that. She would have seen it as a logical conclusion.”

Gossipgathered speed a year later on September 8, 1560, when Dudley’s wife Amy died in suspicious circumstances at the couple’s Oxfordshire home, House, near Abingdon. Earlier that day she had sent all the servants out for the day to a local fair and shortly after was found at the bottom of a flight of stairs, her neck broken.

The scandal tarnished Dudley’s reputation and put paid to any likelihood of him marrying the Queen. But by the end of 1561, Elizabeth was confined to bed with a mysterious illness – one that suggests any relationship between the two remained ongoing.

According to witnesses she was suffering from dropsy – now known as oedema – an abnormal swelling of the body due to a build-up of fluid.

The Spanish ambassador reported she had a swelling of the abdomen, and Doherty insists it is not too much of a jump to imagine this might also have been due to a pregnancy. After all, it is known that several ladies-in-waiting at the Queen’s court successfully concealed their own pregnancies at the time.

Testimony

But by far the most compelling evidence is the testimony of the man who claimed to be the product of that pregnancy.

Shortly after his shipwreck in the Bay of Biscay, Arthur Dudley was brought to Madrid to be questioned by Sir Francis Englefield. Sir Francis’s accounts of the conversation were recorded in three letters, known collectively as the Englefield Papers.

The story they contain is an intriguing one of shame, subterfuge and ultimately exposure. According to Arthur Dudley, one of the royal governess Katherine Ashley’s servants – a man called Robert Southern – was summoned to Hampton Court one night in 1561 and asked to obtain a nurse for a newborn infant.

Staff at the palace told him the child was the offspring of a careless employee and must be quickly concealed before news of the birth reached the Queen. On this proviso, Southern was asked to take the boy, christened Arthur, with him to London and raise him as one of his own children.

The only guidance he was given was that the youngster was to receive the education of a gentleman. Arthur learned of the controversy surrounding his birth only in 1583, when Southern, the man he thought of as his father, lay on his deathbed.

The old man confessed the truth to a bewildered Arthur, in front of a witness, a local schoolmaster. Throughout this time, Elizabeth was revered as the Virgin Queen, and maintained a public facade of chastity. Yet there were hints that she was not as pure as she professed.

In 1562 the Queen contracted smallpox and was not expected to survive. Delirious and fearing death, she made a number of unusual demands from her bedchamber. Rallying what remained of her ebbing energy, she implored her advisers to make Robert Dudley Lord Protector with a pension of £20,000 a year, fuelling speculation that he had indeed been her lover.

Even more strangely, she insisted on a £500-a-year stipend for a servant of Dudley’s, a man called John Tamworth. Was he, asks Doherty, being rewarded for his part in the concealment of an illegitimate child?

In fact the Queen did survive her brush with smallpox, but later the same year wrote an astonishing set of prayers which deviated greatly from her usual, rather bland, style. She suddenly composed a very personal set of prayers that seemed to refer to a great sin she had committed.

“For my secret sins cleanse me,” she wrote. “For the sins of others spare your handmaiden. Many sins have been forgiven her because she hath loved too much.”

This, says Doherty may be evidence of a breakdown, prompted by the abandonment of her child. “Elizabeth was writing about herself and it makes you pause and think,” he says.

“She made some harsh decisions during her reign – dispatching fleets and waging wars – but in these prayers she is confessing to a sexual sin and one of the greatest sacrifices of her life: the abandonment of a child by its mother.”

Three other documents unearthed by Doherty seem to bear out his claim. The first is a letter in the British Library dated May 28, 1588, from an English spy – known only as BC – to his bosses in London. In it, BC describes the interrogation of Arthur Dudley and hints that the Spanish authorities took his claim seriously – housing him at the court of King Philip II and giving him a pension.

Not only that but the spy, who previously served in the court of Queen Mary, said that Arthur Dudley bore more than a passing resemblance to the man he claimed was his father. (This is not something Sir Francis Englefield, who was blind and ageing, would have been able to confirm.)

The second piece of corroboration Doherty highlights is the will of Robert Southern, a document that not only confirms Southern’s existence, but also a series of personal details such as where he lived, names of friends, his occupation and so on – details that Dudley relayed later under interrogation.

“If Arthur Dudley was a fake,” says Doherty, “why would he have gone to the trouble of naming a genuine person (Southern) as his guardian, and providing so many personal details?

“Surely, if we have been able to prove that this part of his statement was true, it is not too difficult to imagine that the rest of it was.”

Finally, Doherty travelled to Simancas in Northern Spain, site of the country’s National Archive, where he found a letter Arthur Dudley wrote, begging to be kept safe. The letter, however, makes no demands for money, position or special treatment – proof, says Doherty, of the sincerity of his plea.

For if Arthur Dudley truly was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth, he had every reason to be afraid. Had it been publicised at the time, the story of his lineage would surely have sparked an international crisis, a civil war and an astonishing revision of history.

Only Robert Dudley and the Queen knew the truth. Dudley died in September 1588, a year after Arthur made his claims. The woman he loved followed him to the grave 25 years later on March 24, 1603.

Her passing marked the end of one of the most controversial reigns in English royal history. Few monarchs have been subject to as much speculation as she was. Buried a virgin and lauded for sacrificing her own happiness for her country – the truth about Elizabeth’s romantic life and possible parenthood will continue to fascinate generations to come.

Francis Bacon

British author, philosopher, and statesmanPrintCiteShareFeedback

Alternate titles: Francis Bacon, Viscount Saint Alban, Francis Bacon, Viscount Saint Albans, Sir Francis Bacon

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Anthony M. Quinton, Baron Quinton, 

Peter Michael Urbach, 

Kathleen Marguerite LeaSee All

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Last Updated: Jan 18, 2023 • Article History

Francis Bacon

See all mediaBorn: January 22, 1561 LondonEnglandDied: April 9, 1626 (aged 65) LondonEnglandTitle / Office: lord chancellor (1618-1621), Englandparliament (1584), EnglandNotable Works: “Advancement of Learning”“Commentarius Solutus”“De Sapientia Veterum”“Instauratio Magna”“Novum Organum”“The New Atlantis”…(Show more)Movement / Style: Jacobean age

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Francis Bacon, in full Francis Bacon, Viscount Saint Alban, also called (1603–18) Sir Francis Bacon, (born January 22, 1561, York House, London, England—died April 9, 1626, London), lord chancellor of England (1618–21). A lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and master of the English tongue, he is remembered in literary terms for the sharp worldly wisdom of a few dozen essays; by students of constitutional history for his power as a speaker in Parliament and in famous trials and as James I’s lord chancellor; and intellectually as a man who claimed all knowledge as his province and, after a magisterial survey, urgently advocated new ways by which man might establish a legitimate command over nature for the relief of his estate.

Life

Youth and early maturity

Bacon was born January 22, 1561, at York House off the Strand, London, the younger of the two sons of the lord keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, by his second marriage. Nicholas Bacon, born in comparatively humble circumstances, had risen to become lord keeper of the great seal. Francis’s cousin through his mother was Robert Cecil, later earl of Salisbury and chief minister of the crown at the end of Elizabeth I’s reign and the beginning of James I’s. From 1573 to 1575 Bacon was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, but his weak constitution caused him to suffer ill health there. His distaste for what he termed “unfruitful” Aristotelian philosophy began at Cambridge. From 1576 to 1579 Bacon was in France as a member of the English ambassador’s suite. He was recalled abruptly after the sudden death of his father, who left him relatively little money. Bacon remained financially embarrassed virtually until his death.

Early legal career and political ambitions

In 1576 Bacon had been admitted as an “ancient” (senior governor) of Gray’s Inn, one of the four Inns of Court that served as institutions for legal education, in London. In 1579 he took up residence there and after becoming a barrister in 1582 progressed in time through the posts of reader (lecturer at the Inn), bencher (senior member of the Inn), and queen’s (from 1603 king’s) counsel extraordinary to those of solicitor general and attorney general. Even as successful a legal career as this, however, did not satisfy his political and philosophical ambitions.

Bacon occupied himself with the tract “Temporis Partus Maximus” (“The Greatest Part of Time”) in 1582; it has not survived. In 1584 he sat as member of Parliament for Melcombe Regis in Dorset and subsequently represented Taunton, Liverpool, the County of Middlesex, Southampton, Ipswich, and the University of Cambridge. In 1589 a “Letter of Advice” to the queen and An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England indicated his political interests and showed a fair promise of political potential by reason of their levelheadedness and disposition to reconcile. In 1593 came a setback to his political hopes: he took a stand objecting to the government’s intensified demand for subsidies to help meet the expenses of the war against Spain. Elizabeth took offense, and Bacon was in disgrace during several critical years when there were chances for legal advancement.

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Relationship with Essex

Meanwhile, sometime before July 1591, Bacon had become acquainted with Robert Devereux, the young earl of Essex, who was a favourite of the queen, although still in some disgrace with her for his unauthorized marriage to the widow of Sir Philip Sidney. Bacon saw in the earl the “fittest instrument to do good to the State” and offered Essex the friendly advice of an older, wiser, and more subtle man. Essex did his best to mollify the queen, and when the office of attorney general fell vacant, he enthusiastically but unsuccessfully supported the claim of Bacon. Other recommendations by Essex for high offices to be conferred on Bacon also failed.

By 1598 Essex’s failure in an expedition against Spanish treasure ships made him harder to control; and although Bacon’s efforts to divert his energies to Ireland, where the people were in revolt, proved only too successful, Essex lost his head when things went wrong and he returned against orders. Bacon certainly did what he could to accommodate matters but merely offended both sides; in June 1600 he found himself as the queen’s learned counsel taking part in the informal trial of his patron. Essex bore him no ill will and shortly after his release was again on friendly terms with him. But after Essex’s abortive attempt of 1601 to seize the queen and force her dismissal of his rivals, Bacon, who had known nothing of the project, viewed Essex as a traitor and drew up the official report on the affair. This, however, was heavily altered by others before publication.

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After Essex’s execution Bacon, in 1604, published the Apologie in Certaine Imputations Concerning the Late Earle of Essex in defense of his own actions. It is a coherent piece of self-justification, but to posterity it does not carry complete conviction, particularly since it evinces no personal distress.

Career in the service of James I

When Elizabeth died in 1603, Bacon’s letter-writing ability was directed to finding a place for himself and a use for his talents in James I’s services. He pointed to his concern for Irish affairs, the union of the kingdoms, and the pacification of the church as proof that he had much to offer the new king.

Through the influence of his cousin Robert Cecil, Bacon was one of the 300 new knights dubbed in 1603. The following year he was confirmed as learned counsel and sat in the first Parliament of the new reign in the debates of its first session. He was also active as one of the commissioners for discussing a union with Scotland. In the autumn of 1605 he published his Advancement of Learning, dedicated to the king, and in the following summer he married Alice Barnham, the daughter of a London alderman. Preferment in the royal service, however, still eluded him, and it was not until June 1607 that his petitions and his vigorous though vain efforts to persuade the Commons to accept the king’s proposals for union with Scotland were at length rewarded with the post of solicitor general. Even then, his political influence remained negligible, a fact that he came to attribute to the power and jealousy of Cecil, by then earl of Salisbury and the king’s chief minister. In 1609 his De Sapientia Veterum (“The Wisdom of the Ancients”), in which he expounded what he took to be the hidden practical meaning embodied in ancient myths, came out and proved to be, next to the Essayes, his most popular book in his own lifetime. In 1614 he seems to have written The New Atlantis, his far-seeing scientific utopian work, which did not get into print until 1626.

After Salisbury’s death in 1612, Bacon renewed his efforts to gain influence with the king, writing a number of remarkable papers of advice upon affairs of state and, in particular, upon the relations between Crown and Parliament. The king adopted his proposal for removing Coke from his post as chief justice of the common pleas and appointing him to the King’s Bench, while appointing Bacon attorney general in 1613. During the next few years Bacon’s views about the royal prerogative brought him, as attorney general, increasingly into conflict with Coke, the champion of the common law and of the independence of the judges. It was Bacon who examined Coke when the king ordered the judges to be consulted individually and separately in the case of Edmond Peacham, a clergyman charged with treason as the author of an unpublished treatise justifying rebellion against oppression. Bacon has been reprobated for having taken part in the examination under torture of Peacham, which turned out to be fruitless. It was Bacon who instructed Coke and the other judges not to proceed in the case of commendams (i.e., holding of benefices in the absence of the regular incumbent) until they had spoken to the king. Coke’s dismissal in November 1616 for defying this order was quickly followed by Bacon’s appointment as lord keeper of the great seal in March 1617. The following year he was made lord chancellor and Baron Verulam, and in 1620/21 he was created Viscount St. Albans.

The main reason for this progress was his unsparing service in Parliament and the court, together with persistent letters of self-recommendation; according to the traditional account, however, he was also aided by his association with George Villiers, later duke of Buckingham, the king’s new favourite. It would appear that he became honestly fond of Villiers; many of his letters betray a feeling that seems warmer than timeserving flattery.

Among Bacon’s papers a notebook has survived, the Commentarius Solutus (“Loose Commentary”), which is revealing. It is a jotting pad “like a Marchant’s wast booke where to enter all maner of remembrance of matter, fourme, business, study, towching my self, service, others, eyther sparsim or in schedules, without any maner of restraint.” This book reveals Bacon reminding himself to flatter a possible patron, to study the weaknesses of a rival, to set intelligent noblemen in the Tower of London to work on serviceable experiments. It displays the multiplicity of his concerns: his income and debts, the king’s business, his own garden and plans for building, philosophical speculations, his health, including his symptoms and medications, and an admonition to learn to control his breathing and not to interrupt in conversation. Between 1608 and 1620 he prepared at least 12 drafts of his most-celebrated work, the Novum Organum, and wrote several minor philosophical works.

The major occupation of these years must have been the management of James, always with reference, remote or direct, to the royal finances. The king relied on his lord chancellor but did not always follow his advice. Bacon was longer sighted than his contemporaries and seems to have been aware of the constitutional problems that were to culminate in civil war; he dreaded innovation and did all he could, and perhaps more than he should, to safeguard the royal prerogative. Whether his policies were sound or not, it is evident that he was, as he later said, “no mountebank in the King’s services.”

Fall from power

Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon

By 1621 Bacon must have seemed impregnable, a favourite not by charm (though he was witty and had a dry sense of humour) but by sheer usefulness and loyalty to his sovereign; lavish in public expenditure (he was once the sole provider of a court masque); dignified in his affluence and liberal in his household; winning the attention of scholars abroad as the author of the Novum Organum, published in 1620, and the developer of the Instauratio Magna (“Great Instauration”), a comprehensive plan to reorganize the sciences and to restore man to that mastery over nature that he was conceived to have lost by the fall of Adam. But Bacon had his enemies. In 1618 he fell foul of George Villiers when he tried to interfere in the marriage of the daughter of his old enemy, Coke, and the younger brother of Villiers. Then, in 1621, two charges of bribery were raised against him before a committee of grievances over which he himself presided. The shock appears to have been twofold because Bacon, who was casual about the incoming and outgoing of his wealth, was unaware of any vulnerability and was not mindful of the resentment of two men whose cases had gone against them in spite of gifts they had made with the intent of bribing the judge. The blow caught him when he was ill, and he pleaded for extra time to meet the charges, explaining that genuine illness, not cowardice, was the reason for his request. Meanwhile, the House of Lords collected another score of complaints. Bacon admitted the receipt of gifts but denied that they had ever affected his judgment; he made notes on cases and sought an audience with the king that was refused. Unable to defend himself by discriminating between the various charges or cross-examining witnesses, he settled for a penitent submission and resigned the seal of his office, hoping that this would suffice. The sentence was harsh, however, and included a fine of £40,000, imprisonment in the Tower of London during the king’s pleasure, disablement from holding any state office, and exclusion from Parliament and the verge of court (an area of 12 miles radius centred on where the sovereign is resident). Bacon commented to Buckingham: “I acknowledge the sentence just, and for reformation’s sake fit, the justest Chancellor that hath been in the five changes since Sir Nicolas Bacon’s time.” The magnanimity and wit of the epigram sets his case against the prevailing standards.

Bacon did not have to stay long in the Tower, but he found the ban that cut him off from access to the library of Charles Cotton, an English man of letters, and from consultation with his physician more galling. He came up against an inimical lord treasurer, and his pension payments were delayed. He lost Buckingham’s goodwill for a time and was put to the humiliating practice of roundabout approaches to other nobles and to Count Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador; remissions came only after vexations and disappointments. Despite all this his courage held, and the last years of his life were spent in work far more valuable to the world than anything he had accomplished in his high office. Cut off from other services, he offered his literary powers to provide the king with a digest of the laws, a history of Great Britain, and biographies of Tudor monarchs. He prepared memorandums on usury and on the prospects of a war with Spain; he expressed views on educational reforms; he even returned, as if by habit, to draft papers of advice to the king or to Buckingham and composed speeches he was never to deliver. Some of these projects were completed, and they did not exhaust his fertility. He wrote: “If I be left to myself I will graze and bear natural philosophy.” Two out of a plan of six separate natural histories were composed—Historia Ventorum (“History of the Winds”) appeared in 1622 and Historia Vitae et Mortis (“History of Life and Death”) in the following year. Also in 1623 he published the De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, a Latin translation, with many additions, of the Advancement of Learning. He also corresponded with Italian thinkers and urged his works upon them. In 1625 a third and enlarged edition of his Essayes was published.

Bacon in adversity showed patience, unimpaired intellectual vigour, and fortitude. Physical deprivation distressed him but what hurt most was the loss of favour; it was not until January 20, 1622/23, that he was admitted to kiss the king’s hand; a full pardon never came. Finally, in March 1626, driving one day near Highgate (a district to the north of London) and deciding on impulse to discover whether snow would delay the process of putrefaction, he stopped his carriage, purchased a hen, and stuffed it with snow. He was seized with a sudden chill, which brought on bronchitis, and he died at the earl of Arundel’s house nearby on April 9, 1626.Kathleen Marguerite LeaAnthony M. Quinton, Baron Quinton

Thought and writings of Francis Bacon

The intellectual background

Bacon appears as an unusually original thinker for several reasons. In the first place he was writing, in the early 17th century, in something of a philosophical vacuum so far as England was concerned. The last great English philosopher, William of Ockham, had died in 1347, two and a half centuries before the Advancement of Learning; the last really important philosopher, John Wycliffe, had died not much later, in 1384.

The 15th century had been intellectually cautious and torpid, leavened only by the first small importations of Italian humanism by such cultivated dilettantes as Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester, and John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester. The Christian Platonism of the Renaissance became more established at the start of the 16th century in the circle of Erasmus’s English friends: the so-called Oxford Reformers—John Colet, William Grocyn, and Thomas More. But that initiative succumbed to the ecclesiastical frenzies of the age. Philosophy did not revive until Richard Hooker in the 1590s put forward his moderate Anglican version of Thomist rationalism in the form of a theory of the Elizabethan church settlement. This happened a few years before Bacon began to write.

In England three systems of thought prevailed in the late 16th century: Aristotelian Scholasticism, scholarly and aesthetic humanism, and occultism. Aristotelian orthodoxy had been reanimated in Roman Catholic Europe after the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation had lent authority to the massive output of the 16th-century Spanish theologian and philosopher Francisco Suárez. In England learning remained in general formally Aristotelian, even though some criticism of Aristotle’s logic had reached Cambridge at the time Bacon was a student there in the mid-1570s. But such criticism sought simplicity for the sake of rhetorical effectiveness and not, as Bacon’s critique was to do, in the interests of substantial, practically useful knowledge of nature.

The Christian humanist tradition of Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, and, more recently, of Erasmus was an active force. In contrast to orthodox asceticism, this tradition, in some aspects, inclined to glorify the world and its pleasures and to favour the beauty of art, language, and nature, while remaining comparatively indifferent to religious speculation. Attraction to the beauty of nature, however, if it did not cause was at any rate combined with neglect and disdain for the knowledge of nature. Educationally it fostered the sharp separation between the natural sciences and the humanities that has persisted ever since. Philosophically it was skeptical, nourishing itself, notably in the case of Montaigne, on the rediscovery in 1562 of Sextus Empiricus’ comprehensive survey of the skepticism of Greek thought after Aristotle.

The third important current of thought in the world into which Bacon was born was that of occultism, or esotericism, that is, the pursuit of mystical analogies between man and the cosmos, or the search for magical powers over natural processes, as in alchemy and the concoction of elixirs and panaceas. Although its most famous exponent, Paracelsus, was German, occultism was well rooted in England, appealing as it did to the individualistic style of English credulity. Robert Fludd, the leading English occultist, was an approximate contemporary of Bacon. Bacon himself has often been held to have been some kind of occultist, and, even more questionably, to have been a member of the Rosicrucian order, but the sort of “natural magic” he espoused and advertised was altogether different from that of the esoteric philosophers.

There was a fourth mode of Renaissance thought outside England to which Bacon’s thinking bore some affinity. Like that of the humanists it was inspired by Plato, at least to some extent, but by another part of his thought, namely its cosmology. This was the boldly systematic nature-philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa and of a number of Italians, in particular Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizzi, Tommaso Campanella, and Giordano Bruno. Nicholas of Cusa and Bruno were highly speculative, but Telesio and, up to a point, Campanella affirmed the primacy of sense perception. In a way that Bacon was later to elaborate formally and systematically, they held knowledge of nature to be a matter of extrapolating from the findings of the senses. There is no allusion to these thinkers in Bacon’s writings. But although he was less metaphysically adventurous than they were, he shared with them the conviction that the human mind is fitted for knowledge of nature and must derive it from observation, not from abstract reasoning.

Bacon’s scheme

Bacon drew up an ambitious plan for a comprehensive work that was to appear under the title of Instauratio Magna (“The Great Instauration”), but like many of his literary schemes, it was never completed. Its first part, De Augmentis Scientiarum, appeared in 1623 and is an expanded, Latinized version of his earlier work the Advancement of Learning, published in 1605 (the first really important philosophical book to be written in English). The De Augmentis Scientiarum contains a division of the sciences, a project that had not been embarked on to any great purpose since Aristotle and, in a smaller way, since the Stoics. The second part of Bacon’s scheme, the Novum Organum, which had already appeared in 1620, gives “true directions concerning the interpretation of nature,” in other words, an account of the correct method of acquiring natural knowledge. This is what Bacon believed to be his most important contribution and is the body of ideas with which his name is most closely associated. The fields of possible knowledge having been charted in De Augmentis Scientiarum, the proper method for their cultivation was set out in Novum Organum.

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Third, there is natural history, the register of matters of observed natural fact, which is the indispensable raw material for the inductive method. Bacon wrote “histories,” in this sense, of the wind, of life and death, and of the dense and the rare, and, near the end of his life, he was working on his Sylva Sylvarum: Or A Natural Historie (“Forest of Forests”), in effect, a collection of collections, a somewhat uncritical miscellany.

Fourth, there is the “ladder of the intellect,” consisting of thoroughly worked out examples of the Baconian method in application, the most successful one being the exemplary account in Novum Organum of how his inductive “tables” show heat to be a kind of motion of particles. Fifth, there are the “forerunners,” or pieces of scientific knowledge arrived at by pre-Baconian, common sense methods. Sixth and finally, there is the new philosophy, or science itself, seen by Bacon as a task for later generations armed with his method, advancing into all the regions of possible discovery set out in the Advancement of Learning. The wonder is not so much that Bacon did not complete this immense design but that he got as far with it as he did.

The idols of the mind

In the first book of Novum Organum Bacon discusses the causes of human error in the pursuit of knowledge. Aristotle had discussed logical fallacies, commonly found in human reasoning, but Bacon was original in looking behind the forms of reasoning to underlying psychological causes. He invented the metaphor of “idol” to refer to such causes of human error.

Bacon distinguishes four idols, or main varieties of proneness to error. The idols of the tribe are certain intellectual faults that are universal to mankind, or, at any rate, very common. One, for example, is a tendency toward oversimplification, that is, toward supposing, for the sake of tidiness, that there exists more order in a field of inquiry than there actually is. Another is a propensity to be overly influenced by particularly sudden or exciting occurrences that are in fact unrepresentative.

The idols of the cave are the intellectual peculiarities of individuals. One person may concentrate on the likenesses, another on the differences, between things. One may fasten on detail, another on the totality.

The idols of the marketplace are the kinds of error for which language is responsible. It has always been a distinguishing feature of English philosophy to emphasize the unreliable nature of language, which is seen, nominalistically, as a human improvisation. Nominalists argue that even if the power of speech is given by God, it was Adam who named the beasts and thereby gave that power its concrete realization. But language, like other human achievements, partakes of human imperfections. Bacon was particularly concerned with the superficiality of distinctions drawn in everyday language, by which things fundamentally different are classed together (whales and fishes as fish, for example) and things fundamentally similar are distinguished (ice, water, and steam). But he was also concerned, like later critics of language, with the capacity of words to embroil men in the discussion of the meaningless (as, for example, in discussions of the deity Fortune). This aspect of Bacon’s thought has been almost as influential as his account of natural knowledge, inspiring a long tradition of skeptical rationalism, from the Enlightenment to Comtian positivism of the 19th and logical positivism of the 20th centuries.

The fourth and final group of idols is that of the idols of the theatre, that is to say mistaken systems of philosophy in the broadest, Baconian sense of the term, in which it embraces all beliefs of any degree of generality. Bacon’s critical polemic in discussing the idols of the theatre is lively but not very penetrating philosophically. He speaks, for example, of the vain affectations of the humanists, but they were not a very apt subject for his criticism. Humanists were really anti-philosophers who not unreasonably turned their attention to nonphilosophical matters because of the apparent inability of philosophers to arrive at conclusions that were either generally agreed upon or useful. Bacon does have something to say about the skeptical philosophy to which humanists appealed when they felt the need for it. Insofar as skepticism involves doubts about deductive reasoning, he has no quarrel with it. Insofar as it is applied not to reason but to the ability of the senses to supply the reason with reliable premises to work from, he brushes it aside too easily.

Bacon’s attack on Scholastic orthodoxy is surprisingly rhetorical. It may be that he supposed it to be already sufficiently discredited by its incurably contentious or disputatious character. In his view it was a largely verbal technique for the indefinite prolongation of inconclusive argument by the drawing of artificial distinctions. He has some awareness of the central weakness of Aristotelian science, namely its attempt to derive substantial conclusions from premises that are intuitively evident, and argues that the apparently obvious axioms are neither clear nor indisputable. Perhaps Bacon’s most fruitful disagreement with Scholasticism is his belief that natural knowledge is cumulative, a process of discovery, not of conservation. Living in a time when new worlds were being found on Earth, he was able to free himself from the view that everything men needed to know had already been revealed in the Bible or by Aristotle.

Against the fantastic learning of the occultists Bacon argued that individual reports are insufficient, especially since men are emotionally predisposed to credit the interestingly strange. Observations worthy to substantiate theories must be repeatable. Bacon defended the study of nature against those who considered it as either base or dangerous. He argued for a cooperative and methodical procedure and against individualism and intuition.

The classification of the sciences

Book II of the Advancement of Learning and Books II to IX of the De Augmentis Scientiarum contain an unprecedentedly thorough and detailed systematization of the whole range of human knowledge. Bacon begins with a distinction of three faculties—memory, imagination, and reason—to which are respectively assigned history, “poesy,” and philosophy. History has an inclusive sense and means all knowledge of singular, individual matters of fact. “Poesy” is “feigned history” and not taken to be cognitive at all and so really irrelevant. After subdividing poesy perfunctorily into narrative, representative (or dramatic), and allusive (or parabolical) forms, Bacon gives it no further consideration.

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History is divided into natural and civil, the civil category also including ecclesiastical and literary history (which for Bacon is really the history of ideas). History supplies the raw material for philosophy, in other words for the general knowledge that is inductively derived from it. Although Bacon proclaims the universal applicability of induction, he himself treats it almost exclusively as a means to natural knowledge and ignores its civil (or social) application.

Two further general distinctions should be mentioned. The first is between the divine and the secular. Most divine knowledge must come from revelation, and reason has nothing to do with it. There is such a thing as divine philosophy (what was later called rational, or natural, theology), but its sole task and competence is to prove that there is a God. The second, more pervasive distinction is between theoretical and practical disciplines, that is, between sciences proper and technologies, or “arts.”

Bacon acknowledges something he calls first philosophy, which is secular but not confined to nature or to society. It is concerned with the principles, such as they are, that are common to all the sciences. Natural philosophy divides into natural science as theory on the one hand and the practical discipline of applying natural science’s findings to “the relief of man’s estate” on the other, which he misleadingly describes as natural magic. The former is “the inquisition of causes,” the latter, “the production of effects.”

To subdivide still further, natural science is made up of physics and metaphysics, as Bacon understands it. Physics, in his interpretation, is the science of observable correlations; metaphysics is the more theoretical science of the underlying structural factors that explains observable regularities. Each has its practical, or technological, partner; that of physics is mechanics, that of metaphysics, natural magic. It is to the latter that one must look for the real transformation of the human condition through scientific progress. Mechanics is just levers and pulleys.

Mathematics is seen by Bacon as an auxiliary to natural science. Many subsequent philosophers of science would agree, understanding it to be a logical means of expressing the content of scientific propositions or of extracting part of that content. But Bacon is not clear about how mathematics was to be of service to science and does not realize that the Galilean physics developing in his own lifetime was entirely mathematical in form. Although one of his three inductive tables is concerned with correlated variations in degree (while the others concern likenesses and differences in kind), he really has no conception of the role, already established in science, of exact numerical measurement.

Bacon is fairly cursory about “human philosophy.” Four somewhat quaint sciences of body are sketched—medicine, cosmetic, athletic, and “the voluptuary arts.” The sciences of mind—logic and ethics—are practical, consisting of sets of rules for the correct management of reasoning or conduct, with no suggested theoretical counterpart. Bacon is unreflectively conventional about moral truth, content to rely on the deliverances of the long historical sequence of moralists, undisturbed by their disagreements with one another.

Bacon represents civil philosophy in the same uninquiringly practical way. It comprises not only the art of government but also “conversation,” or the art of persuasion, and “negotiation,” or prudence, the topic of proverbs and, to a considerable extent, of his own Essayes.

In principle, Bacon is committed to the view that human beings and society are as well fitted for inductive, and, in 20th-century terms, scientific study as the natural world. Yet he depicts human and social studies as the field of nothing more refined than common sense. It was, of course, an achievement to extricate them from religion, and to do so without unnecessary provocation. But in his conception they remain practical arts with no sustaining body of scientific theory to ratify them. It was left to Thomas Hobbes, for a time Bacon’s amanuensis, to develop complete systems of human and social science. Bacon’s practice, however, was better than his program. In his writings on history and law he went beyond the commonplaces of chronicle and precedent and engaged in explanation and theory.

The new method

The core of Bacon’s philosophy of science is the account of inductive reasoning given in Book II of Novum Organum. The defect of all previous systems of beliefs about nature, he argued, lay in the inadequate treatment of the general propositions from which the deductions were made. Either they were the result of precipitate generalization from one or two cases, or they were uncritically assumed to be self-evident on the basis of their familiarity and general acceptance.

In order to avoid hasty generalization Bacon urges a technique of “gradual ascent,” that is, the patient accumulation of well-founded generalizations of steadily increasing degrees of generality. This method would have the beneficial effect of loosening the hold on men’s minds of ill-constructed everyday concepts that obliterate important differences and fail to register important similarities.

The crucial point, Bacon realized, is that induction must work by elimination not, as it does in common life and the defective scientific tradition, by simple enumeration. Thus he stressed “the greater force of the negative instance”—the fact that while “all A are B” is only very weakly confirmed by “this A is B,” it is shown conclusively to be false by “this A is not B.” He devised tables, or formal devices for the presentation of singular pieces of evidence, in order to facilitate the rapid discovery of false generalizations. What survives this eliminative screening, Bacon assumes, may be taken to be true.

Bacon presents tables of presence, of absence, and of degree. Tables of presence contain a collection of cases in which one specified property is found. They are then compared to each other to see what other properties are always present. Any property not present in just one case in such a collection cannot be a necessary condition of the property being investigated. Second, there are tables of absence, which list cases that are as alike as possible to the cases in the tables of presence except for the property under investigation. Any property that is found in the second case cannot be a sufficient condition of the original property. Finally, in tables of degree proportionate variations of two properties are compared to see if the proportion is maintained.

Bacon rightly showed some hesitation in arriving at the goal he had prescribed for himself, namely constructing a method that would yield general propositions about substantial matters of natural fact that were certain and beyond reasonable doubt. But he hesitated for an insufficient, secondary reason. The application of his tables to a mass of singular evidence, he said, would give only a “first vintage,” a provisional approximation to the truth, because of the defects of natural history, that is to say, the defects inherent in the formulation of the evidence.

There are, however, more serious difficulties. An obvious one is that Bacon assumed both that every property natural science can investigate actually has some other property which is both its necessary and sufficient condition (a very strong version of determinism) and also that the conditioning property in each case is readily discoverable. What he had himself laid down as the task of metaphysics in his sense (theoretical natural science in 20th-century terms), namely the discovery of the hidden “forms” that explain what is observed, ensured that the tables could not serve for that task since they are confined to the perceptible accompaniments of what is to be explained. This point is implied by critics who have accused Bacon of failing to recognize the indispensable role of hypotheses in science. In general he adopted a naive and unreflective view about the nature of causes, ignoring their possible complexity and plurality (pointed out by John Stuart Mill) as well as the possibility that they could be at some distance in space and time from their effects.

Another weakness, not sufficiently emphasized, is Bacon’s preoccupation with the static. The science that came to glorious maturity in his own century was concerned with change, and, in particular, with motion, as is the natural science of the 20th century. It was with this aspect of the natural world that mathematics, whose role Bacon did not see, came so fruitfully to grips.

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The conception of a scientific research establishment, which Bacon developed in his utopia, The New Atlantis, may be a more important contribution to science than his theory of induction. Here the idea of science as a collaborative undertaking, conducted in an impersonally methodical fashion and animated by the intention to give material benefits to mankind, is set out with literary force.

Human philosophy

Although, as was pointed out above, Bacon’s programmatic account of “human and civic philosophy” (i.e., human and social science) treats it as a matter of practical art, or technique, his own ventures into history and jurisprudence, at any rate, were of a strongly theoretical cast. His Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh is explanatory, interpretative history, making sense of the king’s policies by tracing them to his cautious, economical, and secretive character. Similarly his reflections on law, in De Augmentis Scientiarum and in Maxims of the Law (Part I of The Elements of the Common Lawes of England), are genuine jurisprudence, not the type of commentary informed by precedent with which most jurists of his time were content. In politics Bacon was as anxious to detach the state from religion as he was to disentangle science from it—both concerns being indicative of very little positive enthusiasm for religion, despite the formal professions of profound respect convention extracted from him. He endorsed the Tudor monarchy and defended it against Coke’s legal obstruction because it was rational and efficient. He had no patience with the inanities of divine right with which James I was infatuated. Bacon wrote little about education, but his memorable assault on the Scholastic obsession with words—an obsession largely carried over, if to different words, by the humanists—bore fruit in the educational theory of Comenius, who acknowledged Bacon’s influence in his argument that children should study actual things as well as books.

Legacy and influence

Bacon’s personality has usually been regarded as unattractive: he was cold-hearted, cringed to the powerful, and took bribes, and then had the impudence to say he had not been influenced by them. There is no reason to question this assessment in its fundamentals. It was a hard world for someone in his situation to cut a good figure in, and he did not try to do so. The grimly practical style of his personality is reflected in the particular service he was able to provide of showing a purely secular mind of the highest intellectual power at work. No one who wrote so well could have been insensitive to art. But no one before him had ever quite so uncompromisingly excluded art from the cognitive domain.

Bacon was a hero to Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, founders of the Royal Society. Jean d’Alembert, classifying the sciences in the Encyclopédie, saluted him. Kant, rather surprisingly for one so concerned to limit science in order to make room for faith, dedicated the Critique of Pure Reason to him. He was attacked by Joseph de Maistre for setting man’s miserable reason up against God but glorified by Auguste Comte.

It has been suggested that Bacon’s thought received proper recognition only with 19th-century biology, which, unlike mathematical physics, really is Baconian in procedure. Darwin undoubtedly thought so. Bacon’s belief that a new science could contribute to the relief of man’s estate also had to await its time. In the 17th century the chief inventions that flowed from science were of instruments that enabled science to progress further. Today Bacon is best known among philosophers as the symbol of the idea, widely held to be mistaken, that science is inductive. Although there is more to his thought than that, it is, indeed, central; but even if it is wrong, it is as well to have it so boldly and magnificently presented.