Birthday: One of the original Bacon Brothers, he did not paint screaming popes

Above: Bacon at 18. The inscription reads, “If one could but paint his mind.”

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Statesman, scientist, lawyer, philosopher

For one born into such fraught times, Francis Bacon lived a remarkable, memorable life, even if only by the measure of dying in bed. His ideas are part of the foundations of modern existence; one of his biographers has claimed,

"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."

Bacon and his brother Anthony were born under the best of signs. Their father was Lord Keeper of the Great Seal to Queen Elizabeth I. Their mother could not only read, but was one of the most literate women of her day, speaking six languages. Their aunt married into the Cecils, who became among the Queen’s lasting favorites.

Bacon was twelve when he entered Trinity College, Cambridge with his fifteen year old brother. They lived with the college’s master and were his students. When the queen met the boy scholar, she was impressed; in a nod to his father she called him the young lord keeper.”

In 1576 Bacon entered Gray’s Inn to read law, but within months was engaged to be secretary to a diplomatic mission that took three years and took him to France, Italy and Spain. Anthony, three years Francis’ elder, joined him in France in 1580 and stayed on for twelve years, a secret agent in the English government’s spy service.

When the Bacons’ father died in 1579, he had put aside a substantial fund to set Bacon up in an estate, but had not bought it. Bacon’s inheritance- a fifth of that sum- was insufficient to support a young man on the make at court. Through his uncle, Lord Burghley, he won a parliamentary by-election in 1581, the first of eight constituency seats he held over the next 37 years. He made himself into a strikingly capable barrister on the side. When in favor at court he proved an able intermediary between the sovereign and his legislature, though not without the attendant risks of being thought too servile to one side by the other, and vice versa.

In the House of Commons Bacon made a name as a reformer, calling for union with Scotland and religious tolerance. In the 1580s, when it became apparent Lord Burleigh would do nothing much for his nephew’s advancement, Bacon dropped him and won the patronage of the Queen’s favorite, The Earl of Essex. While the shift kept Bacon in parliament, and won him a house Essex gave him as consolation for not getting him a government job (Bacon sold it to fend off creditors) it did little else. His role in the investigation of a plot to murder to queen was thought overly obsequious even by the standards of the time, and won him enemies in court. Nor did it help that Anthony returned to England the year before, still trailing the scandal of a French sodomy conviction, having escaped the pyre only through the intervention of the King of Navarre. In quick succession- even though he had become a Queen’s Counsel, the elite of the bar, Bacon was passed over for the posts of Attorney General, Solicitor General, and Master of the Rolls.

To even be considered for such high posts, one had to live as a member of the elite, and Bacon’s legal fees were nowhere near sufficient to his household bills. In 1597 he tried to marry money, but was thrown over when the intended bride got a better offer. He was arrested for debt in 1598. By 1599 his patron Essex was under arrest.

Bacon’s goose seemingly cooked, he nimbly cut his ties to Essex and managed to land a spot on the team prosecuting Essex trial for treason. All this he managed while maintaining good ties with the Scots king, James I, to whom Essex had reached out for aid in overthrowing the English queen, and avoiding fallout from Anthony’s having been Essex’s right-hand man.

Essex was executed in 1601; Anthony died shortly after. The queen died in 1603; and James I assumed the throne. Bacon’s fortunes picked up, at least politically. He became a close familiar to the king; winning a knighthood. He managed a good wedding in 1604. He became Solicitor General in 1607. In 1608 he became clerk of the Star Chamber. Despite its munificent salary- about $800,000 a year in modern money- it was not enough to support the Bacon household and pay off his debts.

As a high government legal official, Bacon took a personal interest in the planting of colonies in North America. As advocate, and drafter, of the first royal charters, he earned credit as one of the founders of Newfoundland (of whose company of adventurers he was a member), Virginia, and the Carolinas.

Bacon’s rise- and dependence on the erratic favors of the king- seemed unstoppable. He was named Attorney General in 1613; Regent of England for a month, and Keeper of the Great Seal- his father’s post, in 1617; and, elevated to Baron Verulam, Lord Chancellor in 1618. But his jump to the House of Lords, followed by being named Viscount St. Albans in 1621, triggered another assault by his rivals.

He was charged with two dozen counts of corruption in 1621, mostly for accepting gifts from litigants. He confessed, though maintaining such gifts had never influenced his decisions; many scholars argue he took the fall out of fear of worse fates if he did not. He was rumored- like his brother- to have homosexual tendencies; some whispered that this accounted for his closeness to the king. He may have been blackmailed into his confession to avoid a certain death sentence if exposed. So Bacon, the theory holds, bet his future on the king’s favor.

It was a winner-take-all bet. Parliament fined him forty thousand pounds- $20 million in today’s funds- barred him from future parliamentary service or office in government, came within an inch of stripping him of his titles, and parked him in the Tower to await the pleasure of the king.

James did not fail him, remitting the fine and set him free after a few days. But Bacon’s career in government and law was over. Always a prolific writer, he set about envisioning a whole new framework for how the world and the universe operated. His scientific studies led him to lay out the foundations of empirical reasoning and the experimental record.

His writings on law and legal reform were significant; from his work unwritten law could be inferred, through logic and analogy, from the past decisions of the courts. He pioneered the use of opposing counsel’s legal briefs as alternative theories of determinable principles of law, raising the law from a jumble of individual decisions to an edifice of rules and precedents. He is credited with influencing the English common law and the Napoleonic Code.

Bacon wrote of ethics, religion, philosophy, and statecraft; his three volumes of essays (1597-1625) argue for his status as the English Montaigne (brother Anthony was a friend and neighbor of the French essayist when Montaigne was writing his fourth volume). He pioneered the study of logical fallacies.

A posthumous work, The New Atlantis (1627) was, even incomplete, widely read. In it, Bacon drew on his experiences with the American colonies to posit a utopian island off the coast of Peru, where rationalism and scientific inquiry ruled, and, among the residents, there was “no touch of masculine love”. In the book Bacon predicted the rise, and form, of the modern research university, and his Solomon’s House of savants became a model for the formation of the Royal Society.

Bacon died of pneumonia in April 1626. He was travelling with the king’s doctor and decided, spur of the moment, to buy some geese from a roadside poulterer, pack them with snow, and see how the meat froze. He took a chill, was unable to continue home, and took refuge in the Earl of Arundel’s country house. He was 65 at his death.

Bacon’s relevance remains considerable in the modern world, if not always creditably. Among legal scholars his enthusiasm for torture as a tool of the law has dimmed his standing a bit, though, since 1996, the Oxford University Press has been publishing a new edition of his collected works.

From 1857 to 1916, Bacon was widely claimed to be the true author of the plays of William Shakespeare. Despite the dearth of real evidence either in Bacon’s writing style, skill as poet, or even having the time in the midst of all his duties and intrigues, Baconians laid the foundation for modern day conspiracy theorism, finding codes and hidden clues in the plays that, to them, irrefutably led back to Bacon. His star faded after- in the way of most such theories- the ambitions of conspiracists new to the party and unable to elbow into the club led to the advancement of at least three other candidates.

For the rest of the twentieth century the theory was an object of mockery in popular culture. Kipling mocked it in a story; In P.G. Wodehouse’s novel The Reverent Wooing of Archibald, the hero, Archy Mulliner, hears about the theory. While he considered it “dashed decent” of Bacon, he assumed that, if Bacon did it at all, it was because he owed Shakespeare gobs of money. In 1961 Professor Peabody and Sherman tackled the question in a Rocky & Bullwinkle time travel episode that had Shakespeare growling, “Bacon, you’ll fry for this!” What little dignity the theory had left was dispatched by Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis in a 1982 SCTV skit called “The Adventures of Shake and Bake”.

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