Lady Bacon As for that, nephew, you yourself are Secretary, but were never nominated.

  Sir Robert I wait still, and think myself as hardly used as my cousin. I tell you plainly, madam, I disdain to seem to be thought that I doubted of the place, and so would I wish my cousin Francis do, as long as the room vacant, and to bear the delay. Let him not be discouraged, but carry himself wisely. It may be said her Majesty was too much pressed at the first which she liketh not, and at last will come of herself.

  Lady Bacon reported the encounter to her sons, and certainly the dialogue between aunt and nephew bore fruit, for within a day Sir Robert Cecil spoke with the Queen, but the move was premature and irritated her Majesty.

  ‘Why,’ stormed the Queen, ‘I have made no solicitor? Hath anybody carried a solicitor with him in his pocket? But it seems Francis Bacon must have it in his own time or else I am to be thought to cast him away. If he continues in this manner, I shall seek all England for a solicitor rather than take him.’

  So Lady Bacon might have done better to stay at home, or else sought an audience of the Queen herself. It would surely have proved a meeting worth recording.

  Francis, at Twickenham, was short of money as usual, and had asked brother Anthony to write to their uncle Sir Henry Killigrew for a loan of £2,000. Uncle Killigrew excused himself. ‘To be plain,’ Francis told Anthony on January 25th 1595, ‘I mean to make the best of those small things I have, with as much expedition as may be without loss, and so I sing a mass of requiem, I hope abroad. For I know her Majesty’s nature, that she neither careth tho’ the whole surname of the Bacons travelled, nor of the Cecils neither.’ Then, a tantalising footnote to his letter, ‘I have here an idle pen or two, specially one, that was cozened, thinking to have got some money this term. I pray send me somewhat else for them to write out besides your Irish collection, which is almost done. There is a collection of King James, of foreign states, largeliest of Flanders; which though it be no great matter, yet I would be glad to have it.’

  Anthony had no idle pens in Bishopsgate, for the Earl had need of his services night and day. An agent recommended by his friend Standen, a Catholic named Anthony Rolston, was sending intelligence weekly from Spain, and confirmed reports that the rebel Scots noblemen were in secret treaty with the Spanish King. Several new ships were being built, all destined, so they said, for Scotland. Another new correspondent was Sir Thomas Bodley, who was the Queen’s resident Minister at The Hague, and it was part of Anthony’s business to wean Sir Thomas from his dependence hitherto upon the Lord Treasurer and divert it to the Earl of Essex. Naturally, the Minister would continue to keep the Lord Treasurer informed of all that happened at The Hague, but the Earl of Essex would be privy to the same intelligence. For this was the object of all Anthony Bacon’s undertakings, both in Scotland and in Europe: that Essex should have secret information before such matters came to the ear of the Lord Treasurer, or, if this were impossible, that at least Essex should not be left in ignorance.

  Another contact who was becoming increasingly important was the King of Spain’s former Secretary of State, now living in London, who had offered intelligence to Essex in December—the flamboyant and frequently indiscreet Antonio Perez. The Queen disapproved of him, saying that anyone who had betrayed his own sovereign would have little compunction in betraying another. Essex believed otherwise, and that he could be valuable. So Anthony became go-between, and Perez persona grata in Bishopsgate Street. Besides, he was amusing company, his speech full of flowery affectation that Anthony delighted in repeating to Francis. One recommendation to Anthony personally was the fact that Perez professed himself devoted to King Henri IV of France and even more so to the King’s sister, the Princess Catherine, who—as he was fond of telling everyone—chose to confide in him. Meanwhile, awaiting some remuneration from the royal purse, Perez hovered about Queen Elizabeth’s Court.

  Another point in Perez’s favour, so far as Anthony and Francis were concerned, was his dislike of their cousin Sir Robert Cecil, whom he nicknamed ‘Roberto il diavolo’, which immediately became one of the family code-words. It was not only that dislike was mutual between the cousins, and had been so since boyhood, but there was mutual mistrust between the Lord Treasurer and his son Robert on the one hand and the Earl of Essex on the other. The Cecils, father and son, understood probably better than anyone that the Queen, being neither wife nor mother, must bestow her affection upon someone. The Earl of Leicester had possessed her heart for many years, and there was nothing unnatural that his stepson should appeal to her emotionally almost as if he were indeed the son she had never borne. Her indulgence of the young man was on a very personal footing, quite different from the mocking, challenging attitude she had adopted throughout her reign towards other favourites, Sir Christopher Hatton, for instance, and later Sir Walter Raleigh. Her godson, the witty John Harington, was also a young man who amused her and who was permitted much free speech that she would have denied another. But Robert Devereux, ‘Robin’, was in a very special category, and had he been content to remain at her side as a courtier, on easy, even submissive, terms, with her chief counsellors the two Cecils, they would have accepted it. What they feared was his growing interference in matters of State. Sometimes he acted almost as an heir apparent would have done, and this was dangerous.

  As their mistrust of Essex grew, so Anthony Bacon’s affection and devotion to him deepened. The quality which the Cecils deemed headstrong Anthony called volonté or will, the desire to gain his own way not through some youthful pettiness but because he believed himself in the right. Impulsive? No, courageous. Haughty? No, proud. Lavish? No, generous. The Earl’s personality was such that a man either looked askance at him and felt inferior, or was willing to lay down his life for him. There was nothing in between. Francis had judged him rightly from the first. Robert Devereux had all the qualities of leadership that could make him foremost in the land next to her Majesty, and because of this he must be guided.

  Francis, with his brilliantly analytical mind, perhaps perceived something that others, even the gossips, had not grasped, which was that her Majesty the Queen indulged her Robin not only because he was Leicester’s stepson, but because Robin’s mother, Lettice, had been her hated rival, and it was to her, the Queen, that the young man gave his devotion, not to his real mother. Thwarted maternal instinct, unconscious spite. Frances Walsingham, Robin’s wife, was never a problem. She stayed at home and bred. But if Essex took a mistress the Queen lashed out at him like a possessive mother, something that Lettice—who had not mourned Leicester long but had married Sir Christopher Blount, one of Robin’s friends—never did. Did the Queen, then, envy her, because in days gone by she had not only given birth to Robin but had been bedded by Leicester? Was envy part of her unconscious torment?

  There be none of the affections which have been noted to fascinate or bewitch but love and envy: they both have vehement wishes; they frame themselves readily into imaginations and suggestions, and they come easily into the eye, especially upon the presence of the objects, which are the points that conduce to fascination, if any such thing there be. We see likewise the Scriptures calleth envy an evil eye; and the astrologers call the evil influences of the stars evil aspects; so that still there seemeth to be acknowledged, in the act of envy, an ejaculation or irradiation of the eye…

  Memoranda to be noted down by idle pens at Twickenham, and one of these days Francis decided he would please brother Anthony, who was forever quoting Montaigne’s Essays, by producing something of the kind himself.

  Meanwhile he would continue to give advice to the Earl of Essex when opportunity allowed, ‘for lookers on, many times, see more than gamesters; and the vale best discovereth the hill’. Then another letter would be dashed off to his brother, which Anthony replied ‘came by your man Percy’, and so the interchange of news, ideas, plans, went back and forth between the pair of them.

  Henry Percy, still the coach-companion and bed-fellow of Francis, and so much disliked by Lady Bacon, was trusted with all secret correspondence, much as Anthony’s letters were carried by Tom Lawson, and it is posterity’s loss that no letter from either man exists amongst the records, save one in French from Tom Lawson to a certain Monsieur Durant, a doctor of medicine in London. The contents are obscure but the style is humorous, giving a brief glimpse of Anthony’s closest friend.

  Monsieur, I am very pleased to hear you are so busy, and I have no doubt that these white devils have tried to stop you, because they are terrible sirens who with their song draw people into their clutches and principally those who are of your complexion. So like a good prior that loves and honours his abbé, I am to tell you that one of these days they will summon you to the chapter to account for your absence. I have need of a little Benedictine laxative, but am ignorant of the dose, so please send, as since your departure I have taken nothing.

  I pray that the white devils will not overwhelm their pastor.

  Your most vigilant prior, from your convent,

  Thomas Lawson.

  The convent, presumably, is the house in Bishopsgate Street, but the significance of the allusion to the ‘white devils’ is, alas, lost.

  Anthony’s papers for the first months of 1595 teem with matters which, unimportant historically, nevertheless reveal many glimpses of his London life. For instance, the household bills. The servants—the cook, John Knight the butler—spent a small fortune on cloth and canvas, caps and hose, napkins, waist-bands, cuffs, suggesting that the personal appearance of his staff was something the master deemed important. All bought of a merchant, Mr Archer. Horsecloth, saddles, stuffing for the saddles, here were items from the coachman. And later in the year, with the weather more favourable, there is a considerable sum spent on boat-hire between London and Barn Elms, Essex’s house at Putney, and from London to the Court at Greenwich, as well as for wine, board and lodging for the messenger who bore the letters. Dr Morrison, the Scottish agent, now in London, very naturally expected Anthony Bacon to pay for items of clothing. One pair of hose, six shillings. And he must also be taken by boat to his various destinations, from Essex Stairs to Westminster and back again.

  Anthony’s greatest extravagance, for himself and for his friends and staff, was in the purchase, almost every week, of beaver hats. In the spring of 1595 beaver hats were lined with taffeta and velvet. They were bought new, or old hats were re-trimmed. There were black beavers and black felts, a black felt lined with taffeta was bought ‘for a doctor’—Lawson’s friend, perhaps, or Dr Morrison—and for the first time the name of Anthony’s new page, ‘a French boye’, appears, with mention of a black felt lined with taffeta for him, and what was more he had a cipher upon it, doubtless Anthony’s family crest.

  Jacques Petit, the French lad, was to figure increasingly in future letters, and, with Tom Lawson more continuously employed as messenger to the Earl of Essex, to Standen and to Antonio Perez, Jacques became close to his master. Lady Bacon had already shown her usual disapproval. She mentions ‘your French cattle’ in one of her letters about this time, complaining that when on a temporary stay at Gorhambury he had ‘loosened a sheet of lead near her gate with hacking it for pellets’. All was not well at Redbourne, either. Mistress Read, the housekeeper, was ‘malcontent for certain implements, and the best reserved chamber for your friends, noble or not noble, was filled with birds, hunting or hawking, or dogs. Mr Lawson was the nobleman lodged there, I ween; and like enough, for he is subtle, vainglorious and makes you bleared still to ensure all, and pay for all. One that tames the bit is become a tippler, and will be overseen with drink, but an ill servant in your house, the fruit of idleness.’

  Anthony was toying with the idea of moving from Bishopsgate to a house in Chelsea, and was in treaty with a Lady Mary Baker for her Chelsea house. He had even persuaded his mother to send carpets from Gorhambury to furnish it in style. But at the last moment Lady Mary begged to be allowed ‘to release myself and husband of a promise made you for his house’, so Anthony was obliged to stay on for the time being at Bishopsgate.

  Lord Mayor Spencer, now living in great style at Crosby Hall, had a daughter ripe for marriage, whose hand was sought by another city dignitary, Alderman Radclyffe. Why the Alderman’s letter pressing his suit upon Sir John Spencer should be amongst Anthony’s papers is a mystery, unless he offered his services as go-between.

  ‘There is not much odds between our years,’ the prospective suitor told the father, ‘but that mine are more by a year or two, and if her growth be accounted by you to be small it cannot be better helped than by a tall man. Your Lordship’s care of her is too dear to have her far removed from you and my purpose is to live where you shall like. I doubt not that you may have many richer offers, but one that will more love and honour your daughter I protest you shall never have.’

  Alderman Radclyffe was disappointed: either Sir John or his daughter Elizabeth was unwilling. Some time later she created a scandal by escaping from her father’s house in a laundry-basket, let down by a rope from her balcony. Her lover was the young Lord Compton. Sir John was so furious he would not give her a dowry, not even when he heard she was pregnant, and it was the Queen herself who finally reconciled them.

  The Bacon finances remained at a low ebb. Nicholas Trott, the obliging lawyer friend who had helped to negotiate the sale of Barley Manor to the Lord Mayor, was still unpaid for his services. How could he be appeased? The Earl of Huntingdon, an old friend of Anthony’s father the Lord Keeper, must be approached. ‘As the son of a father who honoured your Lordship’s rare virtues so much, and loved your most honourable name and person as dearly as any other what-soever, I venture to request… on behalf of a good friend of mine, Mr Nicholas Trott, whose sufficiency in law be warranted by those who make it their profession, and whose honesty, integrity, and other extraordinary good parts I dare pawn to your Lordship my poor words and credit. What favour soever it shall please your Lordship to grace Mr Trott withal I shall esteem it done to myself,’ etc., etc.

  What came of the request is unrecorded. The Earl, who was a strict Puritan and had acted as gaoler to Mary Queen of Scots in earlier days, might not have approved of Anthony’s Bishopsgate address or of his many Papist friends, amongst whom could now be counted Lord Harry Howard, younger brother of that Duke of Norfolk who had been executed for treason in 1572. Lord Harry had of late become one of the close associates of the Earl of Essex, as Lady Bacon was aware.

  ‘Beware in any wise of the Lord H! He is a dangerous intelligencing man; no doubt a subtle Papist inwardly, and lieth in wait. Peradventure he hath some close working with Standen and the Spaniard Perez. Be not too open, he will betray you to divers, and to your aunt Russell among others. The Duke [Norfolk] had been alive but by his practising and double undoing… He is a subtle serpent…’

  The gossip that Lord Harry was a homosexual perhaps escaped her, likewise that the same smear attached itself to Standen and to Antonio Perez. The morals of his friends and agents did not concern the Earl of Essex. Good company he enjoyed, and if he suddenly decided to descend upon Anthony in Bishopsgate with some of his circle, then Anthony was only too happy to receive them. But he liked warning, possibly to have his men prepared with clean hose and cuffs and the entrance passage swept. Standen was aware of this, hence the following hasty word.

  ‘As we were at supper, my Lady Rich [Essex’s beautiful sister Penelope], Signor Perez, Sir Nicholas Clifford and myself, there came upon a sudden into the chamber my Lord and Sir Robert Sidney, and it was resolved that tomorrow my Lord means to dine at Walsingham House and in the way to visit Mr Anthony Bacon, and my Lady Rich said she would go with them, and in their company, and dismount from the coach at Mr Bacon’s house. All of which I write to you by way of advice, to the end you may not be taken unarmed. Women’s discretions being uncertain, it may be she will not dismount, and the contrary also will fall out…’

  Did she dismount? It will never be known, but the image remains, the clatter of hoofs, the coach coming to a halt before Anthony’s house, the door flung wide, young Jacques, his beaver hat discarded, bowing and blushing and stammering in French, and the rustle of her gown as Penelope Rich advanced into the offending passage, her brother and his friends in attendance; while Anthony, leaning upon his stick, bade her ladyship welcome.

  13

  Intelligence from France and Scotland continued to filter through Anthony’s hands, and so to the Earl of Essex, through the spring and summer of 1595. In February, Henri IV had declared war on Spain, and this, combined with the sad state of his country, torn apart so long by civil strife, was a tremendous burden upon his finances and troops. He had barely escaped assassination the preceding Christmas, and the shock of this told upon his usually buoyant spirits and those of his sister Princess Catherine, who still followed him everywhere, despite the fact that he steadfastly forbade her marriage to the man of her choice, her cousin the comte de Soissons. The relationship between brother and sister became more sorely tried in the spring of this year, when the King, marching into Burgundy, found himself deserted before a battle by Soissons, on the petty excuse of having been placed second in command. Henri could not resist writing to Catherine, ‘Many of my young nobles showed the greatest courage, there were others who did less well, and some who did very ill indeed. Those who were not there ought to be sorry, for I was in need of all my good friends…’

  The King’s own courage in this particular action was, according to the agent reporting from Dijon, one of the most spectacular of his life, and showed ‘the miraculous effects of God’s favour upon him’. Henri IV’s bearing in this skirmish, and in those that followed, certainly roused the admiration of the Earl of Essex and whetted his own appetite for glory in the field, and for putting into effect plans of his own to succour the sorely pressed armies in France.