Then the question came up regarding the appointment of a new governor for Ireland, and here once more Essex found himself in disagreement with the Cecils and with her Majesty herself. The Queen wished to send the Earl’s uncle, Sir William Knollys, while Essex urged the merits of Sir George Carew, one of the Cecil faction, who would thereby be removed to a safe distance. The famous quarrel ensued in which the Earl of Essex turned his back upon the Queen, and she boxed his ears for his bad manners, whereupon he laid his hand on his sword and declared he would not have suffered such an indignity from Henry VIII himself. The Earl of Nottingham, he who had been Lord Admiral Howard, intervened; but the damage had been done. The Queen bade Essex go hang himself, and he left Court immediately and retired to Wanstead. Whispers of a serious breach between monarch and favourite spread from Whitehall and throughout London and beyond. It was an unhappy setback for Essex and his supporters.

  The immediate reaction at Essex House is not known, but Anthony Bacon was still in active correspondence with the Earl’s friends. Reports from Scotland and the border continued to reach him for forwarding to his Lordship at Wanstead, and foreign intelligence from overseas, from Venice and from France, was also dealt with during those summer months of 1598.

  On August 4th William Cecil, Earl Burghley, Lord Treasurer, died, aged seventy-seven, and if his nephews Anthony and Francis Bacon were not greatly affected it was a crushing blow to her Majesty and a sad loss for England. He was a great man and a great statesman—possibly none wiser or more devoted has ever served an English monarch; and what over-caution he was apt to show, what narrowness of mind in some particulars, must be forgiven him. Certainly some family rivalry, a desire to favour his astute son at the expense of his equally talented nephews, remains a shadow on his reputation; but this is a basic fault, natural to most men through the ages. Perhaps, had things been otherwise, Cecil dying in early middle-age and the Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon surviving him, the same accusation might have been levelled at the latter’s door, Anthony and Francis exalted to high favour and Robert Cecil ignored, left without position.

  The Lord Treasurer’s funeral was a solemn and stately occasion attended by five hundred mourners and all his family, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The Earl of Essex was present, ‘carrying the heaviest countenance of the company’, it was reported at the time, and that same evening retired once more to Wanstead, still out of favour with her Majesty. Another reason for this was that the maid of honour who had been courted by the Earl of Southampton, Essex’s close friend, was six months pregnant and was staying at Essex House. Southampton, in fact, married her in secret about this time, which so infuriated the Queen when she came to hear of it that both he and his bride were imprisoned in the Fleet.

  It had been an anxious, unhappy year for her Majesty. Now sixty-five, affairs abroad and at home weighed heavily upon her. She had lost her most trusted and faithful servant, Lord Burghley; she was estranged from her loved Robin Devereux, who had dared to oppose her in open Council; her maids of honour flaunted her, thereby causing young courtiers to laugh behind her back; and every day the ‘ulcer of Ireland’, as Francis Bacon had termed it, swelled and erupted. The commander of the English troops was killed in battle with 1,500 men, fighting the rebel leader Tyrone; she must appoint a new commander, a new governor, a new Lord Treasurer, the whole weight of the final decision resting upon herself.

  The weeks following Burghley’s death had been fraught with anxiety for Francis Bacon also, though from a very different cause. On August 28th brother Anthony had sold the manor and tithes of Redbourne to Edmund Bressey of London and Gray’s Inn for £1,800, but much of this money was already forfeit to Anthony’s own debts—monies due to agents abroad—and little could be spared for Francis. Friends had been touched too often to be approached again. Relatives were useless. Those half-brothers Nicholas and Nathaniel in Suffolk and Norfolk would do nothing for him, despite their joint fortunes and large estates. To whom, then, could Francis turn, like most of his contemporaries, but Jews and money-lenders?

  A goldsmith, one Sympson of Lombard Street, had held a bond of his for £300 since the early summer, but had agreed to wait for its forfeiture until Michaelmas Term began in October. Meantime, Francis was engaged in the examination of a certain John Stanley, accused of a conspiracy against the Queen; and although his part in the examination was a minor one, it necessitated going every day to the Tower of London and taking depositions. The matter of the bond may not have been uppermost in his mind as he walked to and from the Tower, for he was preoccupied with another matter which dismayed him greatly. The man whom he most detested in the legal world, the Attorney-General Sir Edward Coke, had become a widower in June, and with his wife scarcely two months dead he had had the nerve to approach Sir Thomas Cecil, now the 2nd Earl Burghley, for the hand of his daughter Lady Elizabeth Hatton. Coke was now a man of property, with an estate in Norfolk and £30,000 from his late wife; the fact that he was forty-six years old and had ten children would not count against him in the eyes of the new Lord Burghley, who would undoubtedly find it extremely useful to have the Attorney-General in the family. The young lady herself would hardly favour him, though he was not ill-looking, and his powerful mind and caustic tongue would match her own; but the £30,000, added to the persuasion of her parents, might sway her opinion, and it was no use blinking the fact that Edward Coke was a formidable rival to a penniless barrister deep in debt, despite the friendship that had grown ever since, wandering from Gray’s Inn to those famous gardens at Hatton House, he had given her advice on plants and shrubs. If, indeed, friendship was all that took place between them.

  On September 23rd, walking homeward from the Tower, Francis was arrested and seized at the instigation of Mr Sympson the goldsmith, although it wanted a full fortnight still to Michaelmas Term, when the bond for £300 would fall due. In a matter of hours he would have been confined in the Fleet, and indeed he was detained for a short while by the officials sent to arrest him; but he managed to send a message to Sheriff More, a personal friend, with whom he had fortunately dined two days previously, and was at once transferred to a house in Coleman Street where he could spend the night in comfort, and from there send urgent messages to his brother and his friends. Unfortunately, no trace remains of a letter sent to Anthony or of Anthony’s response, which would have been immediate. The only reference to the whole affair consists of two letters written by Francis on September 24th from Coleman Street, one to Sir Robert Cecil, the other to Sir Thomas Egerton, Keeper of the Great Seal. The letters were discovered in a collection at Hatfield House a century and a half later, around 1760. There is no mention of Francis’s arrest in the common gossip of the day, so presumably the debt was promptly paid, Francis released, and the unfortunate affair hushed up. The two letters have, of course, been published since in biographies, and it is of some interest to include them here.

  To Sir Robert Cecil, Secretary of State.

  It may please your Honour,

  I humbly pray you to understand how badly I have been used by the enclosed, being a copy of a letter of complaint thereof, which I have written to the Lord Keeper. How sensitive you are of wrongs offered to your blood in my particular, I have had not long since experience. But herein I think your honour will be doubly sensitive, in tenderness also of the indignity to her Majesty’s service. For as for me, Mr Sympson might have had me every day in London; and therefore to belay me, while he knew I came from the Tower about her Majesty’s special service, was to my understanding very bold. And two days before he brags he forebore me, because I dined with Sheriff More. So as with Mr Sympson, examinations are not so great a privilege, eundo et redeundo, as Sheriff More’s dinner. But this complaint I make in duty, and to that end have also informed my Lord of Essex thereof; for otherwise his punishment will do me no good. So with significance of my humble duty, I commend your Honour to the divine protection. From Coleman Street, this 24th of September, 1598.

  At your honourable command particularly,

  Fr. Bacon.

  The letter he enclosed to Lord Keeper Egerton gives fuller detail.

  It may please your Lordship,

  I am to make humble complaint to your Lordship of some hard dealing offered me by one Sympson, a goldsmith, a man noted much, as I have heard, for extremities and stoutness upon his purse; but yet I could hardly have imagined, he would have dealt either so dishonestly towards myself, or so contemptuously towards her Majesty’s service. For this Lombard (being admonished by the street he lives in I give him this name) having me in bond £300 principal, and having the last term confessed the action, and by his full and direct consent respited the satisfaction till the beginning of the term to come, without ever giving me warning either by letter or message, served an execution upon me having trained me at such time as I came from the Tower, where Mr Waad can witness, we attended a service of no mean importance. Neither would he as much as vouchsafe to come and speak with me to take any order in it, though I sent for him divers times, and his house was just by handling it as upon a despite being a man I never provoked with a cross word, no, nor with any delays. He would have urged it to have had me in prison; which he had done, had not Sheriff More, to whom I sent, gently recommended me to an handsome house in Coleman Street, where I am. Now because he will not treat with me, I am enforced humbly to desire your Lordship to send for him, according to your place, to bring him to some reason; and this forthwith, because I continue here to my further discredit and inconvenience, and the trouble of the gentleman with whom I am. I have an hundred pounds lying by me, which he may have, and the rest upon some reasonable time and security; or if need be, the whole; but with more trouble…

  The letter then repeats something of the same matter contained in the covering note to his cousin Sir Robert Cecil, and ends with his humble duties.

  In all probability the Earl of Essex came to the rescue first, but there is no proof of this, nor of what action was taken by Sir Robert Cecil or the Lord Keeper. Francis may have remained in Coleman Street a day or a week. Certainly the debt must have been paid, the bond cancelled, and Mr Sympson the goldsmith of Lombard Street in some way satisfied, if grudgingly.

  Ile have my bond, I will not heare thee speake,

  Ile have my bond; and therefore speake no more,

  Ile not be made a soft and dull ey’d fool,

  To shake the head, relent, and sigh, and yeeld

  To Christian intercessors: follow not,

  Ile have no speaking; I will have my bond.

  Shylock, Merchant of Venice, drove a harder bargain with his demand for a pound of flesh than Sympson the goldsmith did with Francis; nevertheless, the similarity of the cases would have caused those few in the know to nod and smile when the play first appeared in quarto two years later.

  Whether news of the arrest ever came to the ears of Lady Elizabeth Hatton is open to speculation. Six weeks after his arrest she married Sir Edward Coke, secretly by night at Hatton House, the only witnesses her father and the minister who performed the service. The date in St Andrew’s parish register, Holborn, is November 2nd 1598. She was twenty years of age. The secret marriage, without banns or licence, was at her own insistence, and she declared that although now wife to Edward Coke she would continue to be known as Lady Hatton.

  Naturally the marriage remained a secret for a few days only. Men in the position of Lord Burghley and Edward Coke could not deceive the world. The Queen must be informed, and the Queen ordered that the marriage should be made public, and that the Archbishop of Canterbury should take up the matter in the Ecclesiastical Court and somehow legalise the marriage by giving a dispensation to the offending couple, who otherwise might have been imprisoned and excommunicated. The Attorney-General, incidentally, pleaded ignorance of ecclesiastical law, which saved his face and reputation, but why Lady Elizabeth had insisted on secrecy in the first place remains a mystery. Many a battle followed between them, in later years, regarding the property of her first husband, Sir William Hatton, and in other matters too; but she stuck to her guns, and was always known, at Court and elsewhere, even at Stoke Manor, the Attorney-General’s house, as Lady Hatton.

  The marriage was the talk of the town. ‘The seventh of this month,’ wrote the gossip John Chamberlain to his friend Mr Dudley Carleton, ‘the Queen’s Attorney married the Lady Hatton to the great admiration of all men, that after so many large and likely offers she should decline to a man of his quality, and the world will not believe that it was without a mystery.’

  The mystery remains. And the rumour that she was pregnant by another man could not be proved or disproved when nine months later, in mid-August 1599, she was ‘brought to bed of a daughter’. But this is to anticipate.

  Francis, presumably either at Twickenham Lodge or at the Inn of Glaucus, endeavoured to bury mortification in a manner common to most writers, by employing his own and other idle pens in forgetting the whole sorry business. What was past was past. The future beckoned. And Anthony, his anxiety for his Lordship’s cause temporarily relieved, since Essex had been received back at Court by the Queen with partial favour, could turn to a letter addressed to him by the new French ambassador, lately arrived in London, saying that the King his master, ‘Could not have conferred his favours upon a more worthy person than Mr Bacon, or upon a gentleman of more merit, or more mindful of the courtesies he had received in France; that he deserved a thousand more courtesies than he had received, and Mr Bacon might, when opportunity offered, certainly expect this from the King, who, as a prince, had a greater affection and regard for her Majesty than could be expressed, and consequently for the brave gentleman of England, whom the ambassador was ready to serve.’

  The brave gentleman of England had so far received nothing more concrete from his Majesty King Henri IV, with the exception of kind protection in 1586, than he had from her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, or indeed from his beloved Essex, beyond board and lodging—perhaps not even board and certainly not fuel; but there was always consolation in the knowledge that his Lordship trusted him, and that, despite the jealousy of others in the entourage, his had been the name, upon the Apologia written in May. When plagued by gout and rheumatism and the stone, he could forget his unpaid labours and turn up a poetic conceit penned by an anonymous European who at least thought him worthy of much praise.

  ANTHOINE BACON

  A. Anglais phenix de celeste origine,

  N. Né pour orner et la terre et les cieux,

  T. Ton renom bruit jusques aux envieux:

  H. Honneur te sert, et vertu te domine:

  O. Ornement seul de sagesse et doctrine,

  I. Jour, et clairté de tout cæur genereux:

  N. Nous ne sçaurions regarder de nos yeux

  E. Eternité qui devant toi chemine. Bacone.

  B. Bacon fior di virtu, raro e perfetto

  A. Animo pronto, angelico intelletto,

  C. Chiaro lume d’honor e caritade,

  O. Ornamento e beltà di nostra etade,

  N. Natural real di fideltà pieno

  E. Essempio d’ogni ben sempre sereno.

  20

  January 1599 opened with the decision not yet made as to who was to be Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, although most of the Council were inclined towards Lord Mountjoy, and her Majesty was said to be wavering between him and the Earl of Essex. In any event, the Earl was restored to favour and was now pressing his own claim to the position; and it was observed that upon Twelfth Night, when the Queen was entertaining the Danish ambassador at Whitehall, she ‘danced with the Earl of Essex very richly and freshly attired’. Whether this description refers to her Majesty’s own apparel—she was invariably gorgeously dressed and bejewelled—or to Robin Devereux’s own costume is not clear. He was apt to be negligent in this respect, and had been warned of his error in the letter which Francis Bacon had written to him twelve months previously. Nor is it really clear either from the gossip of the day or from historical records how passionately determined the Earl of Essex was to become her deputy in Ireland; like her Majesty, he too blew now hot, now cold on the appointment. One thing is evident: if he was finally offered the position he wanted to accept it on his own terms, with a strong enough army to support him and fellow-officers he could trust, and no niggardly pay arrangement from the Treasury.

  Throughout February and March the matter remained unsettled, and then, on March 24th, the Queen signed the document appointing the Earl of Essex Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, a decision that was immensely popular amongst the ordinary people, but was accepted with some reserve by the Council and even by certain of his closest friends. The position required a man of great experience, judgement and political understanding, and with some knowledge of the Irish people. The Earl was untested in these qualities, and his predecessors in Ireland, who had possessed them in some measure, had not been conspicuous for their success. Lady Bacon’s cousin, Sir William Fitzwilliam, had been one of them. From 1588 until 1594 he had striven hard to bring some sense of justice and equanimity to the troubled, and troublesome, island; sometimes acting with too firm a hand, laying waste part of the countryside so that ‘not a house was left standing or a grain of corn unburnt’, sometimes attempting pacification. When at the age of sixty-eight he gave way to his successor, Sir William Russell, Fitzwilliam, like his second cousin Anthony Bacon, was ‘old in body, sick in stomach, racked with the stone, bed-ridden with the gout’. How much these disabilities could be laid at Ireland’s door and how much to a constitution inherited from Fitzwilliams before him—this last might well have been Anthony’s inheritance too—remains conjecture.