Author of Elizabetha Triumphans (1588), an account of Elizabeth’s visit to Tilbury. See ch. xxiv (C).
THOMAS ATCHELOW (c. 1589).
The reference to him in Nashe’s Menaphon epistle (App. C, No. xlii) rather suggests that he may have written plays.
FRANCIS BACON (1561–1626).
Bacon was son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, by Anne, daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke. He was at Trinity, Cambridge, from April 1573 to March 1575, and entered Gray’s Inn in June 1576. He sat in the Parliaments of 1584 and 1586, and about 1591 attached himself to the rising fortunes of the Earl of Essex, who in 1595 gave him an estate at Twickenham. His public employment began as a Queen’s Counsel about 1596. He was knighted on 23 July 1603, became Solicitor-General on 25 June 1607, Attorney-General on 27 Oct. 1613, Lord Keeper on 7 March 1617, and Lord Chancellor on 7 Jan. 1618. He was created Lord Verulam on 12 July 1618, and Viscount St. Albans on 27 Jan. 1621. Later in the same year he was disgraced for bribery. The edition of his Works (with his Letters and Life) by J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath (1857–74) is exhaustive. Many papers of his brother Anthony are at Lambeth, and are drawn on by T. Birch, Memoirs of the Reign of Elizabeth (1754). F. J. Burgoyne, Facsimile of a Manuscript at Alnwick (1904), reproduces the Northumberland MS. which contains some of his writings, with others that may be his, and seems once to have contained more. Apart from philosophy, his chief literary work was The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, of which 10 appeared in 1597, and were increased to 38 in 1612 and 58 in 1625. Essay xxxvii, added in 1625, is Of Masks and Triumphs, and, although Bacon was not a writer for the public stage, he had a hand, as deviser or patron, in several courtly shows.
(i) He helped to devise dumb-shows for Thomas Hughes’s Misfortunes of Arthur (q.v.) given by Gray’s Inn at Greenwich on 28 Feb. 1588.
(ii) The list of contents of the Northumberland MS. (Burgoyne, xii) includes an item, now missing from the MS., ‘Orations at Graies Inne Revells’, and Spedding, viii. 342, conjectures that Bacon wrote the speeches of the six councillors delivered on 3 Jan. 1595 as part of the Gesta Grayorum (q.v.).
(iii) Rowland Whyte (Sydney Papers, i. 362) describes a device on the Queen’s day (17 Nov.), 1595, in which the speeches turned on the Earl of Essex’s love for Elizabeth, who said that, ‘if she had thought there had been so much said of her, she would not have been there that night’. A draft list of tilters, of whom the challengers were led by the Earl of Cumberland and the defendants by the Earl of Essex, is in Various MSS. iv. 163, and a final one, with descriptions of their appearance, in the Anglorum Feriae of Peele (q.v.). They were Cumberland, Knight of the Crown, Essex, Sussex, Southampton, as Sir Bevis, Bedford, Compton, Carew, the three brothers Knollys, Dudley, William Howard, Drury, Nowell, John Needham, Skydmore, Ratcliffe, Reynolds, Charles Blount, Carey. The device took place partly in the tiltyard, partly after supper. Before the entry of the tilters a page made a speech and secured the Queen’s glove. A dialogue followed between a Squire on one hand, and a Hermit, a Secretary, and a Soldier, who on the entry of Essex tried to beguile him from love. A postboy brought letters, which the Secretary gave to Essex. After supper, the argument between the Squire and the three tempters was resumed. Whyte adds, ‘The old man [the Hermit] was he that in Cambridg played Giraldy; Morley played the Secretary; and he that plaid Pedantiq was the soldior; and Toby Matthew acted the Squires part. The world makes many untrue constructions of these speaches, comparing the Hermitt and the Secretary to two of the Lords [Burghley and Robert Cecil?]; and the soldier to Sir Roger Williams.’ The Cambridge reference is apparently to Laelia (q.v.) and the performers of the Hermit and Soldier were therefore George Meriton and George Mountaine, of Queen’s. Morley might perhaps be Thomas Morley, the musician, a Gentleman of the Chapel.
Several speeches, apparently belonging to this device, are preserved. Peele speaks of the balancing of Essex between war and statecraft as indicated in the tiltyard by ‘His mute approach and action of his mutes’, but they may have presented a written speech.
(a) Lambeth MS. v. 118 (copied by Birch in Sloane MS. 4457, f. 32) has, in Bacon’s hand, a speech by the Squire in the tiltyard, and four speeches by the Hermit, Soldier, Secretary, and Squire ‘in the Presence’. These are printed by Birch (1763), Nichols, Eliz. iii. 372, and Spedding, viii. 378.