“Join Romeo with Troy’s famous Cressida if you wish to know my story. Cressida in this play with Juliet b——,” which, says the Editor,[2] “ends the cipher in King John with an incomplete word. Turning to Romeo and Juliet (p. 53), the remainder of the word and of the broken sentence is continued, being a part of the description of Marguerite, and the love Francis entertained for her.”
This love never faded from his heart, although before he married, at the age of 47, he had, he says, hung up, as it were, the picture of his love on the walls of memory. We remember the calm and uneffusive fashion in which he then imparted to his friends the news that he had found “a handsome maiden who pleased him well.” The tones in which he bewailed his lost love are pitched in a different key.
“It is sometimes said, no man can be wise and love, and yet it would be well to observe many will be wiser after a lesson such as wee long ago conn’d. There was noe ease to our sufferi’g heart til our yeares of life were eight lustres.[3] The faire face liveth ever in dreames, but in inner pleasances only doth th’ sunnie vision come. This will make clearlie seene why i’ the part a man doth play heerein and where-ere man’s love is evident, strength hath remained unto the end—the want’n Paris recov’ring by his latter venture much previouslie lost.”
A second son was born to Elizabeth, and named Robert, after his father, the Earl of Leicester. Robert was “made ward” of Walter Devereaux, Earl of Essex, who “died” conveniently and unexpectedly, when Robert was old enough to succeed to his title and estates. At what period the brothers became aware of their kinship has not yet been told in the cipher. Francis describes the personal beauty, gallantry, and boldness of his brother, and says that for these qualities Robert was a great favorite with the Queen, who thought that he resembled herself. The tale is still incomplete; but enough has already been disclosed to give us a firm sketch of the miserable outline. We see Robert taking advantage of the Queen’s doting fondness for him, and Francis endeavoring to keep his ambition within bounds, and to smooth matters with his irascible mother when, as was often the case, she became irritated beyond endurance by his arrogant audacity. The aim of Essex was, not only in the future to supplant his elder brother, but even in the Queen’s lifetime to seize the crown, and rule as king. It is a dark and painful page in history, and the more we read the less we marvel at the efforts made by Elizabeth to destroy or garble the records of her own private life, and of the times in which she lived. Having spoilt and indulged Essex so long as she believed him devoted to herself, she turned upon him “in a tigerlike spirit” when his treachery became patent, and because Francis had spoken strongly on his brother’s behalf, and had endeavored to shield him from the wrath of the Queen, she punished him by forcing him, under pain of death, to conduct the case (in his official capacity) against Essex, whom she had foredoomed to execution. An allusion is made to the ring which the Queen expected Essex to send her, but which miscarried. This story has been held doubtful, but it seems as though we may find it true.
The sentence passed upon Essex was just; but the horror of the trial and the circumstances connected with the execution, haunted Francis for the rest of his life, his tender and sensitive nature, and his highly strung imagination continually reviving, whilst they shrank from, the recollection of the horrible details of which hereafter we shall have to read. Although Francis speaks in affectionate terms of his “deere” and cruelly used brother, we cannot but think that the tenderness grew out of a deep pity; for Robert had long ago proved himself a most selfish and unsatisfactory person, and a perpetual thorn in his brother’s side, but, however this may have been, the gruesome tragedy remained imprinted on his soul, and clouded and embittered his whole life. “His references to the trial and execution of Essex, and the part he was forced to take in his prosecution, are the subject of a wail of unhappiness and ever-present remorse, with hopes and prayers that the truth hidden in this cipher may be found out, and published to the world in his justification.
“O God! forgiveness cometh from Thee; shut not this truest book, my God! Shut out my past—love’s little sunny hour—if it soe please Thee, and some of man’s worthy work; yet Essex’s tragedy here shew forth; then posterity shall know him truly.”[4]
The Queen commanded Francis to write for publication an account of the Earl of Essex’s treasons, and he did so. But the report was too lenient, too tender for the reputation of the Earl to satisfy his vindictive mother. She destroyed the document and with her own hand wrote another which was published under his name, and for which he has been held responsible. Such matters as these were State secrets, and we cannot wonder that Elizabeth should have taken care by all means in her power to prevent them from becoming public property by appearing in print. We may well believe that, as the cipher tells us, all papers were destroyed which were likely to bring dark things to light. Nevertheless much must have gradually leaked out through the actors themselves, and more must have been suspected, and only through dread of the consequences withheld from general discussion. “See what a ready tongue suspicion hath”; in private letters and hidden records the value of which is perhaps now for the first time fully understood, evidence is forthcoming to substantiate statements made in the deciphered pages of Mrs. Gallup, and her forerunner, Dr. Owen.
The matter gathered from the deciphered pages is not limited to personal or political history. For instance, speaking of the “Anatomy of Melancholy” (edition, 1628), the Editor says:—“The extraordinary part is that this edition conceals, in cipher, a very full and extended prose summary—argument, Bacon calls it—of a translation of Homer’s Iliad. In order that there may be no mistake as to its being Bacon’s works, he precedes the translation with a brief reference to his royal birth, and the wrongs he has suffered.... In the De Augmentis is found a similar extended synopsis of a translation of the Odyssey. This, too, is introduced with a reference to Bacon’s personal history, and although the text of the book is in Latin, the cipher is in English.
“The decipherer is not a Greek scholar, and would be incapable of creating these extended arguments, which differ widely in phrasing from any translation extant, and are written in a free and flowing style.”[5]
Readers must not expect to find in this book which we are noticing, a complete and shapely narrative explaining everything, and pouring out before us the true story of our wonderful “concealed man” from beginning to end. The cipher utterances are, for the most part, nothing if not fragmentary. The writer himself says so, and adds that his objects in thus trusting his secrets to the care of his friends and to the judgment of time were, First, that he might hand down to the future age the only faithful account of himself and his history, which would ever be allowed to reach them. Secondly, he proposed to link his unacknowledged works one with another in such a way that hereafter his sons of science should from the hints given in one work be led on to another, and so to another, until the vast mass of books, Historical, Scientific, Poetical, Dramatical, Philosophical, which he wrote, should be connected, welded together like an endless chain, and the true history of the Great Restauration and of the English Renaissance fully revealed.