Through all of these works, according to Mrs. Gallup, who has just filled a large octavo volume with her asserted revelations, runs a story, composed by Francis Bacon, and repeated over and over again, in varying, but never contradictory, forms, in which he affirms that he was the son of Queen Elizabeth by Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, to whom she was secretly married in the Tower of London when before her accession to the throne, both she and the Earl were imprisoned there; that, in order to keep his birth secret, he was given, while a child, to Sir Nicholas Bacon and his wife Anne, who brought him up as if he were their own son; that he did not discover the truth about his birth until he was sixteen years old, when an intimation of it reached his ears through the indiscretion of a lady of the court, and then his mother, the Queen, in a fit of passion, confessed the truth to him, and immediately afterward sent him away to France in charge of Sir Amyas Paulet; and that while he was in southern France he fell in love with Marguerite, the beautiful wife of King Henry of Navarre, and the play of Romeo and Juliet was afterward based upon this romantic episode in his life. In other parts of the story Bacon is represented as affirming that Queen Elizabeth had another son from her secret union with the Earl of Leicester, this being no less a person than the Earl of Essex, who was afterward executed for high treason by his mother’s command. Essex was thus, according to the story, Bacon’s younger brother, and, in the Cipher, Bacon appears as constantly lamenting the share which he unwillingly had in the tragic fate of his brother.
This story, whether it truly exists in the alleged Cipher or is the product of imagination, cannot fail to hold the reader’s attention, but before pursuing it farther let us see what the Bi-literal Cipher is.
In his work, De Augmentis Scientiarum, Bacon first shows that a cipher alphabet can be formed by various transpositions of the two leading letters of the ordinary alphabet, a and b, in sets of five, each set representing one letter of the Cipher, thus:
Such an alphabet in itself would be of no use for secret writing. For instance, let us print the word “Bacon” in it. It would run: aaaab, aaaaa, aaaba, abbab, abbaa. If a series of sentences were written, or printed, in that manner it is evident that the merest tyro would quickly discover the key and decipher the message.
Bacon’s next step, then, is to contrive a way in which the alphabet above described can be “infolded” in a printed book so that each set of five successive letters composing the words of the book, without changing their order and without reference to the meaning that they convey to the ordinary reader, shall represent one of the letters of the hidden Cipher. For this purpose it is necessary to employ two fonts of type, in which the forms of the letters slightly differ. Call one the “a font” and the other the “b font;” then every letter in the “a font” will stand for “a” in making up the sets of five a’s and b’s that compose the letters of the cipher alphabet, and similarly every letter of the b-font will stand for “b.”
Note: An extended illustration of the working out of the cipher is omitted here, the manner of it being fully illustrated in two other parts of the volume.
Thus, by simply printing three sentences, containing one hundred and twenty-five letters in two kinds of type, another entirely different sentence, containing only twenty-five letters, is inclosed in them, and can be read only by one who holds the clue to the double system of types, which Bacon calls a Bi-literal Cipher. It is not necessary in any manner to interfere with the order of the words in the original work, and any book in existence could be made to hold a cipher of this kind. The only restriction upon the proceedings of the person who inserts the cipher is imposed by the necessity of using up five letters of the original for every one letter of his inclosed cipher.
In Bacon’s alleged use of the Cipher he is said to have included it only in the italicized portions of the books wherein it is found, using two fonts of Italic letters.