The next point is this: “His name, 'Fr. Bacon,’ is his only 'by adoption,’” and in a footnote Mr. Lang quotes: “'My name is Tidder, yet men speak of me as Bacon.’” In Bacon’s Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh (p. 151), we find the name of the first reigning Tudor spelled Tidder. The assertion “We be Tudor” merely shows that he belonged to the Royal house. It was certainly not from Robert Dudley that he claimed a title to the throne. I myself asked, “Why Francis I.?” when this passage was deciphered; and the answer is perhaps in this—as Elizabeth was “Queene of England, Fraunce, and Ireland, and of Virginia,” her son as king would be Francis III. of France and Francis I. of England, as James VI. of Scotland became James I. of England. The right to the French title is questionable, of course; but when the play of Edward the Third has been deciphered we shall know how Bacon regarded it.
In the expression, “our law giveth to the first-borne of the royall house the title of the Prince of Wales,” Bacon did not intend to say “the statute giveth.” Had he used custom no one would have cavilled, but custom is defined in law as “long-established practice, or usage, considered as unwritten law, and resting for authority on long consent,” and, even at that time, it had long been customary to invest the eldest son of the sovreign with this title. In the Historie of Henry the Seventh (p. 207), speaking of the time when “Henry, Duke of Yorke, was created Prince of Wales, and Earle of Chester and Flint,” he added, “For the Dukedom of Cornewall devolved to him by statute.” We see per contra that in this place he did not mean by custom.
Bacon and the Small Poems.
As evidence of the superficiality of Mr. Lang’s knowledge of the book he attempts to criticise, I quote: “In 1596, in his 'Faerie Queene,’ Bacon grew wilder, in saying 'We were in good hope that when our divers small poemes might bee seene in printed forme, th’ approval o’ Lord Leicester might be gain’d!’ The earliest of the small Bacon-Spenser works used here, by Mrs. Gallup, is of 1591. Leicester died in 1588. Only a raving maniac like Mrs. Gallup’s Bacon could hope to please Leicester, who died in 1588, by 'small poemes’ printed in 1591, if he means that.”
Has Mr. Lang read so carelessly that he thinks “he means that”? Does he really not preceive that Bacon was speaking of the small poems appearing between 1579 and 1588—Shepheards’ Calender in several editions, Virgil’s Gnat nearly ready for the printer and suggestively dedicated to the Earl of Leicester? If a careless reading, it discredits his criticism; if a wilful perversion, it is unworthy and without justification.
This is much like his remarkable statement in Longman’s Magazine regarding the Argument of the Iliad: “The right course with Mrs. Gallup is to ask her to explain why or how Bacon stole from Pope’s Homer ... and how he could be (as he certainly was) ignorant of facts of his own time.... These circumstances make it certain that, though the cipher may be a very nice cipher, Mrs. Gallup must have interpreted it all wrong. She will see that, she would have seen it long ago, if she had read Pope’s Homer and had known anything about Elizabethan history.”
We all know what this impossible charge—that “Bacon stole from Pope’s Homer,” and also the insinuation regarding Melville—covertly asserts. I have fully set out in another article the answer to this baseless accusation of Mr. Marston; but I will here repeat that any statement that I copied from Pope, or from any other source whatever, in obtaining the matter put forth as deciphered from Bacon’s works, is false in every particular.
Bacon and Elizabeth’s Marriage.
Mr. Lang, and others, have asserted that Bacon refers to the first Lord Burghley as Robert. This is incorrect. Bacon says Robert Cecil when he means Robert Cecil, and at no other time. Robert is not only named, but described unmistakably. Mr. Lang says, “Robert Cecil was born in 1563, or thereabout, was younger than Bacon,” consequently could not have incited the Queen against him, etc., and devotes a page to mis-statements and sarcasms. Here again is he ignorant, or indulges in wilful perversion. The encyclopædias say, “Robert Cecil was born in 1550.” He was therefore eleven years older than Bacon, and twenty-seven years of age when the incident referred to occurred. We learn also from the same source: “Of his cousin, Francis Bacon, he appears to have been jealous.” The “blunder” is Mr. Lang’s, not Bacon’s, and it is not an evidence that “either an ignorant American wrote all this, or Bacon was an idiot.”
In speaking of Elizabeth’s marriage, Mr. Lang says, “The second was 'after her ascent to royal power’ (1558). Any one but Bacon would have said, 'after the death of Dudley’s first wife,’ because only after that death could the marriage be legal.”