CHAPTER III.
BACON AND JAMES I.
Bacon's life was a double one. There was the life of high thinking, of disinterested aims, of genuine enthusiasm, of genuine desire to delight and benefit mankind, by opening new paths to wonder and knowledge and power. And there was the put on and worldly life, the life of supposed necessities for the provision of daily bread, the life of ambition and self-seeking, which he followed, not without interest and satisfaction, but at bottom because he thought he must—must be a great man, must be rich, must live in the favour of the great, because without it his great designs could not be accomplished. His original plan of life was disclosed in his letter to Lord Burghley: to get some office with an assured income and not much work, and then to devote the best of his time to his own subjects. But this, if it was really his plan, was gradually changed: first, because he could not get such a place; and next because his connection with Essex, the efforts to gain him the Attorney's place, and the use which the Queen made of him after Essex could do no more for him, drew him more and more into public work, and specially the career of the law. We know that he would not by preference have chosen the law, and did not feel that his vocation lay that way; but it was the only way open to him for mending his fortunes. And so the two lives went on side by side, the worldly one—he would have said, the practical one—often interfering with the life of thought and discovery, and partly obscuring it, but yet always leaving it paramount in his own mind. His dearest and most cherished ideas, the thoughts with which he was most at home and happiest, his deepest and truest ambitions, were those of an enthusiastic and romantic believer in a great discovery just within his grasp. They were such as the dreams and visions of his great Franciscan namesake, and of the imaginative seekers after knowledge in the middle ages, real or mythical, Albert the Great, Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Faustus; they were the eager, undoubting hopes of the physical students in Italy and England in his own time, Giordano Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, Gilbert, Galileo, or the founders of the Italian prototype of "Solomon's House" in the New Atlantis, the precursor of our Royal Societies, the Academy of the Lincei at Rome. Among these meditations was his inner life. But however he may have originally planned his course, and though at times under the influence of disappointment he threatened to retire to Cambridge or to travel abroad, he had bound himself fast to public life, and soon ceased to think of quitting it. And he had a real taste for it—for its shows, its prizes, for the laws and turns of the game, for its debates and vicissitudes. He was no mere idealist or recluse to undervalue or despise the real grandeur of the world. He took the keenest interest in the nature and ways of mankind; he liked to observe, to generalise in shrewd and sometimes cynical epigrams. He liked to apply his powerful and fertile intellect to the practical problems of society and government, to their curious anomalies, to their paradoxical phenomena; he liked to address himself, either as an expounder or a reformer, to the principles and entanglements of English law; he aspired, both as a lecturer and a legislator, to improve and simplify it. It was not beyond his hopes to shape a policy, to improve administration, to become powerful by bringing his sagacity and largeness of thought to the service of the State, in reconciling conflicting forces, in mediating between jealous parties and dangerous claims. And he liked to enter into the humours of a Court; to devote his brilliant imagination and affluence of invention either to devising a pageant which should throw all others into the shade, or a compromise which should get great persons out of some difficulty of temper or pique.
In all these things he was as industrious, as laborious, as calmly persevering and tenacious, as he was in his pursuit of his philosophical speculations. He was a compound of the most adventurous and most diversified ambition, with a placid and patient temper, such as we commonly associate with moderate desires and the love of retirement and an easy life. To imagine and dare anything, and never to let go the object of his pursuit, is one side of him; on the other he is obsequiously desirous to please and fearful of giving offence, the humblest and most grateful and also the most importunate of suitors, ready to bide his time with an even cheerfulness of spirit, which yet it was not safe to provoke by ill offices and the wish to thwart him. He never misses a chance of proffering his services; he never lets pass an opportunity of recommending himself to those who could help him. He is so bent on natural knowledge that we have a sense of incongruity when we see him engaging in politics as if he had no other interest. He throws himself with such zest into the language of the moralist, the theologian, the historian, that we forget we have before us the author of a new departure in physical inquiry, and the unwearied compiler of tables of natural history. When he is a lawyer, he seems only a lawyer. If he had not been the author of the Instauratio, his life would not have looked very different from that of any other of the shrewd and supple lawyers who hung on to the Tudor and Stuart Courts, and who unscrupulously pushed their way to preferment. He claimed to be, in spite of the misgivings of Elizabeth and her ministers, as devoted to public work and as capable of it as any of them. He was ready for anything, for any amount of business, ready, as in everything, to take infinite trouble about it. The law, if he did not like it, was yet no by-work with him; he was as truly ambitious as the men with whom he maintained so keen and for long so unsuccessful a rivalry. He felt bitterly the disappointment of seeing men like Coke and Fleming and Doddridge and Hobart pass before him; he could not, if he had been only a lawyer, have coveted more eagerly the places, refused to him, which they got; only, he had besides a whole train of purposes, an inner and supreme ambition, of which they knew nothing. And with all this there is no apparent consciousness of these manifold and varied interests. He never affected to conceal from himself his superiority to other men in his aims and in the grasp of his intelligence. But there is no trace that he prided himself on the variety and versatility of these powers, or that he even distinctly realized to himself that it was anything remarkable that he should have so many dissimilar objects and be able so readily to pursue them in such different directions.
It is doubtful whether, as long as Elizabeth lived, Bacon could ever have risen above his position among the "Learned Counsel," an office without patent or salary or regular employment. She used, him, and he was willing to be used; but he plainly did not appear in her eyes to be the kind of man who would suit her in the more prominent posts of her Government. Unusual and original ability is apt, till it is generally recognised, to carry with it suspicion and mistrust as to its being really all that it seems to be. Perhaps she thought of the possibility of his flying out unexpectedly at some inconvenient pinch, and attempting to serve her interests, not in her way, but in his own; perhaps she distrusted in business and state affairs so brilliant a discourser, whose heart was known, first and above all, to be set on great dreams of knowledge; perhaps those interviews with her in which he describes the counsels which he laid before her, and in which his shrewdness and foresight are conspicuous, may not have been so welcome to her as he imagined; perhaps, it is not impossible, that he may have been too compliant for her capricious taste, and too visibly anxious to please. Perhaps, too, she could not forget, in spite of what had happened, that he had been the friend, and not the very generous friend, of Essex. But, except as to a share of the forfeitures, with which he was not satisfied, his fortunes did not rise under Elizabeth.
Whatever may have been the Queen's feelings towards him, there is no doubt that one powerful influence, which lasted into the reign of James, was steadily adverse to his advancement. Burghley had been strangely niggardly in what he did to help his brilliant nephew; he was going off the scene, and probably did not care to trouble himself about a younger and uncongenial aspirant to service. But his place was taken by his son, Robert Cecil; and Cecil might naturally have been expected to welcome the co-operation of one of his own family who was foremost among the rising men of Cecil's own generation, and who certainly was most desirous to do him service. But it is plain that he early made up his mind to keep Bacon in the background. It is easy to imagine reasons, though the apparent short-sightedness of the policy may surprise us; but Cecil was too reticent and self-controlled a man to let his reasons appear, and his words, in answer to his cousin's applications for his assistance, were always kind, encouraging, and vague. But we must judge by the event, and that makes it clear that Cecil did not care to see Bacon in high position. Nothing can account for Bacon's strange failure for so long a time to reach his due place in the public service but the secret hostility, whatever may have been the cause, of Cecil.
There was also another difficulty. Coke was the great lawyer of the day, a man whom the Government could not dispense with, and whom it was dangerous to offend. And Coke thoroughly disliked Bacon. He thought lightly of his law, and he despised his refinement and his passion for knowledge. He cannot but have resented the impertinence, as he must have thought it, of Bacon having been for a whole year his rival for office. It is possible that if people then agreed with Mr. Spedding's opinion as to the management of Essex's trial, he may have been irritated by jealousy; but a couple of months after the trial (April 29, 1601) Bacon sent to Cecil, with a letter of complaint, the following account of a scene in Court between Coke and himself:
"A true remembrance of the abuse I received of Mr. Attorney-General publicly in the Exchequer the first day of term; for the truth whereof I refer myself to all that were present.
"I moved to have a reseizure of the lands of Geo. Moore, a relapsed recusant, a fugitive and a practising traytor; and showed better matter for the Queen against the discharge by plea, which is ever with a salvo jure. And this I did in as gentle and reasonable terms as might be.
"Mr. Attorney kindled at it, and said, 'Mr. Bacon, if you have any tooth against me pluck it out; for it will do you more hurt than all the teeth in your head will do you good.' I answered coldly in these very words: 'Mr. Attorney, I respect you; I fear you not; and the less you speak of your own greatness, the more I will think of it.'
"He replied, 'I think scorn to stand upon terms of greatness towards you, who are less than little; less than the least;' and other such strange light terms he gave me, with that insulting which cannot be expressed.
"Herewith stirred, yet I said no more but this: 'Mr. Attorney, do not depress me so far; for I have been your better, and may be again, when it please the Queen.'
"With this he spake, neither I nor himself could tell what, as if he had been born Attorney-General; and in the end bade me not meddle with the Queen's business, but with mine own; and that I was unsworn, etc. I told him, sworn or unsworn was all one to an honest man; and that I ever set my service first, and myself second; and wished to God that he would do the like.
"Then he said, it were good to clap a cap. ultegatum upon my back! To which I only said he could not; and that he was at fault, for he hunted upon an old scent. He gave me a number of disgraceful words besides, which I answered with silence, and showing that I was not moved with them."