But the tide had turned against him for good. A few fair words, a few grudging doles of money to relieve his pressing wants, and those sometimes intercepted and perhaps never rightly granted from an Exchequer which even Cranfield's finance could not keep filled, were all the graces that descended upon him from those fountains of goodness in which he professed to trust with such boundless faith. The King did not want him, perhaps did not trust him, perhaps did not really like him. When the Novum Organum came out, all that he had to say about it was in the shape of a profane jest that "it was like the peace of God—it passed all understanding." Other men had the ear of Buckingham; shrewd, practical men of business like Cranfield, who hated Bacon's loose and careless ways, or the clever ecclesiastic Williams, whose counsel had steered Buckingham safely through the tempest that wrecked Bacon, and who, with no legal training, had been placed in Bacon's seat. "I thought," said Bacon, "that I should have known my successor." Williams, for his part, charged Bacon with trying to cheat his creditors, when his fine was remitted. With no open quarrel, Bacon's relations to Buckingham became more ceremonious and guarded; the "My singular good Lord" of the former letters becomes, now that Buckingham had risen so high and Bacon had sunk so low, "Excellent Lord." The one friend to whom Bacon had once wished to owe everything had become the great man, now only to be approached with "sweet meats" and elaborate courtesy. But it was no use. His full pardon Bacon did not get, though earnestly suing for it, that he might not "die in ignominy." He never sat again in Parliament. The Provostship of Eton fell vacant, and Bacon's hopes were kindled. "It were a pretty cell for my fortune. The College and School I do not doubt but I shall make to flourish." But Buckingham had promised it to some nameless follower, and by some process of exchange it went to Sir Henry Wotton. His English history was offered in vain. His digest of the Laws was offered in vain. In vain he wrote a memorandum on the regulation of usury; notes of advice to Buckingham; elaborate reports and notes of speeches about a war with Spain, when that for a while loomed before the country. In vain he affected an interest which he could hardly have felt in the Spanish marriage, and the escapade of Buckingham and Prince Charles, which "began," he wrote, "like a fable of the poets, but deserved all in a piece a worthy narration." In vain, when the Spanish marriage was off and the French was on, he proposed to offer to Buckingham "his service to live a summer as upon mine own delight at Paris, to settle a fast intelligence between France and us;" "I have somewhat of the French," he said, "I love birds, as the King doth." Public patronage and public employment were at an end for him. His petitions to the King and Buckingham ceased to be for office, but for the clearing of his name and for the means of living. It is piteous to read the earnestness of his requests. "Help me (dear Sovereign lord and master), pity me so far as that I who have borne a bag be not now in my age forced in effect to bear a wallet." The words are from a carefully-prepared and rhetorical letter which was not sent, but they express what he added to a letter presenting the De Augmentis; "det Vestra Majestas obolum Belisario." Again, "I prostrate myself at your Majesty's feet; I your ancient servant, now sixty-four years old in age, and three years and five months old in misery. I desire not from your Majesty means, nor place, nor employment, but only after so long a time of expiation, a complete and total remission of the sentence of the Upper House, to the end that blot of ignominy may be removed from me, and from my memory and posterity, that I die not a condemned man, but may be to your Majesty, as I am to God, nova creatura." But the pardon never came. Sir John Bennett, who had been condemned as a corrupt judge by the same Parliament, and between whose case and Bacon's there was as much difference, "I will not say as between black and white, but as between black and gray," had got his full pardon, "and they say shall sit in Parliament." Lord Suffolk had been one of Bacon's judges. "I hope I deserve not to be the only outcast." But whether the Court did not care, or whether, as he once suspected, there was some old enemy like Coke, who "had a tooth against him," and was watching any favour shown him, he died without his wish being fulfilled, "to live out of want and to die out of ignominy."
Bacon was undoubtedly an impoverished man, and straitened in his means; but this must be understood as in relation to the rank and position which he still held, and the work which he wanted done for the Instauratio. His will, dated a few months before his death, shows that it would be a mistake to suppose that he was in penury. He no doubt often wanted ready money, and might be vexed by creditors. But he kept a large household, and was able to live in comfort at Gray's Inn or at Gorhambury. A man who speaks in his will of his "four coach geldings and his best caroache," besides many legacies, and who proposes to found two lectures at the universities, may have troubles about debts and be cramped in his expenditure, but it is only relatively to his station that he can be said to be poor. And to subordinate officers of the Treasury who kept him out of his rights, he could still write a sharp letter, full of his old force and edge. A few months before his death he thus wrote to the Lord Treasurer Ley, who probably had made some difficulty about a claim for money:
"MY LORD,—I humbly entreat your Lordship, and (if I may use the word) advise your Lordship to make me a better answer. Your Lordship is interested in honour, in the opinion of all that hear how I am dealt with. If your Lordship malice me for Long's cause, surely it was one of the justest businesses that ever was in Chancery. I will avouch it; and how deeply I was tempted therein, your Lordship knoweth best. Your Lordship may do well to think of your grave as I do of mine; and to beware of hardness of heart. And as for fair words, it is a wind by which neither your Lordship nor any man else can sail long. Howsoever, I am the man that shall give all due respects and reverence to your great place.
"20th June, 1625.
FR. ST. ALBAN."
Bacon always claimed that he was not "vindicative." But considering how Bishop Williams, when he was Lord Keeper, had charged Bacon with "knavery" and "deceiving his creditors" in the arrangements about his fine, it is not a little strange to find that at the end of his life Bacon had so completely made friends with him that he chose him as the person to whom he meant to leave his speeches and letters, which he was "willing should not be lost," and also the charge of superintending two foundations of £200 a year for Natural Science at the universities. And the Bishop accepted the charge.
The end of this, one of the most pathetic of histories, was at hand; the end was not the less pathetic because it came in so homely a fashion. On a cold day in March he stopped his coach in the snow on his way to Highgate, to try the effect of cold in arresting putrefaction. He bought a hen from a woman by the way, and stuffed it with snow. He was taken with a bad chill, which forced him to stop at a strange house, Lord Arundel's, to whom he wrote his last letter—a letter of apology for using his house. He did not write the letter as a dying man. But disease had fastened on him. A few days after, early on Easter morning, April 9, 1626, he passed away. He was buried at St. Albans, in the Church of St. Michael, "the only Christian church within the walls of old Verulam." "For my name and memory," he said in his will, "I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages." So he died: the brightest, richest, largest mind but one, in the age which had seen Shakespeare and his fellows; so bright and rich and large that there have been found those who identify him with the writer of Hamlet and Othello. That is idle. Bacon could no more have written the plays than Shakespeare could have prophesied the triumphs of natural philosophy. So ended a career, than which no other in his time had grander and nobler aims—aims, however mistaken, for the greatness and good of England; aims for the enlargement of knowledge and truth, and for the benefit of mankind. So ended a career which had mounted slowly and painfully, but resolutely, to the highest pinnacle of greatness—greatness full of honour and beneficent activity—suddenly to plunge down to depths where honour and hope were irrecoverable. So closed, in disgrace and disappointment and neglect, the last sad chapter of a life which had begun so brightly, which had achieved such permanent triumphs, which had lost itself so often in the tangles of insincerity and evil custom, which was disfigured and marred by great misfortunes, and still more by great mistakes of his own, which was in many ways misunderstood not only by his generation but by himself, but which he left in the constant and almost unaccountable faith that it would be understood and greatly honoured by posterity. With all its glories, it was the greatest shipwreck, the greatest tragedy, of an age which saw many.
But in these gloomy and dreary days of depression and vain hope to which his letters bear witness—"three years and five months old in misery," again later, "a long cleansing week of five years' expiation and more"—his interest in his great undertaking and his industry never flagged. The King did not want what he offered, did not want his histories, did not want his help about law. Well, then, he had work of his own on which his heart was set; and if the King did not want his time, he had the more for himself. Even in the busy days of his Chancellorship he had prepared and carried through the press the Novum Organum, which he published on the very eve of his fall. It was one of those works which quicken a man's powers, and prove to him what he can do; and it had its effect. His mind was never more alert than in these years of adversity, his labour never more indefatigable, his powers of expression never more keen and versatile and strong. Besides the political writings of grave argument for which he found time, these five years teem with the results of work. In the year before his death he sketched out once more, in a letter to a Venetian correspondent, Fra Fulgenzio, the friend of Sarpi, the plan of his great work, on which he was still busy, though with fast diminishing hopes of seeing it finished. To another foreign correspondent, a professor of philosophy at Annecy, and a distinguished mathematician, Father Baranzan, who had raised some questions about Bacon's method, and had asked what was to be done with metaphysics, he wrote in eager acknowledgment of the interest which his writings had excited, and insisting on the paramount necessity, above everything, of the observation of facts and of natural history, out of which philosophy may be built. But the most comprehensive view of his intellectual projects in all directions, "the fullest account of his own personal feelings and designs as a writer which we have from his own pen," is given in a letter to the venerable friend of his early days, Bishop Andrewes, who died a few months after him. Part, he says, of his Instauratio, "the work in mine own judgement (si nunquam fallit imago) I do most esteem," has been published; but because he "doubts that it flies too high over men's heads," he proposes "to draw it down to the sense" by examples of Natural History. He has enlarged and translated the Advancement into the De Augmentis. "Because he could not altogether desert the civil person that he had borne," he had begun a work on Laws, intermediate between philosophical jurisprudence and technical law. He had hoped to compile a digest of English law, but found it more than he could do alone, and had laid it aside. The Instauratio had contemplated the good of men "in the dowries of nature;" the Laws, their good "in society and the dowries of government." As he owed duty to his country, and could no longer do it service, he meant to do it honour by his history of Henry VII. His Essays were but "recreations;" and remembering that all his writings had hitherto "gone all into the City and none into the Temple," he wished to make "some poor oblation," and therefore had chosen an argument mixed of religious and civil considerations, the dialogue of "an Holy War" against the Ottoman, which he never finished, but which he intended to dedicate to Andrewes, "in respect of our ancient and private acquaintance, and because amongst the men of our times I hold you in special reverence."
The question naturally presents itself, in regard to a friend of Bishop Andrewes, What was Bacon as regards religion? And the answer, it seems to me, can admit of no doubt. The obvious and superficial thing to say is that his religion was but an official one, a tribute to custom and opinion. But it was not so. Both in his philosophical thinking, and in the feelings of his mind in the various accidents and occasions of life, Bacon was a religious man, with a serious and genuine religion. His sense of the truth and greatness of religion was as real as his sense of the truth and greatness of nature; they were interlaced together, and could not be separated, though they were to be studied separately and independently. The call, repeated through all his works from the earliest to the last, Da Fidel quæ Fidel sunt, was a warning against confusing the two, but was an earnest recognition of the claims of each. The solemn religious words in which his prefaces and general statements often wind up with thanksgiving and hope and prayer, are no mere words of course; they breathe the spirit of the deepest conviction. It is true that he takes the religion of Christendom as he finds it. The grounds of belief, the relation of faith to reason, the profounder inquiries into the basis of man's knowledge of the Eternal and Invisible, are out of the circle within which he works. What we now call the philosophy of religion is absent from his writings. In truth, his mind was not qualified to grapple with such questions. There is no sign in his writings that he ever tried his strength against them; that he ever cared to go below the surface into the hidden things of mind, and what mind deals with above and beyond sense—those metaphysical difficulties and depths, as we call them, which there is no escaping, and which are as hard to explore and as dangerous to mistake as the forces and combinations of external nature. But it does not follow, because he had not asked all the questions that others have asked, that he had not thought out his reasonable faith. His religion was not one of mere vague sentiment: it was the result of reflection and deliberate judgment. It was the discriminating and intelligent Church of England religion of Hooker and Andrewes, which had gone back to something deeper and nobler in Christianity than the popular Calvinism of the earlier Reformation; and though sternly hostile to the system of the Papacy, both on religious and political grounds, attempted to judge it with knowledge and justice. This deliberate character of his belief is shown in the remarkable Confession of Faith which he left behind him: a closely-reasoned and nobly-expressed survey of Christian theology—"a summa theologiæ, digested into seven pages of the finest English of the days when its tones were finest." "The entire scheme of Christian theology," as Mr. Spedding says, "is constantly in his thoughts; underlies everything; defines for him the limits of human speculation; and, as often as the course of inquiry touches at any point the boundary line, never fails to present itself. There is hardly any occasion or any kind of argument into which it does not at one time or another incidentally introduce itself." Doubtless it was a religion which in him was compatible, as it has been in others, with grave faults of temperament and character. But it is impossible to doubt that it was honest, that it elevated his thoughts, that it was a refuge and stay in the times of trouble.