Francis Bacon was born in York House, London, on January 22, 1561. Of this building only the ancient water-gate, fronting the Thames, survives the waste of time. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, was for twenty years Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Elizabeth—a famous statesman, orator, and wit. His mother, Lady Ann Bacon, was the second daughter of the celebrated Sir Anthony Cooke, formerly tutor of King Edward VI., Henry VIII.'s short-lived son. She was a woman of great learning and many accomplishments, and of a strong, earnest, passionate, affectionate, and religious nature.
Francis was the youngest of eight children, six of whom were by the first wife of Sir Nicholas. He belonged to the aristocracy of England, but not to that ancient, warlike race of battle-crowned warriors, whose pedigree dated back beyond the Crusades. His father was a lawyer. Both his father's family and his mother's seem to have risen from the ranks on the great wave of the Reformation; they belonged to the intellectual new age, then dawning; rather than to the rude, fighting age which was about to pass away. Francis was no accident. We can see in him the two natures of his father and his mother—the commingling of the powerful, practical, sagacious politician and man of affairs, with the studious, contemplative, imaginative, affectionate, religious enthusiast.
His birthplace was a palace; the country seat of Gorhamsbury, near Saint Albans' village, is in the midst of the most charming rural scenery in England, or in the world. There a great part of his youth and early manhood was passed.
He came into this breathing world when the human race were upon the threshold of the tremendous development which now surrounds us. He was born sixty-nine years after Columbus had re-opened the long-closed pathway from the eastern to the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean; twenty-seven years after the French took possession of Canada; twelve years after the Portuguese settled in Brazil; and forty-six years before the first English colonists landed at Jamestown, Va. The degree of advancement of the mind of the age will be understood when it is remembered that it was only one hundred and twenty-five years, at the date of Bacon's birth, since Guttenberg had invented movable types, in Germany; and but eighty-seven years since Caxton set up his printing press at Westminster. No man has ever lived who did more than Bacon to change the opinions and condition of those who came after him.
It was a "day of little things." England contained less than five million inhabitants, and of these probably not one-tenth spoke a language which could be understood to-day by the English-using people of the world. The mass of the populace were steeped to the lips in brutality and ignorance. The houses of the peasants were built of "sticks and dirt;" many of them "without chimneys or glazed windows;" the habits of the people were "inconceivably filthy;" "scurvy and leprosy were endemic;" the schools did not, as a rule, teach English; the amusements of the populace were bear-baitings and dancing naked in barns; the people of one county could not understand the speech of the inhabitants of the next county; "the disputes about tithes and boundaries were usually settled by bands of armed men, and the records of the Star-Chamber swarm with such cases." Education was at a low ebb. "In one year, 1570 (Bacon was then nine years of age), the scholars of Trinity College, Cambridge, consumed 2,250 barrels of beer." Many of the graduates became beggars; and so extensive was this evil that Parliament, by an act of 14th Elizabeth, declared that "all scholars of the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge that go about begging, not being authorized under the seal of the said universities," are declared "vagabonds" and punished as such. But even this was an improvement on Henry VIII.'s time when three hundred men were hanged in London for soliciting alms.
The only illuminated spot in all this darkness was the Court in London. Here they talked something which we would to-day call English; here they caught, through France and Italy, a reflected light from the dying glories of the ancient Roman civilization; here the travelled wealthy, "the picked men of countries," brought home some of the culture of more refined races. Bacon says:
"Courts are but only superficial schools
To dandle fools;
The rural parts are turned into a den
Of savage men;
And where's the city, from foul vice so free,
But may be termed the worst of all the three?"
In this curious, primitive, rude, ensmalled age, grew up the great man who was to do so much to change it all.