Not far from St. Alban's once stood the celebrated Roman city of Verulam, called by Tacitus Verulamium, which Bacon, deeply imbued with Latin learning, appropriately selected for his first title. The plough has now for many centuries made furrows over it, and the only vestiges remaining are a few detached masses of the wall. Verulam was bounded on the south-west by the Roman Watling Street. Gorhambury was built by Sir Nicholas, and in the archbishop of Canterbury's library at Lambeth may be seen an interesting account of the expenses. It need scarcely be added that Queen Elizabeth paid her lord-keeper a visit there. Sir Nicholas Bacon left Gorhambury to Mr. Anthony Bacon, the eldest son of his second marriage, and he, dying unmarried, left the estate to his brother Francis.
Gorhambury now belongs to the earl of Verulam, whose family name is Grimston. It was left by the great Bacon to his friend, Sir Thomas Meautys, and thence, by a course of intricate successions, came to the present proprietor.
Bacon, like so many other famous men, had no children. He died in Lord Arundel's house at Highgate in 1626.
Sir Robert Bacon, fifth baronet, sold Redgrave, the family seat in Suffolk, to Lord Chief-Justice Holt toward the end of the seventeenth century. Holt, who died in London 5th of March, 1710, was buried there, and a grand monument to his memory may be seen in the church. It was erected by his brother and heir, for, like Bacon, he was childless.
Redgrave Hall, eighty-seven miles from London by the coach-road, is a large square mansion. The male line of the Holt family has long been extinct, but the present owner of the estate is descended from the great lord chief-justice's niece, who married Mr. Wilson, a younger son of an ancient Westmoreland family.
But to pass to the origin of the order of baronets. After one of the almost chronic Irish insurrections against British rule, James I. conceived in 1609 the idea of offering to English and Scotch settlers, known to be possessed of capital, a large portion of the forfeited estates in Ulster. The supposed necessity of a military force for the protection of the colonists suggested to Sir Antony Shirley a project of raising money for the king. He proposed the creation of a new honor, between those of knight and baron, and that it be conferred by patent at a fixed price for the support of the army in Ulster—that it should descend to heirs male, and be confined to two hundred gentlemen of three descents in actual possession of lands worth one thousand pounds a year—a sum equal to five thousand now.[N]
James I. approved of the scheme, as he would have done of any which seemed feasible for raising the wind, and the patents were offered at the price of ten hundred and ninety-five pounds, the estimated amount of the charge of thirty soldiers during three years. The purchasers did not prove so numerous as had been expected. In the first six years ninety-three patents were sold at £101,835. "It is unnecessary to add," says Doctor Lingard, "that the money never found its way to Ireland" in the shape of forces paid for by this process.
There have been three or four creations of baronetesses in their own right, but nearly two centuries have elapsed since such a creation. James II. made a curious remainder clause in a patent, by creating a Dutchman a baronet with remainder to his mother. It has been a mooted question whether baronets are not entitled to a coronet, and a certain Sir Charles Lamb, who died a few years ago, was so determined to uphold their privileges on this score that he had this ensign worked into the ornamentation of his entrance gates at Beaufort, near Battle Abbey, Sussex; but he met with small encouragement in such notions from his brother-baronets. An old English gentleman was wont to declare that more of disagreeable eccentricity is to be found amongst members of the baronetage than amongst those of any other order of men. He chanced to be thrown early in life amongst several eccentric beings of the class, and took his ideas accordingly; but it is a fact that a very large number of stories about eccentric baronets are in circulation. A marked man of the kind was early in the last century an individual who, in consequence of his height, was called Long Sir Thomas Robinson. It was in allusion to him that the lines were penned:
Unlike to Robinson shall be my song—
It shall be witty, and it sha'n't be long.
This was the man to whom a Russian nobleman displayed the greatest anxiety to be introduced, under the impression that he was the real identical and unadulterated Robinson Crusoe.