Francis Bacon

• 1. Introduction

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  Francis Bacon dictated his last letter from a borrowed bed in Highgate, his fingers, he wrote, so disjointed with sickness that he could not steadily hold a pen. He compared himself to Caius Plinius the elder, who lost his life testing an experiment about the burning of Mount Vesuvius. Bacon's own experiment had been humbler. According to a story John Aubrey heard from Thomas Hobbes, Bacon had stepped from a coach into the snow, bought a hen from a poor woman, and stuffed it with snow to see whether flesh could be preserved by cold as well as by salt. He died of pneumonia on the 9th of April 1626, at the age of 65. This was the man called the father of empiricism, an English philosopher and statesman who had risen to be Lord Chancellor of England, and who would later be named alongside Locke and Newton as one of the three greatest men who ever lived. How did a sickly boy tutored at home become the figure Voltaire would hand to France as the father of the scientific method? How did the same man end his public career charged with 23 separate counts of corruption? And why, centuries later, would some insist he secretly wrote the plays of William Shakespeare?

• 2. Method And Induction

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  "There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth," Bacon wrote in the Novum Organum. One way flies from the senses to the most general axioms and treats them as settled. The other rises by a gradual and unbroken ascent, arriving at the most general axioms last of all. The first way, he said, was now in fashion. The second was the true way, but as yet untried. That second way is induction, which can be thought of as reasoning from evidence rather than from a pre-existing premise. Bacon argued that scientific knowledge could rest on inductive reasoning and careful observation of events in nature. His studies at Cambridge had brought him to believe that the methods and results of science as then practised were erroneous. His reverence for Aristotle conflicted with his rejection of Aristotelian philosophy, which seemed to him barren, argumentative, and wrong in its objectives. Bacon insisted that one must first gather the particulars, the specific parts of nature, before any conclusion can form. He saw nature as an extremely subtle complexity that demanded all the energy of the natural philosopher to disclose her secrets. His most specific proposals, the Baconian method, did not have long-lasting influence. The broader idea, that a sceptical and methodical approach could keep scientists from misleading themselves, made him one of the founders of the scientific method. He also warned of what he called idols of the mind, giving worship of Neptune as an example of the fallacy he named idola tribus, a hint at the religious dimension of his critique.

• 3. Climbing The Ladder

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  Bacon set himself three goals: to uncover truth, to serve his country, and to serve his church. He pursued them by seeking a prestigious post, and his early efforts failed. In 1580, through his uncle Lord Burghley, he applied for a post at court that might let him pursue a life of learning, but the application failed. He was admitted as an outer barrister in 1582 and entered Parliament, first elected MP for Bossiney in Cornwall in a by-election in 1581. Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex and Queen Elizabeth's favourite, became his patron, and by 1591 Bacon acted as the earl's confidential adviser. Even that powerful friendship could not secure him high office. When the post of Attorney General fell vacant in 1594, Essex's influence was not enough, and it went to Sir Edward Coke. The lesser office of Solicitor General slipped away in 1595, the Queen pointedly appointing Sir Thomas Fleming instead. To console him, Essex gave Bacon a property at Twickenham, which Bacon later sold for £1,800. Coke became a lifelong enemy in matters beyond the law. Bacon courted the wealthy young widow Lady Elizabeth Hatton, but she broke off the relationship to marry Coke instead. Bacon's fortunes turned when he severed ties with Essex, a shrewd move, since Essex would be executed for treason in 1601. Bacon then helped investigate the charges, joined the legal team at the treason trial, and was ordered by the Queen to write the official government account of it.

• 4. Favour Under King James

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  The succession of James I in 1603 brought Bacon into greater favour, and he was knighted that year. Office finally came in quantity. He became Solicitor General in 1607, began work as Clerk of the Star Chamber in 1608, and in 1613 was at last appointed Attorney General after advising the King to shuffle judicial appointments. His methods could be harsh. In pursuing the conviction of Edmund Peacham for treason, Bacon's zealous efforts included torture, raising legal controversies of high constitutional importance. The honours mounted. In March 1617 he served as temporary Regent of England for a month, and in 1618 he became Lord Chancellor. On the 12th of July 1618 the King created him Baron Verulam, and on the 27th of January 1621 he rose again to Viscount St Alban. His closeness to the King bred resentment. The so-called Prince's Parliament of April 1614 objected to his presence in the seat for Cambridge, and though he was allowed to stay, Parliament passed a law forbidding the Attorney General to sit in Parliament at all.

• 5. A Broken Reed

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  "My lords, it is my act, my hand, and my heart," Bacon told the committee sent to confirm his confession. "I beseech your lordships to be merciful to a broken reed." In 1621, after he fell into debt, a parliamentary committee charged him with 23 separate counts of corruption. His old enemy Sir Edward Coke had instigated the accusations and was appointed to help prepare the charges. The sentence was severe on paper. Bacon was fined £40,000 and committed to the Tower of London at the king's pleasure, declared incapable of holding future office or sitting in Parliament. In practice the imprisonment lasted only a few days, and the king remitted the fine. Bacon's defence was that gifts from litigants were an accepted custom of the time. He admitted his conduct had been lax but said he had never let gifts sway his judgement, and had on occasion ruled against those who paid him. To King James he protested he was as innocent of bribery as any man born on St. Innocents Day. To George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, he wrote that his mind was calm, that he knew he had clean hands and a clean heart. Some have suggested Bacon served as a scapegoat to divert attention from Buckingham's own alleged corruption. Others speculate he may even have been blackmailed, with a threat to charge him with sodomy, into his confession. The disgraced viscount then devoted himself to study and writing.

• 6. Marriage And Affections

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  When he was 36, Bacon courted Elizabeth Hatton, a young widow of 20, and years later still wrote of his regret that the marriage had not taken place. At the age of 45 he married Alice Barnham, the 13-year-old daughter of a well-connected London alderman and MP. He wrote two sonnets proclaiming his love for Alice, the second on his wedding day, the 10th of May 1606. When he became Lord Chancellor, Lady Bacon was given precedence over all other Court ladies by special warrant of the King. His chaplain William Rawley described the marriage as one of much conjugal love and respect, and noted a robe of honour Bacon gave Alice that she wore until her dying day, twenty years and more after his death. The harmony did not last. Reports circulated of friction, with speculation that Alice had to make do with less money than before, and that she complained bitterly as household finances dwindled. Bacon disinherited her after discovering her secret romantic relationship with Sir John Underhill, rewriting his will and revoking her entirely as a beneficiary. Several authors believe that, despite the marriage, Bacon was primarily attracted to men. The scholar Forker concluded that both Bacon and King James I were oriented to what was called masculine love. The diarist Sir Simonds D'Ewes recorded that there had been a question of bringing Bacon to trial for buggery, the same charge his brother Anthony Bacon had faced, and wrote of a young serving-man D'Ewes called Bacon's catamite and bedfellow. In New Atlantis, by contrast, Bacon described his utopian island as the chastest nation under heaven.

• 7. Death By Experiment

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  Bacon died at Arundel House in Highgate, the country residence of his friend the Earl of Arundel, though Arundel himself was then imprisoned in the Tower of London. Two accounts of how he came to be there survive, and they do not fully agree. John Aubrey's version, told to him by Thomas Hobbes, portrays Bacon as a martyr to experimental method. In that telling the snow that he packed into the hen so chilled him that he fell extremely ill, could not return to his lodging, and was put into a damp bed at Highgate that had not been slept in for about a year. William Rawley, Bacon's secretary and chaplain, gave a gentler account. He wrote that Bacon casually repaired to the Earl's house about a week before, and died of a gentle fever accompanied by a great cold, the defluxion of rheum falling so plentifully upon his breast that he died by suffocation. Aubrey has been criticized for his credulousness, though he did know Hobbes personally. Bacon was buried in St Michael's Church in St Albans. At the news of his death, over 30 great minds gathered their eulogies, later published in Latin. His accounts told their own story. He left personal assets of about £7,000 and lands that realised £6,000 when sold, against debts of more than £23,000, the equivalent of more than four million pounds at current value.

• 8. The Long Afterlife

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  Thomas Jefferson named Bacon, Locke, and Newton as the three greatest men who ever lived, who had laid the foundation of the superstructures raised in the physical and moral sciences. That reputation built slowly. The Novum Organum proved highly influential in the 17th century, shaping the work of Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica and of Robert Hooke, who used Baconian language in his Micrographia. During the Restoration, Bacon was commonly invoked as a guiding spirit of the Royal Society, founded under Charles II in 1660. In 1733 Voltaire introduced him to a French audience as the father of the scientific method, an understanding widespread by the 1750s. His reach extended past the laboratory. Bacon played a leading role in establishing British colonies in North America, submitting a report on the Virginia Colony in 1609 and helping send John Guy to found a colony in Newfoundland. In 1910 Newfoundland issued a postage stamp calling him the guiding spirit in colonization schemes in 1610. His legal legacy was credited by the magazine New Scientist in 1961 with influencing the drafting of the Napoleonic Code and the reforms of Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. Then there is the strangest legacy of all. The Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship, a fringe theory first proposed in the mid-19th century, contends that Bacon wrote at least some and possibly all of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. Bacon himself was a patron of libraries who sorted all knowledge into history, poetry, and philosophy, and who left one instruction for readers: some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.