Bacon — 07 - Chapter 4A

BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL.

The great thinker and idealist, the great seer of a world of knowledge to which the men of his own generation were blind, and which they could not, even with his help, imagine a possible one, had now won the first step in that long and toilsome ascent to success in life, in which for fourteen years he had been baffled.

He had made himself, for good and for evil, a servant of the Government of James I. He was prepared to discharge with zeal and care all his duties.

He was prepared to perform all the services which that Government might claim from its servants.

He had sought, he had passionately pressed to be admitted within that circle in which the will of the King was the supreme law; after that, it would have been ruin to have withdrawn or resisted.

But it does not appear that the thought or wish to resist or withdraw ever presented itself; he had thoroughly convinced himself that in doing what the King required he was doing the part of a good citizen, and a faithful servant of the State and Commonwealth.

The two lives, the two currents of purpose and effort, were still there.

Behind all the wrangle of the courts and the devising of questionable legal subtleties to support some unconstitutional encroachment, or to outflank the defence of some obnoxious prisoner, the high philosophical meditations still went on;

the remembrance of their sweetness and grandeur wrung more than once from the jaded lawyer or the baffled counsellor the complaint, in words which had a great charm for him, _Multum incola fuit anima mea_--"My soul hath long dwelt" where it would not be.

But opinion and ambition and the immense convenience of being great and rich and powerful, and the supposed necessities of his condition, were too strong even for his longings to be the interpreter and the servant of nature.

There is no trace of the faintest reluctance on his part to be the willing minister of a court of which not only the principal figure, but the arbiter and governing spirit, was to be George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.

The first leisure that Bacon had after he was appointed Solicitor he used in a characteristic way.

He sat down to make a minute stock-taking of his position and its circumstances.

In the summer of 1608 he devoted a week of July to this survey of his life, its objects and its appliances; and he jotted down, day by day, through the week, from his present reflections, or he transcribed from former note-books, a series of notes in loose order, mostly very rough and not always intelligible, about everything that could now concern him.

This curious and intimate record, which he called _Commentarius Solutus_, was discovered by Mr. Spedding, who not unnaturally had some misgivings about publishing so secret and so ambiguous a record of a man's most private confidences with himself.

But there it was, and, as it was known, he no doubt decided wisely in publishing it as it stands; he has done his best to make it intelligible, and he has also done his best to remove any unfavourable impressions that might arise from it.

It is singularly interesting as an evidence of Bacon's way of working, of his watchfulness, his industry, his care in preparing himself long beforehand for possible occasions, his readiness to take any amount of trouble about his present duties, his self-reliant desire for more important and difficult ones.

It exhibits his habit of self-observation and self-correction, his care to mend his natural defects of voice, manner, and delivery; it is even more curious in showing him watching his own physical constitution and health, in the most minute details of symptoms and remedies, equally with a scientific and a practical object.

It contains his estimate of his income, his expenditure, his debts, schedules of lands and jewels, his rules for the economy of his estate, his plans for his new gardens and terraces and ponds and buildings at Gorhambury.

He was now a rich man, valuing his property at £24,155 and his income at £4975, burdened with a considerable debt, but not more than he might easily look to wipe out.

But, besides all these points, there appear the two large interests of his life--the reform of philosophy, and his ideal of a great national policy.

The "greatness of Britain" was one of his favourite subjects of meditation.

He puts down in his notes the outline of what should be aimed at to secure and increase it; it is to make the various forces of the great and growing empire work together in harmonious order, without waste, without jealousy, without encroachment and collision; to unite not only the interests but the sympathies and aims of the Crown with those of the people and Parliament; and so to make Britain, now in peril from nothing but from the strength of its own discordant elements, that "Monarchy of the West" in reality, which Spain was in show, and, as Bacon always maintained, only in show.

The survey of the condition of his philosophical enterprise takes more space.

He notes the stages and points to which his plans have reached; he indicates, with a favourite quotation or apophthegm--"_Plus ultra_"--"_ausus vana contemnere_"--"_aditus non nisi sub persona infantis_" soon to be familiar to the world in his published writings--the lines of argument, sometimes alternative ones, which were before him; he draws out schemes of inquiry, specimen tables, distinctions and classifications about the subject of Motion, in English interlarded with Latin, or in Latin interlarded with English, of his characteristic and practical sort; he notes the various sources from which he might look for help and co-operation--"of learned men beyond the seas"--"to begin first in France to print it"--"laying for a place to command wits and pens;" he has his eye on rich and childless bishops, on the enforced idleness of State prisoners in the Tower, like Northumberland and Raleigh, on the great schools and universities, where he might perhaps get hold of some college for "Inventors"--as we should say, for the endowment of research.

These matters fill up a large space of his notes.

But his thoughts were also busy about his own advancement.

And to these sheets of miscellaneous memoranda Bacon confided not only his occupations and his philosophical and political ideas, but, with a curious innocent unreserve, the arts and methods which he proposed to use in order to win the favour of the great and to pull down the reputation of his rivals.

He puts down in detail how he is to recommend himself to the King and the King's favourites-- "To set on foot and maintain access with his Majesty, Dean of the Chapel, May, Murray.

Keeping a course of access at the beginning of every term and vacation, with a memorial.

To attend some time his repasts, or to fall into a course of familiar discourse.

To find means to win a conceit, not open, but private, of being affectionate and assured to the Scotch, and fit to succeed Salisbury in his manage in that kind; Lord Dunbar, Duke of Lennox, and Daubiny: secret."

Then, again, of Salisbury-- "Insinuate myself to become privy to my Lord of Salisbury's estate."

"To correspond with Salisbury in a habit of natural but no ways perilous boldness, and in vivacity, invention, care to cast and enterprise (but with due caution), for this manner I judge both in his nature freeth the stands, and in his ends pleaseth him best, and promiseth more use of me.

I judge my standing out, and not favoured by Northampton, must needs do me good with Salisbury, especially comparative to the Attorney."

The Attorney Hobart filled the place to which Bacon had so long aspired, and which he thought, perhaps reasonably, that he could fill much better.

At any rate, one of the points to which he recurs frequently in his notes is to exhort himself to make his own service a continual contrast to the Attorney's--"to have in mind and use the Attorney's weakness," enumerating a list of instances: "Too full of cases and distinctions.

Nibbling solemnly, he distinguisheth but apprehends not;"

"No gift with his pen in proclamations and the like;" and at last he draws out in a series of epigrams his view of "Hubbard's disadvantages"-- "Better at shift than at drift....

_Subtilitas sine acrimonia_....

No power with the judge....

He will alter a thing but not mend....

He puts into patents and deeds words not of law but of common sense and discourse....

Sociable save in profit....

He doth depopulate mine office; otherwise called inclose....

I never knew any one of so good a speech with a worse pen."

...

Then in a marginal note--"Solemn goose.

Stately, leastwise nodd (?

) crafty.

They have made him believe that he is wondrous wise."

And, finally, he draws up a paper of counsels and rules for his own conduct--"_Custumæ aptæ ad Individuum_"--which might supply an outline for an essay on the arts of behaviour proper for a rising official, a sequel to the biting irony of the essays on _Cunning_ and _Wisdom for a Man's Self_.

"To furnish my L. of S. with ornaments for public speeches.

To make him think how he should be reverenced by a Lord Chancellor, if I were; Princelike.

"To prepare him for matters to be handled in Council or before the King aforehand, and to show him and yield him the fruits of my care.

"To take notes in tables, when I attend the Council, and sometimes to move out of a memorial shewed and seen.

To have particular occasions, fit and graceful and continual, to maintain private speech with every the great persons, and sometimes drawing more than one together.

_Ex imitatione Att.

_ This specially in public places, and without care or affectation.

At Council table to make good my L. of Salisb.

motions and speeches, and for the rest sometimes one sometimes another; chiefly his, that is most earnest and in affection.

"To suppress at once my speaking, with panting and labour of breath and voice.

Not to fall upon the main too sudden, but to induce and intermingle speech of good fashion.

To use at once upon entrance given of speech, though abrupt, to compose and draw in myself.

To free myself at once from payt.

(?

) of formality and compliment, though with some show of carelessness, pride, and rudeness."

(And then follows a long list of matters of business to be attended to.

) These arts of a court were not new; it was not new for men to observe them in their neighbours and rivals.

What was new was the writing them down, with deliberate candour, among a man's private memoranda, as things to be done and with the intention of practising them.

This of itself, it has been suggested, shows that they were unfamiliar and uncongenial to Bacon; for a man reminds himself of what he is apt to forget.

But a man reminds himself also of what seems to him, at the moment, most important, and what he lays most stress upon.

And it is clear that these are the rules, rhetorical and ethical, which Bacon laid down for himself in pursuing the second great object of his life--his official advancement; and that, whatever we think of them, they were the means which he deliberately approved.

As long as Salisbury lived, the distrust which had kept Bacon so long in the shade kept him at a distance from the King's ear, and from influence on his counsels.

Salisbury was the one Englishman in whom the King had become accustomed to confide, in his own conscious strangeness to English ways and real dislike and suspicion of them; Salisbury had an authority which no one else had, both from his relations with James at the end of Elizabeth's reign, and as the representative of her policy and the depositary of its traditions; and if he had lived, things might not, perhaps, have been better in James's government, but many things, probably, would have been different.

But while Salisbury was supreme, Bacon, though very alert and zealous, was mainly busied with his official work; and the Solicitor's place had become, as he says, a "mean thing" compared with the Attorney's, and also an extremely laborious place--"one of the painfullest places in the kingdom."

Much of it was routine, but responsible and fatiguing routine.

But if he was not in Salisbury's confidence, he was prominent in the House of Commons.

The great and pressing subject of the time was the increasing difficulties of the revenue, created partly by the inevitable changes of a growing state, but much more by the King's incorrigible wastefulness.

It was impossible to realise completely the great dream and longing of the Stuart kings and their ministers to make the Crown independent of parliamentary supplies; but to dispense with these supplies as much as possible, and to make as much as possible of the revenue permanent, was the continued and fatal policy of the Court.

The "Great Contract"--a scheme by which, in return for the surrender by the Crown of certain burdensome and dangerous claims of the Prerogative, the Commons were to assure a large compensating yearly income to the Crown--was Salisbury's favourite device during the last two years of his life.

It was not a prosperous one.

The bargain was an ill-imagined and not very decorous transaction between the King and his people.

Both parties were naturally jealous of one another, suspicious of underhand dealing and tacit changes of terms, prompt to resent and take offence, and not easy to pacify when they thought advantage had been taken; and Salisbury, either by his own fault, or by yielding to the King's canny shiftiness, gave the business a more haggling and huckstering look than it need have had.

Bacon, a subordinate of the Government, but a very important person in the Commons, did his part, loyally, as it seems, and skilfully in smoothing differences and keeping awkward questions from making their appearance.

Thus he tried to stave off the risk of bringing definitely to a point the King's cherished claim to levy "impositions," or custom duties, on merchandise, by virtue of his prerogative--a claim which he warned the Commons not to dispute, and which Bacon, maintaining it as legal in theory, did his best to prevent them from discussing, and to persuade them to be content with restraining.

Whatever he thought of the "Great Contract," he did what was expected of him in trying to gain for it fair play.

But he made time for other things also.

He advised, and advised soundly, on the plantation and finance of Ireland.

It was a subject in which he took deep interest.

A few years later, with only too sure a foresight, he gave the warning, "lest Ireland civil become more dangerous to us than Ireland savage."

He advised--not soundly in point of law, but curiously in accordance with modern notions--about endowments; though, in this instance, in the famous will case of Thomas Sutton, the founder of the Charter House, his argument probably covered the scheme of a monstrous job in favour of the needy Court.

And his own work went on in spite of the pressure of the Solicitor's place.

To the first years of his official life belong three very interesting fragments, intended to find a provisional place in the plan of the "Great Instauration."

To his friend Toby Matthews, at Florence, he sent in manuscript the great attack on the old teachers of knowledge, which is perhaps the most brilliant, and also the most insolently unjust and unthinking piece of rhetoric ever composed by him--the _Redargutio Philosophiarum_.

"I send you at this time the only part which hath any harshness;

and yet I framed to myself an opinion, that whosoever allowed well of that preface which you so much commend, will not dislike, or at least ought not to dislike, this other speech of preparation; for it is written out of the same spirit, and out of the same necessity.

Nay it doth more fully lay open that the question between me and the ancients is not of the virtue of the race, but of the rightness of the way.

And to speak truth, it is to the other but as _palma_ to _pugnus_, part of the same thing more large....

Myself am like the miller of Huntingdon, that was wont to pray for peace amongst the willows; for while the winds blew, the wind-mills wrought, and the water-mill was less customed.

So I see that controversies of religion must hinder the advancement of sciences.

Let me conclude with my perpetual wish towards yourself, that the approbation of yourself by your own discreet and temperate carriage, may restore you to your country, and your friends to your society.

And so I commend you to God's goodness.