Bacon | Page 5

too much alive to the shakiness of current doctrines and
arguments on religion and policy? Was he too open to new impressions,
made by objections or rival views? Or did he show signs of wanting
backbone to stand amid difficulties and threatening prospects? Did
Burghley see something in him of the pliability which he could

remember as the serviceable quality of his own young days--which
suited those days of rapid change, but not days when change was
supposed to be over, and when the qualities which were wanted were
those which resist and defy it? The only thing that is clear is that
Burghley, in spite of Bacon's continual applications, abstained to the
last from advancing his fortunes.
Whether employed by government or not, Bacon began at this time to
prepare those carefully-written papers on the public affairs of the day,
of which he has left a good many. In our day they would have been
pamphlets or magazine articles. In his they were circulated in
manuscript, and only occasionally printed. The first of any importance
is a letter of advice to the Queen, about the year 1585, on the policy to
be followed with a view to keeping in check the Roman Catholic
interest at home and abroad. It is calm, sagacious, and, according to the
fashion of the age, slightly Machiavellian. But the first subject on
which Bacon exhibited his characteristic qualities, his appreciation of
facts, his balance of thought, and his power, when not personally
committed, of standing aloof from the ordinary prejudices and
assumptions of men round him, was the religious condition and
prospects of the English Church. Bacon had been brought up in a
Puritan household of the straitest sect. His mother was an earnest,
severe, and intolerant Calvinist, deep in the interests and cause of her
party, bitterly resenting all attempts to keep in order its pretensions.
She was a masterful woman, claiming to meddle with her
brother-in-law's policy, and though a most affectionate mother she was
a woman of violent and ungovernable temper. Her letters to her son
Antony, whom she loved passionately, but whom she suspected of
keeping dangerous and papistical company, show us the imperious
spirit in which she claimed to interfere with her sons; and they show
also that in Francis she did not find all the deference which she looked
for. Recommending Antony to frequent "the religious exercises of the
sincerer sort," she warns him not to follow his brother's advice or
example. Antony was advised to use prayer twice a day with his
servants. "Your brother," she adds, "is too negligent therein." She is
anxious about Antony's health, and warns him not to fall into his
brother's ill-ordered habits: "I verily think your brother's weak stomach

to digest hath been much caused and confirmed by untimely going to
bed, and then musing nescio quid when he should sleep, and then in
consequent by late rising and long lying in bed, whereby his men are
made slothful and himself continueth sickly. But my sons haste not to
hearken to their mother's good counsel in time to prevent." It seems
clear that Francis Bacon had shown his mother that not only in the care
of his health, but in his judgment on religious matters, he meant to go
his own way. Mr. Spedding thinks that she must have had much
influence on him; it seems more likely that he resented her interference,
and that the hard and narrow arrogance which she read into the Gospel
produced in him a strong reaction. Bacon was obsequious to the
tyranny of power, but he was never inclined to bow to the tyranny of
opinion; and the tyranny of Puritan infallibility was the last thing to
which he was likely to submit. His mother would have wished him to
sit under Cartwright and Travers. The friend of his choice was the
Anglican preacher, Dr. Andrewes, to whom he submitted all his works,
and whom he called his "inquisitor general;" and he was proud to sign
himself the pupil of Whitgift, and to write for him--the archbishop of
whom Lady Bacon wrote to her son Antony, veiling the dangerous
sentiment in Greek, "that he was the ruin of the Church, for he loved
his own glory more than Christ's."
Certainly, in the remarkable paper on Controversies in the Church
(1589), Bacon had ceased to feel or to speak as a Puritan. The paper is
an attempt to compose the controversy by pointing out the mistakes in
judgment, in temper, and in method on both sides. It is entirely unlike
what a Puritan would have written: it is too moderate, too tolerant, too
neutral, though like most essays of conciliation it is open to the
rejoinder from both sides--certainly from the Puritan--that it begs the
question by assuming