Let us “call him up” as Milton would have called him up,
The story owho left untold
The story of Cambuscan bold.
Without Dr. Dee’s stone, or Simon Forman’s cap, we have him photographed before us. We see him lolling, in sic sedebat fashion, in what we should now call a cumbrous and un-Long-Acre-like coach, with four stout, punchy, corn-and-grass-fed Flemish mares, a full-bottomed beans-and-bacon Jehu on the box, flanked by a hammer-cloth richly wrought with the Bacon crest—a boar—and his servants in the Gorhambury livery, each wearing a silver boar on his left arm. Thus travelled in woolsack ease—his seals and his mace before him—the great Lord Chancellor of Human Nature, Queen Elizabeth’s Attorney-General, King James’s Lord High Chancellor, “the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind” of the undying satire of Alexander Pope. He, the great poet of modern philosophy, makes his customary journey in this wise. He has twenty-two miles of road to travel before he reaches his fish-ponds and oaks, or drinks his favourite ales in the manor-house of his own building, on what were the lands of Abbot de Gorham—a mitred abbot, let us bear in mind, and one of three entitled to sit so mitred in the Parliament of England.
My lord’s horses are better than the road, for each takes kindly to his collar, and paws and curvets as if proud to carry the great dignitary of England’s law over or through ruts of long standing and ruts but half repaired. The well-fed Jehu laughs with his fellow servants at the Horns at Highgate, dedicated to cuckolds, has his tankard of ale at my Lord Arundel’s Arms, and, while wiping his lips, somewhat sarcastically contrasts the deep draught he has taken with the kilderkin he has left at Gray’s Inn, and the kilderkin he is to taste at Gorhambury. His master, the great Bacon, is differently employed.
One memorable winter—and England’s philosopher will be at work, and at Highgate, with the cold snow and living flesh and blood, putting theory to the test of truth. He will rue the delay: England is to lose one of her greatest men by this experiment, for the snow sinks to and chills the blood of six-and-sixty years. This is to be Francis Bacon’s last practical experiment—Francis Bacon’s last journey from Gray’s Inn to Gorhambury, or from Gorhambury to Gray’s Inn:
The glories of our birth and state
Are shadows, not substantial things:
There is no armour against fate,
Death lays his icy hand on Kings.
Who does not wish for Bacon to have foreseen that the writer of these noble lines[1] was then an ill-paid tutor, and unknown in his little borough of St. Alban?
At other times his thoughts will be indifferently with his experiments, or with the Howards, Earls of Arundel, at Barnet, or at London-Colney with the red and white roses of York and Lancaster. The woods of North Mimms remind him of Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More, of the scaffold and the axe; the trees of Tittenhanger, of Lord Chancellor Wolsey and the dying words of the great cardinal.
The whip, the spur, and the cloak, those attendant Jehus of the road, bring him at length in sight of his beloved abbey and of his own woods. He sees before him the rough, huge, and square-built tower of the mitred abbey of St. Alban’s; the clock-tower, with its fabled and poetic origin; the ruins of the suppressed nunnery of Sopwell (now at the distance marked by nine tall poplars), with its fish-ponds, not, as now, dried up, but full of carp and tench, fit food for fasting nuns on Fridays and in Lent. Here the historian of Henry VII. could not fail to remember that Anna Boleyn, the mother of England’s Elizabeth, and his own royal mistress, was married to King Henry VIII.; that here, as a nun, lived Lady Juliana Berners, whose taste and skill gave us a volume so much coveted by collectors, that “Boke of St. Albans” on hunting and hawking, on hounds and scents, on tarsels and lures, which gold cannot buy, so scarce has it become, that it is now only to be seen in a few of our noblest libraries.
He is now at home, in his own manor, in a house of his own design, and among his own books. He can walk under the shadow of his own oaks, and gain health anew, in his own broad acres. Suitors in Chancery may murmur at delays—his thoughts are not now in law, or of law. Here he will receive Ben Jonson on his foot-pilgrimage towards Scotland, and, in parting, tell Ben pleasantly (Jacobuses not forgotten), that he did not care to see poetry go on any other feet than dactyls and spondees. Here he can walk and talk with Master Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, who then, young as he was, was most skilled in catching the thoughts that breathe and words that burn—falling at every second step from a head so wise and lips so ready. Here, playing with the strings of his band all the while (as was his wont), he can fathom the instability of human greatness, and think little, and care less, for what posterity may say about him.
He who visits St. Alban’s to see Lord Bacon, as it were, in the flesh, must bring a well-filled mind with him. Let us see, then, how far a residence in the place, and no lack of reading or diligence will accomplish in furnishing others with what we know ourselves touching the man Bacon, when at home. Of his habits of life, his biographers, in the penury of their knowledge, have told literally nothing. What there is remaining that he must have seen and saw are these. First and foremost, the mute unchanging glory of the eternal hills; then the site and ruins of Roman Verulam, rich in Roman tiles and Roman coins. Then his own house, now a ruin, not from the hands of Time, but from the hands of a Grimston; one who bore the title of England’s great Lord Chancellor, by another creation and from another king; one whose descendants—the Grimstons, Earls of Verulam—sold the “materials” of Bacon’s Gorhambury and live on a different site in the larger Gorhambury House of the reign of George III., which Bacon, of course, never saw, and would have cared so little to have seen.
- ↑ Shirley, the dramatist.
