ELIZABETH AND ESSEX: a tragic history (4 page)

The spring of youth was almost over; in those days, at the age of twenty-five, most men had reached a full maturity. Essex kept something of his boyishness to the end, but he could not escape the rigours of time, and now a new scene - a scene of peril and gravity appropriate to manhood - was opening before him.

The circumstances of a single family - it has happened more than once in English history - dominated the situation. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who had filled, since the beginning of the reign, the position of Prime Minister, was over seventy; he could not last much longer; who would succeed him? He himself hoped that his younger son, Robert, might step into his place. He had brought him up with that end in view. The sickly, dwarfed boy had been carefully taught by tutors, had been sent travelling on the Continent, had been put into the House of Commons, had been initiated in diplomacy, and gently, persistently, at every favourable moment, had been brought before the notice of the Queen. Elizabeth's sharp eye, uninfluenced by birth or position, perceived that the little hunchback possessed a great ability. When Walsingham died, in 1590, she handed over to Sir Robert Cecil the duties of his office; and the young man of twenty-seven became in fact, though not in name, her principal secretary. The title and emoluments might follow later - she could not quite make up her mind. Burghley was satisfied; his efforts had succeeded; his son's foot was planted firmly in the path of power.

But Lady Burghley had a sister, who had two sons - Anthony and Francis Bacon. A few years older than their cousin Robert, they were, like him, delicate, talented, and ambitious. They had started life with high hopes: their father had been Lord Keeper - the head of the legal profession; and their uncle was, under the Queen, the most important person in England. But their father died, leaving them no more than the small inheritance of younger sons; and their uncle, all-powerful as he was, seemed to ignore the claims of their deserts and their relationship. Lord Burghley, it appeared, would do nothing for his nephews. Why was this? To Anthony and Francis the explanation was plain: they were being sacrificed to the career of Robert; the old man was jealous of them - afraid of them; their capacities were suppressed in order that Robert should have no competitors. Nobody can tell how far this was the case. Burghley, no doubt, was selfish and wily; but perhaps his influence was not always as great as it seemed; and perhaps, also, he genuinely mistrusted the singular characters of his nephews. However that may be, a profound estrangement followed. The outward forms of respect and affection were maintained; but the bitter disappointment of the Bacons was converted into a bitter animosity, while the Cecils grew more suspicious and hostile every day. At last the Bacons decided to abandon their allegiance to an uncle who was worse than useless, and to throw in their lot with some other leader, who would appreciate them as they deserved. They looked round, and Essex was their obvious choice. The Earl was young, active, impressionable; his splendid personal position seemed to be there, ready to hand, waiting to be transformed into something more glorious still - a supreme political predominance. They had the will and the wit to do it. Their uncle was dropping into dotage, their cousin's cautious brain was no match for their combined intelligence. They would show the father and the son, who had thought to shuffle them into obscurity, that it is possible to be too grasping in this world and that it is sometimes very far from wise to quarrel with one's poor relations.

So Anthony at any rate thought - a gouty young invalid, splenetic and uncompromising; but the imaginations of Francis were more complicated. In that astonishing mind there were concealed depths and deceptive shallows, curiously intermingled and puzzling in the extreme to the inquisitive observer. Francis Bacon has been described more than once with the crude vigour of antithesis; but in truth such methods are singularly inappropriate to his most unusual case. It was not by the juxtaposition of a few opposites, but by the infiltration of a multitude of highly varied elements, that his mental composition was made up. He was no striped frieze; he was shot silk. The detachment of speculation, the intensity of personal pride, the uneasiness of nervous sensibility, the urgency of ambition, the opulence of superb taste - these qualities, blending, twisting, flashing together, gave to his secret spirit the subtle and glittering superficies of a serpent. A serpent, indeed, might well have been his chosen emblem - the wise, sinuous, dangerous creature, offspring of mystery and the beautiful earth. The music sounds, and the great snake rises, and spreads its hood, and leans and hearkens, swaying in ecstasy; and even so the sage Lord Chancellor, in the midst of some great sentence, some high intellectual confection, seems to hold his breath in a rich beatitude, fascinated by the deliciousness of sheer style. A true child of the Renaissance, his multiplicity was not merely that of mental accomplishment, but of life itself. His mind might move with joy among altitudes and theories, but the variegated savour of temporal existence was no less dear to him - the splendours of high living - the intricacies of court intrigue - the exquisiteness of pages - the lights reflected from small pieces of coloured glass. Like all the greatest spirits of the age, he was instinctively and profoundly an artist. It was this aesthetic quality which on the one hand inspired the grandeur of his philosophical conceptions and on the other made him one of the supreme masters of the written word. Yet his artistry was of a very special kind; he was neither a man of science nor a poet. The beauty of mathematics was closed to him, and all the vital scientific discoveries of the time escaped his notice. In literature, in spite of the colour and richness of his style, his genius was essentially a prose one. Intellect, not feeling, was the material out of which his gorgeous and pregnant sentences were made. Intellect! It was the common factor in all the variations of his spirit; it was the backbone of the wonderful snake.

Life in this world is full of pitfalls: it is dangerous to be foolish, and it is also dangerous to be intelligent; dangerous to others, and, no less, to oneself. "Il est bon, plus souvent qu'on ne pense," said the wise and virtuous Malesherbes, "de savoir ne pas avoir de l'esprit." But that was one of the branches of knowledge that the author of the Advancement of Learning ignored. It was impossible for Francis Bacon to imagine that any good could ever come of being simple-minded. His intellect swayed him too completely. He was fascinated by it, he could not resist it, he must follow wherever it led. Through thought, through action, on he went - an incredibly clever man. Through action even? Yes, for though the medley of human circumstance is violent and confused, assuredly one can find one's way through it to some purpose if only one uses one's wits. So thought the cunning artist; and smiling he sought to shape, with his subtle razor-blade, the crude vague blocks of passion and fact. But razors may be fatal in such contingencies; one's hand may slip; one may cut one's own throat.

The miserable end - it needs must colour our vision of the character and the life. But the end was implicit in the beginning - a necessary consequence of qualities that were innate. The same cause which made Bacon write perfect prose brought about his worldly and his spiritual ruin. It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet. His imagination, with all its magnificence, was insufficient: it could not see into the heart of things. And among the rest his own heart was hidden from him. His psychological acuteness, fatally external, never revealed to him the nature of his own desires. He never dreamt how intensely human he was. And so his tragedy was bitterly ironical, and a deep pathos invests his story. One wishes to turn away one's gaze from the unconscious traitor, the lofty-minded sycophant, the exquisite intelligence entrapped and strangled in the web of its own weaving. "Although our persons live in the view of heaven, yet our spirits are included in the caves of our own complexions and customs, which minister unto us infinite errors and vain opinions." So he wrote; and so, perhaps, at last, he actually realised - an old man, disgraced, shattered, alone, on Highgate hill, stuffing a dead fowl with snow.

But all this was still far distant in the busy years of the early nineties, so rich with excitements and possibilities. The issues were simplified by the disgrace and imprisonment of Raleigh, whose amorous intrigue with Elizabeth Throgmorton, one of the maids of honour, had infuriated the Queen. The field was cleared for the two opposing factions: the new party of Essex and his followers - aggressive and adventurous - and the old party of the Cecils, entrenched in the strongholds of ancient power. This was the essence of the political situation till the close of the century; but it was complicated and confused both by compromises and by bitternesses, which were peculiar to the time. The party system was still undreamt-of; and the hostile forces which would be grouped today as Government and Opposition, then found themselves side by side in a common struggle to control the executive. When, early in 1593, Essex was sworn of the Privy Council, he became the colleague of his rivals. It was for the Queen to choose her counsellors. She would listen to one and then to another; she would shift, according to her adviser, from one policy to its direct contrary; it was a system of government after her own heart. Thus it was that she could enjoy to the full the delicious sense of ruling - could decide, with the plenitude of power, between momentous eventualities - and, by that very means, could contrive to keep up an endless balance and a marvellous marking of time. Her servants, struggling with each other for influence, remained her servants still. Their profound hostility could not divert them from their duty of working together for the Queen. There was no such thing as going temporarily out of office; one was either in office or one was nothing at all. To fail might mean death; but, until that came, the dangerous enemy whose success was one's annihilation, met one every day in the close companionship of the council table and the narrow inner circle of the court.

Very swiftly Essex, with the Bacons at his back, grew to be something more than a favourite and emerged as a minister and a statesman. The young man was taking himself seriously at last. He was never absent from the Council; and when the House of Lords was in session, he was to be seen in his place as soon as the business of the day began - at seven o'clock in the morning. But his principal activities were carried on elsewhere - in the panelled gallery and the tapestried inner chambers of Essex House - the great Gothic family residence which overlooked the river from the Strand. There it was that Anthony Bacon, his foot swathed in hot flannels, plied his indefatigable pen. There it was that a great design was planned and carried into execution. The Cecils were to be beaten on their own chosen ground. The control of foreign affairs - where Burghley had ruled supreme for more than a generation - was to be taken from them; their information was to be proved inaccurate, and the policy that was based on it confuted and reversed. Anthony had no doubt that this could be done. He had travelled for years on the continent; he had friends everywhere; he had studied the conditions of foreign states, the intricacies of foreign diplomacy, with all the energy of his acute and restless mind. If his knowledge and intelligence were supported by the position and the wealth of Essex, the combination would prove irresistible. And Essex did not hesitate; he threw himself into the scheme with all his enthusiasm. A vast correspondence began. Emissaries were sent out, at the Earl's expense, all over Europe, and letters poured in, from Scotland, France, Holland, Italy, Spain, Bohemia, with elaborate daily reports of the sayings of princes, the movements of armies, and the whole complex development of international intrigue. Anthony Bacon sat at the centre, receiving, digesting, and exchanging news. The work grew and grew, and before long, such was the multiplicity of business, he had four young secretaries to help him, among whom were the ingenious Henry Wotton and the cynical Henry Cuffe. The Queen soon perceived that Essex knew what he was talking about, when there was a discussion on foreign affairs. She read his memoranda, she listened to his recommendations; and the Cecils found, more than once, that their carefully collected intelligence was ignored. Eventually a strange situation arose, characteristic of that double-faced age. Essex almost attained the position of an alternative Foreign Secretary. Various ambassadors - Thomas Bodley was one - came under his influence, and, while corresponding officially with Burghley, sent at the same time parallel and more confidential communications to Anthony Bacon. If the gain to the public service was doubtful, the gain to Essex was clear; and the Cecils, when they got wind of what was happening, began to realise that they must reckon seriously with the house in the Strand.

Francis Bacon's connection with Essex was not quite so close as his brother's. A barrister and a Member of Parliament, he had a career of his own; and he occupied his leisure with literary exercises and philosophical speculations. Yet he was in intimate contact with Essex House. The Earl was his patron, whom he held himself ready to assist in every way, whenever his help was needed - with advice, or the drafting of state papers, or the composition of some elaborate symbolic compliment, some long-drawn-out Elizabethan charade, for the entertainment of the Queen. Essex, seven years his junior, had been, from the first moment of their meeting, fascinated by the intellectual splendour of the elder man. His enthusiastic nature leapt out to welcome that scintillating wisdom and that profound wit. He saw that he was in the presence of greatness. He vowed that this astonishing being, who was devoting himself so generously to his service, should have a noble reward. The Attorney-Generalship fell vacant, and Essex immediately declared that Francis Bacon must have the post. He was young and had not yet risen far in his profession - but what of that? He deserved something even greater; the Queen might appoint whom she would, and if Essex had any influence, the right man, for once, should be given preferment.