Bacon’s biographers have strained every effort in explaining and excusing his action in the ensuing trials. Not only have they failed to exculpate him, but themselves must realise the futility of their most ingenious endeavours to clear his character of this foul blot. Abbott, his impartial biographer, says: “We may acquit him of everything but a cold-blooded indifference to his friend’s interest and a supreme desire to pose (even at a friend’s cost) as a loyal and much-persecuted servant of the Queen.” But, truly, the most that can be said in extenuation of his behaviour, is little indeed, when the friend is a man to whom he had written, “I do think myself more beholding to you than to any man.”
What, however, are the facts? When the first proceedings were taken against Essex in the Star Chamber, Bacon absented himself from the Court, his excuse to the Queen being, he said, “Some indisposition of body.” His actual letter to Elizabeth explains that his absence was compelled by threats of violence on the part of the Earl’s followers, whom he openly charges with a purpose to take the Queen’s life. “My life has been threatened, and my name libelled. But these are the practices of those … that would put out all your Majesty’s lights, and fall on reckoning how many years you have reigned.” Abbott considers that we need not accuse Bacon of deliberately intending by these words to poison the Queen’s mind against his former friend, while Professor Gardiner adduces this imputation as a proof that Bacon was liable to “occasional ill-temper.” Contemporary judgment did not so interpret the wording of the excuse. The treacherous nature of the insinuation provoked a feeling of amazement and anger. That his brother Anthony believed Bacon to be capable of so great vileness is evident, and even Lord Cecil, the Earl’s greatest enemy, wrote to Francis begging him to be, as he himself was, “merely passive, and not active,” in insuring the fallen Favourite’s utter ruin.
In the face of these warnings and remonstrances, Bacon wrote to the Queen expressing his desire to serve her in the second stage of the proceedings against Essex. He asked that an important rôle might be assigned to him, but although he was only entrusted with a subsidiary part, he performed his task so adroitly as to earn the deep resentment of the friends of Essex. Within a fortnight of the Earl’s liberation Bacon again offered his services to Essex, who accepted them!
What followed? Bacon devised a plan to secure the Earl’s re-instatement in the Royal favour. The artifice employed was to bring before the notice of Elizabeth, a correspondence – ostensibly between Essex and his brother Anthony – exhibiting the loyalty and love of the former for the Queen. The letters were composed by Bacon, and while they are interesting as specimens of the author’s literary power, and are illustrative of his “chameleonlike instinct of adapting his style to his atmosphere,” they were calculated, by the interpolation of artful passages, to advance the interests of Bacon, rather than those of Essex, with the Queen. It is significant also that the demeanour which Bacon in these letters caused the Earl to assume, he used against him when Essex was subsequently arraigned for treason. Unless we are prepared to accept the statements of Bacon in this connection, it is impossible to view his participation in this second trial without a feeling of the deepest abhorrence. Bacon had no right to be in Court at all. As one of the “learned counsel,” his presence was not required, but in the capacity of “friend of the accused,” his evidence could not fail to be greatly damaging to the Earl’s case. He proffered his evidence, not only with readiness, but with a ferocious efficacy. We have no evidence beyond Bacon’s own word – the word of a man who was striving to put the best complexion on a foul act of treachery – that he deprecated the task. “Skilfully confusing together” the original proposal, and the abortive execution of Essex’s outbreak, he insisted that the rising, which in truth was a sudden after-thought, was the result of three months’ deliberation, and he concentrated all his efforts on proving that Essex was “not only a traitor, but a hypocritical traitor.” No other piece of evidence adduced at the trial had greater weight in procuring the verdict against the Earl. Bacon subsequently pleaded in extenuation of his behaviour that he was acting under pressure from the Crown, but we have the knowledge that on the first occasion he had offered his services, and we can only conclude that at the price of sacrificing the friend who had loaded him with kindnesses, he had determined to make this trial a stepping-stone to Royal favour. To serve this end, friendship, honour, obligation were brushed aside; for, as Bacon has said in one of his essays, the man who wishes to succeed “must know all the conditions of the serpent.” The price Bacon received for the blood of Essex was £1,200, or £6,000 in our currency. “The Queen,” he wrote to a friendly creditor, “hath done somewhat for me, though not in the perfection I hoped.” Bacon had, it is fair to infer from this remark, betrayed his friend; had, in fact, delivered him to the headsman for the hope of pecuniary reward.
In what degree Bacon was responsible for the drawing up of a Declaration of the Treasons of Essex, which Lord Clarendon described as a “pestilent libel,” is impossible to decide. He tells us that his task was little more than that of an amanuensis to the Council and the Queen, but this excuse fails him in the case of his Apology, put forth as a vindication of the author in the estimation of the nobles, from the charge of having been false to the Earl of Essex. The paper is admittedly full of inaccuracies, conveying to us the picture, “not of his actual conduct, but of what he felt his conduct ought to have been.” Dr. Abbott dismisses this literary and historical effort as interesting only as a “psychological history of the manifold and labyrinthine self-deception to which great men have been subjected.”
On the accession of James I., Bacon again threw himself into the political arena, determined to neglect no chance of ingratiating himself with the new Sovereign. He poured forth letters to any and everybody who had the power to forward his cause. He dwelt in these epistles upon the services of his brother Anthony, who had carried on secret and intimate negotiations with Scotland. Sir Thomas Challoner, the confirmed friend of Essex, received a letter from him; he appealed to the Earl of Northumberland; and became the “humble and much devoted” servant of Lord Southampton, on the eve of that nobleman’s release from the Tower (where Bacon had helped to place him as an accomplice of Essex). To each he turned with the same request that they would bury the axe, and “further his Majesty’s good conceit and inclination towards me.”
At this time, Bacon, desperately apprehensive of rebuff, was anxious to conciliate all parties, and to secure friends at Court. He was willing, nay, eager, to be Greek, Roman, or Hebrew, in order to attain his object – even he would avow a gift of poesy to make his calling and election sure. Writing to Sir John Davies, the poet, Bacon, the politician and philosopher, who did not publish two lines of rhyme until twenty-one years later, desired him to “be good to concealed poets.” Reading this statement in connection with the other epistles he indicted at the same crisis, we realise how little dependence can be placed upon the implied confession that he had written anonymous poetry. His letters to Southampton, to Michael Hickes (Cecil’s confidential man), to David Foules and Sir Thomas Challoner, and to the King himself, all betray the same feverish desire to be all things to all men. He assured Hickes that Lord Cecil is “the person in the State” whom he “loves most,” and at the same moment he placed his whole services at the disposal of Cecil’s rival, the Earl of Northumberland! When the star of Northumberland began to pale, Bacon importuned Cecil to procure him a knighthood to gratify the ambition