Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

ALEXANDRA GAJDA

T HE ‘APOLOGY’ is a modish theme in modern political life. Should governments, institutions, scholars, even private individuals apologise for those actions of our ancestors that we find morally reprehensible today? The ‘apology’ was also a striking - if under-studied - genre in early modern political exchange. Two of the most famous early modern English apologia were enmeshed: Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex’s Apologie against those which most falsely and maliciously taxe him to be the only hinderer of the peace and quiet of his country (1601, 1603) and a tract by Essex’s erstwhile client and advisor, Francis Bacon, about his relationship with the earl, His Apologie in certaine imputations concerning the late earle of Essex (1604). 1 These are famous tracts, indispensable to the political histories of both men. 2 Indeed, James Spedding, Bacon’s magisterial editor, observed that Bacon’s Apologie was the writing ‘by which I was first attracted long ago to the study of Bacon’s personal character and history’. 3 Analysed together these apologia reveal more than biographical information about their authors: they enshrine new insights into the discursive forms of public politics at the turn of the seventeenth century. There are other early modern English tracts that style themselves as apologia, but as far as I am aware, Essex’s and Bacon’s are the first such tracts to present their political narrative within an autobiographical framework. 4 This essay explores implications of the decision of Essex and of Bacon to personalise these political interventions for our understanding of English political culture at the turn of the seventeenth century. The history of the publication of both tracts, in manuscript and in print, is unusually complex. Essex’s Apologie was written in the first months of 1598, when England, at war with Spain since 1585, had been invited to join in peace talks taking place at Vervins between France and Spain, a peace to which the earl was vehemently ideologically opposed. 5 Framed as a letter to ‘Maister Anthony Bacon’, 1 Bacon’s Apologie was also printed in James Spedding ed., The Works of Francis Bacon. Volume 10. The Letters and Life, 3 (1868), pp. 136-62. 2 R. Malcolm Smuts, Political Culture, the State and the Problem of Religious War in Britain and Ireland, 1578-1625 (Oxford, 2023), ch. 7. Alexandra Gajda ‘Debating War and Peace in Late Elizabethan England’, The Historical Journal 52:4 (2009), 851-78; Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘The Smiling Crocodile: the Earl of Essex and Late-Elizabethan ‘Popularity’’ in Peter Lake and Steven C. A. Pincus eds., The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007), pp. 95-111. 3 Spedding, Works of Francis Bacon , 10, p. 136. 4 The earliest printed apologia were confessional tracts produced during the early Reformation: The Apologye of Syr Thomas More Knyght (1533), More’s defence of his writings about Tyndale and Barnes; The Apology of Iohan Bale Agaynst a Ranke Papyst … (1550). 5 This discussion draws primarily on Hugh Gazzard, ‘‘Idle Papers’: An Apology of the Earl of Essex’ in Annaliese Connolly and Lisa Hopkins eds., Essex: The Cultural Impact of an Elizabethan Courtier ( Manchester, 2013), pp. 179-200. Also see Alexandra Gajda, The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (Oxford, 2012), pp. 97-105.

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