Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

ALEXANDRA GAJDA

Against critics who alleged that he wished to ‘keepe the state of England in continuall warr’, Essex insisted that he was no hawk by nature, rather a soldier because of the necessity of the age. In his youth (like the young Agricola) he had been famed for ‘contemplative retiredness’ and ‘bookishness’ as his friend ‘honest maister Sauill’ (Essex’s close acquaintance, renowned mathematician and translator of Tacitus) could attest. His service in Portugal, Northern France, and on the seas during the famous raid on Cadiz were performed for the ‘honour of my Soueraigne, the securitie of my countrey, the contentment of our confederates’. 19 The earl conflated his own enemies, who now condemned him as a bloodthirsty warrior, as generally ‘injurious … to the men of warre that fight for them’ and as enemies of the state. 20 The cognates of the term ‘self’ were rare in the sixteenth century: in a short tract of just 34 pages Essex uses the word ‘myself’ 14 times. Essex’s treatise, then, made an unparalleled public and personal intervention in the matter of war and peace, the most momentous of arcana imperii or prerogative concern of the prince, through an account of his own public service to the state. The generic similarity of Bacon’s Apologie to that of his former patron must have been a stylistic choice. Obviously it recalled the earl’s Apologie which, as Bacon acknowledged, was ‘in many mens hands’. 21 Bacon’s Apologie , like Essex’s, was also written in epistolary form to Charles Blount, 8th Baron Mountjoy and earl of Devonshire, whose lover was Essex’s sister Penelope, Lady Rich, and who had been one of the earl’s closest confidants at the end of his life. Blount was in high favour with the new king, having prevailed where Essex had failed in suppressing Tyrone’s rebellion: Bacon hailed him as an ‘honorable friend … excellently grounded in the true rules and habits of duties and moralities’. 22 Angus Vine has shown that one of the two surviving English manuscripts of Bacon’s Apologie , Bodleian Rawl. MS D. 672, fos. 28r-43v, was a personalised version produced specifically for Mountjoy, with some slight (insignificant) textual differences to the printed texts. 23

19 Essex, Apologie , sig. Ar-Cr. 20 Essex, Apologie , sig. D2v. 21 Bacon, Apologie , sig. B3v. 22 Bacon, Apologie , sig. A2r. 23 Angus Vine, ‘A New Version of Bacon’s Apologie’: Ms Rawl. D. 672, The Bodleian Library Record, 20: 1-2 (2007), pp. 118-137.

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