Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

Bacon’s Apologie also frames its arguments through the potted biography of his political career that Spedding found so compelling. Bacon describes his service for Essex as an intelligence gatherer from the early 1590s, and he details the various episodes in the earl’s life when he delivered his patron brilliant advice on military and domestic policy. 24 But while Essex’s Apologie had the wider purpose of intervening in the peace negotiations, Bacon appears to have written his tract for more ostensibly personal purposes - to defend himself from the slur that he had been a treacherous friend to his former patron, and to glamourise his own credentials as a sagacious counsellor. At the behest of the crown, Bacon had acted as counsel for the prosecution at Essex’s treason trial and had written the anonymous early printed account of Essex’s rebellion, A Declaration of the Practices & Treasons Attempted and Committed by Robert Late Earle of Essex and his Complices (1601), the official narrative of why Essex, the popular military hero, had come to be executed as a traitor. At James’s accession Essex’s reputation had been immediately rehabilitated: James had pardoned the earl’s friends the earl of Southampton and Sir Henry Neville and released them from the Tower, while the printing of ballads and poems mourning the earl’s passing in the early months of the new reign implied that Bacon’s ‘official’ account of Essex’s treachery had not convinced the wider public of the earl’s guilt. In his dedicatory epistle to Mountjoy, Bacon declares his intention to defend his personal honour from the ‘wrong which I sustaine in common speech’. 25 The tract’s scribal circulation seems to have been limited. Vine has discovered two manuscript copies of this work in English and two in French. 26 But the tract was printed twice, with Bacon’s endorsement: it was entered in the Stationers’ Register under Bacon’s own name, in 1604 and 1605, for the printers Felix Norton and Matthew Lownes, and it was printed six times overall in the seventeenth century. 27

24 The best reading of Bacon’s Apologie in print is David Wotton, ‘Francis Bacon: Your Flexible Friend’ in John Elliott and Laurence Brockliss (eds.), The World of the Favourite (Yale, 1999), pp. 184-204. 25 Bacon, Apologie, sig. A2r. 26 Richard Serjeantson, ‘The Division of a Paper Kingdom: the Tragic Afterlives of Francis Bacon’s Manuscripts’ in eds. Vera Keller et al ., Archival Afterlives (Brill, 2018), pp. 28-71. 27 Arber, Transcript , iii , p. 261. Two further versions were published in 1605, and there were more printings in 1642, 1651, 1663, 1671: Vine, ‘A New Version’, pp.122-3.

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