Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

ALEXANDRA GAJDA

This episode in Bacon’s authorial career is, frankly, odd. Bacon had produced printed tracts to this point: works commissioned by the crown against alleged traitors to the Elizabethan state and, since the accession of James I, his own treatises on church government and the union of Britain. 28 But these had been anonymous productions, and only the first volume of Bacon’s Essayes , his Montaigne-lite ruminations on political life, had been printed to date under his own name. 29 It seems plausible, then, that despite Bacon’s protestations to the contrary, his desire to repair his public image, his concern for ‘common fame’, was the motivation for launching this autobiographical writing in print. 30 Bacon’s Apologie, however, is more than a mere defence of his treatment of Essex. Throughout the short tract Bacon defines a theory of statecraft which was deliberately antithetical to many of the political ideas enshrined in his former patron’s treatise, as he critiques Essex’s self-aggrandising political practices by defining service to the crown as the most pressing ethical requirement of any subject. 31 These apologia , though generic twins, make a diametrically different case about how subjects should intervene in public life. Before reaching a deeper understanding of the arguments of both of these tracts, it is necessary to examine the ‘apology’ as a literary form. ‘ Apologia ’ ( apologia ) was a recognised genre within classical rhetoric, particularly associated with Greek statesmen and philosophers - a legal speech or writing in defence of a subject, particularly against an attack on an individual. 32 Students of the genre note that the apologia has a distinct framework: a defence of the immediate charge against the individual/entity under attack; a historical account of the origins of this attack; an exposition of the ethos of the defendant in a biographical narration; and a moment of ‘transcendence’, whence the ‘defence’ of the individual takes on a much wider public or philosophical significance. This framework also neatly corresponds to the 28 As well as the Declaration of the Practices and Treasons , Bacon wrote the official account of a catholic plot to kill Elizabeth and Essex known as the ‘Squire conspiracy’: it was anonymously published as A Letter Written Out of England to an English Gentleman Remaining at Padua Containing a True Report of a Strange Conspiracie, Contriued between Edward Squire … and Richard Walpoole a Iesuite (1599). 29 They were published with Religious Meditations and Places of Perswasion and Disswasion : further editions of this first book of essays were printed in 1579, 1598, 1606, and 1612. 30 Bacon, Apologie , sig. A3v. 31 Wootton, ‘Francis Bacon: Your Flexible Friend’. 32 Karl Enenkel, ‘Apologia’ in Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf ed., Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction (Berlin and Boston, 2019), pp. 211-215; Sharon D. Downey, ‘The Evolution of the Rhetorical Genre of Apologia’, Western Journal of Communication , 57 (1993), pp. 42-64.

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