Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

Spain in 1598 for reasons broadly set out in the earl’s Apologie . When Essex chose, however, to endorse this tract with his own name, and to advance his political agenda with biographical materials, he left no opportunity to distance himself from the authorship of his treatise when it circulated vigorously in manuscript, or appeared in print. In his own Apologie, Bacon defends his career in a rather different manner. As did Essex and Orange, Bacon commences his ‘defence’ of his reputation against unnamed detractors; in a tract he deliberately ushered into print, Bacon insists that ‘vulgar’ reputation means nothing to him and that he only cares about the good opinion of virtuous superiors such as Mountjoy and his sovereign. 39 The theme of the tract is not the fate of liberty and of Christendom, but the divided dilemmas of an individual counsellor, advising not only the monarch but the monarch’s greatest statesmen ( quis consiliarios monet ?). Like Essex, Bacon advances a potted biography of his education and public service, to the queen and as Essex’s advisor, and expounds at length his counsel to both. His pen portrait of Elizabeth is critical, more so than that of Essex. He claims to have advised the earl that ‘the onely course to be held with the Queene, was by obsequiousnesse and obseruance’ – in other parlance flattery. 40 The queen developed ‘jealousie’ of Essex’s public appeal, and took the wrong decisions in her treatment of him in 1600, allowing the earl to be subjected to a disciplinary hearing at York House against Bacon’s own advice. 41 He realised that the age of the queen had blunted her abilities as she neared the end of her life: ‘I saw plainely the Queene must either liue or die; if she liued, then the times would be as in the declination of an old Prince; if she died, the times would be as in the beginning of a new’. 42 On the other hand, the earl, Bacon explains, was a man of extraordinary ability and virtues, whom he had anticipated would be ‘the fittest instrument to do good to the State’, and whose greatness could have been realised if only he had continued to listen to his wisest counsellor, Francis Bacon himself: ‘my Lord, howsoever his eare was open, yet his heart and resolution was shut against that advice, whereby his ruine might have bin prevented’. 43

39 Bacon, Apologie, sig. A2r. 40 Bacon, Apologie , sig. Br. 41 Bacon, Apologie , sig. B2r, [sig. C5v-C6r]. 42 Bacon, Apologie , sig. B2v-B3r. 43 Bacon, Apologie , [sig. A6v]; [B5r].

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