Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

Bacon argues, should be evaluated on a scale depending on the beholder, with the monarch’s estimation superseding the opinion of any other individual. Various of these themes – of honour and reputation; of negotiation; of the regulation of the degrees of friendship – flesh out or exemplify the arguments advanced in Bacon’s first book of Essayes . 46 Bacon’s Apologie is a form of politic and didactic history of the very recent past, with its author in the starring role. Despite the extensive use of these apologia in narrative histories of the biographies of Essex and of Bacon, these tracts deserve to be analysed as complicated literary confections rather than mere factual accounts of their authors’ lives. Under Elizabeth, there blossomed a species of tracts claiming to ‘reveal’ the intimate workings of the court, the psychological motivations of statesmen, the religious and political ends of those claiming to act in the interests of the commonwealth. These were conducted in the realm of the fictitious ‘libel’ - the imagined ‘letter’, the anonymous attack or defence of public policy. 47 In other words, imaginative accounts of the court and its politics had been conducted largely in print between catholic detractors and the protestant defenders of the status quo. The writers of such tracts – Robert Parsons, Richard Verstegan, Thomas Norton, even Bacon himself – had been deliberately obfuscatory about their authorship. But when statesmen and aspiring statesmen (that is Essex and Bacon) adopted a strenuous ‘autobiographical’ voice to advance their own policies and political credentials, a turning point had been reached. The materials of ‘public’ discourse were no longer enshrined in a binary of protestant v/s catholic polemic whose ‘libels’ and ‘secret histories’ of Elizabethan church and court were fantastical inventions, often written by individuals in exile, or on the margins of public life. Instead, the affairs of council, and of the courts of Christendom, were brought were to a wider, ill-defined public for analysis and reflection by self proclaimed insiders at the heart of the protestant regime.

46 The 1597 edition includes essays on ‘Of Honour and Reputation’; ‘Of Negotiating’; ‘Of Faction’. 47 Lake, Bad Queen Bess .

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