LADY ANN BACON'S ANGER. 59 motherly love have bounds. So presently Captain Allen, with a good deal of circumlocution, being somewhat afraid of the lady's stately manner-so little like that of the court ladies he is acquainted with,-shifting uneasily in his seat, begins: "Mr. Anthony is still ill and unable to leave for England, but purposes immediately on his recovery to return. He desires his best love to his mother, and all dutiful regards. But the fact is"-and here there comes a trying pause-"Lawson's confinement is impairing Mr. Anthony's health." This is a masterstroke of the captain's, who thinks he has the awful lady with the broad brow and pinched mouth at a disadvantage. At last the murder is out, and the lady breaks forth. She expresses the utmost resentment at her son's absence; "why should he stay abroad thus? what has she done that he hides himself from her?-it is unfilial. Away, and not even to close his poor father's eyes! Away from her all these years, and she pining in secret! He is a traitor to God and his country. He has undone me, and sought my death:" in her excitement, all her love and passion welling up, the pent-up grief of years, the yearnings of the fond mother. "But though he seeks to kill me, and is doing this merely to kill me, he will not gain but one hundred pounds. I will take care he shall benefit nothing." She will procure the Queen's letter to force him back; and when he comes back she will have him committed to prison with his man, Lawson, to bear him company. She declared she could. not bear to hear of him: "he is hated of all the chiefest in France, and cursed of God in all his actions," and Lawson is at the bottom of it all. It is Lawson's doings, and she 60 SIR FRANCIS DRAKE'S RETURN. is determined he shall never return to his master. She would not have cared if he had gone to the wars, and fought under the King of Navarre for the Protestant cause there would have been glory in that; but to idle like a coward at Montauban, that was too bad. Besides, "she has spent all her money and her jewels, and had borrowed the last money she had obtained for him of no less than seven different persons." Captain Allen finds Mr. Francis Bacon "very tractable," and anxious to effect Lawson's release, and to do as his brother desires; but fear of his mother's displeasure prevents him moving actively in the matter. Here, after the lapse of nearly three hundred years, comes again the touch of nature, amid all the diplomatic letters and worldly and wary correspondence, from which meaning has hardly to be gleaned only by induction and care,-here is a mother of strong love, of tragic vehemence of passion and temper, wailing for her son, not in very dignified language of the coldly classic model, but such as the fondest mother would in reality perhaps use to-day under strong excitement, whether in Billingsgate or in Belgravia. Captain Allen sends by the same post a little news. That the Earl of Essex had chased Raleigh from the court into Ireland; that Sir Francis Drake had returned from his Portugal voyage; that the Countess of Leicester, Essex's mother, had married Sir Christopher Blount; that Mr. Robert Cecil, son of Lord Burleigh, was shortly about to marry Lord Cobham's daughter;--all of which specially concerns us interested in the life of Bacon, by-and-by. A little picture, moreover, of the times of these magic ANTHONY RETURNS TO ENGLAND. 61 days of romance and reality, of that happy age when all about seems lit with an air of poetry and splendour: Mr. Cavendish returns from sea and passes up the Thames amid the acclamations and cries of the thousands who line the banks in that glorious July weather, his marines and soldiers clothed in silk, his sails of damask, his topmast cloth of gold, and the richest prize ever brought at once into England. Anthony Bacon remains inexorable; neither his mother's pleadings, nor state affairs, nor the anger of his sovereign, nor his servant Lawson's imprisonment, will bring him back. He removes from Montauban to Bordeaux, where he is in February 1591. Whence we find him pleading on behalf of a Mr. Standen, a Roman Catholic, to Lord Burleigh; his friendship with this gentleman, and his endeavours on his behalf, raising in England, especially in his mother's mind, the presumption of his leaning to the Catholic faith. At last, in February of the year following, Mr. Bacon returns home. Immediately on his landing his cousin, Sir Edward Hoby, writes to congratulate him. He is the son of Elizabeth Cook. He cannot help being the bearer of good news to the returned prodigal. "Her Majesty sent for me at the stroke of eleven at night, called me to her, among other things to ask if I had seen you since your return." I told her highness that I had, and that Mr. Anthony, though he had an infirm body, had a mind much more infirm, by reason of not being able to see her most gracious majesty, through your infirmities. The Queen expresses her regret at his bad health, "earnestly affirming, how that you had been greatly and from good hands recommended unto her." 62 ESSEX AND BACON. Of course, now he is returned his mother will put him in prison-will punish him, for seeking her life, spending her money, and running after false gods. She'll never see him more, the ungrateful boy. Of course she does nothing of the kind. She writes full of love and motherly counsel, as if he had never been away, charging him to set a good example to his brother. "In hoc noli adhibere patrum tuum ad consilium aut exemplum," and concluding with the hope "that he will serve the Lord diligently, his brother Francis being too negligent therein." And now commences, on Anthony's return, the friendship of these two brothers with the young and brilliant Earl of Essex. The fates have taken up the skein of their lives. They will be tangled, and the web of Robert Devereux's life is to be woven in with that of the future Lord Verulam. The bright jewel of their young contract shall hang as a burden and millstone about the neck of the latter's fame, to drag it down, to bring the great name of Bacon into the dirt, from which even the wings of his immortality can never free him, soar his reputation proudly as it may. How this friendship progressed, and all its results, must be told in another chapter. How it commenced will be a fitting end for this. It is a point of some little curiosity to know precisely in what manner the bond of amity first arose. Leicester, the father-in-law of Essex, had been Burleigh's rival and Sir Nicholas Bacon's enemy. At his instance the latter had been deprived of his seat in the Privy Council. In the year 1579 he had charged Anthony Bacon to the Queen, of being friendly with a certain Dr. Parry, then an exile for breaking into a chamber in the Temple, a spy and CAUSE OF THEIR AMITY. 63 agent of Burleigh's, but a man of traitorous designs as it was supposed, and which well-nigh forfeited Anthony Bacon's reputation with Majesty, especially as this Dr. Parry was of so factious a disposition as to be some years after executed.* He had during all his life been at enmity with the Cecils. Dying he bequeathed the legacy of hate, of rivalry, and opposed interest, to Essex. The rise of Essex was a death-blow to the supremacy of Burleigh's second son Robert, who was his follower in statesmanship. The bond of enmity was doubly sealed by hereditary wrong and immediate injury. That this antipathy to Essex always existed in Robert Cecil's heart is probable. That it became by nurture deadly and venomous is certain. Howsoever it arose, it became mutual. It ripened with years, till death alone satisfied it. That popular reputation at the time ascribed his death to Cecil is also known. So that the question arises, How came the Bacons bound up with the Cecils, looking to Burleigh for advancement, bound by hereditary hatred and kinship to hate the Earl of Essex-for party feeling then ran high-to desert the Cecils and to hang their fortunes on Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex? Here is in part the solution : Bacon in his letter to the Earl of Devon‡ states that he himself "knit his brother Anthony's service to be at his lordship's (Essex) disposing." But then he is writing to a friend of Essex, and Anthony is dead, and cannot refute him; and we shall see anon, Francis Bacon will not scruple * 1585. † Harleian MSS. Written, it must be observed, after James's accession to suit the altered circumstances of the case. |