Nicholas Bacon

“ The lo. keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, was asked his opinion by Queen Elizabeth of one of these monopoly licences? And he answered "Will you have me speak truth, madam? 'Licentia omnes deteriores sumus;'" We are all the worse for a licence.
6. Pace, the bitter fool, was not suffered to come at the queen, because of his bitter humour. Yet at one time, some persuaded the queen that he should come to her; undertaking for him, that he should keep compass: so he was brought to her, and the queen said: "Come on, Pace; now we shall hear of our faults." Saith Pace ”

“ In person Bacon was (in Camden's phrase) 'exceeding gross-bodied.' As Elizabeth said of him, 'his soul lodged well' (Naunton, p. 38) . The unwieldiness of his body is frequently the subject of amusing comment in his own letters. A portrait of Sir Nicholas by Zucchero has been often engraved, and a coloured terra cotta bust besides two portraits are at the modern Gorhambury house.
Bacon was twice married, first to Jane, daughter of William Fernley of West Creting, Suffolk, by whom he had three sons, Nicholas, Nathaniel, and Edward, and three daughters, Anne, Jane, and Elizabeth. ”

“ Diogenes begging, as divers philosophers then used, did beg more of a prodigal man, than of the rest which were present. Whereupon one said to him; "See your baseness, that when you find a liberal mind, you will take most of him." "No," said Diogenes, "but I mean to beg of the rest again."
138. Jason the Thessalian was wont to say, "that some things must be done unjustly, that many things may be done justly."
139. Sir Nicholas Bacon being keeper of the seal, when Queen Elizabeth, in progress, came to his house at Redgrave, and said to him, "My lo. what a little house have you gotten?" ”

“ In 1333 he was invited by letters to Rome; and Paulus Pansa, writing of him from thence, says, "This one resolute doctor has furnished the Christian religion with armour against the Jews, stronger than any of Vulcan's," &c. He was held in great esteem all throughout Italy. He died in London, 1346.
4th. Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the great seal to Queen Elizabeth, was born at Chislehurst, in Kent, 1510, and educated at Cambridge. "As a statesman," says his historian, "he was remarkable for a clear head and deep counsels ”

“ Grant at the suit of Sir Francis Bacon to Sir William Cooke, Sir John Constable, and three others, of the King's reversion of the estates in Herts above referred to. Sir Nicholas, to whom it had descended from the Lord Keeper, conveyed the remainder to Queen Elizabeth her heirs and successors "with the condition that if he paid £100 the grant should be void, which was apparently done to prevent the said Sir Francis to dispose of the same land which otherwise by law he might have done." ”

“ They are no longer standing. The site of them was No. 1 Gray’s Inn Square. Bacon began to keep his terms at the age of eighteen, in June 1579. His uncle Burleigh was bencher in this inn, and his cousins, Robert, Cecil, and Nicholas Trott, students. In his latter days, when Attorney-General, and even when Lord Chancellor, he retained a lease of his old rooms in Coney Court. He was called to the bar when he was twenty-one, in 1582; and as soon as he was called he appeared in Fleet Street in his serge and bands, as a sign that he was going to practise for his bread. ”

“ It would be impertinent to enter into an account of this amazing genius or his works; both will be universally admired so long as science exists."
7th. Sir Nathaniel Bacon, K.B., a younger son by his second wife of Sir Nicholas, was an excellent painter. He studied his art in Italy, but his style and colouring approach nearer to the Flemish school. I can find no date of his birth, &c.
8th. Phanuel Bacon, D.D., an admirable wit and poet. He died at Balden, Jan. ”

“ Bacon was undoubtedly an impoverished man, and straitened in his means; but this must be understood as in relation to the rank and position which he still held, and the work which he wanted done for the Instauratio. His will, dated a few months before his death, shows that it would be a mistake to suppose that he was in penury. He no doubt often wanted ready money, and might be vexed by creditors. But he kept a large household, and was able to live in comfort at Gray's Inn or at Gorhambury. ”

“ Often there seems little to distinguish him from the ordinary place-hunters, obsequious and selfish, of every age; little to distinguish him from the servile and insincere flatterers, of whom he himself complains, who crowded the antechambers of the great Queen, content to submit with smiling face and thankful words to the insolence of her waywardness and temper, in the hope, more often disappointed than not, of hitting her taste on some lucky occasion, and being rewarded for the accident by a place of gain or honour. Bacon's history, as read in his letters, is not an agreeable one ”

“ Philosophy must be taught its true purpose, and for this purpose a new method must be devised. With the first germs of this great conception in his mind, Bacon left the university.
On the 27th of June 1576 he and his brother Anthony were entered de societate magistrorum at Gray’s Inn, and a few months later he was sent abroad with Sir Amyas Paulet, the English ambassador at Paris. The disturbed state of government and society in France at that time afforded him valuable political instruction. ”

“ Bacon was a philosopher from his youth, but from his youth to his old age he was also a lover of social distinctions, and of a sumptuous mode of life. If he had the desire to take all human knowledge for his province, and to extend his name and his good influence into future ages, if he desired to be a reformer even of philosophy itself, he had also other desires of a much more commonplace description; not evil in themselves—good perhaps in themselves—but not subordinated to the high morality which might have been expected from one so wise. ”

“ The adoption of the principle that a story must be rejected because it is strange, would then have amounted to a disbelief of all that had been written on physics; a state of mind to which we cannot conceive any one of that age bringing himself. Nor can we rightly decide [Pg 51] what opinion to form of Bacon as a philosopher, until we know how much he rejected, as well as how much he believed. These remarks apply particularly to his alchemy: he does not say he had made gold himself, but that others had asserted themselves to have made it ”

“ He fell upon hard times, first the courtier of a princess whose thirst of praise and requisition of humility was unbounded, then the courtier and servant of a king who all but believed himself to be a god. The most marvellous fact of Bacon’s character is, that he who knew men so well, and whose insight into their feelings and motives was so clear, should have been so blind as to remain totally ignorant, as is apparent from all his letters and writings, of that youthful spirit of freedom which in the subsequent reign sprung into such vigorous manhood. ”

“ And, in a word, it seemed that Nature had exempted from the ordinary frailities of men him whom she had marked out to deal with their crimes. All these good qualities made him the darling of the people and prized by the great ones of the State. But when it seemed that nothing could destroy his position, Fortune made clear that she did not yet wish to abandon her character for instability, and that Bacon had too much worth to remain so long prosperous. ”

“ The truth and depth of his sayings, and the extent of ground which they cover, as well as the weighty compactness of his style, have given many of them the currency of proverbs. "Revenge is a kind of wild justice." "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune." "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." Bacon's reason was illuminated by a powerful imagination, and his noble English rises now and then, as in his essay On Death, into eloquence—the eloquence of pure thought, touched gravely and afar off by emotion. ”

“ But if Bacon was far from being a mean example of human nature, it is surely an exaggeration to call him the wisest and brightest of mankind. He was a scholar and critic of vast accomplishments, a writer of noble English prose, and a philosopher who represented rather than inaugurated a most beneficial revolution in the aims and methods of scientific inquiry. He is one of the real glories of English literature, but he is also one of the most overrated men of modern times. ”

“ The effect is seen in such essays as that on "Of Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates," "Of Simulation and Dissimulation," "Of Great Places," "Of Cunning," "Of Suspicion," and "Of Negotiating." With scientific detachment he notes every means, important or trifling, worthy or ignoble, by which human nature is worked on, power acquired and maintained. There was, undoubtedly, in Bacon a certain degree of moral obliquity as well as weakness. But he was humane, and by no means without ideals. Behind all his worldly ambition and crooked policies lay an ideal enthusiasm for knowledge ”

“ He is writing thoughts rather than words, set down without art, disguising or reservation. But if his Lordship will not carry him along he has definitely decided on his course of action. The law is not now even referred to. If the object of the suit was not stated in 1580, there cannot be much doubt now but that it had to do with the making of books and pioneer work in the mine of truth. For ten years Francis Bacon had waited, buoyed up by encouragements and false hopes. Now he decides to take his fortune into his own hands and rely no more on assistance either from the Queen or Burghley. ”

“ The one, that I shall lead such a course of life as whatsoever the King doth for me shall rather sort to his Majesty's and your Lordship's honour than to envy; the other, that whatsoever men talk, I can play the good husband, and the King's bounty shall not be lost."
It might be supposed from the tone of these applications that Bacon's mind was bowed down and crushed by the extremity of his misfortune. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In his behaviour during his accusation there was little trace of that high spirit and fortitude shown by far inferior men under like disasters. ”

“ The powerful delusion of alchymy seized upon a mind still greater than that of Raymond Lulli. Roger Bacon firmly believed in the philosopher's stone, and spent much of his time in search of it. His example helped to render all the learned men of the time more convinced of its practicability, and more eager in the pursuit. He was born at Ilchester, in the county of Somerset, in the year 1214. He studied for some time in the University of Oxford, and afterwards in that of Paris, in which he received the degree of doctor of divinity. ”

“ We thought it best to bury him in the forest where his enemies could not find him. Brent is crushed; his men have deserted him, and all are with us. The general died very suddenly in the arms of Major Pate."
It was the purpose of the friends of liberty to keep the death of Bacon a secret, and there is some dispute in history as to where and when he died. News of this character cannot be suppressed. It came out, and the republicans of Virginia began to lose heart from that hour, while the royalists' hopes increased. ”

“ But the chief interest of Bacon's works lies in their exhibition to us of himself, a man foremost in his own time in all knowledge, endowed by Nature with a genius of peculiar force and clearness of intuition, with a resolute energy that yielded to no obstacles, with a combination so remarkable of the speculative and the practical intellect as to place him in the ranks of the chief philosophers to whom the progress of the world in learning and in thought is due. ”

“ Bacon was great as a moralist, a historian, a writer on politics, and a rhetorician; but it is as the father of the inductive method in science, as the powerful exponent of the principle that facts must be observed and collected before theorizing, that he occupies the grand position he holds among the world's great ones. ”

“ He subsequently made friends with Anthony Standen, an English catholic—well known as a spy of Walsingham—who was at the time in prison at Bordeaux on suspicion of holding treasonable correspondence with Spain. Bacon's influence with the English government procured his release in 1591, and Standen was afterwards one of Bacon's many regular correspondents. At the end of 1591 Bacon returned to England, where he arrived in very poor health in February 1591-2. ”

“ Bacon is a young man who has not yet arrived at thirty years. His family belongs to the English gentry, for he is a cousin of Lord Culpepper and married a daughter of Sir John Duke. He run out his patrimony in England and hath, by his liberality, exhausted the most of what he brought to Virginia. He came here four years ago and settled at Curies on the upper James River. His uncle, who lives in Virginia, was a member of the king's council. He is Nathaniel Bacon, senior, a very rich politic man and childless, who designs his nephew, Nathaniel Bacon, junior, for his heir. ”

“ Francis Bacon, an English philosopher, died, aged 66. At the age of 13 he entered the university, where he made the most astonishing progress in all the sciences then taught, and at the age of 16 attacked the Aristotlean philosophy. He succeeded rapidly in office under government, and in 1619 was appointed lord high chancellor of England and baron of Verulam. Here, unfortunately, he sullied his name, and was fined, imprisoned and degraded, for bribery and corruption. This extraordinary man is justly entitled to the appellation of "the father of experimental philosophy." ”