80 CHAPTER IV. YORK HOUSE, STRAND, AND GRAY'S INN.-THE PHILOSOphy of fruit. OUR view of civil and religious liberty would be indeed narrow were we to confine it solely to a statement of mere facts and obvious effects. Such lie upon the surface, and are more easily observed as well as understood; but the causes themselves have a wider range, and an alliance with principles and things apparently the most remote. For, if a wise and rational liberty-the liberty if we may so express it of law-be, as we believe it to be, synonymous with the gradual development of the highest human good, then must such effects proceed from causes embracing the widest and most diversified generality. It is this idea which makes us give a place to Francis Bacon in these pages. The relation of his philosophy to human liberty has, as yet, been rather abstract than immediate and direct; still, for this reason, is it the more sublime and vital; it is a liberty whose fruits centuries shall ripen and increase-but not consume. In winter time "when fields were dank and ways were mire," when the great rookery of Durham-house, and the elms in Covent Garden were leafless, he was born at York-house in the Strand, the 22nd of January, 1561. The old maps show the place of his birth far better than his modern biographers, who willingly please their readers with the fable, that parts of the old house are yet existing. This is not the case. In Aggas's plan we see the old house as it stood near the Thames, surrounded by a courtyard, and gardens; and separated from the Strand at a point close upon Charing Cross by a single line of mean houses, used probably as in the case of Arundel-house as stables, sheds, and servants' lodgings. The old map is borne out by a passage in Rawley's Life of Bacon, that he was born in "York Place or Palace,"infra plateam dictam le Strand; "* that is below or back from it. The house was so called from having been originally the "London lodgings," of the Archbishops of York; but after the Reformation it was either let or granted by the crown to the Lord Keepers of the Great Seal during the time they held office. It was in connexion with this dignity that it was occupied by Sir Nicholas Bacon, at the date of his son's birth, and probably through the two previous years, as the Great Seal had been delivered to him on the 22nd of March, 1558. At this period the Strand had lost much of its ancient appearance. It was now bordered by houses on either side; though the conspicuous rookery of Durham House, the trees around the Savoy and Somerset Place, and the large gardens which ran behind the single line of houses separating the Strand from that "inclosure or pasture commonly called Covent Garden,"* must have still retained to it a degree of its olden rusticity. This inclosure, anciently the garden of the Abbey of Westminster, was, about 1570, leased in portion from the Earl of Bedford by Sir William Cecil-the great Lord Burleigh, who, building himself a house at the "south end of Drury Lane," with an orchard contiguous, or running into Covent Garden, resided here during the remainder of his life. At the point where York Place stood, the Strand, exceedingly narrowed by a block of houses at the north-east angle of St. Martin's Lane, then called "West Church Lane," opened upon the wide space of Charing, adorned by its ancient Cross. To the west and north of this were nothing but fields; at the south-west angle lay St. James's Park, then roughly inclosed by a wall built by Henry VIII. Immediately at the rear of Charing Cross, at the north-west angle of West Church Lane, were the royal "Mewes." On the opposite side of the lane * Copy of a lease in Archæologia, vol. xxx. p. 454. G stood, on the site of the present edifice, old St. Martin's Church, in which Bacon was baptized; whilst beyond this, and its very extensive graveyard, the lane, becoming wholly rural, stretched away amidst fields to the pleasant farmhouses of St. Giles. York House itself was nobly encompassed; east to it stood Durham House, retained by Queen Elizabeth in her own keeping during a considerable portion of Bacon's youth, and the quaint old chapel of St. Mary's, Rounceval, on the west, led from it into Scotland Yard, and thence into the "Court" or Whitehall, called "York Place" when built and inhabited by Wolsey. No true estimate of Bacon's extraordinary genius can be made without reference to his mother. From her he undoubtedly derived the gorgeousness, the bounty and universality of his intellect, whilst its practical and strongly objective characteristics came from that statesman, who, with Cecil, guided with such consummate skill the earlier civil councils of Elizabeth's reign. As is well known, Lady Bacon was one of the most accomplished women of her age. Her father, Sir Anthony Cooke-an exquisite character-had, it is said, in imitation of Sir Thomas More, resolved to bestow a learned education on his daughters. To this end he himself became their instructor; and during the period he held the office of tutor to the young son of Henry VIII. and Jane Seymour, the morning lessons of the youthful king were made theirs each evening. Sir Anthony was also the intimate friend and associate of the carlier English reformers, and at his instigation it probably was that Cranmer, during the first year of the young king's reign, invited to this country, amongst other foreigners, Peter Martyr, the Florentine, and Bernardo Ochino, the Tuscan, for the purpose of consulting them on a farther extension of the principles of the Reformation. Ochino remained eight years in this country, not leaving till he was forced to fly during the Marian persecution, as were also many others-foreigners, clergy and laity of distinction-including amongst the latter Sir Anthony Cooke himself.* During his residence in England, Ochino was made a prebend of Canterbury by Cranmer; but as his religious views were far more liberal than those of the narrow-minded prelate, there is little doubt but that he was indebted for his prebendal stall, and his pension of one hundred marks per annum, to the patronage of both Cooke and Sir John Cheeke. More than one daughter of the former became perfect mistress of the Italian tongue -then an accomplishment rarer than those of Greek and Latin. Anne, the second daughter, and the future mother of Bacon, translated, whilst yet unmarried, Ochino's Twelve Sermons on Free Will, from the Tuscan. This proves intercourse as well as sympathy between Sir Anthony Cooke and the most daring reformer, who, as the disciple of the younger Socinius, was the apostle of the tenets of the great Priestley; tenets that the statute-book was the last to erase from her list of religious delinquencies. Neal. vol. i. p. 77. and which were "anathematised alike by Wittenberg, by Geneva, by Zurich, and by Rome." Performing the part of a second Roger Ascham, at Sir Anthony's seat, Giddy Hall, near Brentwood, in Essex, there it may have been that the marvellous eloquence and sweet disposition of the wonderful Tuscan moved the hearts of those around him as they had done elsewhere. Without appreciation, or at least sympathy, Sir Anthony would have neither permitted the translation, nor Lady Cooke received the dedication of her daughter's labours. Copies of this exquisite black letter little book, with its monogram A. C., more than once printed A. L., are very rare. There is one in the British Museum in the king's collection; and recollecting the influence such studies must have had over the future mental condition of Francis Bacon, and this in its mightiness over the great destinies, both physical and mental, of mankind, it cannot be looked at without interest or emotion. It had even a literary influence, if a slight but curious analogy may be trusted. "It is good," affixed the great mother to the title-page of her little book, "to hyde the kyng's secrets; but to declare and prove the works of God it is an honourable thing." Whilst the greater son says, in one of the finest passages of the preface to the "Novum Organum," and in the First Book of the "Novum Organum" itself, "That it is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king to search it out." Meaning, thereby, that the Supreme having hidden for sublimest purposes the secrets of nature, it is for man, through submission, through labour, through hope, to eliminate them, to progress by them, and thus approach Him, joyful in knowledge, strong in power, and dignified and invincibl in Truth. Towards the close of life, Lady Bacon was at issue with her sons on points chiefly religious, so much so, that Cartwright, during his imprisonment in the Fleet, acted as mediator between them; but though this difference probably limited both sympathy and social intercourse, we have affecting testimony of her son Francis's affection. In his will he desired to be buried with her, "thus spanning," Basil Montague beautifully says, as it were, his whole life between the cradle and the grave to find nothing else therein worthy of a tribute of affection." There are also in the little preface to Ochino's Sermons, opinions, that Bacon as the great philosopher of induction must have believed in; and one small word is also made use of, pregnant with suggestion and immeasurable interest. "Soe have I taken in hande," wrote Anne Cooke to her mother, "to dedicate unto your Ladyship this smale number of Sermons for the excelet fruit sake in the conteined." Think of this word FRUIT and its immortal connexion with the uprise of a true philosophy and the progress of man! Anne Cooke must have been young when she became the second wife of Elizabeth's elderly and grave Lord Keeper. York House was from this time, without doubt, a quiet, yet influencing centre of opinion relative to a purer worship and simpler ceremonies than those established. Sir Nicholas Bacon favoured, it is well known, the non-conforming clergy as far as his habitual caution, and Elizabeth and her bigoted bishops would permit ; indeed, had he and Sir William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burleigh, been suffered to exercise the same judgment in religious as they did in civil matters, the laws against recusants would have been less progressively atrocious, and the hatred they engendered less personal and austere. Neither can Lady Bacon be classed otherwise than the greatest amongst the Puritan women; and around her must have congregated Bedford, Huntingdon, Leicester, Warwick, Knollys, Walsingham, Sadler, Smith, and Mildmay; all of them more or less men of extraordinary intellect, and conscientiously opposed to the power exercised by the hierarchy, and the retention of such popish ceremonies in the Church as begat schism, and led the way to important changes as regarded doctrine. Amidst influences of this kind Bacon passed his childhood. The din of religious dispute was always sounding round him; and his theological tracts prove with what effect in leading him to inquiry. Though these were not published till some years after his death, two of them were at least written, probably, in early life. That on the "Purification of the Church," contains opinions relative to baptism, the ring in marriage, the use of the surplice, and church music, which were essentially those of the Puritans, and afterwards, conjointly with doctrine, those for which they suffered all that supremacy could inflict. We are thus led to think that Robert Johnson, his father's domestic chaplain, shared with Lady Bacon the guidance of his young scholarship; for it was for these opinions, and no more, that Johnson, in 1571, was cited before Archbishop Parker, and the Bishops of Winchester and Ely, at Lambeth. On this occasion he escaped, after a short imprisonment. He was then made minister of St. Clement's-probably by Lord Burleigh, whose parish it was; but, in 1573, he was again suspended, and cast into the Gatehouse for nonconformity. From this prison he was never released, but died the next year from the effects of foul air, want, and cruelty. At this distance of time it seems strange that powerful interest, such * as Bacon and Cecil undoubtedly possessed, did not effect his release, or, at least, a mitigation of his severe imprisonment; but in far more atrocious cases than this of Johnson's, their interference was as nugatory with the bishops as distasteful to the queen. His mother's erudition was, undoubtedly, of value in advancing his studies; for, at thirteen years of age, Francis Bacon was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge. Before this, he had given many proofs of the possession of a remarkable intellect. The echo of a conduit, placed somewhere in St. James's fields, to the north of the park, amused him, whilst other children were at play; and the feats of an itinerant juggler in willing a card, led him, as early as his twelfth year, to meditate upon |