Bacon was a prominent and influential
figure in both Tudor and Stuart times.
Richard Serjeantson reveals the
many disciplines in which this
16 th-century polymath excelled
THE TRUE
RENAISSANCE MAN
FRANCIS
BACON
The most important of Bacon’s
intellectual interests was his
fascination with natural science. His
physician William Harvey, who
discovered the circulation of the blood,
said rather cuttingly that Bacon wrote
philosophy “like a lord chancellor”.
And in some ways Bacon wasn’t on
the cutting edge of early 17th-century
science: he doubted the claim of
Nicholas Copernicus, for instance, that
the earth went round the sun.
But his great significance stems
from his conviction of the possibilities
of scientific progress. He called his
scheme for the renewal of human
knowledge the ‘Great Instauration’.
At the heart of this was his New
Organon of 1620, which intended to
replace the ideas of Aristotle. Bacon’s
solution was to rest the study of nature
on a bedrock of natural historical
experiments: his own collection of
these, 1626’s Sylva Sylvarum, was
his most popular book in the century
after his death.James I / Francis Bacon
F
rancis Bacon was born in
1561, two years after the
accession of Queen
Elizabeth I, and was the
youngest of two sons of an
important political family.
He studied at Trinity
College, Cambridge, where his tutor was a
future Archbishop of Canterbury, John
Whitgift. He pursued an increasingly
successful career as a law yer and MP until,
in 1618, he became lord chancellor and was
raised to the peerage as Baron Verulam
(after the Latin name for his home town of
St Albans). Three years later, however, he
was impeached and deposed in a political
attack orchestrated by enemies in
Parliament and aimed at his patron, the
royal favourite, the Duke of Buckingham.
Bacon died in 1626 without regaining
the political favour he badly wanted. But
he combined his great political energieswith intellectual interests in literature and
philosophy of a remarkable range and
scope, writing once to his uncle,
Elizabeth’s lord treasurer and principal
minister Lord Burghley, that he had taken
“all Knowledge to be my Province”. Yet
Bacon has long been regarded in a rather
ambiguous light. Some recent scholars
have stressed the contemporary rumours
about his sexuality. His integrity and
loyalty was questioned both by his peers
and later historians. He stands accused of
betraying his former patron, the Earl of
Essex, whom he helped prosecute after the
Earl’s failed coup d’état against the ageing
Elizabeth in 1601. And he did admit taking
bribes as lord chancellor – although he
claimed they did not affect his judgement.Richard Serjeantson is a fellow and lecturer in
history at Trinity College, Cambridge, with
ongoing research interests in Francis BaconThe law was a constant throughout
Bacon’s life. He turned to it as a source
of financial support after the unexpected
death of his father when he was 18 and
he remained a loyal member of Gray’sInn (one of London’s Inns of Court) all his
life. A set of legal maxims was among the
first books he published.
Bacon was a sharp and exacting
lawyer – something Sir Walter Ralegh
learned to his cost when Bacon delivered
the death sentence at his trial in 1618.
Yet he never became a judge (at least
until he became lord chancellor) and he
seems to have been rather dissatisfiedwith English common law, advancing
a number of schemes to improve it
throughout his life. This came to
nothing, but certain aspects of Bacon’s
jurisprudence have had a significant
impact in later centuries, in particular his
arguments in Calvin’s Case (1608) that
Scots born after the accession of King
James VI and I to the English crown were
automatically naturalised in England.THE
PHILOSOPHER
AND SCIENTISTBacon’s intellectual curiosity
saw him trying to usurp
Aristotle’s dominant ideasTHE LAWYER
Bacon had great ambitions to
improve English common law