The political enemies of Lord Verulam were astounded at the success of their infamous Cabal. It seemed incredible that the great Chancellor, the glory of his age, should have been laid low so easily. They were not aware of what had passed behind the scenes between the King and Buckingham and the wily prelate, John Williams, who supplanted Bacon as Keeper of the Great Seal. His advice was to save the favourite and the Crown by a vicarious sacrifice. Neither could it have been known that at His Majesty's entreaty Bacon abandoned his defence and consented to offer himself as "an oblation [a charitable offering] to the King ." Possibly the dread of pressing the fallen Lord Chancellor beyond the limits of human endurance sealed the lips of his adversaries. He might have been driven to make recriminations. His peremptory demand to Buckingham for release as a prisoner from the Tower," Good My Lord, Procure the warrant for my discharge this day", may have acted as a salutary warning to the then all-powerful favourite.
Next to Pope, whose brilliant line on Bacon as the"Wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind" has provided the text for a host of libellers, comes Mrs. Catherine Macaulay as the foremost of Bacon's calumniators. Her name is now almost forgotten, but for several generations she was regarded as a great and reliable historian. Pope's craving for antithesis was irresistible. No attribute could have been more inappropriate to Bacon than meanness, for lavish generosity was with him almost a weakness. But the poet required a dark background to set off the panegyric of the other adjectives. No such excuse can be offered for Mrs. Macaulay. She seizes on the word "meanest" [Pope's meaning was "humblest"] to sum up her delineation of Bacon's character and writings. She was a republican and a radical, and naturally Bacon, as a wholehearted supporter of Monarchy, was obnoxious to her views. But no political prejudice can serve as an excuse for the following shameful words as applied to the greatest of England's philosophers and statesmen.
"Despicable in all the active part of life and only glorious in the contemplative, to him the rays of Science served to embellish not to enlighten, and philosophy herself was degraded by a conjunction with his mean soul."
One would have thought that such intemperate language applied to him who is universally admitted to have been the father of experimental philosophy would have put the writer out of court as a reliable historian. Yet Lecky called her the ablest writer of the new radical school, and her History was by some preferred to that of Hume. Her maiden name was Catherine Sawbridge, but she is known by the surname of her first husband, Dr. George Macaulay. Her History of England was published in eight volumes from 1763 to 1783. It had a wide circulation and was translated into French. It inspired Madame Roland with the ambition of being la Macaulay de son pays . Mrs Macaulay visited Paris in 1775 and was received with great honour. In 1785 she was entertained for ten days at Mount Vernon by General Washington. A white marble statue of her was placed within the altar rails of St. Stephens, Walbrook, in which she was represented in the character of history. A vault was also constructed to receive her remains. But the statue was afterwards removed and the vault was otherwise utilised. Many portraits of her were painted and a medallion was struck in her honour. Pitt eulogised her History in the House of Commons. She was noted, however, for her vituperative language and, being addicted to the use of rouge, Dr. Johnson remarked of her that it was better that she should "redden her own cheeks" than blacken the character of others.
It is an ungrateful and repulsive task to say anything except what is good of the dead. But Bacon's counsels have played so important a part in founding the British Empire, and obedience to them is so essential to its maintenance, that the veracity of his vilifiers demands enquiry. They have known no restraint in their ghoulish propensity to desecrate his memory, and in the interests of justice their own characters must be subject to postmortem examination. In the Gentleman's Magazine, Part II, 1794, p. 685, the following quotation is given from Isaac D'Israeli's Dissertation on Anecdotes. "I shall not dismiss this topic, without seizing the opportunity it affords of disclosing to the public an anecdote which should not have been hitherto concealed from it. When some Historians meet with information in favour of those personages whom they have chosen to execrate as it were systematically, they employ forgeries, interpolations, or still more effectual villainies. Mrs. Macaulay, when she consulted the MSS. at the British Museum, was accustomed in her historical researches, when she came to any passage unfavourable to her party, or in favour of the Stuarts, to destroy the page of the MS. These dilapidations were at length perceived, and she was watched. The Harleian MS. 7379 will go down to posterity as an eternal testimony of her historical partiality. It is a collection of State letters; this MS. had three pages entirely torn out; and it has a note, signed by the Principal Librarian, that on such a day the MS. was delivered to her; and the same day the pages were found to be destroyed."
Mrs. Macaulay's second husband, Mr. Graham, wrote letters to Mr. D'Israeli containing such insults as proved him to be an apt pupil of his wife's methods. Witnesses were reluctant to come forward to verify their previous statements, but Mr. D'Israeli in the final letter of the correspondence sees no argument or fact in what was brought forward to disprove the truth of the anecdote which he recorded. It would be interesting to know if Mrs. Macaulay ever had access to the MSS. in the Lambeth Palace library. That would explain many things.
The following is from The Greatest of Literary Problems, James Phinney Baxter, 1915 p. 629.
As we have not related in our sketch of Bacon the calumnious stories of his enemies, ignorance of them may be imputed to us, as it has been undeservedly to Spedding; since, with the exception of a salacious bit of court gossip about Mary Fitton, which requires too great a strain upon the imagination to connect it with Bacon, they emanated from men notoriously envious and malicious, like Wilson, Weldon and the self-righteous D'Ewes, who measured others by his own insufficent standards.
The burden of testimony is all against them. Boener, his physician; Rawley, his chaplain; Bushell, his disciple; Matthew, his alter ego; Pierre Amboise, Fuller, and a score of others all testify to his indefectible Christian character . . . he cannot be harmed in the estimation of fair-minded men by the cryptic story of court gossip, or the unsupported calumny of such men as we have named, many of whose other utterances have been discredited and condemned by the best writers since their time.
Well may it be said of Francis Bacon, Virtus vincit invidiam.
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