Rvw. Martin, Julian. Francis Bacon, the State and the Reform of Natural Philosophy. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992.
Francis Bacon is usually described as either primarily a statesman with an interest in natural philosophy or primarily a natural philosopher with an interest in statesmanship. Martin attempts to show how Bacon’s natural philosophy and statesmanship arose together as functions of each other. “…Bacon’s legal and political career was crucial in the creation of his natural philosophy and…his natural philosophy cannot be separated from his political ambitions” (2). Martin concludes that Bacon’s natural philosophy was a reaction against certain political and social forces arising from the English Reformation and that its most significant element was that: “‘knowledge is power’ [and]…should be harnessed so as to augment the powers of the state” (5).
…the instruments of his philosophical enterprise were to be royal institutions (that is, departments of the state), and…the means for producing the knowledge which allows the ‘conquest of the works of nature’ and the ‘soveraingtie of man’ are owned by the sovereign…(71)
Martin begins by tracing Bacon’s career back to its earliest roots in Tudor politics. By about 1510, under Henry VIII, a generation of humanists, including Erasmus, Thomas More and Thomas Elyot, pious and conservative moralists, educated in Italy, came to the court through the patronage of the king’s grandmother, Margaret of Beaufort, and others (8). A group of commoners also attained to powerful political office under Henry VIII. They were educated lawyers who had been in charge of Church property when it was seized by the Crown. These included Richard Sackville, Thomas Smith, Thomas Gresham, Walter Mildmay, William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon (16). They all shared a “commitment to the reforms begun in the 1530’s, to the established Church and to the ‘commonweal’ programme,” that had been established primarily by Thomas Cromwell.
Cromwell had worked during his youth as a merchant’s assistant on the continent both in Italy, where he had been exposed to the political philosophy of Marsiglio of Padua and in Antwerp where he had a great deal of experience with the exigencies of a capitalist state. His radically visionary “commonweal programme” was an adaptation of certain ideas from Marsiglio’s Defensor pacis, which Cromwell had translated in 1535.
Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of spirituality and temporality, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience…(14)
Cromwell achieved the “…subjugation of the Church, the destruction of independent jurisdictions in England, [and] the restructuring of the central administration…” as well as other ‘commonweal’ reforms, before his fall from power in 1540.
In 1549, under Edward VI, Thomas Smith attempted to revive Cromwell’s ‘commonweal’ reforms. He was unsuccessful, but following 1558, during “the very difficult and dangerous early years – the ‘testing time’” of Elizabeth’s new regime, while beset by foreign war, the issue of succession, and the “clash of conservatives and radicals over the queen’s religious settlement,” his “close friends, Sir Nicholas Bacon, now the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and Sir William Cecil, the Principal Secretary of State became responsible for preparing the new government’s legislative program, and they instituted economic and legal reforms which “clearly bore the stamp of Thomas Cromwell” (18).
Francis Bacon came to service at the court at an early age. However, while his father was associated with a conservative faction that supported the established Elizabethan religious settlement and the sovereignty of the Church of England, young Francis seems to have followed his mother’s sympathies and to have become associated with the Puritan movement. After involving himself with legal reforms, bringing jurisdiction more completely into the hands of the centralized state, Bacon wrote ’A Letter of Advice to the Queen’ hoping to sway Elizabeth away from full support of archbishop Whitgift (his former teacher at Cambridge) and his conservative policies (33).
He had accepted the parliamentary patronage of the Puritan Earl of Bedford, while refusing similar offers from his powerful conservative uncle, Lord Burghley. He then became associated with the Puritan champion, the Earl of Leicester’s, celebrated nephew, Sir Philip Sidney. His ‘Letter of Advice to the Queen’ was part of the great Puritan campaign of the 1584-5 parliament for a ‘Godly Church’ and for the destruction of the ‘papists’.
As Elizabeth’s anti-Puritan position became clear and the “broad alliance of reforming Protestants” began to disintegrate, Bacon changed his affiliations.
…his noble patrons (and his mother as well) were setting themselves against the queen’s explicit wishes. Bacon could no longer expect their patronage to gain him office in government and certainly, when compared with the broad ‘commonweal’ aspirations he had learned from his father, their ambition now seemed narrowly sectarian. (34)
Whether because he no longer sympathized with the Puritan cause, or to protect his prospects as an Elizabethan courtier, Bacon began to take a more conservative position. His mother,
…Lady Anne Bacon, devoted to Puritan causes, encouraged Francis to seek his career through association with Puritan noblemen and to distance himself from Sir Nicholas’ old colleagues…when the queen rejected Puritan attempts to pressure her and the puritan leaders became increasingly radical, Bacon (then twenty-five years old) felt forced to make a serious choice. (43)
In 1586 “Bacon declined the Earl of Warwick’s offer of a Commons seat in the Leicester House interest. He accepted instead a seat provided by the Bishop of Winchester” (35), after which he became an intelligence gatherer under Sir Francis Walsingham, examining Jesuits and seminary priests, looking for potential recusant uprisings.
Martin gives several illustrations of the extremely high level of trust and authority Bacon attained at Elizabeth’s court, by about 1587, in the area of national security and the strength of the state. In 1589, he was elevated to the office of ‘Clerkship of the Privy Council in Star Chamber’. The Court of Star Chamber was in charge of enforcing the royal peace and royal justice. It was the central government’s principal instrument for impressing obedience to the strict rule of law upon the realm and for punishing all outbreaks of ‘riot and affray’ (37).
It was in this capacity that Bacon began to discuss the political implications of the pursuit of knowledge. He regarded recent developments in popular learning as “politically dangerous and a serious challenge both to the stability and to the ‘commonweal’ of the realm.” Natural philosophy could, however, be refashioned into a splendid support for the Tudor state (46). The English Puritans and radical Protestants, following the lead of Lutherans and Calvinists on the continent, and much in the spirit of Paracelsus, were beginning to engage in a program of “voluntary” or self-authorized pursuit of knowledge. With the aid of the new printing press they produced thousands of how-to books concerning all facets of life. “Artisans and gentlemen were asserting a right to pursue natural knowledge and to make public pronouncements…” (173).
Bacon severely criticized the idea that matters of learning could be trusted to open discussion by the world at large. “Let none that is unlearned presume to admonish another in controversies of religion. Let not one that liveth alone and seeth not into the affairs of the world presume to advise others of their proceedings” (41). The unlearned must be protected from inevitable errors for “…few follow the things themselves, more the names of the things, and most the names of their masters.” Most men:
…leap from ignorance to a prejudicate opinion, and never take a sound judgement in their way…when men are indifferent, and not partial, then their judgement is weak and unripe through want of years; and when it groweth to strength and ripeness, by that time it is forestalled with such a number of prejudicate opinions, as it is made unprofitable: so as between these two all truth is corrupted’ (42)
Another point of great inconvenience and peril, is to entitle the people to hear controversies and all points of doctrine. They say no part of the counsel of God is to be supressed, nor the people defrauded: so as the difference which the Apostle maketh between milk and strong meat is confounded: and his precept that the weak be not admitted unto questions and controversies taketh no place.’ (62)
But Bacon’s concern was first and foremost the security of the state. Voluntary, unregulated pursuit of learning and natural philosophy would bring about “‘general affectations’ and ‘accidental emulations and discontentments’” which “‘together break forth into contentions, such as either violate truth, sobriety, or peace’”(42).
The Puritan voluntary community flew in the face of the official Tudor ideal of an all-embracing, national community – the common weal of all English people – bound together within a single state and Church and within an all-embracing hierarchical structure. (59)
The national community was undergoing a severe crisis in 1585. After thirty years of successive good harvests, England was experiencing its first crop failures since Queen Elizabeth had ascended the throne. Prices for grains, peas and beans vastly increased. By 1589, peasants and urban laborers were eating “little wheaten bread, and prices for barley, oats, peas, beans…Hay and straw were similarly dear and precious livestock became more expensive to maintain” (51). Common wisdom explained these things as signs of divine anger at human wickedness, be it of prince, bishops, landlords, the individual, or of mankind in general (52).
After Walsingham’s death, Bacon once again associated himself with the more radical Protestant faction. He went to work for Robert Devereaux Earl of Essex who was “…widely regarded at the beginning of the 1590’s as the rightful successor not only to the Earl of Leicester, but also to Sir Philip Sidney and to Secretary Walsingham” (46) and as the “standard-bearer of the Puritan ‘war party’ (47). By 1591, he had become a “principal confidant and advisor of Essex.” He was “actively organising an intelligence network for Essex;…reactivating Walsingham’s networks…receiving spy information on priests and Jesuits.” He was now in charge “…directing a network of political ‘intelligencers’ (50).
However, from 1590 onward “…lengthy imprisonments of leading Puritan controversialists smashed the radical movement…” (60), and Bacon resumed his more conservative political position at court, taking on a new role as natural philosopher, a statesman who had taken “all knowledge” as his “province.” “…Bacon had decided that ‘knowledge’ should be a provincia of the state and that he should be its governor” (62).
Bacon presented a dramatic entertainment modeled on a “mirror for princes” to the Queen in honor of the Earl of Essex in which he praised “fortitude,” “love,” and “knowledge.” “fortitude” and “love” are themes found, respectively, in Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Governour (1531) and Castiglione’s Il cortegiano (1514; translated by Bacon’s uncle Thomas Hoby), but in the speech “In Praise of Knowledge,” Bacon had praised the new natural philosophy, a theme unexpected in a ‘mirror.’
All the Philosophie of nature which is now receaved is eyther the Philosophie of the Gretians or that other of the Alchimists. That of the Gretians hath the foundations in words, in ostentation, in confutation, in sectes, in Auditories, in schooles, in disputacions…That of the Alchimists hat the foundation in imposture, in auriculer tradicions, and obsucuritie…The one is gathered out of a few vulgar observacions, and the other out of a few experiments of the furnace.’ (67)
Bacon’s message was that a careful program of natural philosophy was a necessary element of the policy of commonweal reform, and likewise necessary to the political power of the sovereign and the state. “Now we governe nature in opinions but are thrall to her in necessities. But if we would be led by her in invention we should command her in accion” (68). Martin points out that Bacon has used specifically political terms to describe natural philosophy: ‘thrall,’ ‘governing,’ ‘commanding,’ ‘the soveraingtie of man.’ Bacon wanted the English state to distinguish itself among emerging European monarchies by employing the study of natural philosophy in the project of “state building itself.”
Again in 1595, at a Winter revels at Gray’s Inn, Bacon presented a dramatic entertainment containing advice “…not of any particular action of our state, but in general of the scope and end whereunto you think it most for our honour and the happiness of our state that our government should be rightly bent and directed…” (69). These were: the “’Exercise of War’, the ‘Study of Philosophy’, ‘Eternizement and Fame by Buildings and Foundations’, Absoluteness of state and Treasure’, ‘Virtue and a gracious government’ and ‘Pastimes and Sports’. It is the “Study of Philosophy” to which Martin calls our attention as Bacon’s primary rhetorical figure.
What Bacon was really advocating was a natural philosophy carried on by state institutions. He “firmly believed institutional ‘tools’ are required for discovering knowledge of nature” (70). This knowledge was to be in the personal possession of the ruler of the state. Natural philosophy had the potential of producing “infinite commodities,” “generated on the monarch’s behalf by a bureaucracy overseen by a loyal philosopher-statesman” (71). Bacon’s reformed natural philosophy of the early 1590s was an attempt to reorient the ‘commonweal’ program of his father’s generation. Despite his periods of alliance with radical Protestant and Puritan causes he ultimately believed in the same Tudor bureaucracy initiated by Cromwell.
During the sixteenth century natural philosophy expanded from the university and cloisters into the “broader and more volatile public arena…” (172). Bacon regarded it as potentially dangerous to the structure of civil society. He believed that, just as in Scriptural matters, men should accept the leadership of official experts, namely, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, “so, too, in natural philosophy: men should accept the leadership of official experts and a centralised organisation. Those who assumed otherwise were ‘willful’ and ‘voluntaries’” (172). In order to define the role of natural philosophy in the Elizabethan state, Bacon:
…translated Tudor strategies of bureaucratic state management, late-Elizabethan political anxieties and social prejudices, and a principal intellectual resource of the landed gentry – the science of the common law – into his ‘novum organum’ for the paternal governance of the ‘province’ of knowledge. (173)
In the early 1590s, when Bacon was making his first pronouncements, Doctor Faustus was on the stage, a frightening symbol of the dangers of independent, voluntary natural philosophy, unregulated by the institutions of state control.