For over thirty years Brian Vickers has been a leading figure in Baconian scholarship— the genuine kind, not the bogus kind connected with the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. His Oxford Authors volume of 1996, bringing together Bacon’s major English works, is now complemented by an edition of The History of the Reign of King Henry VII, a work he did not then include.[1] It is not the first modern edition—indeed, one by Jerry Weinberger appeared from Cornell as recently as 1996; but Vickers, while properly grateful for Weinberger’s scrupulous analysis of Bacon’s treatment of his narrative sources, is also properly censorious about his misguided view of Bacon as a prophet of modern democracy and technological tyranny. Vickers’s edition—crisply introduced, fully annotated, meticulously glossed, and appending Bacon’s fragmentary histories of other Tudor monarchs, together with five of the Essays—now becomes the standard one.

Bacon wrote the 75,000 words of the History in fourteen weeks in 1621, but he had been thinking of the project for many years. Lamenting the poor quality of modern historical work in the second book of The Advancement of Learning (1605), he pointed to the lack of a single comprehensive history of Great Britain, adding that if this were thought too great an undertaking, “the story of England … from the Uniting of the Roses to the Uniting of the Kingdoms,” i.e., from the accession of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, in 1485 to that of the first Stuart king, James I and VI, in 1603, would make an engrossing subject. In the enforced retirement which followed his dismissal from his post as Lord Chancellor on a charge of accepting bribes (a dubious affair in which he was made the scapegoat for discontent with his political master James I), Bacon seized the chance to show what a thoroughly up-to-date historian he could be. He also, by presenting himself as an elder statesman whose experience remained valuable, hoped to recover some influence at court. Only in the first of these aims did he succeed.

Bacon’s theories of historiography involved him in a dilemma. As Vickers explains in his introduction, Bacon shared the Jacobean vogue for Tacitus with his emphasis on secret causes and hidden motives, yet also admired contemporary historians such as Machiavelli, who, to quote from the Advancement again, wrote “what men do and not what they ought to do.” This involves a contradiction neglected by Vickers, for Bacon was thus simultaneously committed to showing the unvarnished truth and also to suspecting that there may have been more to it than meets the eye. His Henry is a plain dealer, a wise lawmaker and parliamentarian, and also a clinical observer who keeps his own counsel and whose thinking is often inscrutable. In a venerable metaphor, vigorously exploited by one of Bacon’s predecessors and sources, Sir Thomas More, political behavior is seen as theater: public gestures which may be illusions, speeches which may be scripted. A major example of the consequent ambiguity is Bacon’s treatment of the royal pretenders of Henry’s reign, Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck. This is the part of the work which is of most interest to us, not only because of its literary quality but also because of its self-reflexiveness. It poses the question: what and where is historical truth?

Having defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, Henry had won the crown by force of arms, but he was well aware that his title was technically weak. There were rumors that one or both of the sons of Edward IV, the so-called “Princes in the Tower,” had not after all been murdered on Richard III’s orders but had survived. Their claim would supersede that of Henry, and Edward’s widow, Queen Elizabeth, who had her own circle of sympathizers, was quick to exploit his vulnerable position. Lambert Simnel in 1486 and Perkin Warbeck between 1491 and 1499 both claimed to be the younger son, Richard Duke of York, and Warbeck at least was taken seriously, to the extent of being believed by James IV of Scotland. Simnel later changed his claim and said he was Edward Plantagenet, Edward’s IV’s nephew: he was actually crowned Edward VI at Dublin in 1487. Henry’s position was fragile, for he could not easily denounce these men as imposters without risking the countercharge that he was one himself. The problem was not that they were royal while he was not, but that he, just as much as they, was forced to act a part—an embarrassing fact to which he did not want attention drawn.

Both episodes are for Bacon “stage-plays.” The defeated Simnel is spared by Henry and put to work in the royal kitchens: “he turned a broach [spit],” comments Bacon grimly, “that had worn a crown,” a reversal of the normal order of things whereby “fortune commonly doth not bring in a comedy or farce after tragedy.” Warbeck posed a graver threat and was a more complex character. Unlike Simnel, he needed no prompting from the wings: he “could make his own part if any time he chanced to be out.” Bacon even speculates, fascinatingly, that he may ultimately have been sincere, although deluded:  

Nay himself, with long and continued counterfeiting and with often telling a lie, was turned (by habit) almost into the thing he seemed to be, and from a liar into a believer.

This is a piercing insight, but implicitly damaging to Henry VII’s cause, for Warbeck emerges as an antitype of the king, who may also have turned himself, by frequent repetition of a lie, into “the thing he seemed to be.”

The Lord Chamberlain, Sir William Stanley, whose tactics at Bosworth had saved Henry’s life and who had personally placed the crown on the victor’s head, was found to have been a Warbeck sympathizer and was executed. Bacon’s comments on this are brilliantly penetrating: Henry, he suggests, was irritated at owing Stanley a debt that could never be repaid. This was unwise of Stanley, since “convenient merit, unto which reward may easily reach, does best with Kings.” Bacon goes so far as to say that Stanley’s service was “like the benefit of Christ, at once to save and crown.” It may be Henry then, not Stanley, who acts the role of Judas, feigning shock and sorrow at his old ally’s treachery. Besides, when one considers the nature of Stanley’s offense,

the cause for which he suffered … was little more than for saying in effect that the title of York was better than the title of Lancaster, which was the case almost of every man (at least in opinion) … no man thought himself secure, and men durst not commune or talk one with another, but there was a general diffidence everywhere; which nevertheless made the King rather more absolute than safe. For bleeding inwards and shut vapours strangle soonest and oppress most.

“Little more”! Considering that Bacon was angling to recover the royal favor, this passage is breathtakingly risky. For a few moments we are in the world of Shakespeare’s Richard III (and also Sir Thomas More’s, who was one of Shakespeare’s sources as well as one of Bacon’s). Who is the real king, who the imposter? In a world where Tacitus practices Machiavellianism and Machiavelli preaches openness, how can we ever know?

This is Bacon’s prose at its best. But his mind, although never less than forceful and fluid, is not Shakespeare’s, and a reading of the History merely reinforces one’s bafflement at how anyone can think otherwise, or why they want to. Nor, for all his scholarship and experience of government, can he really be compared to Shakespeare as a political thinker or analyst; if he read the history plays, he seems to owe them little or nothing. The insight quoted above is the best thing in his book. Yet though an unresponsive pupil, he was a stimulating master; his work inspired John Ford to write the last, belated, great English Renaissance history play. Perkin Warbeck: A Strange Truth (1634) picks up Bacon’s hypothesis that Warbeck may have come to believe his own story, and presents him as a figure of tragic dignity, far more regal than Henry, and his death as a waste rather than a just punishment. “Be men of spirit!,” he exhorts his co-conspirators as they leave for their executions. “Illustrious mention/ Shall blaze our names, and style us kings o’er death.”

For Ford’s Warbeck, royalty of mind is greater than the name of king, because it confers upon its possessor an imperishable crown. Only fifteen years after his play, and twenty-three after Bacon’s death, Charles I stood on a scaffold himself, perhaps thinking exactly that: while Andrew Marvell, commemorating the king-cum-martyr-cum- tragic actor in his “Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” distilled the essence of Bacon’s work into a Baconian aphorism: “the same arts, that did gain/ A power, must it maintain.”

Notes
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The History of the Reign of King Henry VII, by Francis Bacon, edited by Brian Vickers; Cambridge University Press, 284 pages, $19.95. Go back to the text.

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