Bacon, Francis, first Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans

Bacon, Francis, first Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans (1561–1626), the fifth son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, lord keeper to Queen Elizabeth 1558–79, by his second marriage, to Lady Anne Cooke. Bacon's mother was the daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, tutor to King Edward VI, and a gifted scholar and translator. One of her sisters married Lord Burleigh. Bacon was born in London, at York House in the Strand, and, with his brother Antony, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge (1573–75); their tutor was the master, John Whitgift (later archbishop of Canterbury). He spent from 1576 to 1579 with the Queen's ambassador to France, Sir Amias Paulet, studying statecraft and performing diplomatic duties.

Bacon's public career suffered two serious setbacks. His father died suddenly, in February 1579, having settled estates on his first four sons, and in the process of doing so for his youngest. Deprived of an inheritance, Bacon returned to England, entering Gray's Inn in 1579, graduating in 1582. He was appointed a lecturer in law and sat on government legal committees while still in his twenties. In 1581 he became an MP (for Bossiney, Cornwall). In the 1593 session his opposition to the unusually heavy taxes that the queen wanted led to his being expelled from royal favour, promotion to higher legal office going to his rival, Coke. The Queen continued to employ Bacon in various legal offices, severely testing his loyalty to the Crown by appointing him one of the prosecutors of his former patron, the earl of Essex.

Under King James, Bacon achieved high public offices. Knighted in 1603, he became king's counsel in 1604, solicitor-general in 1607, attorney-general in 1613, a privy counsellor in 1616, and lord keeper in 1617. He was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Verulam in 1618, became lord chancellor in that year, and was created viscount St Albans in 1621. Bacon impressed everybody with his forensic skills, intellectual penetration, and ability to present complex issues clearly. But he increasingly found that his advice and counsel were ignored both by James and by the first earl of Buckingham. Without a proper salary structure, government officials under James depended for their livelihood on gifts from suitors and on selling their office, leading to corruption from which many (particularly Buckingham) profited. In 1621 a parliamentary group bent on reform, led by Coke and Sir Lionel Cranfield, attacked the system of monopolies, where lucrative patents were allocated by nepotism and enforced by illegal means. While attempting to censure Bacon, who as head of the Court of Chancery had issued licenses to patentees at the king's request, they heard of two aggrieved suitors who had followed the custom of giving presents to Bacon as presiding judge, but had not won their case. The government's enemies succeeded in having him impeached in the House of Lords on charges of bribery, even though he had never allowed such presents to sway his judgement, and at this point both James and Buckingham abandoned him as scapegoat for their own unpopular policies. Bacon's career was ruined: he was given a huge fine, imprisoned in the Tower, and forbidden to come within 10 miles of the court. But the fine was never collected; the imprisonment lasted three days, the whole affair being cynically intended to placate the reform party, while the real abuses continued. Deprived of power, and vulnerable to Buckingham's greed, Bacon was made to sell York House.

Out of office, he produced in quick succession A History of the Life and Reign of King Henry VII (1622), the De Dignitate & Augmentis Scientiarum (1623, a Latin expansion of The Advancement of Learning), the Essays (1625), and the posthumously published New Atlantis (1627). Simultaneously a Protestant or moderate Calvinist (as his Confession of Faith shows) and a humanist, all Bacon's intellectual activities were directed towards practical ends. He outlined many schemes for reforming the laws, making them more coherent; he wanted the universities to widen their curriculum from the three traditional professions (theology, law, medicine) to take in the ‘arts and sciences at large’; and he was ahead of his time in realizing that a continuous growth of knowledge was possible. Bacon's plan to reform the whole of natural philosophy (or science), outlined in the fragmentary Instauratio Magna (1620), of which the Novum Organum was the only more or less complete part, aimed to effect a new union between ‘the mind and the universe’, from which would spring a range of inventions to ‘overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity’. Bacon's writings inspired the founding of the Royal Society in 1662, and had a considerable influence on Hobbes, Boyle, Locke, Defoe, and others. See also Baconian theory.