And we seem to hear the cry of his own long disappointed heart in the words of Wolsey:

O, how wretched

Is that poor man, that hangs on princes' favors!
There is, between that smile he would aspire to,
That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin,

More pangs and fears than wars or women have.

And Hamlet, his alter ego, expresses the self-loathing with which he contemplated the abasements of genius to power:

No; let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,
Where thrift may follow fawning.

These words never came from the smooth surface of a prosperous life: they were the bitter outgrowth of a turbulent and suffering heart. When you would find words that sting like adders-expletives of immortal wrath and hate-you must seek them in the depths of an outraged soul.

What was there in the life of the Stratford man to justify such expressions? He had his bogus coat-of-arms to make him respectable; he owned the great house of Stratford, and could brew beer in it, and sue his neighbors, to his heart's content. He fled away from the ambitions of the court to the odorous muck-heaps and the pyramidal dung-hills of Stratford; and if any grief settled upon his soul he could (as tradition tells us) get drunk for three days at a time to assuage it.

IX. RICHARD III. REPRESENTED ROBERT Cecil.

There is another very significant fact.

The arch-enemy of Bacon and of Essex was Sir Robert Cecil, Bacon's first cousin, the child of his mother's sister. He was the chief means of eventually bringing Essex' head to the block. We have just seen how intensely Bacon hated him, and with what good

reason.

He was a man of extraordinary mental power, derived, in part, from the same stock (the stock of Sir Anthony Cook, tutor to King Edward IV.) from which Bacon had inherited much of his ability. But, in his case, the blood of Sir Anthony had been crossed by the shrewd, cunning, foxy, cold-blooded, selfish, persistent stock of his father, Sir William Burleigh, Elizabeth's Lord Treasurer; and

hence, instead of a great poet and philosopher, as in Bacon's case, the outcome was a statesman and courtier of extraordinary keenness and ability, and a very sleuth-hound of dissembling persistency and cunning.

He had the upper hand of Bacon, and he kept it. He sat on his neck as long as he lived. Even after the death of Elizabeth and the coming-in of the new King, he held that mighty genius in the mire. He seemed to have possessed some secret concerning Bacon, discreditable to him, which he imparted to King James, and this hindered his advancement after the death of the Queen, notwithstanding the fact that Bacon had belonged to the faction which, prior to Elizabeth's death, was in favor of James as her successor. This is intimated by Dean Church; he says:

Cecil had, indeed, but little claim on Bacon's gratitude; he had spoken him fair in public, and no doubt in secret distrusted and thwarted him. But to the last Bacon did not choose to acknowledge this. Had James disclosed something of his dead servant [Cecil], who left some strange secrets behind him, which showed his hostility to Bacon 1

Was it for this that Bacon rejoiced over his death? Was the secret an intimation to King James that Bacon was the real author of the Plays that went about in the name of Shakespeare? Whatever it was, there was something potent enough to suppress Bacon and hold him down, even for some time after Cecil's death.

Dean Church says:

He was still kept out of the inner circle of the council, but from the moment of Salisbury's [Cecil's] death, he became a much more important person. He still sued for advancement, and still met with disappointment; the "mean men" still rose above him. . . . But Bacon's hand and counsel appear more and more in important matters."

Now it is known that Cecil was a man of infirm health, and that he was a hump-back.

We turn to the Shakespeare Plays, and we ask: What is the most awful character, the most absolutely repulsive and detestable character, the character without a single redeeming, or beautifying, or humanizing trait, in all the range of the Plays? And the answer is: The crook-backed monster, Richard III. 1

Richard III. was a satire on Bacon's cousin, Robert Cecil.

To make the character more dreadful, the poet has drawn it in colors even darker than historical truth would justify.

Like Cecil, Richard is able, shrewd, masterful, unscrupulous, ambitious; determined, rightly or wrongly, to rule the kingdom. Like Cecil, he can crawl and cringe and dissemble, when it is necessary, and rule with a rod of iron when he possesses the power Here we have a portrait of Cecil.

Was the expression of that face in Bacon's mind when he wrote those lines, which I have just quoted?

Man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority,

... like an angry ape,

. The expression of Cecil's countenance is, to my mind, actually ape-like.

The man who has about him any personal deformity never ceases to be conscious of it. Byron could not forget his club-foot. What a terrible revenge it was when Bacon, under the disguise of the irresponsible play-actor, Shakspere, set on the boards of the Curtain Theater the all-powerful courtier and minister, Sir Robert Cecil, in the character of that other hump-back, the bloody and loathsome Duke of Gloster? How the adherents of Essex must have whispered it among the multitude, as the crippled Duke, with his hump upon his

shoulder, came upon the stage-"That's Cecil!" And how they
must have applied Richard's words of self-description to another?
I that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them
Why I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair, well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain,

--

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

And these last lines express the very thought with which Bacon opens his essay On Deformity.

Deformed persons are commonly even with nature; for as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature, being for the most part (as the Scripture saith) “void of natural affection;" and so they have their revenge of nature.

And we seem to see the finger of Bacon pointing towards his cousin, in these words:

Whoever hath any thing fixed in his person that doth induce contempt, hath also a perpetual spur in himself to rescue and deliver himself from scorn; therefore all deformed persons are extreme bold, first, as in their own defense, as being exposed to scorn, but in process of time by a general habit. Also it stirreth in them industry, and especially of this kind, to watch and observe the weaknesses of others, that they may have somewhat to repay. Again, in their superiors it quencheth jealousy towards them, as persons that they think they may at pleasure despise; and it layeth their competitors and emulators asleep, as never believing they should be in possibility of advancement till they see them in possession, so that upon the matter, in a great wit, deformity is an advantage to rising.

Speaking of the death of Cecil, Hepworth Dixon says:

And when Cecil passes to his rest, a new edition of the Essays, under cover of a treatise on Deformity, paints in true and bold lines, but without one harsh touch, the genius of the man. . . . Every one knows the portrait; yet no one can pronounce this picture of a small, shrewd man of the world, a clerk in soul, without a spark of fire, a dart of generosity in his nature, unfair or even unkind.'

One can conceive how bitterly the dissembling, self-controlled Cecil must have writhed under the knowledge that the Essex party, in the Essex theater, occupied by the Essex company of actors, and filled daily with the adherents of Essex, had placed him on the

Personal History of Lord Bacon, pp. 193, 204.

boards, with all his deformity upon his back, and made him the object of the ribald laughter of the swarming multitude, "the scum" of London. As we will find hereafter Queen Elizabeth saying, “Know ye not I am Richard the Second?" so we may conceive Cecil saying to the Queen: "Know ye not that I am Richard the Third?” And if he knew, or shrewdly suspected, that his cousin, Francis Bacon, was the real author of the Plays, and the man who had so terribly mocked his physical defects, we can understand why he used all his powers, as long as he lived, to hold him down; and, as Church suspects, even blackened him in the King's esteem, so that his revenge might transcend the limits of his own frail life. And we can understand the exultation of Bacon when, at last, death loosened from his throat the fangs of his powerful and unforgiving adversary.

In conclusion and recapitulation I would say that I find the political identities between Bacon and the writer of the Plays to be as follows:

Both were aristocrats.

Both despised the mob.

Both contemned tradesmen.

Both loved liberty.

Both loved feudalism.

Both pitied the miseries of the people.

Both desired the welfare of the people.

Both foresaw and dreaded an uprising of the lower classes.
Both belonged to the military party.

Both hated Lord Cobham.

Both were adherents of Essex.

Both tried to popularize Essex.

Both were friends of Southampton.

Both hated Coke.

Both, although Protestant, had some strong antipathy against Queen Elizabeth.

Both refused to eulogize her character after death.

Both, though aristocratic were out of power and bitter against

those in authority.

Both hated Robert Cecil.

Surely, surely, we are getting the two heads under one hat and that the hat of the great philosopher of Verulam.