Francis Bacon: The History of A Character Assasinatio.

Nieves Mathews. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. xiii + 592 pp. $50. ISBN: 0300-06441-1.

At first glance these two books under review look very similar. Both are hefty volumes on well-known early modern English intellectuals and lawyers. On closer inspection, however, they turn out to be entirely different volumes. Whereas Paul Christianson has written a detailed study of John Selden's historical writings and parliamentary career before the English Civil War, Nieves Mathews's book on Selden's older contemporary, Francis Bacon, is more difficult to describe.

Far from being a new detailed biography of Bacon, Mathews's work is, as the title implies, a history of Bacon's moral and professional castigation as well as an eloquent and powerful defence of his professional competence and moral character against his muckrakers. We are offered in painstaking detail what other people have thought about Bacon from his lifetime to our own times.

The biggest blame for this character assasination is laid at Lord Macaulay's door. Although Bacon's moral character was sometimes questioned before the early ninenteenth century, it was only after Macaulay had vilified Bacon in most outspoken terms that this moral criticism became a real pastime. And despite the fact that James Spedding refuted Macaulay sentence by sentence more than a century ago, many people have not heeded Spedding's strictures, and Macaulay's censure of Bacon is still being repeated. Mathews's aim is thus to rescue Bacon's character afresh from this vilification - to "set the record straight" (23) - and we are given a harping but strong and successful defence of Bacon.

Mathews first treats the two events which have been the main sources of Bacon's defamation: his relationship with the earl of Essex and his impeachment. Mathews demonstrates how Bacon advised Essex to the tragic end, trying above all to reconcile him with the queen. Behind Bacon's impeachment Mathews finds Edward Coke and Lionel Cranfield and shows that James did not even lift his finger to protect him. Bacon was a mere scapegoat for safeguarding Buckingham. He is often accused of being corrupt by the standards of his own times, but, as Mathews shrewdly points out, this can be doubted merely because he was rather poor in comparison with his prosecutors as well as to many courtiers.

Mathews turns Macaulay upside down; while Bacon becomes the real hero in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the real villain is, of course, Macaulay's celebrity, Edward Coke, who is described as an unprincipled torturer and a real bully. Moreover, far from being a cold or arrogant personality, as he is so often claimed to be, Bacon is proven to be thoroughly amiable: he had numerous friends and was especially liked by them; he was "remarkably forbearing" even to Coke, but this feeling, needless to add, was not reciprocated.

For Mathews, the historian is the final judge who condemns or acquits people. For most of her book this conception is applicable but when she moves to Bacon's intellectual work (or self-seeking and principle in Bacon's career) this point of view becomes sligthly less tenable. While she is surely right in arguing that the often repeated claim that Bacon's philosophical pursuits were nothing but a way of advancing his own career is outright ridiculous, her viewpoint commits her to slightly less convincing conclusions. Of course there is a connection between Bacons political principle and action but it hardly follows that had James taken any piece of Bacon's political advice (whether dealing with parliament, church or foreign policy) England would have been spared from the horrors of the civil war (241, 243, 249, 276-77). Furthermore, in her attempt to form as positive a picture as possible of Bacon's political thinking, Mathews wants to distance him from the intellectual origins of the British Empire, remaining curiously silent about his ideas of civic greatness and his obvious intellectual debt to Machiavelli at this point.

The significance of Mathews's book is not so much to be sought from its contribution to our historical knowledge of early modern England as from serving an important function in revealing the most blatant misrepresentations of the past. In many places she is able to expose historical myths, how they were born, and how they are kept alive.

In his work on John Selden, Paul Christianson offers a close reading of Selden's works on history, governance, and law from the 1610s and 1630s, sandwiched together with a detailed analysis of Selden's parliamentary career in the 1620s. It is above all Selden's discussions of the ancient constitution, the feudal law, and the Roman law, and later his growing interest in Grotian natural law discourse which are explored.

Christianson stresses Selden's historical method and its indebtedness to Continental humanist philology. At its core lay a replacement of traditional humanist historiography by a new one where the use of manuscript material played a crucial role. History continued to have its utility, but it could only serve this function when it was based on an accurate philological analysis of the primary sources.

For those who are familiar with Christiansons earlier work it is no news that his general standpoint towards the history of political thought in early-seventeenth-century England takes a middle ground between the current competing views. With Glenn Burgess he argues that the political thought of the period can be reduced to theories about the ancient constitution. But unlike Burgess, he argues that there were rival theories of the ancient constitution: "More than one voice spoke about the ancient constitution of England" (292). In Christianson's account there were three competing interpretations: James's theory of constitutional monarchy created by kings; the constitutional monarchy governed by the common law, aired most clearly by Thomas Hedley in 1610; and John Selden's theory of a mixed monarchy.

The book follows a strictly chronological pattern. Although this makes it slightly repetitive, it makes the development of Selden's thought clear. What emerges in the first chapter on the 1610s is how Selden dramatically changed his mind over the question of the Norman Conquest. In the first edition of Titles of Honor (1614) he argued that there had been a real conquest and a major break in English history. After his victory William I had introduced the feudal law into England. Four years later, however, in The Historie of Tithes Selden claimed that there had been no real conquest and William had merely confirmed the former laws of England. Major changes in Selden's exposition of the ancient constitution is again depicted in the 1630s. Whereas in the first edition of Titles of Honor Selden had claimed that democracy was the original form of government and that patriarchalism covered only "Oeconomic rule," by the time he published the second edition in 1631, he had changed his mind on both questions.

In his meticulous account of the parliamentary debates of 1626 and 162829 (and Selden's role in them), Christianson, on the one hand, underlines their constitutional importance. Thus the Five Knights' Case of 1627 is said to have commenced "a great debate over the essence of the common law and the ancient constitution" (114), and by 1629 "the king and the leaders of the Commons had charted and seemed determined to maintain a collision course," becoming "increasingly rigid and more than slightly paranoid" (168, 179). Consequently, "mixed monarchy had reached an impasse in England" (180). Part of the blame for this polarization could be assigned to the king and his ministers, but Selden must also bear part of the responsibility. Indeed, Selden is described as "an ideologue possessed" rather than "a practical politician." (178). On the other hand, Christianson argues that underlying these seeming ideological controversies was factional power struggle rather than any ideological division. From this perspective, far from being a theorist (let alone an ideologue), Selden was a practical politician who could find "little place for . . . theoretical constructions" and could not therefore "revel in the sort of general principles favoured by such civil lawyers as Sir Henry Marten" (193).

Christianson concentrates almost exclusively on Selden's work. There is hardly any other context (whether political, historiographical or ideological) for Selden's writings than his own previous writings. Moreover, we are often reminded of Selden's great indebtedness to humanist philology, but we are never given a full discussion of it, let alone a proper analysis of Selden's relationship with Continental scholarship.

All in all, however, Christianson's volume gives us the fullest account of Selden's writings before the civil war period, and anyone interested in the political thought of the period can hardly ignore this important book.

MARKKU PELTONEN University of Helsinki