Francis Bacon, colonisation, and the limits of Atlanticism

ABSTRACT

Historical interest in the ideologies behind the ‘first’ British empire have tended, for very understandable reasons, to look towards the colonies of the eastern seaboard of North America and the Caribbean. By contrast, this study of the imperial vision held by the English philosopher and politician Francis Bacon (1561–1626) emphasises a different geography of empire. In an investigation of what Bacon took to be the implications of the union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland in the person of King James VI & I, and in the pacification of Ireland following the conclusion of the Nine Years’ War in 1603 and the Flight of Earls in 1607, it argues that Bacon’s own imperial ambitions were ultimately directed towards the annexation of the Low Countries and the founding of a new British imperium in western Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
• colonialism
• imperialism
• Ireland
• Atlantic history
• European Union

It is only very recently that questions of colonisation and empire in the political thought and action of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) have begun to receive the detailed and judicious treatment they deserve.¹ Bacon plays only a minor role in two authoritative accounts of the intellectual history of the first British empire.² But a number of reasons suggest that his views on these questions are worth exploring. Firstly, colonial and imperial questions were a constant preoccupation not only of Bacon’s practical work as a counsellor to the governments of Elizabeth I and James I, but also as a less applied theorist of these questions in his Essays (in the editions of 1612 and 1625) and De augmentis scientiarum (1623). Secondly, Bacon’s ideas in these areas received a broad diffusion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, partly through the wide readership of his Essays, and particularly through their influential uptake by James Harrington in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656).³ The present study accordingly offers both some new evidence and a new interpretation of Bacon’s action and reflection on this subject – now one of the dominant areas of interest in the historiography of both modern and early-modern political thought.⁴

This is not to suggest that the question of Bacon’s views on imperial expansion has wholly escaped the attention of previous scholars of his writings. One long-standing tradition of interpretation yokes Bacon’s views of empire to his natural philosophy. This view was represented by Howard White, who concluded that ‘Baconian imperialism’ was chiefly ‘the imperialism of Baconian science’.⁵ It is decisively challenged in an important article by Markku Peltonen.⁶ Yet the desire to relate Bacon’s natural philosophical ambitions to his politics remains tempting, and continues to be reasserted.⁷

The starting-point of this study, however, is a different one. But it does take its lead, in part, from historiographies of the sciences as well as those of political philosophy. Over the past generation histories of the natural sciences have taken a determinedly localist turn. Natural knowledge has been placed not only in its temporal, but also in its geographical context. In its ‘turn to empire’ the history of political thought is beating a similar path. This study therefore focuses on an area of Francis Bacon’s political reflection that has not always received the attention it deserves: his geopolitical, or (if you prefer) his international thought.

1. Colonies vs. plantations?

We might begin with a specific and somewhat tentative suggestion about Bacon’s understanding of colonisation. His most sustained statement on this question came in an essay that he published in the last lifetime edition of his celebrated Essayes. In its original English version, which appeared in 1625, it is simply entitled ‘Of Plantations’.⁸ In the Latin translation of the Essayes – the Sermones Fideles, first published only in 1638, but made either by Bacon, or under his direction, towards the end of his life – the title of this essay is ‘De Plantationibus Populorum, et Coloniis’.⁹ As this Latin title suggests, the ‘plantation’ in question is not in the first instance of agriculture, but of people.¹⁰

There is a general tendency among most historians writing in this field simply to conflate early modern ‘plantations’ with ‘colonies’.¹¹ Yet it is notable that in the original English version of the essay Bacon did not in fact choose to anglicise the existing Latin term colonia, and to entitle his essay ‘Of Colonies’. He certainly might have done so had he wished. Several of Bacon’s predecessors and contemporaries had written specifically about what they called ‘colonies’.¹² His friend Sir John Davies, for instance, did so in his Discouerie of the True Causes why Ireland was Neuer Entirely Subdued until the beginning of the reign of King James (1612).¹³ And Bacon himself was perfectly capable of speaking of ‘colonies’ when he wished to. He conjoined – but also, as it would appear, distinguished – ‘Colonyes & plantacions’ in the 1607 speech he gave in Parliament on the naturalisation of the Scots.¹⁴

More particularly Bacon spoke of ‘colonies’ in the important legal argument that he delivered before the judges of the Exchequer Court in 1608 as the first of the advocates for the Crown in ‘Calvin’s Case’ (1608). This important trial concerned the question whether one of the ‘Post-Nati’ – a Scottish subject of King James born after his accession to the kingdom of England – might lawfully inherit property in England. It was an important plank in James’s plans to achieve a union of the Scottish and English kingdoms. In his speech – which we possess because Bacon later wrote it up and presented it to his monarch in manuscript – Bacon directly addressed the question of colonisation. There are two means (he argued) to retain the obedience of conquered countries:

The one is by Colonies, and intermixture of people, and transplantacion of families […], and it was indeed the Romaine manner: but this is like an old relique, much reverenced, and almost never vsed. But the other which is the moderne manner, and almost wholly in practise & vse, is by Garrisons & Cittadells, & listes, or Companies of men of warre, and other like matters of terror, & bridle.¹⁵

Bacon here identifies ‘colonies’ with the ancient Roman world, and contrasts them with the modern habit – then being practised, for instance, by the Spanish in the southern Netherlands – of setting up garrisons and castles to subdue the inhabitants.

Yet when Bacon is speaking of the modern practice of planting people, he tends to speak not of ‘colonies’, but by contrast of ‘plantations’. As we have seen, this was the term he chose for the original English title of his essay published in 1625. It had previously also been the term he had used in a position paper of 1609, also presented to James, entitled ‘Certaine Considerations Touching the Plantations in Ireland’. It seems possible, that is to say, that Bacon is consciously distinguishing between the modern phenomenon of separated ‘plantations’, and the ancient phenomenon of incorporating ‘colonies’. Not only two different terms, but two different concepts may be at work here.

Yet even if this is to put the case too strongly, it remains clear that Bacon highly valued the Roman habit of incorporating the peoples they conquered into their imperium by conferring differential rights and privileges upon the inhabitants of their colonies. This custom – which he might have learned about from his own thorough reading of Livy’s Ab urbe condita, especially through its interpretation by Machiavelli, and perhaps in detail from the relevant monograph of Carlo Sigonio – consistently shaped Bacon’s positive early responses to the new monarch’s desire to unite his two British kingdoms of England and Scotland.¹⁶

2. Ireland

To see why it might matter that Bacon should have distinguished between Roman ‘colonisation’, and modern ‘plantation’, we need now to turn to consider a place that is consistently important for Bacon’s geopolitical thought: Ireland. Ireland, or more specifically the English (and also the Scottish) presence in Ireland, was a subject that preoccupied Bacon throughout his career, and above all in the first decade of the seventeenth century: initially in the context of the protracted conflicts of the Nine Years War (1594–1603); then, once peace had been concluded, in the different circumstances following the Flight of the Earls in September 1607 and the consequent commencement of the Plantation of Ulster from late 1608 onwards.

The political history of the English conquest of Ireland is paralleled, and indeed underpinned, by its own intellectual history, and this is a subject that has increasingly preoccupied historians.¹⁷ In the course of several distinguished contributions one thought has emerged as being particularly important for our understanding of this field: the classical legacy of Renaissance humanism. It has become clear that the English experience in Ireland was commonly seen through the lenses offered by Greek and Roman antiquity.¹⁸ William Herbert’s Croftus, sive de Hibernia liber (1591),¹⁹ Richard Beacon’s Solon His Follie (1594),²⁰ and Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (circa 1596),²¹ are all the products of educated Englishman who interpreted English actions, and the Irish people, in terms provided to them by antiquity. As Nicholas Canny has put it, they relied fundamentally upon ‘the justifications of colonization that could be drawn from, or imposed upon, Greek and Latin texts’.²²

Francis Bacon’s assimilation into this ‘classical’ interpretation of Irish colonisation has arrived only recently. But this has not prevented him coming to occupy a central position within it. For it is Bacon whom Canny, the foremost historian of the subject, finds to be the ‘most prominent advocate of classical procedures and justifications’; someone who ‘both in his general reflections on plantations and in his particular advice on the Ulster plantation, always portrayed colonization as a classic civilizing enterprise’.²³ In fact, however, none of these arguments, as they have been applied to Bacon, seem to me to be wholly sustainable. Bacon’s view of ‘plantations’, we have suggested, was not a classical one; in consequence, he did not regard plantations, per se, as having a ‘civilizing’ function; and although there certainly is a strong classical element in his thinking about territorial expansion, it appears not in his treatment of plantations, but in his ideas about the ‘true greatness’ of kingdoms and republics.

It is now time to elaborate the argument that Bacon’s conception of ‘plantation’ was not a classical one. Near the beginning of Bacon’s essay ‘Of Plantations’ (1625) we find the following statement: ‘I like a Plantation in a Pure Soile; that is, where People are not Displanted, to the end to Plant in Others. For else, it is rather an Extirpation, then a Plantation’.²⁴ On Bacon’s account (in this essay), plantation was best accomplished without any autochthonous inhabitants involved at all. By definition, therefore, it was not a ‘classic civilizing enterprise’.

Michael Kiernan has argued, with a good deal of plausibility, that Bacon’s late essay ‘Of Plantations’ is fundamentally American in orientation; indeed, that it is specifically (as Kiernan proposes) ‘essentially a gloss upon the Virginia plantation before 1623’.²⁵ Yet even if Bacon’s most general statement on plantation did have the New World principally in mind, it is clear that its seeds nonetheless lie in his understanding of the British presence in Ireland.²⁶ For it was not Virginia that provided Bacon with his first example of a ‘pure soil’ for planting in, but instead County Tyrone in the province of Ulster.

The final years of Elizabeth I’s reign had been characterised by a general violence in Ireland; Bacon saw fit to write to the Earl of Essex in 1600 of the ‘more than Indian barbarism’ of the Irish. In 1594 a war began there that would last for the next nine years. In 1597 an uprising throughout Munster led to the destruction of much of the plantation that had been settled there from the late 1570s onwards. Edmund Spenser’s celebrated View of the Present State of Ireland is one product of the loss of the Munster plantation, a loss that Spenser experienced at first hand. And in 1599 a rebellion by the Earl of Tyrone resulted in the death of the English Marshal of Ireland, Sir Henry Bagenal, and the deaths of several thousand of his soldiers. These events in turn prompted the Earl of Essex’s ill-fated expedition to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant in 1600 – an expedition on which Bacon, characteristically, briefed his patron in a formal letter of advice before he left.²⁷

The early years of James I’s reign as king of Ireland, by contrast, were characterised by a general cessation of hostilities. As Bacon himself wrote in 1609, ‘The reuolution of this present age, seemeth to inclyne to Peace, almost generallie, in these parts’.²⁸ The Nine Years’ War ended in 1604. But of even greater consequence for the history of Ireland were the events of September 1607: the departure of the Catholic earls from their Irish lands to the continent of Europe, and ultimately to Rome. This Flight of the Earls presented the English in Ireland, and their Scottish king, with a piece of good fortune that they must hardly have credited: as treasonous rebels, the earls’ lands were ipso facto escheated to the Crown.

The question was simply what to do with them. Bacon wrote on 23 October 1607 to his old acquaintance Sir John Davies, then the Attorney-General for Ireland: ‘I see manifestly the beginning of better or worse. But methinketh it is first a tender of the better, and worse followeth but upon refusal or default’.²⁹ King James, it would appear, agreed. The answer was to turn the escheated lands in Ulster to plantations – more, and more secure, than those that had failed in Munster. On 20 July the Privy Council in London wrote to the Deputy in Dublin, Sir Arthur Chichester, requiring him ‘to abstain from making promises of any of the escheated lands, and to assure himself that not an acre will be disposed of till the survey and certificate of the lands be returned over to them’.³⁰ A Commission formed at the same time to survey the Ulster lands found six counties to be almost entirely escheated to the King, and on 20 December 1608 a document docketed with the title of ‘Project for the Plantation of Tyrone’ was presented to the Privy Council by its principal authors, Sir John Davies and Sir James Ley.³¹

It was this project – a draft of which he had perhaps seen by virtue of his friendship with Davies – that provoked Bacon into writing his most substantial work on Ireland: the ‘Certaine Considerations Touching the Plantation in Ireland’. Bacon must have written this little treatise in some haste, for he presented a copy to King James as a New Year’s gift for 1609.³² This work, together with an accompanying presentational letter, was first printed in the volume of unpublished works by Bacon that his former chaplain, William Rawley, published in 1657 under the title of Resuscitatio, and hence has long been known to Bacon scholarship. What has not been known hitherto, however, is that what appears to be the actual presentation manuscript to the King survives in the collection of his Lord Chancellor, Thomas Egerton, Baron Ellesmere. This little volume has been elaborately and carefully copied by a professional scribe. But the key to its identification lies in the binding, which is tooled in gold with the badge of a falcon holding a fleur-de-lys.³³ The same badge had been used by both Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I, and was adopted from them by James after his English accession as a means of connecting himself to the Tudor dynasty to whom he owed his crown as the great-grandson of Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret Tudor.³⁴

What this document tells us is that it is not in respect of North America, but rather of Ireland, that Bacon first spoke of a plantation taking place in a ‘pure soil’. For it was in this little treatise that he first wrote that the king ‘shall build in solo puro, et in area pura [in a pure soil, and in a pure air], that shall neede noe sacrifices expiatorye for bloud’.³⁵ With the end of the Nine Years’ War and the Flight of the Earls, James would no longer need to resort to arms to set about the work of plantation in Ulster.³⁶ Bacon further stated that he regarded the ‘Natiues’ of Tyrone as being ‘excluded’ from the plantation.³⁷ Thus – and pace Nicholas Canny – Bacon does not here regard the work of Irish ‘plantation’, specifically, as having an inherently civilising purpose.

What plantations instead offered was the opportunity to remit the surplus population of England and Scotland to a purer soil. Jean Bodin had listed this as the second of his four reasons for sending out colonies (coloniarum deducendum) in his Method for the Easy Understanding of History (1566), and Bacon picked up this point in the ‘Speech Touching Naturalization’ which he delivered in Parliament on 17 February 1607.³⁸ The apparently ‘desolate & wasted realme of Ireland’, he suggested to his fellow English Members, provided a ‘faire & happye’ means to ‘yssue & discharge’ the ‘multitude’ of people in Britain.³⁹ Bacon developed this point in his Certaine Considerations on the Tyrone plantation scheme of new year 1609. The putatively pure soil of Ulster offered James a means to discharge any ‘surcharge, or ouerflowe of People’ that might ensue in England and Scotland from the peace that had arisen in the ‘reuolution of this present age’.⁴⁰

One of the best reasons for undertaking these movements, to Bacon’s mind, was that it helped forestall the emergence of the ‘internall troubles, and seditions’ that he suggested might arise from a ‘fruitefull’ peace.⁴¹ His essay ‘Of Seditions and Troubles’ helps develop our understanding of this thought. There Bacon argued that the ‘materiall Cause of Sedition’ was ‘Want and Poverty in the Estate’. Since Bacon explicitly articulated there what would now be thought of as a zero-sum conception of economic development – ‘whatsoeuer is some where gotten, is some where lost’ – he regarded growth in population, caeteris paribus, as a potential source of poverty.⁴² It was for this reason that he felt emboldened to suggest to James that the plantation of Ireland would present the king with a ‘a double commoditye, in the auoydance of People heere, and in makeing vse of them there’.⁴³

The first appearance of the phrase ‘troubles, and seditions’ in the context of Ireland plantation is suggestive, and it is notable that Bacon appears to have begun to think about this source of sedition at broadly the same time that he was newly concerned with the question of Ireland.⁴⁴ For although his essay of this title was first printed only in 1625, it had evidently been written by 1612, since it appears not only in the manuscript of the essays that Bacon originally prepared for dedication to Prince Henry in that year (whose untimely death, however, forestalled its presentation), but also in the elaborate folio manuscript of various of his political, ecclesiological, and legal writings that Bacon seems to have presented to William Cavendish, second Earl of Devonshire, at some point in or shortly after 1614.⁴⁵ Ireland thus offered, in Bacon’s view, a providential place to which the surplus population of Britain might conveniently be exported.

3. Colonies and ‘true greatness’

But how is Bacon’s thinking on plantations and colonies related to his conception of the greatness of states, and specifically of the unitary new British state that he sought to help bring into being following the accession to the English crown of the Scottish king James? Our starting point here should be Markku Peltonen’s persuasive argument that the ideological context of Bacon’s writings on true greatness is to be sought neither (as Julian Martin and Sarah Irving would argue) in his scientific preoccupations nor (as Howard White and Charles Whitney had argued) in a modern commercial imperialism. The source of Bacon’s ideas instead lies in the context of a classical republican discourse about civic greatness that was mediated to the early modern world by the account of grandezza in book ii of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discorsi (written c. 1518; printed 1531).⁴⁶ This was in turn taken up by post-Machiavellian authors such as Giovanni Botero, above all in his Delle cause della grandezza delle città (1588).⁴⁷ Our question therefore becomes the following: since Bacon clearly is the heir of this Machiavellian tradition of civic grandezza, how did it affect his thinking about colonisation?

Colonies are a prominent concern in this tradition. Indeed, Machiavelli had identified the Roman habit of sending out colonies as one of the principal sources of their military success, for they provided a means of protecting frontiers and maintaining garrisons without impoverishing the treasury at home.⁴⁸ Botero similarly regarded colonies as having been ‘useful for increasing the power’ of Rome.⁴⁹ Again, however, neither Machiavelli nor his heir Botero particularly stressed that the purpose of colonies was to civilise the native inhabitants of a conquered territory.

What Botero mostly emphasises, by contrast, is the danger of setting up colonies too far from the home country. He insists in the Della grandezza that ‘if Colonies must increase their mother; it is verie necessarie that they bee neere neighbors’.⁵⁰ (The quotation is taken from the timely translation of the Della grandezza published by Robert Peterson, a member of Lincoln’s Inn, in 1606, at the moment of the founding of the Virginia Company.⁵¹) And in his Ragione di Stato (1589), Botero had argued that it was unwise ‘to set vp Colonies far off, in places too remote from your state and gouernment. For, in that case, it being no easie thing for you to succor them; they must either become a praye to their enemies, or else governe themselues as the occasion and time doth offer, without respect had of their originall beginning, or of whome they depend’.⁵² This stricture did not obviously apply to Ireland. But it certainly resonated with the situation of the English colonies in the New World in the first decade of the seventeenth century, which were so precarious that little confidence could then be placed in their long-term prospects.

Rather than stressing colonies, then, Bacon’s vision of true greatness is above all a Machiavellian vision of the cultivation of military prowess by one’s own citizens. Greatness lies in the cultivation of a yeoman infantry, and a corresponding neglect of ‘delicate Manufactures’.⁵³ Bacon is clear in the first version of his essay ‘Of the True Greatness of Kingdomes’, published in 1612, that true greatness means greatness in war. As he puts it, ‘the breed and disposition of the people’ should ‘be militarie’.⁵⁴ In the 1625 version of the essay Bacon expanded this thought considerably, asserting that ‘the Principal Point of Greatnesse in any State, is to have a Race of Military Men’. And he joined to this thought the striking new suggestion that a truly great state must always be ready to find ‘just Occasions (as may be pretended) of Warre’.⁵⁵

Bacon’s account of true greatness, that is to say, is thoroughly expansionist. In the 1612 essay he distinguishes between, on the one hand, states that are ‘great in Territory, and yet not apt to conquer or inlarge’, and on the other, those that have ‘but a small dimention or stemme’ and yet are ‘apt to be the foundation of great Monarchies’.⁵⁶ He also made an audacious analogy between a great earthly kingdom and the kingdom of heaven: they were both like a ‘graine of Musterd’, which had the capacity ‘hastily to get vp & spread’ (cf. Matthew 13:31).⁵⁷ And in the 1625 essay he added a passage praising the Romans’ willingness to ‘grant Naturalization’ and ‘their Custome of Plantation of Colonies; whereby the Roman Plant, was removed into the Soile, of other Nations’.⁵⁸

But Bacon’s most strikingly expansionist moment had appeared in his earliest thoughts on this subject: an unfinished treatise that he seems to have begun to write for James at some point between 1604 and 1607, entitled Of the True Greatnes of the Kingdome of Brittaine.⁵⁹ His leading idea in that abortive work was that the dynastic circumstances of the uniting of the English, Irish, and Scottish crowns in a single monarch now meant that ‘the prowesse and valour of your subiectes is able to maister and weilde farre more territorie then falleth to their lott’.⁶⁰ But to where, then, did Bacon suppose (what he optimistically calls) the ‘Kingdome of Britain’ was going to expand? By this point he was no longer thinking of Ireland. In his unfinished treatise he makes clear that he regards the ‘troubles of Ireland’ as having then been quieted.⁶¹ Nor, as will become clear, were Bacon’s eyes set upon a new world across the Atlantic. To be sure, we can only work here from the slightest of hints – not least because Bacon never finished this treatise, and hence never came to say where precisely the territory was that the prowess and valour of King James’s subjects was going to master. But there is a public clue to Bacon’s thinking on this question in the speech on naturalisation that he delivered to the House of Commons in 1607:

For Greatnes (Mr Speaker) I thinke a man may speake it soberly, and without braverye, that this kingdome of England, haveing Scotland vnited, Ireland reduced, the Sea provinces of the lowe Countries contracted, and Shipping mantayned, is one of the greatest Monarchies in forces trulye esteemed, that hath bene in the world.⁶²

It may indeed have been possible to regard Scotland as having been ‘united’ with England in early 1607, even if a formal Act of Union did not come into being until exactly a century later, under the different circumstances of the Darién project.⁶³ Following the conclusion of the Nine Years’ War in 1604, and a fortiori following the Flight of the Earls in September 1607, shortly after Bacon delivered this speech, it was also feasible to regard Ireland as having been ‘reduced’ – or, in the words of John Davies’s 1612 treatise on the matter, ‘Entirely Subdued’. But what does Bacon mean by the ‘sea provinces’ of the Low Countries being ‘contracted’? This becomes a little clearer in the very suggestive private memorandum Bacon made for himself in July 1608: the remarkable document entitled ‘Commentarius Solutus’.

In this memorandum book, Bacon reminded himself to set about ‘Finishing my treat. of ye great. of Br. w^th aspect ad pol’. That is to say, he reminded himself to finish his treatise ‘Of the true greatnes of the Kingdome of Brittaine’ with the addition of the promised applications of his theory to the practical politics of James’s situation. Of these applications, Bacon went on to recall to himself,

The fairest, wthout dis. or per. is the gener. perswad. to K and peop. and cours. of infusing every whear the foundat. in this Ile of a Mon. in y^e west, as an apt seat state people for it; so cyvylizing Ireland, furder coloniz. the wild of Scotl. Annexing y^e Lowe Countries.⁶⁴

Which cryptic text might be expanded as follows:

The fairest [course?], without dispute or per[adventure?], is the general persuasion to [the] King and [the] people, [of a] course of infusing every where the foundation in this Isle of a Monarchy in the west, as an apt seat, state, [and] people for it; so civilizing Ireland, further colonizing the wild of Scotland, [and] Annexing the Lowe Countries.

It is this startling final item about annexation to which I wish to draw attention: for it leaves no doubt that Bacon is proposing the armed invasion, and then perhaps the subsequent colonisation, by Britain of the Spanish Netherlands and also (it would appear) the United Provinces of the Netherlands.

The sheer audacity of the idea that Bacon might seek to persuade his monarch to annex the Low Countries perhaps accounts for the fact that he only committed it to paper in a private memorandum. It was a vision that he came closest to articulating in public when addressing James’s rather less pacific son Charles in his Considerations Touching a War with Spain (written in 1624, but first printed only in 1629). Here Bacon describes Flanders as ‘our Outwork’, and speaks of ‘England, Scotland, Ireland, and our good Confederates the Vnited Prouinces’ as lying ‘al in a plump together’.⁶⁵ The Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator’s contemporary map of England, Scotland and Ireland neatly illustrates Bacon’s geopolitical vision for James’s new ‘Mon[archy] in the west’, demonstrating as it does Flanders’ natural proximity to Britain (Figure 1).

Figure 1. England, Scotland, and Ireland in Gerhard Mercator, Atlas (Amsterdam, 1619). Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

In the first decade of the seventeenth century, that is to say, the true greatness of Britain (in Bacon’s view) did not cease with James VI & I’s consolidation of his rule (imperium) over Scotland and Ireland. Nor did it lie in the colonisation of North America or the Caribbean. Instead, the future of British greatness lay back on the continent of Europe. The annexation of the Low Countries would involve renewing the war against Catholic Spain with which Bacon had grown up under Elizabeth, and which, although it was intermitted under James, the blessed peacemaker, was indeed renewed by his more bellicose son Charles as soon as his father died – as Bacon himself had recommended in his Considerations Touching a War with Spain, dedicated to the then Prince in 1624.⁶⁶ This war would be pursued from the Netherlands, themselves newly-annexed by the yeoman armies of England. These troops, moreover, would perhaps be reinforced by the support of the kerns of Ireland, whose fighting abilities Bacon evidently much admired. The ultimate goal, I suggest, was a translatio imperii; the establishment of an imperial monarchy in the west that could rival the Habsburg empire, and which in time, perhaps, might even come to imitate the universal glory of the Roman imperium. Not the American Atlantic seaboard, but rather the continent of Europe, with its arms, its learning, and its treasure, was the goal of Bacon’s early imperial vision.

4. The limits of Atlanticism

With the benefit of hindsight, a British empire in Europe, commencing with the invasion of the Netherlands, may now appear quixotic. Is this not an ideological cul de sac rather than an ideological origin? Yet it need not have seemed so to Bacon: whose king was throughout his life styled as the monarch not only of England, Scotland, and Ireland, but of France as well; who also remembered the English enclaves both of Calais and of Boulogne – not to mention England’s older French possessions – as both historically important and legally consequential; and who grew up with an English army standing in the Netherlands.⁶⁷

Though the emptiness of the English crown’s formal claim to France was apparent by the earlier seventeenth century (for all that it persisted until 1801), the subsequent history of Britain’s imperial ambitions for the Low Countries is one that is only now beginning to be to written. An increasing body of scholarship is drawing our attention to the covert presence of the Netherlands in seventeenth-century British imperial thinking before and during the era of the Anglo-Dutch wars.⁶⁸ In 1651, three years after Westphalia supposedly solidified the modern European state-system, Marchamont Nedham was advocating the union of England and Holland, and St John and Strickland were sent to Amsterdam as emissaries from the new English republic to propose to the Dutch ‘a Confederation of the two Commonwealths’.⁶⁹ As late as 1677, Andrew Marvell could write that ‘the Spanish Nether-Land … had alwayes been considered as the natural Frontier of England’.⁷⁰ In 1725 the partition of Flanders between the British, the Dutch, and the French, was seriously considered in London.⁷¹ The Dutch Prince of Orange’s successful invasion of England in 1688 further demonstrated that the neighbourhood of Britain and the Netherlands cut both ways.

Jonathan Scott, who has done so much to draw our attention to the importance of these phenomena, would nonetheless have it that Bacon was not, in fact, ‘a conspicuously “continental” thinker’.⁷² But one of the purposes of this paper has been to argue the opposite case. It is true, of course, that Bacon’s vision of a future British imperium that was local rather than distant, ‘plumped’ together rather than oceanic, turned out to be historically false. Yet if Britain’s imperial destiny did not ultimately lie in Flanders, its military future – at Ramillies, at Waterloo, at Ypres – certainly did.

We may also allow that across Bacon’s lifetime, England’s colonial engagement with the Americas developed, and with it too, it seems, did Bacon’s sense of their geopolitical possibilities. The Virginia Company was first chartered in 1606 and by the time it received its second charter in May 1609 ‘S^r. Francis Bacon’ is named as a member of its Council.⁷³ Bacon was also a member of the Newfoundland Company that was chartered in 1610.⁷⁴ And when he came to offer George Villiers advice on state affairs in 1616, the ‘West-Indies’ is named (in one version of the letter at least) as the place Bacon saw as most likely to be favourable to the ‘Colonies and forreign Plantations’ that were necessary ‘out-lets, to a populous Nation’.⁷⁵ By the time he published his essay ‘Of Plantations’ in the final 1625 edition of the Essays, Bacon allowed that one of their goals might be to provide patient private investors with financial profit.⁷⁶ He had arrived at this view in the context of the rapid development since 1600 of the colonial joint-stock companies in which he was himself an optimistic investor, and a developing colonial commercial culture in London which closely observed the potential monetary returns to be had from foreign plantations, whether in Virginia or in Ulster.⁷⁷ This point may go some way to explain the disagreements with the arguments offered here that have been raised by Samuel Zeitlin.⁷⁸ On this account Bacon’s own personal intellectual trajectory would itself bear witness to an established longer-term transformation in the political theory of empire in early-modern Europe: from a neo-Roman (or Machiavellian) understanding that emphasised the deduction of colonies as an aspect of continental conquest, towards a newer commercial and oceanic account of colonisation which – articulated against the Spanish counter-example which had been so eloquently and influentially exposed by Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552) – emphasised the benefits of cultivation and trade over those of subjugation and extraction.⁷⁹

Nonetheless, in a speech that Bacon delivered to the newly-elected Speaker of the House of Commons on 3 February 1621, Bacon spoke of the ‘Plantation, and Reduction to Civility’ of Ireland as a work ‘resembling, indeed, the Workes of the ancient Heröes: No new piece, of that kind, in Modern Times’. He then went on to make a much more speculative point. It concerned the precarious English colonies then located on the margins of the North American landmass, and the islands adjacent to it that are now known as Bermuda:

this Kingdom, now first, in his Majesties Times, hath gotten a Lot, or Portion, in the New World, by the Plantation of Virginia and the Summer Islands. And certainly, it is with the Kingdomes on Earth, as it is in the Kingdom of Heaven. Sometimes, a Grain of Mustardseed, proves a great Tree. Who can tell?⁸⁰

My point here has been to emphasise that Bacon – lacking the hindsight that later developments would go on to provide – indeed could not tell. Such grounds as he had for hoping for greatness from Virginia or Bermuda derived from the example of the Spanish, and so far nothing in North America had suggested that plantations there might offer the kind of rich pickings that had been found in New Spain. He was evidently entirely unpersuaded by the vain hopes of figures such as Ralegh or Hakluyt that the English might make discoveries of precious metals in the New World comparable to those grasped by the Spanish. Instead, as I have suggested, the established treasures of the Low Countries offered a much more immediate – and, from Bacon’s point of view, much more plausible – prospect.

Hence I find scanty evidence that in the early seventeenth century Bacon foresaw a shining British city on a hill in North America. Compared with the tangible possibilities being opened up in County Tyrone, the nascent North American plantations were a place of fable: like the romantic Amadis de Gaule by contrast with the weighty deeds of Caesar’s Commentaries.⁸¹ Historians who prefer to look towards North America when investigating the ideological origins of the first British empire may therefore have been justified in their relative neglect of Bacon’s writings.

What Francis Bacon offers us, by contrast, is a quite different and rather unexpected idea of empire – one that was shared, we might add, by his follower James Harrington in his thirtieth and final ‘Order’ for Oceana.⁸² Once it had taken in Ireland, Bacon’s early imperial vision led not westward to America, but instead in the opposite direction: back, towards the annexation of the Netherlands, and a dream of potential empire in Europe that was continental.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to this journal’s two anonymous referees, and to Sam Zeitlin and other participants at a seminar on ‘Nature, politics and the imagination in the thought of Francis Bacon’ held at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2014, for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, which this publication now supersedes. I also thank my former doctoral student Jamie Trace for many stimulating discussions about Giovanni Botero and his English readers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC [grant number: 617391].

Notes

1 Hiram Morgan, ‘Francis Bacon and Policy-Making in Ireland under Elizabeth and James’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 119C (2019): 1–26. Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, ‘Francis Bacon on Imperial and Colonial Warfare’, The Review of Politics 83 (2021): 196–218.

2 See David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 57–9; Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 169, 187.

3 James Harrington, ‘The Commonwealth of Oceana’, in The Political Writings of James Harrington, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 157.

4 Jennifer Pitts, ‘Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism’, Annual Review of Political Science 13 (2010): 211–35, provides an overview.

5 Howard B. White, ‘Bacon’s Imperialism’, The American Political Science Review 52 (1958): 489. See subsequently, idem, Peace Among the Willows: The Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968); also Charles Whitney, Francis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), esp. 198, seeing the Bensalemites of the New Atlantis as Baconian ‘intellectual imperialists’; and, more concretely, Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, the State and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

6 Markku Peltonen, ‘Politics and Science: Francis Bacon and the True Greatness of States’, Historical Journal 35 (1992): 279–305; extended and developed in Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 192–228. See also Richard Serjeantson, ‘Francis Bacon and the Late Renaissance Politics of Learning’, in For the Sake of Learning, ed. Ann Blair and Anja Goeing (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 195–211.

7 Most recently in opposition to the arguments of this paper: see Mauro Scalercio, ‘Dominating Nature and Colonialism: Francis Bacon’s view of Europe and the New World’, History of European Ideas 44 (2018): 1076–91. See also Sarah Irving, ‘“In a Pure Soil”: Colonial Anxieties in the Work of Francis Bacon’, History of European Ideas 32 (2006): 249–62; reprised in Sarah Irving, Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), ch. 1.

8 Pace John McGurk, Sir Henry Docwra, 1564–1631: Derry’s Second Founder (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), 241 n. 6, who bizarrely claims that ‘Bacon’s celebrated essay On [sic] Plantations has of course more to do with his passion for gardens than colonies’.

9 Francis Bacon, Operum moralium et civilium tomus, ed. William Rawley (London, 1638), sig. T6^r.

10 Pace Nicholas Canny, ‘The Origins of Empire’, in The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 8.

11 See e.g. Anthony Pagden, ‘The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Image of Empire in the Atlantic to c. 1700’, in The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 36, on how English legitimations of the subject slowly ‘abandoned the vision of El Dorado and Spanish-style kingdoms overseas for that of “colonies” and “plantations”; places, that is, which would be sources not of human or mineral, but of agricultural and commercial wealth’.

12 See e.g. David Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire’, in Origins of Empire, 109:

When used at all, the vernacular term ‘colony’ meant only the plantation of nucleated settlements within a foreign landscape, and carried none of the negative associations with exploitation and cultural domination that are implied by the much later term ‘colonialism’.

13 Sir John Davies, A Discouerie of the True Causes why Ireland was neuer entirely Subdued … vntill the Beginning of his Maiesties Happie Raigne (London, 1612), 3: ‘there haue bin … so many English Colonies planted in Ireland, as that, if the people were numbered at this day by the Poll, such as are descended of English race, would bee found more in number, then the ancient Natiues’.

14 British Library, London (hereafter BL), MS Royal 17. A. 56, fo. 71^v (Spedding, Letters and Life, 3: 313).

15 BL, MS Royal 17 A. 56, fo. 32^r. This professionally-copied manuscript provides a fuller, and probably therefore a later, version of this argument than the one recorded in Huntington Library (hereafter HL), MS EL 1870 (see fo. [5^r] for this passage). The text of the speech in the Royal MS is printed, in modernised form, in Francis Bacon, Works, ed. James Spedding, R.L. Ellis, and D.D. Heath, 7 vols (London, 1857–1861), 7: 641–79 (quotation at 661).

16 Niccolò Machiavelli, I Discorsi … sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (‘Palermo’ [i.e. London], 1584), bk 2, chs. 3–4, 7–8. Carlo Sigonio, De antiquo iure populi Romani (Bologna, 1574). For Bacon’s interests in the rights the Romans conferred on their colonies, see [Francis Bacon], A Briefe Discovrse, Touching the Happie Vnion of the Kingdomes of England, and Scotland (London, 1603), sigs. C1^v–C2^r (Spedding, Letters and Life, 95–97) ‘Argument … in the Case of the Post-Nati of Scotland’, in BL, MS Royal 17. A. 56, fo. 12^r–v (Bacon, Works, 7: 649); Francis Bacon, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (London, 1623), sigs. 3L2v–3L3r (Bacon, Works, 1: 793–802); and Francis Bacon, ‘Of the True Greatnesse of Kingdomes and Estates’, in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan, The Oxford Francis Bacon XV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 94.

17 This development takes its lead from the important contributions of David B. Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), and Nicholas Canny, ‘The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America’, William and Mary Quarterly 30 (1973): 575–98. Certain of Canny’s themes are prefigured in Howard Mumford Jones, ‘Origins of the Colonial Idea in England’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 85 (1942): 448–65. His thesis has now been extensively reassessed in Rory Rapple et al., ‘“The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America” Fifty Years Later’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 80 (2023): 435–92.

18 On this point see generally Canny, ‘Origins of Empire’, 7–8, and David Armitage, ‘The Elizabethan Idea of Empire’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14 (2004): 273–4.

19 Sir William Herbert, Croftus sive de Hibernia liber, ed. and trans. Arthur Keaveney and John A. Madden (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1992). See further Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Robe and Sword in the Conquest of Ireland’, in Law and Government under the Tudors, ed. Claire Cross, David Loades, and J.J. Scarisbrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 139–62; Ciaran Brady, ‘New English Ideology in Ireland and the two Sir William Herberts’, in Sixteenth-Century Identities, ed. A.J. Piesse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 75–111.

20 Markku Peltonen, ‘Classical Republicanism in Tudor England: The Case of Richard Beacon’s Solon His Follie’, History of Political Thought 15 (1994): 469–503 (challenged by D. Alan Orr, ‘Inventing the British Republic: Richard Beacon’s Solon His Follie (1594) and the Rhetoric of Civilization’, Sixteenth Century Journal 38 (2007): 975–94).

21 Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W.L. Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). (This edition is superior to the one edited by Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997)).

22 Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 198. See also Canny, ‘Origins of Empire’, 8.

23 Canny, Making Ireland British, 197–8. Canny’s argument might be a little more plausibly applied, not to Bacon’s thinking on Irish plantation after 1607, but to his earlier position paper ‘Considerations touching the Queen’s Service in Ireland’ written at the height of the Nine Years’ War, in August 1602 (Spedding, Letters and Life, 3: 45–51).

24 Bacon, Essayes, ed. Kiernan, 106.

25 Michael Kiernan, ‘Commentary’, in Bacon, Essayes, ed. Kiernan, 239.

26 As Kiernan, ‘Commentary’, 239, also allows.

27 Francis Bacon, ‘A Letter of Advice to My Lord of Essex, Immediately Before His Going Into Ireland’ (1600), in Spedding, Letters and Life, 2: 129–33 (quotation from 130).

28 Huntington Library, San Marino (hereafter HL), MS EL 1721, fo. 11^r (cf. Spedding, Letters and Life, 4: 118).

29 Spedding, Letters and Life, 4: 5.

30 George Hill, An Historical Account of the Plantation in Ulster at the Commencement of the Seventeenth Century (Belfast: M’Caw, Stevenson & Orr, 1877), 71.

31 Hill, Historical Account, 75. The document containing this ‘project’ appears never to have been published: it may be found in The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA), SP 63/225, fos. 256^r–260^v.

32 For this date, see Spedding, Letters and Life, 4: 115. In the copy at BL, MS Harley 6797, fo. 122^r, Bacon himself later assigned the work the mistaken date of 1606, which was then followed in Francis Bacon, Resuscitatio, ed. William Rawley (London, 1657), sig. 2K4^r.

33 HL, MS EL 1721.

34 Cyril Davenport, Royal English Bookbindings (London: Seeley, 1896), 52, 56. I owe this point to Dr Deirdre Serjeantson.

35 HL, MS EL 1721, fos. 5^v–6^r (cf. Bacon, Essayes, ed. Kiernan, 106). (This parallel is uncharacteristically overlooked in Kiernan’s rich commentary on the Essayes.)

36 Nonetheless, the prospect of blood being shed in future was prominent both the ‘Project’ on which Bacon is commenting and in his own text (see e.g. HL, MS EL 1721, fo. 41^r, on ‘meanes to secure the Countrey against future perills in case of any Revolt, and defection’ and ‘the daunger of any attempts of Kiernes, and sword-men’). The example of the Munster Plantation – in which ‘the worke of yeares’ had been made ‘the spoyle of daies’ – was foremost (HL, MS EL 1721, fo. 41^r).

37 HL, MS EL 1721, fo. 43^v (cf. Spedding, Letters and Life, 4: 125). There is a puzzle here, however, since the authors of the original ‘Proiect’ did in fact explicitly include in their plans ‘Natives whoe are to bee made freeholderes’ (TNA, SP 63/225, fo. 257^v). This inclusion was later celebrated by Davies, Discouerie of the True Causes, 281. Had Bacon perhaps seen a different, earlier, version of the plan – or is the difference wilful?

38 Jean Bodin, Method ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Paris, 1566), 438 (ch. ix): ‘Est autem coloniarum deducendum ratio quadruplex. [… .] alterum coloniarum genus deducitur abundante multitudine’. (English version in Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 360–61.)

39 British Library, MS Royal 17. A. 56, fos. 71^r–v (Spedding, Letters and Life, 3: 313).

40 HL, MS EL 1721, fo. 11^r–v (cf. Spedding, Letters and Life, 4: 118).

41 HL, MS EL 1721, fos. 12^r, 11^v (cf. Spedding, Letters and Life, 4: 118).

42 Bacon, Essayes, ed. Kiernan, 47.

43 HL, MS EL 1721, fo. 13^r (cf. Spedding, Letters and Life, 4: 118). On the prevalence in later sixteenth century writings of the idea that England was overpopulated, and for one response also proposing English ‘replanting the Country [sc. Ireland] with English inhabitants’, see David B. Quinn, ‘“A Discourse of Ireland” (Circa 1599): A Sidelight on English Colonial Policy’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 47 C (1942): 156, 164.

44 This judgment is intended to complement the intriguing and resourceful, though different, interpretation of Bacon’s ‘Seditions and Troubles’ essay that is offered in Steve Hindle, ‘Imagining Insurrection in Seventeenth-Century England. Representations of the Midland Rising of 1607’, History Workshop Journal 66 (2008): 36–41.

45 Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, MS Hardwick 51, item 12 (unfoliated). The most secure published discussion of this manuscript and the likely termini for its copying remains Noel Malcolm, De Dominis (1560–1624): Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist, and Relapsed Heretic (London: Strickland & Scott, 1984), 53 and 123 n. 310, supplemented by Noel Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda and the Thirty Years’ War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7. Neither Robin Bunce, ‘Thomas Hobbes’ Relationship with Francis Bacon – An Introduction’, Hobbes Studies 16 (2003): 41–83 (who was not aware of Malcolm’s book) nor Andrew Huxley, ‘The Aphorismi and A Discourse of Laws: Bacon, Cavendish, and Hobbes, 1615–1620’, Historical Journal 47 (2004): 399–412 (which recapitulates, though it does not cite, several of the findings of John C. Fortier, ‘Hobbes and “A Discourse of Laws”: The Perils of Word Print Analysis’, Review of Politics 59 (1997): 861–87) adds to our knowledge of this document.

46 Peltonen, ‘Politics and Science’, 281–2; Peltonen, Classical Humanism, 198–99.

47 Botero’s work was first printed in 1588; thereafter it was often reprinted together with Botero’s Della ragione di Stato (Venice and Ferrara, 1589; Rome, 1590; Venice, 1601, 1606). It also appeared in a separate edition put out by Scipione Barberino (Milan, 1596). A Latin translation made from the German version by Georg Draut might also have been available to Bacon (Ursel, 1602). For a rich study of Botero’s English reception in this period, see Jamie Trace, ‘Giovanni Botero and English Political Thought’ (Unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2017).

48 Machiavelli, Discorsi, ii. 6. See also Botero, Della ragione di stato, ii. 2.

49 See Giovanni Botero, ‘Delle Cause della Grandezza delle Città’, in Della ragion di stato libri dieci. Con tre libri della cause della grandezza della Città (Venice, 1606), 331–2 (bk ii, ch. 2), on how colonies ‘giouassero all’augmento della potenza’. I have benefited from the rendering of Giovanni Botero, The Reason of State, trans. Robert Bireley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

50 Botero, Della Grandezza, 332: ‘egli è vero, che se le Colonie debbono augentare la loro matrice, bisogna che siano vicine’. Translation from Botero, A Treatise, Concerning the Causes of the Magnificencie and Greatnes of Cities, trans. Robert Peterson (London, 1606), 35 (bk ii, ch. 2).

51 Botero’s English translator Robert Peterson regarded his handling of colonies as sufficiently important that he added a translation of the chapter on colonies (bk vi, ch. iv) from Botero’s Della Ragione di Stato (1589), as an appendix to his translation of Delle cause della grandezza delle città (1588). See Botero, A Treatise, trans. Peterson, 99–101. Almost nothing is known of Peterson beyond his publications: see L.G. Kelly, ‘Peterson, Robert (fl. 1562–1606)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22030.

52 Botero, Della ragione di stato, 167: ‘Non si debbono però fare Colonie lungi dallo stato tuo; perche in quel caso, non essendo à te facile il soccorrerle, esse ò restano preda de’nemici; ò accommodandosi all’occasioni, & a’tempi, si gouernano senza rispetto della loro origine’. Translation from Botero, A Treatise, 100. This view contrasts somewhat with what he had said in book i, ch. 7, of Della ragione di stato, 14, that even a crown’s territories distant from one another may nonetheless be ‘united by the sea’ (uniti per mezo del mare), though editions from 1598 onwards removed the unwelcome rider that the Spanish Netherlands were an exception to this principle, owing to ‘the opposition of England’ (per l’oppositione d’Inghilterra).

53 Bacon, Essayes (1625), sig. 2A1^r.

54 Bacon, The Essaies (London, 1612), sig. Q4^r. In the 1625 version ‘militarie’ is altered to ‘stout and warlike’. See Bacon, Essayes, ed. Kiernan, 91.

55 Bacon, Essayes, ed. Kiernan, 91, 96. On the implications of this point, see Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, ‘Francis Bacon on Just Warfare’, The Political Science Reviewer, 45 (2021), 69–106 (esp. 83–85).

56 Bacon, Essaies (1612), sigs. Q3^v–Q4^r.

57 Bacon, Essaies (1612), sig. Q3^v. The comparison with heaven is toned down in 1625: see Bacon, Essayes, ed. Kiernan, 90. On Bacon’s employment of the mustard-seed image, see further Michelle Tolman Clarke, ‘Uprooting Nebuchadnezzar's Tree: Francis Bacon's criticism of Machiavellian imperialism’, Political Research Quarterly 61 (2008): 367–78.

58 Bacon, Essayes, ed. Kiernan, 94.

59 BL, MS Harley 7021, fos. 25^r–42^v (Bacon, Works, 7: 47–64). The composition-date of this unfinished treatise has been much debated. James Spedding proposed the summer of 1608 (Bacon, Works, 7: 43). By contrast, Jonathon Marwil, The Trials of Counsel: Francis Bacon in 1621 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1976), 214 (following Charles de Rémusat, Bacon, sa vie et sa temps (Paris, 1857), 69), and Benjamin Farrington, Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science (New York: Crowell, 1949), 151, proposed that it was begun immediately before the accession of James in 1603; this suggestion is taken up in Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The troubled life of Francis Bacon (London: Gollancz, 1998), 272. Peltonen, ‘Politics and Science’, 282–3 n. 9, however, finds the evidence inconclusive and scrupulously concludes that ‘the date of the composition of the treatise could have been from 1603 to 1608’. It seems to me most likely to have been begun between 1605 and 1607.

60 BL, MS Harley 7021, fos. 31^v–32^r (Bacon, Works, 7: 55).

61 BL, MS Harley 7021, fo. 32^r (Bacon, Works, 7: 55). We might make the comparison in this respect with Richard Beacon’s Solon His Follie (1594), in which the completion of the conquest in Ireland is (in the words of Peltonen, ‘Richard Beacon’, 503) ‘but a means’ towards the ‘loftier goal’ of the greatness of England.

62 BL, MS Royal 17. A. 56, fo. 91^r (Spedding, Letters and Life, 4: 323).

63 See further the essays in John Robertson, ed., A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

64 BL, MS Additional 27,278, fo. 23^v (Spedding, Letters and Life, 4: 74).

65 Francis Bacon, ‘Considerations Touching a Warre with Spaine’, in Certaine Miscellany Works, ed. William Rawley (London, 1629), sigs. E2^v, K4^r.

66 Spedding, Letters and Life, 7: 469–505.

67 Bacon, ‘Argument … in the Case of Post-Nati’, in BL, MS Royal 17. A. 56, fos. 19^v, 52^v–60^v (Bacon, Works, 7: 653, 673–78).

68 See, in particular, John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Jonathan Scott, When the Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

69 Simon Groenveld, ‘The English Civil Wars as a Cause of the First Anglo-Dutch War, 1640–1652’, Historical Journal 30 (1987): 556.

70 Andrew Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery, and Arbitrary Government (‘Amsterdam’ [recte London], 1677): 17–18. This point is owing to Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, 225.

71 Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire (London: Penguin, 2007), 189.

72 Scott, Britannia, 16.

73 Magdalene College, Cambridge, Ferrar Papers 120 (a copy made in 1619 of the names on the Second Charter of 1609); consulted via Virginia Company Archives (Adam Matthew Digital, 2022), https://www.virginiacompanyarchives.amdigital.co.uk. See also William Stith, The History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia (New York: Joseph Sabin, 1865), Appendix, 16.

74 Gillian T. Cell, ‘The Newfoundland Company: A Study of Subscribers to a Colonizing Venture’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 22 (1965): 617, who also offers a general analysis of the motives of the investors.

75 ‘The Copy of a Letter, Conceived to be Written to the Late Duke of Buckingham, When He First Became a Favourite to King James’, in Cabala, sive Scrinia sacra (London, 1663), 50 (Spedding, Letters and Life, 6: 50). Note that this geographical specificity is absent from an earlier version of this advice: A Letter of Advice Written by Sr. Francis Bacon to the Duke of Buckingham, when he became Favourite to King James (London, 1661), 11 (Spedding, Letters and Life, 6: 21).

76 Bacon, Essayes, ed. Kiernan, 106.

77 This culture is eloquently exemplified by the newsletter of 1611 printed in D.B. Quinn, ‘Advice for Investors in Virginia’, William and Mary Quarterly 23 (1966): 136–45, which concludes (145): ‘The Cytyzens of London are exceding wearye of theyre Ireyshe plantacion’.

78 Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, ‘Eutopia of Empire: Francis Bacon’s Short View and the imperial and colonial background to the New Atlantis’, Political Research Quarterly 76 (2022): 1012–23 (esp. 1016).

79 A precise and lucid version of this argument for the case of the United Provinces is made by Arthur Weststeijn, ‘Republican Empire: Colonialism, Commerce and Corruption in the Dutch Golden Age’, Renaissance Studies 26 (2012): 491–509. Some consequences in the English case are explored in the important studies of Philip Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. ch. 4, and Stern, ‘Corporate Virtue: The Languages of Empire in Early Modern British Asia’, Renaissance Studies 26 (2012): 510–30.

80 Francis Bacon, Resuscitatio, ed. William Rawley (London, 1657), sig. N4^v (Spedding, Letters and Life, 7: 175). See also Theodore Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967; repr. London: Routledge, 1999), 69 n. 99.

81 HL, MS EL 1721, fos. 33^v–34^r (cf. Spedding, Letters and Life, 2: 123).

82 Harrington, Oceana, 319–33. See further Mark Somos ‘Harrington’s Project: The Balance of Money, a Republican Constitution for Europe, and England’s Patronage of the World’, in Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment, ed. Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, and Richard Whatmore (Cambridge, 2017), 20–43. (I am grateful to Mishael Knight for helpful discussion of this point.)