Francis Bacon on religious warfare

ABSTRACT

For Francis Bacon (1561–1626), toleration is an end-state goal. In his New Atlantis, Christians and Jews alike live peaceably together as they did not in the England of his time, from which Jews were banned. Yet, for Bacon, toleration was not always, in the first instance, regarded as the means for its own attainment. The present article situates Bacon's utterances on religious warfare within four contexts: the writings of Richard Knolles, Giovanni Botero, Alberico Gentili, and Bacon's own works advocating British imperial hegemony and a pan-European league of (Protestant) Christians. Having situated Bacon's advocacy of religious warfare within these contexts, the present article argues that Bacon invokes the rhetoric of religious warfare as part of a strategy to secure British (and Protestant) dominance in global politics, not least against the rival power of the Spanish Habsburgs. The article thus aims to lay out Bacon's various pronouncements on religious warfare with and against the contextual material for a fuller and richer understanding of Bacon's project. Bacon aims, the article argues, at a peace requisite to the fulfilment and advancement of scientific progress and aims at an ultimate toleration in religious affairs. Yet, for the success of that project, Bacon regards the defeat of the Inquisition and the political power that supports it as a necessary precondition, for which the invocation of all requisite means, including targeted and specific injunctions to ‘holy war’, is held, by Bacon, to be politic. For Bacon, the problem of religious warfare is that such warfare must, in his view, however infelicitously, be urged and waged for the very purpose that it may (at some future time) be abated and, finally, ended.

KEYWORDS:

• Francis Bacon
• religious war
• political philosophy
• empire
• peace

1. Introduction

Pleading before the King's Bench on 17 May 1615 in his capacity as Attorney General, Francis Bacon took note of ‘the doctrine, that upon an excommunication of the Pope, with sentence of deposing, a King by any son of Adam may be slaughtered’.¹ To this doctrine licensing regicide against excommunicate princes and the putative authors of the doctrine, Bacon did not take kindly. ‘Nay, I say,’ the Attorney General is reported to have said, ‘it deserveth rather some holy war or league amongst all Christian princes of either religion for the extirping and rasing of this opinion and the authors thereof from the face of the earth, than the stile of pen or speech.’² Rather than refutation, Bacon contended, the opinion of licit regicide might rather be removed by ‘some holy war’³ raised, in the first instance, against the Vatican. Yet, the Vatican was not the only place or power against which Francis Bacon advocated martial intervention in an overtly religious tune. Nearly a decade after his plea before the King's Bench, in his Considerations touching a War with Spain, Bacon would advance ‘three just grounds of war with Spain’, not the least of which was ‘A just fear of the subversion of our Church and religion.’⁴ No less, in his diplomatic correspondence as well as in his philosophic dialogue, An Advertisement Tovching an Holy Warre, both Bacon in propria persona and through the mouthpieces of his dialogic characters would seemingly advocate pan-European war upon the Ottoman empire in the terms, as Bacon's title indicates, of ‘Holy War.’⁵

How might one make sense or begin to understand such seeming advocacy of religious warfare by a figure at times thought and claimed to be a founding thinker of modern science, of rationalism, and of the Enlightenment?⁶

Recent scholarship on Bacon's religious and scientific thought makes comparatively little of Bacon's advocacy for religious warfare or Bacon's injunctions to ‘holy war’.⁷ Meanwhile, the scholarship on Bacon's political philosophy which does take note of the Baconian advocacy of wars of religion does not situate Bacon's utterances either in the context of his prominent contemporaries writing on the Ottomans, reason of state, and the law of war, or within the broader context of Baconian foreign policy as a whole, often treating Bacon's advocacy of holy war as ironic or exoteric in character.⁸ The present article aims to resolve these absences in the scholarly literature on Bacon with a view to gaining a better understanding of early modern political thought on religious warfare more broadly and of Bacon's thought in particular.

Because Bacon directs the language of ‘holy war’ and religiously inflected warfare at a number of targets, a number of contexts are relevant to understanding Bacon's claims for religious warfare historically. As Bacon advances some claims of ‘holy war’ against the Ottomans, the present article first aims to situate his utterances in relation to a prominent early modern English source on the Ottoman Empire, Richard Knolles's Generall Historie. As Bacon makes his utterances on behalf of religious warfare within geostrategic context, the article also situates Bacon's work in relation to the reason of state tradition, not least in relation to the work of Giovanni Botero. Further, as Bacon advances claims for religious warfare as a lawyer, it is worth considering Bacon's arguments in relation to contemporary writings on the law of war, not least those of Alberico Gentili.⁹

Finally, as Bacon advances his arguments for British hegemony most clearly in ‘A Short View to be taken of Great Britain and Spain’, the article offers an extended interpretation of this understudied work to better understand Bacon's pronouncements on religious warfare.

The present article thus situates Bacon's utterances on religious warfare within four contexts: the writings of Richard Knolles, Giovanni Botero, Alberico Gentili, and Bacon's own works advocating British imperial hegemony over and against Spanish claims to empire. Having situated Bacon's advocacy of religious warfare within these contexts, the present article argues that Bacon invokes the rhetoric of religious warfare as part of a strategy to secure British dominance in global politics, not least against the rival power of the Spanish Habsburgs. The article thus aims to lay out Bacon's various pronouncements on religious warfare with and against the relevant contextual material for a fuller and richer understanding of Bacon's project. Bacon aims, the article argues, at a peace requisite to the fulfilment and advancement of scientific progress and aims at an ultimate toleration in religious affairs. Yet, for the success of that project, Bacon regards the defeat of the Inquisition and the political power that supports it as a necessary precondition, for which the invocation of all requisite means, including targeted and specific injunctions to ‘holy war’, is held, by Bacon, to be politic.

2. Bacon, Reason of State, and the Ottomans: Richard Knolles's Generall Historie and Giovanni Botero's Della Ragione di Stato

Across the frontispiece of Richard Knolles's 1603 The Generall Historie of the Turkes two figures face one another. The figure on the right is full bearded with a plume helmet; he is attired in armour with a buckler and a drawn sword. The personage on the left is moustachioed and turbaned, enveloped in a flowing cloak, and wielding a drawn battle axe. The figure on the right bears a shield broadly painted with a cross against a white field; the figure on the left guards himself with a shield displaying multiple crescent moons: separated by two pillars the figures are counterpoised depictions of an Ottoman and a Christian, highlighted by the subtitle to Knolles's work: ‘from the first beginning of that Nation to the rising of the Othoman Familie: with all the notable expeditions of the Christian Princes against them’. Beneath the title and the pillars and warriors which frame it, between two leonine faces staring out at the viewer, in the lower margin of the frontispiece a fierce battle of infantry and cavalry is being waged between forces waving a discernible crescent insignia and an army brandishing a cross-strewn flag. From the poised gladiatorial posture of the two figures, coupled with the pitched battle being waged beneath them, the reader staring at Knolles's frontispiece garners the impression that his Historie is not merely presented to chronicle past wars and ‘notable expeditions’ but to sway his readers to undertake new ones.

Knolles opens his history with the presentation of the Ottoman Empire as a threat, indeed, pronouncing the ‘Empire of the Turkes’ to be ‘the present terrour of the world’ in the first sentence of the main text of the Historie.¹⁰ Building upon the imagery of threat and terror, Knolles refers to the Ottomans as ‘this barbarous Empire’¹¹ and the Turks as ‘this barbarous nation.’¹² In his opening address ‘To the Reader’, Knolles broaches the question of the causes of ‘the greatnesse and increase of the Turkes Empire’¹³ in a marginal note and while emphasizing that ‘The causes whereof are many and right lamentable’ he has perceived an ordinal hierarchy in the causes of Turkish greatness. Knolles attributes the ‘first and greatest’ cause of the ‘greatnesse’ of the Ottoman Empire to the ‘iust and secret iudgement of the Almightie’. On the reading of Knolles's first cause, divine power deploys the Ottomans as the instrument of divine wrath upon wayward nations and kingdoms, even and, perhaps, especially Christian ones. Here, perhaps drawing upon an earlier humanist tradition of writings on the Ottomans that includes works by Erasmus and Martin Luther,¹⁴ Knolles stresses that Turkish victories over Christian powers may be an indirect divine instrument for the expression of the ‘dreadfull wrath’ with which ‘sinnes’ are punished. Subsequent to divine retribution or divine revenge, Knolles perceives a cause of Turkish greatness in ‘the uncertainetie of worldly things’ whereby all is in flux and the fall of one empire is succeeded by the rise of another, with time triumphing over all.¹⁵ The third cause, and the first, which Knolles professes is not derived ‘from aboue’, is the divided character of European Christendom in the face of an external threat and a corresponding ‘small care’ which Christian princes have had ‘of the common state of the Christian Commonweale’.¹⁶ This lack of care and unity amongst Christians has, in Knolles's view, been particularly disastrous as in place of unity, Christian states ‘are so diuided among themselues with endlesse quarrels, partly for questions of religion (neuer by the sword to bee determined,) partly for matters touching their own proper state and soueraignetie, and that with such distrust and implacable hatred’.¹⁷ This last being a human cause it is subject to a human remedy: in lieu of such internal divisions and fratricidal strife, Christian princes could ‘ioyne their common forces against the common enemie’, in the absence of which remedy both the fratricide and the divine retribution at Ottoman hands would, in Knolles's view, continue apace.

Knolles's work, and works like it,¹⁸ served as the contextual background when Francis Bacon came to treat the question of the Ottoman Empire and, in the course of this article, as we consider Bacon's views on religious war, we shall have to keep Knolles's imagery of a divided Christendom facing retribution as well as his proposed remedy of Christian forces ‘ioyned’ against a common external adversary in the back of our minds.¹⁹

Francis Bacon lived in an age of religious warfare and this is a persistent theme of his political reflections and writings. Bacon witnessed the French Wars of Religion from 1576–1579 while attached to the English embassy of Sir Amyas Paulet in France, served in Parliament throughout the confessionally framed Armada Wars between Britain and Spain, and advocated for British entry into the Thirty Years’ War on behalf of the Protestant side at the end of his lifetime. No less than bearing witness to religious strife, Francis Bacon treats questions related to religious warfare in his literary and scientific writings, his Essayes, his History of the Reign of King Henry VII, his diplomatic correspondence, philosophic dialogues, his aphoristic Apophthegmes new and old, and in his white papers proposing government policy for the Tudor and Stuart monarchs Elizabeth I and James VI and I. Yet, Bacon centrally treats these themes in two main texts from the last decade of his life, his Considerations touching a War with Spain of 1624, in which Bacon advocates British intervention on the Protestant side of the Thirty Years’ War against the Spanish Habsburgs and in the curious dialogue dated to 1622/3, An Advertisement Tovching an Holy Warre, a philosophic work which might be thought to havethe premise of a bad joke: a Protestant theologian, a Catholic theologian, a soldier, a courtier, a politique and a moderate divine debate the question of whether Europe and Christendom might unify amidst the Thirty Years’ War through an external war upon the Ottoman Empire. Thus, across both these key texts, Bacon treats the question of and proposal for religiously inflected war with Spain under the Habsburgs and with the Ottoman Empire under Ahmed I, Osman II, Mustafa I, and Murad IV. Why does Bacon treat this question primarily through the, at first glance, disparate, cases of Spain and the Ottoman Empire?

Bacon held that both the Spanish Habsburgs and the Ottomans raised similar claims on behalf of a religious injunction to impose their religions, Roman Catholicism and Islam, upon others by force. In his pivotal essay, centrally situated in the 1625 edition of the Essayes, ‘Of the true Greatnesse of Kingdomes and Estates’, Bacon examines both Spanish and Ottoman power and observes that ‘The Turke, hath at hand, for Cause of Warre, the Propagation of his Law or Sect; A Quarell that he may alwaies Command.’²⁰ In his Considerations touching a War with Spain of 1624, Bacon made the comparison explicit, ‘As if the crown of Spain had a little of this, that they would plant the Pope's law by arms, as the Ottomans do the law of Mahomet.’²¹ In aligning the purported justifications for aggressive or offensive religious war advanced by Spain and the Ottomans, Bacon structures his pretext for a defensive religious war against either the Ottoman or the Spanish Empires at the same moment that he estranges Roman Catholicism from Protestant Christianity whilst assimilating the former to Islam.

In this assimilation of the claims of the Spanish and Ottoman powers, it is worth recalling Bacon's interest in Giovanni Botero, whose notion of ragione di stato Bacon drew upon explicitly in his 1605 Advancement of Learning.²² For Botero, in his 1589 Ragione di Stato, Islam is not properly grasped as a religion but rather redescribed as an infidel sect (setta).²³ Botero quickly follows this redescription of Islam with a rhetorical strategy which links Botero's confessional opponents to Islam. In the next sentence Botero redescribes Calvinist Christians (discepoli di un certo Caluino) as a sect (setta) for the self-same reason (Per la medesima ragione) as the adherents of Islam. According to Botero, Calvinists are bearers of war rather than peace and, lacking the defence of reasons, doctrines, and saintly authorities, they ‘defend their sect with arms in the manner of the Turks’.²⁴ As one contemporary scholar has observed, Botero rhetorically assimilated Muslims and Calvinists in an argument that neither can be trusted in politics and that toleration and faith with either ‘does not work.’²⁵

Perhaps drawing upon Botero's rhetorical strategy, Bacon, too, refers to Islam as a ‘sect’ rather than a religion properly so called.²⁶ Bacon also follows Botero in swiftly associating and assimilating Islam and Catholicism—both further their religious aims by means of war, rather than peace, and may thus be most justly opposed in self-defence. Bacon mirrors Botero's rhetorical strategy, but turns it against Botero himself: he uses the rhetorical weapons of Jesuits against the material defender of Catholicism, the Spanish crown.²⁷

In discursive combat against what Bacon regards as the imperialistic claims of Spain and the Ottoman Empire to impose their religion on other powers, not least on Bacon's own Britain, Bacon offers two categories of ‘wars for religion’ in his 1624 Considerations touching a War with Spain: ‘wars defensive for religion’ and ‘offensive wars for religion.’²⁸

Wars defensive for religion are those which are based upon ‘A just fear for the subversion of our Church and religion’²⁹ and are wars for the preservation of existing religious institutions and structures. These wars defensive for religion, Bacon affirms, exclude the promotion of rebellion, and are with this exclusion, in his assessment ‘most just.’³⁰ Bacon's class of pre-emptive defensive wars may extend to wars defensive for religion, so that Britain may pre-emptively attack Spain for the defence of the Anglican Church. Bacon contends that the war which he propounds against Spain is a defensive war even if England strikes first in the war. Moreover, to the extent that the war is a defensive war and a war for religion, Bacon writes that ‘if this war be a defensive (as I proved it to be), no man will doubt that a defensive war against a foreigner for religion is lawful.’³¹ By contrast, ‘offensive wars for religion’, which seem to involve invading the countries of others for the purpose of imposing new religious institutions upon them, are, in Bacon's assessment ‘seldom to be approved, or never’.³² But Bacon then immediately qualifies this negative assessment of waging offensive wars of religion: they are never to be approved, Bacon avows, ‘unless they have some mixture of civil titles.’³³

In allowing that a mixture of civil titles may justify offensive wars of religion, does Bacon give us any hints as to what these civil titles may be, the status of their mixture with claims for offensive religious war, or a view of the particular religious wars which Bacon himself may have in mind? At first glance, mixture may seem like an unusual way of speaking within the just war tradition. Are mixed titles sufficient for justifying warfare? Is there a threshold of mixture which the title must meet to justify war? In what, then, does this mixture of civil titles consist which tends to upturn Bacon's negative assessment of waging offensive wars of religion? What particular war seems to meet this criterion? In order to answer these questions, as well as to get a better sense of what Bacon is doing, it is worth considering Bacon's view of the categories of ‘wars for religion’ (offensive and defensive) within the context of the thought and views of the most prominent civilian jurist teaching in his age in England, the civilian lawyer and Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, Alberico Gentili.

3. Bacon, Religious Warfare, and the Law of War: Alberico Gentili's De jure belli

In his posthumously published unperfected dialogue on holy war, composed in 1622–3, Bacon includes amongst the dramatis personae in his Parisian salon one ‘Eusebius’ who ‘beareth the Character of a Moderate Diuine.’³⁴ This moderate divine is silent in matters of whether or when to wage war: in all versions of Bacon's scribally-published though unfinished Advertisement Tovching an Holy Warre, Eusebius doesn't utter a word.³⁵

The character of Eusebius might seem to instantiate the famous injunction of Alberico Gentili's De jure belli. The twelfth chapter of its first book concludes by imploring theologians to be quiet in matters that are none of their concern, not least, in the matters of war with which Gentili's treatise is especially concerned.³⁶ Gentili's great prominence as a civilian lawyer and Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford, along with his membership of Gray's Inn (Bacon's Inn and a persistent place of residence)³⁷ as Bacon's contemporary from 1599 onwards all incline one to take seriously Gentili's major work on the law of war as an important context for Bacon's thinking on the subject.

In De jure belli, the justification of war, for Gentili, is ultimately and importantly a legal question: the justice of war is properly the province of jurisconsults rather than theologians.³⁸ Gentili argues that wars should have grounds, but the grounds for war should be just as, in his opinion, ‘an unjust cause is no cause at all.’³⁹

Within this framework, how then does it stand with religious warfare? For Gentili, religion is not a just claim or cause for undertaking or waging war. Rather, in his own age, religion is solely a pretext and not a just one at that. ‘For in these latest times religion is merely a pretext’, Gentili writes in De iure belli.⁴⁰ Following a claim advanced by Machiavelli in Il Principe and propounded in Guicciardini's Historia d’Italia, Gentili describes the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century King Ferdinand of Spain as having ‘covered almost all his excesses with a respectable mantle of religion’,⁴¹ noting further that ‘it was under a similar pretext that the Emperor Charles, the grandson of Ferdinand, shaded his desire for dominion.’⁴²

In his De iure belli, Gentili distinguishes between wars waged for the sake of religion and wars waged for the maintenance of religion. Wars waged for the sake of religion, in Gentili's presentation, seem to involve the forcing of consciences—they are wars against ‘heretics’ or ‘infidels’ for the sake of converting them to the true ‘Faith’, whatever local preference on this question happens to be. However, Gentili holds that religion is a matter of free will. Gentili emphasizes that ‘Religion is a matter of the mind and of the will, which is always accompanied by freedom’ and that, therefore, ‘Religion ought to be free.’⁴³ Gentili emphasizes the freedom of the will and the freedom of the mind in arguing that wars waged for the sake of religion are unjust: ‘if religion is of such a nature that it ought to be forced upon no one against his will, and if a propaganda which exacts faith by blows is called a strange and unheard of thing, it follows that force in connexion with religion is unjust.’⁴⁴ Gentili holds that ‘no man's rights are violated by a difference in religion, nor is it lawful to make war because of religion.’⁴⁵ Waging war for the sake of religion, in Gentili's assessment, means compulsion when the war is for conversion but also compulsion when the war is for maintenance of religion. Gentili's view of wars for the maintenance of religion, however, particularly by subjects being forced to convert to a different religion, which fall under the ambit of wars for self-defence or protection rather than wars for religion, is less condemnatory than his view of wars waged for the sake of conversion: these latter are unjust and have the status of unwarranted pretexts, as Gentili assessed Ferdinand of Spain's wars for faith to be.⁴⁶

Let us return now to Bacon's categories in his Considerations, where it seems there is some convergence between Bacon's and Gentili's categories: Gentili's wars for the maintenance of religion become Bacon's wars defensive for religion; Gentili's wars for the sake of religion become Bacon's wars offensive for religion. Importantly, however, Bacon modifies Gentili's categories even as he adopts them: for Bacon, it seems, a space opens up for the latter category in which offensive wars for religion might, if ‘they have some mixture of civil titles’⁴⁷ be classed and advocated as just wars.

The question of the admixture of civil titles as ground for the justification of offensive wars of religion raises interpretative difficulties. Outside his Considerations, Bacon is almost completely silent about the notion of a civil title. Nonetheless, he calls his political thought and social philosophy ‘civil philosophy’ and, at various moments, not least in his New Atlantis, he propounds peace as the aim of his political thought, with the isle of Bensalem of New Atlantis named after the offspring of peace. In his essay ‘Of Atheisme’ Bacon attributes to ‘Learned Times,’ another explicit aim of his project, especially when coupled with peace and prosperity, the force of causing atheism.⁴⁸ In a directly juxtaposed sentence, in the following essay,⁴⁹ Bacon ascribes to ‘Barbarous Times’ the force of causing superstition.⁵⁰ In Bacon's parallel causal lists, times of learning, coupled with peace and prosperity are directly contrasted with ‘Barbarous Times’. Taken together, the terms ‘learning’, ‘peace’, and ‘prosperity’ are opposed to that which is ‘Barbarous’ in Bacon's discourse—they are near synonyms for what he means by civility or that which is civil. On this view, while defense or necessity may count as civil titles, peace, coupled with the learning which it may foster, would seem to be a civil title as well.

Yet, on Bacon's view, the international situation in 1623/4 could hardly be characterized as peaceful. In his banishment from court and parliament, in February of 1623/4 Bacon drafted a parliamentary speech for Sir Edward Sackville, later Earl of Dorset, advocating a cessation of treaty relations with Spain in the aftermath of the failed Spanish match. Much of the draft for this same speech was to recur verbatim, with argumentative expansions, in Bacon's 1624 tract Considerations Touching a War with Spain written later that same year.⁵¹

Bacon's draft for this parliamentary speech opens with a sharp and pointed critique of James VI and I's policy of peace with Spain, codified in the 1604 Treaty of London, which the notes class as a matter of manifest delusion, urging instead a rupture of treaty relations and full preparation for open war. Bacon frames a departure from James's policy heretofore as a rare potential point of parliamentary consensus as ‘all will advise the King not to entertain further a treaty wherein he hath been so manifestly and so long deluded.’⁵²

While not openly published and often circulated in manuscript via scribal publication, Bacon's writings from this period bear some seemingly unguarded criticisms of his sovereign and particularly his sovereign's strategy for keeping Britain at peace. Speaking on behalf of a motion for supply in the House of Commons on 12 April 1614, Bacon stressed that under the terms of the 1604 Treaty of London only a nominal peace was being enjoyed by Britain, such that ‘when a state environed with envious foreigners on the one part, and encroachments on matter of trade on the other side, and religion so much questioned; our peace may flatter us, not secure us.’⁵³ In addition to his ventriloquistic 1624 pronouncement here that James had been ‘deluded’⁵⁴ in the matter of peace with Spain, Bacon went further in this question in his ‘Short View to be taken of Great Britain and Spain.’ In that work, Bacon claims that British strength under James is in effect such that it could strip Spain of its colonial holdings at will, writing of the Spanish King Philip that ‘for all the greatness he hath he holds by courtesy of his Majesty, and to that end courts him: he knows he were undone else.’⁵⁵ In other words, Spain holds its empire at James's courtesy, which to withdraw would mean the end of the Spanish empire.

The ‘peace’ that Britain enjoyed with Spain in 1623 was, in Bacon's estimation, little better than a nominal peace in which Spain strengthened its hand for a future war with the Stuart crown which would come, in any case, sooner or later, while it might fairly and rightly be deprived of its power in the present moment. This nominal peace was, in Bacon's view, a ‘false’ peace or a costly peace at interest. True peace would look quite different indeed.

4. Baconian Peace and the Advocacy of Religious Warfare

Francis Bacon identified ‘true peace’ with the military capacity of a power not to be harmed by its opponents, even if they had the will to do so. This is a view Bacon recurred to quite regularly across his literary, philosophic and political career. In his 1592/3 Certaine Obseruations vppon a Libell, Bacon deployed a citation from Demosthenes’ Against Aristocrates to assess the security situation of England in the near historical aftermath of the Spanish Armada. Writing out his assessment of England's power position in the face of all its adversaries, Bacon reflected that ‘I do find it to be a securitie of that nature & kinde which Iphicrates the Athenian did commende; who beinge a Comissioner to treate with the State of Sparta vpon Condicions of peace and hearing the other side make manie propositions touchinge securitie, interrupted them & told them Ther was but one manner of securitie wherupon the Athenians cold rest, which was, If the Deputies of the Lacedemonians cold make it plaine vnto them, that after these and these thinges parted withall, the Lacedemonians should not be able to hurte them thoughe they would.’⁵⁶ While some scholars have insisted that Bacon's standard for surety in peace is so unattainable as to yield ‘hostility with no real prospect of cessation,’⁵⁷ Bacon himself explicitly held not only that the standard was attainable but further held it to have been historically attained, especially for England's power vis-à-vis its adversaries in the immediate aftermath of the thwarting of the Spanish Armada in the summer of 1588. As Bacon stressed in his 1592/3 Certaine Obseruations vppon a Libell, applying the standard of Iphicrates’ true peace to England in the aftermath of the Spanish Armada ‘as we have not iustlie provoked the hatred or enmitie of anie other State; so howsoeuer that be, I knowe not at this time the enemie that hath the power to offende vs thoughe he had the will.’⁵⁸

Bacon recurs to Iphicrates in augmenting by authority his case for a true peace in the 1624 Considerations touching a War with Spain, with Bacon again quoting Iphicrates concluding peace with the Spartans, ‘telling them, there could be no true and secure peace, except the Lacedæmonians yielded to those things, which being granted, it would be no longer in their power to hurt the Athenians, though they would.’⁵⁹ Bacon concludes this quotation of Iphicrates in 1624 with a note of approval writing that ‘to say truth, if one mark it well, this was in all memory the main piece of wisdom in strong and prudent counsels’.⁶⁰ Here it is worth noting that memory, for Bacon, is the cognitive faculty associated with the discipline of history,⁶¹ and that the expression ‘in all memory’, for Bacon, has a non-diminutive temporal scope. Even after the 1624 Considerations, Bacon does not tire of recurring to Iphicrates by repeating his 1624 invocation of Iphicrates’ maxim in his drily witty Apophthegmes new and old of 1625. There Bacon observes that ‘Iphicrates the Athenian, in a Treatie that he had with the Lacedemonians for peace, in which question was about securitie for obseruing the same, said; The Athenians would not accept of any Securitie, except the Lacedemonians did yeeld vp vnto them those things, whereby it mought bee manifest, that they could not hurt them, if they would.’⁶² Here, in the 1625 Apophthegmes, as in his earlier treatments of the same quotation, Bacon presents as a prudent maxim of state the notion that the security for a peace to be observed is the inability of opponents or enemies to do one harm. The incapacity of an opponent power to do one harm is integrally tied, for Bacon, to assured preparations for war.

For Bacon, war and preparation for war were crucial to peace, especially his emphatic notion of ‘true peace’, both foreign and domestic. The civil concern for peace inflects not only Bacon's writings on religious warfare but also his interventions on ecclesiastical questions and questions of the internal government of the Church of England as well. In his Advertisement Touching the Controuersyes of the Church of England dated to 1589, Bacon enters the fray of ecclesiological controversy in the guise of a peace maker, claiming that ‘the Contrauersyes of the Church of England’ are ‘such as onely doe vnswade her of her bandes (the bandes of peace)’.⁶³ With this Advertisement of 1589, Bacon opts, not for the last time, for the audience-tailored targeted persuasion of scribal publication, the circulation of a tract amongst a selected or choice readership in manuscript form.⁶⁴ Because replies and repetitions of the grounds of controversy rather multiply than assuage such strife, Bacon avows that ‘The Controuersyes them selues I will not enter into, as iudging that the disease requireth rather rest then any other Cure.’⁶⁵ Expanding on Gentili's injunction of silence to the theologians (Silete theologi), Bacon urges religious controversialists on questions of surplices and other ‘thinges indifferent’⁶⁶ to ‘know the virtue of scilence and slownes to speake’.⁶⁷ Bacon thus exhorts divines to be silent not only in the matters which do not concern them but also in familiar (if fruitless) theological controversies as well. Bacon is also concerned throughout his 1589 Advertisement with the question of the political consequences of peace, particularly in the aftermath of the defeat of the Spanish Armada the previous summer, worrying that following 1588, ‘it may be our peace hath made vs more wanton.’⁶⁸ External ease may loosen checks upon the habits of internal dissension and conversely, it might seem, external threats might hold internal strife at bay.⁶⁹

In this Advertisement, Bacon makes the argument that with regard to innovations in Church government, the time for ecclesiastical founding, and with it, fundamental innovations, has passed. ‘Our church is not now to plant it is setled & established’, Bacon stresses.⁷⁰ Fourteen years later, Bacon would repeat this very point in his Certain Considerations touching the better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England, writing that ‘the Church is not now to plant or build’⁷¹ and change from episcopal to synod government within the Church of England could effect a similar alteration in the civil state from a monarchy to a republic, as, in Bacon's view, episcopal government has a certain regimental relation of fit with monarchy.⁷² Thus the question of synod Church government is best left ‘in peace and silence.’⁷³ This concern with peace and order in his writings on the government of the Church of England points to Bacon's central preoccupation when writing about religious matters generally. Rather than regarding the Church of England as a sacral body, Bacon instead analyses the Church as a ‘politic body’⁷⁴ and subordinates the examination of ecclesiastical causes under the heading of civil causes.⁷⁵ For Bacon, the Church is above all a political or civil institution and religion is an ingredient, albeit an important ingredient, of social order and social union.⁷⁶ To this end, in both his Certain Considerations touching the better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England of 1603/4 and his earlier Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England, Bacon's chief aim in intervening is the maintenance of ‘the bandes of peace’⁷⁷ in the Church—the preservation of unity and order and with them, the prevention of civil war along confessional lines.

It is worth once again considering the ways in which peace, both internal and external, may provide the crucial civil title the admixture of which may justify Bacon's favoured offensive wars of religion.⁷⁸ It is the criterion of ultimate or true peace—a peace where one is in a position of dominant or preponderant power which drives Bacon's advocacy of religiously-inflected wars with Spain and the Ottoman states.

In this connection with Bacon's estimations of Ottoman power, it is worth considering briefly the ways in which Bacon's assessments of Ottoman greatness more generally relate to and diverge from the presentation of the Ottoman Empire found in Richard Knolles's Generall Historie. Knolles offers four reasons external to the Ottomans for their greatness: divine wrath on Christendom, the uncertainty of worldly things and the accompanying cycle of human regimes, the inattention of Christian princes to the state of the Christian Commonwealth, and the relative superiority of the Janissary as a unit soldier (which depends, in part, on the fecklessness of Christian soldiers). Following upon this analysis, Knolles turns to the causes of Ottoman greatness ‘proper unto themselues, as not depending of the improuident carelesnesse, weaknesse, discord, or imperfections of others’.⁷⁹ These causes are, in the first instance, the ardent and infinite desire for sovereignty and the pledge to attain universal monarchy as ‘a quicke motiue vnto their so haughtie designes’. The Ottomans are further strengthened by the second cause of their unity in matters of both religion and state, which unity confers strength and corresponding fear in others.

These causes, as Knolles discusses them, are not without analogous treatments in Bacon's political writings. Unity in religion as well as unity in state is, for Knolles, one of the internal (rather than external) constituents of Ottoman ‘greatnesse’ as Knolles beholds in the Turks ‘such a rare vnitie and agreement amongst them, as well in the manner of their religion (if it be so to be called) as in matters concerning their state (especially in all their enterprises to be taken in hand for the augmenting of their Empire)’.⁸⁰ In laying emphasis upon unity in the fundamental bond of human society, religion, Bacon in his ‘Of Unity in Religion’, the third essay of his 1625 Essayes, may be seen to follow Knolles in his emphasis, yet for Knolles this unity is a constituent of ‘greatnesse’—for Bacon unity in religion is something much more urgent: that which is needed to prevent confessional civil war. Beyond divine wrath, the uncertainty of worldly things, the fecklessness of Christian princes in caring for a united Christian commonwealth (united in resistance against an external foe), Knolles lays a fourth cause for Ottoman ‘greatnesse’ in the relative superiority of Ottoman elite soldiers or Janissaries with respect to their equivalents in Christendom, soldiers Knolles regards as ‘taken up hand ouer head out of the promiscuous vulgar people’.⁸¹ Where the Janissaries are ‘continually euen from their youth exercised in feats of armes’ their Christian counterparts are ‘for most part vntrained men, seruing rather for shew and the filling vp of number, than for use, and in no respect to be compared with the Turks’.⁸² Knolles's concern is paralleled by Bacon's emphasis on the importance of gauging the strength of the unit soldier in assessing the fighting capacity of an army in his pivotal essay ‘Of the True Greatnesse of Kingdomes and Estates’ (1612,⁸³ 1625) in which Bacon stresses the superiority of the British yeoman to the French (and Spanish) peasant as well as, less famously, stressing the advantages of a veteran army (an army of soldiers exercised in feats of arms like the Janissaries) for building and maintaining an empire. Knolles's (and Bacon's) interest in the unit soldier and military preparedness serve to stress that religious wars are won and lost for practical reasons of military discipline.

While themes from Knolles resonate across Bacon's work, the former Lord Chancellor's treatment of the Ottomans receives its most extensive consideration in a late dialogue whose title announces its concern with religiously inflected war. In his Advertisement Tovching an Holy Warre as well as in his diplomatic correspondence, attacking the Algerian pirates is an optimal initial casus belli against the Ottoman Empire. The dialogue advances primarily towards a confrontation between Martius, a soldier who advocates war with the Ottoman Empire and Zebedaeus, a ‘zelant’ for Catholicism, who pushes the argument in various directions. While some scholars have argued that the movement of Zebedaeus's long speech shifts from the proposal of making war upon the Ottoman Empire to making open war on piracy and pirates,⁸⁴ the very structure of Zebedaeus's remarks calls this interpretation into question. Zebedaeus pointedly notes that the ‘the Pyrates now being, haue a Receptacle, and Mansion, in Algiers’, an Ottoman port.⁸⁵

Zebedaeus further advances the view that a sovereign power may enter another's territory without warning to remove pirates and may do so without a prior request for such entry ‘as there needs no Intimation, or Denunciation of the Warre; There needs no Request from the Nation grieued; But all these Formalities, the Law of Nature supplies, in the case of Pyrates.’⁸⁶ Bacon's Zebedaeus is here in accord with Alberico Gentili's view that piracy contravenes the law of nations and the communion of human society,⁸⁷ that pirates are violators of the laws of nature,⁸⁸ and that waging war upon piracy is just,⁸⁹ even to the point that Gentili creates an exception to his principle that only states may wage war: against pirates, on Gentili's presentation, even individuals may wage war⁹⁰ and they may do so in such a manner that the pirates enjoy no rights in the conflict.⁹¹ The state entered into for the removal of its pirate population might perceive such action as an invasion with the possibility of commencing what is perceived to be a just war on both sides, with one country claiming a just ground of war on the basis of waging war on piracy and the other nation claiming to defend itself by necessity from invasion. This would place the conflict in the category of wars just on both sides discussed by both Alberico Gentili in the De iure belli and Scipioni Gentili in his commentary on Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated. However this may be, Zebedaeus gives a further hint of the martial aims of his proposal for the invasion of ‘Algiers’ by noting that all his arguments about entering the territories of others unannounced for the destruction of pirates who may dwell there apply not only to pirates but to ‘Rouers by Land’ as well, offering the further caveat that ‘Such as yet are some Cantons in Arabia’—also an Ottoman possession in the early seventeenth century.⁹² Far from marking a discursive deviation from the aim of waging war on the Ottoman states, as some writers have contended in interpreting Bacon's dialogue, the case of pursuing piracy in Algiers and ‘Rouers’ in Arabia are specifications of the ways in which a war with the Ottoman Empire might be begun under the cloak of justice.

On a variety of questions, the views expressed by Bacon's Martius, the soldier, bear striking similarities to Bacon's own positions. In his invective against the Ottoman Empire, Martius stresses especially that the Ottomans are a nation ‘without Letters, Arts, or Sciences’. Moreover, as Bacon displays both at the Essex trial and in his writings on colonies and plantations, Martius has a pronounced proclivity for the exercise of ‘Marshall Iustice’, the exercise of which, Martius esteems, is a mark that a nation is ‘Ciuill’.⁹³ If there is one character in the dialogue who approximates Bacon's views most closely, this is Martius, even if Martius is not simply a figure for Bacon and even if Baconian positions are given voice by other interlocutors in the dialogue.

Like Bacon arguing in Calvin's Case in 1608 and yet more recently in his History of the Reign of King Henry VII in 1622, Martius speaks of conquest as granting titles to both land and dominion.⁹⁴ Like Bacon, Martius seems to have an affinity for monarchic government and obedience to royal power and Martius praises the pre-conquest governments of Mexico and Peru for being ‘Ciuill’ in no small part because they are monarchical.⁹⁵ As Bacon shows a willingness to admit redistribution to alleviate poverty as a material cause of sedition and civil war, so Martius avows that with a view to property and possession ‘whatsoeuer is in order, to the greatest, and most generall Good of people, may iustifie the Action’—in short that property may be upheld or overturned on the grounds of ‘the greatest and most generall Good’ if this tends to the preservation of order (OFB VIII, p. 192, ll. 4-5).

Not least, as Martius argues in Bacon's dialogue, so Bacon had earlier advocated in his diplomatic correspondence: both advocate ‘a Warre vpon the Turke’ on grounds of both policy and of religion. Bacon's advocacy of this policy is not merely confined to his literary works, but is present in his diplomatic correspondence during the period when he was in government, with the policy Bacon counselled in government closely paralleling that of Martius in the later Advertisement. In a letter to Sir John Digby, docketed 23 March 1616/17, who was then in charge of negotiating a treaty of marriage between the future King Charles I, then Prince of Wales, with the Spanish Infanta, Bacon, as a matter of state business, instructs Digby to raise two claims whilst present at the Spanish Court.

The first issue concerns the extirpation of pirates, a theme which, as we have seen, was also to recur in a conjoined context in Bacon's Advertisement half a decade later. A benefit of a marriage treaty with Spain would be, Bacon exhorts Digby, ‘a means utterly to extinguish and extirpate pirates, which are the common enemies of mankind, and do so much infest Europe at this time.’⁹⁶ Moreover, such action against pirates is a but a prequel of further acts of kingly cooperation between James I and Philip III of Spain; in particular Bacon hopes that Digby as an ambassador may ‘intermix discourse’ at the Spanish court ‘that may express ourselves to the effect following’ that union in marriage between the Stuarts and the Spanish Habsburgs ‘may be a beginning and seed (for the like actions before have had less beginnings) of a holy war against the Turk, whereunto it seems the events of time doth invite Christian kings, in respect of the great corruption and relaxation of discipline of war in that empire; and much more in respect of the utter ruin and enervation of the Grand Signor's navy and forces by sea; which openeth a way (without congregating vast armies by land) to suffocate and starve Constantinople, and thereby to put those provinces into mutiny and insurrection.’⁹⁷ Where Bacon elsewhere laments stirring internal revolt in the countries of others,⁹⁸ it seems that there may be politic limits which he imposes upon this general view—for the purposes of diverting Spain eastward and destroying the Ottoman Empire, Bacon is willing to advance both internal and external warfare in the realms of others as part of the ‘holy war against the Turk’ which he advances and advocates in his own person.

Consideration of the evidence of Bacon's diplomatic correspondence offers a view contrary to several scholarly interpretations of Bacon's work which hold the avowedly Catholic characters to be Baconian spokespersons,⁹⁹ as well as to those interpreters who hold Bacon's proposals of war on the Ottoman Empire in the Advertisement to be solely an esoteric or dramatic ruse.¹⁰⁰ The proposal of ‘a holy war against the Turk’ is not merely a characteristic utterance of Bacon's Martius let slip in a dialogic context: it is also a statement made by Bacon himself in diplomatic correspondence half a decade earlier, articulating what he hopes will be an area of international cooperation, albeit a cooperation of a non-pacific kind, namely a seventeenth-century crusade for the better unification and pacification of Christendom both within its own boundaries and within those of others.

The assault which Bacon hopes for against the Ottoman Empire in 1616/17 is primarily a naval assault and one in which he wishes for Spain to play a leading part, perhaps to the extent that the Spanish navy may share a fate similar to that of its Ottoman rival. Via Digby, Bacon tries to exhort Spain first to engage pirates in Ottoman waters and then, once within the Turkish domain to undertake ‘the utter ruin and enervation of the Grand Signor's navy and forces by sea’ .¹⁰¹ Bacon's aim in this is not necessarily an alliance between Spain and Britain in 1616/17, but the exhortation of a Spanish venture that may destroy the Ottoman fleet in a manner similar to the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, which Bacon repeatedly acclaims in his own voice and that of his characters,¹⁰² but also that the Spanish navy itself might bear the brunt of the damage when the Ottoman navy returns fire. Thus, while some scholars have claimed that Bacon advocates a British alliance with the Spanish crown in the 1622/3 Advertisement,¹⁰³ Bacon does not overtly advocate a British alliance with Spain for attacking the Ottomans—either in his diplomatic correspondence or in his Advertisement. Advocacy in the Advertisement for Spain (or Spain and France) attacking the Ottomans is not the same as advocating that Britain join France in attacking the Ottomans. One thrust of setting the dialogue in Paris is to propose the diplomatic course of encouraging France to reverse its alliance with the Ottoman Empire, and to reverse it so substantially that it may join Spain in waging war against the Ottomans in the Mediterranean. British participation in the conflict is nowhere mentioned in the Advertisement. Those who claim that an Anglo-Spanish alliance is advocated in the Advertisement seem to overlook the Parisian and continental context of the Advertisement, which, like Bacon's earlier so-called Redargutio Philosophiarum, takes place in a Parisian setting¹⁰⁴ and has no explicitly English characters. It is not an alliance between Britain and Spain that is being advocated in the Advertisment but rather an alliance between the continental powers and especially an alliance between representatives of each of the confessions—Catholics (Zebedaeus) and Protestants (Gamaliel)—engaged in the Thirty Years’ War—these powers might be better united (and diverted eastward) by waging a war for the control of the Mediterranean with the Ottoman empire.

Further, in his diplomatic dispatch from 1616/17, Bacon wishes for Digby to express to the Spanish court that the aim of ‘a holy war against the Turk’ is not only a further reduction of naval power, but more generally the promotion of internal disorder within the Ottoman states themselves as a result of a naval onslaught ‘thereby to put those provinces into mutiny and insurrection.’¹⁰⁵

Bacon's diplomatic and dialogic proposal of the holy war on the Ottoman Empire persists beyond the good effects that members of the English court in 1616/17 thought might attend a successful Spanish match. Bacon's proposals for a pan-European war against the Ottoman Empire recall the late-fifteenth century claims of the French King Charles VIII enunciated upon his invasion of Italy in 1494, claims with which Bacon could well have been familiar through his extended sojourn in France as well as from his extensive and meticulous reading of Machiavelli and Guicciardini.

Having seen that the character Martius recapitulates Bacon's own earlier proposals for engaging Spain in war with the Ottoman powers, Bacon's Advertisement must be interpreted within the broader context of Bacon's grand strategic proposals and the place of religious war within them, a strategic project which culminates in Bacon's manuscript tract ‘A Short View to be taken of Great Britain and Spain,’ to which our study shall now turn.

5. Baconian Strategy: ‘A Short View to be taken of Great Britain and Spain’

In ‘A Short View to be taken of Great Britain and Spain,’ which both James Spedding and, more recently, Noel Malcolm ascribe to Bacon,¹⁰⁶ the author proposes the ‘planting’ of the Protestant Church in Spain, with potentially capacious implications, given that Bacon understood the Spanish crown as encompassing its territorial holdings across its overseas colonies and territorial holdings on the European continent. There is no discussion of justice in ‘A Short View’—perhaps consistent with Bacon's distinction between ‘just pretence’ and ‘pretence of religion’ for going to war and for waging war.¹⁰⁷

The author of ‘A Short View’ is concerned to outline the relative power positions of Britain and Spain near the outset of the Thirty Years’ War and after the failure of the Spanish Match. ‘His Majesty now of England’, the ‘Short View’ professes, ‘is of more power than any of his predecessors.’¹⁰⁸ By contrast, the ‘View’ contends, Spain's fame for grandeur exceeds its real power: ‘for Spain, his Majesty there, though accounted the greatest monarch in Christendom, yet if his estate be enquired through, his root will be found a great deal too narrow for his tops.’¹⁰⁹ Here, in taking stock of Spain's greatness, Bacon may be drawing on Botero's discussion of disunited empire in the latter's Della Ragione di Stato, where empires disunited are either too weak to defend themselves or strong enough to ride their neighbours or at least hold their own.¹¹⁰ Bacon's assessment of Spain is that should Spain be on the defensive it would fall into the first of Botero's categories—too weak to maintain or defend itself.

Bacon's assessments of Spanish power in the 1620s seem to pivot between cautionary fears of the impending Spanish threat and exhortations to invade Spain in light of its weakness. How is it possible to plausibly offer both seemingly contradictory strains of argument in nearly the same historical moment in ‘A Short View’ and in the Considerations, respectively? On the one hand, in the ‘Short View’, Spain is described as weak and overstretched and thus a prime target for a two-armada assault.¹¹¹ On the other hand, in Bacon's Considerations, Spain is presented as recuperating and regaining its martial prowess, threatening an invasion of a scale not seen since 1588. For Bacon in the 1620s, Spanish strength and Spanish weakness are two faces of the same Janus. Mirroring his claims on battle from the De Sapientia Veterum, where attackers are said to hold the decisive advantage in battle, Bacon depicts Spain as strong on the assault and weak on the defensive.¹¹² In Bacon's view, Spain is thus particularly threatening in its military preparations as well as being simultaneously quite tempting as a target of a well-executed assault. In both instances, in pressing an attack on Spain, no time is to be lost.

In assessing England's strength, the author of the ‘Short View’ is keen to stress Britain's situation with respect towards the United Provinces—which the ‘Short View’ praises as both well-situated and well-motivated. With respect to its situation or neighbourhood, ‘A Short View’ commends the United Provinces to King James as ‘By reason his Majesty hath the neighbourhood of the powerfullest nation at the sea that now is in the world, at his devotion’. The state of the United Provinces is also to be commended for ‘it hath the motive in it to make defence with us against an opposite Church in such a nation as hath drawn both of us into one and the same cause in quarrel as well of policy as religion.’¹¹³ Here, Bacon sets the United Provinces and Britain together in making a joint defensive war against Spain and the ‘Short View’ has a particular aim in view with regard to what it might portend for the United Provinces and Great Britain to make a successful joint defence against their common opponent. Surveying the relative weakness of Spain in relation to Britain, ‘A Short View’ emphasizes both the poverty of Spain and the vastness of its empire: Spain is both too poor and spread too thin. ‘His dominions are so far in distance asunder, as they cannot give relief time enough one to another upon an alarum; which is the reason he is more powerful to assault than to defend’.¹¹⁴ Spain's poverty is a martial weakness, particularly in the Spanish Netherlands: ‘His poverty heretofore hath appeared in the mutinies of the Low Countries’ armies for want of pay: which was a great cause of his ill success there.’¹¹⁵ Spain's finances know only one bright spot: income from overseas colonial holdings. ‘A Short View’ holds that ‘but for the Indies’ Spain ‘were the poorest King of Europe.’¹¹⁶

‘A Short View’ poses the question of whether Spain can withstand a joint assault upon its colonial possessions and its mainland simultaneously. The ‘Short View’ thus has a particular joint venture between the United Provinces and Great Britain in view: the raising of joint armadas—one armada ‘to block up the Indies’ and the other ‘to block up Spain’ (LL VII, p. 25). The author of the ‘Short View’ concludes with a series of politic reasons recommending his policy of preference. The author ascribes to Spain the very motives of unjust warfare which Lipsius adduces: ambition and a greedy desire for empire,¹¹⁷ thereby turning Lispius's criteria against the confessional side which Lipsius himself preferred at the end of his scholarly and philosophic career. The Spanish crown, the ‘Short View’ contends, ‘hath an ambition to the whole empire of Christendom.’¹¹⁸ This injustice forces the author to inquire into the question of whether peace may be assured with Spain. The author feels compelled to the conclusion that it may not be so assured, for although ‘peace with a true neighbour is a condition to be embraced’,¹¹⁹ the Spanish crown is lacking in true neighbourliness while religious difference, in the estimation of the ‘Short View,’ is a barrier to this neighbourly comportment. Most importantly, ‘we shall never be assured of him (such [is]¹²⁰ the nature of his religion) so long as we differ in matters of faith.’ To the compounding of this difference, in the view of the ‘Short View,’ ‘the greatest islander of Christendom,’¹²¹ James I, should direct himself: ‘the planting of the true Church there [i.e. in Spain and the Spanish Empire] is a sacred work that even by office as it were belongs to him.’¹²² Such a ‘planting’, coupled with the blocking of the West Indies and of mainland Spain would be, in our author's estimation, self-financing as ‘the Indies will afford him the means to exercise it.’¹²³ The ‘Short View’ affords the image of an imperial and colonial war of conversion as a ‘sacred work’¹²⁴ to secure the conditions of future peace,¹²⁵ which pacification, however necessary its author deemed it to be, is never said to be ‘just.’ Bacon's ‘Short View’ thus is to be situated apart from his discussion of just war in the Considerations and in aiming at the civil end of reducing Spanish power and converting its inhabitants to Protestantism, as the prerequisites for a future, longer lasting peace, Bacon comes to advocate some wars under the cover of the sacred.

The issue of common religion as a source of political unity and stability is one of long standing in Bacon's political thought and a recurrent trope of his rhetoric. In his 12 May 1604 draft of ‘An Act for the better grounding of a further Union to ensue between the Kingdoms of England and Scotland’, Bacon stresses that not merely island locale and linguistic commonality serve to unite the ‘mighty kingdoms of England and Scotland’ but even more their shared participation ‘in God's true religion’, which Bacon proclaims is the superlative band of both unity and peace as ‘true religion’ is ‘the perfectest bond of all unity and union’.¹²⁶ That both England and Scotland partake not only of linguistic commonality and spatial contiguity but religious unity helps to serve, in Bacon's profession to make both realms as a united kingdom a ‘most quiet and peaceable possession’ (LL III, p. 205). It is thus unsurprising, when considering the question of the conditions for a future peace with Spain that Bacon should recur to the question of ‘God's true religion’ and ‘true Church’ when composing his Short View more than a decade later.

In the Short View, Bacon's discussion of the ‘planting’ of Protestant churches in Spain opens up an image and theme to which Bacon recurs throughout his scientific, literary, and political writings, ‘the League of Christians’,¹²⁷ to which we now briefly turn in closing.

6. Baconian Alliances: ‘The League of Christians’

In a passage added to the expanded essay ‘Of Religion’ from the 1612 Essaies, Bacon presents ‘the League of Christians’ as a via media between ‘certaine Zelants’ to whom ‘all Speech of Pacification is odious’,¹²⁸ and ‘certaine Laodiceans, and Luke-warme Persons’ who ‘thinke they may accommodate Points of Religion, by Middle Waies, and taking part of both; And witty Reconcilements’.¹²⁹ The doctrine that heretical monarchs may be dispatched by assassins under the cover of licit tyrannicide is not, in Bacon's estimation, a view that can be accommodated by any witty reconcilement.¹³⁰ ‘Both these Extremes,’ Bacon caustically remarks, ‘are to be avoyded; which will be done, if the League of Christians, penned by our Saviour himselfe, were in the two crosse Clauses thereof, soundly and plainly expounded; He that is not with us, is against us: And againe; He that is not against us, is with us: That is, if the Points Fundamentall and of Substance in Religion, were truly discerned and distinguished, from Points not meerely of Faith, but of Opinion, Order, or good Intention.’¹³¹ The League of Christians is midway between the extremes of those who will hear no talk of peace and those who wish to paper over disagreements which cannot be papered over. Bacon stresses that his notion of a Christian league may seem trivial to some or, in a sense, already completed, however Bacon emphasizes that these appearances deceive and if the emphasis on Christian union and ‘Points Fundamentall’ ‘were done lesse partially, it would be embraced more generally.’¹³² If the fundamental points of religion were, perhaps, reduced to a minimal creed and the Church emphasised social and political unity of Christians rather than uniformity of Christian worship, the extremes of both zealotry and luke-warmness might, in Bacon's estimation, both be avoided.

Indeed, discussing the ‘league amongst Christians’ in his 1589 Advertisement Touching the Controuersyes of the Church of England, Bacon emphasised ‘that the ancient & true bandes of vnity are one faith, one baptisme and not one Ceremony, one policy’.¹³³ This is followed by the recurrence of Bacon's assertion that such unity would be furthered ‘if we wold obserue the league amongst Christians that is penned by our sauiour He that is not against vs is with vs; if we wold but comprehend that saying, Differentia rituum commendat vnitatem doctrinæ, the diuersitye of Ceremonyes doth set forth the vnity of doctrine.’¹³⁴ Bacon concluded this homily on unity and the Christian league with the wish that ‘if we did but know the virtue of scilence and slownes to speake commended by Saint Iames our controuersyes wold of themselues close vp & growe together.’¹³⁵ The ‘league amongst Christians’ was one which Bacon associated in one of his earliest extant writings with ‘the virtue of scilence and slownes to speake’ in matters of religion and Church discipline coupled with a recurrent emphasis on unity, rather than uniformity, in ecclesial matters.¹³⁶

While Bacon discusses his ‘League of Christians’ prominently in his 1589 Advertisement and in his 1625 Essayes, elsewhere he does not regard it as merely an institution or heuristic for ecclesiology and Church government. Bacon's league amongst Christians recurs in the second book of his 1605 Aduancement of Learning with the side note ‘De gradibus vnitatis in ciuitate Dei’ (On the gradations of unity in the city of God),¹³⁷ where he introduces the ‘league’ with an example drawn from the second chapter of the book of Exodus.¹³⁸ ‘Wee see,’ Bacon notes in his Aduancement, ‘Moses when he sawe the Israelite and the Egyptian fight, he did not say, Why strive you? but drewe his sworde, and slewe the Egyptian: But when he sawe the two Israelites fight, hee said, You are brethren, why striue you?’¹³⁹ Violence between co-religionists, as Bacon's Moses exhorts, is at root violence between brethren, from which it would follow that wars between Christians are, at root, wars between brethren, fratricidal wars and thus instances of civil war.

Bacon's Moses, selectively cited, is brought forth to counsel peace within a community of faith but also within the political community which is coterminous with that faith. In this regard, Bacon's proposal of a ‘league of Christians’ in which Christians strike down those who are against them but keep peace amongst themselves may recall an earlier philosophic tradition, with which, as Whitgift's purchase accounts for the Bacon brothers at Trinity College, Cambridge indicate,¹⁴⁰ the philosopher himself would have been well acquainted. In Plato's Republic, Socrates stresses that he regards wars amongst Greek states not as external wars (polemoi) but as internal wars (staseis) amongst a common people, who should be united in peace through brotherhood and friendship. On this view, wars between Greek and non-Greek are wars properly so called but wars amongst Greeks are factional civil wars, the occurrence of which is worse than plague.¹⁴¹ Bacon's league between Christians transposes this ancient view onto the states and peoples of Christian Europe—at root, so long as they persist, violence and wars between Christians have the nastiness and repugnance of civil wars and wars between brothers.

Bacon's proposals and persistent injunctions for a league of Christians are themselves not solely a matter of Church government; rather, this view, taken as a backdrop to Bacon's military white papers in A Short View and his Considerations, has serious strategic and geopolitical implications. Late in the tenth century of Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum, in experiment nine hundred eighty-eight, Bacon is engaged in a series of queries on the possibility of shared affections, imaginations, and trepidations in groups. In this natural experiment, Bacon stipulates ‘If there be any force in imaginations and affections of singular persons, it is probable the force is much more in the joint imaginations and affections of multitudes: as if a victory should be won or lost in remote parts, whether is there not some sense thereof in the people whom it concerneth’.¹⁴² Bacon's test case for this experiment is none other than ‘the naval battle of Lepanto’ of 1571 ‘won by the Christians’ in a pan-European ‘league’ ‘against the Turks’. Crucial for our discussion is Bacon's description of the battle of Lepanto in his natural experiment: Bacon does not regard the victory at Lepanto as principally a Roman Catholic victory, but rather as a ‘memorable victory’ which was ‘won by the Christians’ in a ‘league’ which Pius V had concluded.¹⁴³ Bacon does not attribute the battle of Lepanto to Catholicism or describe it as a Spanish or Italian victory—it is a victory won by Christians in league against an external adversary. As the discussion in Bacon's natural history shows, his league of Christians is not merely a matter of ecclesiology and Church doctrine—it is also a matter of geopolitics and religiously and confessionally inflected warfare.

7. Conclusion: Bacon, ‘The League of Christians’, and a Tolerant Peace

In his early Certaine obseruations vppon a libell, Bacon had charged Spain with disturbing the ‘generall peace of Christendom.’¹⁴⁴ The removal of Spain and the destruction of Spanish power, which Bacon counselled whenever the discursive conditions permitted from the 1590s to the 1620s, and the establishment of the league of Christians in its place, would serve, in Bacon's view, to rectify the peace which the Spanish empire had disturbed. In this regard, the ‘league of Christians’ might be seen as Bacon's act of formulating a polemical counter-concept (and counter-ideal) to the Catholic League whose politics writers like Botero favoured and which Bacon regarded as having led to unrivalled slaughter, leading him to redescribe the Catholic League as the ‘League for the Extirpation of the Protestants’.¹⁴⁵ To this, and to its sponsor, the imperial power of Spain, Bacon's ‘league of Christians’ was opposed—indeed, it took the destruction of Spanish power as its presupposition. Bacon's ‘league of Christians’ founded on an order in ‘Christendom’ established upon the destruction of Spanish power and the ‘planting’ of Protestantism in Spain, would be an order in which Christian states in Europe would not war upon their neighbours but unite against common adversaries, such as the Ottoman Empire, and unite for common enterprises, such as scientific research, oceanic exploration, and global expansion. Something of this vision might be glimpsed in Bacon's New Atlantis in which the European sailors are addressed in Spanish¹⁴⁶ yet narrate their tale in English and are addressed by the Bensalemites as neither English nor Spanish, but as ‘Christians’, which they profess themselves to be.¹⁴⁷ The sailors who sail from Peru but write their narratives in English may indicate the end-state at which Bacon's Considerations and his sharply pointed Short View aim. The Baconian route to Bensalem leads through the conquest of Spain, the conversion of the Spanish to Protestantism, and the seizure of Spanish colonial holdings. It is on this basis that true peace and scientific advancement, in Bacon's estimation, may find a surer footing. Despite the assurances of some scholars to the contrary,¹⁴⁸ however, this surer footing, from Bacon's perspective, will not be ‘wrought by the hand of God’, but must be wrought by human innovation, human arms, and a navy capable of overpowering its competitors.

For Bacon, paradoxically, toleration is an end-state goal. In his New Atlantis, Christians and Jews alike live peaceably together as they did not in the England of his time, from which Jews were banned. Yet, for Bacon, toleration was not always, in the first instance, regarded as the means for its own attainment. In this, Bacon reversed the view of Botero, who, in cases of necessity was willing to countenance some religious toleration for the purpose of temporarily appeasing powerful leaders of religious groups, like the French Huguenots, with an aim of ultimately restoring persecution.¹⁴⁹ Bacon, by contrast, seems to favour some tactical and strategic deviations from his preferred policy of toleration for the sake of securing more lasting toleration and the grounds for future peace which is a ‘true peace,’ resting on the complete incapacity of others to conduct war against Britain. For Bacon, the problem of religious warfare is that such warfare must, in his view, however infelicitously, be urged and waged for the very purpose that it may (at some future time) be abated and, finally, ended.

Acknowledgments

The author is thankful to Mark Bevir, Erin Dolgoy, Timothy Hampton, Kinch Hoekstra, Kimberly Hurd Hale, Charlotte Johann, Victoria Kahn, Clemens Kauffmann, Evan Lowe, Svetozar Minkov, Eva Odzuck, Richard Serjeantson, Shannon Stimson, Sylvana Tomaselli, Richard Whatmore, Joanna Williamson, and two anonymous reviewers for Global Intellectual History for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg in December of 2016, and the author is particularly thankful for comments on that occasion from Professor Eva Odzuck and the late Professor Clemens Kauffmann, to whose memory the present article is dedicated.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Bacon, 'The charge of Owen, indicted of High Treason, in the King's Bench, by Sir Francis Bacon, his Majesty's Attorney-General’, pp. 154–9, at p. 157; Cf. LL V, p. 165. Throughout, OFB refers to the Oxford Francis Bacon, ed. L. Jardine, G. Rees, R.W. Serjeantson, A. Stewart and B. Vickers (Oxford, 1996–present); LL refers to The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon Including all his Occasional Works, ed. J. Spedding (7 vols., London, 1861–74); SEH refers to The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R.L. Ellis and D.D. Heath (7 vols., London, 1857–9).

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid. Relatedly, see Lerner, Playing the Fool, p. 40n9: 'It should go without saying that Attorney General Bacon viewed the papal doctrine of tyrannicide as criminal in the highest degree.’

4 Bacon, Considerations touching a War with Spain, in LL VII, pp. 469–505, at p. 470. See also the Notes on the Present State of Christendom (1582), the authorship of which is a subject of scholarly debate, in LL I, p. 28.

5 OFB VIII, pp. 183–206; SEH VII, pp. 9–36. Bacon, 'A remembrance additional to the instructions of Sir John Digby,' in LL VI, pp. 158–9, at p. 158: ‘Also, that it may be a beginning and seed (for the like actions before have had less beginnings) of a holy war against the Turk, whereunto it seems the events of time doth invite Christian kings, in respect of the great corruption and relaxation of discipline of war in that empire; and much more in respect of the utter ruin and enervation of the Grand Signor's navy and forces by sea’. On early modern advocacy of war against the Ottoman Empire, see Idris, War for Peace, pp. 133–8; p. 199.

6 For a restatement of these views of Bacon's project, see Tadié, Francis Bacon, pp. 9–13.

7 No mention of Bacon's 'The charge of Owen,' Bacon's Advertisement Tovching an Holy Warre or Bacon's Considerations touching a War with Spain is made in Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon or in McKnight, The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon's Thought. For other recent studies of Bacon's thought which do not mention these works, see Jalobeanu, The Art of Experimental Natural History; Corneanu, Regimens of the Mind; Irving, Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire; Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature; Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy; Peltonen, 'Bacon's Political Philosophy,' pp. 283–310.

8 For scholarship which treats Bacon's Advertisement and other writings on religious warfare, see van Malssen, The Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon, pp. 221–36; Minkov, Francis Bacon's ‘Inquiry Touching Human Nature’, p. 49; pp. 63–5; Lerner, Playing the Fool: Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times, pp. 31–48; Faulkner, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress, pp. 224–6; Weinberger, 'On Bacon's Advertisement Touching a Holy War,' pp. 191–206; White, Peace Among the Willows, p. 15; p. 58n1; p. 90; Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times, A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche, pp. 67–115.

9 On the relevance and significance of Gentili in the period, see Brett, 'Roman Law and Roman Ideology in Alberico Gentili'; Kingsbury and Straumann eds., The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations; Grant, 'Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili on the Juridical Status of Native American Polities.' Renaissance Quarterly, 72(3) (2019), 910–952.

10 Knolles, Generall Historie, B i recto, p. 1. As potential evidence that Bacon was reading Knolles in the mid-1600s, in a speech to the House of Commons on 17 February, 1606/7, Bacon repeats Knolles's claim that the Ottomans constitute ‘the present terrour of the world’ nearly verbatim in discussing ‘the Othoman family, now the terror of the world.’ LL IV, ‘A Speech used by Sir Francis Bacon, in the Lower House of Parliament, concerning the Article of Naturalization,' pp. 307–25, at p. 324.

11 Knolles, Generall Historie, ‘To the Reader,’ [A v recto].

12 Knolles, Generall Historie, ‘To the Reader,’ [A v verso].

13 Knolles, Generall Historie, A iv verso.

14 Erasmus, De bello turcico; Luther, Vom Krieg wider den Türken. On Erasmus in this connection, see Idris, War for Peace, pp. 133–8.

15 Knolles, Generall Historie, A iv verso: ‘Then, the uncertainetie of worldly things, which subiect to perpetuall change cannot long stay in one state, but as the sea is with the wind, so are they in like sort tossed up and downe with the continuall surges and waues of alteration and change; so that being once growne to their height, they there stay not long, but fall againe as fast as euer they rise, and so in time come to nothing: As we see the greatest Monarchies that euer yet were upon earth haue done, their course being run; ouer whom, Time now triumpheth, as no doubt at length it shall ouer this so great a Monarchie also, when it shall but then liue by fame, as the others now doe.’

16 Knolles, Generall Historie, A iv verso.

17 Ibid.

18 See Greville, The tragedy of Mustapha, on which consider Erkoç, 'Dealing with Tyranny,' 265–90. See also de Moffan, Soltani Solymanni Turcarum Imperatoris horrendum facinus, scelerato in proprium filium natu maximum, Soltanum Mustapham, parricidio, Anno Domini 1553 patratum.

19 Discussing Bacon's sources for Ottoman materials in his commentary on An Advertisement Tovching an Holy Warre, Michael Kiernan stresses that ‘Bacon's source is the account of ‘Sigismund, prince of Transylvania, Valachia, and Moldauia’ in Richard Knolles, The Generall historie of the Turkes, London, 1603’. Kiernan, 'Commentary,' in OFB VIII, p. 500. Further commenting Bacon's use of Ottoman examples in the essay ‘Of Empire,’ Michael Kiernan writes that ‘Though Bacon quotes Busbecq elsewhere (XIII.22–4), his source for this reference and below, lines 98–102, is Knolles, who places the ultimate responsibility for the murder upon Roxolana and uses the same term as Bacon does’. Kiernan, 'Commentary,' in OFB XV, p. 212.

20 OFB XV, 'Of the true Greatnesse of Kingdomes and Estates', p. 96, lines 228–30. This essay is pivotal both in terms of the political thrust of the argument of Bacon's Essayes as a whole as well as in its position within the Essayes as a literary work. Originally situated as the culminating essay in the 1612 Essaies, in which it bore the title ‘Of the greatnesse of Kingdomes’, and offered a kind of conclusion or point to the work as a whole, Bacon resituated the essay at the very center or pivot of the 1625 edition rewriting and reorganizing his Essayes, ‘So that they are indeed a New Worke.’ OFB XV, p. 5, lines 15–6.

21 LL VII, Considerations touching a War with Spain, p. 482. On this passage in Bacon's Considerations, Kinch Hoekstra comments ‘Christian states may thus at any time legitimately attack the Ottomans as a defensive measure. And presumably if the Ottomans had reason to believe that this is what the Christians believed, they would on the same grounds be justified in attacking a Christian state at any time.’ Bacon holds the former position, but not the latter. Bacon's view of preventive defensive wars is positionally circumscribed—he advocates such wars for his own side but not for others. Nonetheless, the fact that other sides may also advance pretexts based upon just fear to engage in preventive wars of defence fits with Bacon's notion of the true peace—the only secure state of affairs in international politics, on Bacon's view, is the ‘true peace’ in which one's enemies are impotent and incapable of harming one even if they desire to do so and are thus incapable of offering a pretext for a preventive defensive war precisely because they are incapable of defending themselves. See Hoekstra, 'Thucydides and the Bellicose Beginnings of Modern Political Theory,' pp. 25–54, at p. 50. See also White, Peace Among the Willows, p. 90: 'In "The Holy War," he discusses the arguments for legitimating a holy war against the Turks. It is clear from other Baconian passages that what is true of the Turks is true, mutatis mutandis, of the Spaniards. As long as Spain is what it is, England has a permanent quarrel.’ For Bacon's view of 'true peace', see Zeitlin, 'Francis Bacon on Peace and the 1604 Treaty of London,' History of Political Thought 41, no. 3, pp. 487–504.

22 OFB IV, Aduancement of Learning I, p. 11: ‘for although men bred in Learning, are perhaps to seeke in points of conuenience, and accommodating for the present which the Italians call Ragioni di stato’.

23 Botero, Della Ragione di Stato, Libri Dieci. V.[iii], 'De gl’Indomiti,' p. 139: ‘Tra gl’Infedeli, i più alieni dalla Fede Christiana sono i Mahomettani: perche la carne, alla quale inclina affatto la lor setta, ripugna allo spirito dell’Euangelio.’ (The spelling of the 1598 edition is retained above, in which perché is without an accent).

24 Botero, Della Ragione di Stato, Libri Dieci. V.[iii], 'De gl’Indomiti,' p. 139: ‘e perche non hanno ragione di dottrina, non autorità di Santi, difenderanno la lor setta con l’armi, à guisa de’ Turchi.’ On the discourse of 'Calvinoturcism' in the period see Malcolm, Useful Enemies, pp. 96–103.

25 Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, p. 94: ‘Botero provides a paradigm example of the political case for religious uniformity and intolerance’; ibid., p. 94: ‘with Calvinists, whom Botero linked with Muslims under the title of indomiti (the unsubmissive), the policy of enticing (invitar) people to the faith does not work; left unsuppressed they would turn everything both public and private upside down’.

26 OFB XV, 'Of the true Greatnesse of Kingdomes and Estates. XXIX.' p. 96, lines 228–230: ‘The Turke, hath at hand, for Cause of Warre, the Propagation of his Law or Sect; A Quarell that he may alwaies Command.’ For Bacon's political usage of the term 'sect' see Zeitlin, '"The Heat of a Feaver": Francis Bacon on civil war, sedition, and rebellion,' in History of European Ideas.

27 Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, p. 90n19: ‘Giovanni Botero (1543/4–1617) left the Society in 1580; while he remained a member, his superiors were undecided whether to dismiss him or to raise him to the rank of the Professed. His will in 1613 made the Society his testators and beneficiaries and he was buried in the Jesuit Church in Savona.’ For Bacon's views of justice in war, see Zeitlin, Zeitlin, 'Francis Bacon on Just Warfare,' in The Political Science Reviewer 45, no. 1 (2021), 69–106.

28 LL VII, p. 470.

29 Ibid., (emending word order from 'our of' to 'of our').

30 Ibid.

31 LL VII, Considerations Touching a War with Spain, p. 481.

32 LL VII, p. 470.

33 LL VII, p. 470.

34 OFB VIII, p. 187; Bacon, Certain Miscellany Works of the Right Honourable Francis Lo. Verulam, p. 93 (right margin); Bacon, Operum moralium et civilium tomus, p. 335: ‘Eusebius, Theologus Orthodoxus, et Moderatus.’

35 OFB VIII, p. 187–206, at p. 194: ‘[EVPOLIS:] Eusebius hath yet said nothing’. See also Bacon, Operum moralium et civilium tomus, pp. 335–49. Spedding, 'Preface' to the Advertisement touching an Holy War, in SEH VII, pp. 3–7, at p. 5: ‘the ‘moderate divine’ having said nothing.’ See further Faulkner, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress, p. 225: ‘While in Bacon's dialogue a "moderate divine" is announced, he never speaks.’ There is scholarly debate as to whether the Advertisement is in fact completed as it stands.

36 Gentili, De iure belli libri tres, 2 vols, I.xii; vol. I, p. 92; vol. II, p. 57: ‘Silete theologi in munere alieno.’ See also Malcolm, 'Alberico Gentili and the Ottomans,' pp. 127- 145 in Kingsbury and Straumann eds., The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations, at p. 127: '"Silete theologi in munere alieno"—or, as we might colloquially translate it, "Theologians, mind your own business". This is perhaps the most famous sentence written by the great jurist Alberico Gentili.’

37 Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to Fortune, The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon, pp. 116–7. Bacon's friend Tobie Matthew was acquainted with Gentili. See ibid, p. 304.

38 Gentili, De iure belli libri tres, I.xii; vol. I, p. 92; vol. II, p. 57.

39 Gentili, De iure belli, I.vii; vol. I, p. 55, vol. II, p. 35: ‘Iustæ sint causæ: nam causa iniusta nec est causa.’

40 Gentili, De iure belli, I.x; vol. I, p. 77, vol. II, p. 47: ‘Nam religio his vltimis temporibus tantùm prætextus.’

41 Gentili, De iure belli, I.ix; vol. I, p. 63, vol. II, p. 40: ‘Ferdinandus rex, qui catholicus cluit, omnes fere suas cupiditates sic obtexuit honesto religionis velamento.’ Cf. Machiavelli, Il principe, xxi (Quod principem deceat ut egregius habeatur); Guicciardini, Historia d’Italia, xii.

42 Gentili, De iure belli, I.ix; vol. I, p. 63, vol. II, p. 40: ‘& Carolus imperator, Ferdinandi nepos, non alio colore cupiditates regnandi suas adumbrauit.’ (Rolfe's translation modified above).

43 Gentili, De iure belli, I.ix; vol. I, p. 61, vol. II, p. 39: ‘Scis? At audi adhuc vnum. Libertas religioni debetur.’

44 Gentili, De iure belli, I.ix; vol. I, p. 59, vol. II, p. 38: ‘Et quidem si religio eius est naturæ vt compelli ad eam inuitus nullus debeat. atq[ue]; noua illa dicitur, & inaudita predicatio, quae verberibus exigit fidem. sequitur, vim istam iustam non esse.’

45 Gentili, De iure belli, I.ix; vol. I, p. 64, vol. II, p. 41: ‘nec ius læditur hominum ob diuersam religionem: itaq[ue]; nec bellum caussa religionis.’

46 Gentili's position on this question appears somewhat vague—wars for conversion are, on Gentili's account, clearly unjust, but there may be cases where wars waged for the maintenance of religion in the case of subjects forced to convert to a different religion fall under the ambit of wars for self-defense or protection.

47 LL VII, Considerations, p. 470.

48 OFB XV, 'Of Atheisme. XVI', p. 53, lines 59–69: ‘The Causes of Atheisme are; Divisions in Religion … And lastly, Learned Times, specially with Peace, and Prosperity: for Troubles and Adversities doe more bow Mens Mindes to Religion.’ On Bensalem as the 'offspring of peace, safety, and completeness', see Hurd Hale, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis in the Foundation of Modern Political Thought, p. 76.

49 This is the case for both the 1612 Essaies and 1625 Essayes, in which these two essays appear side by side. OFB XV, pp. 51–6; SEH VI, pp. 559–61. The latter essay, ‘Of Superstition’ was dropped in the Saggi morali along with the references to Machiavelli throughout the Essaies, perhaps out of caution for censorship in Catholic countries on the continent.

50 OFB XV, 'Of Superstition. XVII.' p. 55, lines 33–42: ‘The Causes of Superstition are: Pleasing and sensuall Rites and Ceremonies … And lastly, Barbarous Times, Especially joyned with Calamities and Disasters.’

51 Compare LL VII, p. 470 with LL VII, p. 460: ‘To a war (such as may promise success) there are three things required: a just Quarrel; sufficient Forces and Provisions; and a prudent and politic choice of the Designs and Actions whereby the war shall be managed.’ LL VII, p. 461 with LL VII, p. 469: ‘Spain is no such giant’.

52 LL VII, p. 460. On Bacon's critical assessment of the 1604 Treaty of London, see Zeitlin, 'Francis Bacon on Peace and the 1604 Treaty of London,' pp. 487–504.

53 Commons Journal quoted in LL V, p. 35n1.

54 LL VII, p. 460.

55 Ibid., p. 26. Philip's ‘greatness’ which Bacon claims the Spanish monarch holds at the courtesy of the English crown would seem to encompass territorial greatness, wealth, and provision and upkeep for the unit soldier who is criterial of greatness on Bacon's assessment in ‘Of the true Greatnesse of Kingdomes and Estates. XXIX.’ OFB XV, Essayes, pp. 92–3, ll. 102–139.

56 OFB I, p. 368, ll. 739–47.

57 Hoekstra, 'Thucydides and the Bellicose Beginnings of Modern Political Theory,' p. 25–54, at p. 53: ‘Again we have universal hostility, and what is more, hostility with no prospect of cessation, for the only guarantee is the impotence of the other.’ To the same author's credit, his references to Bacon's repeated usage of Iphicrates and Demosthenes, Against Aristocrates, are more complete than the relevant commentaries in the Oxford Francis Bacon. Ibid, p. 53n135, where ‘[SEH] XIII:358’ should read ‘LL I:167’ or ‘[SEH] VIII:167’. Cf. Stewart, 'Commentary,' in OFB I, p. 836; Kiernan, 'Commentary,' in OFB VIII, p. 555.

58 OFB I, p. 368, ll. 747–750.

59 LL VII, Considerations touching a War with Spain, pp. 476–7.

60 Ibid., p. 477.

61 OFB IV, p. 62, ll. 5–8: ‘THE PARTS of humane learning haue reference to the three partes of Mans vnderstanding, which is the seate of Learning: HISTORY to his MEMORY, POESIE to his IMAGINATION, and PHILOSOPHIE to his REASON’.

62 OFB VIII, Apophthegmes new and old, §144, p. 237. Jean-Pierre Cavaillé notes the recurrence of Bacon's Iphicrates in the 1625 Apophthegmes in his 1997 edition of De Sapientia Veterum. See Bacon, La Sagesse des Anciens, p. 76n1.

63 OFB I, An Advertisement Touching the Controuersyes of the Church of England, p. 160, ll. 21–23.

64 OFB I, Stewart, 'Introduction', p. 136: ‘indeed, it could be said to have been “published” in manuscript form.’ See further Serjeantson and Woolford, 'The Scribal Publication of a Printed Book,' pp. 119–56.

65 OFB I, An Advertisement Touching the Controuersyes of the Church of England, pp. 160, l. 39 – 161, l. 42.

66 Ibid., p. 161, l. 58.

67 Ibid., p. 162, l. 68.

68 Ibid., p. 178, l. 415.

69 On the relation between external and internal warfare in Bacon's thought, see Zeitlin, '" The Heat of a Feaver": Francis Bacon on civil war, sedition, and rebellion,' in History of European Ideas (forthcoming, 2021).

70 OFB I, Advertisement Touching the Controuersyes of the Church of England, p. 177, l. 386.

71 LL III, Certain Considerations touching the better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England, pp. 103–27, at p. 109.

72 Ibid., pp. 103–27, at pp. 108–9: ‘First therefore for the government of Bishops, I for my part, not prejudging the precedents of other reformed churches, do hold it warranted by the word of God and by the practice of the ancient Church in the better times, and much more convenient for kingdoms, than parity of ministers and government by synods.’ Even if Bacon regards episcopal church government as ‘much more convenient for kingdoms’ it does not necessarily follow that Bacon regards the presence of the ‘prelates’ in the Houses of Parliament with respect. See also Serjeantson and Woolford, 'The Scribal Publication of a Printed Book,' pp. 119–56, esp. pp. 122–4.

73 LL III, Certain Considerations touching the better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England, pp. 103–27, at p. 109: ‘Translatio sacerdotio, necesse est ut et Legis fiat translatio [tr. 'For the transferring of priesthood, it is necessary that there be a transferring of laws as well']. It is not possible, in respect of the great and near sympathy between the state civil and the state ecclesiastical, to make so main an alteration in the Church, but it would have a perilous operation upon the kingdom. And therefore it is fit that controversy be in peace and silence.’

74 LL III, Certain Considerations touching the better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England, pp. 103–27, at p. 106: ‘And therefore it seemeth to me that as the spring of nature, I mean the spring of the year, is the best time for purging and medicining the natural body, so the spring of kingdoms is the most proper season for the purging and rectifying of politic bodies.’

75 LL III, Certain Considerations touching the better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England, pp. 103–27, at p. 105: ‘But if it be said to me that there is a difference between civil causes and ecclesiastical, they may as well tell me that churches and chapels need no reparations though houses and castles do: whereas commonly, to speak truth, dilapidations of the inward and spiritual edification of the Church of God are in all times as great as the outward and material.’

76 OFB XV, The Essayes or Counsels, 'Of Unity in Religion. III.' p. 11, ll. 4–6: ‘Religion being the chiefe Band of humane Society, it is a happy thing, when it selfe, is well contained, within the true Band of Unity.’

77 OFB I, An Advertisement Touching the Controuersyes of the Church of England, p. 160, l. 23.

78 LL VII, p. 470: ‘unless they have some mixture of civil titles.’

79 Knolles, Generall Historie, ‘To the Reader,’ [A v recto].

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid.

82 Ibid.

83 In the 1612 Essaies of Sir Francis Bacon, Knight, the essay bore the title ‘Of the greatnesse of Kingdomes.’ SEH VI, p. 586; OFB XV, p. 89n.

84 Lerner, Playing the Fool, pp. 40–4; Lerner, 'The Jihād St. Alban,' pp. 5–26, at pp. 22–6.

85 OFB VIII, p. 202, lines 28–29. As James Spedding notes in his commentary on Bacon's life in the time of the 1614 Parliament, piracy from precisely these Ottoman ports was of great concern to English merchants in the Mediterranean: ‘Abroad, there was Spain, with the Pope to back her, ready to invade on the first opportunity. What case so inviting to an invader, as that of a nation whose Government can raise no money? Ireland, with both Spain and the Pope at her back, was always ready to rebel: what better opportunity for rebellion? The Dutch would gladly beat the English merchants out of the markets of the world: how were they to be protected against foul play? The pirates of Algiers and Tunis were plundering them as they passed: how were they to be protected against robbery?’ See Spedding's commentary, LL V, p. 77.

86 OFB VIII, p. 203, lines 6–8. The related discussion of Ottoman violations of the laws of nature may be borrowed by Bacon for the mouthpieces of his characters in his Advertisement Tovching an Holy Warre from Knolles's address ‘To the Reader’ prefacing the Generall Historie of the Turkes. ‘As for the kind law of nature,’ Knolles writes, ‘what can be thereunto more contrarie, than for the father most vnnaturally to embrue his hands in the bloud of his owne children? and the brother to become the bloudie executioner of his owne brethren? a common matter among the Othoman Emperours.’ Knolles, Generall Historie, ‘To the Reader,’ [A v recto].

87 Gentili, De iure belli, vol. I, p. 202; vol. II, p. 124: ‘Piratica est contra ius gentium, & contra humanæ societatis communionem.’

88 Gentili, De iure belli, vol. I, p. 202; vol. II, p. 124: ‘Et ergo quoniam lædi possumus item singuli ab istis violatoribus naturæ, bellum eisdem fiet à singulis.’

89 Gentili, De iure belli, vol. I, p. 201; vol. II, pp. 124: ‘Bellum fit piratis iuste.’

90 Gentili, De iure belli, vol. I, p. 202; vol. II, p. 124.

91 Gentili, De iure belli, vol. I, p. 202; vol. II, p. 124: ‘Nullum neque his debetur ius’.

92 OFB VIII, p. 203, lines 9–10.

93 OFB VIII, An Advertisement Tovching an Holy Warre, p. 192, line 20.

94 Ibid., p. 190, line 30; p. 191, lines 9–10. On conquest as a title to rule see both Bacon's remarks in Calvin's Case (when arguing for a client) as well as his History of the Reign of King Henry VII (writing in his own person). SEH VII, p. 646; p. 659; OFB VIII, p. 4, lines 6–16; p. 5, line 31–33; p. 6, lines 21–35;OFB VIII, Kiernan, 'Commentary,' p. 296. On the title of conquest in Francis Bacon's political thought, see Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, 'Francis Bacon on Imperial and Colonial Warfare,' in The Review of Politics 83:2 (Spring 2021), pp. 196–218.

95 OFB VIII, An Advertisement Tovching an Holy Warre, p. 192, lines 19–23.

96 Bacon, 'A remembrance additional to the instructions of Sir John Digby,' in LL VI, pp. 158–9, at p. 158.

97 Ibid., pp. 158–9, at p. 158.

98 See Bacon, 'The charge of Owen, indicted of High Treason', in LL V, pp. 154–9.

99 Spedding, 'Preface' to the Advertisement Touching An Holy War, in SEH VII, pp. 3–7, at p. 5: ‘the statesman (who, though a Roman Catholic also, would, I presume, have represented Bacon's own opinion)’. J. Max Patrick contends that Bacon 'probably agreed with his character Zebedaeus', in Patrick, 'Hawk versus Dove,' p. 171. Lerner, Playing the Fool, pp. 45–6: ‘An Advertisement Touching a Holy War is Bacon's trumpet inflaming the heart and powers of a man to daring and resolution. Pollio's jihād is his own, and, if Bacon's invented speeches succeed in getting at least a few philosophical souls to look at the affairs of Christendom through his eyes, why, then there is hope.’ Robert Faulkner identifies Bacon's position with that of his Zebedaeus, the ‘Catholic zelant’ writing that ‘In the Advertisement, Bacon revises Christianity toward a universal creed of humanity that will excuse war against Christian kingdoms and especially against Christ's kingdom. His Zebedaeus abstracts from faith in Christ and dwells on charity, and while he promises to speak of “propagation of the faith” in the “proper place,” he never speaks of it.’ Faulkner, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress, p. 226.

100 Lerner, Playing the Fool, pp. 40–4; Lerner, 'The Jihad St. Alban,' pp. 5–26, at pp. 22–6.

101 LL VI, 'A remembrance additional to the instructions of Sir John Digby,' in LL VI, pp. 158–9, at p. 158. On Bacon's view of naval power, see Clarke, 'Uprooting Nebuchadnezzar's Tree,' pp. 367–78, at p. 376.

102 SEH II, Sylva Sylvarum, Century X, §988, pp. 667–8. OFB VIII, An Advertisement Tovching an Holy Warre, p. 189, ll. 17–21: ‘For where it is, vpon the Defensiue, I reckon it, a Warre of Nature, and not of Piety. The First was, that Famous, and Fortunate Warre by Sea, that ended in the Victory of Lepanto; Which hath put a Hooke, into the Nosthrills of the Ottomans, to this day: Which was the Worke (chiefly) of that excellent Pope, Pius Quintus; whom I wonder his Successours haue not declared a Saint.’

103 Hoekstra, 'Thucydides and the Bellicose Beginnings of Modern Political Theory,' pp. 25–54, at p. 50n129. See also Patrick, 'Hawk versus Dove,' pp. 159–71.

104 The setting of the Advertisement seems to be something like a Parisian salon '(There met at Paris (in the house of Eupolis)', OFB VIII, p. 187) whilst that of the Redargutio rather resembles the royal auditorium of the Collège Royal.

105 LL VI, 'A remembrance additional to the instructions of Sir John Digby,' pp. 158–9, at p. 158. To what extent does this violate Bacon's oft repeated injunctions that it is a high crime to promote insurrections in the countries of others (a complaint which he lodges most frequently against the papal states)? One thrust of Bacon's suggestion that it is not Britain but Spain (and, in the Advertisement, other continental powers) who are to engage in war with the Ottomans is that while such a war, of itself, might promote indirectly or as a foreseen unintended consequence internal disorder and possible insurrection in a neighbouring state, Bacon's injunction against these high crimes would not be violated as the violation would be Spanish, rather than British, and might offer a further pretence for Britain to wage war upon Spain.

106 LL VII, p. 22; Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years’ War, p. 83n27: ‘Among these should surely be counted a text entitled ‘A Short View to be taken of Britain and Spain’ (ibid., xiv, pp. 22–8), which Spedding incorrectly dated to 1619, even though it clearly refers to the negotiations over the Spanish Match as a thing of the past (p. 27).’

107 On Bacon and just war tradition, see 'Francis Bacon on Just Warfare,' in The Political Science Reviewer 45:1 (2021), pp. 69–106.

108 LL VII, p. 22.

109 Ibid., p. 25.

110 Botero, Della Ragione di Stato [1598 ed.], I.vii (‘Quali stati siano più durabili, gli vniti, ò i disuniti’), p. 11: ‘Di più i membri dell’Imperio disunito sono, ò tanto deboli, che da se soli non si possono mantenere, né difendere da’vicini; ò cosi grandi e possenti, che stanno, ò à caualieri, ò al pari de’vicini.’

111 LL VII, pp. 22–5.

112 LL VII, p. 25: Spain is ‘more powerful to assault than to defend.’

113 LL VII, p. 24.

114 Ibid., p. 25.

115 Ibid., p. 25. The Spanish occupying force in Flanders had a persistent problem with mutinies within their ranks, rendering this a difficult point from which to date the Short View. The historian Geoffrey Parker noted 37 major mutinies in the Spanish army in Flanders in the period 1572–1607 alone. See Parker, 'Mutiny and Discontent in the Spanish Army in Flanders 1572–1607,' pp. 38–52.

116 LL VII, p. 25.

117 Lipsius, Politica, V.iii, p. 542, lines 19–20: ‘Sunt autem iniqua illa omnia bella, quibus Ambitio aut Avaritia caussae.’

118 LL VII, p. 26.

119 Ibid., p. 27.

120 Emendation of ‘as’, LL VII, p. 27.

121 LL VII, p. 28.

122 Ibid., p. 28.

123 Ibid., p. 28.

124 Ibid., p. 28.

125 Lipsius, Politica, V.iv, p. 550, line 6: ‘Sapientes Pacis caussa bellum gerunt, et laborem spe otii sustenant.’

126 LL III, pp. 204–6, at p. 205. As Stephen Alford has noted, sixteenth and seventeenth century English Protestants referred to their faith as the true religion. Alford, The Watchers, p. 40; see also p. 319: ‘the destruction of queen, country and what Protestants called the “true religion”’.

127 OFB XV, p. 13, lines 64–65.

128 Ibid., pp. 12–3, lines 56–57.

129 Ibid., p. 13, lines 59–62.

130 van Malssen, The Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon, p. 227: ‘the same Bacon, moreover, who in what one might call an inner-Christian context only used the notion of a “holy war” to describe what he considered to be the well-deserved response to the authors of the doctrine of papally and therefore religiously sanctioned regicide’; ibid, p. 307n68, citing the The charge of Owen, indicted of High Treason, in the King's Bench, by Sir Francis Bacon, his Majesty's Attorney-General, LL V, pp. 154–9. See also Lerner, Playing the Fool, p. 45: ‘More profoundly offensive than the Turks is the papal endorsement of political assassination. Arguing as attorney general in the King's Bench a few years earlier, Bacon had leveled his guns against a more deserving enemy’.

131 OFB XV, 'Of Unity in Religion. III.' p. 13, lines 63–71.

132 Ibid. p. 13, lines 71–73.

133 OFB I, An Advertisement Touching the Controuersyes of the Church of England, p. 161, lines 59–62.

134 Ibid., pp. 161–2, lines 59–65.

135 Ibid., p. 162, lines 67–70.

136 Ibid., pp. 161–2, lines 59–68; OFB XV, 'Of Unity in Religion. III', p. 13, line 82: ‘They be two Things, Unity, and Uniformity.’

137 OFB IV, Aduancement of Learning II, p. 185, lines 26–27.

138 Exodus 2:11–14, cited in Kiernan, 'Commentary,' p. 358.

139 OFB IV, Aduancement of Learning II, p. 185, lines 31–35. Bacon's discussion of all Christians being brothers in his Advancement of Learning finds early expression in the 1589 Advertisement Touching the Controuersyes of the Church of England, where Bacon had earlier cited the same passage of Exodus (‘yee are brethren, why striue yee’) and further avows that any who are affronted by his interpretation of the doctrine of Christian brotherhood ‘shall give a great presumption against himself that he is the party that doth his brother wrong.’ See OFB I, An Advertisement Touching the Controuersyes of the Church of England, p. 161, ll. 36–39: ‘ffor if any shalbe offended at this voice Vos estis fratres, yee are brethren, why striue yee, he shall giue a great presumption against himself that he is the party that doth his brother wrong.’

140 Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to Fortune, p. 35: ‘he bought them Aristotle and Plato, Cicero's Complete Works and a commentary on his Orations, Sallust's Roman History, Hermogenes and Xenophon in a facing-page Greek and Latin edition.’ John Whitgift's account books for the Bacon brothers, Anthony and Francis, at Trinity College Cambridge show that dual copies were purchased for only four authors: Aristotle, Cicero, Homer, and Plato, with both brothers each receiving a copy of Plato's Works. Gaskell, 'Books bought by Whitgift's pupils in the 1570s,' 284–93, at pp. 289–90.

141 Republic, V, 470a-471b; Thucydides II.47–54 with III.82–84.

142 SEH II, Sylva Sylvarum, Century X, §988, pp. 667–8.

143 Ibid., pp. 667–8.

144 OFB I, p. 384, line 1246; Cf. p. 399, line 1683; LL I, p. 183; Cf. p. 196.

145 Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, p. 96: ‘the prince should aim to spread disunion among the leaders, after the example of Louis XI … If that does not work, the king—not “prince”; Botero plainly had recent events in France in mind—must make himself the head of the most powerful faction, as Henri III made himself head of the Ligue’. Bacon counsels exactly the opposite, noting of Botero's policy brief on behalf of Henri III as head of the Catholic League that this policy led to Henri III's ruin. OFB XV, 'Of Seditions And Troubles. XV', p. 44, lines 44–54: ‘Also, as Macciavel noteth well; when Princes, that ought to be Common Parents, make themselves as a Party, and leane to a side, it is as a Boat that is overthrowen, by uneven weight, on the one Side; As was well seen, in the time of Henry the third of France: For first, himself entred League for the Extirpation of the Protestants; and presently after, the same League was turned upon Himselfe. For when the Authority of Princes, is made but an Accessary to a Cause; And that there be other Bands, that tie faster, then the Band of Soveraignty, Kings begin to be put almost out of Possession.’

146 SEH III, p. 130; Cf. New Atlantis in Bacon, The Major Works, p. 458: ‘In which scroll were written in ancient Hebrew, and in ancient Greek, and in good Latin of the School, and in Spanish, these words’.

147 SEH III, p. 131; Cf. New Atlantis in Bacon, The Major Works, p. 459: ‘And thereupon the man whom I before described stood up, and with a loud voice in Spanish, asked, “Are ye Christians?” We answered, “We were;” fearing the less, because of the cross we had seen in the subscription.’ One scholar had inferred from the fact that the narrator writes in English that the sailors in Bacon's New Atlantis are British: ‘The narrator writes in English, and the voyage to Bensalem represents the future way of Great Britain to the perfection of science as man's destiny. The history of Britain's future is the history of Bensalem, which points to the true end of days. Thus, the history of Bensalem and the history of England converge.’ Weinberger, 'Introduction,' pp. vii-xxix, at p. xviii in Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration and New Atlantis, ed. Jerry Weinberger (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1980).

148 Steven Matthews, in the line of commentators like Webster and Lewis, reads Bacon as a millennialist and millenarian. Matthews is not shy in the ambit and scope which he accords theology in the intellectual world of the seventeenth century, writing that ‘All ideas in the seventeenth century were theological in their implications, if not in their very nature.’ Going further, Matthews avows that across ‘early modern Europe there was a widespread belief that a special age had or would soon come upon them in which momentous changes, wrought by the hand of God, would transform the world, and that such an age was foretold in the Scriptures.’ Without adducing textual support for such an interpretation, Matthews attributes such a ‘belief’ to Francis Bacon, as ‘In Bacon's own writing, as well as that of his followers, there can be found the conviction that Britain, her king, and her people, were set aside by God for a particular glorious destiny.’ See Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon, pp. 19–20. Matthews ignores the precarious status which learning, natural philosophy, and the sciences had in the world, in Bacon's estimation. Projects for the advancement of knowledge with an ultimate aim of human betterment and the effecting of all things possible were, as Bacon avowed, far from assured in their success and might easily be diverted, thwarted, or upturned by civil wars, by Spanish power (and with it the power of the Inquisition), or, in Bacon's view, by Ottoman victories over continental powers within Christendom. Moreover, in addition to being unassured and insecure, the progress of knowledge and natural philosophy was in no way ‘wrought by the hand of God’ or ‘set aside by God’ but rather these were matters to be wrought by human hands and directed by human intelligences, albeit, optimally, in Bacon's view, with generous doses of regal subsidy and state support (hence the regal dedication to The Advancement of Learning, the De Augmentis, the Novum Organum, and the majestic Sylva Sylvarum). In keeping with his reading of Bacon viewing the success of science as providentially assured, Matthews and McKnight ignore Bacon's discussions of the threats to science posed by civil war, the Spanish Inquisition, and the power of the Ottomans—each a central concern of what Bacon actually wrote on matters of religion. See also McKnight, The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon's Thought.

149 Botero, Della Ragione di Stato, V.ii-V.viii. Cf. Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, p. 96: ‘But Botero himself elsewhere casually allowed that the best course for a prince who lacked power to deal with heretics by force was to temporise and allow the upheavals to blow over, which they would do once the multitudes lost their leaders.’