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    Secrets of the Golden Age Prince: Francis Bacon
    Secrets of the Golden Age Prince: Francis Bacon
    Secrets of the Golden Age Prince: Francis Bacon
    Ebook609 pages7 hours

    Secrets of the Golden Age Prince: Francis Bacon

    By Elizabeth Clare Prophet

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    This book stands with respect on the shoulders of four centuries of Francis Bacon’s biographers, referencing historical and cipher inquiries about his noble person and transcendent body of work, but pushing further to ask: Did his vision for the ages, the Great Instauration, die with him?
    The premise of the fine, foregoing biographies has been to discern and explain the secrets of a great, historic personality, perhaps the world’s greatest genius, from a fixed birthdate to a fixed date of death. The less conventional premise of this book is to explain the context of the life of the person, Francis Bacon, as one crucial chapter within a long continuity of lifetimes, yet unending.
    Francis, and those closest to him, manifested the beginning of the Great Instauration in the form of an extraordinary array of civilization-building services, sacrificially, under persecution, for the love of humanity and the latent divinity within the people. Francis’ conclave of literary men saw themselves as brothers, demonstrating a constructive vision and true charity, outside the churches which had suppressed as heresy what the people needed to know about nature and themselves.
    How did twelve-year old Francis see the need and then generate the beneficial concept of the Great Instauration, meaning the restoration of a golden age of abundance, a paradise lost? This would require prior knowledge and likely actual engagement in such a civilization. Why was it lost? Why did he persevere under Job-like trials to produce a legacy of enlightenment he knew would only bear fruit long after his passing? And, is a soul of this magnitude lost forever to humanity at his passing? None of these questions can be answered entirely by original source documents, especially when for safety’s sake Francis deliberately hid or obscured the records of that lifetime.
    To answer the questions, the scope of Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s biography of Francis Bacon honors the existing body of documented research and then necessarily expands the lens of discovery to summarize a continuous chain of prior lives, the lifestream of this soul.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSummit University Press
    Release dateJul 2, 2024
    ISBN9781609884390
    Secrets of the Golden Age Prince: Francis Bacon
    Author

    Elizabeth Clare Prophet

    Elizabeth Clare Prophet is a world-renowned author, spiritual teacher, and pioneer in practical spirituality. Her groundbreaking books have been published in more than thirty languages and over three million copies have been sold worldwide.

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      Secrets of the Golden Age Prince - Elizabeth Clare Prophet

      Secrets of the Golden Age Prince: Francis Bacon

      PART 1

      A Sacred Mystery

      May God the Maker, the Preserver, the Renewer of the Universe of his love and compassion to man protect and guide this work both in its ascent to His glory, and its descent to the good of man, through his only Son, God with us.

      ~ Francis Bacon, Abecedarium Naturæ

      The Dark Ages were ending. The sacred secrets of the hidden mystery schools were coming again to the surface of thought, culture, and philosophy. The warm light of the Renaissance was beginning to gleam in the hearts of spiritual seekers once again. The entire world waited for the coming of a true teacher, a master, to light that spark.

      In November 1572, a supernova flashed out of the constellation Cassiopeia, startling the world. As bright as Venus, it caused great speculation and had royalty from Britain to China questioning their astrologers.

      Tycho Brahe, who first recorded the supernova’s appearance, wrote in his Introduction to the New Astronomy that some great light is now at hand which shall enlighten and by degrees expel the former darkness.¹

      Its appearance in Cassiopeia held great mystical meaning. "Cassiopeia means ‘the Enthroned Lady’ or ‘Celestial Queen.’ She represents the Virgin Queen and Mother of the Christ Child (or children). Each new star that appears within her basic star pattern signifies the birth of a new Christ impulse or ‘Child of Light’ that will influence and manifest itself on Earth. Cassiopeia is the ‘Woman with Child’ of Revelation, and was also called by the Druids, Llys Don, meaning the ‘Court of the Lord.’ Each star in her bosom is a ‘Child of Don,’ a sun-son of the Supreme Lord."²

      The constellation also signifies the Elohim Cassiopea who holds a focus of great illumination on behalf of the Godhead. This cosmic being assists in raising the consciousness of the entire planet in preparation for the golden age.

      The supernova came with an upwelling of cultural reformation and signified the appearance of a soul who would lay the foundations for a new age. For centuries, scientific experimentation in Europe had been virtually nonexistent, except in the alchemical laboratories of the mystics. The spirit of intellectual discovery had been snuffed out during the thousand-year reign of a despotic Church and State. Alfred Dodd, a biographer of Francis Bacon, explains:

      In 1561 England was slowly awakening from the death-like trance into which she had fallen, in common with the rest of Europe, through the spells of the Holy Catholic Church. For upwards of a thousand years this Church had reigned supreme over an entire Continent. The Pope was the Dictator not only of the religious life of the nations but he also controlled all intellectual activity. Men and women had no right to think outside the narrow bonds of an enervating theology.

      …All search for Truth from the third century onwards ended in a pre-ordained cul-de-sac—orthodox dogma. Theology led men away from the great thinkers of Greece and Rome and from the Ethical Rituals of the Mysteries that had once displayed their Secret Dramas in Sacred Temples on the banks of the Nile. It trampled on the Pagan Schools of Thought and ground their teachings into the dust with cries of heresy. It scoffed at secular learning. Under the leadership of the priest, civilization plunged blindly forward into the abyss of the Medieval Era.³

      The corruption of the Roman Catholic Church had reached astounding extremes in the practice of indulgences for crimes.* If you could afford to pay the Church, they promised God would forgive you for crimes such as incest, perjury, and even murder, which was in fact the least expensive to absolve. Its corruption was topped only by its use of violence to control populations. Under the chief inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, Torquemada, 10,220 persons were burned alive, 97,321 being punished with confiscation of property.⁴

      In terms of literature in Europe and England, Alfred Dodd points to similar suffocating effects of both Protestant and Catholic religious dogma. The Reformation did little to aid Free Thought. The English Puritans made great bonfires of everything Popish, destroying Art and glorying in their depredations. Luther called Copernicus, ‘this fool who wishes to reverse the entire system of astronomy.’ Puritans and Romanists alike were united in their persecution of philosophy and their hatred of secular knowledge for the common people.⁵

      This was a dangerous environment for independent thinkers. But the appearance of the supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia heralded a remarkable change in Europe and England—a change wrought by the secret Brotherhood of adepts, saints, and masters by hidden means and great courage. The sudden intellectual revolution of the sixteenth century was born from the seeds planted by those such as Dante and Roger Bacon, who hid liberating spiritual truths within their writings that were anathema to the Roman Catholic Church.

      Dante and His Poem

      Florence Cathedral, Florence, Italy

      Painting by Domenico di Michelino, 1465.

      Historian Alfred North Whitehead, in his book Science and the Modern World, wrote that this resurgence of learning bequeathed formed systems of thought touching every aspect of human life. It is the one century which consistently, and throughout the whole range of human activities, provided intellectual genius adequate for the greatness of its occasions.⁶

      Those in power tried to control this new renaissance of thought and the coming birth of a new world by reinforcing the oft misunderstood and misused ideal of the divine right of kings—Philosopher-King or Holy Emperor. But the corrupt power structures of Europe were far from this ancient ideal of rulers who have the greatest attainment of the God consciousness and the greatest mastery of the physical universe—individuals who are accomplished in the sciences, in economics, in government, as well as in religion. Many new thinkers no longer had faith in their rulers, seeing little of the divine in their politicking. Mystics and philosophers across Europe were now inspired by the belief of a coming golden age governed by wisdom, love, and the divine rights of each individual.

      Peter Dawkins, a Baconian scholar, writes about this time period:

      Many looked to a rebirth of Christianity according to its original model, before the Roman takeover and domination of what should have been a free and personal religion. Movements aiming to reform the Church, to return to the first principles of religion and religious life, to study and comprehend the original and true sources of Christian thought and inspiration, spread like wild-fire. The invention of the printing press enabled the new gospel—the new learning—to be spread. Renaissance colleges, academies, schools and universities raised the level of education, not only amongst the more wealthy and privileged, but amongst the poorer classes of society too….

      Amongst the better educated, moderate and beautiful humanistic thought developed, both mystic and scholarly, surrounded on one side by the mediaeval and conservative dogmas of Roman Catholicism and on the other by new and radical dogmas of various reforming movements. The pendulum was swinging from one side of tyranny and oppression, to another side that was proving to be equally violent and aggressive, in Reformation and Counter-Reformation.⁷

      This division and warring between theologies threatened to destroy the true reformation that was beginning to take place, but for the coming of one man who took up the cause for freedom and enlightenment. The coming of the supernova coincided exactly with the dawning of a century of genius in science and literature, which was initiated by the greatest of mankind, Sir Francis Bacon of England.

      How could one person usher in a new age? It was only possible because Francis Bacon came to earth with soul mastery that took lifetimes to achieve. This is the story of a wonderful man who became a spiritual adept and a living master. This is a being who personified the Christic light and embodied the Higher Self. Francis’s soul journey is like our own. Each soul is here to fulfill her own spiritual destiny.

      Francis blazes ahead and shows us the way.

      A Marvelous Being Is Born

      O, he sits high in all the people’s hearts,

      And that which would appear offense in us

      His countenance, like richest alchemy

      Will change to virtue and to worthiness.

      ~ Julius Ceasar, act 1, sc. 3

      The great light, Francis Bacon, was born in 1561. He incarnated the true expression of noblesse oblige and never failed to follow the inner teaching of the heart.

      The supernova appeared above Francis at the dawn of his age of reason. Even at twelve, Francis saw the shortcomings of civilization and discovered tangible pathways toward their improvement. As a boy, he possessed cheerfulness, great wisdom, and a practicality that enabled him to succeed in the projects he set before himself.

      Jesus the Christ, the avatar or master of the Piscean age, publicly lived the example of the sacred mysteries of the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the ascension. Francis Bacon, as the future avatar for the Aquarian age, lived the example of the inner ancient mysteries. Like Solomon, he built the temple, but his was an inner temple of the spirit. His life was the enfolding and revealing of Truth, a life that exemplifies the edict of God for mankind to find the living Truth concealed in the Matter cosmos.

      To be a follower of the way that Jesus taught is to be the living flame of love in action; it is to be God’s charity at work—to sacrifice your life for others. This is what Francis Bacon did. He dedicated his life to creating a culture of true brotherhood and a reformational foundation of principles, education, law, government, culture, and theology. He worked to save a people in ages beyond his own. He strove against great odds to create a world where personal Christhood and freedom could thrive.

      Traditional historians state that Francis was the son of Sir Nicholas and Lady Anne Bacon, but there was a secret to his birth. Though these two raised Francis and gave him love, inspiration, and education, they were not his parents by blood. For Francis was a true Tudor prince, the firstborn son of Queen Elizabeth I.

      Out of Darkness

      Out of this nettle, danger,

      We pluck this flower, safety.

      ~ Henry IV, part 1, act 2, sc. 3

      Court intrigue, murder, treachery, fear, and suspicion paint a disturbing pattern in medieval England. The monarchs ruled with tyrannical power, Machiavellian lords manipulated and committed murder for power, the merchant guilds stripped the craftsman of any protections, and the laborers and common people lived as serfs in hovels. The wisdom of the ancients was unknown to the illiterate populace and a heresy to the controlling factors of Church and State. Though even then, in England, there were bright lights such as Sir Thomas More, who formed a secret spiritual society that believed in the coming of a special soul and the true reformation of the world.

      Francis’s grandfather was the tempestuous King Henry VIII. The birth of Henry’s elder brother, Arthur, unified the two warring royal houses of York and Lancaster. At age fifteen, Arthur married sixteen-year-old Catherine of Aragon and was the hope of the British nation, but in 1502, only five months later, the two newlyweds came down with the sweating sickness.* Catherine survived but Prince Arthur did not.

      Catherine stayed on in the English court, and when Arthur’s younger brother, Prince Henry, ascended the throne, the previous marriage of Catherine to Arthur was annulled by the pope. Henry and Catherine married in 1509. They were married for over twenty years and had one child, Princess Mary Tudor.

      King Henry VIII, by Hans Holbein

      After the thirty long years of dynastic civil war that England had just endured, King Henry knew he needed a strong line of succession. Dissatisfied that his marriage to Catherine produced no male heir, and infatuated with a younger courtier, Anne Boleyn, Henry appealed to Pope Clement to have his marriage to Catherine annulled. The pope refused and in a regal power play, King Henry defied the Church and the pope by assuming supremacy over all religious matters in England. This was unprecedented in European history.

      At first glance, King Henry’s defiance seems to be completely ruled by self-interest, not by law. However, he asserted the primacy of British Christianity over the Vatican as lawful precedent. His ascendancy, he claimed, was founded on the historical fact that Britain was the first Christian kingdom and the early refuge of Joseph of Arimathea and Jesus’ disciples. It is interesting to note that the Vatican had accepted the primacy of the British Church for hundreds of years before Henry VIII.⁸

      A Mystic History

      Thou met’st with things dying,

      I with things newborn.

      ~ The Winter’s Tale, act 3, sc. 3

      For generations, the British monarchy had been trying to rid itself of Roman papal control. Rome had never been able to conquer the entirety of Britain with military tactics and force, so they sent in the Roman Church to convert the Anglo-Saxons. The corruption of the Roman Catholic Church began as early as the Council of Nicaea in the year AD 325. It was then that Christianity became a universal religion based on the ambitions of Rome and a Roman emperor. Thus Christianity has descended as a Roman religion, not as a religion of Jesus. Despite its claim, Saint Peter and Saint Paul were never bishops of Rome; they were apostles whose work extended to all people and not confined to location.

      Hugh Paulinus Cressy,* an Anglican turned Benedictine priest and close relative through marriage to Francis Bacon, wrote that Britain received beams of the Sun of Righteousness before many other countries nearer approaching the place where He first rose. In his history of Christianity in Britain, he wrote:

      Now the most eminent of the Primitive Disciples, and who contributed most to this heavenly building, was S. Joseph of Arimathea, and eleaven of his companions with him, among whom is reckoned his Son, of his own name. These toward the latter end of Nero’s raign, and before S. Peter and S. Paul were consummated by a glorious Martyrdom, are by the Testimony of ancient Records said to have entered this Island, as a place for the retirednes of it, the benignity of the Brittish Princes, and the freedom from Roman Tyranny, more opportune, and better prepar’d for entertaining the Gospell of Peace, then almost any Countrey under the Romans.⁹

      In his Ecclesiastical Annals, a sixteenth-century work, Cardinal Caesar Baronius, a historian and librarian to the Vatican, stated that those who accompanied Joseph were: the two Bethany sisters, Mary and Martha; their brother Lazarus; Saint Eutropius; Saint Salome; Saint Cleon; Saint Saturninus; Saint Mary Magdalene; Marcella, the maid of the Bethany sisters; Saint Maxim or Maximin; Saint Martial; Saint Trophimus; Restitutus, the man who was born blind. And he also says that Mary the mother of Jesus undoubtedly was not left behind.

      So in many of the early historical accounts, Joseph of Arimathea then carries the Holy Grail west, in most cases to Britain, usually to Glastonbury. When Rome, through Augustine, tried to place its authority over the Bishops of the British Church, they answered him saying, We have nothing to do with Rome. We know nothing of the Bishop of Rome in his new character of Pope. We are the British Church, the Archbishop of which is accountable to God alone, having no superior on earth.¹⁰

      Francis Bacon knew well this history and the ancient mysticism of the original British Church. He wrote:

      The Britons told Augustine they would not be subject to him, nor let him pervert the ancient laws of their Church. This was their resolution, and they were as good as their word, for they maintained the liberty of their Church five hundred years after this time, and were the last of all Churches in Europe that gave up their power to the Roman Beast, and in the person of Henry VIII, that came of their blood by Owen Tudor, the first that took that power away again.¹¹

      Though the Roman Church was finally successful in taking over the isle, the British Church never died out. Instead, it hid its mysteries until a time when Rome’s control would crack.

      King Edward III had started the process in the 1300s. He held King Arthur as his ideal and refounded the British Order of St. George. King Arthur, a descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, had first founded

      an Order of Chivalry based on the traditional pattern adopted by Jesus and his disciples—the Zodiacal Round Table (i.e. Christ, the Sun, surrounded by 12 Apostles or Signs). Each Christian community was established on this same pattern, each Apostle representing the Christ and presiding over one or more Round Tables of disciples, with a Bishop as chief or head of each Twelve (and being one of those Twelve). With the ideal and example of St. George brought into the Christian symbology, it became possible to translate the priestly office to that of a knight for those of the fighting, chivalrous ilk. Thus the Holy Grail of the priest-priestess could become, at another level of expression, the Holy Grail of the knights and their ladies. This was no new idea, but a revival of ancient traditions and systems of initiation. Arthur called his Order of Chivalry, The Order or Society of St. George and the Round Table, and he adopted (or was allowed to adopt) the Cross of St. George (i.e. the Rose Cross) as his personal banner.¹²

      The Rose Cross was first given to the ancient British hero, Caradoc, by Joseph of Arimathea along with the title Defender of the Faith. It is in fact older than the symbol of the crucifixion, which did not come into use until the seventh century.

      It is interesting to note the pattern of a soul’s work, for as Merlin, Francis’s soul was in embodiment for this rejuvenation of ancient mysteries. "Merlin or Myrrdin, meaning ‘Wise Man,’ was a title given to Ambrosius (i.e. Merlin Ambrosius), who was also known as ‘the Prince of the Sanctuary’ because of his holiness and wisdom. It is quite possible and in keeping with Ancient British practice that Uthyr’s son Arthur was adopted by Ambrosius, raised and initiated by him into the Mysteries."¹³

      A part of the Arthurian legend deals with the quest for a vessel of great sanctity, the Sangreal, the Grail. Camelot as a mystery school became the quest for the vessel of Christ, in other words, one’s own true being. This quest took the outer form of conquering all that was less than the qualities and virtues of Christ within ourselves. It took the form of defending the people against injustice and every force that was anti-Grail. To deny the vessel is to deny the very content of the vessel. The Grail, then, is seen as the community, as the mystery school, as the individual that, somehow in the mystery, merits bearing the light or containing the essence of God.

      In refounding this order under the name The Most Noble Order of St. George and the Garter, Edward III created a society, fellowship and college of knights for the purpose of Good Fellowship.¹⁴ He obtained a papal bull from Pope Clement VI, which declared the Chapel of the Knights of the Order of St. George and the Garter as free of the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Canterbury. This Chapel with its college was the first religious foundation in England to be free of Roman control since the fall of the British Church.

      This order was also known as The Knights of the Blue Garter and has included women since its founding. The garter and its symbolism go back to Druidic teaching. The Druids’ battle cry was Truth against the World. The blue garter tied around or slightly below the knee, held the druidic meaning to represent unity amongst a fellowship who never fled from living, proclaiming or defending the Truth.¹⁵

      A Violent Break

      So every bondman in his own hand bears the power to cancel his captivity.

      ~ Julius Caesar, act I, sc. 3

      History cycled forward and two hundred years later, the pope excommunicated the upstart English King for England’s final break with Rome. King Henry VIII defied the pope and proceeded to exercise sole religious power in England, including confiscation of Church properties and the destruction of monasteries. In 1533, as head of the new Church of England, he dissolved his own marriage with Catherine and married Anne Boleyn. Unfortunately, with this dramatic shift of power came the cost of innocents and wise men. The mystical author, philosopher, and judge Sir Thomas More was beheaded, and many monks and nuns lost their lives.

      Princess Elizabeth was born to Anne and Henry, but by the time she turned three, she was motherless. With Henry no longer in love and still seeking a male heir, Anne was accused of adultery, incest, and treason and sent to the Tower. While Anne awaited her fate, Henry had their marriage annulled, making Elizabeth illegitimate. On May 19, 1536, Anne was beheaded.

      After Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, gave Henry the long-awaited male heir, he declared Elizabeth legitimate once more by an act of Parliament in 1543. She was raised with her half brother and a succession of stepmothers. Under the care of her final one, Katherine Parr, Princess Elizabeth was given an education far surpassing many women of that time. She could speak in French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch as well as write in Greek, Latin, French, and Italian.

      After long being ill, King Henry VIII died January 28, 1547. His young son, Edward VI, took the throne. Elizabeth became the ward of Katherine Parr and her new husband, Thomas Seymour (Jane Seymour’s brother). Thomas’s elder brother was Lord Protector and Regent to the young King Edward, and as such he held power over the throne, which Thomas wanted. Once ensconced in the same household as Elizabeth, Thomas showed inappropriate attention to her. As a fourteen-year-old, she would have had little recourse against the forty-five-year-old Lord of the house.

      At the same time as he was pursuing Elizabeth, Thomas bought the wardship of Jane Grey, the great granddaughter of Henry VII, thus gaining control of two of the four women who could inherit the throne. Katherine, who was in love with her husband, did not see anything wrong at first. It was only when his actions became undeniable that Elizabeth was sent away. This parting was hard for both women.

      When Katherine died, Seymour set about not only trying to marry Elizabeth but to overthrow his brother as well. When his plans for a coup were discovered, he even tried to kidnap the young king.

      When Thomas Seymour discovered that Elizabeth was with child, he told her to kill her baby. Francis wove the story of his life into multiple types of cipher, hidden in his literary and scientific works. In his biliteral cipher, he wrote about Seymour: He, by disownei’g the child, subjected the princely heart to ignominie, and co’pelled Elizabeth to murder this infant at the very first slight breath.¹⁶ In his word cipher, he gives a poetic version of this secret history as his foster mother had told it to him. Anne Bacon, who had been a young unmarried Anne Cooke at the time, served Elizabeth and could give Francis her firsthand account of what truly happened: When Princess Elizabeth confessed her condition to Anne and begged her for help, Anne had her feign illness and keep to her bed to conceal her pregnancy.

      That here she liest till at last

      The swelling infant, ripe,

      . . . . . . .*

      From the fortress built by nature

      With fury sprung selfborn,

      And yet unborn.

      . . . . .

      This sweet soul in speechless death

      Lie’st in bed as in a grave.

      I was not skill’d enough

      To play the nurse, open the rotten bands

      And aid the poor child

      From the impervious case

      Which keeps it from breathing native breath.

      So unhallowed, unmuzzled, it passed in silence

      To the fountain of final causes,

      Namely, God.¹⁷

      This tragic account paints the picture of two frightened young women facing a complicated birth alone. To call a doctor could have been to forfeit Elizabeth’s life. Afterward, Anne attempted to bury the infant in secret but was seen and her actions were reported to the King. Upon the arrest of Seymour, Elizabeth and her two servants were detained and questioned. Elizabeth convinced her questioners that she had nothing to do with Seymour’s plots for the throne, swearing that she would never think of marrying someone without the permission of the King.

      Only six years after his reign began, King Edward VI died at the age of fifteen (whether by poison or disease). Lady Jane Grey was named queen by Parliament and her father-in-law, John Dudley, who had replaced Seymour’s brother as the late king’s Chief Advisor. She was not even officially crowned before Henry VIII’s oldest daughter, Mary, a Catholic from birth, overthrew her. Elizabeth rode to London with her half sister amidst cheering crowds. One can only imagine Princess Elizabeth’s thoughts as she rode through the throngs.

      The Rise of the Virgin Queen

      We were not born to sue, but to command.

      ~ Richard II, act 1, sc. 1

      Elizabeth’s life remained in turmoil. In the first year of Mary’s reign, Wyatt’s Rebellion sought to stop her from marrying the Catholic King Philip of Spain with the undeclared objective to put Elizabeth on the throne. When it failed, Elizabeth was arrested and placed in the Tower, but Lady Jane Grey, her husband, and father-in-law were put to death. Mary could not afford to have figureheads for rebellions to rally around.

      After this failed uprising, Mary became more ruthless in her dedication to restoring Catholicism in Britain. During her short reign, she condemned over 280 Protestant dissenters to be burned at the stake and gained the epithet Bloody Mary. She endeavored to return to the monasteries the land that her father had confiscated but was blocked by Parliament, which was made up of the Lords who would have to give up their newly obtained properties.

      While being held in the Tower, Elizabeth fell in love with Robert Dudley, Lady Jane Grey’s young brother-in-law, who was also being held in the Tower. Although Robert Dudley was already married, a passionate relationship sprang up between them. Both Elizabeth and Robert believed they were likely to lose their lives and were not in a mind to waste any time they had. She was in one tower and he in another with a connecting walk between them. They would exchange letters, delivered by one of the children also imprisoned there. Eventually Robert, through subterfuge, persuaded a Catholic priest to perform a secret marriage ceremony.

      After two months, on the anniversary of her own mother’s execution, Elizabeth was suddenly released from the Tower and taken to the Palace of Woodstock in Oxfordshire to live under house arrest. After almost a year, she was brought back to court and spent a few months at Mary’s side while the Queen thought herself pregnant. After this, Mary allowed Elizabeth her own household away from court. When Mary realized that she was not pregnant but dying, and would leave no heir except Elizabeth, she tried to persuade her half sister to follow in her footsteps as a Catholic, but Elizabeth refused.

      When Mary died, English Protestants rejoiced at the crowning of Queen Elizabeth. Many marveled that she looked like the Old King with her fiery red hair and youthful power. The Catholics in the country worried about how the new Queen would treat them.

      Elizabeth at her coronation

      As her first royal act, the new Queen appointed Robert Dudley as her Master of the Horse and then anointed him Earl of Leicester. During the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, she and Robert Dudley were inseparable. Elizabeth gave Robert all the honors he wanted, poured wealth upon him and put power into his hands. No one doubted that she loved him passionately.

      What the court didn’t know in those early years was how far her love went. Elizabeth was not only a secret wife but she became a mother as well. At that time, Robert’s wife, Amy, met with a fatal fall, and three weeks later, the Queen remarried Robert in a secret ceremony at the house of Lord Pickering. A young prince was born just four months after Elizabeth and Robert’s second marriage. Meanwhile, the British Kingdom was at great risk. The powerful Catholic countries of France and Spain sought total control and revenge for the actions of Henry VIII.

      Elizabeth’s honor, public image, and the security of the throne were tenuous early in her reign. She could not let it be publicly known that she had married and had a son at all, let alone with a man who was already married. Her power with foreign sovereigns lay in the fact that she might marry one of them. She posed as the Virgin Queen even while in secret she lived as wife and mother. From the day of her coronation, twenty-two-year-old Queen Elizabeth was faced with court intrigue, dangerous incursions and spies from Spain, Scotland, and the Vatican. Symbolically, her people saw her as the personification of Astrea, the Virgin Queen. This was vital for her, for it was an image that was acceptable to both the English Catholics and Protestants. With the religious wars tearing France apart, Elizabeth knew how quickly religious differences could induce countrymen to massacre each other. In the imaginations of her people, she had to be the Faerie Queen on the throne of Merry Old England. The supernova in the constellation of Cassiopeia helped cement this imagery and its importance.

      The true lineage of her son became a state secret, although many members of her court learned of it and the common people suspected it. It became a criminal offense to mention the obvious. It meant certain death or mutilation to speak slander about the Virgin Queen. Mistress Anne Dowe of Brentwood gossiped that the Queen had given birth. She was burned to death. Robert Brookes of Devizes was sent to prison for reviving the report. And in 1570, Mr. Marsham, a gentleman of Norfolk, had his ears cut off for having said, My Lord of Leicester had two children by the Queen.

      Prince Francis

      The golden age prince was born on January 22, 1561. Queen Elizabeth had her lady-in-waiting and trusted friend, Lady Anne Bacon née Cooke, with her. Anne pleaded with the Queen to spare this very inconvenient new baby’s life. She had faithfully kept the princess’s secret and now would keep the queen’s living son. She offered to christen and raise the young prince as her own. Lady Anne took the baby boy home that same day in a little round, painted box.¹⁸

      Anne had been expecting a child herself and planned to simply announce the birth of twins. But a week later, Anne’s baby was stillborn, and Elizabeth’s baby was introduced to the world as Anne’s son, Francis Bacon.

      Francis Bacon as a young child

      The baptism of Francis was recorded in the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields on the twenty-fifth of January 1561. Historians have been puzzled by his registered name, Mr. Franciscus Bacon, an unusual title of respect for a newborn.

      The universe had provided the young infant with a perfect place to grow and thrive. Francis grew up in an atmosphere full of learning, wit, and wordplay. His childhood was spent at the Bacon’s York House by the Thames River, and Gorhambury, their country estate near St. Albans. The Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon welcomed the notable minds of the time to his home—statesmen, scholars, patriots, and poets. Francis gained a love for the ancients, for myth and fairytales, logic and classical literature.

      York House, the Bacons’ home in London

      Lady Anne was known throughout England as a deeply religious woman whose accomplishments were many and varied. As the daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, the tutor to both Elizabeth I and Edward VI, she was well versed in classical and modern languages and was respected in Europe for her translations from Latin and Italian.

      Francis loved her passionately, calling her God’s own saint, and even in his middle years he often returned home to be with her.

      As an expert in coded ciphers and a secret author himself, his foster father, Lord Keeper Bacon, gave Francis the key to publishing secret truth and a love of ancient wisdom. Sir Nicholas Bacon with Sir Thomas More had founded the college for the Advancement of Learning and Training of Statesmen during the reign of Henry VIII. Long before Francis’s birth, Sir Nicholas Bacon had joined the Sir Thomas More spiritual fraternity that focused on the coming age of spiritual light.

      Sir Nicholas and Lady Anne Bacon

      It can only be seen as the work of divine wisdom that the boy destined to change the face of the world would be fostered by a man whose passion and works were laying the foundations for that path.

      During this time, young Francis was constantly with the Queen and Lord Leicester at court, during her regular visits to Gorhambury, and at Burghley House, the country seat of the Cecil’s, where plays and pageants were often performed.

      Lord Leicester, Queen Elizabeth and Francis Bacon miniatures by Hilliard

      Leicester was the first man to receive a royal license for the performance of plays in England. His band of players was organized the year after Elizabeth was enthroned, and he maintained them all his life. Leicester’s theater was the first to be built in England, and until the 1580s, it was the only one. He had tremendous force of will and is said to have possessed remarkable literary ability.

      Queen Elizabeth possessed genius administratively and intellectually. She was literary to the fingertips. She and Mary were the first queens of England to rule in their own right. The fact that Elizabeth not only survived but held a long, successful reign is a testament to her mind and spirit.

      Francis himself was not cut from the common mold. From an early age, he showed touches of genius. His natural talents were enhanced by a palace education fit for a king. The Queen demanded that Francis receive the same caliber education as she had and, rather prophetically, called him baby Solomon. His young heart was full of the fire of the new science and the new era that he felt and knew in his very soul.

      As a child Francis was remarkable for his precocity and understanding. Alfred Dodd wrote, "If ever a man was born for power, a man on whom there shone a beam of God’s splendour from the cradle to the grave, a man sent out from the World Unseen to do things—great things—to re-create England, the Continent, the World—‘Born to set it Right’—that man was Francis Bacon."¹⁹

      He was a favorite with the servants that made up the Bacons’ two households as well as with the nobility. The Queen often invited Francis to accompany Sir Nicholas to court. Dr. Rawley, later Francis’s chaplain, wrote:

      His first and Childish Years were not without some Mark of Eminency; at which time he was endued with that pregnancy and towardness of Wit, as they were Presages of that deep and universal Apprehension which was manifest in him afterward, and caused him to be taken notice of by several Persons of Worth and Place, and especially by the Queen; who (as I have been inform’d) delighted much then to confer with him, and to prove him with Questions; unto whom he delivered himself with that Gravity and Maturity above his years, that Her majesty would often term him, The young Lord Keeper. Being asked by the Queen how old he was, he answered with much discretion, being then but a Boy, That he was two years younger than Her Majesties happy Reign; with which Answer the Queen was much taken.²⁰

      Francis’s home with the Bacons was the perfect chrysalis for his exceptional mind. "In many respects ‘Mr. Francis’ was fortunate in being reared in the household of a great civil

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