Last week’s post looked at the gardens created by Sir Francis Bacon before he managed to climb the greasy pole of political advancement. This week I’m going to look at the gardens, theoretical and real, that he designed once he’d reached the top.

These include the imaginary garden setting he planned for a magnificent court masque, and the water gardens he created at his Gorhambury estate near St Albans.

Of course greasy poles are notoriously slippery and it was not long before his rapid fall and dramatic disgrace  sent him back to Gorhambury where he spent the last five years of his life writing, including  what have been described as the “greatest philosophical works of the English Renaissance.“, and of course his famous Essay “On Gardens”.

To start with he rose slowly after being made Treasurer, the highest office, at Grays Inn in 1608. He became  Attorney General in 1613, thanks to the support of Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, the favourite of the King [or quite probably more than the favourite]. When  Carr married Lady Frances Howard the daughter of the Earl of Suffolk the Lord Chamberlain, and looked set to create an immensely powerful alliance at court, Bacon designed and paid  £2000 for a masque as a wedding present.

The Masque of Flowers was performed by members of Grays Inn  on 6th January 1614 in the  short-lived first Jacobean Banqueting House in Whitehall which  was built in 1607 but burned down in 1617.

The scenery consisted of a “garden of a glorious and strange beauty”  and the description in the Masque of Flowers is detailed enough almost to allow a full reconstruction, although unfortunately there are no surviving images, so I’ve included some other contemporary scenes to at least give a semblance` of what  the staging might have been like.

The full description is unfortunately too long to include here but suffice it to say the garden formed the setting for the masque which lasted for  over four hours.

It was  “cast into four quarters, with a cross-walk, and alleys compassing each quarter. In the middle … stood a goodly fountain raised on four columns of silver; on the tops whereof stood four statues of silver, which supported a bowl, in circuit containing four and twenty foot, …above stood a golden Neptune, in height three foot, holding in his hand a trident, and riding on a dolphin so cunningly framed that a river seemed to stream out of his mouth.”

“The garden-walls were of brick artificially painted in perspective, all along which were placed fruit trees with artificial leaves and fruit.” There were columns supporting gold and silver statues and heraldic beasts, while “Every quarter of the garden was finely hedged and “the knots within set with artificial green herbs, embellished with all sorts of artificial flowers.” There were pyramids garnished with gold, silver and jewels and ”  great pots of gilly-flowers, ..tulippas of diverse colours, and… great tufts of several kinds of flowers,

At the farther end of the garden was a mount … covered with grass and with a bank of flowers curiously painted” on which  “stood a goodly arbour” 33 ft long and 21 feet high covered with “with arbour-flowers, as eglantine, honeysuckles and the like. and “In the middle part of the arbour rose a goodly large turret, and at either end a smaller.”  Behind all this were “artificial trees appearing like an orchard adjoining the garden, and over the all was drawn in perspective a firmament like the skies in a clear night.”

For more on the Masque of Flowers and its importance, including the full description of the garden and some imagined plans see Christine Adams, Francis Bacon’s Wedding Gift of ‘A Garden of a Glorious and Strange Beauty’ for the Earl and Countess of Somerset, in Garden History, Spring, 2008, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring, 2008), pp. 36-58

The masque was a great success even if the marriage of Robert Carr and Frances Howard was not.  The couple ended up on trial for murder but although found guilty escaped execution,  spending  instead nine years in the Tower of London before  being pardoned by James on his deathbed.

For more on the case see The Rise and Fall of Robert Carr on the Historic Royal Palaces website.

Bacon led the prosecution of his former patron and this led to him becoming a Privy Councillor  in 1616. The following year he was appointed to his father’s former office of Lord Keeper of the Seal and then in 1618 was promoted again to be Lord Chancellor. This came with a peerage, first as Lord Verulam,  after the old Roman city of St Albans and then three years later, in 1621,  he was raised to be Viscount St Albans.

It had taken until he was 60, so all in all hardly a metioriic  rise through the ranks after a very slow start. But what comes up must go down, and the fall was as rapid as the rise had been slow.

 

No sooner had Bacon  been made a viscount than he fell victim to factional and political  intrigue. He  was scapegoated, accused of taking bribes, which although the charges were probably true,  would have been nothing unusual for the period as government posts were largely unpaid and Bacon had no real family money.   He was fined, imprisoned briefly the Tower of London, and stripped of all political office.

He retired to Gorhambury, to “betake myself to letters” .  Now what to do?  The answer was as for  so many other political figures in times of defeat – think about a new garden.  As early as 1608 Bacon had clearly been mulling over the idea – not that long after he inherited Gorhambury. He made a note that year in his common place book- Commentaries Solutus – that he should  talk to his cousin Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury about ” a plott to be made to turn ye pond yard into a place of pleasure”.

The pondyard seems to have started as a collection of medieval ponds near the river Ver, about a mile from the main house. According to his notebook the proposals   included a ‘howse for freshnes with an upper galery open upon the water, a tarace above that, and a supping roome open under that; a dynyng roome, a bedd chamber, a Cabanett, and a Roome for Musike.   Elsewhere would be a grotto, an arbour of Musk roses’ and a ‘fayre bridg’.

Commentarius Solutus is in the British Library and was until the recent cyber attack available digitally -but luckily the 3 pages containing Bacon’s notes to discuss with Cecil were downloaded and can be found on the Gardens, Heritage and Planning. website. 

Water Gardens were nothing new. There was a long tradition of ponds for keeping and breeding fish especially in monasteries, but also in royal and aristocratic gardens such Woodstock, Richmond and Hampton Court and then in Bacon’s own time at Holdenby, Theobalds and Hatfield.

The  water gardens he eventually built at Gorhambury did not, however, follow the description in those notes  Instead they were laid out  a mile or so from the house  and reached via a wide tree-lined avenue as can be seen on an estate map of 1634. [which can be found in Paula Henderson’s Tudor House and Garden, but which is too dark to include here].The gardens included a series of geometric canals with islands, as well as grottos, rock work and statues and may have been inspired by water gardens such as Fontainebleau and St Germain that he had seen in France  or perhaps more likely by the work of Salomon de Caus  who had been working for Lord Salisbury at Hatfield and for Prince Henry at Richmond.

While many of the gardens have disappeared almost without trace, and with little by way of description those at Gorhambury were visited by the antiquarian John Aubrey  thirty years after Bacon’s death and luckily he left a sketch and short account of them.

The figures of the Ponds were thus: they were pitched at the bottomes with pebbles of severall colours, which were work’t in to severall figures, as of Fishes, etc., which in his Lordship’s time were plainly to be seen through the cleare water, now over-grown with flagges and rushes. If a poore bodie had brought his Lordship half a dozen pebbles of a curious colour, he would give them a shilling, so curious was he in perfecting his Fish-ponds, which I guesse doe containe four acres. In the middle of the middlemost pond, in the Island is a curious banquetting-house of Roman architecture, paved with black and white marble; covered with Cornish slatt, and neatly wainscotted.

Overlooking the whole site was “the most ingeniously contrived little pile, that ever I sawe”,  according to Aubrey. This was  Verulam House, a chunky three-storey brick building with balustrades and a lantern on top. Inside it was “very loftie, and … very well wainscotted” with a “curiously carved’ staircase and a mirrored door with which the Stranger was very gratefully deceived, for … when you were about to returne into the roome, one would have sworn primo intuito that he had beheld another Prospect through the Howse:”  It would be good know where the idea of the mirrored door came from because it   conjures up the later fashion for visual deception and mirror tricks seen later in the century in the works of artists like Van Hoogstraaten.  (For more on this see this earlier post).

Verulam House served as Bacon’s “Summer-howse: for he sayes (in his essay) one should have seates for Summer and Winter as well as Cloathes.”  However even in Aubrey’s day the gardens were showing signs of severe neglect. What had been “in his Lordship’s prosperitie, a Paradise; now is a large ploughed field”. The house itself was “yet standing, but defaced, so that one would have thought the Barbarians had made a Conquest here”.

Soon after Aubrey’s visit it was sold for a fraction of its cost simply for the value of the building. materials by the then  owner, Sir Harbottle Grimston, and rapidly demolished.

There’s no record after Aubrey’s visit, as far as I can see,  of any description of the water gardens for nearly 200 years until  one of Sir Harbottle’s descendants, Charlotte Grimston, the sister of the first Earl of Verulam, wrote her account of the estates history in 1821.

The ponds were so completely dry in the remarkable hot Summer of 1802 that I had an opportunity of endeavouring to discover if any traces could be found of the Tessalated pavements Mr Aubrey mentions, but I could not find the smallest remains of them, and only slight traces of the foundations of the banqueting house. 

Around another hundred ears later in 1926  the then Countess of Verulam,  Violet, investigated` and a few years later following two very dry summers she hired someone to dig one of them out and he found a few coloured pebbles, some brick channels that connected the ponds  as well as a large wooden bung.  However, nothing further was done until after the Second World War when plans were investigated  to restore and open the pondyards as a tourist attraction, perhaps with swimming and fishing. Again these ideas did not materialise. Today the ponds are overgrown and virtually dry largely because the local water company got permission in the 1950s to extract water from the river Ver and so reduce drastically its flow.

For more information on the Water Gardens at Gorhambury see Paula Henderson’s article in Garden History, Autumn, 1992,  pp. 116-131 and the  very detailed illustrated  commentary in Sir Francis Bacon’s Garden at Old Gorhambury on the Gardens, Heritage and Planning website. 

Significant though the pondyards might have been,  it was Bacon’s writing that proved the most productive outcome of his last years and definitely his lasting legacy. Professor Richard Serjeantson of Bacon’s alma mater Trinity College Cambridge is clear that disgrace and isolation “allowed him the time to write all the books he had never had time to write before. Those turned out to be the greatest philosophical works of the English Renaissance.”

In 1623, the same year Shakespeare’s First Folio appeared, he published a new and enlarged edition of his Advancement of Learning, which introduced  his approach to understanding nature and the world  through  observation, skepticism and testability. It followed on from Novum Organum, or “true directions concerning the interpretation of nature”) which was part of what he called  “The Great Instauration” [or the Great Renewal]

He had also been working for years on  New Atlantis, which was eventually published unfinished and posthumously.  In it he suggested the idea of a utopian scientific institution called ‘Salomon’s House’ in homage to the wisdom of the Biblical King Solomon. It was from these ideas that the Royal Society would come to be founded in 1660. New Atlantis was often included in another posthumous compilation of his works put together by his secretary William Rawlins and published as Sylva Sylvarum or A Natural History

Seargeantson goes on to  argue, in an exhibition at Trinity to commemorate the 400th anniversary,  that Bacon  wasn’t just an expert in science and in his professional sphere of law, because he also wrote on history, rhetoric, architecture, gardens, and on religion, as well  plays and poetry. He was a man who could do anything and was acknowledged by his contemporaries as a master of all these arts.and who himself who claimed that  “all knowledge to be my province.”

His polymathy shows up clearly in his  Essays. A small collection of 10 short pieces was published in 1597 but an enlarged edition with 58 came out  in 1625.which including “Of Building” and “Of Gardens”. If you don’t know them already  they’re short and definitely worth reading, although you might be surprised to know neither the princely house nor its garden bear much relation to what he had created at Gorhambury!

For more about “On Gardens” see Paula Henderson’s article “Sir Francis Bacon’s Essay ‘Of Gardens” in Context in Garden History 2008).

In March 1626 Francis Bacon met his end as a result of conducting a scientific experiment into the preservative properties of snow on the carcass of a chicken. The chill he caught turned into pneumonia, and he died at Highgate in the house of his friend, the Earl of Arundel, on the 9 April 1626. He is buried in St Michael’s church in St Albans.

There is a huge amount written about Bacon and his gardens.  Apart from the various articles listed above probably the best places to start for more information are Paula Henderson’s The Tudor House and Garden (2005); and Hostage to Fortune: Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) by Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart (1999). The Gorhambury Estate have recorded a  talk commemorating the life of Francis Bacon with Suzannah Lipscomb and Jesse Norman which is available until the end of the year.

In honour of this 400th anniversary you might find the following websites of interest:  Bacon 400 website ; the Francis Bacon Society and the Francis Bacon Research Trust

You might also like to know about a talk being given by Paula Henderson, Sir Francis Bacon’s ‘Greater Perfection’ and his love of gardens and plants, at The Apple House, Sergehill Lane, Bedmond, Hertfordshire WD5 0RZ, Thursday 25 June 2026, 6-8pm,  in association with Hertfordshire Gardens Trust and as part of the Bacon400 celebrations.