Bacon’s “Concealed Poets”

Appendix C

Four days after Elizabeth’s death, Francis Bacon asked a poet travelling to the new king to “be good to concealed poets.” Henry Neville and Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, were still in the Tower. By 10 April 1603, thirteen days later, both were free. Bacon’s letter belongs to that brief interval between the change of monarch and the prisoners’ freedom.¹

The recipient was John Davies, later Sir John Davies, the lawyer and author of Nosce Teipsum. He was a different man from John Davies of Hereford, whose poem to Neville appeared in Microcosmos that year. Spedding prints Bacon’s letter in full as follows:

Mr. Davis,

Though you went on the sudden, yet you could not go before you had spoken with yourself to the purpose which I will now write. And therefore I know it shall be altogether needless, save that I meant to show you that I am not asleep. Briefly, I commend myself to your love and to the well using of my name, as well in repressing and answering for me, if there be any biting or nibbling at it in that place, as in impressing a good conceit and opinion of me, chiefly in the King (of whose favour I make myself comfortable assurance), as otherwise in that court. And not only so, but generally to perform to me all the good offices which the vivacity of your wit can suggest to your mind to be performed to one, in whose affection you have so great sympathy, and in whose fortune you have so great interest. So desiring you to be good to concealed poets, I continue

Your very assured,
FR. BACON.

Gray’s Inn, this
28th of March, 1603.²

Bacon asks Davies to defend his reputation and recommend him to James. The unexplained final request follows these personal appeals. “Concealed poets” is Bacon’s own phrase, used without an explanation to a fellow poet: it could refer to writers known to both men whose poetry was not publicly acknowledged. The plural invites consideration of a circle, although it does not exclude an indirect reference to Bacon himself.

Spedding’s note gives both his uncertainty and his proposed explanation:

The allusion to “concealed poets” I cannot explain. But as Bacon occasionally wrote letters and devices, which were to be fathered by Essex, he may have written verses for a similar purpose, and Davis may have been in the secret.²

Bacon, Neville and the change of reign

Bacon was connected to Neville through two branches of the family. His half-sister Elizabeth Bacon had married Neville’s father and become Neville’s stepmother. His first cousin Anne Killigrew was Neville’s wife: their mothers, Anne Cooke Bacon and Katherine Cooke Killigrew, were sisters. This was a relationship Bacon acknowledged himself. Writing to his mother on 4 December 1593, he referred to “Mr Nevell, my cosin” and promised to remember him when an opportunity arose.³

The political relationship was more complicated. Bacon had acted as counsel for the queen at the trial of Essex and Southampton in February 1601. Two years later he was seeking favour under James while Southampton and Neville awaited release from the imprisonment that followed the rising. The letter’s date therefore places its unexplained request in an immediate setting of damaged reputations, hoped-for rehabilitation and access to the new king.⁴

The possibility proposed here is that Southampton and Neville were the “concealed poets” Bacon had in mind. The timing makes that worth considering; the family connections explain how Bacon could have known about Neville’s private writing.

Southampton’s poem from the Tower

Southampton’s place in this possibility acquired a substantial new basis when literary scholar Lara M. Crowley published “Was Southampton a Poet? A Verse Letter to Queen Elizabeth” in English Literary Renaissance in 2011. She examined a seventy-four-line poem attributed to the earl in British Library Stowe MS 962, fols. 47r–48r. Its heading presents Southampton as a condemned prisoner addressing Elizabeth; Crowley dates its likely occasion to February or March 1601. The plea opens:

Not to live more at ease (Dear Prince) of thee
But with new merits, I beg liberty
To cancel old offences […]

Later, the prospect of execution takes a startling physical form:

Prisoners condemned, like fish within shells lie
Cleaving to walls, which when they’re opened die.⁵

The poem survives in a later scribal copy, not Southampton’s handwriting. Crowley’s case rests partly on the care of the miscellany’s compilers: among fifty-four attributed works she found only one almost certainly wrong attribution and one further probable error in a disputed case. She also compares the poem with Southampton’s Tower petitions and the circumstances of his imprisonment. She considers composition by another writer on his behalf, or a later poem adopting his voice, but concludes that Southampton’s authorship is likely.⁵

If that attribution is right, the patron of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece also wrote poetry himself, though this substantial example survived outside his familiar public identity. It gives the proposed connection with Bacon’s phrase something more concrete than Southampton’s patronage of other writers. Neville, imprisoned alongside him and connected to Bacon by family, becomes a second possible referent under the authorship hypothesis developed in this book. Crowley’s discovery concerns Southampton; the application to Bacon’s letter and to Neville is the argument made here.

Robert Sidney’s unpublished poetry

Robert Sidney provides a particularly close example within Neville’s own circle. Neville’s travelling companion was the younger brother of Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, and the father of the poet Mary Wroth. His public career as a soldier, governor of Flushing and later Earl of Leicester long overshadowed his own writing. Yet his surviving autograph notebook contains thirty-five complete sonnets, eighteen songs, five pastorals, four short epigrams, three translations and an elegy.

The notebook bears the inscription ‘For the Countess of Pembroke’: Sidney intended his sister to read it. His daughter Mary Wroth drew on his poems in her own writing. This was poetry known within a literary family, but largely unknown beyond it. The notebook preserves corrections and attempts to arrange the poems into sequences, showing sustained work rather than occasional versifying. Acquired by the British Library in 1975, it gave modern readers access to a substantial body of poetry by a man whose literary achievement had been almost invisible.⁶

One particularly effective sonnet, ‘Time, cruel time’, moves from enforced silence to defiance. The speaker begins hidden in darkness, afraid to declare his love; by the final couplet he insists that time cannot travel beyond its reach:

Time, cruel time, how fast pass you away,
And in my case from your own custom fly,
While I unknown in blackest shadows lie,
And dumb with fear, not that I love dare say.
Alas, your wings do to the light display
What choicest care in darkest bands doth tie;
But thus forsaking me, you make me try
That who to time trusts doth himself betray.
Speak, time, and time’s child truth, since first I saw
That bodied angel, did my faith e’er quail?
Or was not spurred love held with reigns of awe?
But you hear not; pack on then your best sail;
Leave me behind. Time, you shall nowhere move,
Where while you are you shall not see my love.

— Robert Sidney, “Time, cruel time”.⁷

The sonnet’s craft makes the historical point tangible. One of Neville’s own companions was an accomplished poet whose surviving work bore little relation to his public reputation.

The proposed connection rests on the letter’s timing, Bacon’s knowledge of Neville and the Essex circle, and the evidence that Southampton himself may have been an unrecognized poet. Bacon leaves the names unstated.