Bacon

Bacon, SIR NICHOLAS, was born in 1509, most likely at Chislehurst, Kent, and passing from the abbey school at Bury to Corpus College, Cambridge, (1523), was ten years later called to the bar. In 1537 he was appointed solicitor to the Court of Augmentations, and in 1539, on the dissolution of the monasteries, he presented to Henry a reasonable project for applying their revenues to the founding of a college for the study of diplomacy. Unfortunately, the king had already dispersed the forfeited estates. Of these the young lawyer received no small share; and in 1546 he was advanced to the office of attorney of the Court of Wards. During Mary's reign his Protestantism cost him all his public honours and emoluments; but on her death in 1558, he received from Elizabeth the post of lord keeper of the Great Seal. Elizabeth left to him and to Cecil 'the ordering of church matters for the most part'; and Parker chiefly owed to him the see of Canterbury. He was always honestly opposed to Catholics generally, above all, to Mary of Scotland. Elizabeth honoured him with several visits—one of six days in 1577, at his magnificent mansion of Gorhambury, Hertfordshire. He died at York House, his London residence, 20th February 1579. A profound lawyer, and all but a great orator, Sir Nicholas was one of those solid and stately Englishmen to whose sagacity, high principle, and firm demeanour England owed its safety in that critical period when Elizabeth mounted the throne.