BACON AND COKE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 378, 20 September 1946, Page 5

BACON AND COKE

Sir,-R. L. Stevenson has insisted that a good reader must start with the admission that he is not always right, and this can apply to a listener also. I have listened with pleasure to the weekly broadcasts Great Figures of the Bar, but I was rather surprised to notice that the speaker when dealing with the great lawyer Sir Edward Coke, referred to him as a kindly and virtuous man, while at the same time referring to Coke’s great contemporary and riyal, Sir Francis Bacon, as a corrupt judge, servile and mean of soul, More recent light, however, has been thrown on the lives of these two men, showing Coke, although a great lawyer, to have been coarse, narrowminded and venomous and utterly unscrupulous, whereas Bacon is shown ‘as Coke’s antithesis. The old view, which the most of us were taught in school, was founded on Macaulay’s famous essay on Bacon, but Macaulay’s view has :been proved quite wrong. In fact, in Bachelor's Life of Bacon mention is made that Macaulay admitted he had made a mistake and expressed regret he had ever written his Bacon essay. His best biographer, J. Cotter Morrison, wrote "nothing has been more injurious to Macaulay’s fame than this essay. . . He deviated into fiction in his libel on Bacon." Hallam, the historian, described Bacon as "the greatest and wisest of mankind." A book recently published, The Martyrdom of Bacon, by Alfred Dodd, proves conclusively that Bacon was a greatly-wronged and misjudged man and was not guilty of corruption, whereas Coke was proved guilty of corruption, dismissed from all his high offices, and disgraced, Bacon, on the other hand, though after his fall not restored to his high office, was restored to the King’s fayour and in fact enjoyed a State pension so long as he lived of over £1,000 a year, equivalent to about £4000 to £5.000.in our times.

BACONIAN

(Johnsonville)