Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban, was an English philosopher and statesman born on 22 January 1561 at York House near the Strand in London. He lived in the age of Elizabeth I and James I, moving between law, Parliament, court service, and natural philosophy. Under King James I he served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. He was knighted after James’s accession in 1603, created Baron Verulam in 1618, and made Viscount St Alban in 1621.

Bacon came from a family close to learning and power. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, was Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and his mother, Anne Cooke Bacon, was the daughter of the Renaissance humanist Anthony Cooke. Poor health affected Bacon from early life, and biographers believe he was first educated at home. At twelve he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, with his older brother Anthony, studying under John Whitgift, later Archbishop of Canterbury. The curriculum was largely medieval and Latin-based. At Cambridge, Bacon met Queen Elizabeth, who was impressed by his precocious intellect and called him “The young lord keeper.”

His education helped form one of the central tensions in his thought. Bacon had reverence for Aristotle, yet came to reject Aristotelian philosophy as barren, argumentative, and wrong in its aims. He believed the methods and results of science as then practiced were mistaken. After entering Gray’s Inn in 1576, he spent time abroad with Sir Amias Paulet, the English ambassador in Paris, and visited Blois, Poitiers, Tours, Italy, and Spain. During those years he studied language, statecraft, and civil law while carrying out routine diplomatic tasks. The death of his father in 1579 brought him back to England and left him with limited means, debt, and the need to support himself through law.

Bacon’s public career began early. He was elected MP for Bossiney in 1581, then sat for Melcombe, Taunton, Liverpool, Middlesex, Ipswich, and Cambridge University. He became an outer barrister in 1582, a bencher in 1586, and a Reader in 1587. In 1597, Elizabeth I made him the first recipient of the Queen’s Counsel designation, reserving him as her legal adviser. He also wrote on church parties and philosophical reform, including the lost tract Temporis Partus Maximus. He showed sympathy toward Puritanism, criticized the English church’s suppression of Puritan clergy in his earliest surviving tract, and in the Parliament of 1586 urged execution for Mary, Queen of Scots.

Bacon is best known as a founder of the scientific method and has been called the father of empiricism. He argued that scientific knowledge should rest on inductive reasoning, careful observation of nature, and a sceptical, methodical approach that helps investigators avoid misleading themselves. His specific Baconian method did not have long-lasting influence in every detail, but his larger case for disciplined experiment and observation remained important during the Scientific Revolution. He promoted scientific experimentation as a way of glorifying God and fulfilling scripture. He was also a patron of libraries and proposed cataloguing books under history, poetry, and philosophy, with further subjects and subheadings. Bacon died on 9 April 1626 at the age of 65 and was buried at St Michael’s Church, St Albans, Hertfordshire. His words still speak because they come from a mind trained in law, politics, faith, books, and the hard work of testing what people think they know.