Keywords

Francis Bacon’s philosophical achievements often overshadow his brilliance as a parliamentary orator. Part of that brilliance lies in his astute use of his listeners’ memories of bodily situations. In many of his extant speeches, Bacon tries to evoke remembered bodily experience and use it to animate the deliberative political thought relevant to those occasions. In doing that, I shall argue, Bacon draws on the materialist faculty psychology derived in particular from Aristotle that was transmitted to renaissance thinkers through Augustine, Aquinas, and many others. In terms of rhetoric, that meant evoking composite mental images in listeners’ minds out of the bits and pieces of memory, which served to alter rational perceptions of things, and, in doing so, alter emotional responses too. Rational and emotional responses in Bacon’s rhetorical planning are two dimensions of the same set of mental image dynamics. This integrated conception of how reason and emotion work is also a feature of ancient stoic thinking, as important recent scholarship has shown.Footnote 1

Bacon himself does not equate reason and emotion. However, he does link them. His view of rhetoric itself is cast in terms of such mental faculties.Footnote 2 In a much quoted passage from his Advancement of Learning he says: “the duty and office of Rhetoric is to apply Reason to Imagination for the better moving of the will”.Footnote 3 For Bacon, the will of humans may become captive to the “affections”. If so, eloquence will step in and “win the Imagination from the Affection’s part, and contract a confederacy between Reason and Imagination against the Affections” (III: 410). Reason, that is, has to enter the imagination so that the will sees a greater affective appeal in a freshly reasoned observation than in whatever it was captivated by before. Since Bacon leaves so much open about the means by which reason engages with the imagination’s passionate potential, it is important to interrogate his model. It is unclear, for instance, whether by “reason” Bacon means something like “right judgment” or whether he refers to the cognitive function of sorting out the consistency and inconsistency between different ideas and different images. If “reason” means “right judgment”—leaving aside the question of whose judgment is ‘right’—then Bacon seems to be saying that the affections (or passions) are something different from reason. A belief, that is, can entail emotions but is it the same thing as an emotion? But if reason were unrelated to affection, how would Bacon’s theory that the reason works on the will and affections through the imagination even work? If “reason”, on the other hand, means sorting out consistency and inconsistency with the most widely respected beliefs in his parliamentary culture, then the relation between reason and imagination becomes much clearer. Reasoned rhetoric evokes mental images which embody consistencies and inconsistencies with other known beliefs. Rhetoric thus constructs altered perceptions, say of parliamentary identity or the practice of dueling, by inviting a certain range of rational analysis between the contents of a mental image and other remembered material. When an audience can see contradictions especially, it has huge passionate potential. Altered perceptions, and objects of perception, will mean potentially altered passions. The passions or affections in Bacon’s theory are better thought of, perhaps, as by-products of the cognitive activity of perceiving consistency and inconsistency with various beliefs and observations. To this extent, Bacon seems to be drawing on the Chryssipean-stoic idea of the emotion-as-judgment. When utilizing such dynamics in his parliamentary speeches, Bacon’s mental images bring rationality and emotion together. This offers us a fresh perspective on the relations between reason and emotion. The specific meanings of the “mental image” both in the tradition Bacon drew on and in the context of his actual rhetorical practice will be considered in detail in a moment.

The speeches themselves have not been much studied. Spedding’s fascinating nineteenth-century reconstruction of Bacon’s speeches and letters, and their contexts, relegated all seven volumes of it to the second half of his edition. Clearly, for Spedding, there was Bacon the philosophical visionary and there was Bacon the wheeler and dealer. Much the same separation, perhaps, lies behind the fact that we can count on the fingers of one hand the number of scholarly engagements with Bacon’s speeches. In 1925 an article by Robert Hannah took a broad but insufficiently rigorous look at them (Hannah 1925, pp. 91–132). It did not account for Bacon’s actual rhetorical skills and what they were used for on particular occasions. A slightly more recent article by Karl Wallace, however, is more attentive to the rhetorical elements of the speeches (Wallace 1971, pp. 173–188). Wallace begins by stating that the “fundamental categories of Bacon’s art of rhetoric are psychological” (Wallace 1971, p. 173). He then proceeds to point out that a rhetorical critic must consider the purpose, the occasion, and the “materials” of the speech (Wallace 1971, p. 188). Unfortunately, Wallace only considers those connections in one of Bacon’s speeches—the speech on the subsidy bill of 1597. That speech will be my starting point here. Furthermore, in looking at the rhetorical materials of that speech, Wallace notes the role of pathos and reason in Bacon’s rhetoric, as well as the figures of speech, but explicitly dissociates reason from other aspects of persuasion. Reason, he says, “cannot account for ethos, nor for the affective ingredients; for these imagination is chiefly responsible” (Wallace 1971, p. 188). Reason for Wallace seems to mean Bacon’s analysis of the material rather than mental perceptions of consistency and inconsistency. Indeed Wallace seems uninterested in how Bacon’s rhetoric actually envisages the cognitive activities his listeners will entertain. Peter Mack’s recent scholarship on the culture of Elizabethan parliamentary rhetoric adds a great deal to our understanding of the details of rhetorical theory but offers no significant discussion of (Francis) Bacon.Footnote 4 It is for those reasons especially that I seek to present a fuller account of Bacon’s rhetorical skills, skills that include more than the well-recognized brilliance of his campaign to reform the sciences.

It is important to consider the psychology Bacon drew on in planning and executing his parliamentary speeches. Without specifying his conception of the mind, it is hardly possible to contexualize Bacon’s rhetorical choices sufficiently, or to historicize more generally the connections between typical early modern rhetorical skills and its underlying psychological understanding. Considering Bacon’s psychological understanding means asking these questions. What kind of rational and emotional cognition from his audiences did he think would be relevant to persuading them on particular occasions? How did he connect that understanding to the figures of speech and other practical rhetorical skills? What roles do a listener’s memories play in those dynamics? What did Bacon think he was doing to people’s minds when he went about the task of ‘moving’ them—in the sense classical of movere? I do not wish to claim that particular things actually happened in the minds of Bacon’s listeners. The goal is rather to illuminate Bacon’s rhetorical decisions—especially his decision to evoke memories of bodily experience—in order to bring out more clearly the dynamics that exist for renaissance communicators between passion and reason (consistency), and between the body and the mind.

Speaking of rhetorical ‘decisions’ means taking intentions seriously. While it is clearly impossible to recover a communicator’s intentions in any complete and determinative sense, it is possible—and indeed necessary—to attribute some agency to a writer or speaker, and to theorize the decision making process concerning which rhetorical skills to deploy with reference the cultural and material networks of his or her context. I shall be considering Bacon’s decisions in terms of what Mark Bevir calls a “situated agency”: an agency that is nonetheless capable of achieving a set of intentions despite the cultural and material constraints it works within. Some of the intentions that lie behind that agency are recoverable by the critic. The idea of the writer’s “situated agency” relates to Bevir’s larger concern with a “postfoundational intentionalism”. This kind of intentionalism explores the middle ground between a thoroughgoing textualism, on the one hand, where the ‘writer’ is little more than a nexus of social forces, and a largely discredited foundationalism, on the other, where the writer’s agency is seen as working independently of those forces.Footnote 5 When I speak of Bacon’s having a given rhetorical purpose on a particular occasion and when I assume he has the agency to carry it out, it should be understood in this context.

I shall focus on Bacon’s evocation of mental images that rely on his audience’s memories of bodily experience—visual, tactile, and auditory—for two reasons. First, because it is a rhetorical move that Bacon employs very often: there are many resources from cultural and personal memory but those of bodily experience give him the broadest rhetorical net since everyone listening has a body to reimagine them with. Second, because understanding rhetoric’s power to direct mental reconstructions of bodily experience offers another interesting angle on the multiplicitous historical conjunctions between body and mind. In a certain sense, of course, all memories are rooted in bodily experience. I shall focus, therefore, on moments when Bacon tries to evoke memories of very specific bodily situations. I will try to link such moments to our existing contextual understanding of what he was trying to do on that particular occasion. One thing that will be particularly interesting in this context is the extent to which Bacon moves away from evoking mental images of bodily situations when he needs a cool, rational, deconstructive style, and towards them when he needs an impassioned style that generates powerful feelings. If that is the case, care must be taken, though, not to think of the impassioned focus on bodily experience as any the less ‘rational’.

Before getting to the speeches, it will be necessary first to consider some important concepts in the Aristotelian faculty psychology tradition that Bacon relied on and the implications of such concepts for gaining rhetorical power over other minds. Primarily that means focusing on the all-important ability of the imagination to create composite mental images. With that in mind, I will then examine the links between the contexts, purposes, and rhetorical skills deployed in five of Bacon’s extant speeches that have survived as relatively complete artifacts. Three other speeches are relatively well preserved in Spedding’s edition along with summaries and small pieces of other Baconian speeches from various parliamentary records. These, however, for their brevity, are much less amenable to rhetorical analysis.

Memory and the Centrality of the Mental Image

Bacon evokes memories of bodily situations by requiring his listeners to reconstruct composite mental images of those situations out of more fragmentary memory-images. In the Aristotelian tradition that Bacon relied on, the imagination had at least two functions. One is the production of phantasmata, memory images. Here the imagination turns sense perceptions into a form that can be stored in memory and then used as the basis for further mental activities, such as recall and intellectual reflection.Footnote 6 Another is the ability to use those phantasmata to create new composite mental images.Footnote 7 It is that second combinatory capability of the imagination, to put various phantasmata together, which rhetoric may most exploit—to the extent that rhetoric can associate some phantasmata and disassociate others. It was a capability that grew more and more frightening for renaissance thinkers thanks to its unpredictable power.Footnote 8 The mental image I am talking about then is a product of the vis cogitativa, the mental capability that Carruthers has linked to the act of “trained recollection” or mental composition.Footnote 9 Mental images, then, are the compositions that people make mentally in response to rhetoric, constructed out of items in personal and cultural memory, that is, from the things they ‘know’. They are not simply metaphors though they will usually serve one part of a metaphoric (comparative) structure. For example, when Bacon compares parliamentary procedure to the process of bringing a boat into a harbour, the mental image of a harbour is not itself the metaphor, it serves the metaphorical or allegorical connection to parliament already set up.

How can an orator activate another person’s ability to create and reflect on such composite mental images of bodily situations such as bloodletting or being on a boat in an unruly sea? The ancient Roman rhetorical theorist Quintilian suggested that vividly describing key details of a situation as if it were before our very eyes—a technique called enargeia—would evoke a potentially powerful mental image in the judge.Footnote 10 To the use of enargeia may be added the role of inherent spectatorship in the description and the fact that the scene or situation is located in a well-defined sense of place.Footnote 11

When coming to emotion, Quintilian discussed enargeia again. There he exposes the close connection between interpretative perceptions and passionate feelings. He shows how a vivid description that evokes composite mental images is also a way of shifting people’s passionate responses. The emotions of orators, says Quintilian, affect the emotions of judges, so if an orator wants the judge to feel pity, he must make himself feel pity so that the judge sees it in him (I.O., pp. 26–36). How does the orator make that happen to himself initially? By vividly imagining details of the situation as if they were before his eyes—using enargeia on himself. For example, “when pity is needed,” says Quintilian, “let us believe that the ills of which we are to complain have happened to us, and persuade our hearts of this. Let us identify with the persons of whose grievous, undeserved, and lamentable misfortunes we complain” (p. 34). Here it is possible to see how newly shaped perceptions in mental images give us newly shaped emotions because there is a direct link in faculty psychology between the qualities of perception and the qualities of passionate feeling. The same link between passion and perception is implicit in Aristotle’s own discussion of pathos proofs in the Rhetoric. For example, considering the causes and rhetorical usefulness of major emotions he defines fear as “a sort of pain and agitation derived from the imagination of a future destructive or painful evil”, especially one that is “about to happen; for what is far off is not feared”.Footnote 12 A composite mental image, built in the mind from the precise perceptions that rhetoric constructs, can activate more precise passionate feelings towards the contents of the mental image. In that way, to evoke mental images can mean interventing on passionate feeling. The same dynamic plays out in Aquinas’ influential theory of the passions as articulated in Summa Theologiae.Footnote 13 Thomas theorizes there about how his 11 fundamental passions arise in a person’s mind. They are a result of the way he or she perceives an object and are thus amenable to the intellectual soul’s rational ability to perceive consistency and inconsistency with other known things.

Mental images, then, are both rational and emotional. They are rational constructs both for orator and listener because their power over the passions involves seeing consistency or inconsistency with other things that are known or remembered. What seems impossible, for example, is much less frightening. The misfortunate man who turns out to be pretending is, for that reason, much less pitiable. But mental images are also passionate to the extent that the perceptions they involve specify a fresh or newly particularized relationship between the observer and the object observed, and thus a different passionate stance toward it. The mental image thus scripts an appropriate emotional response. That two-sided nature of Bacon’s mental images needs to be kept in mind when looking at the role of bodily experience in his parliamentary rhetoric.

Upon the Motion of Subsidy (1597)

In the parliament of 1597–1598, Bacon made a speech in support of the queen’s request for a new defense subsidy. A few years earlier, in 1593, in a similar request for subsidy, Bacon had created difficulties for himself by suggesting good reasons why parliament should not provide it.Footnote 14 Elizabeth was not happy with him.Footnote 15 By 1597, Bacon was still feeling the effects of the estrangement in the slow pace of his career (Jardine and Stewart 1998, pp. 194–195). But here again he got the chance to talk about the defense subsidy. This time, of course, he supported it.

Erring on the side of caution, Bacon starts by stating that Elizabeth’s bounty toward the nation has been like a “sweet odour of honour and reputation” (IX: 86). He then predicates the whole speech on the commonplace principle that “safety and preservation is to be preferred before benefit or increase” (IX: 86). Providing for ‘safety’ is why the subsidy should be granted. However, the main argument, to which Bacon gets very quickly afterward, is that a renewed Spanish attack on England is all the more likely at the present time (1597) because the normal impediments to that state’s otherwise natural willingness to attack others have disappeared since the last parliament. Since these impediments have gone, Spain will very likely renew ‘her’ attack on us. In view of this, Bacon argues that granting the subsidy would be another prudent example of the principle of “safety and preservation”. Furthermore, he argues, it affords the English the opportunity to have another hotly desired “invasive war” like the expeditions to the Azores and to Cadiz (IX: 88), which will, no doubt, redound to England’s glory.

Making the first point as economically as possible that “at the foot of the account remains the purchase of safety”, Bacon advertises the “prints” of this commonplace that are “everywhere to be found” (IX: 86).

The patient will ever part with some of his blood to save and clear the rest. The seafaring man will in a storm cast over some of his goods to save and assure the rest. The husbandman will afford some foot of ground for his hedge and ditch to fortify and defend the rest. (IX: 86)

Bacon’s anaphora (repeated first words) and antistrophe (repeated last words) here, created through his repetitions of “save” and “rest”, create the effect of parison (isocolon), that is, of well-balanced clauses that build up an accumulatio of ‘evidence’ for the commonplace. However, what Bacon specifies as evidence is a series of situations that can only be imagined by referring to memories of highly specific bodily situations. The first two in particular involve recognizable bodily situations: bloodletting and boating in an ocean storm. The third—the husbandman’s hedge and ditch—is only slightly more abstracted from bodily experience. People in the audience need to reconstruct each situation in the imagination from their bits of memory, phantasmata. They may have experienced those situations, seen people experiencing them, or experienced related things. Any such memories can be used to make a new mental image. Each situation involves making a complex mental image, even if held in consciousness for just a few moments. The mental image will have to be built around a simple narrative of experience in an identifiable place that involves spectatorship. Each mental image enacts the loss of something. Reconstructing these mental images involves remembering the pain of loss. Those feelings link closely to the rational comparison Bacon is making in support of the “preservation of safety” commonplace. Each of the mental images focuses attention on bodily loss and on the ‘cost’ of safety, which all intelligent people, Bacon implies, would be naturally willing to pay. Each involves loss felt at the level of the physical body: loss of blood, loss of personal possessions, and loss of ground for the making of a ditch. Taken together, each situation views state cost through bodily cost.

Each “mental image”—to the extent that it is actually reconstructed in the minds of Bacon’s audience—engages both the reasoning faculty and the emotions. Each bodily situation supports the commonplace—that “safety and preservation is to be preferred before benefit or increase”—by purporting to have a recognizable similarity to it: the “marks”. Bacon’s listeners must sort through personal memory with their reasoning faculties and decide whether such bodily situations really are similar enough to count as marks of the commonplace, and thus as legitimate evidence. The fact that Bacon advances evidence at all for an apparent commonplace that he merely plans to brush over suggests either that the commonplace has little force of authority or that Bacon wants to cast his own ethos at this early stage as one who always gives sufficient evidence. Be that as it may, logos and pathos intersect around the uses of mental images. The mental images are emotional proofs of the commonplace precisely because they evoke rational analysis of their content’s consistency with the commonplace at the same time as engaging memories of bodily ‘pain’ (of loss). Bacon is asking people to remember the rational process of exchanging one kind of loss (the pain of infection, drowning, and crop loss) for better kind of loss (provision), and then importing that perception, with all of its attendant feelings, onto the apparently rational idea that a subsidy (smaller loss) is the right thing to do against imminent Spanish attack (larger loss). Passionate feeling and rational perception do not just interrelate. They are part of the same set of dynamics.

Bacon’s now says why he really thinks a Spanish attack is imminent: Spain’s natural impediments to foreign invasion have recently diminished making an invasion of England more likely. In presenting that argument, he uses the age-old body politic metaphor and its potential for talking about a state’s ‘illness’ in his own creative ways.Footnote 16 The four recently displaced general impediments to invasion, Bacon notes, are as follows: to have one’s [the state’s] “hands full of other matter”; to need ports or places of “near approach”; to conceive of how difficult invasion would be; and to have an aged monarch not much concerned with foreign invasions unless provoked (IX: 87). Even in Bacon’s way of saying the first of those impediments—the state’s having its “hands full of other matter”—he draws on the body politic metaphor.

But the way he explains the recent removal of these impediments “since the last parliament” (IX: 87) involves an even more creative use of the rational and emotional potential of the body politic metaphor. Following Henry IV of France’s return to Catholicism, Spain, Bacon assures his listeners, “shall be more free to intend his malice against this realm” (IX: 87). Spain is a human being here with emotional intensity who feels ‘malice’. Spain’s recent acquisition of Calais, Bacon says, is like “a knocking at our doors” (IX: 88). Spain has arms to knock with. Regarding the third impediment—difficulty—Spain now has a greater ease since “that ulcer of Ireland”, like a sore in the side of England’s body, now makes an attack look easier. Just as “rheums and fluxes of humours” tend to attack that part of the body “which is weak and distempered” (IX: 88), so the disease of Spain will find an easy way in through our own ulcerating English side. Bacon asks his audience to imagine not only Spain but also England itself through memories of bodily vulnerability. Regarding the last impediment, age and lack of provocation, Spain, despite is old ‘head’ (Phillip II), is now a fellow with naturally uncheckable “flames of revenge” (IX: 88) for recent damage done to him by us. In short, then, Bacon argues, recent occurrences have combined to bring Spain “on his way” and “to tempt and allure him” (IX: 88). Again, Spain is a body subject to emotional flux and temptation. Bacon further constructs the perviousness of the Spanish body when characterizing his reaction to a recent English expedition against ‘him’: “the life-blood of Spain went inward to the heart, the outward limbs and members trembled and could not resist” (IX: 89). Bacon implies that precisely because he (Spain) has a passive vulnerability, his active reactions are just as likely, since that is what all bodies do. They react to provocation. The point I want to make here is not that the argument is fully cogent but that it is a means for Bacon to develop persuasive potency over the greatest amount of listeners he can. The English judges and counselors are able to feel (and are asked to feel) concern for Spain’s unpredictable potential to the extent that they themselves have bodies with active and passive parts and unpredictable possibilities. They themselves are subject to the same desires, temptations, diseases, medicines, checks, and encouragements. They may imagine what Spain will do because they have bodies and memories to refer their imaginations to. Bodily memory animates the deliberative political thought Bacon wants to promote.

For a speech that purports to “speak not by way of apprehending fear” (IX: 87), Bacon’s body politic metaphors have a considerably unsettling, if not disturbing, potential for those listening because they locate his Spanish probabilities in a logic that people know all too well: bodily action and reaction. The speech’s power is that it carefully avoids looking like an act of fear-mongering yet is still able to bring fearful passions to bear on the situation by relating that situation to other problematic bodily conditions, such as loss and illness. Bacon derives rhetorical force from this move but also protects his own ethos: Mr Bacon MP is not an imprudent fear-monger.

A Petition Touching Purveyors (1604)

In the parliament of 1604, the king’s major concern was the issue of the Union (Smith 1999, p. 104). Yet there were other issues too, including those of purveyance and monopolies. Each of these, as Jardine and Stewart point out, involved an implicit and awkward attack on royal prerogative (Jardine and Stewart 1998, pp. 282–283). In the case of purveyance, Bacon was chosen by the Commons to present to the king the grievances of the people toward the purveyors, who were responsible for buying provisions for the royal households, and who abused that responsibility by forcing sales at untenably low prices, and extorting to excess (Jardine and Stewart 1998, p. 282). Complaints abounded. But royal prerogative was royal prerogative. The king had a right to use purveyors to secure goods for his household. Bacon had to tread very thin ice. His job was to present what was, at one level, an attack on royal prerogative but without angering James (Jardine and Stewart 1998, p. 282). Spedding suggests that the king’s frustration at continual obstacles to the Union bill made this particular job easier for Bacon since the king had bigger things to worry about (Spedding 1861–1879, X: 187). Bacon cleverly associates James’s court with a mental image of a nettle plant and people being stung by it. James is the generative root but his outer leaves are stinging people. The outer might easily be fixed.

Bacon starts by setting up the ethos of the king as “pater patriae…father of your people” (X: 181–82)—with which the king who is listening to him can be happy and against which Bacon can contrast the abuses of purveyance. Just like the emperors of Rome who took victory names like Germanicus, Britannicus, and Pater Patriae, James may do the same:

Your Majesty mought with good reason assume unto yourself many of those other names…as appertaining to you, not by bloodshed (as they bare them) but by blood; your Majesty’s royal person being a noble confluence of streams and veins, wherein the royal blood of many kingdoms of Europe are met and united. (X: 182)

Bacon has here asked James to focus his own self-perception on his embodiment. It will be a useful basis for presenting the problem of purveyance when Bacon comes to the nettle plant. But purveyance also threatens to dishonor the Pater Patriae aspect of James’s rightful kingship and body. Bacon is careful to show that what he and the commons are asking for—the right to proceed against the purveyors—is in no way “to derogate from your Majesty’s prerogative” (X: 183). The focus on Pater Patriae gives Bacon a way of presenting the grievances without looking like he is taking away from royal prerogative. That is because it allows Bacon to present the grievances as a compromise of what James rightfully wants (and ought) to be—Pater Patriae—and not as a denial of his customary rights. Bacon presents the issue as a contradiction within James’s own kingship, within his body, both politic and natural, but as a contradiction at the level of function (purveyors) and not at the level of structure (prerogative). It is no argument against royalty to attack what contradicts royal honour, Bacon suggests.

Bacon makes the sense of contradiction come through quickly. Referring to his majesty’s personal household and the prerogative to fill it with the country’s goods, he says:

we hold it ancient, we hold it reverend. Other courts respect your politic person, but that [prerogative] respects your natural person. But yet notwithstanding (most excellent king) to use that freedom which to subjects that pour out their griefs before so gracious a king is allowable, we may very well allege unto your Majesty a comparison or similitude used by one of the fathers in another matter, and not unfitly representing our case in this point; and it is of the leaves and roots of nettles; The leaves are venomous and stinging where they touch; The root is not so, but is without venom or malignity; and yet it is that root that bears and supports all the leaves. This needs no furder application. (X: 183)

Presumably it needed no further application because Bacon could rely on the king to feel at the level of bodily experience the irrationality of the situation as Bacon has constructed it. The “similitude” Bacon makes also generates a powerful mental image of a nettle plant and its sting. Bacon does not simply say “your Pater Patriae has become like a nettle plant”. He specifies simple details that have to be put together from memory. The nettles have roots. They are in the ground. So there is a sense of location. The roots in the ground do not do any hurting as we know from experience. It is the leaves above the ground that sting when people of the realm walk by and touch them. The mental image of the nettle plant, however detailed it gets in individual minds, involves a simple narrative that has to be seen and thought about. The current state of affairs makes the king’s court seem like a nettle plant. Bacon asks the king to compare the nettle plant both with purveyancy as currently practiced, and also, of course, with the ideal image of Pater Patriae. Rational analysis of sameness and difference is required. Does the king want to be like this nettle plant and put up with the contradiction between excellent root (James the Pater Patriae) and nasty nettled exterior (abusive purveyors) or does he want to extend a consistency with Pater Patriae all the way through his political body and thus not be like the nettle plant? James is pushed toward the later to the extent that the contradiction itself is associated with bodily pain. The nettles, and the memory of pain at touching them (whether personal or commonplace) is an extra resource for Bacon here. It adds to the pathos of contradiction, to the feeling that this particular contradiction ought not to exist. Out of it Bacon achieves a sense of injustice but avoids any sense of disrespect because James is the generating root, not the whole plant. He is the stinging-leaf-supporting root but, as the root, he is himself non-malignant.

Concerning the Article of Naturalization (1607)

The debate over whether and how to naturalize, with full English rights, those Scottish born after James’s accession to the throne in 1603, and those born before, was vehement and nasty. At the meeting of parliament in November 1606 the issue of the Union with Scotland came up again bringing with it a wave of fears about the naturalization that would ensue from it. The Christmas break of that year seems to have been “a breeding ground for new fears” (Jardine and Stewart 1998, p. 294). Englishmen worried about what would happen if Scots had similar rights to them, and in their own country. When Bacon gave his pro-Unionist speech after the break it was a response to Nicholas Fuller’s anti-naturalization invective given on the 17 February 1607 (Spedding, X: 307). Fuller’s oratory presented reasons why naturalization should not take place, reasons that reflected English fears and insecurities. Bacon addresses them, adopting the coolest tone he can in view of the passions of fear and hatred raging among the houses. In supporting the Unionist cause, Bacon needed to undo Fuller’s fear-generating rhetoric. An impassioned rhetoric of his own would not have been suitable. Interestingly, when moving back into a cooler rational style for deconstructing Fuller’s impassioned statements, his evocations of mental images tend to steer clear of drawing directly on memories of bodily experience. That is to say, drawing on bodily experience is a rhetorical mode that fits most neatly with attempts to engage the passions. When he needs a style that either enlivens or diminutes the passions Bacon also tends to engage bodily experience. In the same way that Fuller has here, Bacon also is able to stir fear and loathing in the speech “Touching Duels”, which I will get to in a moment.

The naturalization speech was a complicated and brilliant performance. Bacon’s eloquence was admired at the time and transcripts were collectable (Jardine and Stewart 1998, p. 295). However, I will need to focus on just a few aspects of it. One of the first things he does is to break down Fuller’s argument. Acknowledging the first alleged inconveniences of naturalization, he says:

To come therefore to the inconveniences alleged on the other part [Fuller’s]. The first of them is, that there may ensue of this Naturalization a surcharge of people upon this realm of England, which is supposed already to have the full charge and content: and therefore there cannot be an admission of the adoptive without a diminution of the fortunes and conditions of those that are native subjects of this realm. (X: 309–310)

For Bacon, this objection to naturalization would have significant weight if only it were reasonable. He assures his audience, however, that the similitudes Fuller has advanced in support of this “surcharge” just do not work.

For (Mr Speaker) you shall find those plausible similitudes, of a tree that will thrive the better if it be removed into the more fruitful soil; and of sheep or cattle, that if they find a gap or passage open, will leave the more barren pasture, and get into the more rich and plentiful, to be but arguments merely superficial, and to have no sound resemblance with the transplanting or transferring of families. (X: 310)

Fuller must have tried to develop mental images of sheep and cattle rushing disruptively toward fresh pastures as a way of strengthening his similitude and enhancing, through confronting mental imagery, the fear and indignation he wanted people to feel for the very idea of naturalization. Breaking this down and trying to support naturalization, Bacon asserts that sheep and plants need little more than good ground and pasture in moving from one place to a foreign one. Humans, however, need significantly more. How can they [the Scottish] thrive in England, to the detriment of the English, if “they have not stock, means, acquaintance and custom, habitation, trades, countenance, and the like” (X: 310). The grass may always be greener, even for humans, but there is just not enough similarity between sheep, plants, and Scots to support the anti-Unionists’ fear-mongering arguments.

In deconstructing Fuller’s rhetoric, Bacon exposes the psychological dynamics between rational perception of similarity and difference and the emotional responses (in this case of fear) that can ensue from them. Revealing the irrationality of an opponent’s argument is to rob it of its power over the passions, if, that is, passions are affected by perceptions. Bacon’s rhetoric in these speeches, taken as a whole, does seem to imply his belief that it is possible to affect the passions by trying to alter perceptions.

While he explicitly refers his audience to their own knowledge and experience in this speech, the mental images he evokes here tend toward historical examples rather than the sorts of bodily situations that have been analyzed so far. “Experience”, he says, in reference to the alleged influx of Scots, “is the best guide; for the time past is a pattern of the time to come…I report me to all your private knowledges of the places you inhabit” (X: 311). Objecting now to the potential argument that since the Scottish live and thrive in Polonia they are even more likely to do so here in England, Bacon states that it is nonsense: “for you see plainly before your eyes, that in Germany, which is much nearer, and in France, where they are invited with privileges, and with this very privilege of Naturalization, yet no such number can be found” (X: 311). Obviously, his listeners do not actually see that “plainly” before their eyes. It is an allusion to the rhetorical procedure of enargeia, in which the orator tries to present a scene, event, or a location so vividly that it is as if it were before the eyes, sub oculos subiectio, at the same time as an application of it. Given that the classically trained lawyers listening to him will be aware of the allusion, Bacon’s reference to enargeia invites them to imagine. The imagining they are to do, though, is not a passionate and empathetic response to a highly constructed bodily situation. Instead they are to imagine an image of a current political situation. The complexity of that situation takes us far from the vivid mental focus on a particular bodily situation. Bacon relies further on historical examples of political situations when responding to Fuller’s objections. He can rely on his audience imagining those situations, even vividly, but not with the same pathos that personal memories of bodily suffering and pleasure afford. His decision to move away from bodily memory here suits the persuasive context—the need to deconstruct the similitude—because it offers relative objectivity and distance from the emotional intensity of Fuller’s mental images.

Bacon’s ensuing string of political examples—and potential mental images—across this cautious speech slides, only once, back into a body politic metaphor that requires people to feel a situation at the level of their own bodies’ vulnerabilities. Even then Bacon is cautious. He does it when mentioning Ireland for the second time. The first time he mentions Ireland is while objecting to the influx of Scots. Ireland is “that desolate and wasted kingdom”, with “all the dowries of nature”, which “continually call unto us for our colonies and plantations” (X: 313). This is not a concession to Fuller’s own argument. The point is that influx is not proportionate to opportunity: there have been many things complicating the plantation and as many reasons not to go (war and foreignness) as reasons to go (“all the dowries of nature, as rivers, havens…good soil, and temperate climate”, X: 313). Bacon mentions Ireland for the second time later when describing the benefits of naturalization in his view. Here he slides back into the bodily politic metaphor. The union, he suggests, would be helpful in cutting off enemy access to England via Scotland, and, likewise, the path through Ireland will be “cut off by the convenient situation of part of Scotland towards the north of Ireland, where the sore was: which we see, being suddenly closed, hath continued closed by means of this salve” (X: 323). Bacon most likely refers here to Elizabeth’s Nine Years’ War with the Irish. The war was finished by 1603 and the Plantation of Ulster had begun by the time of Bacon’s speech. Ireland as a “sore” on the English body has been closed and the union, Bacon says, would consolidate that closure. The union would be a healing salve protecting the body further than it has been from infectious foreign invasion.

Why does the body politic metaphor of state illness return at this point in the speech? It is because Bacon has now moved out of deconstruction and back into the attempt to support his own propositions about the benefits of union. He is not now negating his opponent’s views. He is not now attenuating fears of a Scottish influx. When he was doing that, any reference to the closeness of bodily pathos would be relatively indecorous and ineffective because that kind of pathos—developed in his opponent’s favour—is precisely what he is trying to attenuate. Later when that job is done, he can afford some moderate references of his own to bodily memories of pain, and the fear of it, as well as of relief, and the pleasure of it, through the ulcer-salve metaphor. The use of memories of bodily experience constitutes an impassioned style that can be employed or not employed at different times depending on the argumentative stance of the orator toward the listener. Is he trying to generate passions or discourage them? The stance will be defined in part by the emotional tenor read into the oratorical context.

Charge of Sir Francis Bacon, Knight … Touching Duels (1613–1614)

The issue of private dueling was hardly a new legal problem in early 1614 when Bacon addressed his charge against it to the Star Chamber (Bacon 1614). The charge was, at one level, conducted against a particular dueling case involving William Priest and Richard Wright. But Bacon used it as an excuse to develop significant legal precedent against dueling and thus to warn bigger fish than Priest and Wright. He made sure the speech, with the court’s decree annexed to it, was published.Footnote 17 Solutions to the problem—of young men dying in duels over trifles—had been sought before, acknowledges Bacon (XI: 399). However, the very fact that people saw it as a problem was due to early modernity’s gradual transformation of the chivalric honour code into a variety of newer notions of honour shaped by humanist protestantism’s fusion of classical and Christian virtue (James 1986, pp. 308–415). Alongside that renaissance transformation, James argues, was a growing concern to bring the civic body under the wider authority of law and sovereign (James 1986, pp. 308–415). Both contexts inform Bacon’s legislative interests here: the authority of law and sovereign and the different meanings of honour both come out loud and clear in his speech.

Bacon needs to get his judicial audience angry and disgruntled enough to proceed against both the particular case before them and the issue of dueling in general. For that reason Bacon consistently presents dueling throughout the speech in terms of both the ‘demonic’ and the ‘unlawful’, which he relates together. They are related, of course, because of the extent to which ideas of divine law, and of natural moral law which was based on it (thus demonically invertible) lay behind constructions of human law. The space outside the law could then be seen as a demonic inversion.Footnote 18 For example, Bacon calls them “bewitching Duels…no better than a sorcery, that enchanteth the spirits of young men” (XI: 401). Bacon would wish his “Lordships see what a desperate evil this is” (XI: 401).

The speech begins though with Bacon’s attempt to bring out a strong contrast between those law-breaking duelers and his own community of lawmakers—himself and his fellow lordly judges. Their demonic duels are an attempt, says Bacon, to take the law into their own hands. When “private men begin once to presume to give law to themselves, and to right their own wrongs” (XI: 400), this is what happens:

No man can foresee the dangers and inconveniencies that may arise and multiply thereupon. It may cause sudden storms in Court, to the disturbance of his Majesty, and unsafety of his person. It may grow from quarrels to banding, and from banding to trooping, and so to tumult and commotion, from particular persons to dissension of families and alliances, yea to national quarrels, according to the infinite variety of accidents, which fall not under foresight: so that the state by this means shall be like to a distempered and unperfect body, continually subject to inflammations and convulsions. (XI: 400)

Again, the body politic metaphor pops up. Again, those listening are asked to imagine a horrifically disordered situation of which the intensity of bodily experience is a significant part. Again, the mental image serves a number of Bacon’s purposes. There is a textbook example of gradatio here, where an orator moves through the various extents of something moving upwards as if on a ladder adding to what was just mentioned.Footnote 19 In Bacon’s case the extent of danger in dueling moves from quarrels to banding, to trooping, to civil war, and beyond. But the termination of the gradatio resembles Quintilian’s first form of amplification, incrementum, which moves by steps like a gradatio until the listener is at the point where nothing greater could be specified.Footnote 20 The endpoint of Bacon’s gradatio—his “infinite variety of accidents, which fall not under foresight”—is such a large category that it has become totally vague. The details are left to the listener’s private imagination. His gradatio-incrementum is an invitation to the judges to imagine the worst forms of painful discord in the state’s political body, with its members in ‘demonic’ disorder, with reference to any known feelings of the natural human body’s disorder. The pain of disorder in the human body becomes associated with disorder in the political body. Dueling is such a disorder. Dueling is an unnatural illness. The duty, then, of the central control system of law (and sovereign), which is supposed to enact the natural law, is to prevent it.

Amplifying further the difference between (natural) law maker and natural law breaker, Bacon claims that demonic dueling is a very affront to law itself, which, in bodily terms makes it a disease. Human law will be the medicine. Can we have two laws, Bacon asks, rhetorically? It would be as if “Paul’s and Westminster, the pulpit and the courts of justice, must give place to the law…of Ordinary tables, and such reverend assemblies; the year-books and statute-books must give place to some French and Italian pamplets, which handle the doctrine of Duels” (XI: 400).

An ethos framework of upright community has now been established, within which to view demonic dueling in this court. Bacon can go on to encourage a more pointed hatred for the activity by presenting two further things that dueling contradicts, each of which involve situations that must be imagined with reference to specific bodily experiences. The injustice of dueling, then, Bacon affirms, comes not only from its contradicting the law but also from its contradicting what is valuable in youthfulness and what is valuable in self-sacrifice for one’s country.

Again (my Lords) it is a miserable effect, when young men full of towardness and hope, such as the poets call aurorae filii, sons of the morning, in whom the expectation and comfort of their friends consisteth, shall be cast away and destroyed in such a vain manner. (XI: 400)

The pathos of ‘loss’ at the level of bodily freshness, energy, and hope is again channeled into Bacon’s sense of a contradiction. This is not just any contradiction. Dueling contradicts the very value placed in the goodness of youthfulness by a wasteful and preventable death. Such a contradiction informs the larger distinction Bacon is trying to encourage between the ‘honour’ in dueling and the ‘honour’ of upholding the natural values that legal code is supposed to protect. The ‘honour’ in dueling is a false honour, he intimates, a contradiction in terms. Bacon is associating the contradiction between true honour and false honour with the contradiction of the value of youthful vitality by fighting in the streets. He wants his lawmakers to feel the same negative pathos he has associated with the image of aurorae filii—fear, moral indignation, and empathetic sorrow—toward the (dis)honour of dueling. The speech would hardly work in an age that still widely valued the honour code. Older concepts of the honour code that made dueling so important were fracturing in Bacon’s time into a range of new conceptions developed in the context of Christianity (James 1986, pp. 308–415). Space opened up in the concept of honour for other things than the (spurious) ‘honour’ in dueling. Bacon exploits that space for a rewriting of ‘honour’. It is therefore not a conflict over human law per se: that is, about what should be legal and illegal. It is a conflict over readings of the natural moral law. Is one to read honour into the act of protecting a good name to the death, or does honour really exist more in protecting youth and vitality until it has a greater purpose?

But there is more to this “miserable effect”. Bacon continues:

Much more is it to be deplored when so much noble and gentle blood shall be spilt upon such follies, as, if it were adventured in the field in service of the King and realm, were able to make the fortune of a day, and to change the fortune of a kingdom. So as your Lordships see what a desperate evil this is; it troubleth peace, it disfurnisheth war, it bringeth calamity upon private men, peril upon the State, and contempt upon the law. (XI: 400–401)

Dueling does not merely compromise youth and freshness. It also wastes the opportunity of youths to use their freshness and strength to serve their countries. From the larger perspective of the body politic it wastes the strength of the state-body’s members for waging necessary wars. That is a contradiction of something deeper. It contradicts the very desire to get returns out of investments. People want their deaths to mean something. And there is no comparison between the significance of king and country and the supposed significance of a private dispute. Fighting for the later, argues Bacon, is a comparatively pointless expense of potential. No person, state, or body wants to spend everything and get nothing in return. The state invests resources in young men and they are contradicted by dueling. These multiple levels of bodily expense (of youth and strength) animate the contradictions in dueling and encourage the auditors to feel badly toward it in the same way they would feel badly toward unprofitable investments and in any waste of bodily strength.

Bacon defamiliarizes the ‘value’ of trying to derive honour from dueling by exposing the way it contradicts other values in the lawmakers’ value-sphere. By encouraging the lawmakers’ rational analysis of such similarities and differences between the values of youthful freshness and investment returns and the sources of honour, Bacon is attempting to generate the passions of fear and indignation. Any rational response to something is potentially an emotional one in Bacon’s and early modernity’s rhetorico-psychological economy. Interestingly, he is now doing the same thing Fuller had done in the context of naturalization and which Bacon himself had deconstructed—generating fear and anger by constraining perception through particular narratives and rational analyses.

A Speech…When the House Was … Much Troubled About the Undertakers (1614)

In this speech, Bacon evokes memories of the tense interplay between being in and out of control. He locates such feelings specifically within the situation of being on the water in a boat sailing toward the harbour. The speech was made in his capacity as a member of the committee that had been set up to investigate who might have been undertaking for the king, how they were doing it, and what could be done about it if so. Undertaking meant the action of privately reporting to the king on parliamentary events and seeking to move its decisions towards the king’s will. Suspicions ran high and, though the committee Bacon was on found no one to prosecute, anxiety in the house about a threat to parliament’s autonomy, equal in seriousness almost to the gunpowder plot, seems only to have increased after the committee had given its report.Footnote 21 It was that anxiety Bacon was trying to calm in this speech. He hoped his argument would help to avoid a fresh committee inquiry. Given the magnitude of the supposed crime, he must have thought a new inquiry would be uncomfortably invasive, breeding fresh grudges with the potential to disrupt that parliament’s main agendas by fragmenting its community. He failed, however, and the inquiry was launched.Footnote 22

In trying to attenuate people’s fear that undertaking was happening, and thus reduce the chance that new committee powers would come out of it, Bacon tries to reframe the lower House’s sense of parliamentary community. He edits out the possibility that it is vulnerable to undertaking. Bacon develops the reframed identity around the parliament’s history as a firmly established ancient institution impervious to such threats. Everyone knows, says Bacon, that the House is so open to reason and its power to change our thoughts that none of the members can possibly predict what they think on an issue until “they hear things argued and debated” (XII: 43). Much less “can any man make a policy of assurance, what ship shall come safe into the harbour in these seas” (XII: 43). The harbour metaphor becomes the basis of powerful allegory—in Quintilian’s sense of that trope as extended metaphor—with different levels of connection: “ships” are policies and ends; “these seas” are the procedural environment of the parliament; the “harbour” is decision, resolution, or the good effects the parliament tries to accomplish.Footnote 23 Getting an issue debated, reasoned, agreed upon, and enacted in law for the benefit of the country is like steering a ship safely towards the harbour on rough stormy seas with only a few sure guides. How could any one person presume to control that complicated process from the outside?

Bacon now enhances the mental image his hearers are developing with a series of rhetorical questions. “Must there be a new passage found for the King’s business by a point of the compass that was never sailed by before?” he asks (XII: 43). His listeners are invited to infer that no such ‘passage’ could exist in this parliament. “Or must there be some forts built in this House that may command and contain the rest?” asks Bacon and answers immediately that he knows only two “forts” in this House (sea) of the king: affection and reason (XII: 43).

The allegory thus encourages the MPs to shape their mental images of the parliament into a more solid place than had been before. From that fresher angle, parliament is now a place in which undulating and shifting issues can only find steered controlling toward the right decisions because of the firm fort of reason. The idea that a single person could move a ship into the harbour in a predefined way has no ‘visible’ space in the mental image. Bacon has edited it out. How on earth could anyone sail a boat into a harbour without reference to the contingencies of wind, currents, compasses, guideposts, or the harbour’s particular features? It is non-sensical, from the point of view of the mental image, that a predefined pattern unrelated to these issues could work. Bacon asks his audience to put together a mental image in which any other boat passage than reasoning through contingencies is unthinkable. It is only through the process of debate—the compass and fort of reason—that the right passage for ship-policies moving toward resolution-harbours could be found. The very idea of undertaking—which Bacon describes as, the “dust”, “these vapours”, this “cloud”, these “light rumours” (XII: 43)—is set up, through that word-pattern, as the opposite of the solid forts of parliament: affection and reason. The mental image is able to bring emotional distance because it invites the inference that what is feared is impossible. Another way to describe that is to say that Bacon has deconstructed the fear that comes from perceiving impediments to escape. He has provided the means of escape from the fear: it is the perception that undertaking is impossible in such an institution.

Bodily memory is integral to this reimagining of the parliament. The mental image might be experienced as a place the imaginer inhabits as much as a scene played out in front of him. It is certainly possible that Bacon expected some listeners to imagine the scene as if they were immersed in it as the people on the boats. The conceit of life as a boat on the unruly ocean is a commonplace that Bacon can draw on, and expect his audience also to draw on, confidently.Footnote 24 That immersion evokes the tension between being out of control yet amenable to the solid forts of reason. Perhaps some of his listeners had actual experience of the terrifying situation of being on a boat that is only just under control. In saying that, of course, I do not deny the relatively obvious sexual significance of this mental image, the bodily aspects of which add something to Bacon’s evocative power and purpose here. But be that as it may, I wish primarily to point out the potential of the image to evoke memories of seeming to be out of control and really not being so, that is the feeling of recognizing one’s actual safety after all. It is a feeling tied closely to the body within Bacon’s mental image. Whatever tension there was is resolved by the forts, which control the progress of the boat to the harbour within the mental image. Evoking such feelings of tension and resolution in relation to bodily experience with his allegory gives Bacon the opportunity to encourage a reconception of the parliament as similarly in control. The allegory is not there for decoration. With it Bacon can relate his deconstruction of fear, in the parliamentary context, to a consolatory feeling that potentially gets much closer to the persons in front of him. With it Bacon offers the parliament a version of itself that its members will want to be true. The mental image is presented as the more rational view of parliament precisely because it develops consistency with a widely felt bodily experience.

In all the speeches discussed above I have tried to show how Bacon’s rhetorical skills work to evoke memories that can be shaped into powerful mental images with a view to altering perceptions of situations and, thereby, passionate responses to them. While mental images ask listeners to draw on a great variety of remembered material—far more than just bodily experiences—those that register highly sensitive bodily situations are particularly useful to Bacon. They are useful partly because most people have the familiar material in their memories required to construct them. Even if they have not personally had doctors bloodletting them, been stung by nettles, or been in a boat out of control, even if they had never even seen or heard about these experiences from others, they could readily reconstruct those situations with sufficient sympathy in reference to related experiences in order for them to work in Bacon’s favour. Bacon registers, at the level of the body, memories defined by loss, pain, illness, reaction and safety, and associates them rationally with other concepts on his agenda. Bacon’s careful use of mental images involving bodily experience thus is the widest rhetorical net he could cast.

His mental images, in so far as he successfully evokes them in the minds of those listening, are the sort of cognitive activity that provides a basis for further rational and emotional engagement. That cognitive primacy in mental images is itself a feature of the largely Aristotelian psychology Bacon inherited. His mental images involve rationality because they promote thought about similarity and difference, or, consistency and inconsistency. They involve passionate emotion because of their power to alter perceptions—perceptions of consistency and inconsistency—and thus form a different passionate response appropriate to those altered perceptions. Bacon’s mental images of bodily experience, then, show us one more instance of the extent to which the machineries of rational and emotional cognition in renaissance psychology, and thereby those of body and mind, are implicated in one another.