'The Lonely Funeral of Your Speech'

Francis Bacon’s death might have been scripted by Monty Python. It’s certainly the most unlikely in the history of English literature, at least as reported by the not-always-reliable John Aubrey. It’s absurd but if true it helps beatify the author of The Advancement of Learning (1605) as a martyred saint in the cause of science. In his Brief Lives, Aubrey tells us his source was Thomas Hobbes: 

“[H]is lordship’s death was trying an experiment: viz., as he was taking the aire in a coach . . . towards High-gate, snow lay on the ground, and it came into my lord’s thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt. They were resolved they would try the experiment presently. They alighted out of the coach, and went into a poore woman’s howse at the bottome of Highgate hill, and bought a hen, and made the woman exenterate it, and then stuffed the bodie with snow, and my lord did help to doe it himselfe. The snow so chilled him, that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not returne to his lodgings . . . but went to the earle of Arundell’s house at High-gate, where they putt him into a good bed warmed with a panne, but it was a damp bed that had not been layn-in in about a yeare before, which gave him such a cold that in 2 or 3 dayes, as I remember he told me, he dyed of suffocation.”

 

In other words, pneumonia, contracted from a snow-stuffed chicken and exacerbated by sleeping in a wet bed. Exenterate means to remove entrails, to eviscerate or disembowel. Bacon died at age sixty-five on April 9, 1626. He had been a close friend of George Herbert. In his biography of Herbert, John Drury reproduces the six-line elegy Herbert wrote in Latin for Bacon, with Drury's own translation of “On the Death of Francis, Viscount St Albans”:

 

“While you groan under the weight of a long, slow illness,

And life hangs on with a wavering, wasting foot,

I understand at last what prudent Fate willed:

Certainly you could only die in April,

So that here Flora with her tears, there Philomena with her plaintive cries,

Might lead the lonely funeral of your speech.”

 

In his two-page gloss on the poem, Drury writes of the final two lines: “Bacon had to hang on so that he could die in April, that wonderful month of flowers and birdsong for a keen gardener like him.” Of the poem as a whole he adds: “Herbert’s elegy for his old friend breathes tender personal affection.”

 

It was Bacon who wrote in his essay “Of Studies”: “Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

 

[See John Drury’s Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (University of Chicago Press, 2014).]