passionately, but whom she suspected of keeping dangerous and papistical
company, show us the imperious spirit in which she claimed to interfere
with her sons; and they show also that in Francis she did not find all
the deference which she looked for. Recommending Antony to frequent "the
religious exercises of the sincerer sort," she warns him not to follow
his brother's advice or example. Antony was advised to use prayer twice
a day with his servants. "Your brother," she adds, "is too negligent
therein." She is anxious about Antony's health, and warns him not to
fall into his brother's ill-ordered habits: "I verily think your
brother's weak stomach to digest hath been much caused and confirmed by
untimely going to bed, and then musing _nescio quid_ when he should
sleep, and then in consequent by late rising and long lying in bed,
whereby his men are made slothful and himself continueth sickly. But my
sons haste not to hearken to their mother's good counsel in time to
prevent." It seems clear that Francis Bacon had shown his mother that
not only in the care of his health, but in his judgment on religious
matters, he meant to go his own way. Mr. Spedding thinks that she must
have had much influence on him; it seems more likely that he resented
her interference, and that the hard and narrow arrogance which she read
into the Gospel produced in him a strong reaction. Bacon was obsequious
to the tyranny of power, but he was never inclined to bow to the tyranny
of opinion; and the tyranny of Puritan infallibility was the last thing
to which he was likely to submit. His mother would have wished him to
sit under Cartwright and Travers. The friend of his choice was the
Anglican preacher, Dr. Andrewes, to whom he submitted all his works, and
whom he called his "inquisitor general;" and he was proud to sign
himself the pupil of Whitgift, and to write for him--the archbishop of
whom Lady Bacon wrote to her son Antony, veiling the dangerous sentiment
in Greek, "that he was the ruin of the Church, for he loved his own
glory more than Christ's."