Religion. But the poet calls the King "Ferdinand," taking perhaps
from some story this non-existent son of Charles III of Navarre (died
1425): to whom, according to Monstrelet, the Burgundian chronicler
of that time, the French king owed 200,000 ducats of gold. This is a
transaction of the early fifteenth century, and leads to the presence
of the princess of France as an envoy at the Court of Navarre in the
play; the whole thing is quite unhistorical, and has the air of being
borrowed from some lost story or brief novel. Bacon's brother,
Anthony, was English minister at the Court of Navarre. What could
tempt Bacon to pick out a non-historical King Ferdinand of Navarre,
plant him in the distant days of Jeanne d'Arc, and make him, at that
period, found an Academe for three years of austere study and absence
of women? But, if Bacon did this, what could induce him to give to
the non-existent Ferdinand, as companions, the Marechal de Biron with
de Longueville (both of them, in 1589-93, the chief adherents of
Henri of Navarre), and add to them "Dumain," that is, the Duc de
Mayenne, one of the Guises, the deadly foes of Henri and of the
Huguenots? Even in the unhistorically minded Shakespeare, the freak
is of the most eccentric,--but in Bacon this friskiness is indeed
strange. I cannot, like Mr. Greenwood, {124a} find any "allusions to
the Civil War of France." France and Navarre, in the play, are in
full peace.

The actual date of the fabulous King Ferdinand would have been about
1430. By introducing Biron, Longueville, and the Duc de Mayenne, and
Bankes's celebrated educated horse, the author shifts the date to
1591. But the Navarre of the play is a region "out of space, out of
time," a fairy world of projected Academes (like that of the four
young men in de la Primaudaye's L'Academie Francaise, Englished in
1586) and of peace, while the actual King of Navarre of 1591 was