In 1926, suffragist, pacifist, and preacher, Maude Royden, delivered a sermon about Francis Bacon, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of his death. Her sermon, redacted for length, is included here. Royden preached it at the Guildhouse Fellowship, a center for Christian worship in London that she and Rev. Percy Dearmer, along with noted musician Martin Shaw, co-founded a few years earlier. The Guildhouse combined attention to cultural and social concerns, along with stressing the arts and music. Royden’s sermon pays homage to Bacon while also using his life as a lesson in morality and a cautionary tale. – Editor
Bacon is himself a most moving illustration of the Shakespearean concept of tragedy. The heroes of Shakespeare’s tragedies are not the victims of destiny. … There is always in them some flaw, some weakness, some discord, that sets them at odds with their own greatness. … [A] man who has all the elements of greatness, but mixed with them some fatal weakness—that is in Shakespeare’s mind a tragic subject … and behind the life of the man whose greatness we remember and celebrate to-day is just such a tragedy.
Bacon was born with everything in his favour. … In 1621 he was impeached for bribery and corruption. He confessed practically everything. … In 1624 he was pardoned and set free. Two years later he died. His epitaph … was given to him by the poet Pope, who calls him “the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.”
Behind this meteoric career, there is a sordid story. Bacon was haunted by ambition, always doing things unworthy of himself because he wanted more money, always making friends with the prosperous and often leaving them when they fell.
