Eutopia of Empire: Francis Bacon’s Short View and the Imperial and Colonial Background to the New Atlantis

Abstract

The present article considers Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis against the backdrop of Bacon’s Short View to be taken of Great Britain and Spain, one of Bacon’s least studied and most imperially audacious and bellicose texts. In the Short View to be taken of Great Britain and Spain, Bacon argues for a naval war and blockade of both the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish colonies in the Americas, advocating the British seizure of the latter. The article argues that the fulfillment of these imperials and colonial proposals is, in Bacon’s view, a prerequisite and presupposition of the action of Bacon’s New Atlantis.

Outset

In the winter and spring of 1619, Northern European and confessionally Protestant states were agitated by intelligence reports of military rearmament and naval build-up in Spain. The government of King James VI and I, on the Privy Council of which Francis Bacon sat as Lord Chancellor, ordered the seizure and opening of ingoing and outgoing correspondence from Spain, opening the mail of the Spanish embassy. The King’s son-in-law by marriage, the Count and Elector Palatine Frederick V, who had been offered and had accepted the kingship of Bohemia, wrote to the members of the English Privy Council urging English military and financial support for Protestants in Bohemia. ³ Writing in French, the Lord Chancellor replied to the Elector in a manner that was martially non-committal but no less verbally supportive, addressing the Palatine Elector as “the best bulwark, after the Kings of Great Britain, of the most healthy part of Christianity.” ⁴

From this letter, Bacon turned to the composition of a white paper advocating war with Spain and intervention on the behalf of Protestant powers in the nascent 30 Years’ War, A Short View to be taken of Great Britain and Spain, one of the Lord Chancellor’s most audacious, and least studied, ⁵ texts composed whilst in government.

A Short View I: The Forces of Britain and Holland

Five years later, in his Considerations Touching a War With Spain of 1624, addressed to the then Prince of Wales, Francis Bacon observed that “To a war are required; a just quarrel; sufficient forces and provisions; and a prudent choice of the designs.” Bacon proposed to proceed in his argument accordingly: “So then I will first justify the quarrel; secondly, balance the forces; and lastly, propound variety of designs for choice.” ⁶ In Bacon’s A Short View to be taken of Great Britain and Spain, Bacon follows the second two of these steps, omitting the first. In the earlier, more private, work, Bacon leaves aside questions of justice and justification. ⁷

In A Short View, Bacon cuts directly to the “sufficient forces and provisions,” balancing Britain’s forces against Spain’s, before going on to propound designs for choice. The “Short View” opens, first, with an assessment of British strength, under three headings: first, an assessment of Britain’s geographic and geostrategic situation; second, an assessment of the forces and strength of Britain’s allies, the Dutch; finally, an assessment of Britain’s forces in terms of revenue and morale. Thus, the work opens with a proclamation of power: “His Majesty now of England is of more power than any of his predecessors.” ⁸

To an objector who might raise the long-reigning Edward III (regnant from 1327 to 1377), ⁹ a king who conquered much of France under the English sword, as a potential counter-example, Bacon breaks immediately to a defense of his opening assertion of James’s power relative to James’s predecessors. The loss of an English military presence in France, with the English forfeiture of Calais in 1558, is more than offset by the acquisition of Scotland into Britain and the reduction of Ireland “into a more absolute state of obedience.” ¹⁰ Moreover, Bacon contends that Calais was more trouble than it was worth. ¹¹ “The footing we had in France was rather a greatness of trouble unto us than of strength,” Bacon writes. ¹² A sea-walled isle is a fortress less pregnable than a lone outpost across the Channel. ¹³ No less, Calais “was always in division: it held us in a continual flux of treasure and blood: we never attempted it in front but it attempted us in the rear; which did both distract our armies and aggravate the charge.” ¹⁴

Bacon announces that “his Majesty hath brought another whole kingdom to England; undivided from us either in amity or seat.” The union of the kingdoms in the person of their monarch, James, is, in Bacon’s View, both geostrategically decisive and financially provident. Geostrategically, adding Scotland closes the “back-door that was open in the assistance of our enemies,” which, in turn, “is now open to us.” ¹⁵ Financially and in terms of manpower, Bacon avers, “It saves us the money and the men that we were forced to employ in a second army for the withstanding the invasion of that side.” ¹⁶ Jointly securing the isle of Britain and freeing resources and material for their deployment elsewhere changes the scope of the warfare which England and, then, Britain, may wage. The addition of Scotland to England allows Britain, in Bacon’s estimation, to wage multiple wars at once. Indeed, Bacon maintains, “we may be able at one and the same time both to undertake any action abroad and defend ourselves at home without either much danger or great cost.” ¹⁷

Bacon moves from assessing the geostrategic situation of Britain to assessing the forces of its foremost ally, the United Provinces of the Low Countries. Commending the Dutch as “the powerfullest nation at the sea that now is in the world” and commending the Dutch army as “the best military school in the world,” Bacon recommends combining the Dutch and English armies, with the Dutch soldiers made officers over English infantry. ¹⁸ More than a decade prior, in 1608, writing his private diary, the Commentarius Solutus, Bacon had contemplated “Annexing ye Lowe Countries” only a sentence after reflecting upon “cyvylizing Ireland, furder coloniz. the wild of Scotl.” ¹⁹ Recurring in his government policy brief to this theme from his private diary, Bacon cannot help himself from remarking when considering the Dutch that “the use of whose neighbourhood our own histories will commend unto us, if we enquire of the ages past.” ²⁰ In the ages present, by contrast, Bacon estimates that the United Provinces “hath the motive in it to make defence with us against an opposite Church in such a nation as hath drawn both of us into one and the same cause in quarrel as well of policy as religion.” For the common defense against Spain, Bacon holds the United Provinces to be aptly situated.

From the situation in Holland, Bacon shifts to English morale and English resources. Bacon holds English morale to fight the Spanish undiminished by local confessional divisions. When assessing Britain’s strength, Bacon is keen to note that he thinks it unlikely that English Catholics would welcome a Spanish invasion and side with the Spanish invaders over their lawful sovereign, James. Rather, Bacon implies, he holds English Catholics more likely to fight loyally for England against the pretenses of a potential Spanish invasion. “And far be it from me to think that many even of those that hold no communion with us in the Church should give other nations the cause to say that in England are the false men that take up God’s weapon against him and their own weapons against themselves, in the favour of a foreign ambition, that make the pretence of religion but a port-hole to lay his artillery out at, or his scaling ladder to assault by.” ²¹

Addressing the revenue question and the claim that Britain lacks the crown revenues to conduct warfare and maintain armies in the field and naval vessels at sea, Francis Bacon turns to his favored rhetorical strategy: the deployment of witness testimony. Speaking to “the second point touching the wealth of the kingdom,” imaginatively and fictively, Bacon calls the Spanish state council into the witness stand, writing that “if I did call the Council of Spain itself to give judgment in the cause, I should need no better sentence to condemn their opinions that think the King of Great Britain poor.” James VI and I had struggled mightily with Parliament from 1611 onward to pass Bills of Supply to augment crown revenues, with limited efficacy. ²² Were war to be opened between Britain and Spain, Bacon holds, the revenue question for Britain would be solved, as intercepted correspondence of Spanish ambassadors and counselors itself attested. Referring to the Spanish King and his ministers, Bacon noted that “Their master knows well enough he shall find it otherwise whensoever he shall undertake to attempt us, or we them.” Bacon here subtly but surely indicates that James’s fiscal policies of taxation have been undermined by pursuit of a pacific policy of faux-amity, marital bargaining, and détente with Spain. A reversal of James’s foreign policy toward Spain would, in Bacon’s briefly articulated view, amount to a reversal of fortune (and an attendant reversal of state revenue).

Excursus: Francis Bacon on the Spanish Match

Dwelling for a moment on Jacobean foreign policy, Bacon’s view of the Spanish Match in its various iterations and at its various stages is often left unclear, underdescribed and misreported in scholarship, with writers, among them the estimable (and rightly esteemed) Spedding, contending that Bacon favored this policy. ²³ The evidence for attributing such a stance to Bacon merits a brief reconsideration.

Writing as Lord Keeper to James VI and I in the spring of 1617, as negotiations for a Spanish match between the Infanta and the Prince of Wales were underway, Bacon offered a cautionary note to James in pursuing this course while the Privy Council was divided on the matter. “I do foresee,” the Lord Keeper claimed, “in my simple judgment, much inconvenience to insue, if your Majesty proceed to this treaty with Spain, and that your Council draw not all one way.” Bacon then recurs to the ill-starred precedents of division in the Privy Council on matter of policy. “I saw the bitter fruits of a divided Council the last Parliament; I saw no very pleasant fruits thereof in the matter of the cloth.” ²⁴

What is past in precedent is prologue in what is to come, Bacon counsels his King, in the matter of the Spanish match and a divided Privy Council: “This will be of equal, if not more inconvenience; for wheresoever the opinion of your people is material (as in many cases it is not), there, if your Council be united, they shall be able almost to give law to opinion and rumour; but if they be divided, the infusion will not be according to the strength and virtue of the votes of your council, but according to the aptness and inclination of the popular. This I leave to your Majesty in your high wisdom to remedy.” ²⁵

Bacon’s claim is that if James does not unite his Privy Council prior to engaging in the Treaty for a marital union with Spain, the more popular position on the Council (that of opposition to the Treaty) will prevail amongst the English (and British) public in “opinion and rumour.” Put more clearly, if the Privy Council is divided, then the popular (anti-Spanish) position will prevail, if the Privy Council is united, then they will overcome popular opposition to the Spanish Match. ²⁶ A Privy Council united, Bacon seems to claim, could sway public opinion to support (or oppose) a marital union with Spain. But, without a united Council, the opinion of the Council most already in accord with public sentiment (implicitly that opposed to the union with Spain) would carry the day in public “opinion and rumour,” dashing James’s plans for peace via matrimony (a favored Jacobean policy in both domestic and foreign affairs). ²⁷ Without overtly opposing the Spanish match, Bacon politicly counseled its dangers under conditions and circumstances which substantially obtained in the spring of 1617.

A Short View II: The forces of Spain

Returning from Bacon’s gentle counsels to James on the folly of marital diplomacy with enemies to Bacon’s arguments in The Short View, the assessment of Britain’s strength is followed by an assessment of the strength of Spain.

As Britain, by Bacon’s assertion, is stronger than it at first sight appears, Spain is correspondingly weaker than its imperial ambit in 1619 might suggest. Bacon holds Spain to be open to attack, navally vulnerable, and economically in ruins. Militarily, Bacon suggests, Spain is spread too thin. Of the Spanish King, Bacon holds that because “His dominions are so far in distance asunder” these same Spanish dominions “cannot give relief time enough one to another upon an alarum.” This means, Bacon contends, that a quick and unexpected assault upon Spain could be devastating not least because the Spanish monarch “is more powerful to assault than to defend.” ²⁸ Putting Spain upon the defensive would diminish Spanish power. Yet, that would require an assault upon Spain or its imperial possessions or, perhaps, both at once.

Beyond its imperial expanse which makes it open to assault, Bacon holds that Spain is navally vulnerable. The Spanish crown “hath more to do with shipping than any other prince, yet hath few seamen at his devotion, but by extreme charge; and those of the worst sort.” This means that Spain is undersailored and overdrawn in its commitments: a naval assault upon Spain, Bacon reasons, has some chance of success.

Not least, Spain is in arrears to such an extent that it cannot pay its armies. ²⁹ Bacon writes that the Spanish monarch’s “poverty heretofore hath appeared in the mutinies of the Low Countries’ armies for want of pay: which was a great cause of his ill success there.” ³⁰ That was then: Spain’s finances, in Bacon’s View, cannot have improved in the interim. “I cannot see how his estate should be much better now than it was,” Bacon writes, “indeed but for the Indies he were the poorest King of Europe.” ³¹

A Short View III: Designs

Seeing Spain weak in matters military, naval, and economic, both open to an assault and dependent in revenue upon its overseas empire, Bacon proposes a thought experiment, which is not merely offered as food for thought. If one wished to inquire into Spain’s “weakness or strength,” it would serve well to ask whether Spain “be able to stand upon terms of defiance and yet hold the Indies?” Bacon’s answer to his thought experiment is blunt: “I think not.” ³² The following test might be made, Bacon suggests: a two Armada blockade of both Spain and its overseas holdings might test Spain’s weaknesses to their breaking point. “His Majesty of England joining with the States of the United Provinces is of power to raise two Armadas, the one to block up Spain, the other to block up the Indies,” Bacon observes. “The least success that may be hoped for out of this enterprise, the cutting off his returns, would beggar” Spain. Bacon’s thought experiment is not merely theoretical but a policy recommendation, a design propounded for choice. ³³ Indeed, Bacon is so bold as to claim of this two Armada proposition that “This is a right design and a great one: such an one as I wish we had all the treasures and all the valiant blood of our ancestors to bestow upon.” ³⁴

To Bacon’s dual Armada proposal for the encirclement, blockade and assault upon Spain and its overseas possessions, an objector might note that “peace with a true neighbor is a condition to be embraced.” ³⁵ To this objection, Bacon replies that there are problems with Spain’s conduct in the past and problems with Spain’s inclinations in the present foreseeably continuing into the time ahead. Spain, Bacon avers, is ultra-violent and “hath trodden more bloody steps than any state in Christendom.” ³⁶ Bacon here brings his critique of the 1604 Treaty of London and James’s matrimonial diplomacy to the fore: “Look into the treaties and the negociations of his ministers abroad. You shall find as much falsehood in these as blood in the other.” ³⁷ The hope of peace by matrimony in a Spanish match, too, is, in Bacon’s view, delusional, with Bacon amplifying his 1617 critique of marriage diplomacy in stronger and more direct terms. Spain, Bacon writes, “holds league with none but to have the nearer access to do harm by; and a match in kindred shall not hinder it.” ³⁸

Even if one were so inclined as to forget the past, Bacon avows, Spain is unlikely to become an amicable neighbor in the time to come. The problem here is twofold: the Spanish retain a will to empire and the Spanish culture of the Inquisition, which, in Bacon’s view, is inimical to peace (as it is also, in his view, inimical to Bacon’s own philosophic endeavors). Spain’s “ambition to the empire, so long as he holdeth the Indies, will never die” ³⁹ and, in Bacon’s View, “we shall never be assured of him (such is the nature of his religion) so long as we differ in matters of faith.” ⁴⁰

The Dutch, Bacon avers, would be well disposed to the design, and in concluding his brief, Bacon commends his design to James as Fidei Defensor, “the Defender of the Faith.” This defense entails, in Bacon’s estimate, “the planting of the true Church there,” in Spain, this task being “a sacred work that even by office as it were belongs” to James, “the greatest islander of Christendom.” Bacon holds his endeavor to be self-financing as “the Indies will afford him the means to exercise it.” ⁴¹ In both his proposal for “planting of the true Church” in Spain and for the self-financing character of this endeavor via revenue from the Indies, the reader and addressee of Bacon’s memo observes that Bacon is not proposing a naval blockade alone: he is proposing the conquest of the Iberian peninsula and the acquisition of Spanish colonial holdings, not only in the Caribbean, but in the “Indies” more broadly—East and West—that is, the acquisition of all of Spain’s oceanic possessions, the seizure, by Britain and the United Provinces of all Spanish colonies.

After this note of faith, Bacon closes by reference to Britain’s populousness, which had heretofore gone unmentioned in Bacon’s View. “These considerations,” Bacon notes, “and the multitude of his [James’s] subjects do seem to invite him” to Bacon’s design of a dual Armada War against Spain. As if the threat of Spain (and the prospect of seizing its empire) were not enough, “the multitude of subjects” is offered by Bacon as a final spur: too many people at home is a problem of concern on a level with wars abroad.

Bacon's New Atlantis and the Politics of Empire

It is against the background of the Short View, and other imperial and colonial proposals no less bellicose, that Francis Bacon composed his New Atlantis.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis opens with a sailor’s narration to the effect that “We sailed from Peru.” Yet, it is less noted in scholarship and writing on Bacon that the former Lord Chancellor had openly advocated the British invasion and colonial seizure of Peru, at the time a Spanish colony, in the years in which he is thought to have composed his New Atlantis. ⁴²

Bacon’s quasi-utopian fable remains an enigma. Sailing from Peru for China and Japan, a set of Spanish-speaking yet English-narrating sailors find themselves stranded aboard ship without rations amidst fickle winds in the South Pacific. ⁴³ The sailors are seemingly miraculously saved when a large island appears before them. To this island, the sailors go ashore, where, in a series of set speeches and encounters, the island of Bensalem and its scientific, political, and cultural institutions are disclosed to the sailors, the narrator, and the readers of Bacon’s fable. The fable, on its surface, offers a pacific ideal commonwealth not wholly dissimilar to that depicted within the narrative frame of Thomas More’s Utopia, to which Bacon specifically alludes later in the fable.

The Bensalemites address the sailors as people acquainted with the works of Thomas More and with the works of Plato (the latter then central to English university education which Bacon himself had received). ⁴⁴ The Bensalemites do not engage the sailors as readers of Aquinas, Vitoria, and Suarez, all writers with whom learned Spaniards of Bacon’s time (and Englishmen of Bacon’s ilk) ⁴⁵ were well-acquainted. If Bacon’s sailors are Spaniards, they are Spaniards of a different sort. One way or another, the sailors who sojourn to Bensalem have moved beyond the scholastics.

The island in Bacon’s fable, Bensalem, is a place where the streets are fair ⁴⁶ and the poetry is excellent. ⁴⁷ The island is endowed with feasts at which “music and dance, and other recreations” are supported at public expense. ⁴⁸ The people of Bensalem offer acclamations of assent. ⁴⁹ The island is governed monarchically by a king, who has solved all his problems of public finance and who is otherwise never observed in the narrative. ⁵⁰

As the sailors approach the island they espy the “port of a fair city,” invoking comparison with the kallipolis of Plato’s Republic. The Bensalemites are aware of Plato, whom they refer to as “a great man with you” ⁵¹ while they refer to Thomas More as “one of your men”—the Bensalemites seemingly know the culture and literature of other countries but are unknown themselves.

How might we best interpret this fable? In some sense, parts of the fable are to be read autobiographically: in the descriptions of the institutions of Bensalem there are obvious correctives to late marriage and to public servants taking bribes on account of insufficient salary, both issues which troubled Bacon’s own life.

Yet, within the text of Bacon’s New Atlantis there are also explicit resonances to Bacon’s political projects, both domestic and imperial, and to his foreign policy in particular. Bensalem is polyglot in its linguistic knowledge and cosmopolitan in its state composition. In Bensalem, state documents appear in Spanish, ancient Greek, and Latin, and there is the implication for the name of the island, Bensalem, “for so they call it in their language,” that the local language is in part derived from Arabic or shares Arabic cognates. ⁵² As many scholars have noted, Ben Salam in Arabic (like Ben Shalom in Hebrew) means son of peace or offspring of peace. ⁵³

To what extent can Bacon’s definition of peace, as a power’s incapacity to be harmed, ⁵⁴ shed light on how we read Bacon’s utopic fable? Quite explicitly, the island of Bensalem satisfies Bacon’s definition of a power at peace. The state governor of the Strangers’ House in Bensalem stresses to the European sailors that the residents of Bensalem “know well most part of the habitable world, and are ourselves unknown.” ⁵⁵ Bensalem is a power which other powers are incapable of harming militarily, in no small part because they do not even know that it is there. If knowledge is power, then it would seem to follow that ignorance is impotence, and the impotence of Bensalem’s opponents is guaranteed by their ignorance of its existence.

Beyond presenting an island utopia satisfying Bacon’s definition of peace, the narrative of the New Atlantis is consistent with the most extravagant of Bacon’s imperial proposals: his consistent drumbeat in parliament, in his war pamphlets, letters, and governmental white papers, for the seizure of Spanish colonial holdings in the New World.

Across his scientific and literary corpus and political career, Francis Bacon was not unconcerned with voyages to and possession of the “Indies.” In his Novum Organum of 1620, when discussing the earth’s magnetism, Bacon was keen to incorporate that which was often observed in navigations across the Atlantic Ocean towards the Indies. ⁵⁶ What does he include under the heading of the “Indies?” Bacon classes Peru, the sailors’ port of departure in the narrative of the New Atlantis, amongst the “West Indies” in his Sylva Sylvarum ⁵⁷ —the work to which his New Atlantis is appended and importantly conjoined. Indeed, “West Indies,” for Bacon, may well encompass the entirety of North and South America, as the Bensalemites in his New Atlantis claim they raised “the statua of your Columbus, that discovered the West Indies.” ⁵⁸ By “West Indies”—Bacon means that which he regards Columbus as having discovered: both Americas, North and South—the entirety of the “New World” as he sees it.

It is to these “West Indies” no less than to the “Lowe Countries” ⁵⁹ that Bacon’s ultramarine imperial projects are directed. In his Essayes as well as in his De Augmentis Scientiarum, Bacon informs his readers that the advantage of sea power or naval power (potentia navalis) is non-diminutive to the point that a prudent politique would be ill-counseled not to pursue it. ⁶⁰ As Bacon puts it in the De Augmentis, pursuit of such naval power as to yield imperium maris (empire of the sea) is at the height of urgent matters. ⁶¹ Indeed, Bacon enjoins his British readers, and in particular the addressees of his orations, James, Charles, and Buckingham, to stress and pursue sea power and naval supremacy: those who rule the sea enjoy great liberty—they may have as much or as little war as they will. ⁶² If Bacon is a theorist of liberty and not being ruled by the will of another, as some writers assert, ⁶³ then Bacon’s words about freedom must be attended to: the one most free is the one who rules the seas. ⁶⁴ And to the rule of the seas, the wealth (opes) and treasures of both (utriusque Indiæ) “Indies” are an accessory. ⁶⁵ Bacon claims that rule of the sea entails rule of the East and West Indies and he counsels the advantages of ruling the sea. Bacon advocated this position in his De Augmentis no less than in his Essayes of 1625, as well as in his more pointed writings on war with Spain. Indeed, in the 1625 Essayes, Buckingham is addressed explicitly by Bacon in his capacity as Lord High Admiral of England. ⁶⁶ When Bacon enjoins his addressees, the Lord Admiral and his King (Ad Regem Suum ⁶⁷ ), to pursue sea power, outlining both the liberty and advantages of maritime rule, he is counseling the policy that, in his view, leads to control of both the East and West Indies.

No less, Bacon’s claims that rule of the seas entails the treasure of the Indies, East and West, are echoed in his utterances in Parliament during the debates over the naturalization of Scottish subjects in England. In the House of Commons on 17 February, 1606/7, Bacon stressed that “I hold our laws, with some reducement, worthy to govern, and it were the world.” ⁶⁸ “The world” includes both the East and the West Indies, and Africa, Asia, the Pacific Ocean, and the entirety of Europe as well—with little room remaining for the laws of the Spanish empire, the Vatican, or the Ottoman Empire. Bacon did not need to say this in the 1606 Parliament: English law governing the world directly contradicted King James’s preferred policies in all matters of foreign affairs, not least, every article of the 1604 Treaty of London. Nonetheless, in arguing for Scottish naturalization, Bacon made the fitness of naturalization for empire a key component of his argument.

In his Short View to be taken of Britain and Spain, Bacon stressed that in the absence of its colonial empire in the “Indies”—meaning Spanish held territories in the Americas—Spain could neither support nor continue its imperial ambitions. In that white paper, Bacon advocated the raising of a two fleet Anglo-Dutch armada, in violation and abrogation of the 1604 Treaty of London, to blockade both the Iberian Peninsula as well as Spain’s colonial outposts throughout the Americas. ⁶⁹

In Bensalem, the reader may hear a potential echo of Bacon’s preferred military stratagem of dividing an opponent’s forces, via blockade or troop maneuver, in his description of the mythic military founder of Bensalem, Altabin, “a wise man and a great warrior,” who “knowing well both his own strength and that of his enemies, handled the matter so, as he cut off their land-forces from their ships; and entoiled both their navy and their camp with a greater power than theirs, both by sea and land; and compelled them to render themselves without striking a stroke.” ⁷⁰

Bacon’s mythic martial founder applies the strategy to the enemies of Bensalem which Bacon persistently advocated in his discussions of England’s relations to Spain: mass superior forces, divide one’s opponent, and demand an unconditional surrender.

In the Short View, Bacon’s white paper advocating a dual armada war against the Spanish empire, as was his wont, Bacon stressed that this imperial adventure would be self-financing: “the Indies will afford” the English crown “the means to exercise it.” ⁷¹ While scholars dispute the dating of the white paper, both Noel Malcolm and James Spedding place it between 1618 and 1624, and thus situate the text as closely preceding Bacon’s composition of the New Atlantis. ⁷²

Returning to New Atlantis, in Bacon’s Bensalem, the Inquisition is inoperative. No confessional divisions within the Bensalemite version of Christianity are mentioned: Bensalemite Christianity seems to be at once more ecumenical and more tolerant than the Christianity of a confessionally divided Europe. Jews are present and tolerated and all state officials wear headwear unaccustomed in the Britain and Spain of Bacon’s day. No less, the Inquisition appears to be inoperative on the vessel disembarking from Peru. The world picture of Bacon’s fable differs in these key respects from the world picture within which Bacon lived and operated: the Inquisition may never have existed in Bensalem, yet this marks a clear departure from the institutions of 16th and 17th century Spain, above all. ⁷³ Within the fictional frame of Bacon’s fable, neither the religious persecution of the Inquisition nor the terms of the 1604 Treaty of London appear to be in force. James’s political delusions in foreign policy, as Bacon understood them, have been remedied and reversed.

Further, in Bacon’s Bensalem, the population issue, whereby overpopulation or “surcharge of people” threatens to engender poverty and discontentment, which Bacon regards as the material causes of civil war, has been satisfactorily resolved. In early editions of the Sylva to which his fable was appended, Bacon’s New Atlantis ends with a series of natural grandeurs or wonders, Magnalia Naturæ, particularly useful to humans. ⁷⁴ A number of the grandeurs or wonders concern the augmentation of foodstuffs and soil productivity relative to population size, defusing the powder keg of overpopulation which threatens to ignite into the miserable condition of civil war. These include “Making rich composts for the earth” and “Drawing of new foods out of substances not now in use.” ⁷⁵ While chastity is celebrated in Bensalem ⁷⁶ as it is in Bacon’s Essayes, ⁷⁷ procreation, too, is celebrated in the Bensalem of the New Atlantis as it is in no other part of Bacon’s corpus, where population growth is seen as a danger and as a potent political problem in need of drastic resolution. In Bacon’s end-state, population has seemingly become unproblematic in a way that no longer poses a threat to the body politic.

Reading Bacon’s New Atlantis alongside the Short View facilitates an understanding of the island’s total and strategic isolation. Bacon infamously defines peace as the incapacity of opponent powers to do harm to one’s own state—Bensalem, the offspring of peace, satisfies Bacon’s definition of peace straightforwardly: impotent to harm Bensalem because ignorant of its existence, Bensalem is a place at peace from unknowing foes. Yet, reading Bacon’s fable beside his proposals for armada warfare with Spain also draws the reader’s attention to the “Instruments of destruction, as of war,” which Bacon highlights in the great works of nature, the Magnalia Naturae, appended to the end of his New Atlantis. ⁷⁸ From muskets to cannons and from basilisks to gunpowder, the Bensalemites are a people fully armed. The Father of Salomon’s House informs the narrator that with respect to muskets and cannons, the Bensalemites aim “to make them stronger, and more violent than yours are.” ⁷⁹ One of the things which Bacon presents his Henry VII as knowing is that “the way to peace was not to seem to be desirous to avoid wars.” ⁸⁰ In this regard, Bacon’s Bensalemites, like Bacon’s Henry, are presented as knowing what James VI and I knew not.

Outlook

The disembarkation point of Bacon’s New Atlantis is a voyage by English-writing sailors from a Spanish colony the seizure of which Bacon had repeatedly proposed, both in and out of government. A long tradition of scholarship, dating at least to the 19th century, posits Bacon's New Atlantis as the end achieved on the basis of Bacon’s projects for the reforms of science and experimental natural history. ⁸¹ The New Atlantis, on this picture, presupposes the fulfillment of the Novum Organum and the fruits harvested from the woods of Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum. Nothing in the interpretation here suggests otherwise. Yet, if the interpretation I have offered here is apt, Bacon’s New Atlantis also presupposes the fulfillment of Bacon’s political projects to their successful military, colonial, and imperial conclusions: the vanquishing of Spanish power in both Iberia and its ultramarine empire, the British (and allied Dutch) seizure of Spanish colonial holdings, the quelling of the Spanish Inquisition in favor of the inquisition of nature, and the reversal of population as a political problem, which if unaddressed, would furnish the fuel of discord and civil war. Reading Bacon’s utopic fable in the light of his governmental proposals helps us to see the contrast between the world which the Lord Chancellor inhabited and the world at which Bacon aimed.