Abstract
Tosh provides an overview of Anthony Bacon’s life as an Elizabethan intelligence agent, and reveals how his biographical heritage has come to be dominated by his conviction for sodomy by the authorities in Montauban, France, in 1586. Recent advances in queer historiography have cast into question the biographical utility of such convictions, and Tosh situates his study within the ‘affective turn’ in the history of sexuality: the book is an account of the intimate relationships Bacon sustained with four men, based on his extensive archive of personal correspondence (Tosh includes a review of the latest scholarship on the material letter). These friendships, he argues, were crucial in sustaining the men’s lives, careers and affective identities.
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Notes
- 1.
Archives Départementales, Montauban, Préfecture Tarn-et-Garonne, France, la côte 5 E 1537, fols.176–9; GL, 66–8; HF, 107–10. The most thorough account of the depositions is Joyce T. Freedman, ‘Anthony Bacon and his World, 1558–1601’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Temple University, 1979, 103–10.
- 2.
BL Cotton MS Nero B.VI, fol.387; GL, 67; HF, 110.
- 3.
A.L. Rowse, Homosexuals in History: A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature and the Arts (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), 41–47; Martin Greif, The Gay Book of Days: an evocatively illustrated who’s who of who is, was, may have been, probably was, and almost certainly seems to have been gay during the past 5,000 years (London: W.H. Allen, 1985), 27.
- 4.
Alan Haynes, Invisible Power: The Elizabethan Secret Services 1570–1603 (Stroud: Sutton, 1992), 127. A thoughtful analysis of the Cambridge spy ring (to which Haynes winkingly refers) is Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 168–74.
- 5.
Major works in the small field of mid-century sexuality studies include H. Montgomery Hyde, The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name: A Candid History of Homosexuality in Britain (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970) and Noel I. Garde, Jonathan to Gide: The Homosexual in History (New York: Vantage Press, 1964). Anthony Bacon regarded his own sex drive (if such a thing was conceived of in the sixteenth century) as relatively low: writing to a Shrewsbury doctor in 1597, he told him that he had ‘neuer been troobled with any kinde of leues veneria [venereal disease] nor committed any act to occasion it’ (AB to Mr Barker, 17 April 1597, LPL MS 661, fol.160v).
- 6.
HF, 109; Janine Garisson, ‘La Genève française’, in Daniel Ligou (ed.), Histoire de Montauban (Toulouse: Privat, 1984); Philip Conner, Huguenot Heartland: Montauban and Southern French Calvinism during the Wars of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 84–6.
- 7.
Michel Foucault, La Volonté de savoir [The Will to Knowledge] (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976). Published in the UK as The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1979).
- 8.
Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), 9; Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop Journal 29 (1990), 1–19, 14; Bray, ‘Epilogue’, in Tom Betteridge (ed.), Sodomy in early modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 164–8, 165.
- 9.
David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), 7.
- 10.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 25. Alan Stewart’s Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) developed (and challenged) Sedgwick’s thesis in reference to the sixteenth century.
- 11.
Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 23.
- 12.
HF, 109.
- 13.
Goran Stanivuković, ‘Beyond Sodomy: What Is Still Queer About Early Modern Queer Studies?’ in Vin Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray and Will Stockton (eds), Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 41–65, 42, 43.
- 14.
Cynthia B. Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 30; Laura Gowing, Michael Hunter and Miri Rubin, ‘Introduction’, in Gowing, Hunter and Rubin (eds), Love, Friendship and Faith in Europe, 1300–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1–14, 3–4; Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
- 15.
David M. Halperin, ‘Among Men – History, Sexuality and the Return of Affect’, in Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (eds), Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship Between Men, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1–11, 2.
- 16.
Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, revised edn. (London: Vintage, 1992, 2002), 266.
- 17.
Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics 1558–1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 481.
- 18.
‘Friendship space’ deliberately recalls Stephen Guy-Bray’s adoption of the phrase ‘homoerotic space’ to describe the literary terrains in which same-sex intimacy was explored and celebrated (Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002))<Author-Query><!----></Author-Query>.
- 19.
The first major monograph on the cultural centrality of friendship in the English Renaissance was Laurens J. Mills, One Soul in Bodies Twain: Friendship in Tudor Literature and Stuart Drama (Bloomington: Principia Press, 1937). Major literary studies of the past two decades include: Ullrich Langer, Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1994); Reginald Hyatt, The Arts of Friendship: The Idealisation of Friendship in Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994); Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Tom MacFaul, Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 93–126, and Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 187–225, have explored the difference between ‘literary’ ideal friendship and the ‘real thing’. Cedric C. Brown’s forthcoming monograph Discourses of Friendship in the Seventeenth Century, kindly lent in manuscript by the author, promises to offer a much more nuanced picture of friendship in the early modern period. Brown’s work also addresses a lacuna in my book, which is intimate friendships among women and between men and women: Anthony Bacon’s circle was, with very few exceptions, totally male and the work which underpins this account includes few studies of female friendship. But the field is extensive and essential for a full understanding of early modern conceptions of friendship. A short survey includes: Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981); Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Denise A. Walen, Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
- 20.
For Nicholas Bacon, see Robert Tittler, Nicholas Bacon: The Making of a Tudor Statesman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976); for Anne, see Katherine Alice Mair, ‘Anne, Lady Bacon: A Life in Letters’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Queen Mary University of London, 2009, and Gemma Allen (ed.), The Letters of Lady Anne Bacon (Camden Society Fifth Series, vol. 44) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). The Cooke family is well documented in Marjorie K. McIntosh, ‘Sir Anthony Cooke: Tudor Humanist, Educator and Religious Reformer’, Proceedings of the American Philological Society 199 (1975), 233–50, her ‘The Fall of a Tudor Gentle Family: The Cookes of Gidea Hall, Essex, 1579–1629’, Huntington Library Quarterly 41:4 (1978), 279–97, and Chris Laoutaris, Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe (London: Fig Tree, 2014). The Bacon family command numerous entries in the ODNB including Robert Tittler, ‘Bacon, Sir Nicholas (1510–1579)’; Lynne Magnusson, ‘Bacon [née Cooke], Anne, Lady Bacon (c.1528–1610)’; Markku Peltonen, ‘Bacon, Francis, Viscount St Alban (1561–1626)’; Alan Stewart, ‘Bacon, Anthony (1558–1601)’ (all accessed 20 August 2015).
- 21.
Alan Stewart, ‘“Near Akin”: The Trials of Friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen’, in Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (eds), Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 57–71, 64<Author-Query><!----></Author-Query>.
- 22.
Stewart, ‘Bacon, Anthony’ (ODNB).
- 23.
On the creation of the Bacon letter archive, see E.G.W. Bell (ed.), Index to the Papers of Anthony Bacon (1558–1601) in Lambeth Palace Library (MSS. 647–662) (London: Lambeth Palace Library, 1974), 3.
- 24.
Patricia Brewerton, ‘Paper Trails: Re-reading Robert Beale as Clerk to the Elizabethan Privy Council’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of London, 1998; Mark Taviner, ‘Robert Beale and the Elizabethan Polity’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2000.
- 25.
HMCS, 1, iii–vii.
- 26.
Thomas Birch, Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, From the Year 1581 till her Death, in which the Secret Intrigues of her Court, and the Conduct of her Favourite, Robert Earl of Essex, both at Home and Abroad, are particularly illustrated. From the original papers of his intimate friend, Anthony Bacon Esquire, and other manuscripts never before published, 2 vols (London: A. Millar, 1754); Norman Egbert McClure (ed.), The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1939).
- 27.
LL; see also James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath (eds), The Works of Francis Bacon, 7 vols (London: Longman, 1857–9).
- 28.
Alan Stewart, ‘Early Modern Lives in facsimile’, Textual Practice 23:2 (2009), 289–305, 290.
- 29.
Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 68; Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 12.
- 30.
Rudolf M. Dekker, ‘Ego-documents in the Netherlands, 1500–1814’, Dutch Crossing 39 (1989), 61–72; Andrew Hadfield, ‘Does Shakespeare’s life matter?’, Textual Practice 23:3 (2009), 181–99, 181.
- 31.
James Daybell, ‘Women’s letters, literature and conscience in sixteenth-century England’, in Harold E. Braun and Edward Vallence (eds), The Renaissance Conscience (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 82–99, 85.
- 32.
Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter-Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 286.
- 33.
James Daybell and Peter Hinds, ‘Introduction: Material Matters’, in Daybell and Hinds (eds), Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580–1730 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–20, 1. Core texts in the material turn in manuscript studies include: Donald F. McKenzie, ‘Speech-Manuscript-Print’, Library Chronicle of the University of Texas 20:1–2 (1990), 86–109; Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Major works on the material letter influenced by this approach include: Alan Stewart and Heather Wolfe (eds), Letterwriting in Renaissance England (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2004); Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Rayne Allison, A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- 34.
Susan E. Whyman, ‘Advice to Letter-Writers: Evidence from Four Generations of Evelyns’, in Francis Harris and Michael Hunter (eds), John Evelyn and his Milieu (London: British Library, 2003), 25–66. See also A.R. Braunmuller, ‘Accounting for Absence: The Transcription of Space’, in W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991 (Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Text Studies, 1993), 47–56; Jonathan Gibson, ‘Significant space in manuscript letters’, The Seventeenth Century 12:1 (1997), 1–9; Sara Jayne Steen, ‘Reading Beyond the Words: Material Letters and the Process of Interpretation’, Quidditas 22 (2001), 55–69; Sue Walker, ‘The Manners on the Page: Prescription and Practice in the Visual Organisation of Correspondence’, Huntington Library Quarterly 66:3/4 (2003), 302–29.
- 35.
Schneider, Culture of Epistolarity, 13.
- 36.
Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 4.
- 37.
James Daybell (ed.), Early Modern Women’s Letter-Writing, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Jane Couchman and Anne Crabb (eds), Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700: Form and Persuasion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Joanna Moody (ed.), ‘Women’s Letter Writing’, Women’s Writing (special edition) 13:1 (2006); James Daybell, Women Letter Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Nadine Akkerman (ed.), The Letters of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–15).
- 38.
David Loades, Tudor Queens of England (London: Continuum, 2009), 222–5; Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 78–80.
- 39.
Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1989); Pauline Croft, ‘Can a Bureaucrat be a Favourite? Robert Cecil and the Strategies of Power’, in J.H. Elliott and L.W.B. Brockliss (eds), The World of the Favourite (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 81–95, 82–3; Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- 40.
See, for example, John Guy, ‘Introduction. The 1590s: The second reign of Elizabeth I?’ in Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the last decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–19, 3–4, 6.
- 41.
Eric St John Brooks, Sir Christopher Hatton: Queen Elizabeth’s Favourite (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946); Steven W. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991); Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandige (eds), Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010).
- 42.
Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1966), ix–x.
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Tosh, W. (2016). Introduction: Anthony Bacon and the Uses of Friendship. In: Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare’s England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49497-9_1
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