Francis Bacon’s Bi-literal Cipher and the Materiality of Early Modern Diplomatic Writing

Abstract

While embassies have traditionally been discussed in the somewhat abstract language of international law and diplomatic protocol, recent studies have paid increased attention to the rhetorical and textual skills required of early modern diplomats and their servants. Douglas Biow, for example, has explored the relationship between humanist ideology and the ambassador and secretary, while Timothy Hampton has examined the massive literature produced about diplomacy in the period, much of it by those with personal experience of embassies. This essay returns this attention to writing to its most basic level: the role of handwriting in the early modern embassy. It takes as its starting point the celebrated ‘bi-literal cipher’ devised by Francis Bacon, described in his De augmentis scientiarum as ‘the highest degree of Cypher’. Bacon recalls that this ‘invention, in truth, we devised in our youth, when we were at Paris: and is a thing that yet seemeth to us not worthy to be lost’. Bacon was in Paris, and elsewhere in France, when he served on the embassy of Sir Amias Paulet, Elizabeth’s resident ambassador to the French king, from 1576 to 1579. In this essay, I shall suggest, first, that this celebrated ‘bi-literal cipher’ has its origins in the reality of embassy correspondence carried out in wartime, and second, that its particular genius lies in Bacon’s understanding of the materiality of early modern letters - both of these fully implicated in the early modern ambassador’s workaday, pen-and-ink concerns.