The Early Years of Francis Bacon: Secret Founding Father of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood & his Plans for a Universal Reformation of the Whole World

It was the destiny of the great statesman Francis Bacon to hold the helm of the state in his hands and oversee its twin pillars of government and the English Secret Service.¹ He was born in secrecy the concealed royal child of Queen Elizabeth and the favourite Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.² It was his good fortune to be raised on her behalf by the Lord Keeper of the Realm and de facto Lord Chancellor of England Sir Nicholas Bacon and his seriously learned wife Lady Anne Cooke Bacon, fluent in Greek, Latin, Italian and French, and along with her other renowned and celebrated Cooke sisters, part of a vast clandestine Pan-European Protestant network of theologians, philosophers, poets, dramatists, writers, printers, publishers, spies and intelligencers. Her elder sister Lady Mildred Cooke Cecil was married to the most powerful man in the kingdom, Principal Secretary of State Sir William Cecil, who with his brother-in-law Sir Nicholas Bacon, were the Grand Architects of the Elizabethan Reformation, who oversaw a large foreign and domestic network of spies and intelligencers to strictly maintain the national security of the kingdom and for the personal protection of its head of state, Queen Elizabeth.

The English secret state and what became the English Secret Service was governed by strict secrecy. The lifeblood of intelligence and information was the arcane art and science of codes and ciphers and other forms of secret writings. With this in mind, in early 1563 Sir William Cecil directed Dr John Dee, tutor and mentor at various times to Queen Elizabeth and Lord Robert Dudley, and afterwards mentor to a young Francis Bacon, to seek out a rare manuscript copy of Johannes Trithemius's Steganographia. The spy, intelligencer and secret government agent Dr Dee had a profound and extensive interest in cryptology and, in a letter written to Cecil from Antwerp dated 16 February 1563, he informs him that he had eventually tracked down a prized manuscript of Steganographia and had spent the last ten days in continual labour making a copy of it:

Yt may pleas you to understand, that already I have purchased one book, for wch a Thousand Crownes have ben by others offred, and yet could not be obteyned. A boke, for which many a lerned man hath long sowght, and dayly yet doth seeke: Whose use is greater than the fame thereof is spred: The name thereof to you is not unkowne: The title is on this wise, Steganographia Joannis Trithemis: whereof in both the editions of his Polygraphia, mention is made, and in his epistles, and in sundry other mens bokes: A boke for your honor, or a Prince, so meet, so nedefull and comodious, as in humayne knowledg, none can be meeter, or more behofefull. Of this boke the one half, (with contynuall Labor and watch, the most part of x dayes) have I copyed oute. And now I stand at the Curtesye of a nobleman of Hungarie, for writing furth the rest: who hath promised me leave therto, after he shall perceyve that I may remayne by him longer (with the leave of my prince) to pleasure him also with such points of Science as at my hands he requireth.³

The German Renaissance polymath Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516) was one of the early founding fathers of modern cryptography. He wrote the first published work on the subject entitled Polygraphia which appeared in 1518. He had started his work on his Steganographia ("Covered Writings") in 1499. He sent a letter to his friend Arnoldus Bostius, a Carmelite monk in Ghent, in which he says "I have a great work in hand that, should it ever be published (which God forbid), the whole world will wonder at."⁴ Unfortunately Bostius died before the letter arrived but it was read by the abbot who publicized it in an attempt to decry Trithemius. The situation was further exacerbated when in 1500 Trithemius was visited by Carolus Bovillus, who later said in a letter to the Royal Counsellor Germain of Ghent "I hoped that I would enjoy a pleasing visit with a philosopher; but I discovered him to be a magician." After spending a couple of hours reading the Steganographia the shocked and outraged Bovillus "threw it away on the spot because such great wonders and such barbarous and strange names of spirits — not to say devils — had begun to terrify me."⁵ In addition to the manuscript copy of the Steganographia, Dr Dee owned several copies of Polygraphia. He also studied Jacques Gohorry's De Usu et Mysteriis Notarum and Jacopo Silvestri's Opus Novum which he used to practice writing in cipher.⁶

On the face of it the three books of the Steganographia appear to the untrained eye and mind to be about various forms of magic. When it was first published at Frankfurt in 1606 it appeared with a shorter appendage called the Clavis (the key). The Clavis showed Books I and II were not about magic; rather it was a work of concealed cipher systems — in other words, a work of steganography, the practice of secretly concealing a hidden message within another overt message. The Clavis did not include a key for Book III and for centuries it was almost universally believed to be solely about magic. W. E. Heidel claimed to have discovered its true purpose in 1676, but he published his results in the form of a series of equally indecipherable cryptograms, so his claim has never been independently verified. It was near the end of the twentieth century before Book III was deciphered by Thomas Ernst and confirmed by Jim Reed, working in the Mathematics and Cryptography Research Department at AT&T, a few years later. The former discovered that Book III of Steganographia did indeed contain various cipher systems, proving it was a work of cryptography and not of angelic or black magic.⁷

With the copied manuscript of Trithemius's Steganographia, Dr Dee returned to England to show Principal Secretary of State Sir William Cecil and his brother-in-law Lord Keeper and de facto Lord Chancellor of England Sir Nicholas Bacon his prized possession. All three of them were aware that along with the Polygraphia these two works on cryptology (codes and ciphers) would prove to be important weapons in maintaining the national security of the kingdom.

The great mathematician and expert in codes and cipher Dr Dee came into contact with his young protégé Francis Bacon at a very early age. Dr Dee was most probably privy to the secret that Bacon was the secret royal son of Queen Elizabeth and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, with both of whom he had a long relationship and also moved in the same government and court circles as his patron Sir William Cecil and his brother-in-law Sir Nicholas Bacon. The young Francis spent his youth growing up at York House, the official residence of his father the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, which stood adjacent to the grounds of York Place (now known as the Palace of Whitehall, containing government buildings including the Cabinet Office and Ministry of Defence, an arm of British Intelligence), Queen Elizabeth's Palace, the residence of English monarchs from the early sixteenth century.

The prodigious Francis grew up at court with its throngs of foreign ambassadors, diplomats and intelligencers, and all the leading figures of the English establishment, its government, and the various secret agents and other members of the Tudor spy network overseen by his uncle Sir William Cecil, his father Sir Nicholas Bacon and spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. Like everyone else at court, its senior spy and expert on codes and ciphers Dr Dee was familiar with the precocious intellect of his young protégé, described by Queen Elizabeth as her young Lord Keeper, whose dazzling intellect truly astonished all those who crossed his path.

As with his mentor Dr Dee, part of Francis Bacon's prodigious apprehension in those early years was his deep love and fascination with codes and ciphers, which was manifestly evident afterwards and formed a large part of his life and reputation to posterity concerning the various Baconian cipher systems found in his Shakespeare poems and plays.

The controversial figures of Dee and Bacon marked out the Elizabethan epoch, and both are synonymous with the period marking the transition from magic to science in the late sixteenth century. Dr Dee, and afterwards Bacon, worked for the English Secret Service, and down the ages both have been closely linked with the mysterious Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross — in fact the two of them have been put forward as their true founder and head, from which, in the case of Dr Dee, a very curious legend has grown up:

In Germany in the seventeenth century it was generally accepted that Dee was a secret agent of the English Government and that he carried out his work by means of magical communication. Through the ages the legend grew into something larger until it was distorted into the story that Dee founded the Rosicrucians as a subsidiary of the British Secret Service and that through his planning it carried on into modern times as a permanent unit of that Service. Professor Trevor-Roper's book The Last Days of Hitler tells how the humourless, but nevertheless efficient, Himmler laid down quite categorically that the Rosicrucians were a branch of British Espionage!⁸

As with all legends, the jewel of truth is lost in the distortion of its remote delivery, and the truth itself is often so much greater than the grand myth which contains and conceals it. While he was still a young man at Cambridge, Bacon founded his much-fabled Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross and was later the author of its manifestos, and, as we shall see, Head of the English Secret Service, forerunner of modern British Intelligence. The Rosicrucians being founded as a permanent subsidiary unit of British Intelligence only hints at the real truth.

The Rosicrucian Brotherhood is not simply a subsidiary of British Intelligence: at its very highest point it controls and directs it. Nor is its secret invisible power confined by borders. At its apex the Rosicrucian Brotherhood directs all the Secret Intelligence Services of the United States of America, with its invisible power and influence extending over several trans-national institutions, right up to and including the European Union, NATO and the United Nations — a grand design whose secret engine was set in motion by its mastermind several centuries earlier.

The two great polymaths Dr Dee and Bacon were universal in their approach to all branches of knowledge and learning and shared a burning desire to seek out all the secrets of the universe. Dee possessed the single largest library in England and Bacon the greatest mind. Aside from his great learning the erudite Dr Dee was familiar with the finer intricacies of espionage learnt while working as a secret agent for spymaster Walsingham, gathering intelligence on his behalf around Europe:

In Tudor times the effectiveness of espionage from overseas depended in the last resort on the efficiency of the ciphers used for messages. It was in this period that code-breakers came into their own and there began a private war between rival espionage services to break each other's ciphers.

But while Latin Europe was still pursuing Latin ciphers both for speed and precision, in the north attempts were being made to develop a coded jargon. Walsingham had studied secret communications and the methods used on the Continent both in Venice and Florence. He brought back to England with him a copy of a manual on cryptography by one Alberti and soon put this into use. Thereafter both Burghley and Walsingham paid particular attention to new cryptographical developments and relied heavily on the advice of John Dee, who had made a great study of the subject. It was Dee who became closely acquainted with Jerome Cardan and introduced the Cardan grille system.

…Walsingham set up an elaborate cipher department in his house in London and here was undertaken not merely the deciphering of intelligence reports coming into London, but those intercepted from enemy sources, as well as setting up a section to specialise in forgeries for the planting of false documents.

Walsingham without question had the best cryptographic organisation in Europe, built up largely on the strength of his experts' knowledge of existing systems on the Continent, which he adapted for his use as well as using to decipher the messages of his opponents.⁹

In April 1573 a twelve-year-old Francis and his elder brother Anthony Bacon went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where they were placed in the care of the Master of Trinity, John Whitgift, later Archbishop of Canterbury. The Bacon brothers resided in Whitgift's own private quarters, who personally directed their studies and supervised, at the charge of their father Sir Nicholas Bacon, their domestic arrangements and requirements. Their studies at Cambridge were twice interrupted by the plague, between August 1574 and March 1575, and again in August 1575, when Francis and Anthony went to visit Redgrave, before returning to the university in the October.¹⁰

It was during their time at Cambridge that Francis and Anthony met Thomas Phelippes, the future "grand master of intelligence ciphers," marking the beginning of an intimate relationship that largely took place in the shadows of the English Secret Service, nearly all of which has been very carefully shrouded in secrecy for the last four hundred years. Five years older than Francis, it is not known for certain at exactly what date Phelippes entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received his BA in 1574 and MA three years later in 1577. The stay of Francis and Anthony at Cambridge lasted until December 1575, with Francis spending the following year residing at York House with his father Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon, spending much of his time at the Elizabethan court, with all its secrecy, political intrigue, and domestic and foreign espionage.

With Cambridge behind him, from this point on Bacon began his dual journey in life: the public life of Bacon, the one of lawyer, statesman and philosopher, which fills the pages of his orthodox biographies, and his other secret life (pointedly hinted at by his early editors and biographers) of raising from its foundations a universal system of knowledge, which needed to be carried out for the most part in secrecy. To help ensure the success of his grand vision Bacon founded the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross and modern Freemasonry, through which he afterwards established the first permanent English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, thus founding what afterwards became the United States of America, the most powerful nation on earth.

Through his secret societies Bacon quietly began to put in place a machine that, in and beyond his lifetime, would encompass an enduring world-wide renaissance through his philosophical-scientific programme, which partly involved the writing and publishing of books anonymously and pseudonymously across a full range of the liberal arts and sciences. The full implementing of this secret infrastructure has continued down the ages by his secret Rosicrucian Brotherhood for the purpose of laying eternal bases for humanity and to eventually bring about his dream of the Reformation of the Whole World.

This ultra-grand secret and far-reaching vision was hinted at by his great standard editor and biographer at the beginning of The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, which occurred to him and developed during and after his departure from Cambridge. Even then Bacon's universal apprehension had already surpassed those of his illustrious contemporaries, possessing the kind of exquisite mind which, in the carefully chosen words of his great editor and biographer Spedding, he could "imagine like a poet and execute like a clerk of the works."

While professing not to know precisely what the grand vision entailed and how he would secretly go about it (a wonderful form of delivery that Bacon would have been proud of, and other later Rosicrucian and Freemasonic writers would practice and aspire to), the incomparable Spedding set it forth in that inimitable way of his:

It was then that a thought struck him, the date of which deserves to be recorded, not for anything extraordinary in the thought itself, which had probably occurred to others before him, but for its influence upon his after-life. If our study of nature be thus barren, he thought, our method of study must be wrong: might not a better method be found? The suggestion was simple and obvious. The singularity was in the way he took hold of it. With most men such a thought would have come and gone in a passing regret; a few might have matured it into a wish; some into a vague project; one or two might perhaps have followed it out so as to attain a distinct conception of the better method, and hazard a distant indication of the direction in which it lay. But in him the gift of seeing in prophetic vision what might be and ought to be was united with the practical talent of devising means and handling minute details. He could at once imagine like a poet and execute like a clerk of the works. Upon the conviction This may be done, followed at once the question How may it be done? Upon that question answered, followed the resolution to try and do it.

Of the degrees by which the suggestion ripened into a project, the project into an undertaking, and the undertaking unfolded itself into distinct proportions and the full grandeur of its total dimensions, I can say nothing. But that the thought first occurred to him during his residence at Cambridge, therefore before he had completed his fifteenth year, we know upon the best authority — his own statement to Dr. Rawley. I believe it ought to be regarded as the most important event of his life; the event which had a greater influence than any other upon his character and future course. From that moment there was awakened within his breast the appetite which cannot be satiated, and the passion which cannot commit excess. From that moment he had a vocation which employed and stimulated all the energies of his mind, gave a value to every vacant interval of time, an interest and significance to every random thought and casual accession to knowledge; an object to live for as wide as humanity, as immortal as the human race; an idea to live in vast and lofty enough to fill the soul for ever with religious and heroic aspirations. From that moment, though still subject to interruptions, disappointments, errors, and regrets, he could never be without either work or hope or consolation.

So much with regard to the condition of his mind at this period we may, I think, reasonably assume, without trespassing upon the province of the novelist. Such a mind as we know from after experience that Bacon possessed could not have grown up among such circumstances without receiving impressions and impulses of this kind. He could not have been bred under such a mother without imbibing some portion of her zeal in the cause of the reformed religion; he could not have been educated in the house of such a father, surrounded by such a court, in the middle of such agitations, without feeling loyal aspirations for the cause of his Queen and country; he could not have entertained the idea that the fortunes of the human race might, by a better application of human industry, be redeemed and put into a course of continual improvement, without conceiving an eager desire to see the progress begun.

Assuming then that a deep interest in these three great causes — the cause of reformed religion, of his native country, of the human race through all their generations — was thus early implanted in that vigorous and virgin soil, we must leave it to struggle up as it may, according to the accidents of time and weather.¹¹

A Universal Reformation of the Whole World

During his time at Cambridge Bacon was also busy writing poetry, masques and dramatic devices, either anonymously or behind his literary masks. One of these devices contains within it the secret of the beginnings of his divine Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross.

From the magnificent Kenilworth entertainment put on by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, for Queen Elizabeth in the summer of 1575, the monarch and her entourage, which included Bacon, continued her progress to the royal manor of Woodstock, where she stayed from 29 August to 3 October. Sir Henry Lee provided a lavish reception for the entertainment that included music, poetry, and dramatic and allegorical performances. What is known of it almost entirely derives from the anonymous The Queenes Maiesties Entertainment at Woodstock, printed at London for Thomas Cadman ten years later in 1585. Only one copy of the edition survives. The unique copy of the Cadman edition, now held at the British Library, is incomplete and lacks, by accident or design, a title page and three leaves, and begins in the middle of a line.¹² It comprises The Tale of Hemetes the Hermit, followed by a description of a woodland house prepared for a royal banquet, a pageant, and a poem recited from an oak tree.

On the first surviving page its anonymous narrator (Bacon) states that there are secrets hidden in The Tale of Hemetes:

in which tale if you marke the woords in this present world, or were acquainted with the state of the deuises, you shoulde finde no lesse hidden then vttered, and no less vttered then shoulde derserue a double reading ouer, euen of those (with whom I finde you a companion) that haue disposed their houres to the study of great matters.¹³

The Kenilworth and Woodstock entertainments, connected by their mythology and imagery, are part of the same Arthurian cycle, and the anonymous author has already informed us the latter entertainment is one dealing with great matters, replete with hidden and double meaning, deserving of a close and repeated reading, before announcing "Heere followeth Hemetes tale."¹⁴ It "was rumoured," writes Dr Yates, The Tale of Hemetes the Hermit contained "important secret meanings."¹⁵ What then is its full secret import and meaning?

Dr Yates intimated The Tale of Hemetes contained an important secret — which was something of a colossal understatement. Enfolded in this little-known tale is a profound secret with the most far-reaching historical implications. Yet Dr Yates either did not understand its secret or chose not to reveal it. The first to reveal its abstruse enigma was Peter Dawkins, in his difficult-to-obtain work The Great Vision, published by The Francis Bacon Research Trust in 1985, whose then patroness was the Marquess of Northampton, wife of the Earl of Northampton, Pro Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England from 2001-09.

Under the chapter heading "Hemetes and the New Rosicrucian Birth," its voluminous author, and internationally recognised authority on Bacon, Shakespeare and the Rosicrucians, revealed that the Kenilworth and Woodstock entertainments secretly announced the beginning or birth of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. In his illuminating chapter Dawkins provides a long and detailed esoteric interpretation of The Tale of Hemetes, of which the following is an extract:

…The Entertainments were the beginning of a deliberate exercise to revive the ancient and true Rosicrucianism…All it needed was a new Hermes or Merlin — a new Initiator and Teacher — to seize the opportunity and make it so. This is precisely what the fourteen year old Francis did…¹⁶

Francis Bacon was still a young, precocious fourteen-year-old student at Cambridge when he attended Kenilworth and Woodstock and devised The Tale of Hemetes, in which he obscured the secret birth of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. By the time he had written The Queenes Maiesties Entertainment at Woodstock he was approaching his fifteenth birthday.

At Cambridge the philosophy of Aristotle dominated the minds of the schoolmen, which merely evoked dialectical argument and disputation but was "barren for production of anything for the benefit of the life of man."¹⁷ While still there the young precocious genius conceived his great vision for laying bases of eternity for the future benefit of humanity.

In his vision Bacon conceived of a great renewal of all the arts and sciences that was later described by him as the Great Instauration. He would take all knowledge to be his province and realised that the development of the English language was an important vehicle for reaching the widest audience possible among those unable to read and speak Latin. He conceived of making his country a great nation state and the possibilities of a universal reformation built upon the solid foundation of science, mathematics, engineering and navigation in support of an English navy for the benefits of economic power and overseas expansion into the New World.

He dreamed of making his beloved country the centre of reformed religion and an immovable bulwark against Catholic hegemony in Europe and the Americas, around which he carefully grafted the cult of the Protestant Virgin Fairy Queen Elizabeth. Above all else he conceived of a future human race living in peace and prosperity, free from famine, disease and war.

But in the greatest of plans lay the greatest of dangers. For his vision to succeed it would need to be carried out in the utmost secrecy to give it its greatest chance of success. He realised this would require a secret brotherhood of learning that transcended national boundaries, a system of brotherhoods in art, poetry, drama and literature, and the different branches of the sciences, a fraternity of light and illumination, based upon the immutable principles of universal love, faith, hope and charity.

For this great vision of a universal reformation Bacon created his Rosicrucian Brotherhood, whose birth and existence he enigmatically enfolded in The Tale of Hemetes the Heremyte. The existence of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood was secretly known to and preserved by his early editors and biographers.¹⁸ And just as Bacon had obscured the secret in The Tale of Hemetes, his great editor Spedding, drawing on the same skills as his hero, whom he knew so well, likewise artfully and abstrusely hinted and insinuated into the masterful fabric of his text the secret birth of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood while the fourteen/fifteen-year-old Bacon was still at Cambridge.

The ornate frontispiece of The Tale of Hemetes, replete with many symbolic devices, is a pen and ink drawing of a knight kneeling before the Queen, presenting a manuscript or book. The poet-knight is adorned with a symbolically divided costume. In his left hand he holds a spear as his outstretched right hand presents the book. Above his head is a suspended laurel wreath. Through a hole in the ceiling descends the hand of an unseen man holding a ribbon which supports an elaborate frame enclosing the motto "Tam Marti quam Mercurio." There is, however, more to the frontispiece than initially meets the eye, and its accompanying sonnet implies there is some kind of mystery or secret enciphered within it.

Beholde (good Quene) A poett with a Spear (straundge sightes well markt are understood the better) A soldyer armde, with pensyle in his eare with penn to fighte, and sworde to wryte a letter. his gowne haulffe of, his blade not fully bownde In dowbtfull doompes, which waye were best to take with humble harte, and knees that kysse the grownde presenntes hymselffe, to yo[u] for dewtyes sake And thus he saith, no daunger (I protest) shall ever lett this loyall harte I beare to serve yo[u] so as maye become me beste In feilde, in Towne, in Cowtre, or any where. Then peerless prince, employe this willinge man In your affayres to do the beste he cann.¹⁹

The frontispiece, with its prominent architectural features — the pillars, the tiled floor, the arched doorway in the background, part covered with a theatrical curtain receding into the distance, and the doorway to the right indicating further hidden depths — has the appearance of an emblematic Freemasonic Lodge. To the right of the Queen, sitting at her feet, is an all-seeing and muzzled sphinx, and likewise there are two images of lion-like sphinxes, both muzzled, at the top and bottom of its ornate frame, intimating it conceals a mystery or secret:

…it is with the Egyptian Sphinx that our Masonic symbolism is really connected. Among the Egyptians, Sphinxes were placed at the entrances of the temples to guard the mysteries, by warning those who would penetrate within that they should conceal a knowledge of them from the uninitiated; and hence Portal devises the word from Hebrew TSaPHaN, to hide. Champollion says that the Sphinx became successively the symbol of each of the gods, by which Portal suggests the priests intended to express the idea that all the gods were hidden from the people, and that the knowledge of them, guarded in the sanctuaries, was revealed to the initiates only. As a Masonic emblem, the Sphinx has been adopted in its Egyptian character as a symbol of mystery, and as such is often found as a decoration sculptured in front of Masonic temples, or engraved at the head of Masonic documents.²⁰

The sonnet draws specific attention to a poet with a spear and instructs the initiate or reader to closely observe any strange or unusual particulars — the more closely they are examined, the more thoroughly they will be understood. To emphasise the instruction and to draw attention to the deliberate detail in the emblem, the poet invites the initiate to look very closely at every aspect of it, telling them the poet-knight has a pencil in his ear and, more ambivalently, intimates the pen and sword can be seen as both simultaneously. He specifically highlights the detail that the poet-knight has his gown half off and his blade is not fully bound, as it appears to hang from some kind of hook. In his article "A Most Humorous Quixotic Quest," Professor Pierre Henrion, an expert in all aspects of the various branches of cryptology and pictorial cryptograms, had occasion to examine this extraordinary cryptic frontispiece. He begins by saying that a glance at the Sphinx, silenced by a ring in her mouth, will confirm us in the idea there is more in the picture than meets the Queen's eye, who nevertheless sees through the mise en scène:

First she is aware of the strange nearly vertical hook, somewhat like a pointing hand seen in profile, which appears incongruously in the drapery of the poet's robe, just behind the heel of the forward foot. It is a conventional secret signal inviting observers in the know to turn a document in all directions, especially upside down, in order to discover some of the hidden devices it conceals, generally the most interesting. When the time comes we will comply.

…And what about the cloak? How could the poet, with both his hands engaged, walk up to the throne and kneel down gracefully without losing it? For it hangs most precariously on only one shoulder. Curiously enough, as if it was of importance, this detail of "his gowne haulffe off" is mentioned in the introductory poem, but with no explanation forthcoming as to why this trifle should be made so much of. The so-called Droeshout portrait (the Dutch artist engraved it; but who designed it?) of Shakespeare, and many a Rosicrucian portrait of the time, give a key to that abnormality: the discrepancy or simply asymmetry of a "half-off" cloak were the conventional signs that jumped to the eye of the initiates to tell them they were faced with a dual portrait (with one personage, the official one, apparent, and the other, actually the important one, discreetly dissimulated) and that they had better "beholde good" in the light of the lessons they had received in cryptomenytices (concealed stratagems).

…the two shoes of the poet are purposefully dissimilar. The interesting foot, the one materially hidden from the Queen's eyes but not from the sixth sense of the all-seeing monster, reveals the emaciated profile of a be-hatted man. The ankle is the crown of a rakishly tilted hat with a little square brooch near the brim. The slightly ruffled brim, here seen vertically, is the fur collarette of the top of the shoe, and the discreet facial profile is made up of the folds of the robe. Perhaps symbolically, the whole design rests upon a spear.²¹

By this process Professor Henrion identifies Pallas Athena, the spear-shaking goddess, and the mask of invisibility concealing a pig's snout, an obvious allusion to Bacon. In addition to these concealed devices, Henrion highlights the Tudor rose on the tapestry behind the throne with its royal monogram of Elizabeth, where instead of an E it reads F, symbolising F. Tudor, or Francis Tudor, Bacon's true name by dint of his royal birth.²²

In the opening line of the sonnet Bacon asks the Queen to "Beholde…a poett with a Speare," thus writes Peter Dawkins in The Great Vision: The Vision and Birth of the New Rosicrucianism, "drawing attention in a purposeful way to what the poet-knight, Hemetes, represents":

He is the Christian Rose Cross philosopher and knight, the Spear-shaker, the teacher and defender of truth who unites Mercury and Mars in himself. The sentence links in meaning with an old adage carved above the ancient Temples of Initiation: "Man, know thyself." The presence of the sphinx (with the golden 'ring of truth' held in and issuing from its lion's mouth) rather than a lion supporting the throne further confirms this meaning — and another meaning also. In the drawing Hemetes is shown offering the book of poetry — the Hermetic or Rosicrucian teachings, which constitute a revelation of spiritual Truth or Law — to the Faerie Queen. Tucked above his ear is his quill pen, emphasising that he is indeed the poet who wrote down the inspired teachings and who thus is like Hermes or Moses, the law-giver and prophet of God. He kneels before the Queen in service, offering the sacred book of the Law to her, whilst the Latin sentence woven into the tapestry of the Queen's canopy over her head proclaims ambiguously, "Decet Regem Regere Legem," which can mean either "It is fitting for the Sovereign to direct the Law" or "It is fitting for the Law to direct the Sovereign". Even at that early age Francis was a master of specialised ambiguity carefully employed to teach truth and yet disguise it at the same time, so as to make people think yet to leave them to think what they pleased. Truth was (and is) thus offered to all, either hidden or revealed according to whether the viewer-listener has the eyes to see and the ears to hear.²³

The young Lord Keeper, as Queen Elizabeth termed him, was to begin his adult life at the very heart of international espionage and intelligence. It is not known for certain, but it was probably decided by the Queen and Lord Keeper Bacon to send Francis to Paris in the train of Sir Amias Paulet, the ambassador to France. Francis would later recall with pride how he departed from England in his secret service to the crown "from her Majesty's royal hand," and that he "kissed her Majesty's hands upon my journey into France."²⁴ On 25 September 1576 the royal embassy led by Sir Amias Paulet, in a train which included the fifteen-year-old Francis Bacon, Julius Caesar and the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, landed at Calais. Following eight days of travel the newly installed Ambassador-elect to France arrived in Paris on 3 October and headed straight to the English Embassy, which then stood at the very centre of European intrigue and espionage.

Prior to his departure Sir Amias Paulet had received detailed instructions from the Queen, set forth in a document written by her spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. He was "to negotiate on an international level, often in personal contact with sovereigns; adhere to all the complex protocol; provide a news and intelligence service" as well as make clear "Elizabeth's goodwill towards the Huguenots."²⁵ Among his duties in the first few days in Paris, Paulet shared an audience with the French king and the queen mother. "But while afternoons and evenings were spent in official splendour, nights were spent conducting secret interviews with Huguenot leaders, such as François de la Noue and Philippe Du Plessis-Mornay, meetings aimed at building up and reinforcing Huguenot networks."²⁶ This was the new, exciting world in which the young Francis found himself immersed, behind the guise of official diplomacy governed by political intrigue and one that operated in the dark shadows of intelligence and espionage. "No clear distinction was made between legitimate diplomatic activity and undercover espionage. Much of the ambassador's most important work was done off the record. Paris was particularly valuable as a centre for information-gathering — both overt and covert — because of its strategic location…its relatively speedy access to London, and the embassy in Paris was the linchpin of an intelligence-gathering operation carefully constructed by Sir Francis Walsingham."²⁷ His biographers Jardine and Stewart were also familiar with Sir Amias Paulet's "copy book," which revealed how it provided:

an extraordinary insight into the world which Francis Bacon inhabited for three years, revealing above all the sheer bulk of written work that the resident was expected to coordinate — work in which the members of his household certainly participated.

…Everything had to be done to an immoveable deadline — the departure of the post, by which time all letters had to be drafted, converted into the relevant cipher (there were different ciphers for each recipient of sensitive information), and then copied into the copy-book for future reference.²⁸

Soon after leaving Cambridge, Bacon's friend the cryptographer Thomas Phelippes was sent to France by spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham in 1577 to liaise with other English agents abroad and to use his deciphering skills to channel information back to London. His reputation as an expert master decipherer was now well known to high-ranking members of the secret English intelligence community, and if a cipher proved difficult to break it was delivered to Phelippes wherever he was, in England or abroad, for him to go to work on it.

By June 1578 Phelippes was residing with Bacon at the English embassy in Paris. The obscured relationship between Bacon and Phelippes, nurtured from their days at Cambridge, deepened and flourished in the secret environment of the political hotbed of Paris, then the very epicentre of European intelligence and espionage, where all the important diplomatic traffic and most of the everyday routine correspondence was, as a matter of course, enciphered. Bacon learned early the vital importance of secret and enciphered correspondence and was even then familiar with most, if not all, of the accessible cryptographic works of the period.

If not at Cambridge, certainly at the British Embassy in Paris, Bacon and Phelippes were occupied with ciphers and other areas of cryptography on an almost daily basis. At a routine everyday level Bacon was involved in writing and enciphering diplomatic reports and letters, and, by return, the deciphering of letters into clear text finding their way to Paris from around the continent and Walsingham's house in London, where the cipher and their keys were known to the recipient. With his specialist skills, Phelippes played an integral part in Sir Amias Paulet's vast letter-writing operation, dispatching enciphered reports backwards and forwards to the principal English ministers of state, including Secretary of State Sir William Cecil and his brother-in-law Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon and Sir Francis Walsingham. It also clearly involved the deciphering of enemy correspondence intercepted by English and foreign agents, much of which contained very important information regarding matters of national security, which it was vital to immediately read in real time.

At the English embassy in Paris the two of them were conversing and working daily with the secret language of ciphers. Still then only in his early twenties, Phelippes was already known in high private circles as the greatest cryptanalyst in England. Working closely alongside his friend Bacon, who shared his fascination with cryptology, the conversation naturally turned not only to available manuscripts and printed works on the subject, it positively extended to all that was then known about ciphers and their possibilities. From his own account of his time in Paris Bacon tells us how his penetrating mind turned to the infinite possibilities of cryptology and to the invention of new ciphers. In De Augmentis Scientiarum he provides a detailed explanation of his bi-literal cipher, "which I devised myself when I was at Paris in my early youth,"²⁹ a cipher system he secretly inserted into his Shakespeare works and writings written in the names of his various other living literary masks:

It was in France that Francis had his first experience of ciphers and cryptography, which were to play such an important role not only in his later life, but also in his posthumous reputation as the shadowy figure whose authorial identity is cryptically contained in anything from the works of Shakespeare to the Rosicrucian manifesto. In this field, he was lucky to strike up an early relationship with the grand master of intelligence ciphers, Thomas Phelippes, a servant of Sir Francis Walsingham, who had been placed with the embassy to give it the benefits of his skills in languages and ciphering. Bacon and Phelippes also remained close over the following years: Francis was a friend of Thomas' father, employed his younger brother as secretary and close companion during the early 1580s, and recommended Thomas himself to the attention of the earl of Essex in 1591…

An integral element of Phelippes' prowess in cryptanalysis was his mastery of the various languages in which the European powers operated — at least French, Italian, Spanish, Latin and German.

…What Francis learned under Thomas Phelippes remained with him for the rest of his life.³⁰