Francis Bacon, decentralization, and the English Civil War
As Hugh Trevor-Roper observed, the reforms demanded with violence in the 1640s had already been set out, lucidly and loyally, a generation earlier—not by Coke, but by Bacon:
All the reforms of the law which would be loudly and angrily demanded by a rebellious people in the 1640s had been lucidly and loyally demanded, a generation before, not by Coke, but by Bacon. It was the same in education. Bacon, the greatest advocate of lay reason and lay religion, would have reformed the universities, dethroned Aristotle, introduced natural science; he would have stopped the growth of grammar schools and built up elementary education; he would have decentralised charitable foundations, whether schools or hospitals, for ‘I hold some number of hospitals with competent endowments will do far more good than one hospital of exorbitant greatness’; he would have decentralised religion, planting and watering it in the forgotten ‘corners of the realm’; and he would have decentralised industry, trade, wealth, for ‘money is like muck, not good except it be spread.’ When we read this evidence—evidence which is obvious, inescapable, constant throughout his writings—we can easily agree with the greatest of English seventeenth century historians, S.R. Gardiner, that if only Bacon's programme had been carried out, England would have escaped the Great Rebellion.[1]
When Bacon later remarked, in Latin, that he had foreseen civil disorder “on account of morals” (propter mores), he was not gesturing toward popular vice, doctrinal extremism, or abstract constitutional defect, but toward the visible corruption of governance at its center—a diagnosis already articulated, with remarkable consistency, in his essays “Of Counsel,” “Of Nobility,” and “Of Faction.” In “Of Counsel,” Bacon insists that stable rule depends upon structured, plural, and publicly intelligible deliberation; where access to the prince is monopolized by favourites, counsel degenerates into private confidence, and authority, however lawful in form, loses its moral visibility. “Of Nobility” develops the political consequences of this failure, locating the stability of monarchy in a respected and participatory aristocracy, and warning that the systematic bypassing of the nobility through personal intimacy, rather than public function, breeds resentment that is structural rather than personal. “Of Faction” completes the analysis, showing how such resentments, once normalized, detach loyalty from institutions and reattach it to persons, transforming private dependence into public division. Read together, these essays disclose a single causal chain: corrupted counsel produces alienation; alienation produces faction; faction, left uncorrected, produces civil conflict. Bacon’s claim to have foreseen rebellion “on account of morals” is therefore neither prophetic nor rhetorical, but administrative and ethical in the strictest sense; a judgment that the manners of power, long before the language of revolution emerged, had already made order untenable.
[1] Trevor-Roper, Hugh. Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, 1967, pp244-5