PREFACE TO THE HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF HENRY VII. THE history of the reign of King Henry the Seventh was the first work composed by Bacon after his fall; the fruit of his first few months of leisure. The subject indeed of which it forms the opening chapterviz: a History of England from the Union of the Roses to the Union of the Crowns was one which he had long before pointed out as eminently worth handling; but until the time when he saw his retirement from public life inevitable, and that (to use his own words) 66 -- being no longer able to do his country service it remained to him to do it honour," he does not seem to have thought of undertaking any part of it himself. And though it may appear from a letter to the king that he had conceived the purpose as early as the 21st of April 1621, when he was in the middle of his troubles, it is not before the 4th of June, when he was released from the Tower, - hardly perhaps before the 22nd, when he returned to Gorhambury,—that he can be supposed to have commenced the work. By the end of the following October, or thereabouts, he had finished this portion of it in its present form, and sent a fair transcript to the king. It may be regarded therefore as the labour of a long vacation. To say that such a work was executed in four or five months by a man who was excluded (except during the last six weeks) from London, where all the unpublished materials were, is to say that it is in many ways imperfect. The original records of the time had not been studied by any man with a genius for writing history, nor gathered into a book by any laborious collector. The published histories were full of inaccuracies and omissions, which it was impossible to correct or supply without much laborious research in public archives and private collections. The various studies of his civil life had made him acquainted no doubt with many things illustrative of his subject; but for these he must have trusted to the fidelity of his memory. What Sir Robert Cotton could supply was liberally communicated; but Cotton House was within. the forbidden precinct, and any man who has attempted this kind of work knows how imperfect a substitute another man's eyes and judgment are for his own. For the rest of his raw material he must have trusted entirely to the published histories then extant; to Fabyan, who furnished only a naked and imperfect chronicle of London news; to Polydore Vergil, who supplied a narrative, continuous indeed and aspiring to be historical, but superficial and careless and full of errors; to Hall and Holinshed, who did little more than translate and embellish Polydore; to Stowe, whose independent and original researches had only contributed a few additional facts and dates; and to Speed, whose history, though enriched with some valuable records |