Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/62

Rh died, early on Easter morning, April 9, 1626, of the disease now known as bronchitis. He was buried, as he had directed in his will, beside his mother, in St. Michael's Church, St. Albans, where a monument in white marble was erected to his memory by his former secretary, Sir Thomas Meautys. An effigy on the stone represents Bacon's "full portraiture in the posture of studying." In wide-brimmed hat and long official robe, with falling ruff, Bacon is seated in an arm-chair, his head resting on his left arm. The Latin in scription underneath was written by Sir Henry Wotton. The monument portrait is figured as the frontispiece to Part I of John Nicol's Francis Bacon: His Life and Philosophy.

Sir Thomas Meautys had married Anne Bacon, daughter of Bacon's half-brother, Sir Nathaniel Bacon. After her husband's death, Lady Meautys became the second wife of Sir Harbottle Grimston, Speaker of the House of Commons in the year of the Restoration. She had a life interest in the manor of Gorhambury, which Sir Harbottle Grimston made his principal country seat, and of which he bought the reversion. James Walter Grimston, third Earl of Verulam, descends from Sir Harbottle Grimston, so that Sir Nicholas Bacon's manor of Gorhambury passed through his granddaughter to the present owner.

Posterity is indebted to the Grimston family for the preservation of at least two of the five contemporary representations of what Francis Bacon looked like. There is at Gorhambury a set of three Rh