The Rhetorical Method of Francis Bacon's History of the Reign of King Henry VII

Abstract

History of Reign of King Henry VII is now largely superseded as history, but it is important for at least two reasons as historiography. First, it is only full history written by a thinker who not only had a significant effect on later approaches to knowledge, but who also gave particular prominence to history (both civil and natural) in his categories of kinds of knowledge. Second, History itself retained a high reputation for some centuries and still regarded by Wilhelm Busch in 1892 as most influential (though inadequate and erroneous) account of Henry's reign: By no author has history, and especially general estimate of reign of Henry VII, been so influenced, and in fact dominated, as by Francis Bacon.1 Though relatively little scholarly attention has been given to work, both its reputation and importance of its author's theories suggest value of understanding its historiographical method. Scholarship concerned with Henry has pointed out some of sources for approach. Edwin B. Benjamin has identified use of model of Tacitus and Leonard F. Dean has argued that Bacon was clearly one of most important English advocates of what may be called Polybian or Florentine theory of history-writing.2 use of models such as Tacitus and Machiavelli clearly marks his history as a humanist work. But perhaps because of what Morris W. Croll calls the unfortunate, and sometimes mean, reticence he [Bacon] displays concerning his own great obligations to intellectual masters of ancient and modern worlds, scholars have tended to want to find in Henry a clear break with previous methods of historiography.3 F. Smith Fussner claims that Bacon's programme represented a radical break from both humanistic and scholastic traditions partly because he takes Bacon at his own word: To Bacon whole bent of times of humanism had been 'more towards