NOTE G C! C. 



Lord Bacon s Letter to the King. 



It may please your most excellent majestie, I think myself infinitely 

 bounden to your majestie, for vouchsafing me accesse to your royal person, and 

 to touch the hemme of your garment. I see your majestie imitateth him that 

 would not break the broken reede, nor quench the smoking flax ; and as your 



Bushel, who had large property at Eustone, near Oxford,* was, when he was 

 fifteen years old, admitted into the family of Lord Bacon, and that he was 

 under great obligation to him. Bushel s words are &quot; his acceptance of me for 

 his servant at fifteen years of age upon my own address, his clearing all my 

 debts three several times with no smaller sum in the whole than 3000/. his 

 preferring me in marriage to a rich inheritrix, and thereupon not only allowing 

 me 400/. per annum, but to balance the consent of her father in the match, 

 promised upon his honour to make me the heir of his knowledge in mineral 

 philosophy. 



Aubrey, in his anecdotes, when describing the walks at Gorhambury, says, 

 &quot; Here his lordship much meditated, his servant Mr. Bushel attending him with 

 his pen and ink-horn to set down present notions.&quot; 



He was born about 1602, and was, therefore, in 1620, at the time of Lord 

 Bacon s fall, about eighteen years old : and about twenty-six, in 1626, when 

 Lord Bacon died. 



After the death of Lord Bacon Bushel retired to the Isle of Man, as he re 

 lates in his own work, and as is thus stated in Wood s History of the Isle of 

 Man. 



&quot; This island (the Isle of Man) is said to have been the retreat of two her 

 mits, one of whom, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, murdered a beautiful 

 woman in a sudden fit of jealousy, and spent the remainder of his life in soli 

 tude, penance, and the severest mortifications ; the other, Thomas Bushel, in 

 the reign of James, made it his abode for only a few years. A supposed letter 

 of his still extant is to this effect. 



&quot; The embrions of my mines proving abortive by the fall and death of Lord 

 Chancellor Bacon, were the motives which persuaded my pensive retirement to 

 a three years solitude in the desolate isle, called the Calf of Man, where, in 

 obedience to my dear lord s philosophical advice, I resolved to make a perfect 

 experiment upon myself for the obtaining a long and healthy life, most neces 

 sary for such a repentance as my former debauchedness required, by a parsi 

 monious diet of herbs, oil, mustard, honey, with water sufficient, most like to 

 that of our long lived fathers before the flood, as was conceived by that lord, 

 which I most strictly observed, as if obliged by a religious vow, till Divine Pro 

 vidence called me to a more active life. &quot; 



As this tract was published in 1659, he was then near sixty years of age, as 

 is explained in part of the tract, viz. 



In the address to the reader, in the beginning of this tract, he says : 

 now seriously considering that the taper of my life burns in the socket (I having 

 already numbered twelve lustres of years),&quot; and as by a lustre I understand 

 five years, I conclude therefore that Bushel was sixty years in 1659. 



Bushel always speaks of Lord Bacon in terms of the most grateful respect. 

 With such expressions as the following his work abounds, &quot; My old master, the 

 Lord Chancellor Bacon, would often say, &c.&quot; Again, &quot; Dedicated by my 

 obliged gratitude to my Lord Bacon.&quot; 



He died at the age of eighty in 1684. 



He lay sometime at Captain Norton s, in the gate at Scotland Yard, whe; 

 he died seven years since (now 1684) about eighty aetat. Buried in the little 

 cloysters at Westminster Abbey, somebody put B. B. upon the stone (now, 

 1787, all new paved). Awbrey, 260. 



* See Plot s History of Oxfordshire. 



