Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon is recast in the novel’s fabricated history as the secret successor to John Dee and the power behind the Templar Plan. His importance lies less in a stable portrait than in the way the three researchers’ conspiracy turns scattered references into a continuous biography: Bacon becomes a hidden author, political manipulator, and custodian of the Plan, while the very act of connecting evidence exposes how fantasy can harden into conviction.

The Successor to John Dee

Bacon enters the invented chronology as the figure who takes over from Dee. The researchers connect Dee’s study of calendar reform, his encounter with Heinrich Khunrath in Prague, and the allegorical pageantry surrounding the marriage of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V. They then make Bacon the successor who strengthens relations between the English and German circles. At the London festivities for the wedding, Bacon is cast as impresario of a mystical-knightly allegory, with knights appearing on a hill. In this account, such public spectacle is made to serve a covert organization: Bacon supposedly directs the English Templar group while the signs of its existence remain embedded in ceremony and literature.

The theory’s treatment of evidence is openly elastic. Bacon’s New Atlantis does not, strictly speaking, name the Rosicrucians. The researchers bridge that gap by invoking John Heydon, who rewrote the work as The Holy Land and inserted them. The distinction between Bacon’s text and Heydon’s alteration is acknowledged, then declared irrelevant to the theory. A missing link becomes confirmation: discretion explains the silence, and an adaptation is treated as evidence of the original author’s intention. Bacon’s supposed centrality grows precisely through this willingness to make indirect association do the work of proof.

Author, Appropriator, and Rival

In a fantasy narrated through Edward Kelley’s imagined voice, Bacon appears as “Verulam,” an authoritarian rival who forces Kelley to write works that Bacon will later claim as his own. Kelley insists that he is the true Bacon, separating the authorial identity from the celebrated name and depicting Bacon as a parasite on another man’s labor. The episode does not provide an independent account of Bacon’s actions; it dramatizes the researchers’ capacity to turn historical names into characters in an increasingly elaborate secret drama.

The same invented narrative makes Bacon responsible for Dee’s death and attributes to him a campaign to control the Plan. After becoming Viscount St. Albans, he is said to have strengthened his position and eliminated Dee. These claims belong to the novel’s deliberately fantastic conspiracy, not to a verified historical biography. Their narrative purpose is to give the Plan a succession of hidden masters: Dee’s death does not end the lineage but transfers its authority to Bacon.

The researchers extend the alleged appropriation from Kelley’s writings to the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. Belbo jokes that if Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, they must all concern the Plan; the joke exemplifies the rule that no apparently unrelated work should be allowed to remain unrelated. A later extension identifies Johann Valentin Andreae as the author of the Rosicrucian manifestos and proposes that Bacon used Andreae as a pseudonym because he lacked time to write them himself. The claim is presented as something the researchers infer only years later, after assembling scattered references. The accumulating attributions make Bacon less a person with a bounded body of work than an invisible author behind other authors.

From Parody to Belief

The Bacon theory belongs to the larger process by which the researchers construct their Plan from analogies, resemblances, and suspicion. At first, they recognize that their connections are shortcuts so extravagant that they would be ashamed to claim them as true. They tell themselves that they are parodying the conspiratorial reasoning of their sources. But their repeated research sessions train them to connect one thing to another automatically. The novel’s crucial distinction is between pretending to believe and acquiring the habit of belief: practice narrows the distance between the two until the researchers lose the ability to distinguish the similar from the identical, or metaphor from reality.

Bacon’s place in the invented history demonstrates the method at work. A wedding allegory, an edited text, a literary pseudonym, and a succession claim are made to confirm one another, even though the links depend on interpretive leaps. The theory is not merely a collection of false claims; it is a system that makes each gap useful. A text that does not name the Rosicrucians can be explained as discreet, while a later rewriting that does name them can be recruited as supporting evidence. Once every fact is required to reveal a mystery, counterevidence can itself be absorbed as concealment.

The researchers eventually recognize the social force of what they invented. They have created a nonexistent Plan, yet its adherents identify fragments of their own mythologies as episodes within it and treat the resulting web as irrefutable. In that sense, the Plan becomes real through the belief and behavior it produces. Bacon’s imagined role as hidden director is one of the narrative’s clearest instances of this conversion: an attribution made in play helps furnish a world in which the attributed power seems to have existed all along.

The Secret Without Content

The novel’s reflections on secrecy clarify why Bacon’s supposed command of the Plan is persuasive to those who seek it. A conspiracy, the narrator argues, promises a secret that would explain frustration and offer salvation; yet any secret once revealed risks seeming disappointingly small. The more durable object of desire is an empty secret, one that can never be conclusively disclosed and so can continue to organize the search. The Plan offers that structure: each answer leads to another correspondence, and the chain has no final center that would end interpretation.

The fate of Bacon’s alleged secret remains bound to the same logic. Belbo’s refusal to reveal what the conspirators believe he possesses increases its imagined value, while his denial becomes further evidence of its reality. Aglie’s interest in being the sole recipient would preserve both the secret’s aura and his own authority. The secret therefore functions less as hidden information than as the condition that keeps the group together and its hierarchy intact. Bacon, imagined as the keeper and successor within that hierarchy, embodies the appeal of a concealed author behind history—and the danger of mistaking a persuasive pattern for proof.