Daphne Du Maurier’s account of the lives of Anthony and Francis Bacon ends with a description of her visit to St Olave Hart Street in October 1973.Like a passage from her novels and short stories it offers a romantic scene in which an organist suddenly starts to play the Tudor melody Greensleeves as she ponders the life of Anthony, whose burial at St Olave’s she had rediscovered in the parish records but whose final years are shrouded in mystery. Most of this book focuses on Anthony - the lesser known of the two brothers.
Du Maurier’s research produced important discoveries, although historians have sometimes been more sceptical about the use of her novelist’s instinct to fill the gaps between facts. The lives of the Bacon brothers she uncovered were also coloured by her fascination with theories connecting them with the authorship of Shakespeare’s works.
Her method involved a network of women visiting the dispersed stores of documents connected to the Bacon family and transcribing them for Du Maurier to study. This included the substantial collection of Anthony’s surviving papers now held at Lambeth Palace Library.
The compilation of the book has parallels to the way Anthony Bacon came to work himself - as the hub of a network of informants across Europe.
One piece of original research conducted by Du Maurier involved an examination of previously unpublished records in France, concerning a charge of sodomy brought against Anthony in 1586 in Montauban concerning his relationship with a servant. During this time he was closely involved with the Protestant Henri of Navarre, who became Henri IV of France in 1589 and subsequently converted to Catholicism.
Du Maurier notes that she thought Anthony’s escapades in France - missing from official records in England - would pique the interest of her sort of readers. Perhaps as a result the book focuses a great deal on Anthony’s sexuality and on relationships and behaviour which Du Maurier interprets through that lens, from his encounters with stable boys as a young man to the appointment of good looking and well dressed man servants - including Tom Lawson and Jaques Petit, who would become influential as messengers later. Extracts from a letter from Anthony to his doctor state he never had any form of sexual encounter, with men or women.
Du Maurier sets up conflict between Anthony and his mother, Lady Anne Bacon, from the start and charts their relationship - and Anne’s disapproval of Anthony’s company and her lack of any grandchildren as a result - through exchanges of messages and letters.
Anthony is portrayed as intelligent, frequently ill, far more at home in Europe, and among foreign diplomats and in the texts of writers such as Michel de Montaigne, than at the court of Elizabeth I. He is also portrayed as an extravagant, pleasure-loving and frequently profligate figure, spending his inheritance and dying penniless. But at least a proportion of his wealth was not spent dressing his male friends in beaver hats and lace. Du Maurier notes the personal financial burden of paying off informants as part of an international intelligence network reporting first to Francis Walsingham (whose house in Seething Lane stood close to St Olave’s) and then for Walsingham’s son-in-law, Robert Devereux, the Second Earl of Essex, who for some time was one of Queen Elizabeth I’s favourites before falling out of favour. Robert’s first three sons, Du Maurier states, were baptised in the parish of St Olave’s, including Robert, the third Earl, who became Captain General of the Parliamentary forces in the Civil War - although some accounts suggest the baptisms themselves took place privately at Walsingham House.
The main tenor of criticism levelled against the book is also what makes it highly readable! People and personality are placed at the centre of this approach to history, which brings alive the characters and their relationships vividly - prioritising these over a rigid approach to the timeline.
But does that make it any less of a history? This church is full of stories of the lives of people (not least St Olaf himself) that are recorded in fragments and held together by tradition and legend. And even with the benefit of the most comprehensive record of part of his life, we are left guessing for the most part at the reality behind the records Samuel Pepys left behind.
Perhaps the role of novelist and historian are not so far removed - both must construct a narrative from what survives. The difference may lie in how honestly they acknowledge the spaces between the fragments, and how confidently they allow imagination to enter them. Neither can pretend gaps in a life story do not exist and all - both writer and reader - somehow fill in the gaps with all the biases they bring.
I am grateful to Sally Gibbins, Principal of the Francis Bacon Society, for recommending this book to me as an introduction to the life of Anthony Bacon. Sally will be giving the St Olave Lecture at St Olave Hart Street on Tuesday 22nd September 2026 after Choral Evensong at 5.30pm about the Tudor spies and espionage centred on this parish.
Golden Lads: A Study of Anthony Bacon, Francis and their Friends by Daphne du Maurier was first published in 1975. This edition was published by Virago Press in 2007.
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