A One-Name Study for the BARNUM/BARNHAM Surname
Sir Francis Bacon's letters first mention Alice Barnham on July 3, 1603 - an Alderman's daughter, an handsome maiden to my liking. She was then only 11. They were engaged for three years before they were finally married. Bacon appears to have owed his success in wooing Alice, in some degree, to the earl of Salisbury (Bacon's Works, vol xii., p. 63) and lady Ellesmere (vol xii., p. 106).
On May 10, 1606 Alice Barnham, daughter and heiress of Lady Packington and Benedict Barnham, Sheriff of London, married Sir Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, Viscount Saint Alban, at the Parish Chapel, Marylebone High Street, London [the 2nd parish church, built in 1400 to replace the 1st church of 1200 at the junction of Marylebone Lane and (present) Oxford Street.] There was a pre nuptial agreement; she brought to the marriage an income of £220 a year from her father's estate, and expected more after the death of her mother.
Francis dressed all in purple, a color that had been forbidden to all but royalty. (He was 46 years old, she was a few days shy of 14). This was a childless marriage and he may have felt obliged to embark on it for career and social reasons and, some said, to advance his career by sublimating his rumored homosexuality. Had the evidence against Bacon been any more conclusive, he might have suffered the fate of his brother-in-law, who shared similar tastes. Mervyn Touchet, second Earl of Castlehaven, and two of his servants were executed for homosexuality on 14 May 1631 - the master beheaded on the scaffold and the servants hanged on the gallows.
Alfred Dodd, in Francis Bacon's Personal Life-Story (Rider & Company: London, 1949) said: "The bar-sinister of [Bacon's] Tudor birth (he was rumored to have been an illegitimate child of Queen Elizabeth by Lord Burleigh) had hung like a millstone round his neck in the days of Elizabeth and Burleigh. It dragged him down again, dangerously so, in the days of [King] James, and of Burleigh's son, Robert Cecil, the Secretary of State. Bacon had saved himself three years previously from being excommunicated altogether from the public service by his readiness for an engagement with a child of eleven years (Alice Barnham), a commoner. He was now going to open the door to State offices by his marriage to the "handsome wench" of thirteen, according to his bargain with the King and Cecil. He therefore sent a reminder to the Secretary of State on the eve of his marriage, when the Government was in difficulties, that he wanted the Solicitorship, which implied that he was definitely about to wed and thus become properly qualified for the position.
A Research Guide to the Genealogy of the Barnum/Barnam/Barnham Family Worldwide
AncientFaces - Family History Photos
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