For over thirty years Brian Vickers has been a leading figure in Baconian scholarship— the genuine kind, not the bogus kind connected with the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. His Oxford Authors volume of 1996, bringing together Bacon’s major English works, is now complemented by an edition of The History of the Reign of King Henry VII, a work he did not then include.[1] It is not the first modern edition—indeed, one by Jerry Weinberger appeared from Cornell as recently as 1996; but Vickers, while properly grateful for Weinberger’s scrupulous analysis of Bacon’s treatment of his narrative sources, is also properly censorious about his misguided view of Bacon as a prophet of modern democracy and technological tyranny. Vickers’s edition—crisply introduced, fully annotated, meticulously glossed, and appending Bacon’s fragmentary histories of other Tudor monarchs, together with five of the Essays—now becomes the standard one.

Bacon wrote the 75,000 words of the History in fourteen weeks in 1621, but he had been thinking of the project for many years. Lamenting the poor quality of modern historical work in the second book of The Advancement of Learning (1605), he pointed to the lack of a single comprehensive history of Great Britain, adding that if this were thought too great an undertaking, “the story of England … from the Uniting of the Roses to the Uniting of the Kingdoms,” i.e., from the accession of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, in 1485 to that of the first Stuart