In 1590, Francis Bacon was thirty years old, and deeply engaged in the vocation which he always had desired for himself: statesmanship. Explaining what he understood by statesmanship is the aim of this preliminary chapter, which concerns the establishment in the highest reaches of mid-Tudor government of men with a particular conception of the role and purpose of a royal councillor: namely, the notion of a ‘commonwealth’ statesman. Just why we should interest ourselves in such a theme is not immediately obvious: certainly, no previous study of Bacon's philosophy has done so. Yet these men included members of Bacon's family and kin, devoted to serving the Tudor dynasty and fully accepting a ‘commonwealth’ notion of themselves and their work. It was, after all, in their company and amid their values that Francis Bacon grew up.

A programme for statecraft, which incorporated a variety of reforming proposals into long-term state planning (as we might call it) had been learned by Bacon's father, his uncles and their colleagues when junior officials of the Crown under Thomas Cromwell and his successors.