Lady Anne Bacon: A woman of learning at the Tudor court

Lady Anne Bacon (1528-1610) was a highly educated woman who lived through the great political and religious transitions of five reigns and was embedded in the network of power at the Tudor court. Her intelligence and education took her far beyond the limits of the domestic sphere and she was caught up in pivotal events, including the crisis at the accession of Mary I and the reform of the Church of England under Edward VI and Elizabeth I. Yet, like many women, her place in the historical record remains shadowy and few today have heard of her. Born into an Essex gentry family, she was one of the five scholarly Cooke sisters, renowned for their learning. As a young woman she applied her linguistic skills to writing and translation, becoming a published translator before she was twenty. She served as a woman of the Privy Chamber, the inner circle of royal attendants, to both Mary I and Elizabeth I. Committed to the cause of religious reform, she was commissioned to translate a book that became central to the revival of the Protestant religion after Mary’s death. She married lawyer Sir Nicholas Bacon, later Elizabeth I’s Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, becoming stepmother to six children. Her own sons, Anthony and Francis, became respectively spy and statesman, and as a widow she ran a great estate alone for thirty years. Drawing on her subject’s forthright letters and other contemporary sources, Deborah Spring’s deeply researched and compellingly readable book reveals Anne Bacon’s extraordinary part in shaping the public story of Tudor history.