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Montagu Bacon

1686-1749.  Clergyman and writer.

Montagu Bacon was born in December 1688 at Coddenham, Suffolk and baptized on 13 December.  He was the second of the three sons of Nicholas Bacon of Shrubland Hall, Coddenham, and Lady Catherine Montagu (1660/61-1757), youngest daughter of Edward Montagu, first Earl of Sandwich, about whom in 1734 he wrote warmly to the public orator at Cambridge University, Philip Williams. On his father's side Montagu was descended from Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, which he entered on 16 February 1705 but from where he did not graduate MA until 1734. He donated £30 towards the repair of the Chapel in 1707.

Prior to his graduation Bacon resided in Leicestershire where, as John Nichols surmises, he may have been curate of Newbold Verdun. Bacon referred to his residence there in letters to the dramatist George Jeffreys written from Quarles's Coffee House, Cambridge, between October and December 1732. In the correspondence Bacon defended the reputation of the philosopher Malebranche, criticized Cambridge as a ‘very dull place’, and spoke of his weariness with College life. Nonetheless it was the University which presented Bacon with the rectory of Newbold Verdun, which had been acquired from the Duke of Norfolk. Bacon did not remain there long, however, being soon afflicted with mental illness. By this date Bacon had established himself as a learned and wide-ranging scholar of English poetry. After a spell at Duffield's madhouse in Little Chelsea, he moved to Manor Street, Chelsea, where he died on 7 April 1749. He was buried at Coddenham on 19 April.

Bacon's scholarship was collected by Zachary Gray in a single volume published posthumously as Critical, Historical and Explanatory Notes upon Hudibras (1752), to which was prefixed a dissertation on burlesque poetry.

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