Francis Bacon, whom Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie (1751-1780) praised for glimpsing "the general principles that must serve as the foundation of the study of nature" and whom Thomas Jefferson called one of the three greatest men the world has ever known, was born at York House, London, on 22 January 1561, a few years after the young Princess Elizabeth had taken the throne of England. In that time of promise and suspense, with its guarded hope for a peace and prosperity that might follow from an English settlement of the religious controversies that had boiled out of the Reformation, Bacon was raised by powerful parents who embodied two of the dynamics of the age: courtly power and Reformist piety. Nicholas Bacon, his father, was the queen's lord keeper of the Great Seal. Ann Cooke Bacon, his mother, was the sister-in-law of William Cecil, afterward known as Lord Burghley; learned...