Career
In this role, he served as Bacon"s literary executor, with the standing and means to preserve many of Bacon"s papers and see to the posthumous publication of many of his written works. When Bacon died in 1626, the former Lord Chancellor bequeathed Rawley, who had been his private chaplain, his papers and a large sum of money. Rawley continued to admire Bacon"s memory, and worked with associates, led by Thomas Meautys, to edit and publish many of the manuscripts.
This required serious literary work, as Bacon had left many of his manuscripts incomplete.
Baconian works published by Rawley include the English edition of New Atlantis (1628), Bacon"s controversial work of utopian magic realism. Catherine Drinker Bowen, one of Francis Bacon"s biographers, credits her protagonist with inspiring the creation of London"s Royal Society, originally conceived as a group of disinterested scientists working under royal patronage and modeled after the scholars of the New Atlantis.
The biographer suggests that Rawley"s role as defender of Bacon"s insights and literary memory helped encourage elite opinion during the reign of Charles World War II
