Thirty days of travel and the excitement of his arrival at Rome caused Sir William to forget Bacon’s oral message. Although Clement sent a missive, Dated 22nd June 1266, affirming his continued interest, he included no papal gold to assist the beleaguered friar. Instead, he laid upon Bacon the burdens of haste and secrecy. Well aware of the schism within the Franciscan order, he prudently wished to spare Brother Roger, as well as himself, the attention of Bonaventura.

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The papal mandate presented Bacon with both a triumph and a timetable. To claim a pope as patron was no mean honour, nor would his Order be able to stifle his work if it bore Clement’s seal of approval. On the other hand, Clement’s expression of interest was no guarantee of his support once he had read Bacon’s work. The proposed manuscript did not yet exist. Bacon’s troubles of the past eight years had severely hampered his creativity and many of his experiments and ideas had remained incomplete. He still lacked the money necessary to draw his research to a close.

For the second time in his life, Bacon was faced with a major financial crisis. As a friar he had no private savings and no property which might be pawned for cash. He first sent a plea for aid to his brother in England, unaware of the ruin which his family’s fortune had suffered during the recent Barons’ War. After waiting impatiently for the reply which never came, he approached a number of his wealthy friends, begging for loans or benefices. They were wary of his requests, since he would not explain the reason for his need. In desperation, he turned to the less well-to-do among his acquaintances. Threatening and cajoling, he managed to gather the meagre sum of 70 French pounds, barely enough to cover the cost of his parchment and ink. At last he sat down to organise his opus.

Bacon’s fund-raising efforts and his secretive writing did not pass unnoticed by the officials of the Paris convent. Inevitably he was called to account for his work. His only defence lay in the mandate from clement; this he must have produced for them, since he was not prevented from completing his work. They could not gracefully deny him assistance for a project already sanctioned by the Holy Father. The Franciscan copyists were put at his disposal and he was allowed time to complete his work.

Having accepted the aid of this Order, Bacon spent long hours struggling to compose his thoughts in a clear and concise form. At last the Opus majus was complete and he hurried it into the hands of the waiting scribes. Even before it was returned to him he began a second manuscript, hoping to touch upon a number of points which were covered only superficially in the first. This text, the Opus minor, threatened to grow as voluminous as his first; still not satisfied, he cut it short and sent it also the Scriptorium. His third effort resulted in the Opus tertium, in which, for the benefit of his would-be patron, he included a history of his troubles.

The first two manuscripts returned to him and Bacon quickly read them to assure himself that nothing had been edited by the Franciscans. The work was not the best of which he was capable, but he had kept the Pope waiting or two years since the second letter of inquiry. The Opus majus and Opus minor were entrusted to one of his pupils, rather than to a Franciscan courier. Bacon wrote the boy a glowing letter of introduction, ladened him with the two substantial manuscripts and a number of his shorter treatises and sent him down the road to Rome. The Opus tertium followed later that same year, 1268.

In Bacon’s “persuasio”, as he himself called his three-volume effort, Clement must have found much food for thought. The friar presented nothing less than an outline for educational reform. Many of his ideas were based upon the efforts and conclusions of his scholastic predecessors. Even his much lauded “prophecies”, in which he envisioned devices permitting men to walk on the ocean floors and to lift great weights by means of a small machine, were not original.

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