Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901)

Ignatius Donnelly was a Minnesota lawyer, politician, orator, and writer who saw conspiracies wherever he looked. The Shakespearean authorship controversy was just his cup of tea, and after discovering (in a children's book) that Bacon had created a cipher, he was hooked. He did not use Bacon's cipher, however. With mind-boggling complexity, he used numeric ciphers and mathematical operations to decode the First Folio, finding cryptic messages from Bacon throughout.

He published his findings in 1888, in a two-volume, thousand-page magnum opus titled The Great Cryptogram.

See:
John Michell, Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions (London: Thames & Hudson; San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984)