The Great Lord Burghley: A study in Elizabethan statecraft

THE GREAT LORD BURGHLEY




[Illustration: _Walker & Boutall, photo._ _McQueen, Sc._]




                                THE GREAT
                              LORD BURGHLEY

                         A STUDY IN ELIZABETHAN
                              STATECRAFT BY

                            MARTIN A. S. HUME

                   AUTHOR OF “THE COURTSHIPS OF QUEEN
             ELIZABETH,” EDITOR OF THE CALENDARS OF SPANISH
                   STATE PAPERS (PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE)

                 “_He can never be a good statesman who
               respecteth not the public more than his own
                   private advantage._”—LORD BURGHLEY

                                 London
                       JAMES NISBET & CO., LIMITED
                            21 BERNERS STREET
                                  1898

                   Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
                         At the Ballantyne Press




                         TO THE MOST HONOURABLE

               _Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, K.G._
                       THIRD MARQUIS OF SALISBURY
                    PRIME MINISTER OF QUEEN VICTORIA,

                THIS ATTEMPT AT A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF
                   HIS ILLUSTRIOUS ANCESTOR, THE PRIME
                      MINISTER OF QUEEN ELIZABETH,

                     _is respectfully dedicated by_

                                                MARTIN A. S. HUME.




INTRODUCTION


For nearly half a century William Cecil, Lord Burghley, exercised greater
influence over the future fortunes of England than ever fell to the share
of a statesman before or since. It was a period when Mediæval Europe was
in the melting-pot, from which, in due season, some of her peoples were
to arise bright and shining, with fresh faiths, higher ideals, and nobler
aspirations, to start on a new career of civilisation; whilst others were
still to cling a while longer to the garb of dross which remained of the
old order, and was to hamper them in the times to come.

How England should emerge from the welter of the old tides and the new,
depended to some extent upon providential circumstances, but more largely
still upon the personal characteristics of those who guided her national
policy and that of her competitors. Never was nation more favoured in
this respect than was England at this crisis of the world’s history. The
conditions of the Queen’s birth compelled her to embrace the cause of
religious freedom, whilst her intellect, her sex, and her versatility
enabled her during a long course of years successfully to play off one
continental rival against another, until she was strong enough openly to
grasp and hold the balance. But withal, her vanity, her fickleness, the
folly and greed of her favourites, or the machinations of her enemies,
would inevitably have dragged her to ruin again and again, but for the
fact that she always had near her, in moments of weakness or danger, a
fixed point to which she could turn, a councillor whose gaze was never
diverted from the ultimate goal, a man whom flattery did not move, whom
bribery did not buy—wise, steady William Cecil, who, to her honour and
his, remained her prime adviser from the moment of her accession to the
day of his death.

It has happened that most of the historians who have dealt in detail
with Elizabethan politics, and especially with Cecil’s share in them,
have dwelt mainly upon the religious and ecclesiastical aspect of the
subject, and have usually approached it with a strong doctrinal bias on
one side or the other. It is true that Cecil’s life was coeval with the
rise and triumph of the great religious schism in the Christian faith
in England, that in his boyhood there was hardly a whisper of revolt
against the papal supremacy, and that ere he died the Protestant Church
of England was firmly established, and the country freed from the fears
of Rome. Upon this text most of his biographers have founded their
discourse, and have regarded the great minister as first and foremost
a religious reformer. That he was at heart, at all events in his later
years, sincerely attached to the Protestant faith, there is no reason
to doubt; but before all things, he was a statesman who sought to raise
and strengthen England by political means, and used religion, as he used
other instrumentalities, to attain the object he had in view. He was far
too prudent to say so, but he probably regarded religious dogma in as
broad a spirit as Catharine de Medici, Henry IV., and Elizabeth herself.
His youthful training and early circumstances had associated him with
an advanced school of thinkers, who had naturally adopted the cause of
religious reform, condemned by their opponents. The current of events
and the blindness of the other side identified that party with the cause
of national independence and prosperity; and for political aims, Cecil
made the most of the support to be obtained from those who demanded a
simpler and less rigid form of Christian doctrine than that imposed by
Rome.