The Great Lord Burghley: A Study in Elizabethan Statecraft
9781465618436
108 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
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. But in the party of reform Cecil was always the most conservative element.
