WILLIAM CECIL, LORD BURGHLEY
I
THE MINISTERS OF QUEEN ELIZABETH
William Cecil was born in 1520. He lived to the age of seventy-eight, dying in the same year as Philip II. of Spain, who was five years his junior. His political connexion began before Henry VIII. was in his grave; and for more than fifty years it continued, except for his retirement from the public eye during the complete period of the Marian persecution. Even in his old age, when his son Robert was already becoming, in his own crafty fashion, the most important person in Queen Elizabeth’s Council, the father was still the adviser on whom she leaned in the last resort. For forty years he was, in fact, the mainstay of her Government. For twenty of those years—roughly from 1569 to 1589—a man of even higher ability, in some respects, than himself, Francis Walsingham, was his loyal colleague. They served the cleverest, the most successful, and the most exasperating princess who ever sat upon a throne. Both of them—especially Walsingham—told her home-truths on occasion; both of them—especially Walsingham—she on occasion abused like a Billingsgate fish-wife. But all three were unfailingly loyal to each other; and among them they raised England to the forefront of the nations of Christendom.
WILLIAM CECIL (LORD BURGHLEY)
From a Portrait by Marc Gheeraedts (?) in the National Portrait Gallery
To establish orderly government at home, to settle a religious modus vivendi, to avoid war, and to prevent the succession of Mary Stewart or any pronounced Catholic—these were the main aims on which Elizabeth and her two great ministers were united. Of the three, Walsingham—a Puritan—was the least devoted to the Peace policy, Elizabeth the most determined on that policy; yet it was Elizabeth who habitually endangered it. The Queen’s tortuous methods, pursued in defiance of her counsellors, more than once seemed to have brought her to a point where war was inevitable; yet time after time her ingenuity, or her lucky star, or a return just in time to Cecil’s guidance, saved the situation. Never has a sovereign been better served; never has there been a reign in which rulers and ruled worked in more essential concord. Idealism and common sense were united in the conduct of affairs with a completeness which has rarely, if ever, been paralleled—never have the toils of the men of counsel and the men of action been more effectively combined. And England was peculiarly fortunate in this—that the great antagonist whom finally she fought and overthrew could be thoroughly relied on always to miss the opportunity for which he was always waiting, always to move only when the moment had passed irrevocably. So England was the victor in the great duel; and the Stewarts found her might established on a basis so firm that even they were unable to pull it down.
That result was not due to any one mind—to any single guide. Elizabeth, her ministers, her seamen, and her people, all contributed their share; and the work was crowned by the glory of her poets. Burghley may not have been personally a statesman of the highest rank, though if he is not included in that category it is a little difficult to name any Englishman who is entitled to that honour. There is a certain commonplace, bourgeois touch about him; he stands for the common sense, not the idealist, side, in the combination which made England great. His virtues were those of the successful pursuers of the via media. He did not organise revolution: he did not dream of an empire on which the sun should never set. But he played the political game with unfailing loyalty to his sovereign and his country, with level-headed shrewdness, with imperturbable resolution. There are few men to whom England owes so much; and if there be those to whom she owes more, their deeds but for him would yet have been impossible.
II
CECIL UNDER EDWARD VI. AND MARY
In the reign of Henry VII., Richard Sitsilt, affirmed by tradition to be of an ancient Welsh family long established among the gentry of the Marches, owned broad acres in the counties of Monmouth and Herefordshire. One of his sons, David, who elected to modify his name into Cecil, transferred himself to Lincolnshire, where he prospered greatly. He and his son Richard became very large landed proprietors, and held a variety of offices connected with the Court under Henry VIII. So it would appear that the present Marquess of Salisbury is not unconnected by descent with the “Celtic fringe.” It must be admitted, however, that the notable qualities of his great ancestor are not those usually associated with what is supposed to be the Celtic temperament. Still in that connexion a rather curious point may be touched on. A critic has recently remarked that there is a type of statesmanship which we are in the habit of regarding as peculiarly English (à propos of l’Hôpital), naming in a brief list both Burghley and Cromwell—Oliver, apparently, not Thomas. Now Oliver was descended from the sister of Thomas, whose husband was a Welshman, and whose son chose to adopt the maternal patronymic instead of his father’s name, which was Williams. So Wales has some title to claim the Tudors, the Cecils, and the great Oliver among her contributions to “English” celebrities.
William Cecil was born in 1520, and when in due course he went to Cambridge, he became a member of a distinguished group of scholars which included Roger Ascham, afterwards tutor of Lady Jane Grey and of Elizabeth; John Cheke, who became the tutor of Edward VI., and whose sister was Cecil’s first wife; and Nicholas Bacon, who married the sister of Cecil’s second wife. William Cecil married Mary Cheke in 1541: she died in less than two years, after bearing him one son, Thomas, afterwards Lord Exeter. Nearly three years later he married Mildred, daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, the “governor” of Prince Edward—a young lady of portentous learning, whose name Roger Ascham coupled with that of Jane Grey. Thus Cecil himself was not only well versed in the most progressive learning of his time, but his chosen associates, including both the first and the second wife, were all distinguished for erudition—and all, it may be remarked, tinged with the “New Learning” in the specific ecclesiastical sense of the term.
Before the death of Henry VIII. the young man was already the recipient of Court favour, and in the good graces of the Earl of Hertford, to whose personal service we find him definitely attached in the early days of the Protectorship. He accompanied the Protector on his Scottish invasion, was present at Pinkie, and was made Somerset’s secretary about a year later. His assiduity and his immense capacity for mastering laborious detail must have been of infinite value to his chief, whose woeful lack of practicality must, on the other hand, have intensified his secretary’s inborn tendency to rate common sense in method a long way higher than visionary idealism of aim. All his life long, nothing ever induced Cecil to deviate from safe precedent and respectable courses—bold enough, when his foresight satisfied him that boldness was the better part of prudence, but never rash. Every step was always carefully calculated, and a path for retreat kept open if there was the remotest risk of retreat being necessary. In the service of the most impulsive and sentimental of statesmen, he learnt—if he needed to learn—never to act upon sentiment or impulse.
When Somerset fell in 1549 Cecil was still some way short of thirty; but he had an old head on his young shoulders—and he had every intention of keeping it there. He had no personal devotion to Somerset or to his policy, and had carefully avoided quarrelling with anybody. When he perceived that the ship was scuttled, he had no compunction about making sure of leaving it in a decent and orderly manner before it sank. He did not quite desert; he remained with the Protector in the discharge of his duties, while very nearly every one else was making a parade of sympathy with the cabal who obviously held the winning cards; but he remained there in careful obscurity—the personal secretary, not the partisan. He did not escape a brief imprisonment in the Tower; no doubt he had counted on that. But Warwick was perfectly aware of his power of making himself useful, and saw no possible reason why he should not avail himself thereof—nor did Cecil. Competent officials were few, and of these some had already put themselves out of court, in Warwick’s eyes, either by having supported Somerset too boldly or by displaying doubtful religious leanings. The former secretary of Somerset had not made himself obnoxious in any quarter; and in the following September (1550) he emerged again into public life in a more responsible position than before, as Secretary of State.
The political waters were, to say the least, unquiet; there was no telling when squalls might be coming. Personal intrigues were rife. Cecil had no ambition to grasp the tiller under these conditions. He was ready to give advice to the best of his ability; he was ready to carry out instructions, whether they accorded with his advice or not; but he was not disposed to give orders on his own account—his ambition was not of the vaulting sort. His business was to keep his own footing, whether others did so or no; he would take no risks unless his own life were endangered by refusing them—every man must take care of himself. If Warwick chose to insist on a policy which the secretary disapproved—alliance with France abroad, or debasement of coinage at home—that was Warwick’s business, not the secretary’s: what he had to do was to carry out the policy imposed on him, with the maximum of efficiency and the minimum of friction, without allowing himself to be identified with the policy or with antagonism to it.
So when Warwick made up his mind that Somerset must be finally removed, it was Cecil’s cue to avoid, so far as he could, taking an active part in so ungracious a business as his old patron’s destruction—but certainly not to invite destruction for himself by injudicious partisanship. He did not scruple even to give Warwick information injurious to Somerset; though it was probably only because he knew it would reach that cunning schemer’s ears sooner or later—and when it came to a choice between profiting or suffering by the inevitable, he had no qualms about profiting. Still, he managed to be too much occupied with foreign negotiations to have much to do with the Somerset affair. As for the foreign negotiations themselves, he did not make any attempt to counteract the policy which, against his own judgment, he was called upon to carry out, but he was very seriously and not unsuccessfully engaged in minimising the untoward consequences which he foresaw.
As the young king’s death drew manifestly near, the intrigues of Northumberland, as Warwick had now become, thickened. Sir William—he had been knighted at the end of 1551—did not like intrigues; but in spite of seasonable illness, which may have been genuine, he could not altogether avoid being dragged in, and was obliged—like all the rest of the Council—to append his signature to the document nominating Lady Jane Grey heir to the throne. He averred afterwards that he signed only as a witness—a statement more ingenious than ingenuous. Still, he took care that there should be evidence from unofficial quarters that he would have avoided signing if he could, and that so far as he was formally a participator in Northumberland’s plot it was with no goodwill to its success—which, indeed, was the attitude of several other signatories, who did their best to upset the scheme the moment they felt safe in doing so. Cranmer, however, the most reluctant of any of them, had no such double-dealing in his mind, and made no attempt to evade the responsibility when he had once assumed it, though he had been tricked into acquiescence by a lie.
It is only fair, in judging Cecil’s conduct through these years, to remember that he was only in his twenty-seventh year when Somerset became Protector, and in his thirty-third year when Queen Mary succeeded. Warwick made him Secretary of State eight days before his thirtieth birthday. Of course, if the errors he committed had been errors of youth, he would have won easy forgiveness; yet in some respects his excessive caution may reasonably be attributed to his youth. He had every excuse for arguing that a real control must be out of his reach for many years, and that till it came within his reach he was not called upon to insist on his own views. In those days the servants of the State did not resign—the remark has been made before—they carried out the policy imposed on them from above. He was content, therefore, to bide his time, and for the present to do the political drudgery for Somerset or Northumberland, while he avoided committing himself personally to anybody or anything. This course was not one which permitted the exercise of generosity or magnanimity; it completely eschewed the idea of self-sacrifice; but it was a course which he could and did pursue without ever fairly laying himself open to the charge of treachery, or incurring the faintest suspicion of what is called corruption. If he was guided by considerations of personal advantage, it was not in the sense that any one could bid successfully for his support.
So when Northumberland’s plot collapsed ignominiously, Cecil, although a Protestant and officially opposed to Gardiner, had no difficulty in making his peace with the new Government. Only, the political seas being stormier than ever, he had no inclination either to head an Opposition or to take a prominent place among the queen’s ministers. He was too much of a Protestant for that, though not too much so to conform and “bow himself in the House of Rimmon.” In short, he courted an obscurity from which the Government had no desire to extract him—though it is probable that if he had chosen to offer himself as an instrument for Mary’s use, she would have availed herself of him readily enough. But it was one thing to pass from Somerset’s employ to Warwick’s, and another to pass from Northumberland’s to Mary’s. Besides, by keeping in the background now he could quietly establish himself in the confidence of the probable successor to the throne, the Princess Elizabeth. Being a member of the Parliament of 1556, he therein openly opposed sundry Government measures which were hotly resisted by the House of Commons, but even then he behaved with circumspection and did not suffer for his conduct. His real business was with Elizabeth; and when the crisis came, and Mary died, the members of the Council who hastened to Hatfield found Cecil already installed as her Prime Minister elect, with the scheme for carrying on the Government completely organised.
III
FOREIGN AFFAIRS AT ELIZABETH’S ACCESSION
Sir William had bided his time, and that time had arrived. On the throne was a young woman of five-and-twenty, who had already shown a skill akin to Cecil’s own in the avoidance of fatally compromising words or acts under circumstances when the utmost wariness had been the constant condition of safety. She had maintained her Protestantism in precisely the same way and in very much the same degree as he had done; moreover, she was bound for her own sake to maintain it, since her personal claim to legitimate birth was bound up with the rejection of Papal authority. Cecil had received her confidence, it may be, in part, because she was aware that she could afford to indulge her own waywardness more freely while she had so eminently safe a counsellor as a stand-by. He, for his part, was doubtless fully satisfied that she had intelligence enough to recognise that he was indispensable to her, and that in the main their views of policy would harmonise. The young man had held aloof from intrigues and had declined all temptations to grasp at dangerous power, not from lack of ambition or of patriotism, but because the power would have been too dearly bought and its foundations too unstable. Now, while he was still in the prime of life, yet of ripe experience, power lay ready for him to grasp—power to guide England in the courses which he believed would serve her best interests; power to cure the evils from which she had been suffering for many a year past; power to avert those which menaced her in the future; power which, once achieved, he was not likely to lose unless by his own blundering. He knew his own capacity. To refuse power under such conditions would have been not caution but pusillanimity.
It may be that the account of Cecil’s public life during the reigns of Edward and Mary gives an impression merely that he was an exceedingly astute young man with no principles to speak of. If so, that view must be corrected. He valued himself on his own complete integrity, and would have done nothing which he recognised as inconsistent therewith. He had principles, but not enthusiasms. In politics, as in religion, he had his own opinions, but in both he admitted a very large body of adiaphora, things which were not questions of principle, though regarded as such by persons afflicted with enthusiasms. On all such matters, passive or even active conformity to the policy of de facto rulers was permissible. He was ready to go to Mass, but not to take a part in the suppression of Protestantism. He would assent to Northumberland’s plot, but he would not further it. His integrity drew a line—lower than a person of finer moral susceptibilities would have drawn it, but with sufficient firmness and decision, and higher than most of his more prominent contemporaries. He did not feel called upon to swim against a stream which would overwhelm him if he did so; but he made for a backwater. It is often difficult to judge when and where courage becomes rashness, and prudence cowardice. On the whole, he was more inclined to be too prudent than too bold; but it was not because he lacked courage. His conduct might on occasion, though rarely, be charged as disloyal; it could never fairly be called treacherous. He was convinced that as a general rule honesty is the best policy, and justice is the best policy; but in the exceptional cases where he thought they were not, he chose—the best policy. The principles of his mistress were the same; but she deviated from the mean of resolute caution more markedly and more erratically than her minister; she was more readily rash and more easily frightened; her criterion of justice was lax, and her sense of honesty very nearly non-existent.
There was this very important difference between the state of affairs on Queen Elizabeth’s accession and their position between 1546 and 1558. Hitherto a statesman, even if perfectly secure of power, would still have had a difficult course to steer; but security being wanting, the lack of it was the gravest of all the difficulties. The course of safety now was not less intricate; but, in spite of appearances, there was no longer the same risk of incalculable irregular forces wrecking the ship. To retain a useful illustration or analogy; it was one thing to be responsible for bringing the ship home “through billows and through gales,” and another to carry her through a narrow and devious channel infested with reefs and sandbanks, in fair weather. The pilot who judged that he knew every inch of the reefs and sandbanks might feel that the business was an anxious one; to the less discerning passenger, he would often seem to be heading his vessel straight for the rocks; but the pilot himself would not feel any fear of finding himself helpless. As long as he made no mistakes he would be safe; and if he made mistakes, it would be his own fault.
After the event, when the developments of a particular situation have taken place, it is always difficult to realise the aspect the situation itself presented to the statesman who had to deal with it. Still, the attempt has to be made.
Almost from time immemorial until the reign of Henry VIII. antagonism between England and France was traditional; through great part of that period, alliance between England and the House of Burgundy had also been traditional, being largely based on the immense importance of the commercial intercourse between the Low Countries and England. During Henry VIII.’s reign, Wolsey and the king had broken away from the theory of animosity to France, but neither of them had held the Burgundian friendship cheap, and popular sentiment had lost very little of its anti-Gallic flavour. Further, we are apt not to bear in mind that, for forty years past, Spain, Burgundy, and the Empire had been combined under one head; the importance of Burgundy as a factor in the relations with Charles escapes our attention. More or less unconsciously, we think almost exclusively of France and the Empire; as in the coming period we think almost exclusively of France and Spain.
Now in 1558 the dominions of Charles V. were divided between his brother who became Emperor and his son who was lord of Spain and Burgundy. Philip, not the Emperor, is the rival of the French monarchy. The old grounds for seeking friendship with Philip as lord of Burgundy remain. The new reasons for hostility to Philip as King of Spain have not yet developed. The reigning Pope had been elected by French influence. The Council of Trent had not yet defined permanently the line of cleavage between so-called Catholics and Protestants; Philip had not assumed the position of the Church’s champion and the scourge of heretics; his influence in England was understood to have been exerted, so far as it was exercised at all, in mitigation of persecution.
On the other hand, antagonism between French and English interests was acute. England, drawn into a French war in Mary’s reign, had just lost her last foothold on French soil—Calais, which she had held for three hundred years; and though the loss might not be of great political or strategical consequence, its importance was magnified by popular sentiment. But apart from this: the young Queen of Scots had married the French Dauphin, only in this same year; and as a mere question of legitimacy, there was no possible doubt that her title to the throne of England was very much better than that of Elizabeth, who had been declared illegitimate by the English Courts of Justice, which judgment had never been formally reversed. The natural outcome of this marriage would be to bind France and Scotland together in all and more than all the intimacy of that ancient alliance between them which for three centuries had been a thorn in the side of English kings. Beyond that, the future Queen of France and Scotland would have a very much more tenable claim to the throne of England than ever an English king had had to the throne of France. Moreover, there was a special danger threatening under the existing circumstances. Mary was half a Guise by birth; her Guise mother was now Regent in Scotland; she was almost wholly Guise by breeding. The presumption was enormous that the ascendency of that powerful and ambitious family in France and their influence in Scotland would become more dominant than ever; the Guises were strongly anti-English, and it was the head of that house who had just achieved the galling triumph at Calais; while the fanatical Catholics looked to them as their leaders. A more active animosity, therefore, towards Protestantism was to be anticipated from France than from Spain.
The Spanish Minister in England, naturally enough under these conditions, took it for granted that the countenance of Philip was what the new Government would most urgently need—that he would merely have to speak and his instructions would be humbly obeyed. To his extreme astonishment, he discovered that nothing was further from Cecil’s mind. Cecil and his mistress signified quite clearly that they would judge for themselves whether they would take his advice or not. At any rate, they were going to do a good many things entirely regardless of their being in flat opposition to his wishes. The Spaniard declared to his master that Queen and Minister were rushing headlong to destruction; but they were doing nothing of the kind. What Cecil saw was that Philip could not at any price afford to withdraw his countenance from Elizabeth; because the only alternative to Elizabeth was Mary Stewart, and in that case Mary would unite the crowns of France, England, and Scotland. If France moved against England to the danger of Elizabeth’s throne, Philip would have no choice but to interfere on behalf of the Queen—she need not buy support which he could not afford to withhold. He might call the tune, but she need not dance to it unless it suited her.
Within a short period, the French King, Henry II., was mortally injured in a tournament. The Dauphin succeeded, and his wife became Queen of France, as well as of Scotland. Then the situation was modified by the death of Francis and the accession of Charles IX. to the throne, and to power of the Queen-Mother, Catherine de Medici, and the middle party who came to be known by the title of the “Politiques.” With them the Guises were out of favour, and could no longer count on wielding the power of France to advance Mary’s interests; yet their popularity and strength in the country were still sufficient to keep the chance of their recovering their ascendency as a menace which Philip could not disregard. The change, in short, cut both ways: it was not quite so imperative for Philip that he should support Elizabeth, but then it was not so necessary for Elizabeth to have his support.
Thus throughout the first decade of the reign Cecil calculated with perfect accuracy that Philip would not attack Elizabeth, whatever she might do, because he could not risk the accession of Mary Stewart in her place; and that France would not make a direct attack, because that would compel the intervention of Philip. Hence he could go his own way safely in dealing both with domestic affairs and with the everlasting problem of Scotland. There was another matter, that of the Queen’s marriage, in which Cecil might judge and advise as he thought fit, but the Queen herself never had the slightest intention of following any but her own counsel, or of revealing even to her most trusted minister what that counsel might really be.
IV
DOMESTIC AND SCOTTISH POLICY
Now, as concerned domestic affairs, two matters were of first-rate importance. One was religion; the other finance.
It was evidently quite necessary that a definite religious settlement should be arrived at, and that it must be one in which there was a reasonable prospect of the majority of Englishmen concurring. There were fervent adherents of the Papacy as restored by Mary; these were not very numerous. There were fervent adherents of extreme Swiss doctrines, Calvinistic or Zwinglian; these were also few. There were many who, like Gardiner in early days, had no love for the Papacy, but clung to traditional doctrines and ritual; there were not quite so many who might be called perhaps moderately evangelical; there were a very great many more who troubled their heads very little one way or another, and were what we should describe as High or Low, pretty much according to their environment. The extreme reformers had very nearly but not quite succeeded in carrying the day during Northumberland’s ascendency; the extreme Catholics had just had their turn under Mary. The extremists on both sides were intolerant, and it was quite obvious that the triumph of either would drive many moderates into joining the other extreme, and would keep the country in a state of violent unrest, or, at the best, of sullen submission. The experiment of trying to maintain traditional doctrine and ritual with the minimum of modification, while repudiating the Roman authority, had been tried under Henry; and it was fairly clear that a simple return to Henry’s standards was impracticable. The course which Cecil laid down was to adopt a compromise in which the great majority could at any rate acquiesce; a compromise which, while insisting on conformity, allowed of a very considerable latitude of interpretation; which would still pass, in many quarters where it did not satisfy; which was in short politically adequate. Cecil himself would probably have had no quite insuperable objection either to attending Mass or to sitting at Communion; but a compromise which allowed of either course would also probably have found a less general acceptance than one which excluded both.
Hardly less important was the restoration of financial stability. Twelve years before, King Henry had left matters in sufficiently ill-plight. The Government could not, perhaps, be held responsible for the existence of severe agricultural depression; but, for its aggravation, the newly developed class of landlords was largely to blame, while no one but Somerset had attempted to hold them in check. In the general ferment, commercial honesty had been on the downgrade. Among financial officials, corruption had been rampant; and Henry set the example of one of the grossest forms of dishonesty by debasing the coinage, paying his debts, when he did pay them, in the debased coin. Hence in commercial circles credit was bad, while abroad the national credit was exceedingly low; and the national exchequer was almost empty. Through the last two reigns, matters had gone from bad to worse. Cecil took the finances in hand with solid systematic common sense. A rigid supervision of expenditure and stoppage of waste took the place of the prevailing laxity. Men of probity were employed by the Government as its financial agents. The debased coins were called in, and the new currency issued was of a standard which had never been surpassed. Loans were repaid with punctuality, and debts discharged. Almost at once, it followed that fresh loans could be raised at reasonable rates of interest, instead of at the ruinous charges which Edward and Mary had to pay; before long, it was hardly necessary to seek for them abroad—the merchants at home were ready and willing to come forward. Confidence was restored under a steady Government.
Cecil’s economy may have verged on parsimony, and his mistress was as sharp in money matters as her grandfather; hard things are always said of a Government which takes Peace and Retrenchment for its motto. But peace and retrenchment were a stern necessity, and in many respects the parsimony has been exaggerated; at any rate, the expenditure was thoroughly well directed. Later in the reign it would probably have been sound policy to spend more, particularly in Ireland, where efficiency was sacrificed to economy; but outside of Ireland the nation got good value for every penny of outlay. In finance, as in other matters, Cecil habitually followed the maxims of caution. Consistently with this attitude, we do not find him striking out new economic theories. He believed, as nearly every one believed three hundred years ago, that new industries had very little chance of being established without the artificial stimulus of monopolies and patents to prevent competition—a system which always appeals most convincingly to the monopolist, but less convincingly to the consumer and the would-be competitor, as Elizabeth found before the end of the reign. Whatever we may think of the methods adopted to foster and encourage trade and the development of new industries, Cecil is at least entitled to full credit for recognising that this was the direction in which the compensation and the remedy for agricultural depression were to be sought.
The subject of the secretary’s financial reforms has carried us on to a general account of principles which were only gradually illustrated in the progress of the reign. The third question which engaged his immediate activities on Elizabeth’s accession was the policy to be followed in dealing with Scotland.
Traditionally, Scotland was the friend of France and the enemy of England; from which it followed in a general way that Scottish malcontents habitually looked to England for open or secret countenance, and very commonly got it. To foster divisions in Scotland was one way of preventing her from becoming too actively dangerous a neighbour, and the plan had been very sedulously followed, especially throughout the reign of Henry VIII. The Scottish clerics since the days of Bruce had always been strongly anti-English, a term which was almost equivalent to Nationalist. Both James and David Beton had been especially hostile; while, during the progress of the Reformation, the Cardinal was a rigorous and cruel persecutor of heresy. Henry, with all his pride of orthodoxy, had no objection to heresy in the northern kingdom, where Protestant and mal-content were nearly synonymous. Had England devoted her attention simply to giving the Protestants such support as would have secured them a predominance conditional on the support being maintained, diplomacy might have achieved the union of the crowns by the marriage of King Edward to his cousin of Scotland; but Henry and Somerset between them, by the re-assertion of English sovereignty and by the appeal to arms, had roused in Protestants as well as Catholics the nationalist sentiment which would not endure subjection to England at any price. The child-queen had been carried off to France and betrothed to the Dauphin; and in the years that passed before the actual marriage the Catholics had held the mastery; Mary of Guise was regent, and her power was maintained by French support and French troops. Thus the Scots began to realise that there was a danger, when their own Queen should be Queen of France also, that Scotland might become an appendage of France. Scotland was no more willing to be subject to France than to be subject to England.
Thus it was again open to Cecil to adopt the policy, not of exercising a direct English domination, but of establishing a Protestant domination, which would in the nature of things be favourable to England and unfavourable to France—a policy which fitted in precisely with that of establishing a comprehensive Protestantism in England, to which he was committed on other counts. He could rely, as we have already noted, on the fact that Philip, however reluctant, would be compelled to check aggressive interference on the part of France, if carried beyond the limit at which England could cope with it unaided. This, therefore, was the keynote of his Scottish policy—to avoid the blunder of seeming to threaten Scotland’s independence, to maintain friendly relations with the Scottish Protestants, and to help them to a predominance which should yet depend for its security on the goodwill of England.
It was not till December 1560, that the death of Francis deprived Mary of the French crown. During these first two years of Elizabeth’s reign, Philip was kept in play partly by a pretence of negotiations for the Queen’s marriage to his kinsman the Austrian Archduke Charles; while the Scottish Protestants, or Lords of the Congregation, as their chiefs were called, were flattered by the idea of her marriage with James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, who then stood next in succession to the Scottish throne—a scheme of which the real motive was the possibility of dethroning Mary in his favour. But the real business was to get the French out of Scotland. Cecil at last manœuvred his mistress into sending armed assistance to the Lords of the Congregation; the French garrison was cooped up in Leith; in May 1560, Sir William went to Scotland himself to negotiate; in June Mary of Guise died, and in the beginning of July the Treaty of Edinburgh secured the Protestant ascendency in Scotland, and removed the French garrison for ever. Although Queen Mary refused to ratify the instrument, consistently declining formally to withdraw her claim to the throne of England unless she were equally formally recognised as heir presumptive, Cecil’s great object was achieved, in spite of Elizabeth’s vacillations.
Thirteen months later, Mary, an eighteen-year-old widow, landed in Scotland. During the seven troublous years she passed in that country, Cecil’s policy remained the same—to support Scottish Protestantism, to prevent Mary from making a marriage that would be dangerous to England. It is hardly necessary to say that the methods were never qualified by any touch of magnanimity—that the interests of England solely were considered, those of Scotland disregarded. How much of what went on, on the part of England, was Cecil’s doing and how much Elizabeth’s, cannot well be decided. They may or may not have intended the Darnley marriage to take place. They did encourage Moray’s revolt on that occasion, and then repudiate responsibility for it. They knew something—how much is uncertain—about the Rizzio murder, before it took place. Generally, we can be tolerably confident that Cecil, unfettered, would have given Moray a more stable support throughout than it pleased his mistress to permit. It was Elizabeth’s standing rule to object vehemently to being considered as having committed herself to anything by any words or acts in which she might have indulged.
V
CECIL AND PROTESTANTISM
Cecil had been successful in turning the French out of Scotland. He held steadily, and the queen held unsteadily, to the conviction that Spain would not move against England for two reasons—one, that the triumph of the Scots queen would be too advantageous to France; the other, that the existing commercial war with the Low Countries, while bad enough for English trade, was threatening to ruin Flanders, and could hardly fail to do so if any further burden were added. France, on the other hand, was not likely to be actively dangerous independently, so long as neither Catholics nor Huguenots could lay the opposing party prostrate. Nevertheless, Cecil had to be constantly on guard against the risk of a Catholic combination. If Mary placed herself under the ægis of Philip, and the Guises and their following got his active support in France—if he played to the French Catholics the part which England was playing to the Scottish Protestants—he might reckon himself free of the fear of French advancement. The thing was not a probability, but it was a chance against which England had to be on the watch. Every time, however, that a crisis of this kind threatened, or that a Spanish ambassador hinted that his master would feel himself driven into active antagonism, the Secretary refused to be frightened; direct threats always stiffened his mistress; and his calculation turned out correct.
At the bottom of Cecil’s whole system of foreign policy was the theory that Philip as Lord of Burgundy could not, for commercial reasons, afford to quarrel with England, and as King of Spain was tied by the danger of strengthening France. Spain, then, was not to be feared, but France might be; this, however, would be conditional on the Huguenots being decisively crushed—a consummation not desired by Catherine and the Politiques; but this, in turn, required that the French Huguenots should have enough support from England to maintain their power of resistance, if not their domination. As time went on, and the Protestant Netherlands found themselves in open armed resistance to Philip, it was in just the same way necessary for England to keep them from being crushed. Cecil saw the necessity of thus abetting the Protestants in Scotland, France, and the Netherlands; and, being a genuine Protestant if not an over-ardent one, did not dislike it. Elizabeth saw the necessity also, but as in each case the Protestants were subjects acting in opposition to the Government, she did dislike it, and lost no opportunity of making the support she gave as ungracious, as niggardly, and as precarious as she dared, while she perpetually kept up a sort of pretence to herself as well as to others that she was not really helping those whom she called rebels. Yet without the help that was wrung from her, it is doubtful whether in France, in the Netherlands, or even in Scotland, the issue of the struggles during her reign would not have been materially different.
Now Cecil’s ideal was one of sober and opulent respectability; he was not troubled with any notion that the Pope was the Scarlet Woman; he held generally to the view that subjects ought to conform to the religion prescribed by Government. But where the views which he himself held were not prescribed but proscribed, decency compelled sympathy with the sufferers. Besides, the suppression of Protestantism outside of England would inevitably mean its suppression in England also, in course of time. He was thoroughly satisfied that Protestantism was best for England, and thus, although he had no abstract interest in what might be good for other countries, for England’s sake he was satisfied that Protestantism must not be suppressed elsewhere. This was the mark up to which he had to keep the Queen—who, for her part, was quite aware that the security of her throne depended on her sustaining the part laid down for her. But Cecil’s minimum was her maximum, whereas his maximum—with which she would have nothing to do—was the minimum that would have satisfied her other great minister, Walsingham.
Elizabeth, we may put it, felt that Protestantism was a political necessity for her personal government. She did not feel strongly that it would still be a necessity for England when she should be in her grave. Cecil did; while for Walsingham it was a necessity per se. Therefore, to Elizabeth the settlement of the succession was a political counter of which she did not choose to be deprived; while to her ministers the delay of it was a perpetual nightmare, because it meant a constant fear of the accession of Mary Stewart—a prospect even more threatening after she had left Scotland than while she was a reigning queen. Herein is to be found one of the reasons why Elizabeth was not anxious to get rid of a prisoner round whom—dangerous though Mary might be—she could weave intrigues and negotiations as well as her opponents; whereas Cecil and Walsingham would always have been pleased to find any decent excuse for eliminating the Scots Queen from the situation. In the same way, the ministers wanted their own Queen to make a suitable marriage, whereas she herself used matrimonial negotiations merely as tricks for circumventing crises, and probably never at any time really intended to wed any one among the numerous suitors, of whom the last did not finally disappear till she was in her fiftieth year. There is no practical doubt that at one time, early in the reign, Cecil was himself so much perturbed on the question of the succession as to have made a move in co-operation with Nicholas Bacon to get Katharine Grey—sister of Lady Jane, and now married to Lord Hertford—recognised officially as heir presumptive in accordance with the terms of the will of Henry VIII.; for which he very nearly got into serious trouble. Also, it was many years before the Secretary really felt thoroughly free from the fear, which Elizabeth enjoyed holding in suspense over his head, that she might some day throw policy to the winds and court ruin by marrying Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.
VI
ELIZABETH’S SECOND PERIOD
The year 1568 and those immediately following had a very material effect on the general situation. In the first place, the Queen of Scots delivered herself into Elizabeth’s hands, having already forfeited some of her chances of foreign support by her marriage with Bothwell. In the second place, the disaffected provinces of the Netherlands were driven into open revolt. Broadly speaking, it may be said that from this time forward Philip always wished to crush Elizabeth, while he would not involve himself in war with England until he could reckon on crushing her decisively. There was always the possibility of an Anglo-French combination, involving Huguenot predominance in France; and in that event the fleets of the two Powers would command his only line of communication with the Netherlands. So that on the one hand Spaniards are found, throughout Mary’s captivity, engaged in plot after plot for her liberation and enthronement in England; while on the other, Philip is obliged to swallow one affront after another, and to vary threats of utter destruction with elaborate efforts to placate the Queen of England. Cecil—Lord Burghley, as he became in 1571—was no less anxious to avoid war, but was also determined to go as far as might be, short of war, in support of the insurgent provinces; while steadily accumulating the evidence of Spanish complicity in Marian plots, to be produced as an effective answer to any complaints that England was abetting treason in the Netherlands, or her seamen committing acts of war in the Spanish Main or the West Indian Islands.
The Protestantism of the Government stiffened inevitably with the development of Catholic plots centring on Mary, the atrocities perpetrated by Alva in the Netherlands, the cruelties practised by the Spanish Inquisition on English sailors who fell into its hands, and the blundering Papal Bull of deposition—which, in fact, embarrassed Philip a good deal more than it injured the Queen of England. This singularly impolitic act of the Roman Pontiff, emphasising the direct antagonism, not to say the irreconcilability, of loyalty to the Throne and loyalty to the Church, sufficed in itself to bring all Catholics under suspicion of being at heart traitors—in the technical sense; pledged by their faith to desire, if not actively to compass, the overthrow of the reigning queen. Preceded, as it was, by the insurrection of the northern Catholic Earls in Mary’s favour, and followed by the Ridolfi conspiracy, it is difficult to perceive how the Queen’s government could have done otherwise than assume that to be a Catholic was to be disaffected. Nor is it possible to imagine that, after the appalling St. Bartholomew massacres of 1572, anti-Catholic sentiment in the country was not intensified to a white heat.
The people of England had a further grievance against Spain, inasmuch as she had taken possession of the wealth of the New World, and meant to keep it for herself—whereas the English desired a share. Throughout the later sixties and the seventies, English adventurers were engaged in making good their claims, in spite of nominal peace and law, by force of arms, raiding Spanish settlements or compelling local authorities to allow them to trade in defiance of all injunctions from headquarters. Technically, at least, these proceedings amounted to piracy, and if the Spaniards had been content to treat their perpetrators as pirates, it would have been extremely difficult to protest. Having an almost incontrovertible case, the Spaniards elected to put themselves in the wrong by punishing their prisoners—when they caught them—not as pirates but as heretics, gratuitously introducing the religious factor. Even in 1568 English sailors, under such captains as John Hawkins, had learnt to feel that ship for ship they were very much more than a match for Spanish galleons. Thus the most adventurous and most irrepressible class in the community was athirst to measure its strength with the Spaniard, and found no difficulty in convincing itself that to do so was a religious duty. The spirit of rivalry, greed of wealth, and sheer love of adventure, formed a sufficiently strong combination of motives; zeal against the persecutors of true religion gave them a colour which satisfied any but the most fastidious consciences.
Now, it will be easy to see from the foregoing paragraphs that already in 1568 enough had occurred to inflame popular feeling against Spain. There were the doings of the Spanish Inquisition in respect of English sailors. There was, amongst other grievances, the attack on John Hawkins at San Juan d’Ulloa. There was Alva’s tyranny in the Netherlands. In France, no one could tell whether Huguenots or Catholics were going to get the upper hand; but Philip was fully committed to the suppression of heresy within his own dominions, and outside them as well so far as it might lie in his power. During the next four years, every event of importance went to intensify the sentiment against Spain, to which, and not to France, the Ridolfi plot pointed as Mary’s ally. On the other hand, it was evident at once, when Elizabeth was able to detain in her own ports for her own use the treasure which was on its way up channel to help Alva, that for the time Philip was too heavily hampered to be able to turn his full strength against England; and as time went on it became increasingly clear that Spain could not, with the Netherlands revolt on her hands, contemplate an English war with equanimity. Even Saint Bartholomew did not divert the hostile sentiment in the direction of France, since still after the massacre it was difficult to say whether the French nation should be identified with the party of the perpetrators rather than with that of the victims.
At the lowest estimate, then, there was a mass of feeling in the country which could very easily have been fanned into a blaze of indignation, imperatively demanding open defiance of Spain, vigorous support of the Netherlands and of the Huguenots—in short, immediate war instead of the chance of war in the future. But the Queen and Burghley were determined to avoid war; and for nearly twenty years they succeeded. Burghley’s own primary conviction was that amity between Burgundy and England was of such enormous importance to both that considerations of policy would prevent Philip, as they had prevented his father, from being dragged into war by considerations of religious zeal. Protestantism—so much of it, at least, as was necessary—could be saved, probably without adopting heroic courses; and in any case, if a duel should ultimately prove inevitable, every year that it was deferred would tell in favour of England, which was daily growing in wealth, in stability, and in efficiency; and against Spain, which was constantly subjected to the exhausting strain of war in the Low Countries and war with the Turk.
Ultimate friendship with Spain, on the basis of immunity for unaggressive Protestantism, mutual toleration, and unfettered trade, was broadly the ideal for which Burghley worked; to achieve it, he was ready to bring to bear any amount of pressure which would not actually precipitate war. But it was part of the policy always to make sure that there was, at any rate, technical justification for everything done by the English Government. This technical correctness is particularly characteristic of the man. While Elizabeth herself and nearly every man in her court, were all shareholders, or in some degree interested, in the privateering expeditions of Drake and other captains, Burghley held himself rigidly aloof from them, and never made a penny of personal profit in that way. He had no moral qualms about seizing the Genoese treasure in 1568—that was merely an arrangement by which the bankers lent to England money which they had intended to lend to Spain; if it inconvenienced Spain, Spain should not have seized the English ships in her harbours. But when Drake came home after sailing round the world, with vast quantities of captured treasure in the Golden Hind, Burghley stigmatised the whole proceedings as piratical, declined any share of the spoil, and would have had it restored to Spain.
In this connection, the Lord Treasurer’s[E] aversion to these raiding expeditions was so strong that when Drake’s great voyage was in contemplation the utmost pains were taken to keep the matter out of his knowledge. But there were very few things that Burghley did not succeed in being aware of; and one of the gentleman-adventurers who sailed in that expedition, Thomas Doughty, was in personal communication with him before it started. This man was executed by Drake at Port St. Julian, in Patagonia—one of the grounds on which he was held guilty of treason towards the “General,” Drake, being that he had admittedly revealed as much as he knew to Burghley. The fact that inquiry into that execution was carefully shirked, while the recorded evidence is somewhat contradictory and inconclusive, has led to the formation of various surmises to the disfavour of Drake, of Burghley, of Doughty, or of the witnesses, according to the point of view of the critic. The most natural interpretation would seem to be that in the first place Drake and the sailors in general suspected gentleman-adventurers at large of being an objectionably insubordinate and troublesome element; and the General may very possibly have been injudicially ready to condemn one of them on insufficient evidence—evidence which satisfied him but did not amount to legal proof—and fancied that collusion with the antagonistic Lord Treasurer implied certainly ill-will and probably treachery to the commander. Applying those current rules of evidence which repeatedly sufficed to condemn men for treason at home, the case for executing Doughty was quite strong enough to act on, though exceedingly awkward to make public. It would show, of course, that the sailor was very suspicious of the designs of the statesman from whom the Queen wanted to have the thing concealed; it also suggests that Elizabeth liked to do behind the minister’s back, if she could manage it, the things which she knew he would disapprove. But it does not involve anything outrageous on Drake’s part, or any real discredit to the Lord Treasurer.
[E] Burghley was made Lord High Treasurer in 1572.
In fact, for a dozen years after Saint Bartholomew, while Burghley and the Queen had the same main object in view, though others of the Council were urgent in favour of her presenting herself openly as the champion of Protestantism, Burghley’s difficulties were mainly of Elizabeth’s creating. To all appearance, she was in a state of ceaseless vacillation—now on the verge of a shameful betrayal of Orange, now on the brink of a French marriage, now on the point of announcing her readiness to head a League of Protestants, now of allowing them to take their chance with the preposterous Alençon as their figure-head, while she stood aside, and anon dangling her matrimonial bait before that luckless and incapable prince as a preferable alternative. Burghley, Walsingham, all her advisers, were repeatedly driven almost to despair by her vagaries; none knew what her next twist would be—yet every twist that seemed to produce a fresh entanglement was followed by another which evaded it; and always as an open breach with Spain or a flagrant rupture with France seemed really a thing immediately inevitable, some happy accident appeared to save the situation once more.
VII
THE WAR WITH SPAIN
It would seem, however, that the discovery of the Throgmorton conspiracy led Burghley in the beginning of 1584 to the conclusion that a bolder support should be given to the Netherlands, more especially as the Alençon farce was finished. In 1585, Elizabeth committed herself to the Hollanders, Drake went off on the Cartagena raid, and in 1586 Leicester was in the Low Countries in command of the English troops. Then came the Babington plot, the execution of the Queen of Scots after the New Year, the certainty of Philip’s preparations for the Armada, and the “singeing of the King of Spain’s beard” by Drake, which deferred the great invasion for a twelvemonth; finally the week-long battle with the Armada itself, ending in its destruction off Gravelines, and subsequent annihilation by the tempests. To the very last Elizabeth went on playing at negotiations with Parma, on lines involving the basest treachery to the Hollanders; to the entire satisfaction of Sir James Crofts whom she employed in the business, and who is known to have been in Philip’s pay. This, however, was merely one of her regular pieces of diplomatic play-acting; while Burghley kept his own counsel. The war-party lived on thorns; they did not know what to make of the trickery, whether it was genuine or a sham. Howard of Effingham, in fiery wrath, wrote—quoting an old byword—of the “long grey beard with a white head witless that to all the world would prove England heart-less,” i.e., cowardly. Still, though it would have been natural enough for them to suspect that the peace-loving Burghley was abetting the Queen, the probabilities are that Effingham was referring not to him but to Crofts. Retreat without dishonour was impossible; he certainly would not have advocated it seriously; and the elaborate farce which Elizabeth deliberately played was merely a piece of that eternally baffling and exasperating diplomacy of which she might be called the inventor and patentee—methods which Burghley always condemned, though probably his long experience of them had by this time taught him to see through them. From 1584 he recognised that events had forced his own peace-loving policy out of court, and that it could not be revived till the issue between England and Spain had been fought out. The completeness of England’s triumph when the combatants did crash together in mortal fray went far, at any rate, to justify the theory on which he had systematically acted that, if the fight must come, the longer it could be staved off the more decisively it would favour his own country.
The wild outburst of enthusiasm following on the defeat of the Armada very nearly delivered the future of England into the hands of the Protestant war-party, whose desire was to break the power of Spain to pieces; and through the winter Drake and Norreys were preparing for the Lisbon expedition which, as they planned it, would have been another very crushing blow to Philip. But the great victory had brought Burghley’s ideal back into the sphere of practical politics. That is, if English and Spaniards could be brought to see reason, or to act as if they saw reason, an entente might now be established securing religious toleration and the recognition of the old Constitution in the Netherlands, the old Burgundian alliance with its corollary of commercial privileges and legitimate trading with Spanish settlements all over the world, and the immunity of English sailors from the Inquisition. With Spain as an allied Power, whatever might come of the party strife in France, England would have nothing to fear. The aggressive sentiment in England was, indeed, too strong to be repressed; but though the present continuation of the war was inevitable, it might be so manipulated as to bring it home to the obstinate mind of Philip that peace on Burghley’s terms would be a very good bargain for him, without making a total wreck of the power of Spain.
Elizabeth, as usual, was at one with Burghley on the point, and with Burghley’s son Robert Cecil, who was now drawing to the front and making it possible for his father to transfer to him much of the burden of active work for which he was becoming unfitted by age. The main method by which the policy was given effect was by placing the conduct of the war as far as possible in the hands of that section of the war-party, headed by John Hawkins among the seamen and by Essex at Court, which thought more of booty than of Empire—which did not realise, with Drake and Raleigh, that the despoiling of treasure-fleets and the sacking of ports would accomplish very much less than the annihilation of fighting fleets and the establishment in the New World of rival English settlements. Thus, by the time Drake started for Lisbon, he found his hands so tied by restrictions as to what he was to do and what he was not to do that the expedition failed of its purpose. Drake was discredited in consequence, and for some years the war became a mere series of raids; conducted in force, indeed, and openly avowed and authorised by the Queen, but not in essence differing from the semi-piratical performances of the Drakes and Hawkinses when Spain and England were nominally at peace. Hence, in 1598, when Burghley and Philip both died within a few weeks of each other, Spain had been invariably defeated in every successive attempt to strike a blow at her rival; she had suffered a serious disaster at Cadiz; her treasure-ships had been repeatedly raided; her enemy, Henry of Navarre, had carried the day in France: but her hold on the New World remained, she was still an effective Power in Europe, and the fear of her was not yet dead, though England still held, and more than held, the priority she had won ten years before.
VIII
AN APPRECIATION
In foreign policy we have seen that, at any rate in the broader aspects of it, Burghley and Elizabeth were at one—that is, the Queen never departed so far from the path he laid down but that she could regain her footing thereon the moment a crisis arrived. That policy may be summed up as aiming at one issue—friendship with Spain on an equality—while preparing for the alternative, a fight for the mastery. The policy failed to achieve the preferable issue, but in its secondary aspect was completely successful. Burghley’s own methods were not of the heroic type; there was no glamour of chivalry and knight-errantry about them; they were untouched by magnanimity, generosity, moral enthusiasm; they were ruled by a devotion to law and order, to propriety, to sober respectability; they were entirely practical, unsympathetic; but they were essentially marked at least with the intention of strict justice and reasonableness.
The same characteristics present themselves in his domestic policy. In the religious settlement and in finance the course taken throughout the reign is along the broad lines laid down by him; the Queen permits herself to indulge in personal outbreaks, and sets the general scheme at naught in individual instances, but, if she flies off at a tangent, still manages to return before it is too late, before any general deflection has been brought about. And again the desire of essential practical justice is the predominating feature. Zeal for particular religious views, however sincere, must not be permitted to disturb public order; the decencies must be observed, but the decencies would allow of as much latitude as reasonable men could desire. If zeal went the length of harbouring and fostering persons whose doctrines might be interpreted as impugning the right of the Queen to sit on the throne of England, justice required that such zeal should be penalised; if, further, zeal propagated such doctrines actively, zeal became treason. So, when Parsons and Campion came over with their propaganda, the Catholic persecution which followed had Burghley’s entire approval; nonconformity, aggressive and abusive, he was quite ready to punish with severity, but when Archbishop Whitgift and his Court of High Commission set about hunting for nonconformity, Burghley was for restraining them though the Queen sympathised not with him but with them. A more sensitive and sympathetic imagination would often have been alive to the existence of real injustice where the Lord Treasurer failed to perceive it; but where he did perceive it he always endeavoured to moderate it, even though he might not set his face stubbornly against it. His gorge rose at the stories of atrocities perpetrated in Ireland which almost every one else seems to have taken as a matter of course. If the use of the rack met with his approval it was only in cases where he honestly believed that the ends of justice were thereby furthered; and though the practice had not been common in England, its prevalence elsewhere was so general that its increased employment involved no shock to the moral sense of contemporaries.
Burghley’s principles of political action, then, were quite remote from those of Machiavelli and Thomas Cromwell, according to which the slightest claim of political expediency outweighed the entire moral code, and ethical considerations were reduced at the best to a sentiment which under certain circumstances it might be expedient to humour. His principles were equally remote from those of Somerset, which ignored the fact that no ends, however noble, can be achieved by disregarding hard facts. He insisted on upholding a moral standard in policy, and maintained a moral standard in his personal political relations. Admitting the principle salus populi suprema lex, he allowed that supreme necessity might over-ride the moral law, but there were few of his contemporaries who were not very much readier than he to recognise such an exigency on slight provocation. On the other hand, while his personal standard was so high that even his bitterest foes among the Spanish ambassadors acknowledged it with abusive candour, his normal political standard was that of his times. We may, perhaps, express it by saying that he had an almost abnormally strong sense of political proprieties but a complete absence of moral fervour.
Intellectually, he lacked imagination, while no statesman was ever endowed with a more imperturbably shrewd common sense, which served as perpetual ballast to counteract the flightiness of his mistress. He worked as assiduously as Philip of Spain himself, but, unlike Philip, he knew when to trust other men, never misplacing his confidence—whereas Philip never trusted any other man an inch further than he could help. Burghley’s extreme caution was due, not to lack of courage or of self-confidence, but to a thorough distrust of all emotional impulses. He weighed, deliberated, decided on the merits of each case as it arose, with careful and safe judgment; but had none of those flashes of intuitive perception which have characterised the most triumphant types of political genius. He ruled, not by magnetism, but by tact. Among statesmen he was of the order of Walpole and Peel, not of Oliver Cromwell and Chatham. He was lacking in creative imagination; but he was, perhaps, the most thoroughly level-headed minister who has ever guided the destinies of England. He cannot be elevated into an object of hero-worship. But he was precisely the type of man of whom his country had most need at the helm in the second half of the sixteenth century; and he served her as perhaps no other man could have done, with unswerving patriotism, sturdy resolution, and infinite devotion to duty.