Ten Tudor Statesmen

by Arthur D. Innes

[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.