But though acquisitive and fond of surrounding himself with the accessories of wealth and great standing, he had few of the tastes of the territorial aristocracy, whom he imitated. Arms, sport, athletic exercises, did not appeal to him. From his youth he dressed gravely and soberly; and at a time, subsequently, when splendour and extravagance in attire were the rule, he still kept to his fur-trimmed gown and staid raiment. He was an insatiable book buyer and collector of heraldic and genealogical manuscripts. Sir William Pickering in Paris, and Sir John Mason, had orders to buy for him all the attractive new books published in France; and Chamberlain in Brussels had a similar commission. The former mentions in one letter (15th Dec. 1551, State Papers, Foreign) having purchased Euclid with the figures, Machiavelli, Le Long, the New Testament in Greek, L’Horloge des Princes, Discours de la Guerre, Notes on Aristotle in Italian, and others; and the Hatfield Papers contain very numerous memoranda of books and genealogies bought by Cecil, or sent to him as presents from his friends and suitors. Wotton, for instance, when he was abroad and wished to oblige his friend, says: “If I knew anye kind of bookes heere (Poissy) which yow like, I wold bye them for yow, and bring them home with some of myne owne. Here is Clemens Alexandrinus and Theodoretus in Epistolas Pauli, turned into Latin. But because I heere that yow have Clemens Alexandrinus in Greek already, I suppose yow care not for him in Latin.”[63]
His love of study, too, extended to interest in others. He was a constant benefactor to Cambridge University, and St. John’s particularly, and influenced the King[64] to bequeath £100 per annum to the foundation in his will. Shortly before the young King’s death, also, he appears to have granted to Cecil’s own town of Stamford—almost certainly at his instance—funds for the foundation of a grammar school there, of which Sir William was to be the life governor, and there is ample evidence that the establishment of the large number of educational benefactions with which the young King signalised his reign—primarily at the instance of Bishop Hooper—was powerfully promoted by Cecil; who seems also, on his own account, to have always maintained a certain number of scholars,[65] and to have been the universal resource of students, teachers, and colleges, in their troubles and difficulties. The accession of Mary, which threw Cecil out of office, or, as he puts it, gave him his liberty, did not deprive him of his large means, or limit his enlightened activity in other directions. But for a time after the death of Edward, he remained, so far as so prominent and able a man could do so, simply a private citizen. His household biographer asserts “that Mary had a good liking for him as a Councillor, and would have appointed him if he had changed his religion.” Although he puts a grandiloquent speech in Cecil’s mouth, refusing office, saying much about preferring God’s service before that of the Queen, it is extremely doubtful whether Mary ever offered to call him to her Council. Towards the end of her reign, when Elizabeth’s early accession was inevitable, however, the Council itself was desirous of conciliating him. Lloyd (“State Worthies”) says of him: “When he was out of place he was not out of service in Queen Mary’s days, his abilities being as necessary in those times as his inclinations, and that Queen’s Council being as ready to advance him at last as they were to use him all her reign.”
CHAPTER III
1553-1558
During the trial and execution of Northumberland and his accomplices, Cecil remained prudently in the background. Gardiner, Norfolk, Courtney, Bonner, and the other prisoners in the Tower were released. Home and foreign policy changed, the Catholics were buoyed with hope, and the Emperor’s Ambassador was in full favour, whilst the Protestants were timorous and apprehensive, and the French Ambassador ill at ease, for his King was at war with the Emperor, and had from the first endeavoured to minimise the claims of Mary.[66]
On the 3rd August the new Queen entered London with her sister near her, and preparations were at once set afoot for her coronation (1st October). Cecil was no longer in office, and was commanded by the Queen to send her the seals and register of the Garter on the 21st September;[67] but he appears to have gone to the expense of new liveries for his servants in honour of the occasion. Twelve of his servants were given garments of the best cloth with badges, eleven received one and a quarter yards of the best cloth each, with second-class cognisances, and nine more had cloth of second quality, one coat being left with Lady Cecil to bestow as she pleased.[68] On the same document Sir William himself has made numerous notes as to the price of these materials, which, if we did not already know it by many other testimonies, would prove that, though his expenditure was great, he was careful of the items of it. His father, the Yeoman of the Robes, had died in the previous year (1552), and apparently the office had remained in abeyance, being temporarily administered by Sir William. His neighbour Sir Edward Dymoke, of Scrivelsby, Lincolnshire, had, in accordance with his tenure, to act as champion at the Queen’s coronation, and was entitled to his equipment out of the office of robes. A few days before the coronation ceremony Dymoke applied for his outfit. Some of the articles were not on hand and had to be bought of one Lenthal; and the champion begged Cecil to vouch for the purchase, consisting of “a shrowd, a girdle, a scabbard of velvett, two gilt partizans, a pole axe, a chasing staff and a pair of gilt spurs, the value in all being £6, 2s. 8d.” Apparently Cecil took no notice of the application, and in an amusing letter at Hatfield, the champion complains bitterly, nearly two months after the coronation, that he could never get his outfit. Cecil insisted upon a warrant from the Queen; but, said Dymoke, he had received all his equipment without warrant at the previous coronation, and he prays Cecil not to be “more straytor” than his father was. He had his cup of gold, his horse, and trappings, and crimson satin, without warrant then, and why, he asks, should one be required now. “I do not pass so much of the value of the allowance as I do for the precedent to hinder those who do come after me, if I do lose it this time.”
Cecil does not seem to have absented himself from court, though he passed more of his time than hitherto at Wimbledon. Wyatt rose and fell; Elizabeth and Courtney suffered under the Queen’s displeasure; Cheke and Cooke went to exile; Cecil’s old friend the Duchess of Suffolk and her husband Mr. Bertie fled to Germany; Carews, Staffords, Tremaynes, Killigrews, Fitzwilliams, the ex-Ambassador Pickering, and hundreds like them, took refuge abroad from the country over which a Spanish King, with his half-Spanish Queen, were soon to be supreme. Cranmer, Cecil’s friend from boyhood, and other Protestant Churchmen, filled the rooms in the Tower vacated by those whom Cecil had been active in prosecuting, but Cecil himself lived rich and influential, if no longer politically powerful, and no hand was raised against him. That he was a conforming Catholic is certain, quite apart from Father Persons’ spiteful description of his exaggerated devotion; “frequenting masses, said litanies with the priest, laboured a pair of great beads which he continually carried, preached to his parishioners in Stamford, and asked pardon for his errors in King Edward’s time.” This statement of itself would not suffice were it not supported by better evidence; but although there is a dearth of such evidence at the beginning of Mary’s reign, there is abundance of it later. At the Record Office, among other papers of the same sort, there exists the Easter book for 1556, headed, “The names of them that dwelleth in the pariche of Vembletoun that was confessed and received the Sacrament of the altar;” the first entry being, “My master Sir Wilyem Cecell, and my lady Myldread his wyff;”[69] and Cecil’s accounts for this period contain many entries of the cost of his oblations and gifts to the altar. He retained, moreover, the benefices of Putney and Mortlake, of which he kept strict account; and in August 1557 the Dean and Chapter of Worcester addressed a letter of thanks to him for his annual contribution to his two churches, and assured him of their willingness to accede to his wishes and increase the stipends of the curates there.[70] There is therefore no doubt that, like Princess Elizabeth and most of those who afterwards became her ministers, Cecil was quite ready, in outward seeming at least, to adopt the ritual decreed by the Court and Parliament.
Renard, the Emperor’s Ambassador, had broached the idea of a marriage between Mary and Philip, the Prince of Spain, less than a week after the Queen’s entry into London; and thenceforward the arrangements for the match went forward apace. The people generally were in an agony of fear; Gardiner himself, the Queen’s Chancellor, and most of her wisest Councillors, looked coldly upon the idea; they would rather she had married Courtney, and formed a close political alliance with the House of Spain. But the Queen was a daughter of Catharine of Aragon, and the exalted religious ideas of her race had caused her to look upon herself as the divinely-appointed being who was to bring to pass the salvation of her people, and this she knew could only be done by the power and money that Spain could bring to her. The connection would enable her, too, to be revenged upon France, which had befriended her mother’s supplanter, and was still subsidising revolution against her. Those who were Catholics first and Englishmen afterwards, applauded her determination to wed her Spanish cousin; and the priests in Rome watched, from the moment of her advent, for the possibility of the restoration of England to the faith, and the disgorging of the plunder of the Church by those who had swallowed it. Most of these saw in the Spanish match the probable realisation of their hopes.
Immediately after Mary’s accession the Pope had appointed Cardinal Pole to negotiate with these ends. He was an Englishman of the blood royal, who had no special Spanish ends to serve: his one wish was to bring back England into the fold of the Church. But before he started on his journey to England, Charles V. took fright. His views were quite different. He and his son wanted to get political control over England for their own dynastic interests. So long as the religious element helped them in this, they were glad to use it; but if the priests went too fast and too far, and caused disgust and reaction in England, their plans would fail. So, as usual when it was a choice between religion and politics by statesmen of that age, they chose politics. The difficulty was that the Churchmen had expected that the return of England to the fold would necessarily mean the restitution of all ecclesiastical property. Pole himself was full of this idea, and his first powers from the Pope gave him little or no discretion to abate the claim for entire and unconditional surrender of the Church plunder. But at the instance of the Emperor, the Pope was induced to grant to Pole full discretionary powers. Then he was persuaded to send the Legate to France and Brussels on his way to England, with the ostensible purpose of mediating a peace between France and the Emperor, but really in order that he might be influenced in the Spanish interest, and his departure for England was thus delayed until it was considered prudent to let him go. It was not until he had promised that he would only act in accordance with the advice of the new King-consort, Philip, that he was permitted to proceed on his mission, with the certainty now, that the restitution of the Church property would go no further than was dictated by the political interests which the Emperor had nearest his heart. This happened in November 1554, four months after the Queen’s marriage, and the somewhat curious choice of Paget (Lord Privy Seal), Sir Edward Hastings, and Sir William Cecil, was made to go and meet the Legate at Brussels, and bring him to England. Their instructions,[71] evidently inspired by Philip, who was still in England, entirely confirm the above view of the subject. The envoys are to seek the Cardinal, and “to declare that the greatest, and almost the only, means to procure the agreement of the noblemen and others of our Council (to the re-entry of England into the Church) was our promise that the Pope would, at our suit, dispense with all possessors of any lands or goods of monasteries, colleges, or other ecclesiastical houses, to hold and enjoy quietly the same, without trouble or scruple.” Herein the influence of the politicians is clearly visible; and the Churchmen for fifty years afterwards attributed the failure of Catholic attempts in England to God’s anger at this paltering with the plunder of His property.[72] Cecil’s voyage was a short one. The entry in his journal runs thus: “1554. viᵒ Novembris (ii. Mariæ) capi iter cum Domino Paget et Magistro Hastings versus Casarem pro reducendo Cardinale;” but in the little Perpetual Calendar at Hatfield the voyage is noted in English. The journal continues: “Venimus Bruxelles 11 Novēbris;” and then, “Redivimus 24ᵒ Westmonsterij cū Card. Polo.”