In the autumn of the following year (1564) the Queen in her progress was splendidly entertained at the University. Upon Cecil as Chancellor, as well as Secretary of State, fell the responsibility of making the arrangements; and the letters which relate to the visit, as usual exhibit his perfect mastery of detail. From the avoidance of contagion of plague (which had devastated London in the previous year) to the supply of lodgings for the visitors, everything seems to have been settled with him. He was specially anxious, he said, that the University he loved should make a good figure before the Queen; he himself would lodge “with my olde nurse in St. John’s College,” but the rest of the University was to be turned inside out for the entertainment of the court. The choristers’ school was made into a buttery, the pantry and ewery were at King’s, Gonville and Caius was sacred to the Maids of Honour, rushes strewed the roadways, the houses were hung with arras; the scholars were drilled to kneel as the Queen passed and cry Vivat Regina, “and after that quietly and orderly to depart home to their colleges, and in no wise to come to the court.” Sir William Cecil with his wife arrived the day before the Queen (4th August 1564). “I am in great anxiety,” he wrote a few days previously, “for the well-doing of things there; and I find myself much troubled with other business, and with an unhappy grief in my foote.” But notwithstanding his gout, he was received with great ceremony and a Latin oration, and was presented with two pairs of gloves, a marchpain, and two sugar loaves. His great anxiety, expressed to the authorities, was that “uniformity should be shown in apparel and religion, and especially in the setting of the communion table.”
Of the endless orations, the presents, and pedantry with which the Queen was received, of her own coyness about her Latin, of the solemn disputations and entertainments, this is no place to speak; but the official accounts[191] represent the Queen as being agreeably surprised at her reception. After the first service at King’s she “thanked God that had sent her to this University, where she, altogether against her expectation, was so received that she thought could not be better.” This was the first day; but a Catholic friend of the new Spanish Ambassador[192] told him that the Queen’s commendations had so elated the authorities that they besought her to witness one more entertainment. As she was unable to delay her departure, the actors followed her to the first stopping-place, where the proposed comedy was represented before her. “The actors came in,” writes Guzman, “dressed as some of the imprisoned bishops. First came the Bishop of London (i.e. Bonner), carrying a lamb in his hands as if he were eating it, … and then others with different devices, one being in the figure of a dog with the Host in his mouth. They write that the Queen was so angry that she at once entered her chamber, using strong language, and the men who held the torches, it being night, left them in the dark, and so ended this thoughtless and scandalous representation.”[193]
Amongst the long list of honorary Masters of Arts made on the occasion, Sir William Cecil was one, and on the journey to Cambridge he was honoured for the first of many times with a visit from the Queen to his house at Waltham, Theobalds,[194] which at this time was a small house he had recently built as a country retreat, not so remote as Burghley, or so near town as Wimbledon. It was his intention, even then, to leave this estate to his younger son; but, as will be shown later, it was not meant to be the magnificent place it afterwards became. The Queen’s frequent visits, says his household biographer, forced him “to enlarge it, rather for the Queen and her great train, and to set the poor in order, than for pomp or glory, for he ever said it would be too big for the small living he could leave his son. He greatly delighted in making gardens, fountains, and walks; which at Theobalds were perfected most costly, beautifully, and pleasantly, where one might walk two miles in the walk before he came to the end.”[195] We are told that throughout the year at Theobalds, even in his absence, Cecil kept an establishment of twenty-six to thirty persons, at a cost of £12 a week. Every day twenty to thirty poor people were relieved at the gates, and “the weekly charge of setting the poor to work there, weeding, labouring in the gardens, &c., was £10”; whilst for many years 20s. every week was paid to the Vicar of Cheshunt, in which parish Theobalds stands, for the succour of the distressed parishioners.
Cecil was simple and sober in his own living and attire, but by his every act he demonstrates his ambition to be well regarded by the world, and his determination to fulfil what he considered decorous in a great personage who owed a duty to his ancestry, to his position, and to those who should inherit his honours. His letter of advice to the Earl of Bedford when the latter was appointed governor of Berwick (1564) sets forth in a few words his ideal of a grand seigneur, which might represent a portrait of himself. “Think of some great nobleman whom you can take as your pattern.… Weigh well what comes before you. Let your household be an example of order. Allow no excess of apparel, no disputes on Princes’ affairs at table. Be hospitable, but avoid excess. Be impartial and easy of access. Do not favour lawyers without honesty.… Try to make country gentlemen agree: take their sons as your servants, and train them in warlike and manly exercises, such as artillery, wrestling, &c.”
The picture which Cecil presents of his own mind in his writings is consistently that of a judicious, cautious, acquisitive, and intensely proud and self-conscious man; a man eminently fair, especially to his inferiors, to whom it would be undignified to be otherwise; not wanting in courage, but by temperament more inclined to reduce an enemy’s stronghold by sap and mine than by a storming attack; determined that he would stand, no matter who might fall, and yet not greedy or selfish for personal gratification; his mind monopolised by two main ideas, the greatness and prosperity of England, and the decorous dignity of his own house.
To attribute to him modern ideas with regard to liberty, as we now understand it, would be absurd. He was a man of great enlightenment, a lover of learning; but he was a statesman of his own age, not of ours. That England should be governed by nobles, and that he should help the Queen to guide the governors, was in the divine order of things. He would do, and did, according to his lights, the best he could for all men; but that the ordinary citizen should claim a voice in deciding what was best for himself would have appeared to Cecil Utopian nonsense to be punished as treason. He would be rigidly just, charitable, and forbearing to all; but if any but those on the same plane as himself should dream of claiming rights of equality, then impious blasphemy could hardly be too strong a term to apply to such insolence. With opinions such as those he undoubtedly held respecting the exclusive right of an aristocracy to govern, his own position would have been inconsistent if he had not claimed, as he did with almost suspicious vehemence, to belong by birth and descent to an ancient and noble race.
CHAPTER VII
1564-1566
The efforts that had been made by the English Council to benefit native commerce had caused much apprehension amongst the Flemish merchants, who had for many years practically monopolised the English export trade. The English Company of Merchant-Adventurers had agitated and petitioned the Queen and Council to discountenance the foreign merchants; and as a result, a series of enactments was passed which gave considerable trade advantages to Englishmen. Differential duties, compulsory priority given to English bottoms for the export trade, the imposition of harassing disabilities and penalties on foreign merchants established in London, together with the great increase of piracy owing to the extensive shipbuilding of recent years in England, had greatly disorganised Flemish trade. During 1563 and early in 1564, several envoys had been sent from Spanish Flanders to endeavour to obtain a reversal of the new commercial policy, but without effect. This caused reprisals on the part of the Spanish Government, which prohibited the introduction of English cloth into Flanders and the exportation of raw material from Flanders to England, as well as the employment of English ships for Flemish exports. In retaliation, a more stringent order was issued in England forbidding trade with Flanders altogether, and the establishment of a new staple at Embden. The seizure of English goods and subjects in Spain itself was the answer to this. Naturally, people on both sides suffered severely by this commercial warfare.[196] Emissaries went backwards and forwards between Flanders and England, partial relaxations were temporarily arranged, conferences were held; but the main difficulty continued until Antwerp was well-nigh ruined, and the Spaniards were obliged to humble themselves in order to prevent a commercial catastrophe. The day, indeed, had gone by now for hectoring England. The old Bishop of Aquila had died bankrupt, abandoned, and broken-hearted—Cecil’s object-lesson of the impotence of Spain—and a very different Ambassador had been sent, whose main duty it was to keep Elizabeth friendly, and to end, at almost any cost, the commercial war which was ruining Flanders.