The main reason for Elizabeth’s change of attitude must be sought in the panic which seized upon England in the early summer of 1570. A powerful Spanish fleet was in the Channel, ostensibly to convey Philip’s fourth wife, Anne of Austria, from Flanders to Spain; but rumours came that the dreaded Duke of Alba was ready now for the invasion of England. The Guises in Normandy, too, were said to have an army of harquebussiers waiting to embark for Scotland; the Irish rebels were being helped both by Philip and the Guises. The Pope’s bull absolving Englishmen from their oaths of allegiance was the talk everywhere, and English merchants in despair cried that at last they and their country were to pay for the depredations of the pirates. The French were demanding haughtily that the English troops should evacuate the Border Scottish fortresses held by them, and the Protestants in France and Flanders were not yet prepared to furnish the diversion upon which the English usually depended for their own safety.
The position was very grave in appearance, though not so great in reality, and it alarmed Elizabeth out of her equanimity. De Guaras says that she shut herself up for three days, and railed against Cecil for bringing her to such a pass; and the same observer reports that when Cecil one day in the middle of July left the Queen and retired to his own apartment, he cried to his wife in deep distress, “O wife! if God do not help us we shall be lost and undone. Get together all the jewels and money you can, that you may follow me when the time comes; for surely trouble is in store for us.”[320] This may or may not be true in detail, and also Guaras’ assertion that Cecil had sent large private funds to Germany, whither he would retire in case of trouble; but it is certain that panic reigned supreme for a few weeks in the summer, accentuated, doubtless, by the plague which was devastating the country. But fright did not paralyse the minister for long, if at all. Twenty-five ships were hastily armed, two fresh armies were raised of five thousand men each, ostensibly for Scotland. Mary was prompted to send Livingston to Scotland to negotiate an arrangement with the Regent Lennox, and Cecil himself, with Sir Walter Mildmay, was induced to go and confer with Mary at Chatsworth; but, says De Spes, “all these things are simply tricks of Cecil’s, who thinks thereby to cheat every one, in which to a certain extent he succeeds.” The Secretary had by this time discovered that in any case neither Philip nor Alba would raise a finger to avenge a slight upon De Spes, for he had imprisoned him and distressed him in a thousand ways already without retaliation. At the same time, a blow at such a notorious conspirator as he was could not fail to produce a great effect upon the English Catholics who plotted with him and looked to Spain alone for support. Cecil therefore sent Fitzwilliams to Flanders about the seizures, and instructed him to complain to Alba of De Spes’ communications with the rebels. “His object,” wrote the Ambassador, “is to expel me, now that they think I understand the affairs of this country; and Cecil thinks that I, with others, might make such representations to the Queen as would diminish his great authority.… Cecil is a crafty fox, a mortal enemy of the Catholics and to our King, and it is necessary to watch his designs very closely, because he proceeds with the greatest caution and dissimulation. There is nothing in his power he does not attempt to injure us. The Queen’s own opinion is of little importance, and that of Leicester less; so that Cecil unrestrainedly and arrogantly governs all.… Your worship may be certain that if Cecil is allowed to have his way he will disturb the Netherlands.”[321] De Spes’ information was correct on the latter point, as well it might be, for in addition to Cecil’s own secretary, Allington, he had in his pay Sir James Crofts, a member of the Council, and the Secretary of the Council, Bernard Hampton, who between them brought him news of everything that passed in the Council or in Cecil House.
The Secretary’s efforts to get rid of so troublesome a guest as De Spes, and to offer an object-lesson to the English Catholics at the same time, were persistent, and in the end successful. De Spes was refused the treatment of an ambassador, threatened with the Tower, flouted, slighted, and insulted at every turn; but he could only futilely storm and fret, for neither his King nor Alba was pleased with the difficult position which his violence had created for them in England. It was all the fault of Cecil personally, insisted De Spes. He wished to afflict the Catholic cause without witnesses, and would stick at nothing, even poison, to get rid of the Spaniard.
Cecil would have liked to avoid his mission to Mary Stuart, for he was almost crippled with constant gout, and he was fully aware of the hollowness of the negotiations in hand. The interviews with Mary could hardly have been agreeable, although they were carried out with great formality and politeness on both sides. Cecil charged her with a knowledge of the northern rebellion, which she only partly denied, saying, however, that she did not encourage it. Mary seems to have been alternately passionate and tearful; but her bad adviser, the Bishop of Ross, was by her side, and though she argued her case shrewdly, she could not refrain from unwisely and unnecessarily wounding Elizabeth at the outset.[322] In the second article of the proposed treaty, where Elizabeth’s issue were to be preferred in the succession, Mary altered the words to “lawful issue,” to which Elizabeth, although acceding to it, replied that Mary “measured other folk’s disposition by her own actions.” After some acrimony on the subject of other alterations on behalf of Mary, an arrangement was arrived at, which, however, was afterwards vetoed by the Scottish Government,[323] at the instance of Morton, who was the Commissioner in London.
Whilst the negotiations with Mary had been progressing, peace had been signed between the Huguenots and Charles IX. at St. Germains (August 1570), and the fears of Elizabeth and Cecil were consequently aggravated at the plans which were known to be promoted by Cardinal Lorraine for the marriage of the Duke of Anjou, next brother to the French King, with the Queen of Scots. Now that the Montmorencis and the “politicians” had reconciled parties in France, the danger of such a match became serious both to England and the sincere Huguenots. Anjou posed as the figurehead of the extreme Catholic party, but was known to be vaguely ambitious and unstable. Cardinal Chatillon therefore thought it would be a good move to disarm him by yoking him under Huguenot auspices to Elizabeth. The first approach was made by the Vidame de Chartres to Cecil, who privately discussed it with the Queen. They must have regarded it with favour, for it was exactly the instrument they needed for splitting the league, and arousing jealousy between France and Spain. The Emperor had just given a severe rebuff to attempts to revive the Archduke’s match with Elizabeth, but the negotiation for making a French Catholic prince King-consort of England under Huguenot control was a master-stroke which sufficed to overturn all international combinations, set France and Spain by the ears, turned the Guises, as relatives of Mary Stuart, against their principal supporter in France, and reduced the Queen of Scots herself to quite a secondary element in the problem. The idea was just as welcome to Catharine de Medici, who hated Mary Stuart as much as she dreaded the Guises. Both she and the young King would have been glad to be quit of the ambitious Anjou, who always threw in his weight on the Catholic side, and made it more difficult for the Queen-mother to hold the balance. So, very soon Guido Cavalcanti was speeding backwards and forwards between England and France, secretly preparing the way for the more formal negotiations between the official Ambassadors.
So far as the Queen of England was concerned, the negotiation was purely political and insincere, for the reasons just stated, but the comedy was well played by all parties. Leicester of course was favourable, for it meant bribes to him, and there was no danger. La Mothe Fénélon, the Ambassador, gently broached the matter to the Queen at Hampton Court in January 1571. As usual she was coy and coquettish. She was too old for Anjou, she objected, but still she said the princes of the House of France had the reputation of being good husbands.[324] Cardinal Chatillon shortly afterwards was blunter than the Ambassador. Would the Queen marry Anjou if he proposed? he asked, to which Elizabeth replied, that on certain conditions she would; and the next day she submitted the subject to her Council, who, as in duty bound, threw the whole of the responsibility on to the Queen.
Walsingham had just replaced Norris as Ambassador to France. He was a friend of Leicester, a strict Protestant, who had been indoctrinated in the political methods of Cecil, with whom and with Leicester he kept up a close confidential correspondence.[325] One of his first letters to Leicester gives a personal description of the young Prince, in which a desire to tell the truth struggles with his duty not to say anything which may hamper the negotiation. The Guises and the Spanish party in Paris exhorted Anjou to avoid being drawn into the net, and the Duke himself at one time openly used insulting expressions towards Elizabeth; but such was the position in England that it was absolutely necessary that an appearance of reality should be given to the affair. Prudent Cecil, as usual, avoided pledging himself personally more than necessary, and wrote from Greenwich to Walsingham on the 3rd March, that he had wished the Queen herself to write her instructions, but as she had declined to do so, he merely repeated her words in a postscript—namely, that if he (Walsingham) were approached on the matter of the marriage, he might say that before he left England he had heard “that the Queen, upon consideration of the benefit of her realm, and to content her subjects, had resolved to marry if she should find a fit husband, who must be of princely rank.” To this Cecil himself adds as his private opinion, to be told to no one, “I am not able to discern what is best, but surely I see no continuance of her quietness without a marriage.”[326] Matters were indeed critical at this juncture, and Cecil, Leicester, and even Walsingham, repeatedly, and apparently with sincerity, stated their opinion that Elizabeth would be forced to wed Anjou, or he would marry Mary Stuart, as it was necessary for Catharine de Medici and the Huguenots to get rid of this fanatical figurehead of the extreme Catholic party.[327]
In his letter to Walsingham of 1st March, Cecil signs his name thus, “By your assured (as I was wont) William Cecil;” and then underneath, “And as I am now ordered to write, William Burleigh.”[328] That the title was not of his own seeking is almost certain. The Spanish Ambassador, De Spes, says that the Queen ennobled him in order that he might be more useful in Parliament and in the matter of the Queen of Scots; and the new Lord himself, in a letter to Nicholas White, speaks thus slightingly of his new honour: “My style is Lord of Burghley if you mean to know it for your writing, and if you list to write truly, the poorest Lord in England. Yours, not changed in friendship, though in name, William Burghley.” To Walsingham again he wrote on the 25th March, “My style of my poor degree is Lord of Burghley;” and on the 14th April in a letter to the same correspondent he signs, “William Cecill—I forgot my new word, William Burleigh.”
At the time of his elevation the new Lord was suffering from one of his constantly recurring fits of gout, and his letters are mostly written, with pain and difficulty, which he frequently mentions, “from my bed in my house at Westminster.” And yet, withal, the amount of work he got through at the time was nothing short of marvellous. Every matter, great and small, seemed to be dealt with by him. He was a Member of Parliament for the two counties of Lincoln and Northampton;[329] as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge he was deeply interested in the interminable disputes there with regard to ritual, vestments, and scholastic questions; as President of the Court of Wards he attended personally to an immense number of estates and private interests;[330] and acquaintances, high and low, from Greys, Howards, Clintons, and Dudleys, down to poor students or alien refugees, still by common accord addressed their petitions for aid and advice to him. To judge by their grateful acknowledgments, they seem rarely to have appealed to him in vain, and it is evident by the hundreds of such letters at Hatfield, that even when petitions could not be granted, they were assured of impartial and just consideration from Lord Burghley. His own great establishments, too, at Burghley, Theobalds, and London, must have claimed much of his attention, for all accounts passed under his own eyes, and in such small matters as the rotation of crops, the sale of produce, the breeding of stock, and the replenishment of gardens, nothing was done without consultation with the master. His hospitality was very great; for we are told by his domestic biographer that “he kept open house everywhere, and his steward kept a standing table for gentlemen, besides two other long tables, often twice set out, one for the clerk of the kitchen, and the other for yeomen.” He personally can have had but little enjoyment from his splendid houses and stately living. He must have been almost constantly at court, or hard at work at his house in Cannon Row, Westminster, handy for Whitehall, rather than at his new palace in the Strand, where his wife and family lodged. He seems to have had no hobby but books and gardens, and to have taken no exercise except on his rare visits to Theobalds or Burghley, when he would jog round his garden paths on an ambling mule.
This was the man, vigilant, prudent, moderate, cautious and untiring in his industry, who in the spring and summer of 1571 by his consummate statecraft once more brought England out of the coil of perils which surrounded her on all sides. His counter-move to Spanish support to the rebels in England and Ireland, and to Guisan plots in Scotland, was to supply arms, munitions, and money to the Protestants of Rochelle and the Dutch privateers, and to fit out a strong English fleet. The pacification of France and the crushing of reform in Flanders were answered by remittances of money to Germany to raise mercenaries for Orange, and the welcoming of Louis of Nassau and Cardinal Chatillon in England; whilst the marriage of Charles IX. to an Austrian Princess, and the closer relations between France and the Catholic league, were counteracted by the marriage negotiations between Elizabeth and Anjou, and the treaty with Mary Stuart for her restoration.