To say that this was all owing to the management of the Queen and her minister would be untrue. Circumstances and the faults and shortcomings of their rivals—nay, their own shortcomings and weaknesses as well—aided them powerfully to attain the brilliant success that attended them; but it may safely be asserted that without a man of Burghley’s peculiar gifts at her side Elizabeth would at an early period of her reign have lost the nice balance upon which her safety alone depended.
It was curious that the last hours of Burghley should have been occupied in striving still to bring about peace with Spain, which had been his object through life, though he had attained for England already most of the political advantages which a peace with Spain might bring; but old prejudices against France were still as strong as they had been in his youth, for, as he had truly foretold, the Béarnais had played them false, and thenceforward no Frenchman should ever be trusted again. Spain, in any case, would keep the false Frenchmen out of Flanders; so Spain was England’s friend.
For twelve days the Lord Treasurer lay in his bed at Cecil House before he died, suffering but slightly, and resigned, almost eager for his coming release. On the evening of the 3rd August he fell into convulsions, and when the fit had passed, “Now,” quoth he, “the Lord be praised, the time is come;” and calling his children, he blessed them and took his leave, commanding them “to love and fear God, and love one another.”[651] Then he prayed for the Queen, handed his will to his steward Bellot, turned his face to the wall, and died in the early hours of the next morning; decorous, self-controlled, and dignified to the last.
His death, though long expected, was a blow which the aged Queen felt for the rest of her life. She wept, and withdrew herself from all company, we are told, when she was informed of her loss;[652] and two years afterwards Robert Sidney, writing to Sir John Harrington, says, “I do see the Queen often; she doth wax weak since last troubles, and Burghley’s death doth often draw tears from her goodly cheeks.”
Even Essex, who had wrought so much against him, felt the loss the country had sustained. At the splendid funeral in Westminster Abbey[653] on the 29th August, we are told by an eye-witness that “my Lord of Essex to my judgment did more than ceremoniously show sorrow”;[654] and Chamberlain, writing on the next day, says, “The Lord Treasurer’s funeral was performed yesterday with all the rites that belonged to so great a personage. The number of mourners were above 500, whereof there were many noblemen, and among the rest the Earl of Essex, who (whether it were upon consideration of the present occasion or for his own disfavours), methought, carried the heaviest countenance of the company.”[655]
Throughout Europe the death of the Lord Treasurer was looked upon as a loss to the cause of peace. Essex, it was thought, would now hold sway and launch England upon a policy of warlike adventure. But Essex was himself hurrying to his doom; and Robert Cecil held firmly in his hand the strings of his great father’s policy—a policy which was on the death of the Queen to bring a Scottish king to the English throne, and unite England and Spain again in a friendly alliance. The baseness and trickery that accompanied the reunion of the countries belong to the history of the reign of James, and formed no part of the plan of Lord Burghley or his mistress. There was no truckling in their relations with foreign nations, however powerful they might be, and the servile meanness of the Stuarts in carrying out Lord Burghley’s traditions must be ascribed to their degeneracy rather than to the policy itself.
Of Lord Burghley’s place amongst great statesmen it may be sufficient to say that his gifts and qualities were exactly what were needed by the circumstances of his times. He was called upon to rule in a time of radical change, when vehement partisans on one side and the other were fiercely struggling for the mastery of their opinions. It is precisely in such times as these that the moderate, tactful, cautious man must in the end be called upon to decide between the extremes, and to prevent catastrophe by steering a middle course. This throughout his life was the function of William Cecil. His gifts were not of the highest, for he was not a constructive statesman or a pioneer of great causes. He often stood by and saw injustice done by extreme men on one or the other side rather than lose his influence by appearing to favour the opposite extreme; and, as we have seen in his own words, he was quite ready to carry out as a minister a policy of which as a Councillor he had expressed his disapproval. This may not have been high-minded statesmanship, but at least it enabled him to keep his hand upon the helm, and sooner or later to bring the ship of State back to his course again. He was a man whose objects and ideals were much higher than his methods, because the latter belonged to his own age, whereas the former were based upon broad truths and great principles, which are eternal. But it may safely be asserted that the rectitude of his mind and his great sense of personal dignity would prevent him from adopting any course for which warrant could not be found, either in the law of the land or what he would regard as overpowering national expediency. The first cause he served was that of the State; the second was William Cecil and his house. Through a long life of ceaseless toil and rigid self-control these were the mainsprings of his activity and devotion. If he was austere in a frivolous court, if bribes failed to buy him in an age of universal corruption, if he was cool and judicious amidst general vehemence, it was because the qualities of his mind and his strict self-schooling enabled him to understand that his country might thus be most effectively served, and that it would be unworthy of William Cecil to act otherwise. The gifts which made him a great minister at a period when moderation was the highest statesmanship, would have made him a great judge at any period, and it is in its judicial aspect that the finest qualities of his mind are discovered. It was to the keen casuist who weighed to a scruple every element of a question and saw it on every side; it was to the calm, imperturbable judge, that from the first hour of her reign Elizabeth looked to save her against herself; and whatever may be said of Cecil’s statesmanship in its personal aspect, it had the supreme merit of having kept the great Queen upon the straight path up which she led England from weakness, distraction, and dependence, to unity and strength.