13 September 1520 A.D. Birth—William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley: Elizabeth 1’s Chief Minister of State—Diplomat, Politician and Administrator
13 September 1520 A.D. Birth—William
Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley: Elizabeth 1’s Chief Minister of
State—Diplomat, Politician and Administrator
Beckingsale,
Bernard Winslow. “William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley.” Encyclopedia
Britannica. N.d. http://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Cecil-1st-Baron-Burghley.
Accessed 13 Sept 2015.
William Cecil, 1st
Baron Burghley, Burghley also spelled Burleigh , also called (1551–71) Sir William Cecil (born Sept. 13, 1520, Bourne, Lincolnshire, Eng.—died
Aug. 5, 1598, London), principal
adviser to England’s Queen Elizabeth I through
most of her reign. Cecil was a master of Renaissance statecraft, whose talents
as a diplomat, politician, and administrator won him high office and a peerage.
Life
By service to the Tudors and marriage to local heiresses Cecil’s father and
grandfather acquired wealth, office, and the status of gentry. In childhood
William served as a page of the robes at court, where his father was a groom of
the wardrobe. In 1535 he entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he
studied classics under the versatile humanist John Cheke and came under
Protestant influence. At the age of 20 he fell in love with Cheke’s sister, Mary.
They were married in 1541, but she died in 1543, leaving him a son, Thomas.
In 1542, for defending royal policy, William
was rewarded by Henry
VIII with a place in the Court of Common Pleas. A year later he first
entered Parliament. Through his second marriage, to the learned and pious
Mildred Cooke
in 1545, he joined an influential Protestant circle at court; it included his
father-in-law, Sir Anthony Cooke, his former brother-in-law, John Cheke, the
future protector, Edward Seymour (Lord Hertford and duke of Somerset), and the
queen consort Catherine Parr, for whom Cecil edited a devotional tract. When Edward
VI succeeded, Cecil joined the protector Somerset’s household and in 1548
became his secretary. On Somerset’s first fall from power, in 1549, Cecil was
briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London. By
acting as go-between for Somerset and his rival, John
Dudley, earl of Warwick, Cecil regained favour and became in 1550 a
councillor and one of the two secretaries to the King, alongside William Petre.
After Somerset’s final fall, in 1551, Cecil was knighted by the victorious
Warwick, who assumed the dukedom of Northumberland. Cecil was committed to
Northumberland; but, when the Duke proposed to alter the succession, Cecil,
though fearing for his life and contemplating flight, sided with the judges in
opposition. He capitulated to Northumberland only on royal command. Ever loyal
to the Tudors, Cecil deserted Northumberland after Edward VI’s death. He
approached the triumphant Mary Tudor as
representative of the council, winning her approval as “a very honest man.”
As junior secretary, Cecil had had little scope under Edward VI. He shared
neither the social idealism nor the iconoclastic urge of the more extreme
reformists at court. He did share in the spoils of a corrupt government; but he
established himself as an able bureaucrat, a moderate with a sense of legal
propriety, and, like his ally the archbishop of
Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, a gradualist in religious reform. Yet, although
offered employment on Mary’s accession, he, unlike most of his colleagues,
withdrew from the Catholic court. On Elizabeth’s
accession, in 1558, Cecil was appointed her sole secretary. His first major
diplomatic achievement was to persuade a reluctant queen to intervene in
Scotland and conclude the Treaty of Edinburgh (1560),
which removed French forces from Scotland. His gift for compromise facilitated
the church settlement in 1559; his financial sense, the recoinage in 1561.
Elizabeth’s flirtation with John Dudley’s son Robert, however, weakened Cecil’s
position. Despite threats of resignation and opposition to Robert Dudley, Cecil
retained Elizabeth’s trust and was rewarded with the lucrative mastership of
the Court of Wards in 1561.
Decision on the succession was necessary to settle policies. While Cecil
intrigued to thwart Dudley, he sympathized with Protestant efforts in
Parliament to make Elizabeth marry. He resisted Mary
Stuart’s claims to succeed but recommended the Habsburg suitor, the archduke
Charles. Dudley, capturing the initiative, backed an ill-fated expedition to
France to aid the Huguenots, which ended in the Treaty of Troyes, became a
councillor, and in 1564 became earl of Leicester.
On the defensive, Cecil restored the balance by introducing Thomas Howard, 4th
duke of Norfolk,
into the council. But the consequences of Mary Stuart’s marriage to Lord
Darnley in 1565 worked to Cecil’s disadvantage; Cecil’s hopes of drawing England and Scotland
together were threatened.
Mary Stuart’s flight to England in 1568 embarrassed Cecil; although it
opened diplomatic opportunities in Scotland, it led to Norfolk’s plan to marry
the widowed queen of Scots. Norfolk opposed Cecil over Mary’s fate, over secret
aid to the Huguenots, and over policy toward Spain. Resenting the threat of the
Duke
of Alba’s Spanish army in the Netherlands, Cecil nearly precipitated war in
December 1568 by instigating the seizure of ships carrying bullion to Alba, who
retaliated by closing Antwerp to English trade. Leicester joined Norfolk, and
they prepared to oust Cecil; but they faltered before the Queen’s support for
her secretary.
His challengers defeated, Cecil was created a peer, 1st Baron Burghley, in
1571, and in 1572 he became a knight of the Garter and lord treasurer; he now
shared royal favour on equal terms with Leicester. Meanwhile, the papal bull of
1570, deposing Elizabeth, confirmed Cecil in his defense of the Elizabethan
church, in which he cooperated with his nominee, Archbishop Matthew Parker. The
intrigue called the Ridolfi Plot, a
planned Spanish invasion of England to put Mary Stuart on the throne, led to
Norfolk’s execution in 1572 and discredited Mary Stuart and the pro-Spanish
interest. Burghley’s rebuff to Spain was underlined by the Treaty of Blois with
France in 1572. Neither French influence in the Netherlands nor the St.
Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) deterred Burghley from the French alliance;
but he also soothed Spain, and the embargo on trade with Antwerp was lifted. In
Scotland he settled the regency; but he failed to persuade the Scots to try to
depose their queen, who remained a focus of Catholic intrigue in her English
prison.
In the 1570s Leicester, supported by Francis Walsingham, who became a
secretary in 1573, courted Puritan support; agitated for aid to William
of Orange, Protestant leader of the rebels in the Netherlands; and favoured
negotiations with France. Burghley, restraining the French and trying to avoid
open commitment to the rebels, pursued a policy that, in advocating nominal
Spanish suzerainty over a Netherlands enjoying its traditional liberties,
ignored Philip II’s obvious intentions. Failing to gain a settlement in 1576,
Burghley finally joined Leicester in urging Elizabeth to act on behalf of
Orange. Rather than fight openly, Elizabeth tried to utilize French influence
in the Netherlands by marriage negotiations with the Duke of Anjou.
Burghley accepted royal policy, but Puritan opposition prevented a definite
conclusion to the Anjou affair.
Although his hopes for moderate reform collapsed when his chosen
archbishop, Edmund Grindal,
was made powerless following a quarrel with the Queen, Burghley could not
afford to weaken the Puritan militants against aggressive Catholicism. A Jesuit
mission and papal intervention in Ireland in 1580 roused
Burghley to anti-Catholic action and to alarm over the intentions of Catholic
Spain.
The assassination of William of Orange in 1584 and the knowledge of a
planned French landing at Arundel led Burghley to take measures to protect the
Queen’s life and to incline toward war against Spain. His hesitation over the
costs of war and the peace feelers he extended to Alessandro
Farnese, the 3rd duke of Parma, the Spanish commander in the Netherlands,
created ill will with Leicester. But by 1585 Burghley supported Leicester’s
expedition to the Netherlands and Sir Francis Drake’s voyage to the Caribbean.
In 1586, on Walsingham’s revelation of the Babington plot—a plan by Anthony Babington,
once page to Mary Stuart, to assassinate Elizabeth—Burghley pressed to ensure
the trial of Mary Stuart and her execution in 1587. His initiative put him in
brief disgrace with the diplomatically outraged Elizabeth. Under the growing
threat of the Spanish Armada in 1587, Burghley parleyed with Parma, courted
Henry of Navarre and James VI of Scotland, and kept a sharp eye on the Irish
and English Catholics. His diplomatic, military, naval, and financial
preparations proved just adequate in 1588 to defeat the Armada.
He exploited victory with propaganda, and his fame as principal councillor of
Elizabeth spread through Europe.
After the failure of the Armada, Leicester died (1588), but Burghley
survived to preside over the politics of a new generation. He coached his son Robert,
born in 1563, for the secretaryship, which he obtained for him in 1596; Robert
had taken over its responsibilities after Walsingham’s death in 1590. Despite
ill health, Burghley remained active, performing his official duties, writing
memorandums, and dealing with suits. But he devised no new policies to check
declining prosperity. Instead, he intensified a program of retrenchment and
pressed the Commons for grants. In foreign affairs he supported campaigns waged
against Spain in France and the Netherlands and naval expeditions by Drake and
Essex. But finally he urged peace with Spain, fearing a Franco-Spanish
settlement and the strain of prolonged war. He died before the negotiations
were concluded.
Assessment
As a statesman Burghley saw that his duty was to give the Queen his best
advice and then to carry out whatever policy seemed expedient to her. His
loyalty in this task won Elizabeth’s confidence. A master of discretion,
Burghley as a royal servant assumed an official mask and learned “to walk
invisible.” His contribution to policy-making was his intuitive appreciation of
the national interest, which he strove to convey to the Queen. The inspiration
of the “common cause” of European Protestantism did not
lead him to subordinate insular national interests; he reduced the ideological
ends of international Protestantism to the more practical aims of secular
patriotism. Preferring diplomacy to war on practical grounds, he exploited
informal contacts, rebels, and factions among foreign enemies. In economic
affairs he tried to maintain England’s security by conventional statecraft. In
agriculture and industry he encouraged self-sufficiency; in commerce, those
trades that amassed bullion. His pragmatism as an administrator usually
overcame any tendency as an intellectual and lawyer to indulge in balanced
appreciations and legalistic argument rather than in action. His removal of
Mary Stuart, the Catholic pretender, secured the Protestant succession, and his
preparations enabled England to survive the Armada. But he failed to induce
Elizabeth to marry or to reform her church; and his policy over the Netherlands
was unrealistic and in the end led to open conflict with Spain. Often Burghley
was frustrated by the equivocations of the Queen, but he came to accept her
good fortune as the care of Providence for Protestant England.
Burghley’s recommendation was his diligence and competence in handling the
administration. No eager innovator, he fought corruption and made the existing
system work. His patronage in church and state enabled him to harness the
clergy, the gentry, and the nobility to the tasks of administration. His
attendance in council and Parliament was constant, and he understood how to
manage both. He directed censorship, propaganda, and an intelligence network at
home and abroad.
As lord treasurer he maintained solvency until the overwhelming war
expenditure of the late 1580s. Convinced of the damaging political and
constitutional effects of heavy taxation on the Queen’s relations with her
people and on Parliament, he pursued retrenchment and economy rather than
expansion of revenues. Through financial control of the royal household and of
the military and naval establishments, he increased their efficiency. In the
conciliar and departmental courts he gained a reputation for probity as a judge. His handling of
royal finance and justice was scrupulous. His personal fortune derived from the
unofficial opportunities for profit that attached to office in the 16th
century; but in exploiting fees and gifts Burghley was careful not to go beyond
the limits of contemporary public morality. He presided over one of the least
oppressive and most efficient administrations in 16th-century Europe.
As chancellor of
the University of Cambridge from 1559, he influenced discipline rather than the
curriculum, but he made his household a resort of scholars and an educational
centre for the Queen’s wards and the young aristocracy. His
intellectual interests, like his italic handwriting, were formed in the
advanced humanist circle of John Cheke. His artistic eclecticism, developed
under Somerset and Northumberland, was revealed in his personal planning for
his three houses—Burghley House at Stamford, Cecil
House in the Strand, and Theobalds in Hertfordshire; their decoration,
furnishings, collections of pictures, coins, and “things of workmanship,” and
their gardens, supervised by the botanist John Gerard, won universal
admiration. Burghley made a creative contribution to the Elizabethan
architectural achievement.
Burghley has always been a controversial figure. The hostility of his
Catholic victims, foreign ambassadors, disappointed suitors, and rivals started
a critical tradition that was perpetuated by Catholic historians. The
favourable treatment of Lord Burghley by Protestant historians was begun by
Francis Bacon and William
Camden. Inevitably, religious partisanship affected Burghley’s reputation
as a statesman and as a man. The estimates of his responsibility for policy
have depended on the roles in government assigned by
historians to the Queen and to his colleagues. The assessments of his
professional competence have emerged from studies of Elizabethan
administration, finance, faction politics, and diplomacy. The lineaments of
Burghley’s public role and of his characteristics as a man of his time are
becoming clearer, but the depths of his individuality remain difficult to
probe.
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