LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS LORD BURGHLEY, TOGETHER WITH HIS SON, ROBERT, FIRST Frontispiece From the picture at Hatfield House. Painter unknown. THE "RAINBOW" PICTURE OF QUEEN ELIZABETH FACING PAGE 4 KING JAMES I. 192 From the portrait at Hatfield House. Painted by P. VAN CONFERENCE OF THE ENGLISH AND SPANISH PLENIPOTEN- From the picture in the National Portrait Gallery. Painted f ROBERT, FIRST EARL OF SALISBURY, IN THE ROBES OF THE 226 254 From the portrait at Hatfield House. Painted by MARC COUNT GONDOMAR 288 From the portrait at Hatfield House. Painted by CORNELIUS HATFIELD HOUSE, THE SOUTH FRONT 328 TOMB OF ROBERT CECIL, FIRST EARL OF SALISBURY, IN 344 ROBERT, FIRST Earl of Salisbury 380 From the portrait at Hatfield House. Painted by MARC [I have to thank Lord Salisbury for kindly permitting the reproduction of the pictures mentioned above as being at Hatfield.] A LIFE OF ROBERT CECIL FIRST EARL OF SALISBURY CHAPTER I THE STAGE AND THE ACTOR Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee ; Sephestia's Song to her Child in GREENE'S "Menaphon." "FOR my own part," says Gibbon,1 in a familiar passage, "could I draw my pedigree from a general, a statesman, or a celebrated author, I should study their lives with the diligence of filial love." To many to whom Gibbon's studies are a care and Gibbon's memory a cult, those words have doubtless come home both as a charge and as an inspiration. More fortunately situated than he was, they have found at hand a pious duty to perform, and have entered upon it in some, perhaps vain, perhaps presumptuous, hope that out of the very accident of their descent they may bring to bear upon their subject a keener insight and a firmer grasp. And Robert Cecil, as it happens, has never found, in any adequate sense of the term, a biographer. Though he was for fourteen years to all intents and purposes Prime Minister of England, though his premiership chanced to cover almost exactly the duration of those momentous years in which Shakespeare was giving to the world the supreme glories of the English race, yet he has met 1 Memoirs, p. 3. with the scantiest attention; and in the long procession of English statesmen, his figure, naturally pathetic, seems to have acquired all the added pathos of neglect. Beside the splendid gifts of his contemporaries, beside the reckless valour of Essex, the splendid vitality of Ralegh, the far-shining wisdom of Bacon, his own patient labour has passed unperceived, just as amid that crowd of splendid gallants, among whom his lot was cast, his own insignificant person passed unnoticed or despised. Statesmanship is commonly impatient of heroics, and Robert Cecil was not a hero. He carried on the tradition of a cautious policy, under which his country had grown great, and in no contemptible sense he was his father's son. Placed between two epochs of momentous revolution -between the close of the great Protestant upheaval and the bursting of the greater Puritan storm-the administration of the Cecils possesses of necessity rather the tentative character of a provisional government than the strong repose of a national spirit perfectly at one with itself. The country was passing through a hundred and fifty years of unrest, the inevitable consequence of the tremendous mental and spiritual shock of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The time was not ripe for a settlement, and the merit of the Cecils is that they made no attempt to hurry it. But this is perhaps of all merits the least alluring. Also, in a measure, it is true that Robert Cecil has been his own worst enemy. He made no bids for popularity; he was usually indifferent to the opinion of the mob; and he left little record of that inner life of thought and being which might have won him the sympathy or the interest of more penetrating critics. Careful only of that which was his care, well-beloved only of those who knew him well, he moves across the page of history, a dim figure picking his way across 1563-80] CECIL'S BIRTH 3 untravelled country, beneath uncertain lights, towards a goal which no man clearly saw. We need not labour his pedigree. It was enough distinction for him then, and is still, to have been born his father's son; and we may leave ambiguous that dim descent from the princes of Wales which Camden was at some pains to establish for Lord Burghley. He was born on 1st June 1563,1 perhaps at his father's house in Cannon Row.2 The Fates, with delicate irony, twisted the slender thread of the infant's life into the web of those larger destinies with which the man was some day to struggle. The year of his birth was that in which a Puritan Parliament first urged the problem of the succession upon its Sovereign's notice. Four years earlier the House of Commons had pressed the Queen to marry, and had received an ambiguous reply, which they took for a modest assent, and the Queen intended for a gracious refusal. From that time, for close on twenty-five years, Elizabeth prostituted the noblest of human passions to the manifold exigencies of her diplomacy. The detail of her policy became of design an endless mystification, incomprehensible to her enemies, her people, sometimes to her ministers, perhaps sometimes to herself. She was the most unabashed of opportunists. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow crept in with petty pace for thirty years, whilst the Queen groped her way amidst her perils, saving herself again and again by costly sacrifices of honour and decency, being saved again and again by her own good fortune, by the allies, to whom she dealt out her parsimonious subsidies, and by those greater allies to whom she gave no subsidies at all-wind and wave and the stout hearts of her English people. It may be true 1 Hatfield Calendar, pt. v. p. 69; see also the inscription on Lady Burghley's tomb in Westminster Abbey. The registry at St. Margaret's, Westminster, does not, however, show any entry respecting his baptism. that a more straightforward policy offered a poorer chance of success, though either a consistent adhesion to the Protestant policy of Leicester and Walsingham, or the Flemish policy of Burghley, would have been infinitely more creditable than that irregular mixture of the two which the Queen preferred. It may befor the opinion is in effect Burghley's own that Elizabeth did in fact realise the conception of her famous portrait at Hatfield, and was the possessor of a thousand eyes and ears and of that serpentine sagacity which even the Bible does not hesitate to commend. But if this be so-and good judges have doubted it-it is still true that these are not the dominant emblems in the picture. "Non sine sole iris":—in the rainbow-lights that play about her hand lies quivering the genius of Elizabeth. She was possessed of that radiant patriotism, that abiding confidence that God would not fail her people, that indefinable property of making men realise that their country is the embodiment of a spiritual life deeper and truer than their own, which is not of necessity incompatible with great personal selfishness. That very selfishness had, besides, as we know, its patriotic limitations. She never gratified herself at the expense of the nation at large. Whatever personal injustices she may have perpetrated, she had at heart, and was felt to have, the integrity and security of her people. She thought no sacrifice too great for this. Salus populi was for her suprema lex; and she knew no other. By this law, therefore, she has been judged, and will be judged while Time lasts. What is true of her is true also of the men who worked for her. If, under the influence of the cosmopolitan and individualist spirit of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we have insensibly grown accustomed to judge men's lives and work by widely 1 Peck, Desid. Cur., p. 46. |