1 591] THE HERMIT'S ORATION And for your Highness pray continually 51 The Queen took the Hermit's advice. She drew up, or caused to be drawn up, a letter from "Elizabetha Anglorum, id est, a nitore Angelorum Regina formosissima et felicissima to the disconsolate and retired Sprite, the Hermit of Tybole." Where(as)," said this singular document, "in our High Court of Chancery it is given to understand that you, Sir Hermit, the abandonate of Nature's fair works and servant to Heaven's wonders have for the space of two years and two months possessed yourself of fair Tybollet, with her sweet rosary the same time, the recreation of our right trusty and well-beloved Sir William Sitsilt, Knight; leaving to him the old rude repose, wherein your contemplate life was relieved; . . . suffering your solitary eye to bring into his house desolation and mourning .. whereby Paradise is grown wilderness and for green grass are come grey hairs, We, upon advised consideration, have commanded you to your old cave, too good for the forsaken, too bad for our worthily beloved Councillor. And . . . we have given power to our Chancellor to make out such and so many writs as to him shall be thought good, to abjure desolations and mourning (the consumer of sweetness) to the frozen seas and deserts of Arabia Petrosa, upon pain of 500 despights to their terror and contempt of their torments if they attempt any part of your house again.” 1 ... Melancholy, more obedient than the Ocean, retreated, we may presume, at the royal command, 1 Strype's Annals, vol. iv. p. 108. but of the Hermit we shall hear something again presently. At the close of the festivities on 20th May, Cecil was knighted, and more than two months later (on 2nd August) sworn of the Privy Council at Nonesuch. By special favour to his father no other appointment detracted from the lustre of his own.2 He was not more than twenty-eight, but from this time until his death, twenty-one years later, his history becomes in an increasing measure the history of his country. In the early part of 1592 he received his first important trust. He was appointed to sit on the Commission which tried Sir John Perrot. The exLord-Deputy of Ireland was one of those hottempered soldiers to whose hasty expressions no considerate person would attach any grave importance. Burghley, who took his true measure, knew him for a faithful servant,3 and in our time the great historian of the distressful country has singled him as one of the most humane of the Elizabethan rulers. But in that age men had often to give a temporal account of their idle words. Informers were never wanting to repeat and magnify; and Perrot, on his own admission, had said more than he ought to have done had suggested that the Queen might some day need from him that very military assistance which it was his grievance that she did not render him in sufficiently ample measure. The Commission found themselves obliged to convict, and the Queen exacted her pound of flesh. Perrot went to the Tower under sentence of death, which he might probably have suffered at the hands of the executioner, if Nature had not intervened to remove the occasion. Burghley and Cecil had done what they could to reverse his imprisonment. The world imputed their 2 Cotton MSS., Calig., E. viii/120. 4 Lecky. 1 Hatf. Cal., v. p. 71. Camden's Ann. 1592] PERROT'S CASE 53 efforts to bribery. On his death-bed Perrot was at pains to declare with the most solemn asseveration that no money had ever passed between him and them; except as he said that which Burghley had supplied to relieve his more pressing wants in gaol.1 The first charge, at any rate, against Robert Cecil does not bear examination. 1 Hatf. Cal., iv. pp. 195–6. CHAPTER IV PUBLIC AFFAIRS . . . Surely, "... He that commands the sea is at great liberty, and may take as much and as little of the war as he will. . . . at this day, with us of Europe, the vantage of strength at sea, which is one of the principal dowries of Great Britain, is great both because most of the kingdoms of Europe are not merely inland, but girt with the sea most part of their compass, and because the wealth of both Indies seems in great part but an accessory to the command of the seas."BACON'S Essays, Of Kingdoms. SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM died in April 1590, and Burghley, in spite of his age, took over the direction of foreign policy. This course, indeed, was probably agreeable to the aims of the two persons mainly concerned in it, for the Queen had no wish to restore the disgraced Davison, and the Lord Treasurer no doubt intended to secure the place for his son1 so soon as Cecil had received the necessary training. Walsingham's work fell, according to our modern notions, under two heads. There was, on the one hand, the conduct of the English relations with foreign countries, and on the other the management of the famous spy-service, which, humanly speaking, did more than anything else to preserve Elizabeth's life. In practice the two were nearly connected, for the persons over whom watch had mostly to be kept were either themselves foreigners or in close dependence upon foreign influences. The general conduct of foreign affairs Burghley kept in his own 1 See S. P. Dom., Eliz., Add., 12th March 1591. 1590-92] SECRET SERVICE 55 hands; the particular discovery of plots and treasons he had already begun to confide to his most intimate relative about the very time when the Queen visited Theobalds. On 18th May 1591, Michael Moody writes to him to say that he can "obtain for Mr. Robert Cecil, his Lordship's son, more intelligence from abroad than Queen or Council have, without charge."1 The language used by the spy suggests, what was possibly the case, that Cecil carried on his work at first in an unofficial manner. There seem to have been few better methods of obtaining credit at Court, outside the obvious ones afforded by war on sea or land, than the possession of reliable knowledge about the plans and machinations of the enemy. And when the whole future of the country, its religion, its independence, the relative stability of its government, might be said to hang upon the slender thread of the Queen's life, the importance of that kind of information could hardly be exaggerated. Essex set up a secret-service of his own, under the direction of Anthony Bacon, Cecil's first cousin ; and Thomas Phelippes, the decipherer, apparently carried on for a time extensive investigations on his own account. It may well have been that Burghley thought Cecil would recommend himself for the Secretariate by showing that he was already possessed of the ability to discharge its duties. But probably no exact lines can be drawn between his public and his private business. Once he was a Privy Councillor he must have been the principal channel of information. And as Burghley grew more bent and his steps feebler, the burden of work was shifted, no doubt almost insensibly, from the father to the son. There is honour among spies. Nothing is more striking than the strict limitations which Snowden, perhaps the ablest of Cecil's instruments, sets upon 1S. P. Dom., Eliz., 238/155. |