William Cecil

“ In February 1559 Sir William Cecil wrote to Archbishop Parker, begging that the bearer of the letter, Sir Roger North, might have a dispensation from fasting in Lent, ‘in consideration of his evil estate of health, and the danger that might follow if he should be restrained to eating of fish.’ In 1564, on his succession to his father's title, he set himself diligently to the management of his estates and domestic affairs. In 1568 he was elected alderman and free burgess of the town of Cambridge. ”

“ Sir William Cecil, the master of the court of wards, drew up special orders for his exercises and studies, and he became an inmate of Cecil's house in the Strand. There his uncle, Arthur Golding, joined him in the capacity of tutor and receiver of his property. ”

“ Although Sir William Cecil might have expressed himself less warmly, he certainly shared this sentiment, in regard to his benefices of Putney, Mortlake and Wimbledon; and the express mention of the lands held by Sir William Petre and the confirmation of his title to them in the bull of Paul IV. are sufficient proof of the Chief Secretary’s unwillingness to part with the monastic property that had fallen to his share. [484] And these men were fairly representative of all those who had been enriched in this way. ”

“ Cecil would certainly bear no other man’s burden if he could help it.
Through all this critical time Sir William was indefatigable. His wife lived usually retired from the court, at their home at Wimbledon; but Cecil’s town house at Cannon Row, Westminster, was the scene of ceaseless business, for Petre, the joint-Secretary, was ill disposed, and did little. The Duchess of Suffolk, Lord Clinton, and all the Lincolnshire folk used Cecil unsparingly in [32] all their suits and troubles, and they had many. ”

“ A SPECTRAL COLLIE
WILLIAM PERCY CECIL happened to be a younger son, so he left home—which was England—and went to Kansas to ranch it. Thousands of younger sons do the same, only their destination is not invariably Kansas.
An agent at Wichita picked out Cecil's farm for him and sent the deeds over to England before Cecil left. He said there was a house on the place. So Cecil's mother fitted him out for America just as she had fitted out another superfluous boy for Africa, and parted from him with an heroic front and big agonies of mother-ache which she kept to herself. ”

“ The larger questions were settled or in process of settlement, while the commercial matter seemed insoluble. At this juncture the death of Mary introduced fresh factors into the problem, which proved not to be auspicious to the Hansa. One of the promoters of the original revocation of the Hanse privileges, Sir William Cecil, was called to a prominent position in the counsels of the new queen. Acting doubtless on his advice, Elizabeth maintained a firm attitude, resolving to secure once and for all the equitable treatment of English commerce in the North Sea. ”

“ About the middle of the sixteenth century it was conferred upon William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burleigh, Secretary of State to Edward VI. and Elizabeth. In July, 1564, the queen paid her trusty counsellor a visit here, and was so pleased with her reception and the beauty of the place, that she expressed her intention of returning hither at a future date. Cecil accordingly demolished the old grange and erected a spacious and handsome mansion for her majesty’s reception.
A contemporary biographer of Cecil has pertinently observed, “He buylt three houses ”

“ A slight, crooked, hump-backed young gentleman, dwarfish in stature, but with a face not irregular in feature, and thoughtful and subtle in expression, with reddish hair, a thin tawny beard, and large, pathetic, greenish-coloured eyes, with a mind and manners already trained to courts and cabinets, and with a disposition almost ingenuous, as compared to the massive dissimulation with which it was to be contrasted, and with what was, in aftertimes, to constitute a portion of his own character, Cecil, young as he was, could not be considered the least important of the envoys. ”

“ When nominalism was revived in the 14th century by the English Franciscan, William of Occam, it gave evidence of a new tendency in thought, a distrust of abstractions and an impulse towards direct observation and inductive research, a tendency which had its fulfilment in the scientific movement of the Renaissance. ”

“ My portrait was painted by Emily Holman Hunt in 1868. She was William’s sister, and had acquired all his mannerisms. My hair sticks out like wrought-iron railings round my head; and I have my old nurse’s authority for saying that I never wore such an ill-starched collar in my life.
There is also a water-colour of his here, which looks like the estuary of the Teign near Newton. I asked him if it was, 7 February 1909, and he told me that he remembered doing it while on a walking-tour in 1860, and it was somewhere between Falmouth and Exeter, but he was not certain where. ”

“ Miss Broadwood has not reached a definite conclusion, but she inclines to the theory that the Duke of the ballad was William De la Pole, first Duke of Suffolk (1396–1450) . She admits, however, that there is a good deal of evidence in favor of the Duke of Grafton, son of Charles II, an account of whose death was printed on a broadside, licensed in 1690. ”

“ Even before the Queen's death it was known that Cecil would be the chief counsellor of the coming reign. "I am told for certain," the Spanish ambassador wrote to Philip after a visit to Elizabeth during the last hours of Mary's life, "that Cecil who was secretary to King Edward will be her secretary also. He has the character of a prudent and virtuous man, although a heretic." But it was only from a belief that Cecil retained at heart the convictions of his earlier days that men could call him a heretic. In all outer matters of faith or worship he conformed to the religion of the state. ”

“ By that time Cecil had begun to trim his sails to a different breeze. He was in secret communication with Elizabeth before Mary died, and from the first the new queen relied on Cecil as she relied on no one else. Her confidence was not misplaced; Cecil was exactly the kind of minister England then required. Personal experience had ripened his rare natural gift for avoiding dangers. It was no time for brilliant initiative or adventurous politics; the need was to avoid Scylla and Charybdis, and a via media had to be found in church and state, at home and abroad. Cecil was not a political genius ”

“ The latter, who wore a short, brown shell-jacket, with a rolling collar laced with gold, and crimson overalls, was smoking a huge pipe and seated at a table littered with papers and printed journals, from which he started up as Cecil entered, and, drawing himself up to the full height of his short pudgy figure, while all his short, stubbly hair seemed to bristle, and his wiry moustaches to stick out like those of a cat, he eyed him with considerable sternness, indignation, and surprise, mingled in a face that was never at any time a very handsome one. ”

“ Henrietta looked at him without speaking. She was aware that the doctor was rather stating aloud the terms of a problem that absorbed him than addressing his sister consciously.
“Do you remember his grandfather whipping him once as a little boy, and his mother saying that he’d been so brave? And even Sir Thomas was pleased with him for that.... You see, the physical isn’t the weak link in the chain for Cecil at all. It’s other things that he minds. He’s most vulnerable where the average Englishman is most impervious.” ”

“ Cecil's head was so filled with thoughts of the pomander-box and his own greatness that his mother was fully dressed while he sat mooning over the lacing of his hose and breeches, and gazing with admiring fondness at the red roses on his holiday shoes. ”

“ Should he have fancied that he had caught a chill, a tea-spoon of this; should his dressing-room feel over-hot, four drops of that; should he encounter a bad smell, a table-spoonful of a third mixture. Poor Cecil's interior must have been like a walking drug-store. He was quite inimitable in eccentric character parts, his "Graves" in Money being irresistibly funny, and his "Baron Stein" in Diplomacy was one of the most finished performances we are ever likely to see, a carefully stippled miniature, with every little detail carefully thought out, touched up and retouched. ”

“ He had a high idea of what was expected from the prime minister of the queen of England. All this splendour and profuseness could not be kept up through life and any large accumulation of wealth be left behind him. In truth Cecil did not die as rich a man as might have been expected, and there is good reason for believing that if his father had not left him an ample patrimony he would have died as poor a man as many another of Elizabeth's ablest and most faithful servants. ”

“ There was nothing heroic about Cecil or his policy; it involved a callous attitude towards struggling Protestants abroad. Huguenots and Dutch Were aided just enough to keep them going in the struggles which warded danger off from England’s shores. But Cecil never developed that passionate aversion from decided measures which became a second nature to his mistress. His intervention in Scotland in 1559–1560 showed that he could strike on occasion; and his action over the execution of Mary, queen of Scots, proved that he was willing to take responsibility from which Elizabeth shrank. ”

“ Even if Cecil discovered the instinct of the pioneer in him he would not listen to it, for he is very proud and very ambitious. When a man towers in an isolated field like Mr. Rhodes, every man who plants his heels in the same field in the same epoch is a moon to Jupiter. And no two men in a century will ever have all the gifts of the Empire-maker united in one brain. Cecil is highly gifted, and he has enormous energy, but his gifts are on the old conservative lines. ”

“ He was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, where one of his acquaintances was Joshua Barnes [q. v.] , author of the ‘Life of Edward III,’ who states that for ‘loyalty, generosity, and affability’ he was most likely to ‘advance the noble name of Cecil to the utmost period of glory.’ On 21 Oct. 1669 he took his seat in the House of Peers, where he was a zealous opponent of the Duke of York's succession. ”

“ To these applications, the Cecils were not entirely inattentive; for, although not influenced by any sympathy for genius, "for a speculative man indulging himself in philosophical reveries, and calculated more to perplex than to promote public business," as he was represented by his cousin, Sir Robert Cecil, [36] they procured for him the reversion of the Registership of the Star Chamber, worth about £1600 a year, for which, modestly ascribing his success to the remembrance of his father's virtues, he immediately acknowledged his obligation to the queen. ”

“ The Bishop’s comment upon this is, that “Cecil’s disgrace must have great effect, as he has many companions in discontent, especially the Duke of Norfolk.... Their quarrels cannot injure public business, as nobody worse than Cecil can be at the head of affairs, but the outcome of it all might be the imprisonment of the Queen, and the proclamation of the Earl of Huntingdon [131] as King. He is a great heretic, and the French forces might be used for him. Cecil says he is the real heir of England, and all the heretics want him. I do not like Cecil’s great friendship with the Bishop of Valence.” ”

“ But, to say nothing of the fact that he sold himself in the most bare-faced manner, I soon learned that when I played a tune on my nerves he’d give in at any price; there are more ways of getting ahead of an Englishman than one. Still he was a fascinating creature—but that’s passed. Cecil always was sweet to me, and I’ve always simply adored him. ”

“ He was tall, too, and of a stately presence; one of those men, in short, to whom, both physically and mentally, a woman, be she ever so highly placed in her own estimation, would hardly have refused to pay the tribute of tacitly acknowledging to her own self that he was her master. Cecil’s father, a practical though not exactly a discerning man, had intended his only son for the Bar; but circumstances, to say nothing of the young man’s own individual tastes, decided against the realisation of the old gentleman’s plans. ”

“ If it be a fair specimen of his style of composition, he must indeed have been a man of but small ‘parts.’ Next year, on the occasion of the French ambassador visiting Cambridge, accompanied by Lord Burghley as chancellor of the university, and other notables, Cecil was admitted M.A. by a special grace of the senate. At a magnificent tournament held at Westminster during this year he took a prominent part, and received a prize at the hands of the queen for his prowess at the barriers. He had always had a desire for a military life, which his father would never allow him to gratify ”

“ Did you receive much injury from the rough usage of the old woman?"
"My face is a little swolen from the effects of the blow, and my arm aches, yet, nothing very serious I believe."
"I have now a favor to ask?"
"What is it?" asked Cecil quickly, and with trepidation in her manner. "Nothing that I shall be obliged to deny you, I hope."
"I trust not young woman. It is this; you have seen my face, and now I wish to look a moment upon yours."
"Oh! is that all," said she laughing. "I can grant it in a minute. Stop until I pull up the wick of the lamp that you may see better. ”