All the Queen's Men (9 page)

While this initial Council lacked the men of stature and the powerful array of personalities which later characterized her Councils, it was nevertheless a carefully considered and balanced collection of individuals, ideal for the initial period of Elizabeth's tenure, when making a good steady start was more desirable than striving for ill-considered spectacular achievements which could so easily backfire at a later date.

‘I mean to direct all my actions by good advice and council,'
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the new young Queen had solemnly declared during her coronation, when the enormity of the task that lay ahead was becoming all too apparent. Throughout the duration of her reign, Elizabeth rarely took a decision without consultation, sometimes taking the process to excessive lengths. It could well be argued that her reign might not have been nearly so successful without the continual benefit of such impeccable guidance from a Council whose influence in turn, may not have been so great had the monarch of the day not been a woman destined to remain unmarried throughout her lifetime. Certainly, the disastrous Stuart era which followed, marked by civil war, Charles I's execution, England a republic for the first and only time, and James II deposed, was largely attributable to successive arrogant male monarchs ignoring what little good advice they received, during a period of time conspicuously lacking in the capable statesmen which Elizabeth so fortunately possessed during the whole of her lifetime. These Privy Councillors were skilfully able to persuade the Queen to embark on courses of action that were sometimes contrary to her personal inclinations and which a more autocratic male monarch might therefore have refused to contemplate yet alone undertake: traumatic events such as the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, a relative as well as a royal personage, or war with Spain, a nation with such manifestly larger resources.

Faced with a powerful and persuasive Council, backed by a Parliament becoming more conscious of its role as the voice of the people, Elizabeth might be said by force of circumstance to have become the first ever democratic English monarch. The decisions that she finally and habitually reluctantly made were indeed very much her own, but had to be acted on swiftly before she predictably changed her mind. Invariably these had come about as a result of continual political pressure mixed with the gentle art of persuasion from skilful statesmen grown well accustomed to her mysterious ways. ‘That deep and inscrutable centre of the Court which is Her Majesty's mind,' declared Francis Bacon, the perceptive son of Sir Nicholas, Elizabeth's long-time Privy Councillor and Lord Keeper.

Left to her own devices Elizabeth's reign might have been one of masterly inactivity, as the Queen was happiest in the safe haven of indecision. Costly mistakes were avoided by simply adopting the principle of waiting in the anticipation of complicated issues being overtaken by events. ‘I am greatly discouraged with her lack of resolutions,' complained William Cecil on one occasion.

Notorious for her indecisive nature, the Queen was extremely slow to make up her mind, exceedingly quick to change it. Yet this irritating facet of her character could well have been merely one of many weapons in an extensive armoury used in dealings with her Council. It kept them guessing, disrupting their logical, predictable thinking processes in a way that was infuriating and frustrating in the extreme, yet could be highly effective, a feminine ruse to neutralize all-male opposition. Her Privy Council could do little else but wait upon her pleasure. By a combination of innate caution, an occasional push from behind and perhaps a bit of guile, the nation's destiny was well assured and Elizabeth's reputation secured throughout her lifetime and maintained to the present day.

Elizabeth made the first appointments of her embryonic Council within just three days of becoming Queen when she chose William Cecil as her Principal Secretary of State on 20 November 1558 while she was still living at Hatfield. It was to be an inspired choice. Cecil was to be Elizabeth's faithful civil servant for the next four decades, a rock of dependability on which to build a successful kingdom and one of the nation's great statesmen.

Cecil was only thirty-eight at the time of his appointment, yet exuded a reassuringly avuncular air, a feeling of reliability and trustworthiness that was greatly appealing to women, particularly a new young Queen, outwardly calm but inwardly desperately anxious to meet the high expectancy of her subjects. The astute, dependable Cecil would enable her to fulfil her objectives. Above all, in an age bedevilled by deceit and corruption he was both discreet and honest. ‘This judgement I have of you,' Elizabeth famously told him at the time of his appointment, ‘that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gift and that you will be faithful to the state and that without respect of my private will, you will give me that council that you think best.'
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It was to prove an assessment that typified Elizabeth's clear-sighted judgement of human nature. Cecil was later to profit greatly from the post of Master of the Court of Wards, given to him by the Queen in 1561, which enabled him to live in considerable style, constructing several magnificent houses such as Burghley, close to his home town of Stamford in Lincolnshire and Theobolds in the Home Counties, where he lavishly entertained Elizabeth on a number of occasions. There is, however, no evidence that his judgement in matters of state was in any way impaired or influenced by material gain, even on Cecil's grand scale.

The relationship between the monarch and her principal minister was a political marriage of considerable convenience – they suited each other admirably, complementing one another in almost every facet of human behaviour. Both were innately cautious, conservative in the extreme. It is one of the strange paradoxes of Elizabeth's reign that amid such a dazzling age of achievement, rapid change and advancement in virtually every aspect of life, the Queen invariably preferred to maintain the status quo. She was rarely proactive and deeply suspicious of the many profound changes happening around her, characteristics she shared with William Cecil.

Cecil, like the Queen, had Welsh origins; his grandfather David Cecil, or ‘Cyssell' as it was then spelt, had fought alongside Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, Elizabeth's grandfather, against Richard III at the decisive Battle of Bosworth in 1485. It was at this battle that victory enabled Henry to claim the Crown as Henry VII, thereby founding the Tudor dynasty of which Elizabeth was to be the fifth and arguably the greatest monarch of the line.

Elizabeth was fortunate, for although Cecil was by far the youngest member of her first Council, he had already gained considerable political experience, first under the Duke of Somerset and then the Duke of Northumberland as part of Edward VI's Council. Although keeping a low profile during Queen Mary's reign, he had undertaken some minor diplomatic missions while patiently awaiting in hopeful anticipation Elizabeth's arrival on the throne. For the eight years before she became Queen, he had served in the young princess's household as her Land Surveyor. Both Elizabeth and Cecil survived the turbulent years that ensued following the death of Henry VIII in 1547 by adopting a thoroughly pragmatic approach, eschewing any romantic idealism and avoiding risk at all cost. So while Somerset and Northumberland were executed at the Tower of London, Elizabeth and Cecil lived on, despite a period of time incarcerated in that great fortress on the Thames originally created by William the Conqueror. Graduating from the same survival school, they forged a unique bond during the many years of her reign, enduring the inevitable trials and tribulations along the way. They admired each other's intellectual abilities and Cecil became progressively more impressed with Elizabeth's growing political acumen.

If William Cecil had ever nourished any thoughts of becoming the power behind the throne, an Elizabethan
éminence grise
, pulling the strings of a puppet princess who had become apprentice Queen, he was soon to be disappointed. Elizabeth proved to be a quick learner, combining this with an exceedingly demanding nature. She displayed an intuitive grasp of politics coupled with an instinctive appreciation of the art of statesmanship, rarely taking a wrong turning in the complex sixteenth-century corridors of power. So when Cecil returned from Scotland in 1560, delighted with his unexpected yet successful achievement of the Treaty of Scotland, thereby removing the threat of a hostile neighbour on England's northern border, he was both surprised and dismayed to be received coolly by a monarch keen to demonstrate a determination not to be over-dependent on the abilities and actions of any one person, not even one as energetic and capable as Cecil. It was a salutary lesson for her new Secretary of State and a foretaste of a relationship which was to continue in a similar vein for many years to come.

William Cecil was the consummate bureaucrat and administrator, qualities which Elizabeth greatly admired and exploited shamelessly throughout his long and distinguished career, even summoning him to Court for official business within days of the death of his wife. Like several of her key Councillors, Cecil continually suffered from poor health. He was severely stricken with gout from his early thirties, an affliction which left him in old age unable to walk unaided. This is possibly why the well-known portrait of him in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, shows him astride a mule. Elizabeth was unmoved, ‘my Lord, we make use of you, not for your bad legs, but for your good head,'
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she urged her hard-pressed adviser, who was also becoming rather deaf.

Cecil was the only one of Elizabeth's Privy Councillors to receive a peerage: the Queen made him Lord Burghley in 1571. Surprisingly, he later declined the Earldom of Northampton, not long after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, ‘being too old and too poor for higher honour',
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as he was to write to his fellow Privy Councillor, the 6th Earl of Shrewsbury in January 1589.

William Cecil's early dominance of the Queen's Council was to be short-lived: two years after his own appointment he was joined on the Privy Council by the hugely handsome Lord Robert Dudley. Dudley, who had already exercised considerable influence over the Queen as a royal favourite and ardent suitor for her affections and was now attempting to reinvent himself as a politician, having failed in his bid to become Elizabeth's husband. While his royal romantic ambitions were to come to nothing, his political aspirations were rewarded when the Queen elevated him to her Privy Council in the autumn of 1562, additionally appointing him a Knight of the Garter and granting him the generous gift of Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, together with extensive estates.

At the same time Elizabeth perversely appointed to her Council Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of England and the nation's only Duke at that time, the latest member of a powerful family that had long influenced English affairs of state. He was also a sworn enemy of Robert Dudley. His appointment to the Council was a typical tactic of the Queen, and one for which she was well known. The concept of complete harmony on the Privy Council was simply not Elizabeth's style – she continually appointed members whom she knew held opposing views and different agendas. Intriguingly, this strategy worked remarkably well most of the time, although it was not long before Dudley and Norfolk began to dress up their respective followers in distinctive colourful outfits, to roam in noisy gangs through the Royal Court like rival modern-day football supporters. No doubt it kept the Queen amused, but not William Cecil, who had little time for the dashing Dudley, whom he saw as an irrelevant but dangerous distraction both for the Queen and the nation as a whole. Yet their uneasy relationship on the Council lasted for twenty-five years, during which time they complemented each other well, Cecil's gravitas contrasting with Dudley's more glamorous image, all to the Queen's satisfaction and the nation's benefit.

Lord Robert Dudley's unpopularity with some of the Privy Council members arose rather unfairly from a collective jealousy of his intimate relationship with the Queen, coupled with the undoubted chequered history of his family. Both his father and grandfather were Dukes of Northumberland who had been executed for high treason under previous monarchs. Dudley himself had spent time in the Tower, imprisoned on suspicion of plotting against Queen Mary. Thus the sins of the fathers coupled with his own rumoured carnal sin with Elizabeth prejudiced his initial attempts to be viewed objectively as a trustworthy member of the Council. Even his swarthy good looks were held against him: ‘beware of the gypsey, for he will be too hard for you all, you know not the beast so well as I do',
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the Earl of Sussex, another implacable enemy, supposedly warned on his deathbed. Robert Dudley was also wrongly suspected of being implicated along with the rather dim and misguided Duke of Norfolk in the ‘Ridolfi Plot', one of the endless Catholic conspiracies, real or imagined, which involved removing Elizabeth from the throne in order to replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots.

Dudley was singularly unsuccessful as a military commander in the Netherlands, one of a number of royal favourites seemingly more successful in the bedroom than on the battlefield. Yet Dudley was a political survivor and served for more than a quarter of a century as a trusted Councillor to the Queen, who created him Earl of Leicester in 1564. His consistently upbeat approach made a refreshing counterbalance to William Cecil's sometimes depressingly ingrained caution, an attitude which served Elizabeth very effectively, particularly during the long war years.

It was not long before the Queen and her Council knew each other intimately. The Councillors understood her character. Recognizing her violent mood swings, they became masters of timing and manipulation, well rehearsed in the art of subtle persuasion, soothing when the Queen became strident, reassuring when she was anxious or depressed. Naturally, Elizabeth fully comprehended this and treated them accordingly. ‘I perceive they deal with me like physicians who administering a drug, make it more acceptable by giving it a good aromatical savour or when they give pills to gild them all over,'
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she once sardonically declared to a foreign envoy.