The Tudors (83 page)

Cecil, with his intelligence and education and understanding of court life, was soon noticed and put to use. He became secretary to Seymour—now the Duke of Somerset—in 1548. The following year he spent two months as a prisoner in the Tower in the aftermath of Somerset’s fall, negotiating that crisis with all the skill that Cromwell had shown after the fall of Wolsey almost two decades before. In 1550 he became a member of the Privy Council, one of King Edward’s two secretaries, and “surveyor” (general business manager) of Princess Elizabeth’s estates. Having definitely arrived, he allied himself with Archbishop Cranmer and so impressed Lord Protector John Dudley that he was knighted.

The religious restoration that came with the accession of Mary I created grave difficulties for the evangelical party and everyone connected with Dudley, as we have seen, but Cecil does not appear ever to have been in danger. The queen respected him, he continued to sit in Parliament, and Cardinal Pole used him in diplomatic missions to the continent.
In all likelihood he could have played a substantial role in the new regime, but he chose instead to withdraw to his estate at Wimbledon, maintaining contact with Elizabeth and like her going to occasionally ridiculous lengths (ostentatiously displaying his rosary beads, for example) to demonstrate that he was a faithful and practicing Catholic. Elizabeth was fortunate, when Mary died, to have close at hand an experienced politician who was also as dependable a friend as Cecil. In immediately appointing him her principal secretary, she was showing her basic good sense.

Cecil used his new position to take control of all communications to and from the queen and make himself head of the Privy Council and minister-in-chief. He and Elizabeth were, in important respects, a strangely matched pair. Cecil, once in power, showed himself to be a statesman of some vision, capable of formulating strategic objectives and acting decisively when presented with opportunities to achieve them. Elizabeth, with her focus on trying to maintain a stable status quo, on surviving, was chronically reluctant to make irrevocable commitments. The difference between the two became manifest almost at the beginning, when Cecil correctly saw his opportunity to drive the French out of Scotland but had to threaten to resign before the queen would allow him to act. This set the pattern for the next forty years: Cecil generally knew what he wanted to do next and why, and he repeatedly found it difficult or impossible to get a decision out of the queen. In no way, however, can the partnership be dismissed as a failure for either party. The shrewd and patient Cecil, himself a cautious man but able to take carefully calculated risks, learned to swallow his frustration and wait. In the end he accomplished more than a little. And Elizabeth got what she wanted: she survived, and rather handsomely.

Cecil had been born too late to get in on the great scattering of wealth triggered by the suppression of the monasteries, but his father had benefited in a small way, and during the reign of Edward VI both were able to buy up church lands at insider prices. He was already a fairly rich man when Elizabeth became queen, but the best was yet to come. In the aftermath of his great success in Scotland he was given the lucrative post of master of the Court of Wards and granted extensive tracts of land in Lincolnshire, Rutland, and Northamptonshire. Elizabeth also gave him licenses to trade in beer and cloth—licenses that he could then sell to
eager merchants. For the rest of his life he was able to put himself first in line whenever royal largesse was being dispensed.

On the dynastic front, by contrast, things did not seem to be going particularly well for Cecil. In 1561 he sent his only son, Thomas, who was then nineteen years old, on a two-year grand tour of Europe, during which the youth was reported to be neglecting his prayers and studies to such an extent, and devoting so much time to gambling and sport, that his father threatened to have him forcibly confined. Actually Thomas appears to have been nothing worse than high-spirited and mischievous, his conduct intolerable only by the standards of his father and his strait-laced stepmother. After returning to England he was given a seat in Commons and married to a baron’s daughter. (William Cecil was careful to find spouses among the nobility for all his children, thereby condemning one of his daughters to a disastrously unhappy marriage to an earl.) The court, and the whole world of politics, now lay wide open to Thomas Cecil. His father must have been disappointed when he showed himself to be less interested in life at court than in making a career as a soldier.

In 1563, after eighteen years of marriage, Mildred Cooke Cecil presented William with their first and only son, a boy who was given the name Robert. As with Thomas, however, paternity brought disappointment and worry: the child was not only frail but misshapen, with a humped back and feet that pointed outward; all his life he would walk with a crablike shuffle. Rather obviously, this boy was never going to be a soldier. His father must have feared that he might never prosper in the image-obsessed world of the court, either.

But William now had two heirs a generation apart in age, and it became part of his life’s work to place both of them high among the elite. The age, as we saw earlier in connection with food, was one of conspicuous consumption, and of a growing gulf between rich and poor. All across England, families newly rich on church land were building lavish country homes; it was a way of showing off, of proving wealth and power, of staking a claim to aristocratic status. Probably it is only natural that William, as alert as his own father had been to what would be required for success in the next generation, now set out to build for his sons the grandest nonroyal palaces of the age. From his father he had inherited a Staffordshire estate stitched together from onetime monastic
lands and an old manor called Burghley, and during Queen Mary’s reign he had begun building a house commensurate with his new wealth. Upon the birth of his second son he had bought a property called Theobalds only about a dozen miles from London and begun building there as well, and as his fortune increased his plans for both places became more and more grandiose. Work went on at what was named Burghley House for thirty-two years, culminating in the late 1580s in the completion of the most stupendous of the so-called “prodigy houses” of the Elizabethan period. The house’s main part had thirty-five major rooms on two floors plus another eighty more or less ordinary rooms, with east and west wings nearly equal in size, and it was all set in a park of ten thousand acres. The plans for Theobalds were expanded after Elizabeth paid a first visit in the 1560s and declared her intention to return. She visited ten more times between 1571 and 1594 (each visit cost the proud owner between £2,000 and £3,000—money very well spent), and each time she found the place more imposing than before. In the end it had five interior courts, the largest 110 feet on each side with a huge fountain of black and white marble as its centerpiece. The next largest was eighty-six feet square and abutted presence, privy, bed, and coffer chambers specially built for the queen. The land that Burleigh acquired around it eventually had a circumference of eight miles. When Elizabeth created him Baron Burghley in 1573, there could be no doubt about his having resources appropriate to his new rank.

And neither son proved to be a disappointment. Thomas got the military career he had wanted and distinguished himself, participating in putting down the revolt of the northern earls in 1569 and in an English foray into Scotland in 1573. He was knighted in 1575, went with Robert Dudley and the young Earl of Essex to the Netherlands war in 1585, and was wealthy enough to establish his wife and five sons and eight daughters in a prodigy house of his own at Wimbledon. Though Robert’s disabilities could not be outgrown, and though he was educated at home rather than being sent to university, he grew up to be intelligent, hardworking, ambitious, and cunning. His father placed him in Parliament when he was twenty-one and arranged his marriage to a lady close to the queen. When Francis Walsingham died in 1590 and Elizabeth procrastinated in naming a replacement, William Cecil arranged for Robert to take up the duties of secretary without being able to give him the title.

The question of whether he or someone else would ultimately be appointed gave rise to much court gossip.

Ultimately the question was one of succession: who would take charge when Burghley was finally gone? Essex obviously regarded himself as entitled to do so. And it was he, obviously, whom the queen loved. But it was Robert Cecil whom she appointed to the council in 1591, when Essex was away in France. Nobody knew what to expect, which was exactly the way Elizabeth wanted it.

A Seat at the Table

T
he value of staying home, of keeping close to the queen and flirting with her and becoming as adept as Christopher Hatton at appearing to worship her as an unattainably perfect woman, was soon made plain to Essex. In just a year he was given a seat on the council. That made him a player at the table where policy was decided, and it did so at a time when great questions urgently needed to be answered. After Essex’s departure from France, Alessandro Farnese had forced Henry IV to break off the siege of Rouen, which thus remained in control of France’s Catholic League. But then Farnese suffered a wound that at first did not seem dangerous and abruptly died, not yet forty-eight years old. His passing cost Philip II possibly the best soldier-diplomat of his time. William of Orange’s son and heir, the capable Maurice of Nassau, was able to nurse the Dutch rebellion back to vigor with the help of a continuing English military presence. In Brittany, at the same time, John Norris with his little army succeeded in fighting the Spanish to a standstill—an admirable achievement in light of the difficulties he had experienced in trying to get Elizabeth and Burghley to send him men and money. If Norris was a more effective beggar than Essex in addition to being the better general, he had the advantage of a mother who was a lady of the privy chamber. In any case, having accomplished far more than Essex ever had on the continent, Norris received typical Tudor thanks, returning home sick and seriously in debt only to be ordered
against his will to depart again, this time with orders to crush a rebellion now boiling in Ireland. He was all soldier, gruff and charmless, and though his mother helped to shield him from taking all the blame for disappointments that were not his fault, she was unable to make the queen enjoy his company.

Thanks in part to the queen’s approval, thanks as well to the force of his own personality and to Burghley’s ability to wait patiently for conditions to ripen to the advantage of his son, Essex found himself not only taking an active part in the council’s deliberations but second only to Burghley himself among its members. An informal division of labor was established: the lord treasurer continued his customary dominance over domestic politics and matters financial, while Essex, not yet thirty, was able to take charge of military and foreign affairs. This arrangement created the impression, and certainly encouraged Essex to expect, that when Burghley passed from the scene (surely he could not last long now!) he would be succeeded by the earl as minister-in-chief. The situation was not without difficulty, but it put Essex at odds less with Burghley than with Elizabeth. Essex made himself the council’s great champion of the continental Protestants and therefore of his friend Henry of France. Like Dudley before him, he wanted an English war on Spain and on Spain’s friends in France. Elizabeth, however, not only wanted but needed reduced commitments—and much less military spending. Burghley must have been pleased to remain on the margins of this debate. As treasurer, he was obliged to struggle with an increasingly restless Parliament to find the hundreds of thousands—ultimately the millions—of pounds needed to sustain a conflict that had metastasized from the Netherlands into France and was now threatening to worsen the situation in Ireland as well. However strong his sympathy for the beleaguered Protestants across the Channel, however convinced he may have been that Spain was too dangerous a threat not to be confronted, the old man cannot have been displeased to see Essex become the object of the queen’s displeasure.

Essex had been on the council less than a year when Henry IV brought France’s religious wars to an abrupt end by the simple but shocking expedient of becoming a Roman Catholic. His Huguenot followers, along with the Puritans of England, were of course horrified at such an utterly cynical conversion—“Paris is worth a mass,” Henry
famously declared—but the Catholic League dissolved in confusion mixed with relief. Even the Spanish were at first baffled. Soon the Spanish army was gone from Brittany, its presence there having been rendered pointless, and England was able to withdraw all its troops from the continent except for the small force supporting Maurice of Nassau in the seven Dutch provinces that he now controlled. There could be no general peace, however, so long as England remained engaged in the Low Countries. The relationship between England and Spain deteriorated further as Philip awoke to the possibility of repaying the English for the trouble they had caused him in the Netherlands by making similar trouble in Ireland. The limitations of religion as a determining factor in international relations were demonstrated afresh when Henry IV, securely in command in France as a result of his conversion, declared war on Spain and allied himself with England (thereby allying himself as well, if a bit obliquely, with the Dutch Protestants).