Stephen Alford is the author of the highly acclaimed The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He taught for fifteen years at Cambridge University, where he was a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of History and a Fellow of King’s College. He is now Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Leeds.
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Death! I dare tell him so; and all his Spies.
The heart is more devious than any other thing, it is perverse; who can pierce its secrets?
Jeremiah 17:9
Trustworthy words Are not Beautiful, Beautiful words Are not to be Trusted
Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 81, translated by John Minford
I may have had my frailties as all the sons of Adam. Robert Cecil to Patrick, master of Gray, 1603
Photographic acknowledgements are given in parentheses.
1. Sir Robert Cecil, c.1602, by John de Critz the Elder. Hatfield House, Hertfordshire. (Bridgeman Images)
2. William Cecil, 1st Baron of Burghley, 1587, by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. (World History Archive/Alamy)
3. Mildred, Lady Burghley, c.1570–74, attributed to Hans Eworth. Hatfield House, Hertfordshire. (Bridgeman Images)
4. Bird’s-eye view of Antwerp, from Civitates Orbis Terrarum, c.1572, by Georg Braun and Frans Hogenburg, (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
5. Sir Christopher Hatton, probably a seventeenth-century copy of a portrait of 1589, by an unknown artist. National Portrait Gallery, London. (Art Collection 3/Alamy)
6. The ‘Rainbow Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I, c.1600, by Isaac Oliver. Hatfield House, Hertfordshire. (Bridgeman Images)
7. King James VI of Scotland c.1595, attributed to Adrian Vanson. Scottish National Portrait Gallery. (incamerastock/Alamy)
8. Title-page of William Allen’s A True Sincere and Modest Defence of English Catholiques That Suffer for Their Faith, 1585, with handwritten notes by Richard Topcliffe. Cambridge University Library, shelf-mark F.15.24.(Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)
9. A raid on a Catholic house, illustration from Richard Verstegan’s Theatre of the Cruelties of the Heretics of Our Time, 1592. Cambridge University Library, shelf-mark U.*.4.41. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)
10. Instructions set out by the spy Michael Moody for secret communications with Sir Robert Cecil from Antwerp, 1591. Hatfield
House Archives, Cecil Papers 203/124. (Reproduced with permission of the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House)
11. Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, c.1596, by Isaac Oliver. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. (Yale Center for British Art)
12. Sir Edward Hoby, 1583, by an unknown artist. Private collection. (Picture Art Collection/Alamy)
13. Monument to Lady Elizabeth Cecil, c.1597. Westminster Abbey, London. (Copyright © 2024 Dean and Chapter of Westminster)
14. ‘The names of the Intelligencers’. The National Archives, State Papers 12/265, no. 134. (National Archives, Kew)
15. Charles Howard, Lord Howard of Effingham and earl of Nottingham, sixteenth century, English school. Private collection. (Christie’s, London)
16 . Lord Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, 1601–3, by an unknown artist. Private collection. (Art Collection 2/Alamy)
17. Alessandro Farnese, Prince and Duke of Parma, c.1580, Italian school. Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds. (Bridgeman Images)
18. Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, c.1616, workshop of Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Rijksstudio)
19. Draft by Robert Cecil of a secret letter to King James VI , 1601. Hatfield House Archives, Cecil Papers 135/72. (Reproduced with permission of the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House)
20. The same letter, showing Cecil’s heavy alterations. Hatfield House Archives, Cecil Papers 135/72. (Reproduced with permission of the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House)
21. Secretary Cecil in the funeral procession for Queen Elizabeth I, April 1603. Detail of a hand-coloured facsimile drawing, said to have been made by William Camden in 1791. Private Collection. (Look and Learn/Peter Jackson/Bridgeman Images)
22. Ben Jonson, c.1617, by Abraham van Blyenberch. National Portrait Gallery, London. (incamerastock/Alamy)
23. Title-page of Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, His Fall from his Workes, 1616. (Boston Public Library)
24. The Somerset House Conference, 1604, by an unknown artist. National Portrait Gallery, London. (Album/Alamy)
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25. The core group of Gunpowder plotters, 1605, detail from a contemporary Dutch print. Private collection. (Look and Learn/Peter Jackson/Bridgeman Images)
26. Francis Bacon, 1617, Paul van Somer I. Palace on the Isle, Warsaw. (Wikimedia Commons)
27. Father Henry Garnet, undated portrait by an unknown artist. (The History Collection/Alamy)
28. Hatfield House, Hertfordshire. (Loop Images/Alamy)
29. The Marble Hall at Hatfield House. (Jane Tansi/Alamy)
30 . Tomb of Robert Cecil, 1615, by Maximilian Colt. Church of St Etheldreda, Hatfield. (C. B. Newham/Alamy)
Robert Cecil , principal secretary to Queen Elizabeth I and King James I, and later lord treasurer, created by James Baron Cecil of Essendon, Viscount Cranborne and 1st earl of Salisbury.
Queen Elizabeth i of England and Ireland, daughter of King Henry VIII and Queen Anne Boleyn; reigned 1558–1603.
King James VI of Scotland (reigned 1567–1625), James I of England, Scotland and Ireland (reigned 1603–25).
William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s lord treasurer, Robert Cecil’s father, and husband of Mildred , Lady Burghley.
Lady Elizabeth Cecil (Bess) , Robert Cecil’s wife.
William Cecil, Viscount Cranborne , later 2nd earl of Salisbury, son of Bess and Robert Cecil.
Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex , courtier and favourite of Queen Elizabeth, Robert Cecil’s rival.
Francis Bacon , Robert Cecil’s maternal first cousin, suitor, lawyer and follower of Robert, earl of Essex.
William Wade , clerk of Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council and in the reign of James I lieutenant of the Tower of London.
Thomas Phelippes , decipherer and intelligencer.
Michael Hickes , Lord Burghley’s patronage secretary and Robert Cecil’s friend ‘Master Michael’.
Henry Maynard , Lord Burghley’s private secretary.
Roger Houghton , Robert Cecil’s steward.
Simon Willis , Robert Cecil’s first private secretary.
Levinus Munck , one of Robert Cecil’s later private secretaries.
The Dutch States
United Provinces in 1588/1589
Extent of Spanish control by 1589
Robert Cecil’s tour 1588 North
0 50 miles 0 50 kms
Portsmouth
Main postal routes
Some portraits get hold of you straight away. Robert Cecil’s is unlikely to be one of them.
Those of Charles de Solier, sieur de Morette and Robert Cheseman, for example, both painted by Hans Holbein the Younger in an earlier time, grip you fast. These men have presence and power. They can look at and even straight through you, as the great ones often do. They are in charge and are not to be crossed. Yet all the virtuosity of the Flemish artist John de Critz couldn’t do this for Cecil. He looks pallid by comparison.
And so the first impression. A middle-aged man in a sober business suit of black, with a long face and high forehead, hair combed back, a trimmed reddish beard and delicately expressive hands. Most certainly not a courtier glittering in full Technicolor or a man who dominates. More scholar than politician, we might think, though probably we’d guess a quietly ambitious one. A man who sits for an artist out of duty and for form’s sake, who only tolerates the scrutiny, who would rather be somewhere else. Decorating the portrait is a motto, Sero, sed serio, whose clever Latin wordplay can’t hide the whisper of an apology – ‘Late, but in earnest’.
Resist this first impression – it is the mask Robert Cecil presented to the world, the mask this book tries to get behind.
Why should you want to read a long book about Cecil? It is a fair question to ask. I hope what follows gives you an answer and persuades you to turn its pages through to the end.
He was the most accomplished and formidable politician of his generation. No one had power quite like his – not in England, not perhaps
to the reader in Europe. He was close adviser to two monarchs, Queen Elizabeth I and King James I. He manoeuvred his country through and beyond the death of Elizabeth, stage-managing the trickiest change of ruling family in a century. Some admired his political arts. Many feared him. By the end of his life some people – from political rivals, frustrated suitors and poets to ordinary Elizabethans and Jacobeans grumbling in taverns about their betters – detested him for his riches and his influence. He was the object of conspiracy theories, the subject of slanders and libels. Not many mourned his death at the age of forty-eight.
His world was full of shadows and evasions, ambition and secrecy, deceptions and betrayal. You’ll soon discover that things were often not as they seemed to be. Many of the fine Elizabethan words and phrases which are quoted in this book have all the substance of smoke; friendships seem more like enmities; loyalties quickly dissolve. In the furnace of the royal court hopes and disappointments were superheated to sometimes explosive temperatures. Unforgiving competition for patronage made courtiers struggle for the promotions, lands and offices that were in the gift of the monarch. They frequently struggled against each other. And then there was politics.
For a minister like Robert Cecil, serving the ruling prince was everything. Anticipating the wishes and navigating the moods and whims of any monarch kept advisers dancing uncomfortably on their toes. The monarch was absolute, blessed by God. She or he was also fallibly human, as ministers knew very well, even though they couldn’t say it. The superlative adviser – this is what Robert Cecil drove himself so hard to be – had to wrap himself around the will of his prince. And he needed to survive. ‘You good men which frequent the court, your life, and the way wherein you walk, is very slippery: . . . Wherefore you ought to be very circumspect, and to stay yourselves well, lest you fall.’ So wrote one of the great scholars of sixteenth-century Europe, a student of princes’ power, Justus Lipsius. He was quite right. Many failed at court. But no one was more circumspect than Cecil; no one was better trained for political life. He was engineered to serve.1
There are lots of things we know about Robert Cecil and lots that we don’t. His life has to be dug out of the mountain of paper he left
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behind, most of which survives today in the archives of the extraordinary statement house he built (but didn’t live long enough to occupy), Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, and in the collections of the National Archives (mainly the State Papers of the old Public Record Office) and in the British Library in London. So vast is this collection of material that any historian or biographer, for the sake of their readers’ patience and their own sanity, has to choose a path through it. Selection is necessary: a multi-volume epic that tried to include and do everything would be unreadable. There is only so much bureaucratic detail about day-to-day government that any sensible person would want to know about.
What I have endeavoured to do above all, powered by some narrative energy, is to try to get to the heart of Robert Cecil – or at the very least to give us a fuller, richer Cecil than the rather bloodless bureaucrat we find lurking on the edges of popular Tudor history. My emphases are on power and politics, state security and secrecy, and the royal succession following Queen Elizabeth. The greater weight of the book is Elizabethan, though, undoubtedly, we get close to the core of Robert Cecil in the years either side of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
Collecting paper was a compulsion for two Elizabethan generations of the Cecil family. Robert’s father, William Cecil, 1st baron of Burghley, was the longest-serving and most influential of Elizabeth’s ministers. As Burghley’s obedient son and apprentice, Robert was for years in his shadow. There is no way of telling Cecil’s story up to the age of thirtyfive, when his father died, without Burghley.
Nothing much survives of Robert’s childhood – only a few disparate sources. At eighteen he begins to come into focus, at twenty-one even more so. We can follow him properly and fully from his visit to Paris in 1584, but our best early meeting with him – where we really begin to hear the richness of Robert’s voice for the first time – is on his tour of the war-torn Netherlands in 1588 aged twenty-four, a few months before King Philip II of Spain launched his Armada against England. By 1591, the year Cecil turned twenty-eight, when Queen Elizabeth appointed him to her Privy Council, he is completely present. From too few sources, we have from this time on so many, thanks
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to the reader to his family’s habit of hoarding documents and to the long reach and depth of their power.
Where the Cecils served, they also dominated. What they dominated was government – it is a connecting thread of this book.
In some ways the corridors of power have changed very little in four hundred years: we might very easily imagine a contemporary setting for Robert Cecil’s story. There are aspects to human politics and rivalry which feel eternal. Yet Elizabeth’s government functioned quite differently from most governments in our age, even where there are names and institutions – Parliament, Privy Council, the Exchequer – which are still with us today. Understanding the royal court, the council, the role of the monarch’s secretary, parliaments and the problem of Ireland may help you to situate Robert Cecil and his career. What follows is a very brief guide.
The Tudor and early Stuart monarchs moved (or ‘removed’) between their palaces; their courts were peripatetic. The great royal palaces were mainly situated along the course of the River Thames, along which it was straightforward to move by boat and barge: these were Greenwich, Hampton Court, Nonsuch, Richmond, St James’s, Whitehall and others. Elizabeth in particular regularly went on late spring and late summer progresses to visit her courtiers’ and officials’ private houses and estates, where grand entertainments were laid on to welcome her. These progresses were efficient ways of keeping contact with her elite, of meeting her people, of escaping disease-ridden London and Westminster, and (always important for the parsimonious queen) of keeping her costs down, by getting her hosts to pay handsomely for the privilege of housing the whole royal court – which, with courtiers and servants, could number about 1,700 people. Access to the monarch’s private rooms, especially the Privy Chamber, was strictly controlled. Proximity to the queen or king mattered for those families at court who wanted to maintain their own high position or hoped for further favour. That Lord Burghley and Robert Cecil had so much access to Elizabeth – that in fact she needed them close by her to conduct routine business – tells us something very significant about their power and influence at court and in government.
Thronging the court and queueing outside the chambers of courtiers were suitors. Tudor and early Stuart courts and governments ran on
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the fuel of patronage – offices, lands and estates, privileges and preferments, in government and in the Church, all in the hands of the Crown. Those suitors who spoke loudest and petitioned most were sometimes successful in getting the patronage they wanted, putting themselves on the promotional ladder. Often jobs in royal government were ‘in reversion’, that is, they were passed from known successor to known successor, sometimes in the same families. It was a sort of queueing system that used contacts and connections, involved shameless lobbying, and was often lubricated by gifts and favours. Probably nothing caused more anxiety for suitors than patrons at court who might deny them what they were desperate to have. It was no wonder that flattery, self-abasement and kow-towing to powerful courtiers was so much a part of the language and life of the court. Government followed monarch and court: the monarch was government, absolute in his or her power, though not a tyrant. A queen or king governed according to laws and customs, took advice and counsel and was answerable with their soul ultimately to God. She or he was aided by ministers; councillors swore to the monarch an oath of personal loyalty and secrecy. The late Elizabethan Privy Council was small: sixteen councillors in spring 1590, thirteen by December of the same year, eleven in 1598. There were occasional injections of new blood, but Elizabeth became with age ever more hesitant and conservative in her appointments. Her councillors were all from long-established families at court – earls, barons and knights, all of the nobility, knights of the Order of the Garter, and most holding the various great offices of state or roles within the queen’s household, for which there was a fixed hierarchy. From the archbishop of Canterbury (the only cleric) at the top, to the lord chancellor (or sometimes a lord keeper of the great seal), the lord treasurer, the lord admiral, the lord chamberlain, the lord steward, the treasurer, comptroller and vice chamberlain of the household, the principal secretary, all the way down to the chancellor of the Exchequer and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The council met nearly every day, including Sundays, usually first thing in the morning, to discuss the routine business of government and administration. It sent out instructions to officials and noblemen all over the kingdom, for which a team of expert clerks kept register books of letters and memoranda. Every royal palace had a council chamber. What the clerks didn’t record were
political discussions on sensitive matters of policy, which sometimes Elizabeth would host in her own private rooms.
Low down in the council’s hierarchy was the monarch’s principal secretary, the central co-ordinator and planner for the whole government machine. Every piece of paper on every subject under the sun, from Church appointments to military planning, to law and justice, to economic reform, crossed the secretary’s desk. This was the Cecils’ métier, where Robert Cecil and, before him, Lord Burghley flourished in the great tradition of Thomas Cromwell and William Paget in earlier Tudor reigns (the latter was Burghley’s model and mentor). As we will see, the secretary had to be a skilled technician of policy and detail. But he was no robotic technocrat. Everyone knew that a good secretary had to be the keenest student of human nature and a deft courtier, superbly attuned to mood and atmosphere. As one clerk of the council advised in working for Elizabeth,
Learn before your access her Majesty’s disposition by some in the Privy Chamber with whom you must keep credit, for that will stand you in much stead, and yet yield not too much to their importunity for suits, for so you may be blamed, nevertheless pleasure them when conveniently you may.
In other words, know everything about what was happening with and all around the queen, every moment, every day – your career depends on it. A secretary had to have lightning-sharp political reflexes.2
All privy councillors sat in parliaments, the archbishop, earls and barons (with the other bishops and the rest of the nobility) in the House of Lords, and knights and other gentlemen in the House of Commons. Parliaments met in the old Westminster Palace (most of this, except for Westminster Hall, into which were packed the Tudor and Stuart courts of law, burned down in a great fire in 1834). ‘The most high and absolute power of the realm of England consisteth in the parliament. For as in war, where the king himself in person, the nobility, the rest of the gentility, and the yeomanry are, is the force and power of England’, as one distinguished writer put it early in Elizabeth’s reign. By passing statutes, debated as bills in and between Lords and Commons and willed into law by the monarch, parliament could
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the reader in theory deal with anything, from weights and measures and the affairs of towns and cities to the greatest matters of Church and State. But Elizabethan and Jacobean parliaments were complicated. First, they were parliaments, plural; they were events, summoned when the monarch wanted them to meet, usually to raise money through taxation. It was a long-established principle that the Crown’s subjects could not be taxed without their own consent and a parliament represented the voice of the whole kingdom (even though the Elizabethan electorate of property-holders was tiny). So, parliaments were important, but they didn’t sit all the time, and years might pass between one parliament and the next.3
In addition, parliaments were not meant to be political, at least not for Elizabeth who valued their compliance, silence and generosity: when they met she wanted money, not debate. She refused to let any parliament discuss issues which she felt trespassed on her absolute powers as monarch – so-called prerogative matters such as any proposed marriage or the royal succession. Parliaments frequently flouted this limitation, however – sometimes because members of the Commons, especially, felt, in loyalty, that there were urgent issues that had to be talked about and acted upon; sometimes because the queen’s ministers tried occasionally to use parliaments to galvanize her into action on matters of state like the succession. This kind of pressure she both resisted and resented, and it provoked some of the finest speeches of her reign – brilliant examples of her haughtiest ‘Who’s Queen?’ mode of keeping subjects in their place. Robert Cecil saw for himself such complicated political theatre in the first parliament he sat in, in 1584 and 1585, when his father and Elizabeth’s then principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, tried to draft emergency legislation for the queen’s safety and for the security of the kingdom. They even went so far as to lay out the mechanisms for an interregnum government should Elizabeth be assassinated; this she refused to accept. Robert Cecil would one day have his own struggles with parliaments, caught painfully between Lords and Commons and the monarch.
Security both from outside attack and from enemies within was always a heavy preoccupation of Elizabeth’s and James’s ministers. England was a small Protestant kingdom facing many powerful Catholic enemies, principally Philip II of Spain. There were a few Protestant
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Most viscerally of all, the regime felt its weakness in Ireland, the single greatest territorial problem for Elizabeth. She was its queen. It was her second kingdom, an old inheritance settled centuries before by the Anglo-Norman nobility and, more recently, by English Protestant landowners. This made Ireland a delicate, often fractious, cultural melange of Gaelic-speaking indigenous Irish, old established settlers and new, as well as a fortress-strong bastion of the old Catholic faith, which resisted the kingdom’s Protestantization from the 1540s. This was a programme of Reformation insisted on by Westminster and implemented by the English government based in Dublin. But the anglicized territory around Dublin, known as the Pale, was very different from the rest of Ireland. Over the whole island Elizabethan officials laboured with great difficulty to extend their control. They either recruited the support of Anglo-Irish noblemen, or isolated those landowners who got in the way of English government. In addition, by the 1570s, they tried using Ireland as a laboratory for the colonial settlements later taken to North America. These Protestant settler outposts were justified by the supposed lawlessness and wildness of the Irish and by the need to impose order and civility on them. Gradually English officials, in trying to extend their power by placing their own clients and supporters as landholders, pushed Gaelic chieftains into open revolt.
By the 1590s Ireland was becoming a fantastic drain on English money and military resources. Armies were sent by Elizabeth but they were unable to establish English rule and order. There were brutal massacres. The Exchequer in Westminster felt the weight of an impossible financial burden: the rebellion that began in 1593 was calculated in 1603 to have consumed about two million pounds, nearly twenty times the cost of repelling the Spanish Armada in 1588, and a sum even greater than that expended on the longer war against Spain. In this book we will see one career definitively ended by a failure of leadership in Ireland – that of Robert Cecil’s rival Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex.
* allies: in Scotland, in France (when its kings were Protestants), in the northern Netherlands, in Denmark, and in some of the German states. But mostly the regime felt itself vulnerable both abroad and at home – especially from those less easily governed parts of northern England and Wales, a long way from Westminster and London.
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This book keeps Cecil moving forward at a brisk pace. In it I have tried to take you behind the arras to hear the process, as Shakespeare says in Hamlet – to observe Elizabethan and early Jacobean politics from the inside, as we hide ourselves away, listening to conversations, making sense of the actors at close quarters.
There are still gaps, still evasions, still bits of the story that don’t quite fit together – all of these you are bound to see or sense at some point. Lives are rarely as tidy as we might want them to be. Cecil himself wasn’t a static character, was never fixed in one place; he adapted himself to people and situations. The bureaucrat of paper and process, which is how we might at first make sense of the de Critz portrait, is a thin caricature. If we look more closely we begin to find the courtier, highly intelligent, perceptive, commanding and supple in his reasoning. Perhaps there was a negative energy also. ‘There’s power in me and will to dominate / Which I must exercise, they hurt me else’, are lines from Robert Browning’s poem ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ that I have kept returning to in the few years of writing this book, for it always seems to me that there was something very strongly suppressed – perhaps repressed – about Cecil. He held himself under an extraordinary and unyielding self-discipline; he rarely let slip an unguarded word; he measured and planned everything. His powers to dissimulate, to be secret, to hide motives and political moves were considerable. They were necessary too. Justus Lipsius again: ‘The court is full of danger.’
There were also, I think, other Robert Cecils: Cecil as friend, Cecil as husband and father. It can’t be simply an accident of de Critz’s composition that Robert Cecil’s wedding ring, to which I always find my own eye drawn, is almost at the geographical centre of the portrait. Yet these identities, too, he kept tightly under lock and key, giving away only so much.
He grew up late in a century fractured by religious division, war and bitter dynastic rivalry. Sixteenth-century Europe was comprised of kingdoms, provinces and small states under the authority of local or foreign princes. Rebellion or dissatisfaction expressed against overlords was common: we have some sense of this already from the case of Ireland.
As monarchies, England, Scotland and France were relatively straightforward. Scotland had a king, and for a time a queen, though the country was under the influence of France until the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign (King James V, who died in 1542, twice married French princesses); France, a kingdom of power and wealth, had for centuries been England’s rival. Much of the rest of the Continent was a disordered patchwork of dynastic accretions, the complexity and diversity of which can leave us dazed, used as we are today to big states with clear boundaries and (more or less) unitary systems of government. The Low Countries (roughly modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands) were provinces ruled by the Spanish Habsburgs; the German states of the Holy Roman Empire had all kinds of rulers (Rhinegraves, margraves, dukes, bishops). Italy was not unified, but was composed of city states and small kingdoms (Naples, for example, was another Spanish territory), and the pope was a head of state as well as a religious leader.
So much was shaped in Europe by the accidents and happenstances of dynasty. Royal families mattered: their births, their marriages, their deaths, their rivalries with one another. In some ways we could write the history of sixteenth-century Europe through the commanding residences these rulers built, all the way from the palaces of Falkland and Holyrood in Scotland to the royal chateaux of the Loire, from the Coudenberg Palace in Brussels south to the monasterypalace of El Escorial in Spain. All ruling families had histories, sometimes distinguished, occasionally infamous. Generation shaped generation; reputations mattered. The disposition of the first of the two monarchs we will get to know very well in this book, Elizabeth I, was described by her godson as sweet and refreshing as a westerly breeze on a summer’s morning. But sometimes there was a sharp change in the weather: Elizabeth ‘could put forth such alterations, when obedience was lacking, as left no doubting whose daughter she was’. Sir John Harington meant here King Henry VIII , though for Catholic Europe it was Elizabeth’s mother who mattered most: Anne Boleyn, the woman for whom Henry had rejected his first wife Katherine of Aragon, precipitating the break with the Church of Rome. This action further fractured a Christendom already challenged by Martin Luther and other reformers, shattered England’s faith and
remapped its foreign diplomacy. These were memories still vivid in Elizabeth’s reign. To her Catholic foes across Europe, she was no queen at all, simply the bastard daughter of Henry’s courtesan, a heretic offspring of a heretic woman. This is one of the reasons why Elizabeth’s ministers believed to their core that her throne was under constant attack from enemies overt and covert.4
The most powerful of Elizabeth’s rivals – indeed the most powerful of all Europe’s monarchs – was the Spanish Habsburg King Philip II , the ‘Most Catholic King’ as his official title ran, who cast himself as the great defender of Catholic Europe against heresy, against the Ottomans and Islam. Elizabeth’s government believed Philip to be plotting against her at every turn and opportunity, a fear to which there was a strand of truth – the Spanish Armada of 1588 is the obvious illustration. His monarchy was multinational and highly bureaucratic, as well as very expensive to maintain and defend. It stretched from Spain and Portugal east to Italy and north to the Spanish Netherlands. It was global too, extending out to the Americas and the East Indies. Philip had very much more than Protestant England to worry about.
From 1568 he faced a rebellion by his provinces in the Netherlands provoked by complaints about heavy taxation and the high-handedness of his local governors. Two years earlier Dutch Calvinists, Protestants influenced by the teaching of the French reformer Jean Calvin, had risen in religious revolt. There was open warfare and Philip deployed troops. During the 1570s England supported the Dutch with money and mercenaries, and in 1585 agreed a treaty with the new independent ‘States’ of the northern Netherlands to send an army to the Low Countries. One part of this agreement was the English garrisoning of three Dutch ports. Elizabeth’s ministers explained this provocative third-party involvement in a foreign rebellion as legitimate self-defence: Lord Burghley wrote that the queen could no longer ‘suffer the King of Spain to grow to the full height of his designs and conquests’. They were sure that should the Dutch be defeated, Philip would invade England. Elizabeth’s war against Spain lasted until 1604.5
Moreover, it wasn’t only Spain that seemed to threaten England. For decades, the queen’s ministers saw danger and division all about them. In France, divided from the 1560s all the way into the 1590s by a religious civil war with noble families, both Catholic and
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Protestant, fighting for dominance, its throne contested by two dynasties, Angoulême and Bourbon. (So much hung in France – and elsewhere in Europe – on the deaths of kings.) In Scotland, where in 1567 Elizabeth’s blood cousin Mary Stuart was deposed and Mary’s baby son James made king. This fragile royal minority was merely one punctuation mark in decades of Scottish political infighting and instability. This is our James, the sixth of Scotland, the first of Great Britain and Ireland.
There were also deep domestic challenges. Elizabeth’s Protestant Church of England drove English Catholics either underground or into exile. This provoked an international mission to recover England to the true Catholic faith, a mission that Elizabeth’s government saw as treason and subversion. The queen herself, unmarried, childless and with no obvious heir, staunchly refused to name a successor. England faced its own dynastic emergency.
This, then, was the Cecils’ business over four decades. Every paper on every one of these dangers crossed Lord Burghley’s desk. They became Robert Cecil’s concern too as he learned his trade as Elizabeth’s minister.
Which takes us to the town of Antwerp on the Scheldt river a few months before the Spanish Armada sailed into the English Channel.
In March 1588 a foreign visitor arrived in Antwerp from Ghent. Keen and attentive, a privileged Englishman in enemy territory, he was twenty-four years old. So far on his journey he had shivered with ambassadors and diplomats in Ostend and had slogged his way through filthy weather from Bruges. Now on his own, his optimism was undiminished. He liked Antwerp. The young man had an appraising eye; he was an observer who missed little.
Over thirty years before, one of the artists of Antwerp’s golden years, Frans Floris, had painted a great triptych of the defeat of Satan by a heavenly army commanded by the archangel Michael. The twelfth chapter of Revelation in the New Testament, as a good Protestant Elizabethan would find it in the Geneva Bible, described it so: ‘And there was a battle in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels . . . And the great dragon, that old serpent, called the devil and Satan, was cast out . . . he was even cast into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’
The triptych’s vast central panel, six-and-a-half feet by ten, shows Michael and his forces striking down the monstrous rebels with scimitars and rapiers. In early spring 1588 the great painting was hanging where our visitor could not have missed it, in the half-light of the Church of Our Lady, which towered over Antwerp’s market square.1
Antwerp and its citizens knew all about rebellion and religious violence. In 1566 Floris’s masterpiece had had to be hidden away when Protestant iconoclasts had ransacked Antwerp’s churches, defacing the Catholic devotional art they hated as idolatry. There followed
within a few years the Dutch Revolt, the decades-long war against Spanish rule in the Netherlands.
Antwerp, which for many years had been the financial and cultural powerhouse of western Europe, suffered the humiliations and privations of war. Governed in turn by both sides – pro-Spanish Catholics, then scouring Calvinists – the town had at last surrendered in August 1585 to King Philip’s brilliant general, the duke of Parma, who was received into Antwerp with bonfires and bells. Antwerp’s fall was yet another defeat for the beleaguered forces of Protestant Europe in their resistance to the might of Catholic Spain. And it was a particular blow to England, whose soldiers were soon to become fully engaged in the Dutch struggle against Philip II , a commitment of men and treasure that Queen Elizabeth’s government could ill afford. Antwerp’s experience was a stark reminder for Elizabethans of the power of the enemy. Their Protestant kingdom was vulnerable, their world fragile.2
Yet, for all this the battered town was in 1588 still a sight to stir a receptive traveller eager to be impressed. The young English gentleman wrote: ‘This town is one of the pleasantest cities that I ever saw for situation and building.’3
His name was Robert Cecil. He was in Antwerp just for a few days, with neither fuss nor fanfare. True, he carried Parma’s passport; he had privilege and access; he was shown all the sights. But there again he was, after all, the son of Elizabeth’s most influential minister, William Cecil, Lord Burghley. He travelled simply. With him on his short tour of the Low Countries was a middle-aged manservant whom he had known since his own boyhood. Master Cecil and Roger Houghton: the perfect gentleman and – a fact confirmed by his discreet invisibility – the perfect servant.4
Robert Cecil’s journey to the Low Countries had begun with an invitation to join an embassy to the duke of Parma led by Henry, earl of Derby. Robert had jumped at the opportunity. He was desperate to travel, to breathe fresh new air, to see in a new light the arts of power that were his own inheritance and future.
Lady Burghley thought at first that her son was too fragile to make
the journey: Robert himself acknowledged his own ‘not strongest constitution’. Derby offered the young gentleman shelter from the blunt early February cold of the road to Dover, and in his lordship’s coach they passed the hours in companionable conversation. Robert travelled simply, taking only a horse and two servants, Houghton and a boy. He wanted to improve himself. He promised his father that he would use his time studying books of civil law. His mind needed activity.5
Contrary winds kept them in Dover for about a fortnight. Each morning for exercise, Robert climbed steeply to the top of its castle to enjoy taking into his lungs the dry, cold seaside air. He felt fit and well and he was in high favour. The queen herself had sent him a message, addressing him with what Robert called ‘her sporting name of Pygmy’, asking after his health and looking to hear from him by letter. ‘Pygmy’ was a reference to his stature, for Robert was small and his spine curved by scoliosis. He squeezed out of this rare mark of favour all the dignity he could: ‘I may not find fault with the name she gives me, yet seem I only not to mislike it because she gives it.’ Her Majesty’s letter was, he said, ‘interlaced with many fairer words’ than he felt he was worthy of. Robert sent his reply to Elizabeth first to his father, unsealed. The apprentice consulted the master. To a courtier every word – each stroke of the pen – mattered.6
At last they were able to set sail on the Merlin. It was an overnight voyage, and he woke to the crowing of the ship’s cockerel early on Sunday 25 February, an hour before Dunkirk came into view on the broad side. Robert was quickly ashore, borrowing paper and ink for a letter to his father.7
The travellers’ destination was Ostend, a town in allied hands. The atmosphere there was tense and the conditions grim. Though surrounded by walls and moats the town was poorly defended. The English troops garrisoning it were mutinous and had been for two years. The war was not far away; its front line was roughly marked by the course of the Scheldt twenty or so miles to the north-east. With constant fears of Spanish attack, Ostend was neither comfortable nor safe.
Robert was thrilled by it. He embraced his own heroism, relishing
the discomforts of camp life, thinking of home and of his elder sister Anne as he sat (so he wrote to his father) in poor lodgings heated by smouldering turf and being smoked ‘pale and wan as ashes’. In the freezing weather he was jealous of Lord Burghley’s porter, sitting in his lodge all day before a fire of sea coal. To a friend – Michael Hickes, one of Burghley’s team of private secretaries – Robert wrote that he and others lived ‘too in safety and pleasure, both which I never wanted till now’. He himself wanted to learn what it was like to be a soldier. But really Robert was a dyed-in-the-wool civilian. To Hickes he quoted from Lord Burghley’s favourite work of the Roman classics, Cicero’s De Officiis ( On Duties ): Cedant arma togae – ‘Let arms yield to the toga’. He concluded his letter to Hickes with a last reflection on life in Ostend: ‘Not a fair woman nor an honest.’8
This was no idle journey for Robert Cecil. He was always in training for future office, always had to prove himself to his father. From Valentine Dale and John Rogers, the earl of Derby’s diplomats in these tentative negotiations for an Anglo-Spanish peace, Cecil borrowed learned works on the law of international treaties. To Burghley he offered himself as a pupil to be disciplined. His letters from Ostend were like school exercises for correction. ‘I cannot hide my defects every way,’ Robert wrote to Burghley, ‘though of your lordship’s fatherly goodness you have been still pleased to wipe them out of your remembrance.’ Others saw his quick intelligence and sharpness. Derby praised the ‘many good parts in the young gentleman which do much content me’. ‘Vivat [long live] the good earl of Derby’, Robert wrote to Michael Hickes.9
In early March young Master Cecil left allied Ostend to travel out across no man’s land into enemy-held Spanish Flanders. He set out with Valentine Dale for an interview with the duke of Parma in Ghent, nearly forty miles away. Lord Burghley sent Robert a cipher alphabet should any information in his letters need to be kept secret. In it, Parma had the code number 50. Burghley was Cor, ‘heart’ in Latin, from his motto Cor unum, via una, ‘One heart, one way’. Robert himself was 15. The codeword for peace was Larums (from the battlefield cry ‘To arms!’), that for war Spinia (in Latin ‘thorn’ or ‘spine’). Parma potentially held the key to either one.10
So, Robert prepared to meet one of the most powerful princes in Europe.
They stayed in Bruges for a night. Robert slept in the same chamber of the same inn his father had occupied on a visit to the Netherlands over thirty years earlier. Robert had found William Cecil’s name scratched into the chimney breast.
Dale and Robert left at 7 a.m. the following morning, Friday 8 March. Their journey was arduous, nine hours on horseback through rain and mud, along lanes and through woods where they were shadowed by anti-Spanish freebooters, criminal gangs looking for easy targets. They arrived safely in Ghent at 5 p.m.
The two men met Parma the next day. ‘His Altesse’ – his Highness: Robert was always scrupulous in his address – received them in the intimate surroundings of his bedchamber. This was a great honour. Parma was all friendliness and conviviality. He acknowledged with a nod what he called ‘the question’ that lay between his Majesty of Spain and her Majesty of England – he meant a war on land and at sea. He assured Dale and Cecil that there was no prince in the world – other than of course his own – whom he desired more to serve, of whose perfection he had heard so much. On the Dutch rebels Parma was blunt. He was wearied by a people who had brought misery upon themselves by their own folly.
Parma spoke directly to Robert, ‘son to him who served always his sovereign with unfeigned sincerity’. He would, he said, ‘leave no courtesy unperformed’ that Robert should have need of. Master Cecil accepted that courtesy with a speech in reply. He knew that Queen Elizabeth esteemed Parma as a prince of great honour and virtue. He would himself do his Altesse service in anything he could, so long as he preserved the integrity of his loyal duty to his most gracious sovereign the queen.11
It was masterful diplomacy. So much was said, and so little: words soared above substance. The duke of Parma, Doctor Valentine Dale, Master Robert Cecil, all were courtesy, correctness and honour. Yet behind the manoeuvres and dissimulations, behind the duke’s smile and the ambassador’s politeness, there lay a formidable struggle: for Spain’s mastery in western Europe and Queen Elizabeth’s survival.
His Altesse, in Ghent the model of grace and sincerity, was after all preparing an army to invade England, to be supported by the fleet we call the Spanish Armada.
A few days later Doctor Dale went back to Ostend and Robert Cecil was in Spanish-held Antwerp. He visited its great citadel, the forbidding pentagon of moats and bastions that dominated town and river whose governor was the octogenarian Spanish general Cristóbal de Mondragón. Robert knew that had he not been carrying Parma’s passport, Mondragón would have happily laid his authority upon an enemy Englishman. Protected and favoured, however, Robert inspected the fortress he understood to be the strongest in Europe.12
Robert Cecil was no ordinary sightseer – his father had seen to that. He was trained to observe, to count and to describe, all with precision. So, when he left Antwerp for allied Holland he did not miss the fleet of warships in the Scheldt. He kept his ears open to rumours and reports. ‘The speech of the armado of Spain continueth still’, though its preparation was being held up by lack of supplies of food as well as sailors – so he wrote to Elizabeth’s then secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, when he was back in the safe allied outpost of Ostend. He put little store in the likely success of Lord Derby’s peace conference, predicting that ‘immediately upon the breaking of this long-protracted colloquy’ Parma would push his forces further north into the Dutch territory of Zeeland. The young man who had used honeyed words to the duke wrote here as a clear-eyed analyst.13
From Antwerp he travelled by boat along the front line of the Scheldt. The river was in places so narrow that from the forts of Lillo (held by the Dutch) and Liefkenshoek (held by the Spanish) the two sides regularly shot at each other across the water. He went north, deeper into the territory held by Elizabeth’s Dutch allies: to Bergen op Zoom, Dordrecht, The Hague and Flushing (Vlissingen) by way of Maassluis and Brielle. As Lord Burghley’s son Robert was welcomed everywhere he visited. In Flanders the duke of Parma’s passport kept him safe, helped by a six days’ bodyguard of twenty musketeers on the final boat trip from Flushing back to Ostend. It was nineteen days of travel, full of adventure, with plenty of delays because of the stormy equinoctial weather. Cecil was back in Ostend on 30 March, determined to witness
the peace talks. He had missed nothing. Full negotiations had not even begun. Busy preparing his army for the Spanish Armada, Parma was – quite deliberately – dragging his heels.14
Robert Cecil was an incongruous presence in a war zone. Small and unsoldierly, he might have been a model courtier were it not for his curved back, his physical vulnerability. He didn’t warm to garrison life but he was, in his own civilian way, supremely determined, even intrepid. He was a young man noting every experience, learning all the time. He watched and noticed; he wrote. Schooled in precision – for his father there were no short cuts – he kept a ‘calendary journal’ for his own private exercise ‘and remembrance’, a practice long encouraged by Lord Burghley. And his father’s precepts were always to be followed to the letter.15
On 11 April 1588, three months before Philip launched his invincible Armada against England, Elizabeth’s and Parma’s commissioners met to begin to discuss peace on neutral ground in a temporary village of tents in the no man’s land between Ostend and Nieuwpoort. Robert described the gathering for his father; he saw and heard everything. His own mission was complete. Later that same day Lord Cobham, the second ranking of Elizabeth’s commissioners and one of the Cecil family’s closest allies at court, wrote to Burghley: ‘my friend Master Cecil is desirous to return with that which was passed this day at our meeting.’16
Robert left Ostend carrying three dispatches for Burghley. Valentine Dale’s was effusive: ‘Touching Master Cecil I cannot write anything but . . . he is assured I love and like him and your lordship hath great cause to rejoice in him.’ Dale predicted a great future for the young man, ranking him with some of the past heavyweights of Tudor diplomacy: ‘For I see but few that are furnished like to serve in such things hereafter.’ On to those slight shoulders were loaded already some great expectations.17
And so the journey was over. Robert Cecil had taken the air. Earnest Laertes returned to grave Polonius, and with a stock of experience he was never likely to forget. Traveller and observer, diplomat and courtier, he said he wanted to serve. As he had written on 30 March to Secretary Walsingham:
I beseech you, sir, favour me so much, as only herein to regard my willing mind to show the interest you have in my poor service, and for the substance of my letter, value it at that favourable rate, which you have always esteemed my devotion to serve you, as your many favours have often assured me.18
Self-deprecating, alert, tactful, energetic, ambitious: here was a gentleman who looked to older men for advice, correction and validation, his eye already on a future prize that was assumed, if not yet spoken of plainly. Lord Burghley was training him for rule, an apprenticeship of son to father unique in the sixteenth century. Robert was a legacy project – he was the future, to be built piece by piece, experience by experience, into Queen Elizabeth’s minister.
The young traveller was grateful for those precious few weeks in the Low Countries. ‘I not a little glad,’ Robert wrote to his father, ‘that God hath been pleased to grant me good and perfect health, to see so many places both worth the sight, and observing, and that in a time very short.’19
Robert Cecil was three days old when Archbishop Parker of Canterbury wrote to his father, Sir William Cecil, the future Lord Burghley: ‘I wish your honour of much joy of God’s good gift of late sent to you to cheer your family.’ He quoted the fourth verse of Psalm 128 in the Latin of the Vulgate Bible. Ecce sic benedicetur homo qui timet Dominum : ‘Lo, surely thus shall the man be blessed, that feareth the Lord’.1
Robert was born on Tuesday, 1 June 1563, and baptized on Trinity Sunday in the Church of St Clement Danes in Westminster. The sacrament of baptism washed away his sin; it was a promise of resurrection and eternal life. The old fallen Adam in him was buried, the new man raised up. At six days old Robert Cecil was a fresh recruit to the kingdom of heaven.2
St Clement Danes was close to his father’s new mansion in Westminster, just across the street from the Savoy, the former palace given by Henry VII as a hospital for the poor of London. The fields of Covent Garden lay over the perimeter wall from William Cecil’s gardens, the Thames ran nearby for commuting by boat up or down river, and Whitehall Palace was a few minutes away. This was the Strand, the axis of London and Westminster, from Temple Bar to Charing Cross.
Sir William Cecil was Queen Elizabeth’s principal secretary. At the heart of her government, he was never off duty. He was her Majesty’s voice on paper, and the adviser who in audience gave her good news as well as bad. He wrote in his own hand thousands of words a day of letters and papers. His opinion was always heard and always mattered, and he exercised power with easy authority. He became as the years went on a kind of official remembrancer for the reign: he had
lived the Elizabethan story from the beginning. His commitment was absolute, his focus intense. ‘Serve God by serving of the Queen,’ he would write to Robert in 1598, ‘for all other service is indeed bondage to the devil.’3
The strains of work were heavy. ‘So pestered with business’ is a typical Cecilian phrase. Once, allowed a precious few days’ leave from court, Sir William said that he felt like a bird freed from its cage. He was still working, though. Crises and panics at home and abroad occurred with near-metronomic regularity. Elizabeth would make decisions but then change her mind, often changing it back again. Colleagues fell out with one another. Sir William’s own health suffered. But he never rested, for still urgent papers piled ever higher on his desk, still hopeful suitors for favour and patronage clogged the corridors outside his suites of rooms at home and court. There was no choice. The show had to go on.4
William Cecil saw himself as the embodiment of the highest standards of royal service. He was the touchstone of all sound counsel. A planner, an organizer, a formidable processor of information and data, a theoretician and thinker, he was above all a pragmatist. In his endless policy papers and memoranda, he considered every fact, every angle, every consequence of action and inaction. Delay and procrastination offended his instincts and his experience. He conceived of his service to Elizabeth as a kind of sacrament: he called it ‘divinity’. In policy he knew that reality fell a long way short of perfection; too much was rushed and left only half done. An ounce of advice was better acted upon in good time than when danger threatened, he wrote to a colleague a little after Robert’s fifth birthday. ‘But as long as I have served the Queen’s Majesty, Epimetheus [afterthought] hath had more to do than Prometheus [forethought].’5
Service to God was service to the queen. Christ’s ‘greatest commandment’ was also William Cecil’s: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one God, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.’ Every day began with private devotion, the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, and close attentiveness to the will of God. Sir William believed, and he did so with an implacable sense of mission in a Europe riven by wars of faith. Some things were certain. He knew as a fact that Elizabeth’s was
a chosen kingdom specially blessed: no other, he felt, was better ‘established by laws in good policy to remain in freedom from the tyranny of Rome, and in constancy and conformity of true doctrine, as England is’.6
He was one of the principal architects of the Elizabethan Church of England. Avowedly Protestant in its Christianity, the Church was comfortingly conservative in its structure, unchanged since the break with Catholic Christendom engineered by Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII . It sat on the foundations of two laws passed by the first of Elizabeth’s parliaments in 1559. The first was royal supremacy: the queen alone had the title of supreme governor of her Church, a role she took very seriously. The second was uniformity of worship. The Church had one Book of Common Prayer, which every one of Elizabeth’s subjects had to accept and use for worship. Anyone who refused or resisted – especially those who still believed in the Catholic faith or were loyal to the pope – found themselves subject to penalties that became tougher over the years. For some there were fines to pay; others found themselves in prison. For William Cecil this kind of harsh enforcement made true equality for all: not one of Elizabeth’s subjects was ‘by law admitted to profess openly the contrary without punishment’. God’s truth and the English Church were indivisible and indistinguishable. Church and State were fused together: loyalty to one was loyalty to both.7
With Elizabeth’s denouncement by Pope Pius V in 1570 as the pretended queen of England, her ministers felt her kingdoms of England and Ireland to be under assault – and with good reason. They knew that enemies plotted at home and gathered their forces abroad. Some of these enemies hated Elizabeth because she was a woman, others because they believed the true ruler of England should be Elizabeth’s Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, and all because she was a heretic schismatic from the True Faith and Church of Rome. So it was that popes, the king of Spain, the French Catholic noble house of Guise, the Scottish queen, the Jesuits and English Catholic exiles and émigrés plotted and schemed.
It felt to Elizabeth’s advisers like a war for survival, as well as a war of faith (which had been going on for half a century, since Martin Luther’s challenge to pope and Church). For pious Elizabethans, the
wars and rebellions that they saw paralysing Europe were nothing less than a portent of apocalypse. Preachers quoted from the Revelation of St John the Divine, crying out ‘It is fallen, it is fallen, Babylon the great city.’ They felt that God was calling time on his corrupt creation, the clock was ticking, winding down to the End of Days.8
In this cosmic struggle Sir William Cecil knew which side he was on. He raised Robert Cecil to know it too. As the most loyal and hardworking servants of Queen Elizabeth, they were soldiers for heaven in the last phase of a struggle that had begun with the fall of Satan’s rebel angels. They were for Christ against the Antichrist and his Catholic armies. They were vigilant in defending God and queen.9
So, what was to be done in those final days? William Cecil was clear: ‘The first and last comforter for her Majesty to take hold on is the Lord of Hosts.’ Isolated, embattled, but defiant for the truth, he put his trust in God.10
William Cecil’s generation looked first to heaven, but how they wrote and behaved was shaped too by the histories and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. Unflinching in their duty to service and public life, framed by the beauties of Ciceronian oratory, Elizabeth’s councillors bound themselves to a ministerial code they took from the classical world. They were honest, unafraid of hard work, modest, imperturbable to a fault, senatorial in their rank and bearing. Or so they believed themselves to be.
Robert Cecil saw from his earliest years a father whose sense of vocation was fixed and unyielding, and for whom service and selfsacrifice meant the same thing. In his business suit of black, the queen’s secretary observed, listened and spoke. Authority was his, and deep experience of when to give and when to press. His skill was to read the fluctuations of the queen’s mood and mind. He was her guide and her minister. Perhaps, at times, he was her conscience. Lord Burghley obeyed the queen, ‘presuming that she being God’s chief minister here it shall be God’s will to have her commandments obeyed, after that I have performed my duty as a counsellor.’ That duty was to speak truth to power.11
Sir William Cecil was always more than simply a bureaucrat. He owed his political longevity to his talents as a courtier, once describing