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Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I

A keen sense of duty

Stephen Alford
Yale, 412pp, £25,

Leanda de Lisle

Wednesday, 2nd July 2008

Leande De Lisle on Stephen Alford's biography of William Cecil

William Cecil, Lord Burghley, would be delighted that in his historical afterlife he remains the old man he died as, after 40 years of power. The frail flesh and white beard projects the image of the dull bureaucrat we remember: ideal cover for an ideologue who makes Donald Rumsfeld appear warm and fuzzy, and a spin doctor whose fictions retain, after 400 years, a powerful hold on the culture of the English-speaking world.

‘Terrifying’ is an adjective Stephen Alford deploys on more than one occasion to describe Cecil, and with reason. Cecil began his political career in the household of the future Protector Somerset, surviving his master’s fall to become Secretary of State to the boy King, Edward VI. In this role he helped introduce the most radical religious changes England saw before the Puritan Commonwealth. Organs and figurative art were torn out of churches, and books taken from university libraries and burned. When Edward fell fatally ill in 1553, Cecil was faced with the prospect of a Catholic queen in Mary I. Along with many in the Protestant elite, he signed a document backing the exclusion of Mary, and the future Queen Elizabeth, from the succession in favour of the doomed Lady Jane Grey.

There is groundbreaking work here on how Cecil flourished, nevertheless, during the subsequent reign of Mary I. He befriended Cardinal Pole, while, at the same time, anti-Marian propaganda, advertising the martyrdom of Lady Jane Grey, was being printed on his estate. Alford also charts his relationship with the future Queen Elizabeth before she re-appointed him as Secretary of State on her accession in 1558. Cecil liked clever women. His wife, Mildred, was one of the most highly educated women of her generation, and he counted several other remarkable women amongst his friends. They included the Queen Dowager, Katherine Parr, (until her death in 1548) and Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, sometimes known as ‘the mother of English Puritanism’. This ability to get on with formidable women, combined with his political talents, must have played its part in the trust he was able to build with Elizabeth, and it is her reign that is the principal focus of Alford’s attention.

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