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Saturday 6 September 2008

A keen sense of duty

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

Alford carefully deconstructs the traditional picture of Cecil, revealing his partnership with the Queen in all its troubled complexity. Elizabeth was Protestant, but never Protestant enough for Cecil. He helped impose on her a religious settlement that was far more radical than she would have liked, and determined to preserve it. Cecil waged ‘a war on evil’, in which Catholics represented the forces of Satan, justifying the use of torture and the execution of priests, while doing all in his power to secure the royal succession, in ways Elizabeth agreed with or not. For ten years Elizabeth, the dynastic legitimist, maintained the claims of the Catholic, foreign Mary, Queen of Scots to be her heir, over those of Protestant, English, Lady Katherine Grey, and was at loggerheads with Cecil over it. Both these royal cousins were, in the end, destroyed: Katherine Grey by the Queen, while Cecil succeeded in having Mary Stuart executed.

In his latter years Cecil lost much of his old religious radicalism but he maintained a sense of duty to a Protestant nation beyond the reign of a single monarch. Critics often complained they were living in a Cecilian Commonwealth, and although Cecil saw himself as always the loyal servant, they had a point. It was as a citizen, not as a loyal subject, that he had had the death warrant against Mary, Queen of Scots delivered and this sense of civic responsibility, shared and inherited by others, would pose problems for Elizabeth’s autocratic Stuart successors.

Alford’s scholarly but pacey biography reads so fluently, and his subject’s career is so rich, it felt over too quickly. There are excellent pen-portraits of friends and rivals. But it is Cecil who really leaps from the page, as father and husband, but above all as politician and propagandist,with a sheathed sword at his belt, and the face of a man in his prime: dynamic, ruthless and with a long reach, even into our own time.

Leanda de Lisle’s The Sisters Who Would be Queen: The Lives of Katherine, Mary & Lady Jane Grey, will be published by Harper Press in September.

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