“POLONIUS: Have I, my lord?
Assure you, my good Liege,
I hold my duty as I hold my soul,
Both to my God, one to my gracious king.”
Hamlet II.ii
Among Queen Elizabeth’s most influential courtiers and one most familiar to aficionados of Tudor history, is William Cecil, later titled Lord Burghley (1520-1598).
Burghley made it his business to collect secrets, probing into friends’ and enemies’ confidential information. Known as her Majesty’s spin master, he also controlled an impressive spy network at home and abroad that answered only to him and could surreptitiously follow just about anyone.
Burghley’s diminutive figure is most familiar in his grandfatherly age. We see him as Polonius with grey whiskers and drooping moustache, creases of worry between his bushy eyebrows, pink cheeked and watchful-eyed, proudly grasping his staff of office, his Order of the Garter slung prominently across his chest. Shakespeare knew Burghley well and based Polonius in Hamlet on him, down to his spying on private conversations from behind tapestries and the wordy, unwanted advice he showered on the young.
There is much to be admired in Burghley. Throughout his 50-year career, he served Elizabeth at different times as her Secretary of State, Lord Privy Seal and Lord High Treasurer. She made him who he was, and he returned the favor, protecting her fiercely. But she could unmake him again in an instant, if she chose - a fact about which she occasionally reminded him. To know him well, you need to look deeply into Burghley’s past, peeling back the years to uncover what he sought to hide about himself.
Burghley was both avaricious and a snob. Until 1571 when Elizabeth awarded him a barony so that his daughter Anne could overcome an objection to a betrothal that he dearly desired, Burghley was a commoner. He rose to become the second most powerful man in England, after Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Unlike his tavern-keeping grandfather, he amassed an enormous personal fortune and three palatial homes. He epitomized the rise of the middle-class, university-educated striver. His obsession with the ranks of the English nobility to which he had gained admittance on the lowest rung was obvious on the walls of the Green Gallery at Theobalds, his magnificent country estate. There he commissioned an artist to paint the coats of arms of all the landed families in England on 52 trees between which towns, boroughs and rivers created Burghley’s ideal England, a green and growing forest, into which the Cecils were now integrated.
Burghley was exceptionally skilled at re-fashioning the truth and distancing himself from any risks or lies by writing and rewriting records to suit his side of the story. He kept file copies of letters he sent and received that bolstered the legacy he wanted to leave to posterity and destroyed the evidence that did not. He trained his son Robert to do the same. Businesslike and penny-pinching, he also ruthlessly ordered men torn apart on the rack or locked in Tower of London cells with arrow slits open to the weather for ventilation and empty fireplaces if the prisoner could not afford wood, all in the name of protecting the realm. He is most singularly responsible for planning and executing the severance of Mary Queen of Scots from her own head. A political operator sine qua non, Burghley was a pro at publishing anonymous political broadsides advocating government policy, and distributing his polemics through his extraordinary network of informants.
Burghley was not only the architect of many of Elizabeth’s public policies. As Master of the Court of Wards from 1561 to 1598, he also controlled the private lives and choice of marriage partner for several scions of noble families. If a peer died with minor children, the children and the paternal right to determine their spouses became the crown’s property. Surviving mothers’ wishes were immaterial. The crown typically sold the wardship, including the rights to determine a suitable marriage partner, to other nobles who stood to profit from the arrangement. In the 37 years Burghley headed the Court of Wards, he chose to keep only 9 wardships as his own. With the tacit approval of the queen, he never sold those 9 wardships and never paid for them. No letters patent were issued in his name.
Girls as young as 12 and boys as young as 14 could be betrothed. Imagine the power of a guardian over an earl’s orphaned son if the guardian wished to marry the lad to a young lady in the guardian’s family, increasing its social status by placing a coronet on the head of his daughter or granddaughter. Burghley took advantage that opportunity twice.
The next two posts will draw the curtain back further on Burghley’s past and examine a pair of little known but revealing personal secrets about Burghley himself as a very young man. These enigmas betray a rash romantic and a turncoat opportunist under his controlled and controlling façade. Exploring Burghley’s personal rebellion against his father when he married for love in 1540 and his ill-considered political choices that put him in genuine fear of being executed for treason in 1553 illuminate rarely exposed corners of his complex and fascinating persona.
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