“Though those that are betrayed do feel the treason sharply,
yet the traitor stands in worse case of woe.”
Cymbeline, III.iv
Years before he became Lord Burghley and famous for arresting, imprisoning, torturing and executing Catholic traitors on behalf of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant government, William Cecil was himself an inch from arrest, incarceration and execution for treason on account of his Protestantism. He was so close that in 1553 he wrote a letter to his second wife, Mildred Cooke Cecil, asking her to look after his son Thomas and giving her his blessing to remarry after his death to a husband of “good religion”. In what must have seemed at the time his last communication with Mildred this side of eternity, he asked her to pray for him.
The trail that led him at 33 to that moment is as full of twists and turns as a murder mystery. It began with his decision, at the time an act of high treason, to violate a sacred oath he had personally taken as prescribed by the 1546 Succession Act. As young King Edward VI lay dying of a malady no doctor could cure, in the uncertainty swirling about the succession to the throne, Cecil chose to add his name twice to documentation plotting to subvert King Henry VIII’s will of 1544 and the Succession Act of 1546 by placing Lady Jane Grey instead of Henry’s older daughter, Mary Tudor, on the throne. Lady Jane Grey was, of course, Protestant. Mary Tudor was Catholic.
Jane was King Henry VII’s great-granddaughter through his youngest daughter. She was first cousin once removed to Edward and the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, all of whom had been named by their father, Henry VIII, in a codified line of succession. At the age of 15, Jane married Guildford Dudley, who with Robert and Ambrose Dudley were three of the eight sons of the powerful John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. A conspiracy formed around Northumberland, for whom Cecil worked discretely and loyally as fixer, at exactly the time the dying Edward made a few pen strokes to a “Device” (a plan) that purportedly left the crown to “the Lady Jane and her heirs male” instead of to “the Lady Jane’s heirs male” (of which there were none). It is not hard to see what Northumberland had in mind.
The problem Edward’s “Device” created in naming Jane and her male heirs was that it was directly contradictory to his father’s will and the Succession Act.
At first, Cecil tried to run from the conspiracy, or so he said after the fact. Disinheriting a daughter legitimized by Henry VIII on the basis of illegitimacy was impossible, but so was a Catholic woman on the English throne. Doing anything contrary to the Succession Act was high treason, but so was disobeying Edward’s wishes. Cecil frantically ordered money, plate and papers removed from his house and hidden in various Cecil family servants’ houses. But on June 11, 1553, Cecil put the first of his two near-damning signatures with Northumberland and others on a letter sent by the Privy Council to Edward Montague, Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, asking him to attend the Council the next morning. The next day, Montague and his senior lawyers informed the Council and the dying Edward that it was clear that anyone who tried to change the Succession Act was committing high treason. Princess Mary was the rightful heir to Edward by English law. The meetings and legal arguments between Northumberland’s cadre and Montague’s went on for days until Montague yielded to Edward’s wishes, provided he had a license from the king under the great seal and, like any clever lawyer, written immunity for himself and all the lawyers involved. On June 21, 1553, William Cecil put his second traitorous signature on a document in this dangerous game, this one on letters patent that disinherited Mary and named Jane as Edward’s successor.
Cecil was with Northumberland and his confederates at the Tower when Jane arrived to be crowned, but later claimed that he had planned to escape to Stamford. After Jane was crowned, Cecil later claimed he had started a counter conspiracy inside the Northumberland conspiracy to wreck Jane’s government. Within 9 days of when it began, Jane’s reign ended and for Jane and Guildford Dudley and Northumberland very, very badly.
Desperate to live, Cecil pulled a complete political 180 and about faced. Accompanied to court by his brother-in-law Nicholas Bacon who was married to Anne Cooke Bacon, one of Mary’s ladies-in-waiting, Cecil abandoned his Protestant conscience and kissed the hand and hem of the gown of his new sovereign, the very Catholic Queen Mary Tudor. He proclaimed that he had always been a reluctant bystander to the activities of the traitorous Northumberland. Others were guilty of treason, but not he. No, he had always been loyal to her. For good measure, he even clarified his thoughts and actions on paper for posterity, twenty years after the fact.
Throughout the rest of his life, William Cecil’s eyes and ears were always alert for Catholic plots against Protestant Queen Elizabeth. He dealt harshly with those involved in a staggering number of treasons and treacheries, subjecting suspects to mental and physical anguish to elicit the information to convict them or someone else with their “testimony”. Yet when the shoe was on the other foot, Cecil betrayed both England’s legal monarch and then his own cherished Protestantism to save his life.
Whether Mildred’s prayers or Anne Bacon’s pleas caused Mary to spare him, we will never know. The question is: would he have done the same in her shoes?
What do you think?
If you are enjoying delving into these Elizabethan Secrets, you might also enjoy its companion on Instagram: SeekingShakespeare at https://www.instagram.com/ddickerman01/
コメント