Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I

by Stephen Alford

William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520–1598), was the closest adviser to England’s Queen Elizabeth I and—as this revealing and provocative biography shows—he was the driving force behind the Queen's reign for four decades. Cecil’s impact on the development of the English state was deep and personal. A committed Protestant, he guided domestic and foreign affairs with the confidence of his religious conviction. Believing himself the divinely instigated protector of his monarch, he felt able to disobey her direct commands. He was uncompromising, obsessive, and supremely self-assured—a cunning politician as well as a consummate servant. This comprehensive biography gives proper weight to Cecil's formative years, his subtle navigation of the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I, his lifelong enmity with Mary Queen of Scots, and his obsession with family dynasty. It also provides a fresh account of Elizabeth I and her reign, uncovering limitations and concerns about invasions, succession, and conspiracy. Intimate, authoritative, and enormously readable, this book redefines our understanding of the Elizabethan period.

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, Politics, Tudor Period

432 pages, Hardcover

First published August 6, 2008

About the author

Stephen Alford FRHistS (born 1970) is a British historian and academic. He has been professor of early modern British history at the University of Leeds since 2012. Educated at the University of St Andrews, he was formerly a British Academy Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge (1997–99) and junior research fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and, between 1999 and 2012, a fellow in history at King's College, Cambridge. He has been a fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 2000.

Reviews

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1564792.html

A very interesting biography of Elizabeth 's chief minister, who basically ran England from her accession in 1558 to his death in 1598 (and had held the same office of Secretary of State, though with less power, during the earlier reign of her younger brother). I found it generally more interesting, though in places more frustrating, than David Loades' The Cecils which I read two years ago.

Alford is excellent at the big picture. The book is beautifully organised - in general chonologically, with occasional excursions into family life or household economics (facilitated by Burghley/Cecil's obsessional record keeping) - and he usually has interesting things to say about what it meant to Burghley to be in a position of such political power, while running a growing household. He's also very good at cautioning against Whiggism: Burghley did not know that Elizabeth would live to 1603, that she would never marry, that the Spanish Armada would fail, that Mary Queen of Scots would lose their decades-long battle of wits. I found it fascinating that Burghley/Cecil was so heavily involved with the intellectual leadership of the time, as was his second wife Mildred; even more fascinating that, while keeping meticulous records of his own correspondence and affairs, he was apparently instructing printers to generate largely fictional and utterly propagandistic pamphlets describing the issues of the day, which of course in the days before newspapers, and in a society where information was heavily censored, meant that he largely controlled public political discourse.

Burghley/Cecil was also a keen genealogist, but Alford has him as a man of Lincolnshire (rather than Wales as Loades has it), and the evidence is in his favour. Indeed, there is very little about Wales in this book, but lots about Scotland, which Cecil had first visited in the train of the English army during the Rough Wooing. Alford has Cecil obsessed with securing stability and Protestantism in Scotland, in order to secure England's rear from the Catholic enemies on the Continent; Mary Queen of Scots became a direct threat to that policy, and had to be neutralised. Alford's analysis of Burghley/Cecil's Scottish policy is particularly lucid and convincing. Slightly frustratingly, given my own interest, Ireland appears only as a background issue - my ancestor Sir Nicholas White comes up as a correspondent to whom Cecil/Burghley would confide his concerns, though of course with an eye to the possible interception of the correspondence.

I'm sorry to say that I found some serious flaws in the book. Alford's prose is sometimes clunky and often repetitious. His efforts to get inside Burghley's head do not always succeed. An early and unsuccessful chapter deals with how Burghley (then plain William Cecil) dealt with the nine day reign in 1553 of Lady Jane Grey/Dudley, in a situation where he was still Secretary of State (as he had been for Edward VI) but faced with the crumbling of the new queen's rule from the moment her accession was proclaimed. Alford concentrates on the tension between Cecil's loyalty to the wishes of the dying teenage king and his obligations under the law passed by Henry VIII. To me the much more interesting story is that Cecil obviously spotted that Jane was dead in the water from the word go, and made sure he had not signed a single document which could demonstrate that he was seriously complicit in her attempt to take power - which is pretty impressive given that he was the chief minister of the government. He obviously could not know whether Mary would take months, weeks or days to take power (in the end it was only days) but equally obvously saw what was going to happen from pretty early on and made his plans accordingly.

So, a bit annoying in places but generally enlightening and stimulating, if you are interested in the period.

[Brackman1066 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alford has written an enjoyable and readable biography of Cecil. He doesn't go into the detail that Conyers Read's biography (which is actually 3 books!) does, but that's part of what makes this a more accessible book for a non-specialist. For specialists, Alford does focus more on Cecil's personal circumstances than Read (which was what I needed for my own research), so their emphases are different. Alford doesn't heavily footnote, which is both good and bad--it makes the book flow, but sometimes I'd have liked more information about what he was reading.

This won't replace Read's bio--it's not meant to--but it enlarges our picture of a key figure of Elizabeth I's reign.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this, Stephen Alford has written an approachable understanding of a stalwart of England's history. He walks us through the complications of the Elizabethan age. I've learned and appreciate so much of this time and it's people from this book, more than any other.

[Susan Abernethy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Link to my review of this book:

https://flhwnotesandreviews.com/2021/...

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superb detailed and carefully balanced biography of an immense figure of the age.

[Jessica Barrella · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very humanised account of a man often villainized. More illustrations and maps are a plus in a history book. Liked the book and its inclusion of Burghley house in Stamford.

[Leanda Lisle · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

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.

This review first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated July 5, 2008

[Mervyn Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

An accessibly written, if at times episodic, account of one of Elizabethan England's most important political figures. The only surprise for me was how easily Cecil fitted in with the political and religious zeitgeist of Marian England. I suppose it was a survival mechanism, but it also suggests someone who wasn't prepared to martyr himself for what he believed. And although one can admire Cecil, it is difficult to really like him.

[Truls Ljungström · Rating 4 out of 5]

Denna bok håller att läsas flera gånger. Det är en utmärkt genomgång av både Cecils liv och preferenser, och av de politiska och sociala konflikter han och hans familj var inblandade i. Den porträtterar honom som en religiöst orienterad sakpolitiker, och betonar hans långsiktighet. Jag rekommenderar den.

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite up to Conyers Read's biography of William Cecil Lord Burghley, but close. Lots of detail readably presented, creates a rounded image of a remarkably talented statesman.