Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (review)

Sir William Cecil stands like a colossus across the later sixteenth century. It is virtually impossible to think about Elizabethan politics without reference to him. This is not just because he was for so long the queen's principal secretary and, subsequently, lord treasurer, or because his son, Robert, took up where he left off, or even because his papers are the first port of call for so many researchers, but, even more, because he was so deeply implicated in the formation of policy and because he was so ideologically committed to many of the political causes that defined the period.

This intensely readable biography is committed to demonstrating this and to showing that he was not the boring administrator who appears in so much of the extant historiography. This is undoubtedly a valuable service. There was always a risk that the very considerable complexities of scholarly analysis of Elizabethan high politics would make political studies of the period utterly inaccessible and that they would eventually be displaced as other topics in early-modern studies came into fashion in their place. Indeed, the things that we know to have so frequently made contemporaries sick with anxiety in the deeply unstable world of Elizabethan politics, where virtually everything seemed to be either in the balance or up for grabs, are often reduced in monographs on the period to dry-as-dust intellectual minutiae. Such treatments convey almost nothing of what drove the events that are supposed to be at the heart of such studies. This is not something that can be said about this biography. Written in a style similar to John Guy's award-winning volume on Mary Stuart, there is not a single page that does not engage the reader. In the course of this extensive review of Cecil's career we certainly have a version of his life that is anything but bureaucratic in tone. Center stage, here, then is his long-drawn-out duel with Mary Stuart, and his intense suspicion of her, which Elizabeth refused to indulge. Here is the master polemicist and ideologue who formulated some of the crucial theoretical and legal defenses of the Elizabethan regime.

It is clear, too, that his life may have been dominated by his service to the queen but if she was a mistress whom he was dedicated to serving, he frequently did this in a manner that she appeared not to want. This does indeed redress the balance of so much of the often stultifying historical industry of the cult of Elizabeth. Here one gets a real sense of the struggles at court between Elizabeth and her leading councillors, and of the monarchical republicanism that has figured so heavily in Alford's earlier work on the period.

It is, perhaps, a difficult thing, in the literary format of biography, to maintain a balance between high political narrative and the central subject of the study, the principal and principled man of affairs whose private life was blameless, at least compared to many of the other colorful characters of the Elizabethan court, and yet who generated real hatred from a range of enemies. If he was the sober, learned, and scholarly public servant of this study, were his detractors peddling gutter politics in their attacks on him? But if they were not, was his ethic of service a mere façade for Machiavellian evil and greedy acquisitiveness on a gargantuan scale? Ultimately biography is not the ideal vehicle in which to offer an extended treatment of these issues. But still, it offers a very accurate guide to the problems that were thrown up by the often chaotic structure of the late Tudor monarchy and that made Cecil so central to them. And it also reminds us, under the label either of Protestant scholar-councillor or Machiavellian scoundrel, how supremely successful Cecil was in shaping and dominating Elizabethan politics.