William Cecil

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31083, 11 June 1966, Page 4

William Cecil

Students of history will welcome the issue by Jonathan Cape of a paperback edition of one of Conyers Read’s most substantial contributions to his chosen field—sixteenthcentury England. The work, a study of the career of William Cecil, is in two volumes: the first, “Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth” (495 pp. and index); the second, “Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth” (590 pp. and index). If anyone wished to test a contemporary scholar’s opinion, “Nowadays we have better historians of sixteenth-century England than J. A. Froude,” he has only to take up these books. It is unlikely that Mr Read’s study erf Cecil will ever be superseded; it is scholarly work in the best sense of that term. William Cecil was born in 1520, and was identified with the waking of history through three reigns. When Queen Elizabeth came to the throne, she appointed him chief Secretary of State at her very first council meeting, held in the great hall of Hatfield Palace. Of himself, ' Cecil remarked that he was not interested in any gift or recompense. “He had simply three things in mind—the service of God, the service of his mistress, and the welfare of her subjects.” He must surely have been one of the most dedicated of all public servants. William Camden, the antiquary, described him well:

“Of al! men of genius he was the most a drudge; of all men of business the most a genius.” It is this opinion that Mr Read’s two books will amply support.

Cecil’s qualities are illustrated in the context of the great events of that age, events like the life and death of Mary Queen of Scots, the war with Spain, and the wars of religion in France. What his part was may be exemplified in a few sentences. “No sooner was the immediate threat of the Armada passed than he began to worry about expenditure.” “Probably, with his eye in the expense account, he was largely responsible for the rapid demobilisation of the army county by county. He had his eye also on the ripening grain, and the imperative need of turning spears to reaping hooks for the harvesting.” John Dutche, an Englishman in the service of Cardinal Alien, said the last word on him: “he could not more aptly compare the Lord Treasurer of England to any other man than to a waterman of the Thames, whose affair is to look one way and row another.” Mr Read comments on the aptness of the remark, as reflecting the opinion held abroad that William Cecil was “the wittiest, the craftiest, and the wisest statesman in Europe.” “Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth” was first published in 1955, and “Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth,” in 1960.