neous.

Another source of misapprehension, which has led some of our historians into error respecting Mary's feelings towards her sister, is also here pointed out (vol. ii. p. 429). Her responsibilities are heavy enough, without needing that any unfounded calumnies should be laid to her charge.

There were two rare qualities united in Queen Mary's character; she was determined in council, resolute and bold in action but when she had accomplished her purpose, she was, Mr. Tytler thinks, as mild as was consistent with her personal safety. The letters of Renard show, that Courtenay, Earl of Devon, was deeply implicated in Wyatt's rebellion, and in the eye of the law he was worthy of death; yet Mary not only pardoned him, but treated him with much kindness, and sent him to travel for his improvement (vol. ii. p. 471). Mr. Tytler gives a touching letter addressed to the Earl by his mother (p. 473), and another more curious, but less interesting, from the Earl to the Queen herself (p. 474). More illustrations of Mary's merciful disposition might be quoted.

One of her most unpopular acts was her match with the Spanish Prince; and we extract a description of Mary's behaviour with reference to her approaching marriage, as given in one of the somewhat lengthy despatches of Renard to Philip's imperial father:

'On the following Tuesday at three o'clock, the Earl of Pembroke and the Admiral came to bring us to the Queen and her Council; here, in a chamber where was the blessed Host, the ratifications of her Majesty and his Highness were delivered, and the oaths taken by both the one party and the other: but, before this, the Queen fell on her knees, and called God to witness that this marriage was not in her the result of any carnal affection; that it did not originate in ambition, or any motive except the good of her kingdom, and the repose and tran. quillity of her subjects; that in truth, her single intention in all she did, was to prove faithful to the marriage and oath which she had already made to the crown; expressing this with so much grace, that those who stood round were in tears. . . After this, her Majesty,

as she had already done, dropped upon her knees, and requested us to join our prayers with hers, that God would be pleased to give her his grace to fulfil the treaty to which she had sworn, and that He would make the marriage fortunate. Upon which, the Count Egmont presented to her the ring which your Majesty has sent, and which she showed to all the company (and assuredly, Sire, the jewel is a precious one, and well worth looking at). After this we took our leave, first enquiring whether her Majesty had any commands for his Highness; to whom she begged to send her most affectionate regards, begging us to assure him that for her part, as long as she lived, she would by all dutiful obedience endeavour to vie with him in mutual love and good offices: she added that, as his Highness had not yet written to her, she

deferred

deferred writing to him till he began the correspondence.'-vol. ii. pp. 326, 328.

We cannot find room for a description of the marriage, but must refer the reader to vol. ii. p. 430. He will also be interested with the new proof adduced by Mr. Tytler of the extent to which the unhappy Queen indulged the delusion that she was about to become a mother. There exists in the State Paper Office an original letter addressed to Cardinal Pole, and signed by Philip and Mary, wherein the wished-for event is mentioned as having already occurred: God has been pleased, amongst his other benefits, to add the gladding of us with the happy delivery of a Prince' (p. 469). The anxiety of Charles V. on the subject is strikingly illustrated in a letter from Sir John Mason: p. 470.-But we must restrict ourselves to some one definite object.

Deeply impressed with the historical importance which attaches to the name of Cecil, Mr. Tytler has lost no opportunity of directing attention to him in the course of these two volumes, which embracing that portion of his life, concerning which least of all is known, contain much that is new about this great minister. His biographers, dazzled by the lustre of his acts and high station under Elizabeth, invariably slur over the two preceding reigns; contenting themselves with vague assertions or unsupported conjectures. Let us attempt, with Mr. Tytler's help, to supply this defect. Cecil was born, as he himself informs us, in one of his little memorandum-books preserved in the British Museum, on the 13th of September, 1520.

'His grandfather,' says Mr. Tytler, 'David Cecil, esq., was waterbailiff to Henry the Eighth, and one of the King's serjeants-at-arms. His father was Richard Cecil, esq., ycoman of the wardrobe. From these facts we may infer that he was descended from an honest and respectable, rather than from a very ancient and honourable house," as his biographers have so often repeated. He belonged, I think, to the gentry of the country. The heralds, it is true, in the palmy days of Burleigh, got up for him a handsome descent from William Sitsilt, an intimate friend of William Rufus, in the year 1091; which pedigree (with reverence be it spoken) is said to be drawn by Camden: yet so much doubt hangs over the effusions of Rouge Dragons and Clarencieux's, when working for prime ministers, that, till the proofs are produced, we may be allowed to hesitate.'-vol. i. p. 71.

We may indeed. But Mr. Tytler should here have mentioned Cecil's mother,—Jane Hickington, the daughter and heiress of a Lincolnshire gentleman, William Hickington, of Bourne. It was she who brought Burleigh, then a small property, into the family. She lived to a great age, to see her son prime minister, and to keep (as her letters and other papers show) a very strict

and

and severe scrutiny over the farming and planting operations of the great Statesman, who in her lifetime managed Burleigh for her. There is a curious portrait of her at Hatfield, exceeding grim and plain, but with an expression of strong sense. Such were Cecil's ancestors: nor does there seem to be the remotest proof that he had any claim to the genealogical honours of the house of Sitsilt; neither do we remember, amid all the orthographical vagaries which his name admits of, ever having seen it blundered into Sitsilt by any one of the family. It was alternately Cyssell, Cyssyll, Cissell, Cecyll: and various persons addressing the minister, contrived, by a little gratuitous exercise of ingenuity, to torture the sibilants into combinations yet more uncouth and eccentric. He himself invariably spelt his name Cecil.

This great man, who has illustrated a long and honoured posterity, may well dispense with ancestral glories. Still, however, his progenitors can be shown to have been respectable.' In a bitter attack upon him which came from abroad, it is said his grandfather kept the best inn at Stamford, and the writer ridicules his quartering lions in his coat, when a couple of fat capons would have been more appropriate. The greater part of this piece is, no doubt, a mere lying libel; but it is curious enough that in the will of David Cecil, he leaves to his son Richard, Burleigh's father, ́all the title and interest that he has or may have in the Taberd at Stamford.' That David, therefore, had something to do with this inn is clear: it is possible that his ancestors may have had a nearer connexion with it; but he could, we think, have had none but one of property. He styles himself, in his will, of Stamford, in the county of Lincoln, Esquire;' and in those days Esquire meant something. In the British Museum are preserved many of his letters: they prove that he was patronized by Cromwell, the able but unscrupulous minister of Henry VIII., and seem the production of a worthy man, and of one possessing considerable local authority and importance. He evidently lived in something like affluence: but from his enumeration of the effects which he bequeathed to his wife, and to his sons Richard and David, his property seems to have consisted mostly of farming stock and feather beds. He mentions no large sums of money; and Richard, as he inherited little, so had he little to bestow.

Burleigh himself, having received the rudiments of education at Grantham and at Stamford, at the age of fourteen was sent to St. John's College, Cambridge; where he is said to have made extraordinary progress: his diligence being so great, that, according to the story preserved by one of the gentlemen

of

of his household, he hired the bell-ringer to call him up at foure of the clocke every morninge;'-an anecdote which the seminary priests afterwards turned into an assertion that he was hired as the bell-ringer's boy. This over-application impaired his health, and is supposed to have laid the foundation of that malady, to which, in his old age, he became a martyr. He had, no doubt, something of the stimulus of the grand Magister Artium. It is recorded by a contemporary, and evidently a partial writer, that 'one Medcalf, then master of that house (St. John's), seeing his diligence and towardness, would often give him money to encourage him;' and Cecil himself in after years declared that his bringing up' had been mean.”—(vol. i. p. 430.)

6

'We know from his Journal,' says Mr. Tytler, 'that, on the 6th of May, 1541, when twenty-one years of age, he came to the inns of court. His marriage to a sister of Sir John Cheeke took place in August, 1541, and this seems to me to have been the first thing that brought him into notice; for, Cheeke being appointed tutor to Prince Edward in 1544, he must have had opportunities of befriending his brother-in-law and yet I suspect he did not even then desert the law, and come to court. The exact year when he did so has not yet been pointed out by any of his biographers, and his Journal is silent.'-vol. i. p. 72.

The traditional account of Cecil's obtaining the notice of Henry VIII., by confuting O'Neill's two chaplains in a Latin argument on the supremacy question, is very vague; but true or false, it is fair to infer from such a report that he gave early evidence of that understanding and judgment for which he became afterwards so remarkable.

The conjecture respecting the circumstance which first swelled Cecil's sail with the gales of court favour is probably correct. Sir John Cheeke, as tutor to the young king, must have possessed considerable influence at court, though he was a person of inconsiderable origin. Baker says,-Cheeke's mother sold wine in St. Mary's parish, in Cambridge, in which quality she may be met with upon the college books.' By this marriage Cecil had one son, Thomas, afterwards Earl of Exeter; and the next point deserving of notice in his history has been first distinctly pointed out by Mr. Tytler; viz., that at the age of twentyseven, he managed the whole correspondence of the Protector Somerset, probably in the capacity of his private secretary.' (vol. i. p. 73.) This was in 1547, at which time we may begin to regard Sir William Cecil in the light of a public man-though the statement that he was master of requests in that year is inaccurate; he was not appointed to this office till much later. The period, therefore, when he entered on his public career

VOL. LXV. NO. CXXIX.

F

was

was precisely that interesting epoch with which the volumes before us commence. Somerset, the lord protector of the kingdom, at that time in the zenith of power, was his friend and patron; Cecil accompanied the duke on his great Scottish expedition in 1547, at the battle of Pinkey (10th September); and he narrowly escaped being killed by a cannon-shot. In the following February (1547-8) the protector speaks of him in such terms as seem to show that he managed much of his correspondence (vol. i. p. 75); and this very well agrees with an entry in Cecil's Latin diary, which has misled the biographers. Under the year 1548, he says, ' Mense Septemb. cooptatus sum in officium secretarii,'-meaning of private secretary to the protector. Accordingly, Sir Walter Mildmay and others, addressing him in that year, style him 'Secretary to my lord protector's Grace.'

Perhaps there never was a period of history more trying to a statesman than that when Cecil commenced his career. It was a fiery furnace wherein pure faith and honesty proved fatal to their possessors, and the baser qualities stood a man in better stead. He was most fortunate who could most skilfully steer his barque amid the conflicting currents in the great ocean of politics; for to resign oneself to the influence of any one of these, and to become involved in utter ruin, were the same thing. The recollection of Cecil's subsequent greatness suggests some investigation of his conduct during this extraordinary period: and first,—What befel him when Somerset was hurled from place and power in 1549 ? When the Duke was deserted by his former friends and colleagues -openly denounced as an enemy by the council, who till that hour had done his bidding-Cecil was one of the very few who clung to him. Cranmer, Paget, Smith, and he, were almost the only friends who remained with the Protector at Windsor at that memorable moment when the imperious Warwick was summoning him to withdraw himself from the king's majesty, disperse the force which he had levied, and be content to be ordered according to justice and reason.' Of these, Cranmer and Paget proved false to him, but Smith and Cecil shared his imprisonment. Mense Novembris, A° 3° E. 6, fui in Turre,' says Cecil: a statement which has puzzled Mr. Tytler (vol. i. pp. 245 and 274), but we think without reason. The Duke and Smith were committed to the Tower on the 13th of October: how then, says our author, did it happen that Cecil did not follow them thither till the following month? We reply, first, that Cecil's having been in the Tower in November is no proof that he was not sent there in October; and secondly, that, as Mr. Tytler has himself remarked (vol. i. p. 76), Cecil's diary is evidently the

work