it was practically a declaration of war. Cecil understood the significance of the act, and knew better than any one else that from henceforth there could be no peace with Rome. In the council he stood almost alone, but Elizabeth, as always on any great emergency, gave him her steadfast support. As Mr. Froude has well said, ‘she was a woman and a man: she was herself and Cecil.’ Against the secret intrigues that were everywhere now at work, and the secret emissaries of the English refugees supplied with money from their sympathisers at home and from Spain and Rome abroad, Cecil felt himself compelled to resort to baser weapons. His life began to be threatened; assassins were bribed to slay him and the queen; the murder of both or either, it was taught, would be something more glorious than mere justifiable homicide. Against the new doctrine and its desperate disciples, growing ever more reckless and furious as their failures multiplied, it seemed to Cecil that extraordinary precautions were needed, and for the next twenty years he kept a small army of spies and informers in his pay, who were the detective police, that he used without scruple to get information when it was needed to keep watch upon the sayings and doings of suspected characters at home and abroad. They were a vile band, and employment of such instruments could not but bring some measure of dishonour upon their employer. Such men almost necessitated that cruelty and treachery should be wrought under their hands, and the use of torture and other barbarities in the treatment and slaughter of the Roman missioners and their supporters are the shame and indelible reproach which attach themselves to Cecil's conduct of affairs, and which not all the difficulties of his position, or the unexampled provocations he endured, can altogether excuse. In the grim conflict that ensued, however, he carried out his purpose and gained his end. Before the defeat of the Armada, all chance of a restoration of the papal supremacy in England had gone for ever.
Hitherto, though the most powerful man in the kingdom, and far the ablest and most laborious secretary of the queen, Cecil had received no great reward. He had lived bountifully and spent lavishly, but he was still a plain knight. On 25 Feb. 1571 he was created Baron of Burghley. ‘If you list to write truly,’ he says, addressing one of his correspondents, ‘the poorest lord in England’ (Wright, i. 391). Next year he was installed a knight of the Garter, and in July 1572, on the death of the Marquis of Winchester, he became lord high treasurer of England. These were the last honours he received from the queen. To follow his career from this point to its close would be to write the history of England; for by him, more than by any other single man during the last thirty years of his life, was the history of England shaped. He outlived all those who had at one time been his rivals, and almost all who had started with him in the race for power and fame. Ascham and Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith, whom he had loved as familiar friends at Cambridge; Sir Nicholas Bacon, who sat with him for long in the council, not always agreeing with his opinions; Leicester and Walsingham and Sir Christopher Hatton, and many another whose name has become a household word, all passed away before him. It seemed as if he could do without any or all of them; but it is very safe to assert that without him the reign of Elizabeth would not have been as glorious as it was, nor could the nation have emerged from all the long series of difficulties and perils through which it passed under his vigilant and vigorous guidance, so prosperous and strong and self-reliant, if there had been no Cecil in the council of his sovereign, and if his genius had exercised less paramount control. Only once in his career did Elizabeth display towards him any serious marks of her displeasure. After the execution of Mary Stuart she dismissed him from her presence, and spent her fury upon him in words of outrageous insult. He had carried out her secret wishes, but it suited her to have it believed that he had misinterpreted her instructions.
As he outlived almost all his old friends, so did he survive all his children except his two sons, Thomas, his firstborn [see Cecil, Thomas, Earl of Exeter], and Robert, his successor in more than one of his offices of state and the inheritor of no small portion of his genius [see CECIL, ROBERT, Earl of Salisbury]. Of five other children by Lady Mildred, three sons died early. His daughter Elizabeth married, as has been said, William Wentworth, eldest son of Lord Wentworth of Nettlested; the marriage took place in 1582; the husband died about a year after, and his widow did not long survive. There was no issue of the marriage. His other daughter, Ann, married Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford, by whom she had three daughters, but no son. It was a very unhappy alliance; the earl treated his wife very badly, and she died in June 1588. Her mother, Lady Mildred, followed her daughter to the grave in less than a year; she died on 4 April 1589. Cecil mourned her loss with pathetic sorrow. His mother, who had been to him
