thwarted by the baleful influence of Leicester and the caprices of the queen, remains to a large extent a matter of conjecture. His share in the settlement of 1559 was considerable, and it coincided fairly with his own somewhat indeterminate religious views. Like the mass of the nation, he grew more Protestant as time wore on; he was readier to persecute Papists than Puritans; he had no love for ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and he warmly remonstrated with Whitgift over his persecuting Articles of 1583. The finest encomium was passed on him by the queen herself, when she said, “This judgment I have of you, that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gifts, and that you will be faithful to the state.”
From 1558 for forty years the biography of Cecil is almost indistinguishable from that of Elizabeth and from the history of England. Of personal incident, apart from his mission to Scotland in 1560, there is little. He represented Lincolnshire in the parliament of 1559, and Northamptonshire in that of 1563, and he took an active part in the proceedings of the House of Commons until his elevation to the peerage; but there seems no good evidence for the story that he was proposed as speaker in 1563. In January 1561 he was given the lucrative office of master of the court of wards in succession to Sir Thomas Parry, and he did something to reform that instrument of tyranny and abuse. In February 1559 he was elected chancellor of Cambridge University in succession to Cardinal Pole; he was created M.A. of that university on the occasion of Elizabeth’s visit in 1564, and M.A. of Oxford on a similar occasion in 1566. On the 25th of February 1571 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Burghley of Burghley[1] (or Burleigh); the fact that he continued to act as secretary after his elevation illustrates the growing importance of that office, which under his son became a secretaryship of state. In 1572, however, the marquess of Winchester, who had been lord high treasurer under Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, died, and Burghley succeeded to his post. It was a signal triumph over Leicester; and, although Burghley had still to reckon with cabals in the council and at court, his hold over the queen strengthened with the lapse of years. Before he died, Robert, his only surviving son by his second wife, was ready to step into his shoes as the queen’s principal adviser. Having survived all his rivals, and all his children except Robert and the worthless Thomas, Burghley died at his London house on the 4th of August 1598, and was buried in St Martin’s, Stamford.
Burghley’s private life was singularly virtuous; he was a faithful husband, a careful father and a considerate master. A book-lover and antiquary, he made a special hobby of heraldry and genealogy. It was the conscious and unconscious aim of the age to reconstruct a new landed aristocracy on the ruins of the old, and Burghley was a great builder and planter. All the arts of architecture and horticulture were lavished on Burghley House and Theobalds, which his son exchanged for Hatfield. His public conduct does not present itself in quite so amiable a light. As the marquess of Winchester said of himself, he was sprung from the willow rather than the oak, and he was not the man to suffer for convictions. The interest of the state was the supreme consideration, and to it he had no hesitation in sacrificing individual consciences. He frankly disbelieved in toleration; “that state,” he said, “could never be in safety where there was a toleration of two religions. For there is no enmity so great as that for religion; and therefore they that differ in the service of their God can never agree in the service of their country.” With a maxim such as this, it was easy for him to maintain that Elizabeth’s coercive measures were political and not religious. To say that he was Machiavellian is meaningless, for every statesman is so more or less; especially in the 16th century men preferred efficiency to principle. On the other hand, principles are valueless without law and order; and Burghley’s craft and subtlety prepared a security in which principles might find some scope.
The sources and authorities for Burghley’s life are endless. The most important collection of documents is at Hatfield, where there are some ten thousand papers covering the period down to Burghley’s death; these have been calendared in 8 volumes by the Hist. MSS. Comm. At least as many others are in the Record Office and British Museum, the Lansdowne MSS. especially containing a vast mass of his correspondence; see the catalogues of Cotton, Harleian, Royal, Sloane, Egerton and Additional MSS. in the British Museum, and the Calendars of Domestic, Foreign, Spanish, Venetian, Scottish and Irish State Papers.
Other official sources are the Acts of the Privy Council (vols. i.-xxix.); Lords’ and Commons’ Journals, D’Ewes’ Journals, Off. Ret. M.P.’s; Rymer’s Foedera; Collins’s Sydney State Papers; Nichols’s Progresses of Elizabeth. See also Strype’s Works (26 vols.), Parker, Soc. Publ. (56 vols.); Camden’s Annales; Holinshed, Stow and Speed’s Chron.; Hayward’s Annals; Machyn’s Diary, Leycester Corr., Egerton Papers (Camden Soc.). For Burghley’s early life, see Cooper’s Athenae Cantab.; Baker’s St John’s Coll., Camb., ed. Mayor; Letters and. Papers of Henry VIII.; Tytler’s Edward VI.; Nichols’s Lit. Remains of Edward VI.; Leadam’s Court of Requests, Chron. of Queen Jane (Camden Soc.) and throughout Froude’s Hist. No satisfactory life of Burghley has yet appeared; some valuable anonymous notes, probably by Burghley’s servant Francis Alford, were printed in Peck’s Desiderata Curiosa (1732), i. 1-66; other notes are in Naunton’s Fragmenta Regalia. Lives by Collins (1732), Charlton and Melvil (1738), were followed by Nares’s biography in three of the most ponderous volumes (1828–1831) in the language; this provoked Macaulay’s brilliant but misleading essay. M. A. S. Hume’s Great Lord Burghley (1898) is largely a piecing together of the references to Burghley in the same author’s Calendar of Simancas MSS. The life by Dr Jessopp (1904) is an expansion of his article in the Dict. Nat. Biog.; it is still only a sketch, though the volume contains a mass of genealogical and other incidental information by other hands. (A. F. P.)
BURGKMAIR, HANS or John (1473–? 1531), German painter and engraver on wood, believed to have been a pupil of Albrecht Dürer, was born at Augsburg. Professor Christ ascribes to him about 700 woodcuts, most of them distinguished by that spirit and freedom which we admire in the works of his supposed master. His principal work is the series of 135 prints representing the triumphs of the emperor Maximilian I. They are of large size, executed in chiaroscuro, from two blocks, and convey a high idea of his powers. Burgkmair was also an excellent painter in fresco and in distemper, specimens of which are in the galleries of Munich and Vienna, carefully and solidly finished in the style of the old German school.
BURGLARY (burgi latrocinium; in ancient English law, hamesucken[2]), at common law, the offence of breaking and entering the dwelling-house of another with intent to commit a felony. The offence and its punishment are regulated in England by the Larceny Act 1861. The four important points to be considered in connexion with the offence of burglary are (1) the time, (2) the place, (3) the manner and (4) the intent. The time, which is now the essence of the offence, was not considered originally to have been very material, the gravity of the crime lying principally in the invasion of the sanctity of a man’s domicile. But at some period before the reign of Edward VI. it had become settled that time was essential to the offence, and it was not adjudged burglary unless committed by night. The day was then accounted as beginning at sunrise, and ending immediately after sunset, but it was afterwards decided that if there were left sufficient daylight or twilight to discern the countenance of a person, it was no burglary. This, again, was superseded by the Larceny Act 1861, for the purpose of which night is deemed to commence at nine o’clock in the evening of each day, and to conclude at six o’clock in the morning of the next succeeding day.
The place must, according to Sir E. Coke’s definition, be a mansion-house, i.e. a man’s dwelling-house or private residence. No building, although within the same curtilage as the dwelling-house, is deemed to be a part of the dwelling-house for the purposes of burglary, unless there is a communication between such building and dwelling-house either immediate or by means of a covered and enclosed passage leading from the one to the other. Chambers in a college or in an inn of court are the dwelling-house of the owner; so also are rooms or lodgings in a private house, provided the owner dwells elsewhere, or enters by a different outer door from his lodger, otherwise the lodger is merely an inmate and his apartment a parcel of the one dwelling-house.
