48 THE CECILS
Hallam, " the rack in the Tower seldom stood idle." l For this Cecil must be held mainly responsible. In excuse it can only be alleged, first that he never employed torture for its own sake, or unless he believed that he could obtain necessary information by so doing : and secondly, that not only he personally, but what was of far more importance, the Queen and the country were in constant and dire peril from the diabolical schemes of their unscrupulous enemies. Greatly as we must regret that this stain should rest on his character, we may be quite certain that he acted as he did only under the conviction that the interests of the country required it.
He was anything but a cruel man. Indeed at this very time he treated the leaders of the Catholic party with a magnanimity which amounted to weakness. In spite of the participation of the Duke of Norfolk 2 in the plots of the previous year, and of his proposed marriage with Mary, with whom he was still in constant correspondence, he was released from the Tower in August. His letters show that he owed his liberty to Cecil, who even went so far as to offer him his sister-in-law, Lady Hoby, in marriage. Possibly he may have thought it advisable to conciliate his opponents, for political reasons. 3 In June the appearance of a Spanish fleet in the Channel, of which the osten-
1 See art. " Torture," in Encyclopedia Britannica, nth ed., XXVII. 7.
2 Norfolk had been a Protestant, but at this time he professed himself a Catholic ; on the scaffold he said he had always been a Protestant (Pollard, History of England, 1547 1603, p. 298).
- He had several interviews with Mary herself at Chatsworth.
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