work of a later period of his life; and therefore its minute statements are not to be relied on. The inconveniences attending a residence in the Tower during the nipping month of November probably made the strong impression upon his memory.

Mr. Tytler has shown that Cecil obtained his liberty 25th January, 1549-50 (vol. i. p. 274). The fact is interesting; but still more interesting and extraordinary is the fact that, on his release, he possessed the regard not only of Somerset but also of Warwick. That he should have been obliged to sacrifice the duke's friendship in order to obtain a share of the earl's confidence seems only natural; but Mr. Tytler appears to think that he did not then do so (vol. i. pp. 276-7). Warwick must have been deeply impressed with Cecil's merit and value: Cecil, who was now twentynine, pursued the path which it is probable that, under similar circumstances, most men would have pursued; and the consequence of his adherence to Warwick was his promotion to the secretaryship on the 5th of September, 1550.

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În 1551, the memorable year of Somerset's second and final fall, our author again directs attention to Cecil's conduct. Edward VI. states in his journal, that when the duke sent for the Secretary Cecil to tell him he suspected some ill, Mr. Cecil answered, that if he were not guilty, he might be of good courage; if he were, he had nothing to say, but to lament him: whereupon the duke sent him a letter of defiance:' and on this reply, so cold, measured, and unkind,' Mr. Tytler proceeds to pass some severe comments: but let us look a little into this. Surely, before we condemn him for having turned his back upon his friend and first patron in the hour of adversity, it is necessary to examine scrupulously on what the charge rests: now the only evidence is the young king's journal, and there cannot be a doubt, I think,' says Mr. Tytler himself, that the narrative of Edward was the story told him by Northumberland' (vol. ii. p. 60). It is proper to remember that Cecil was now a man of considerable personal standing-that he had to make his choice between two ambitious chiefs-that it is quite possible he sincerely disapproved of Somerset's, and approved, as far as he then understood them, of Northumberland's views-and, finally, that much would depend on the language and manner in which he communicated with Somerset on the occasion; as to which we have no evidence at all. In October, 1551, he was knighted; and Pickering wrote from Paris, congratulating him on having been found undefiled with the Duke's folly.' Northumberland and he lived apparently on terms of great intimacy and friendship, as Mr. Tytler shows from a curious letter in which the Duke assures him

F 2

that

that he will not fail to visit his father, in his progress through Lincolnshire, were it only to drink a cup of wine with him at the door; for I will not trouble no friend's house of mine otherwise in this journey,' says the magnificent Northumberland, ‘my train is so great, and will be, whether I will or not' (vol. ii. p. 111). It must have gratified old Richard Cecil,' observes Mr. Tytler, 'to see the boy who had left his roof with no such bright prospects, return to it secretary of state, and friend and confidant of the first man in the realm. But had he known the cares and dangers of the office, he would have hesitated to change his own cloth of frieze for his son's cloth of gold.' Cecil seems to have deeply felt the restraint to which Northumberland's imperious temper subjected him. In a remarkable entry in his private diary, he describes himself as having no will of his own under Edward, and as only recovering the rights of a free agent by the death of the young king,— Libertatem adeptus sum, morte Regis ; et ex misero aulico factus liber et mei juris.'

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We must find room for another extract.

'Cecil's desertion of Somerset, and his devotedness to Northumberland, brought him to the brink of a precipice. The moment of trial was now come, and it is curious to trace him under it; yet let us do it with every allowance. The times were dreadful, and, in the vocabulary of statesmen, to lose your place and to lose your head were then almost convertible terms. On his first suspicion of the desperate game which Northumberland was playing, Cecil appears to have adopted an expedient not uncommon in those days with councillors who wished to get rid of a dangerous question. He became very sick, and absented himself from court. This, at least, is Strype's conjecture, and there is every reason to believe it correct. Many of his friends, however, thought him really ill, and amongst these, Lord Audley, who loved and studied the healing art, undertook his cure, as appears by the following humorous recipe and epistle.' 'Cecil's disease was deeper

fixed than to be cured by soup formed from the distillation of a sow-pig boiled with cinnamon and raisins, or a compost of a porpin or hedgehog stewed in red wine and rosewater. It was Northumberland's plot that troubled his digestion.'--vol. ii. p. 171.

It must be unnecessary to do more than remind the reader of the daring scheme of the last-named ambitious peer to divert the succession into his own family, and of the reluctance of the council to comply with his wishes. Cecil was as loth as the rest to affix his signature to the king's will, and at first was so fearful of becoming implicated in any of Northumberland's proceedings, that he, as we have seen, absented himself from the council on the plea of sickness. This was from the 22nd April to the 2nd June, 1553, at which time Lord Audley prescribed his hedgehog

soup.

soup. His signature, however, in common with that of the rest of the council, was obtained by Northumberland, and he was thus made accessory to an act directly hostile to Queen Mary.

This placed him in a critical position on her accession. Northumberland on the scaffold, and the Roman Catholic party triumphant, were appalling changes. We must content ourselves with a general reference on this subject to the volumes under consideration (pp. 191 to 206), where an extraordinary paper is published in illustration of Cecil's conduct. It is entitled A brief Note of my Submission and of my Doings,' and was presented by himself to the Queen. He endeavours to exculpate himself on the grounds,-1st, of his having acted on compulsion-I did refuse to subscribe the book, when none of the council did refuse; in what peril I refer it to be considered by them who knew the duke; 2ndly, of his having participated, to the least possible extent, in the treasonable practices of Northumberland, or rather of his having secretly acted against him, e. g. 'I dissembled the taking of my horse, and the rising of Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, and avowed the pardonable lie where it was suspected to my danger.'

All this seems rather shabby; but he was pardoned, though he lost all his places. It is not wonderful that he should seem to have taken little part in public affairs during Mary's reign; though we strongly suspect not so much because he could not have acquired a larger share of influence and authority, as because he did not choose to contend for any. But while he shunned all public business, he continued to be the private adviser of Elizabeth. Write my commendations in your letters to Mr. Cecil,' said the Princess to Parry, her cofferer, in 1551; I am well assured, though I send not daily to him, that he doth not, for all that, daily forget me: say, indeed, I assure myself thereof.' (vol. i. p. 426.) He foresaw that, provided Queen Mary died without issue, a few short years, could he but be successful in surmounting them in safety, would restore the religion and the government of the country to that footing on which it was the wish of his heart to see them placed. When, therefore, we find him following Paget and Hastings to the court of the emperor for the purpose of conducting to this country Cardinal Pole, we feel less inclined to believe, with Mr. Tytler, that he cultivated with assiduity the friendship of Cardinal Pole, the great man of the day, to whom Mary gave her chief confidence' (vol. ii. p. 475), than to suspect that Cecil absented himself as a measure of precaution; too happy to be out of the way of those trials to which all Protestants (especially such as had enjoyed favour in the preceding reign) were exposed. Cecil's name does not occur in the instructions with

6

which Paget and Hastings were furnished (vol. ii. p. 445), and he does not appear to have attended them in an official capacity; if he did, it must have been in a very subordinate one. It seems tolerably certain, however, that with his characteristic sagacity, Cecil did attach himself in some degree to Cardinal Pole. The Cardinal,' says Burnet,' was a man of a generous and good disposition, but knew how jealous the court of Rome would be of him if he seemed to favour heretics, therefore he expressed great detestation of them. Nor did he converse much with any that had been of that party but the late Secretary Cecil, who, though he lived for the most part privately at his house near Stamford, where he afterwards built a sumptuous house, and was known to favour the Reformation still in his heart, yet in many things he complied with the time, and came to have more of his confidence than any Englishman.'

The question in how far Cecil conformed to the popish church after his return to England is one with which his biographers have coquetted. There is in the State Paper Office a document illustrative of this subject, from which Mr. Tytler prints a few extracts. It gives the names of them that dwelleth in the parish of Wimbleton, that was confessed, and received the sacrament of the altar,' at Easter, 1556: the first three persons being my master Sir William Cecil, my Lady Mildred his wife, and Thomas Cecil [his son]' (vol. ii. p. 443): from which, viewed in connexion with other documents cited by Mr. Tytler, the fact that Sir William Cecil conformed to the full extent during Queen Mary's reign may be considered as established. He confessed, attended mass with his wife, and brought up his son, Thomas, afterwards Earl of Exeter, in the profession of the Roman Catholic faith. The paper to which Mr. Tytler has called attention was apparently in the hands of Dr. Nares before him; yet could it extort from the latter nothing beyond the general admission,- Of Sir William Cecil's conformity, to a certain extent, there can be no doubt.' (Life, vol. i. p. 673.) Sir William Cecil's conformity was exactly what he found necessary to his personal security.

A more pleasing feature, which comes prominently forward during this reign, was his strong attachment to country occupations, his love of his farm-of his garden-of planting and horticulture. In the pocket-book which he carried with him into the Low Countries, when he accompanied Paget, we meet with no ambitious memoranda- -no hints for government or statistical collections-but a method of cultivating the willow is carefully set down, dated from Menen. This taste seems to have acquired strength as he advanced in years. His temperate mind ever

tempered

tempered all his actions,' says a contemporary biographer;- If he might ride privatlie in his garden upon his little muile, or lye a day or two at his little lodge at Theobalds, retyred from business or too much company, he thought it his greatest happiness and onlie greatness. As to his books, they were so pleasing to him, as when he got liberty from the Queen to go unto his country house to take the ayre, if he found but a book worth the opening, he would rather lose his riding than his reading; and yet, riding in his garden and walks upon his little muile, was his greatest disport.' If the reader ever dreamed away a happy hour in the picture-gallery of the Bodleian, he will not require to be reminded that he has seen Burleigh pursuing this favourite recreation.

It would be an endless task to collect all the curious evidences of the extent to which Cecil indulged this passion for his garden and his library; but particularly for his garden. Allusions to it occur in the official correspondence of many of our ambassadors, and some high dignitaries in church and state at home testified their solicitude to gratify the minister in this particular by many an interesting postscript, and indeed often by entire letters. But, above all, we have abundance of Cecil's correspondence with his own stewards and servants; where, amid the most miscellaneous notices relating to the building of his house, the state of his farms, &c. &c., such passages as the following are of perpetual recurrence:-'Sir, I have sent to Burleigh seven peartree stocks and six apple-tree stocks to graft in; and if I can find any more, I will send them thither.' This was written by Sir James Hurst, the vicar of Essenden. Another passage from a letter of another vicar and steward, Sir John Abraham (Lansdowne MSS., 3. 75), is worth inserting. At the time it was written, Cecil was busied enclosing his ground with quickset. When your swans,' says Sir John, are fat, I shall, as I may, sell one of them. Your Jennet is, and shall be, both favoured and foddered as well as we can do it. I beseech you let us have either the grey or bay mare to draw, whereof we have much need, and she not worse a pin. The hop yard was dressed above three weeks ago, and the holes in the orchard dug ready for fruit trees, but none came to be set but two dozen of crab-tree stocks. The 19th of this month were your sheep drawn and numbered. There was of young wethers seventeen, one ram, lambs with tithe lambs five score and four, ewes five score.' So wrote Sir John Abraham on the 22nd November, 1557. Gerhard, the author of the well-known Herbal, was for twenty years Cecil's gardener.

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It was in pleasures and concerns such as these that the secretary sought