All His Spies: Professor Stephen Alford on his new book

Robert Cecil was the most influential politician in the last years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, yet he has always managed to evade close scrutiny – a fact that is surprising given his power at the royal court and his central role in managing in 1603 the accession of King James VI of Scotland as monarch of Great Britain and Ireland, thus shaping the modern United Kingdom.

I wanted to pin down this deft political operator who was superbly skilled in the walking the corridors of power.

I found a complex individual: consummate technocrat, intuitively gifted at reading other people, sometimes a loner, yet a man who had a talent for friendship.

I was struck early on by Cecil’s humanity. Given another family and another father – he was the son and political heir of Elizabeth’s formidable minister William Cecil, Lord Burghley – I think he might have been a traveller or a poet. As his father’s legacy project, educated and trained to serve his monarch, he had no choice but to enter the brutal world of the court, to which he brought quiet efficiency and a natural sense of balance. From his father he internalized the golden rule of politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: stick closely to the monarch and to their favour.

What surprised me most about writing the book was just how much of a courtier he was, able to turn on the ornate language and rhetoric common in the 1590s, and how much of a taste he had for conspicuous consumption and display – quite different to the image of the staid bureaucrat.

I wanted to weave Cecil’s story into the lives and careers of fellow courtiers. Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex stands out, both Cecil’s rival and collaborator, the great star of the late Elizabethan court, whose life ended with treason and execution in 1601. Two others were Francis Bacon, Cecil’s cousin, who view Cecil’s easy career at court with envy, and Thomas Phelippes, spy and cryptanalyst, who for years courted Cecil for a job.

One of the prominent themes of the book is Robert Cecil’s use of spies and the gathering of intelligence at home and abroad – critical in years of war against Spain, but also vital for political survival. He was at the heart of the investigations into the Gunpowder Plot in 1605.

I hope readers will find in this book a three-dimensional character – no cardboard cut-out.

Cecil knew his own limitations, and he knew he was never secure at court. The most audacious operation of his career was writing secretly to James VI before Elizabeth’s death in order to prepare for James’s succession to the crowns of England and Ireland. Given that Elizabeth refused to do anything at all about choosing her successor, Cecil knew that he had to do it – with all the risks this involved. It was no wonder that in 1601 King James described Robert Cecil as king of England in all but name.