The Great Lord Burghley: A Study in Elizabethan Statecraft

It may be stated as an historical truism that great organic changes in the relationship of human beings towards each other are usually preceded by periods of quiescence and apparent stability, during which unsuspected forces of preparation are at work. When the moment of crisis comes, the unthinking marvel that men are ready, as if by magic, to accept, and, if need be, to fight and die for, the new order of ideas. Although the outward manifestation of it may be unexpected, yet, in reality, no vast, far-reaching revolution in human institutions is sudden: only that the short-sightedness of all but the very wisest fails to see the signs until the forces are openly arrayed and the battle set. The period of the struggle for religious reform in Europe was preceded by such a process of unconscious preparation as this. Over a century elapsed from the martyrdom of John Huss before the bold professor of Wittemberg dared to denounce the Pope’s indulgences. It is true that during that century, and before, satirists and moralists had often pointed the finger of contumely at the corruption of the clergy and the lax discipline of the Church, but no word had been raised against her doctrines. In the meanwhile, the subterranean process which was sapping the foundations of the meek submission of old, was progressing apace with the spread of printed books and the revival of the study of Greek and Hebrew. By the time that Luther first made his daring stand, the learning of cultivated laymen, thanks to Erasmus and others, had far outstripped the cramped erudition of the friars; and when at last a churchman thundered from the Saxon pulpit his startling doctrine of papal fallibility, there were thousands of men throughout Europe who were able to do without monkish commentators, and could read the Scriptures in the original tongues, forming their own judgment of right and wrong by the unobscured light of the inspired Word itself. Thus it happened that the cry for radical religious reform in 1517 found a world waiting for it, and in an incredibly few years the champions of the old and the new had taken sides ready for the struggle which was to decide the fate of civilisation for centuries to come. By an apparently providential concurrence of circumstances, the personal characters and national ambitions of rulers at the same period were such as to enlist the hardiest and most tenacious of the European peoples on the side of freedom from spiritual and intellectual trammels; and eventually to ally the idea of political emancipation and personal liberty with that of religious reform, to the immense strengthening of both. The fight was to be a long and varied one; it can hardly, indeed, be looked upon as ended even now. Many of the combatants have fainted by the way, and both sides have belied their principles again and again; but looking back over the field, we can see the ground that has been won, and are assured that in the long-run the powers of progress must prevail, as we hope and believe, to the greater glory of God and the greater happiness of men.