The present work will accordingly aim mainly at presenting a panorama of Cecil’s career as a statesman, whose active life was not only coincident with the triumph of the Reformation, but also with the making of Modern England, and with the establishment of her naval supremacy. In the space available it will be impossible to relate in detail the whole of the complicated political transactions of the long and important reign of Elizabeth, and no attempt will be made to do so. But Cecil, to his lasting glory, did more than any other man to guide the nation into the groove of future greatness; and the primary object of this book is to trace his personal and political influence over the events of his time: to show the effects produced by his clear head and steady hand on the councils of the able and fortunate sovereign, who transformed England from a feeble and distracted, to a powerful and united, nation. The task of writing the life of Lord Burghley has been attempted more than once, but in every case with but indifferent success. The failure has certainly not been caused by lack of material, for no English statesman was ever so indefatigable a correspondent and draftsman as Cecil, and the stupendous masses of manuscript left behind by him frightened even the indefatigable Camden from the work of writing an account of Cecil’s ministry three centuries ago. “But,” he writes, “at my very first entrance upon the task, an intricate difficulty did in a manner wholly discourage me, for I lighted upon great files and heaps of papers and writings of all sorts, … in searching and turning over whereof, whilst I laboured till I sweat again, covered all over with dust, to gather fit matter together, … that noble lord died, and my industry began to flag and wax cold.” Strype also, who has reproduced so many important documents relating to Cecil in his “Annals of the Reformation,” and “Ecclesiastical Memorials,” was preparing materials for a life of the statesman, when death stopped his labour. Besides several less pretentious works by various authors, and the curious contemporary memoirs published in Peck’s _Desiderata Curiosa_, a spirited attempt was made seventy years ago by Dr. Nares, Regius Professor of History at Oxford, to produce a book worthy of the subject. After many years of laborious plodding through countless thousands of documents, the worthy professor produced one of the most ponderous and unreadable books in the English language, of which Lord Macaulay made merciless sport in his famous essay on Burghley. “Compared,” he says, “with the labour of reading through these volumes, all other labour, of thieves on the treadmill, of children in factories, of negroes on sugar-plantations, is an agreeable recreation.… Guicciardini, although certainly not the most amusing of writers, is a Herodotus or a Froissart when compared with Dr. Nares.”