ems to have recognised the impossibility of
undermining the Queen's personal regard for her great favourite, which
continued through all the years of his selfish, blundering, and criminal
career, down to the day of his death. While Leicester also in time
appears to have realised the impossibility of seriously impairing
Burghley's power, he, to the last, lost no opportunity of baffling that
minister's more cherished personal policies. In introducing his stepson,
Essex, to Court life and the notice of the Queen, in 1583, it is evident
that he had in mind designs other than the advancement of his young
kinsman. Essex, from the first, seems to have realised in whose shoes he
trod, and for the first ten years of his life at Court fully maintained
the Leicester tradition, and seemed likely in time even to refine upon
and enhance it. Had this young nobleman possessed ordinary equipoise of
temper it is questionable if Burghley would later have succeeded in
securing the succession of his own place and power to his son, Sir
Robert Cecil. Preposterous as it may seem, when judged from a modern
point of view, that the personal influence of this youth of twenty-three
with the now aged Queen should in any serious measure have menaced the
firm power and cautious policies of the experienced Burghley, we have
abundance of evidence that he and his son regarded Essex's growing
ascendancy as no light matter. From their long experience and intimate
association with Elizabeth, and knowing her vanities and weaknesses, as
well as her strength, they apprehended in her increasing favour for
Essex the beginning and rooting of a power which might in time
disintegrate their own solid foundations. The subtlety, dissimulation,
and unrelenting persistency with which Burghley and his son opposed
themselves to Essex's growing influence while yet posing as his
confidants and well-wishers, fully bespeak the measure of their fears.
While Burghley himself lacked the polished manners and graceful presence
of the courtier, which so distinguished Raleigh, Leicester, and Essex,
and owed his influence and power entirely to qualities of the mind and
his indefatigable application to business, he had come to recognise the
importance of these more ornamental endowments in securing and holding
the regard of Elizabeth. His son, Sir Robert Cecil, who was not only
puny and deformed, but also somewhat sickly all his days, made, and
could make, no pretensions to courtier-lik