Alford, a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and the author of an important book on the early Elizabethan polity, is superb on the subtle relationship between Queen and minister. Elizabeth, with her delaying tactics, empty promises and "answers answerless", must have been a maddening mistress to serve. But Burghley could be just as sly, deciding as secretary what she did and did not need to know and occasionally threatening retirement if he felt ignored or under-appreciated. Frequently he was behind parliamentary initiatives that tried to force Elizabeth's hand. One proposal that did not make it to the statute book was a radical provision for a quasi-republican government that would choose a suitable successor in the event of the Queen's death. As Alford notes, it anticipated the Glorious Revolution by more than a century.
Burghley's need to control everything extended to the domestic sphere and it comes as no surprise that, after his careful grooming, his son Robert eventually became a councillor and principal secretary himself. (Burghley was less proud of his elder son Thomas, whom he dismissed as "in study soon weary, in game never".) He had many passions - architecture, gardening, cartography, genealogy, heraldry - but even brief periods of leisure were punctuated by politics. He was the classic workaholic, frequently moaning about the load, but incapable of functioning without it. During Mary's reign, his frustration at his comparative inactivity led to obsessive note-taking sessions, when everything from the contents of his wardrobe to his weight (136lb) and even the weights of all his servants were assiduously recorded.
This book is by no means exhaustive (Burghley's Irish policy, for example, is not handled in depth), but it does not pretend to be. "This is my Burghley," Alford states at the outset, "as I have come to understand him". And it is a fascinating, controversial, hugely enjoyable version. Some may find their Burghley less the born-again reformer and more the worldly politique, but there can be no doubting his brilliance and there can be few surer guides to his vast archive than Alford.
