Page:The house of Cecil.djvu/146

 122 THE CECILS

happiness was short-lived, for Lady Roos died in 1591, after giving birth to one son, William, who succeeded her as Lord Roos. The old Lord Burghley greeted the birth of his first great- grandson with the pious ejaculation, " God bless him to follow my purposes, but not my pains nor dangers," l a prayer which, unfortunately, was not granted.

In 1600 Cecil was again travelling in Italy, and had the misfortune to incur the Queen's suspicion that he was " going to Rome." His wife he had married again writes to the all-powerful Sir Robert to ask him to assure her Majesty that he had no such intention. " I had thought," she says, " his very name in his travel would have proved his greatest foe, which I see is more subject to vipers at home," z and Cecil himself writes from Venice (February ist, 1600), " Those which in my absence do slander me with coming hither for remission of sins and to become a Catholic, do themselves injury and not me in reporting so great an untruth. I write not this to trouble you to defend my innocency against these leprous tongues, because it is the nature of certain poor spirits that if such bitter fanns [? fangs] should not have their natural passage, they would presently fall into some grievous disease." 3

William Cecil was knighted in 1603, on the occasion already described, when his father enter-

1 Historical MSS. Commission, Report XII., App. IV. p. 282. a Hatfield MSS., X. 21. a Ibid., X. 25.

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