Page:The house of Cecil.djvu/208

 178 THE CECILS

But in spite of these marks of the King's appreciation, he cannot have been a happy man. In Elizabeth he had lost his best friend, the very centre of his life, and though he worked loyally for James, he can never have been in full sympathy with his aims and methods. When congratulated on not being obliged to speak to the King kneeling, as he was used to do to Elizabeth, he replied " I wish to God that I spoke still on my knees." Since his father's death, he had led a lonely life, and devoted as he was to work, he hated the intrigues and gaieties of the Court. No wonder that he wrote to Sir John Harington, in 1603 :

" Good Knight, rest content and give heed to one that hath sorrowed in the bright lustre of a Court, and gone heavily even on the best seeming fair ground. Tis a great task to prove one's honesty, and yet not mar one's fortune. You have tasted a little hereof in our blessed Queen's time, who was more than a man, and, in truth, sometimes less than a woman I wish I waited now in your presence chamber, with ease at my food, and rest in my bed. I am pushed from the shore of comfort, and know not where the winds and waves of a Court will bear me. I know it bringeth little comfort on earth ; and he is, I reckon, no wise man, that looketh this way to heaven."

He certainly deserved his honours. " The labours which he underwent," says Gardiner, " were enormous. As Secretary, he had to conduct the whole of the Civil administration of the kingdom, to keep his eye upon the plots and conspiracies which were bursting out in every direction, to correspond with the Irish Govern-

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