Venice: [Paulus Manutius] 1560. Small 4to, A-Y4, Z6, 104 unnum. leaves, Aldine anchor on title-page and last leaf, verso, bound in 19the century hardgrain blue morocco, gilt fillet and small blind leaf tool borders, central panel with scolloped corners gilt, spine fully gilt,a.e.g., by Lewis, signed in blind at foot of front pastedown, “Bound by C. Lewis,7 Denmark Court, Strand”, ink signature on title page “Gulielmi Cecilij 1563” , bookplate of The Oblates of St. Charles on front pastedown and their stamp on A1&2, a fine copy with a doubly distinguished provenance.
Willam Cecil, first Baron Burghley (1520/21-1598) became Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth I on her accession in 1558. His skillful handling of the threat to Elizabeth’s throne by Mary, Queen of Scots cemented the queen’s confidence in him; a confidence which was reaffirmed in 1570 by granting him the power to stamp her signature on routine official documents. In the next year (25 February 1571) she elevated him to the peerage as Baron Burghley, and in 1572 he was made Lord Treausurer and a Knight of the Garter. Burghley's career was shaped by the character of the royal lady he served. Elizabeth was a pragmatist to the core, she waited on events, responding slowly and hesitantly, forever delaying and often reversing decisions. Burghley's personality was an effective foil to that of his temperamental mistress: the clear-headed statesman, certain as to his long-term goals, but in any particular decision forced upon him by events, a pragmatist who before acting made a rigorous accounting of the advantages and disadvantages of any particular line of action.
As W.T. MacCaffrey points out in ODNB - “From the standpoint of the twenty-first century, Burghley commands attention as the sixteenth-century English statesman who envisioned a changing English polity, one which moved away from the dynastic order of the early Tudor world, governed by the ambitions of the monarch for himself and his house, to a burgeoning perception of the public nature of the monarchy in which exercise of the executive will must be governed by calculations of public—of national—interest. Burghley has a rightful claim to a place among the architects and builders of the early-modern British nation state.”
The Oblates of St. Charles was a religious community founded by Cardinal Manning in Bayswater in 1857. It finally closed in the 1970’s, from whence this volume came.
Ahmanson-Murphy Collection 611