All Which Were The Steps Of His
Father's Greatness, And Of The Honour He Left To His House.
For his
person, he was not much beholden to Nature, though somewhat for his
face, which was the best part of his outside:
For his inside, it
may be said, and without offence, that he was his father's own son,
and a pregnant precedent in all his discipline of state: he was a
courtier from his cradle, which might have made him betimes; but he
was at the age of twenty and upwards, and was far short of his
after-proof, but exposed, and by change of climate he soon made show
what he was and would be.
He lived in those times wherein the Queen had most need and use of
men of weight; and, amongst many able ones, this was chief, as
having taken his sufficiency from his instruction who begat him, the
tutorship of the times and court, which were then academies of Art
and Cunning. For such was the Queen's condition, from the tenth or
twelfth of her reign, that she had the happiness to stand up,
whereof there is a former intimation, environed with many and more
enemies, and assaulted with more dangerous practices, than any
prince of her times, and of many ages before: where we must not, in
this her preservation, attribute it to human power, for that in his
own omnipotent providence God ordained those secondary means, as
instruments of the work, by an evident manifestation of the same
work, which she acted; and it was a well-pleasing work of his own,
out of a peculiar care he had decreed the protection of the work-
mistress, and, thereunto, added his abundant blessing upon all and
whatsoever she undertook: which is an observation of satisfaction
to myself, that she was in the right; though, to others now
breathing under the same form and frame of her government, it may
not seem an animadversion of their worth: but I leave them to the
peril of their own folly, and so come again to this great minister
of state and the staff of the Queen's declining age; who, though his
little crooked person could not promise any great supportation, yet
it carried thereon a head and a head-piece of a vast content; and
therein, it seems, Nature was so diligent to complete one and the
best part about him, as the perfection of his memory and
intellectuals; she took care also of his senses, and to put him in
LYNCEOS OCULOS, or, to pleasure him the more, borrowed of Argos, so
to give unto him a prospective sight; and, for the rest of his
sensitive virtues, his predecessor, Walsingham, had left him a
receipt to smell out what was done in the conclave.
And his good old father was so well seen in mathematics, that he
could tell you, throughout Spain, every part, every port, every
ship, with its burden; whither bound, what preparations, what
impediments for diversion of enterprises, counsel, and resolution;
and, that we may see, as in a little map, how docible this little
man was, I will present a taste of his abilities.
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