From the first days of his appointment as Secretary of State, the Duchess of Suffolk was again his constant correspondent. As she was one of the first to condole with him on his misfortune, she was early to congratulate him on “the good exchanges he had made, and on having come to a good market”;[29] and thenceforward all the Lincolnshire gossip from Grimsthorpe and Tattershall reached the Secretary regularly, with many Lincolnshire petitions, and much business in the buying and leasing of land by Cecil in the county, although his father lived until the following year, 1552.[30] His erudite wife, of whom he always speaks with tender regard, seems to have kept up a correspondence in Greek with their friend, Sir Thomas Morysine, the English Ambassador to the Emperor, and with the learned Joannes Sturmius, to which several references are made in Morysine’s eccentric and affected letters to Cecil in the State Papers, Foreign.
The letters of Morysine and Mason, the Ambassador to France, to Cecil are of more importance as giving a just idea of Northumberland’s policy abroad than are their despatches to the Council. The Protestant princes were already recovering their spirits after the defeat of Muhlberg, and the Emperor was again faced by persistent opposition in the Diet. Henry II., having now made sure of Northumberland’s necessary adhesion to him, once more launched against the empire the forces of the Turks in the Mediterranean, whilst French armies invaded Italy and threatened Flanders. To the old-fashioned English diplomatists, this driving of the Emperor into a corner was a subject of alarm. Wotton, in a letter to Cecil (2nd January 1551), expresses the opinion that an attack upon the English at Calais would be the next move of the French King, and that Frenchmen generally are not to be trusted;[31] and Mason, the Ambassador in France (November 1550) writes also to Cecil: “The French profess much, but I doubt their sincerity; I fear they know too well our estate, and thereby think to ride upon our backs.”[32] But, withal, though as yet they knew it not, Northumberland’s plans depended upon a close understanding with France, and during the rest of his rule this was his guiding principle. Mason had to be withdrawn from France, and Pickering, another friend of Cecil’s, more favourable to the French interest, was appointed; whilst Wotton was sent to calm the susceptibilities of the Emperor, who was growing fractious at the close alliance between Northumberland and the French, which was being cemented by one of the most splendid embassies that ever left England (March 1551). Prudent Cecil through it all gives in his correspondence no inkling of his own feeling towards Northumberland’s new departure in foreign policy, though the letters of his many friends to him are a sure indication that they knew he was not really in favour of it.