Biography
Other info : Career
William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (sometimes spelled Burleigh), KG was an English statesman, the chief advisor of Queen Elizabeth I for most of her reign, twice Secretary of State (1550–1553 and 1558–1572) and Lord High Treasurer from 1572. He was the founder of the Cecil dynasty which has produced many politicians including two Prime Minister.
Cecil was born in Bourne, Lincolnshire, in 1520, the son of Richard Cecil, owner of the Burghley estate (near Stamford, Lincolnshire), and his wife, Jane Heckington. Pedigrees, elaborated by Cecil himself with the help of William Camden the antiquary, associated him with the Welsh Cecils or Sitsylts of Allt-Yr-Ynys, Walterstone,[1] on the border of Herefordshire and Monmouthshire, and traced his descent from an Owen of the time of King Harold and a Sitsyllt of the reign of William Rufus. Sitsylt is the original Welsh spelling of the anglicised Cecil. There is now no doubt that the family was from the Welsh Marches and Lord Burghley himself acknowledged this in his family pedigree painted at Theobalds.[2] The family had connections with Dore Abbey.[3] However, the move to Stamford provides information concerning the Lord Treasurer's grandfather, David; he, according to Burghley's enemies, kept the best inn in Stamford. David somehow secured the favour of the first Tudor Henry VII, to whom he seems to have been Yeoman of the Guard. He was Sergeant-of-Arms to Henry VIII in 1526, Sheriff of Northamptonshire in 1532, and a Justice of the Peace for Rutland. His eldest son, Richard, Yeoman of the Wardrobe (d. 1554), married Jane, daughter of William Heckington of Bourne, and was father of three daughters and the future Lord Burghley.
William, the only son, was put to school first at The King's School, Grantham, and then Stamford School, which he later saved and endowed. In May 1535, at the age of fourteen, he went to St John's College, Cambridge,[4] where he was brought into contact with the foremost scholars of the time, Roger Ascham and John Cheke, and acquired an unusual knowledge of Greek. He also acquired the affections of Cheke's sister, Mary, and was in 1541 removed by his father to Gray's Inn, without having taken a degree, as was common at the time for those not intending to enter the Church. The precaution proved useless and four months later Cecil committed one of the rare rash acts of his life in marrying Mary Cheke. The only child of this marriage, Thomas, the future Earl of Exeter, was born in May 1542, and in February 1543 Cecil's first wife died. Three years later, on 21 December 1546 he married Mildred Cooke, who was ranked by Ascham with Lady Jane Grey as one of the two most learned ladies in the kingdom, and whose sister, Anne, was the wife of Sir Nicholas (and later the mother of Sir Francis) Bacon. In contrast to his public unscrupulousness, Burghley's private life seems to have been upright; he was a faithful husband, a careful father and a dutiful master. A book-lover and antiquarian, he made a special hobby of heraldry and genealogy. It was the conscious and unconscious aim of the age to reconstruct a new landed aristocracy on the ruins of the old, Catholic order. As such, Burghley was a great builder, planter and patron. All the arts of architecture and horticulture were lavished on Burghley House and Theobalds (which his son, Robert, was to exchange with James I for Hatfield House). As the Marquess of Winchester (Burghley's predecessor as Lord High Treasurer) had said of himself, Burghley was "sprung from the willow rather than the oak". The interests of the State were his supreme consideration and to that end he felt no hesitation in sacrificing his conscience. He frankly disbelieved in toleration: "That State...could never be in safety where there was a toleration of two religions. For there is no enmity so great as that for religion; and therefore they that differ in the service of their God can never agree in the service of their country." With a maxim such as this, it was easy for him to maintain that Elizabeth's – and his – brutal measures were political and not religious. To say that he was Machiavellian is pointless, for every statesman is so, more or less; especially in the 16th century men preferred efficiency over principle. On the other hand, Burghley may have felt that principles are valueless without law and order; and that his craft and subtlety prepared a security in which principles might find some scope.
