William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley KG PC was an English statesman, the chief advisor of Queen Elizabeth I for most of her reign, twice Secretary of State (1550–53 and 1558–72) and Lord High Treasurer from 1572. Albert Pollard says, "From 1558 for forty years the biography of Cecil is almost indistinguishable from that of Elizabeth and from the history of England. "
Background
William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley was born, according to his own statement, on the 13th of September 1521 at the house of his mother's father at Bourne, Lincolnshire.
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 Lord Burghley.
The connexion with the Herefordshire family is not so impossible as the descent from Sitsyllt; but the earliest authentic ancestor of the lord treasurer is his grandfather, 'David, who, according to Burghley's enemies, " kept the best inn " in Stamford.
Education
William, the only son, was put to school first at Grantham and then at Stamford.
May 1535, at the age of fourteen, he went up to St John's College, Cambridge, where he was brought into contact with the foremost educationists 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, after six years' residence at Cambridge, having taken a degree.
Career
He became part of the important human
ist circle of Roger Ascham, Thomas Smith, John Cheke, and Walter Haddon.
The same year he entered Gray's Inn.
Mary died a year after the birth of their first son Thomas, but Cecil remarried in December 1545.
According to Cecil's own chronology of his life, he sat in Parliament in 1543.
In 1548 he is described as the protector's master of requests, which apparently means that he was clerk or registrar of the court of requests which the protector, possibly at Latimer's instigation, illegally set up in Somerset House " to hear poor men's complaints. "
He was central to the duke of Northumberland's reconstitution of the council.
Cecil did not go abroad during the reign of Mary, but offered his diplomatic services in 1554 and 1555; still, he seems to have been a member of a group of crown critics in the Parliament of 1555 and spent the last three years of the reign privately in Wimbledon.
Cecil's public life began again in November 1558, when he started working on the day of Mary Tudor's death to secure a comfortable accession for Elizabeth.
Until he was appointed lord treasurer in 1572, Cecil was principal secretary and the queen's private secretary.
Cecil was at the centre of the campaign in 1559–60 to support the protestant lords of the Congregation in Scotland.
Like his Privy Council colleagues, Cecil wanted Elizabeth to marry and have heirs to settle the English succession; this was the central political issue of the decade because it involved Mary Stuart, her French connections, Scotland, and the competing ideologies of protestantism and catholicism.
Cecil was prepared to experiment with radical solutions to England's political problems.
He collaborated with Sir Francis Walsingham in 1584 to involve Englishmen in a ‘bond of association’ to take action in the event of Elizabeth's assassination by catholic foreigners; in fact, Cecil had privately worked out the project in 1569.
Although the second part of his Elizabethan career—between 1585 and his death in 1598—is generally viewed as more ‘conservative’, Cecil was still active as a parliamentary patron, co-ordinator of the Privy Council, master of the court of wards (which he had held since 1561), and lord treasurer; on top of this, he held the more ‘local’ offices of lord-lieutenant and justice of the peace in the eastern counties.
Some of his earliest biographers and contemporaries—John Clapham, his ‘anonymous’ biographer, George Whetstone, and Hugh Broughton—emphasized Cecil's anxiety over England's Roman catholic enemies, his political success, and his patronage of learning.
Macaulay argued that Cecil was purely an administrator, and this assessment stuck.
Because Cecil did not flee abroad during the reign of Mary, historians have often assumed that he was not a strong protestant.
In fact, he was part of a solid reformed culture at Cambridge; he knew and patronized radicals like Bishop John Hooper and an English printer of Calvin in the 15406 and 15606, John Day.
Cecil had a keen sense of providence and a strongly apocalyptic view of the struggle between the protestant and catholic European kingdoms. Cecil understood Britain and knew its geography intimately; he wrote his own historical account of the imperial nature of the English crown in 1584 or 1585.
Socially, Cecil was determined to acquire the trappings of court, council, and noble status.
He owned and built three houses—Cecil House in London; Burghley House in Northamptonshire; and Theobalds in Hertfordshire—and developed estates in Lincolnshire, Rutland, and Northamptonshire.
Achievements
He owned and built three houses—Cecil House in London; Burghley House in Northamptonshire; and Theobalds in Hertfordshire—and developed estates in Lincolnshire, Rutland, and Northamptonshire.
Religion
Probably the queen had more to do with the falsification of this rumour than Cecil, though he is said to have opposed in the parliament of 1555-ih which he represented Lincolnshire-a bill for the confiscation of the estates of the Protestant refugees.
But the story, even as told by his biographer (Peck, Desiderata Curiosa, i. 11), does not represent Cecil's conduct as having been very courageous; and it is more to his credit that he found no seat in the parliament of 1558, for which Mary had directed the return of " discreet and good Catholic members.
How far he was personally responsible for the Anglican Settlement, the Poor Laws, and the foreign policy of the reign.
Views
Socially, Cecil was determined to acquire the trappings of court, council, and noble status.
Connections
He 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.
