William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley

• 1. Introduction

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  William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, was the man one biographer said could not be separated from the queen he served. Writing in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, A. F. Pollard put it directly. 'From 1558 for forty years,' he wrote, 'the biography of Cecil is almost indistinguishable from that of Elizabeth and from the history of England.' Cecil was an English statesman who served Elizabeth I as her chief adviser for most of her reign. He held the office of Secretary of State twice, and later became Lord High Treasurer. Behind that string of titles was a Lincolnshire student who left Cambridge without finishing his degree. What carried him instead to the summit of English power? And what did four decades that close to a queen actually cost him?

• 2. Origins and Education

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  Bourne, a market town in Lincolnshire, was where William Cecil was born in 1520, son of Sir Richard Cecil and his wife, Jane Heckington. Richard owned the Burghley estate near Stamford, land his own father, David Cecil, had used to build the family's standing. David Cecil had won the favour of Henry VII, serving as yeoman of the chamber. He also sat as Member of Parliament for Stamford five times between 1504 and 1523. According to Burghley's own enemies, David Cecil also kept the best inn in Stamford.

  Cecil later worked with the antiquary William Camden to trace his ancestry back further still. The trail led to the Welsh Cecils, or Seisyllts, of Allt-yr-Ynys, on the Herefordshire and Monmouthshire border. Cecil is simply an anglicised form of the Welsh name Seisyllt. He had a family pedigree painted at Theobalds acknowledging this Welsh Marches origin.

  At fourteen, in May 1535, Cecil went up to St John's College, Cambridge. There, the scholars Roger Ascham and John Cheke gave him an unusual grounding in Greek. He also fell for Cheke's sister, Mary. His father pulled him out in 1541, sending him to Gray's Inn without a degree, hoping to end the attachment. It failed. Four months later Cecil married Mary Cheke anyway, in what he himself later counted as one of the rare rash acts of his life.

  Their son Thomas, the future Earl of Exeter, was born in May 1542. Mary died in February 1543. Cecil married again in December 1546, to Mildred Cooke. Ascham ranked her alongside Lady Jane Grey as one of the two most learned women in the kingdom. Mildred's sister Anne married Sir Nicholas Bacon and became the mother of Sir Francis Bacon.

• 3. Surviving Two Reigns

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  Cecil's political education began in the household of the Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector for the boy king Edward VI. In 1547 he rode north with Somerset on the Pinkie campaign, serving as one of two Judges of the Marshalsea. The other judge, William Patten, later wrote that Cecil generously handed over his own notes for Patten's account of the campaign, The Expedition into Scotland.

  By 1548, Cecil was acting as the Protector's Master of Requests. He ran a court Somerset had set up at Somerset House to hear poor men's complaints. He also served as Somerset's private secretary, a post that turned dangerous when the Protector fell from power. Lords opposed to Somerset ordered Cecil's detention on the 10th of October 1549, and by November he was locked in the Tower of London.

  Cecil talked his way out within three months by ingratiating himself with John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. Dudley was the man who had just toppled his old master. On the 5th of September 1550 he was sworn in as one of King Edward's two secretaries of state. Years later, writing in his diary about that release, Cecil used a Latin phrase. It translates to, 'I was freed from this miserable court.'

  Service under Dudley, soon Duke of Northumberland, brought its own dangers. In June 1553, Northumberland pressured the dying king's lawyers into a new document. It barred both Elizabeth and Mary Tudor from the throne, in favour of Lady Jane Grey. Cecil hesitated. In a letter to his wife he wrote, 'Seeing great perils threatened upon us by the likeness of the time, I do make choice to avoid the perils of God's displeasure.' He signed the devise anyway, along with a bond among the plotters and letters urging Mary Tudor to accept the new line of succession.

  When Mary marched to claim her throne, Cecil switched sides, becoming, by his own later account, one of the duke's most active opponents. He had played no part in Henry VIII's treatment of Catherine of Aragon or of Mary herself. That let him make peace with the new Catholic regime without much difficulty. He attended Mass, made confession, and in December 1554 met the returning Cardinal Pole, accompanying him to Calais the following May. Through it all he kept winning elections, sitting for Lincolnshire and, by 1563, for Northamptonshire. It gave him a foothold in Parliament that outlasted Mary's reign and carried into Elizabeth's.

• 4. An Unfinished Conquest

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  The historian Dawson traces Cecil's foreign policy back to one long-term aim. He wanted to finish England's control of Ireland, and to lock Scotland into a lasting alliance with England. With the northern land border secured, Cecil argued, England's defence would rest on a strong Royal Navy. He pushed to strengthen it and make it the centrepiece of English power. He got his Scottish alliance, built on shared religion and shared interests, and an opening that seemed to promise real headway in Ireland. Ireland, though, never fell fully into line. Cecil's underlying premise was that England's safety depended on controlling the whole of the British Isles. By the 1600s, that idea had become an unquestioned rule of English policy.

  Cecil sent the French Huguenots and the Dutch just enough support to keep their resistance alive, without dragging England into open war. His Protestantism, in other words, was practical rather than doctrinal. Elizabeth developed a deep-seated caution about committing to decisive action; Cecil never did. His swift intervention in Scotland in 1559-1560 showed he could act forcefully when the moment demanded it. His later push for the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, confirmed the same instinct.

  Cecil left behind stacks of memoranda, weighing the pros and cons of nearly every policy question. Some verged on the absurd in their thoroughness. They rarely reveal which option he actually favoured. How much credit or blame he deserves for the Anglican religious settlement, the Poor Laws, or Elizabeth's foreign policy overall is still debated. The historian Hilaire Belloc went further, calling Cecil the de facto ruler of England during his years as Secretary. Belloc pointed to moments when Cecil and Elizabeth disagreed and argued that it was consistently Cecil's will that won out.

  Historians Leimon and Parker add one more layer. They identify Cecil as the chief protector of Edward Stafford, England's ambassador in Paris. Stafford was secretly a paid Spanish spy around the time of the Spanish Armada. Even they stop short of claiming Cecil knew his own diplomat was a traitor.

• 5. The Incorruptible Minister

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  Richard Verstegan, a Catholic writer living in exile, gave Cecil's enemies their sharpest line of attack. 'The Queen will listen to none but unto him,' he wrote, 'and somtymes, she is faine to come to his bedsyde to entreat him in some-things.' Verstegan and other exiled Catholics turned Cecil into a stock villain in their pamphlets, casting him as the corrupting hand behind the queen. The charge grew out of Cecil's own record. He had a large share in shaping the 1559 religious settlement. He grew steadily more hostile to Catholics as the years passed, and showed far more patience for Puritans than for Rome. He even took the Anglican archbishop John Whitgift to task over his 1583 Articles targeting religious dissent.

  Elizabeth herself answered the pamphleteers, whether she meant to or not. 'This judgment I have of you,' she told Cecil, 'that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gifts, and that you will be faithful to the state.'

  Cecil's economic thinking took its shape from the Commonwealthmen who had advised the boy king Edward VI. He held onto their belief in the social hierarchy, the idea of a just price, and the moral duty owed to labourers. One of his biographers summed up his approach in a single line. Power was for defence from outside enemies, plenty for security at home, and Cecil pursued both at once. He hated England's dependence on foreign corn. During at least one economic downturn, he pushed hard to keep people employed, worried about 'tumults' if they were not. He also used patronage as a tool, buying the loyalty of the nobility with offices and favours.

  In 1572, the death of Lord Winchester left the office of Lord High Treasurer empty. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was offered the post first and turned it down. He recommended Cecil instead, citing his greater, in Leicester's words, 'learning and knowledge.' Cecil took the office, and his grip on the queen's confidence only tightened as the years went on.

• 6. Houses of Ambition

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  Burghley House, rising near Stamford between 1555 and 1587, was modelled on the privy lodgings of Richmond Palace. It passed down to Cecil's descendants, the earls and marquesses of Exeter. It still stands as one of the finest examples of 16th-century Elizabethan architecture. The wool trade running through the Cecil estates helped pay for it.

  In London, Cecil expanded an existing building into what became known as Cecil House. Queen Elizabeth herself supped there in July 1561. Cecil noted in his diary that she came 'before my house was fully finished.' He called the place, modestly, 'my rude new cottage.' His elder son, Thomas Cecil, later inherited it, and it took on a new name: Exeter House.

  Between 1564 and 1585, Cecil ordered the construction of a third residence, Theobalds House in Cheshunt. Part of the purpose was to advertise his rising status at court; part was to give the queen a residence fit for her visits. Elizabeth came eight times, between 1572 and 1596. In May 1591, an entertainment staged for her there, called the Hermit's Welcome, hinted at Burghley's own approaching retirement from public life.

• 7. Father, Son and Friend

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  Cecil wrote his son Robert more than 128 letters over the course of his life, patient letters full of guidance and encouragement. They trace the years between 1593 and 1598, as Robert worked to secure the office of principal secretary for himself. The letters cover finance, administration, foreign policy and religion, and the pivot in Cecil's attention from war on the continent to war in Ireland. Read together, they show a father anxious not just for his son's career, but for his own failing health and for the future of the queen and her kingdom.

  Cecil's longest-running personal correspondence ran from 1566 to 1590, not with family but with an Irish judge, Sir Nicholas White. White had once tutored Cecil's children while he was a law student at Lincoln's Inn. In 1569, early in the imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots, Cecil sent White to visit her, and the meeting turned bitter. White pushed back hard against Mary's claim that Elizabeth was treating her cruelly. Afterward, in a letter to Cecil, White admitted something else. Despite his hostility, he had found Mary somewhat alluring. He urged that she be watched closely, so she could not have the same effect on others. Elizabeth was jealous of her Scottish rival, and White had been careful to insist Mary was no match for her in beauty. Cecil, it seems, kept the more dangerous parts of White's report away from the queen entirely.

  White kept demonstrating his independence for years afterward, refusing at times to add his signature to official letters he disagreed with. His usefulness, as an Irish speaker and a nominal Protestant serving on the Privy Council, lasted two decades. It ended when he was drawn into a Dublin scandal over a priest's confession, a controversy that threatened the Queen's authority in Ireland. Cecil withdrew the protection he had given White for so long. White was imprisoned in London, and died not long afterward.

• 8. Death and Afterlife

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  Burghley collapsed at his London residence, Cecil House, in 1598, in what may have been a stroke or a heart attack. He had outlived every one of his children except Robert and Thomas. He died there on the 4th of August 1598, and was buried in St Martin's Church in Stamford.

  Thomas's descendants became the Marquesses of Exeter, and Robert's became the Marquesses of Salisbury. One descendant on the Salisbury side, Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, served three separate terms as prime minister. He served first under Queen Victoria, and later under her son, Edward VII. His nephew, Arthur Balfour, succeeded him in the job. Centuries later, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the 7th Marquess of Salisbury, led the House of Lords from 1994 to 1997.

  Pollard, writing Cecil's Encyclopædia Britannica entry, did not let him off easily. He quoted Cecil's predecessor as treasurer, Lord Winchester, who said of himself that he was 'sprung from the willow rather than the oak.' Neither man bent easily to obstinate conviction, and Pollard judged Cecil the same way. Cecil once put his own view of religious tolerance bluntly. A state, he argued, 'could never be in safety where there was a toleration of two religions.' People who disagreed about God, he believed, could never truly agree about their country. Calling Cecil Machiavellian meant little, he wrote, since almost every statesman of the era put efficiency ahead of principle. But he credited Cecil's caution and craft with building the stability that let principles survive at all.

  Shakespeare's Hamlet gave Cecil an unlikely afterlife: many scholars consider him a model for Polonius, the play's calculating minister. He has been played on screen by Richard Attenborough in Elizabeth, by David Thewlis in Anonymous, and by Guy Pearce in Mary Queen of Scots. The children's series Horrible Histories cast Ben Willbond as Cecil, a role Mathew Baynton picked up for the spin-off film Bill. Long after his death, one final tribute turned up in an unlikely place. An Airspeed Ambassador airliner, the one that crashed in the 1958 Munich air disaster, was named Lord Burghley.