William Cecil, eventual 1st Lord Burghley, was the son of Richard Cecil
of Burghley in Northamptonshire and his wife, Jane Heckington.
His grandfather had risen, in the service of Kings Henry VII and
Henry VIII of England, to the position of a rich country gentleman,
and his father, in the service of the latter King, was further
enriched with a good deal of monastic land in the North-Eastern
midlands. William entered as a student of St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1535, and
resided, six years, at the University. He became an excellent scholar and a warm
friend of John Cheke, the greatest 'Grecian' of his time. In 1541, Cecil left
Cambridge for the bar and, in the same year, married Mary Cheke, the sister of
his friend. She died in 1544 and, in 1545, Cecil married another lady famous for
her learning - Mildred Cooke, daughter of Edward VI's preceptor, and sister of
Anne Cooke who became the mother of Francis Bacon. The Duke of Somerset made
Cecil his private secretary in 1547 and reposed complete trust in him. Soon
after Somerset's fall in 1550, Cecil, who was for a moment involved in his ruin,
made his peace with the now powerful Earl of Warwick, was made Secretary of State in 1550, knighted in
1551 and became Chancellor of the Garter in 1552. Though he outwardly complied
with the measures of the detestable government of the last three years of Edward
VI's reign, his private journal enables us to see how much he loathed his masters. He
signed, with the rest of the Council, the document by which Edward attempted, in
June 1553, to change the succession, but by a certain amount of quibbling
contrived to reconcile himself to Mary after the failure of the scheme. Cecil held
no office but incurred no disgrace during the Catholic reaction, and he
evidently made no difficulty about going to mass. In the Autumn of 1554, he was
sent to help in escorting Cardinal Pole to England and, in the following Spring,
was again employed on a diplomatic mission. He even sat in one Marian Parliament,
that of October 1555. But it is evident that all through Mary's reign, Cecil had
been gradually attaching himself to the fortunes of the Princess Elizabeth and,
upon her accession, he was immediately appointed to his old office of Secretary of
State. This, he held until in 1572, having already been created Lord Burghley, he
exchanged it for the Treasurership, then the highest post in the service of the
Crown. However, for virtually the first forty years of Elizabeth's reign, he was,
under whatever title, the Prime Minister of England.
It is a constant theme of
dispute between rival schools of historians as to how much of the success of that
reign was due to Cecil and how much to the Queen herself. But it would be, in
any case, a mistake to assume that Cecil's position was always a secure one. The
Earl of Leicester remained, until his death in 1588, a constant thorn in his
side. The Queen's amazing instability in dealing with foreign nations and,
especially, with proposals of marriage, kept him continually in anxiety. His own
leanings were evidently for a 'conservative' attitude in European politics, for
peace and for the maintenance of the old alliance with Spain. On the whole,
it is probable that the Queen leaned in the same direction. But, as time went
on, there grew up a school of courtiers who clamoured for war and for an
alliance with France, and there seemed to be, between 1570 and 1578, a serious
danger that the Queen would make a French marriage. Cecil's own best political
friend, Sir Francis Walsingham, who succeeded him in the Secretaryship, was
avowedly for open war with Spain. When that war was at last forced on England
after the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, an event for which the Queen scolded and
almost disgraced her faithful minister, Lord Burghley was cold and slow to
follow up the providential success gained over the Armada: and here the Queen
agreed with him thoroughly. So, during the last ten years of his long life, he
appeared to the younger generation of 'Elizabethans' as the drag on the wheel.
His second son, Robert Cecil, afterwards 1st Earl of Salisbury, succeeded to
Walsingham's Secretaryship and carried out his father's policy of caution.
Burghley died in 1598. When one examines the history of the reign, one is driven
to the conclusion that, whether Bughley's was the brain that planned or merely the
hand which executed the measures, internal and external, religious and secular,
by which England was rescued from the dangers and disgraces of Mary's reign,
enormous credit is due to him. Few statesmen ever had a harder task and few have
displayed greater foresight and resolution in carrying it out.
In private life, Lord Burghley who became, on his father's
death in 1552, a very rich man, was noted for the splendour and elegance of his
buildings and gardens, for his love of books, for his indefatigable industry and
for his wise and tender affection for his family. The only weakness of which he
is accused is his passion for manufacturing for the house of Cecil a pedigree
which could not be proved.
