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Family Subtree Diagram : Descendants of Maud Vaughan (1410)

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (April 12, 1550 – June 24, 1604), Elizabethan literary figure, was born at Castle Hedingham to the 16th Earl of Oxford. He is most famous today as the alleged author of the works of William Shakespeare, a claim which a large majority of academic Shakespeare scholars reject but which is supported by many notable figures, including a number of acclaimed Shakespearian actors. J. Thomas Looney and Charlton Ogburn authored two seminal Oxford-as-Shakespeare studies.

During his lifetime de Vere was lauded by other English poets, mostly in regard to his patronage; see especially one of the epistolary sonnets to Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. A small corpus of Oxford's own poems and songs have survived, the dates of which (and, in some cases, authorship) are uncertain; most of these are signed "Earle of Oxenforde" or "E.O." [1]. His voluminous catalogue of letters make no mention of a dramatic career or literary matters, but focus on business affairs concerning such matters as the Cornish tin monopoly and his ongoing desire for several royal monopolies and stewardships [2]. His status as a dramatist is uncertain as no play written under his own name survives. Nevertheless, Francis Meres, in his discussion of dramatists in his Palladis Tamia lists Oxford among "the best for comedy"; Shakespeare appears further down in the same list as an entirely separate person:

so the best for comedy amongst us bee, Edward Earle of Oxenforde, Doctor Gager of Oxforde, Maister Rowley once a rare Scholar of learned Pembroke Hall in Cambridge, Maister Edwardes one of her Majesty's Chapel, eloquent and witty John Lilly, Lodge, Gascoyne, Greene, Shakespeare, Thomas Nash, Thomas Heywood, Anthony Munday our best plotter, Chapman, Porter, Wilson, Hathway, and Henry Chettle.

Believers in the Oxford-as-Shakespeare hypothesis, or Oxfordians, maintain that a set of "missing" poems and plays from de Vere's adulthood were eventually published under the pseudonym William Shakespeare, both because of what they perceive as a great literary reputation and due to alleged political reasons that would necessitate such a pseudonym.

De Vere's father died in 1562, when de Vere was twelve years old, making him Earl of Oxford and Lord Great Chamberlain of England. As a minor, Oxford was made a royal ward and was placed in the household of Lord Burghley, the Lord High Treasurer, a member of Queen Elizabeth I's Privy Council, and her closest and most trusted advisor. There Oxford was trained in such aristocratic pursuits as horse riding, combat, hunting, music, and dance, as well as French and Latin. His known tutors included the classical scholar and diplomat Sir Thomas Smith, and Laurence Nowell, one of the founding fathers of Anglo-Saxon studies. Nowell was hired to tutor the young earl in 1563, the same year that Nowell signed his name on the only known copy of the "Beowulf" manuscript (a.k.a. the "Nowell Codex"). There is also speculation that Oxford was taught Latin by his maternal uncle, Arthur Golding, who published the first English translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses while living at Burghley House.

On 23 July 1567, de Vere killed an unarmed under-cook by the name of Thomas Brincknell while practicing fencing with Edward Baynam, a merchant tailor, in the backyard of Cecil's house in the Strand. In the ensuing trial it was alleged the victim had run upon the point of Oxford's sword and was thereby condemned as a suicide; his widow and child were consequently stripped of their possessions. (Interestingly, the English chronicler Raphael Holinshed was one of the jurors at this trial.) Oxford obtained a bachelor's degree from Queens College, Cambridge, a master's degree from the University of Oxford, and legal training at Gray's Inn. However, he matriculated at Queen's College at the age of 8 1/2, remained less than a year, and no evidence exists that he ever returned to a university as an active student; his degrees may have been honorary [3]. Oxford entered the Royal Court in the late 1560s, upon which one contemporary wrote he would have surpassed all other courtiers in the Queen's favour, were it not for his "fickle head". Oxford nevertheless gained great favour and went on to become a tilting champion in several Elizabethan tournaments.

On 19 December 1571 de Vere married Lord Burghley's fifteen-year-old daughter, Anne Cecil — a controversial choice since Oxford was of the oldest nobility in the kingdom whereas Anne was parvenu, her father having only been raised to the peerage that year. At the age of twenty-one, Oxford regained control of most of his lands. His marriage produced five children, including three daughters who survived infancy. He toured France, Germany and Italy in 1575, and briefly adopted Roman Catholicism.

On his return across the English Channel, Oxford's ship was hijacked by pirates, who stripped him naked, apparently with the intention of murdering him, until they were made aware of his noble status, upon which he was allowed to go free, although without most of his possessions. Further controversy ensued after he found that his wife had given birth to a daughter during his journey, and separated from her on grounds of adultery, complaining that she had become "the fable of the world". Confusing the eldest daughter (Elizabeth) with the youngest (Susan), Francis Osborne (1593-1659) included a bed-trick anecdote about her birth, or, as he termed it, “Pembrok’s Wives descent”, in his Historical Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James (1658). According to Osborne (who had been a servant to the Herberts), Philip Herbert, then earl of Montgomery (and later Pembroke), was struck in the face by a Scottish courtier named Ramsey at a horse race at Croydon. Herbert, who did not strike back, “was left nothing to testifie his Manhood but a Beard and Children, by that Daughter of the last great Earl of Oxford, whose Lady was brought to his Bed under the notion of his Mistress, and from such a vertuous deceit she [i.e., Pembroke’s wife] is said to proceed.”

In 1580, Oxford accused several of his Catholic friends of treason, and denounced them to the Queen, asking mercy for his own Catholicism, which he repudiated. These same friends in turn denounced Oxford, accusing him of pederasty, bestiality, and of plotting to murder a host of courtiers, including Sir Philip Sidney and the Earl of Leicester. The charges were not taken seriously, although Oxford never completely recovered the Queen's favour and his reputation was thereafter tarnished.

He fathered an illegitimate child by Anne Vavasour, Sir Edward Vere, in 1581, and was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London. The illicit congress with Vavasour led to a prolonged quarrel with Sir Thomas Knyvett, her uncle, resulting in three deaths and several other injuries. Oxford himself was lamed in one of the duels. The embroglio was put to an end when the Queen threatened to jail all those involved. By Christmas of 1581, Oxford had reconciled with Anne Cecil and once again cohabitated with her.

In 1585 Lord Oxford was given a military command in the Netherlands, and served during the Battle of the Spanish Armada in 1588. His first wife Anne Cecil died in 1588 at the age of 32. In 1591, Oxford married Elizabeth Trentham, one of the Queen's Maids of Honour. This marriage produced his heir, Henry, the 18th Earl of Oxford. The Earl's three daughters, with whom it seems he was never close, all married into the peerage: Elizabeth married Lord Derby; Bridget married Lord Berkshire; Susan married Lord Montgomery, one of the “INCOMPARABLE PAIRE OF BRETHREN” to whom William Shakespeare's First Folio would later be dedicated. (Oxford had died six months prior to this marriage, however; and a couplet regarding Susan recorded in John Manningham's diary circa 1602-03 has been interpreted by some to imply that Oxford was a "deadbeat Dad"[4], yet by others to be "an echo of King Lear."[5])

Oxford maintained both adult and children's theatre companies, and was a patron of several writers; those who dedicated works to him include Edmund Spenser, Arthur Golding, Robert Greene, John Lyly, Anthony Munday, Thomas Churchyard, and Thomas Watson. His patronage (and mismanaged estates) reduced him to penury, and he was granted an annual pension of £1,000 by the Queen, which continued to be paid by her successor, King James I.

In 1603, Lord Oxford was granted his decades-long suit for the Stewardship of Waltham Forest and Havering-atte-Bower, but enjoyed the privilege for less than a year. He died in 1604 of unknown causes at King's Hold, Hackney, Middlesex, England, and was apparently buried at Hackney, although his cousin, Percival Golding (son of Arthur Golding), reported a few years later that he was buried at Westminster Abbey.

Shakespeare controversy
Main article: Oxfordian theory
In 1920, J. Thomas Looney advanced the hypothesis that Oxford was the actual author of Shakespeare's plays, due to what Looney perceived as an advanced education, a knowledge of aristocratic life, an interest in the theatre, the praise accorded Oxford's works, and various similarities between Oxford's life and the plays. According to his hypothesis, Oxford had no choice but to publish under a pseudonym, since it would have been considered disgraceful for an aristocrat to be writing for the public theatre, a claim generally considered by Renaissance scholars, including Steven W. May, to be incongruous with Elizabethan print histories. [6] Author Diana Price has presented a counter-point to May’s thesis. [7]

Notable Oxfordians include Sigmund Freud, diplomat and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Paul Nitze, Supreme Court Justices Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens, former British judge Christmas Humphreys, biographer and historian David McCullough, as well as actors Orson Welles, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Derek Jacobi, Kenneth Branagh, Michael York, Jeremy Irons, and Mark Rylance (former Artistic Director of the Globe Theatre).

Looney's beliefs constitute the core of the Oxfordian theory of Shakespearean authorship, and the debate over it remains contentious. Evidentiary gaps within and problems with the Oxfordian hypothesis have prevented many academics from considering its viability. For example, Oxford's 1604 death prevents him from witnessing certain events (e.g., the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the wreck of the Sea Venture in Bermuda in 1609) thought to be alluded to in Shakespearean dramas such as Macbeth and The Tempest, respectively. Contemporary poetic tributes to Shakespeare from writers such as Ben Jonson and Leonard Digges (who refer to Shakespeare as "Sweet swan of Avon!" and mention his "Stratford Moniment" in the First Folio), and William Basse (who explicitly mentions Shakespeare dying in 1616), seem to provide some of the clearest evidence for the Stratford Shakespeare's status as a reputed poet.

On the other hand, the publication of Shake-speares Sonnets in 1609, with its dedication to "OVR.EVER-LIVING.POET.", would seem to imply the author was dead by that time. Although some scholars (such as Donald Foster) have disputed the meaning of this phrase, when applied to a person rather than a deity, "ever-living" was generally understood to mean that person was deceased. Nevertheless, it remains debatable whether the phrase, in this context, refers to Shakespeare or to God.

Other candidates who have been put forward as the actual author of the Shakespeare works include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and William Stanley, 6th earl of Derby, all of whom are predominantly rejected by the academic establishment. Further insights and debating points from the Stratfordian perspective may be viewed at The Shakespeare Authorship website and from the Oxfordian perspective at The Shakespeare Fellowship website  1556 - 1588 Anne Cecil 32 32 1572 - 1625 Henry De Vere 53 53 1548 - 23 MAR 1607/08 Dorothy De Neville 1542 - 8 FEB 1622/23 Thomas Cecil 1577 Sir James Bourchier 1475 Thomas Mildmay 1520 - 1604 Sir Richard Berkeley 84 84 1525 Elizabeth Anne Reade 1571 Edward Cecil 7 MAR 1568/69 Lucy Cecil 1570 - 1633 Richard Cecil 62 62 1569 Mildred Cecil 1578 - 1662 Thomas Cecil 83 83 28 FEB 1580/81 Frances Cecil 1508 - 1551 Anthony Bourchier 43 43 1576 Anne Bourchier 1512 - 1579 Thomazine Mildmay 67 67 1542 - 1579 Thomas Bourchier 37 37 1546 - 1598 Bridget le Scrope 52 52 1528 - 1589 Mildred Cooke 61 61 1524 - FEB 1542/43 Mary Cheke 6 JAN 1563/64 - 1612 Robert Cecil 1565 - 24 JAN 1596/97 Elizabeth Brooke 1591 - 1668 William Cecil 77 77 JAN 1566/67 - 1640 Sir William Cecil 1490 - 19 MAR 1552/53 Richard Cecil 1495 - 10 MAR 1586/87 Jane Heckington 1520 - 1598 William Cecil 77 77 William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (13 September 1520 – 4 August 1598), was an English politician, the chief advisor of Queen Elizabeth I for most of her reign (17 November 1558–24 March 1603), and Lord High Treasurer from 1572.

Early life
Cecil was born in Bourne, Lincolnshire in 1520, the son of Richard Cecil, owner of the Burghley estate (then in Northamptonshire, now in Cambridgeshire), and his wife Jane Heckington. The estate is today open to the public and is the setting for a popular equestrian event, the Burghley Horse Trials.

Pedigrees, elaborated by Cecil himself with the help of William Camden, the antiquary, associated him with the Cecils or Sitsyllts of Altyrennes in Herefordshire, and traced his descent from an Owen of the time of King Harold and a Sitsyllt of the reign of King William Rufus. The connection with the Herefordshire family is not so impossible as the descent from Sitsyllt; but the earliest known authentic ancestor of the Lord Treasurer is his grandfather, David, who, according to Burghley's enemies, kept the best inn in Stamford, Lincolnshire. David somehow secured the favour of Henry VII, to whom he seems to have been Yeoman of the Guard. He was Sergeant-of-Arms to King 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 Lord Burghley.

William, the only son, was put to school first at Grantham and then at Stamford School, which he later saved and endowed. In May of 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. 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 he married (December 21, 1546) Mildred, daughter of Sir Anthony 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, became the wife of Sir Nicholas (and the mother of Sir Francis) Bacon.

Early career
William Cecil's early career was spent in the service of the Duke of Somerset (a brother of the late queen, Jane Seymour, who was Lord Protector during the early years of the reign of his nephew, the young King Edward VI). Cecil accompanied Somerset on his Pinkie campaign, being one of the two Judges of the Marshalsea, i.e. in the courts-martial. The other was William Patten, who states that both he and Cecil began to write independent accounts of the campaign, and that Cecil generously communicated his notes for Patten's narrative, which has been reprinted more than once.

Cecil, according to his autobiographical notes, sat in Parliament in 1543; but his name does not occur in the imperfect parliamentary returns until 1547, when he was elected for the family borough of Stamford.

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 Hugh Latimer's instigation, illegally set up in Somerset House to hear poor men's complaints. He also seems to have acted as private secretary to the Protector, and was in some danger at the time of the Protector's fall in October 1549. The lords opposed to Somerset ordered his detention on 10 October, and in November he was in the Tower.

Cecil ingratiated himself with Warwick, and on 15 September 1550 he was sworn in as one of King Edward's two secretaries. He was knighted on 11 October 1551, on the eve of Somerset's second fall, and was congratulated on his success in escaping his benefactor's fate.

In April 1551, Cecil became Chancellor of the Order of the Garter. But service under Warwick (by now the Duke of Northumberland) was no bed of roses, and in his diary Cecil recorded his release in the phrase ec niisero aulicofacius liber et lneijuris. His responsibility for Edward's illegal devises of the crown (a document which barred both Elizabeth and Mary, the remaining children of Henry VIII, from the throne, in favour of Lady Jane Grey) has been studiously minimized by Cecil himself and by his biographers. Years afterwards, he pretended that he had only signed the devise as a witness, but in his apology to Queen Mary I, he did not venture to allege so flimsy an excuse; he preferred to lay stress on the extent to which he succeeded in shifting the responsibility on to the shoulders of his brother-in-law, Sir John Cheke, and other friends, and on his intrigues to frustrate the Queen to whom he had sworn allegiance.

There is no doubt that Cecil saw which way the wind was blowing, and disliked Northumberland's scheme; but he had not the courage to resist the duke to his face. As soon, however, as the duke had set out to meet Mary, Cecil became the most active intriguer against him, and to these efforts, of which he laid a full account before Queen Mary, he mainly owed his immunity. He had, moreover, had no part in the divorce of Catherine or in the humiliation of Mary in Henry's reign, and he made no scruple about conforming to the religious reaction. He went to Mass, confessed, and out of sheer zeal and in no official capacity went to meet Cardinal Pole on his pious mission to England in December 1554, again accompanying him to Calais in May 1555.

It was rumored in December 1554 that Cecil would succeed Sir William Petre as Secretary of State, an office which, with his chancellorship of the Garter, he had lost on Mary's accession to the throne. Probably the Queen had more to do with the falsification of this rumor than Cecil, though he is said to have opposed, in the parliament of 1555 (in 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, 1732–1735, 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.

Reign of Elizabeth I of England
By that time Cecil had begun to trim his sails to a different breeze. He was in secret communication with Elizabeth before Mary died, and from the first the new Queen relied on Cecil as she relied on no one else. Her confidence was not misplaced; Cecil was exactly the kind of minister England then required. Personal experience had ripened his rare natural gift for avoiding dangers. It was no time for brilliant initiative or adventurous politics; the need was to avoid Scylla and Charybdis, and a via media (middle way) had to be found in Church and State, at home and abroad. Cecil was not a political genius; no great ideas emanated from his brain. But he was eminently a safe man, not an original thinker, but a counsellor of unrivaled wisdom. Caution was his supreme characteristic; he saw that above all things England required time. He restored the fortunes of his country by deliberation. He averted open rupture until England was strong enough to stand the shock.

There was nothing heroic about Cecil or his policy; it involved a callous attitude towards struggling Protestants abroad. The Huguenots and the Dutch were aided just enough to keep them going in the struggles which warded danger off from England's shores. But Cecil never developed that passionate aversion from decided measures which became a second nature to his mistress. His intervention in Scotland in 1559–1560 showed that he could strike on occasion; and his action over the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, proved that he was willing to take responsibility from which Elizabeth shrank.

Generally he was in favour of more decided intervention on behalf of continental Protestants than Elizabeth would admit, but it is not always easy to ascertain the advice he gave. He has left endless memoranda lucidly setting forth the pros and cons of every course of action; but there are few indications of the line which he actually recommended when it came to a decision. How far he was personally responsible for the Anglican Settlement, the Poor Laws, and the foreign policy of the reign, how far he was thwarted by the baleful influence of Leicester and the caprices of the Queen, remains to a large extent a matter of conjecture.

His share in the religious Settlement of 1559 was considerable, and it coincided fairly with his own somewhat indeterminate religious views. Like the mass of the nation, he grew more Protestant as time wore on; he was readier to persecute Papists than Puritans; he had no love for ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and he warmly remonstrated with John Whitgift over his persecuting Articles of 1583. The finest encomium was passed on him by the queen herself, when she said, "This judgment I have of you, that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gifts, and that you will be faithful to the state."

Later years
From 1558 for forty years, the biography of Cecil is almost indistinguishable from that of Elizabeth and from the history of England. When she came to the throne in 1558, she appointed him Secretary of State. Of personal incident, apart from his mission to Scotland in 1560, there is little. He represented Lincolnshire in the Parliament of 1559, and Northamptonshire in that of 1563, and he took an active part in the proceedings of the House of Commons until his elevation to the peerage; but there seems no good evidence for the story that he was proposed as Speaker in 1563. In January 1561, he was given the lucrative office of Master of the Court of Wards in succession to Sir Thomas Parry, and he did something to reform that instrument of tyranny and abuse. In February 1559, he was elected Chancellor of Cambridge University in succession to Cardinal Pole; he was created M.A. of that university on the occasion of Elizabeth's visit in 1564, and M.A. of Oxford on a similar occasion in 1566.

On 25 February 1571, in anticipation of the impending marriage between Cecil's daughter Anne (b. 1556) to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, she created him Baron Burghley. The fact that he continued to act as Secretary of State after his elevation illustrates the growing importance of that office, which under his son became a secretary of the ship of state. In 1572, however, Lord Winchester, who had been Lord High Treasurer under Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, died, and Burghley succeeded to his post. It was a signal triumph over Leicester; and, although Burghley had still to reckon with cabals in the council and at court, his hold over the queen strengthened with the lapse of years. Before he died, Robert, his only surviving son by his second wife, was ready to step into his shoes as the Queen's principal adviser. Having survived all his rivals, and all his children except Robert and Thomas, Burghley died at his London house on 4 August 1598, and was buried in St. Martin's church, Stamford.

His younger son, Sir Robert Cecil (later created Baron Cecil, Viscount Cranborne and finally Earl of Salisbury), inherited his political mantle, taking on the role of chief minister and arranging a smooth transfer of power to the Stuart administration under King James I. His elder son, Sir Thomas Cecil, who inherited the Barony of Burghley on his death, was later created Earl of Exeter.

Private life
Burghley's private life was singularly virtuous; he was a faithful husband, a careful father and a considerate master. A book-lover and antiquary, 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, and Burghley was a great builder and planter. All the arts of architecture and horticulture were lavished on Burghley House and Theobalds House, which his son exchanged for Hatfield House. His public conduct does not present itself in quite so amiable a light. 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" (in other words, flexible rather than unbending) and he was not the man to suffer for convictions. The interest of the State was the supreme consideration and to it he had no hesitation in sacrificing individual consciences. He frankly disbelieved in toleration; that State, he said, 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 coercive measures were political and not religious. To say that he was Machiavellian is meaningless, for every statesman is so, more or less; especially in the 16th century men preferred efficiency to 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.

Nicholas White
The most prolonged of Cecil's surviving personal correspondences is with an Irish judge, Nicholas White, lasting from 1566 until 1590; it is contained in the State Papers Ireland 63 and Lansdowne MS 102, but receives hardly a mention in the literature on Cecil.

White had been a tutor to Cecil's children during his student days in London, and the correspondence suggests that he was held in lasting affection by the family. In the end, White fell into a Dublin controversy over the confessions of an intriguing priest, which threatened the authority of the Queen's deputised government in Ireland; out of caution Cecil withdrew his longstanding protection, and the judge was imprisoned in London and died soon after.

White's most remarked-upon service for Cecil is his report on his visit with Mary, Queen of Scots in 1569, during the early years of her imprisonment by Queen Elizabeth. He may have published an English translation of the Argonautica in the 1560s, but no copy has survived.




William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (13 September 1521–4 August 1598), was an English politician, the chief advisor of Queen Elizabeth I for most of her reign (17 November 1558–24 March 1603), and Lord High Treasurer from 1572.

Early Life
Cecil was born in Bourne in 1520, the son of Richard Cecil, owner of the Burghley estate (then in Northamptonshire), now in Cambridgeshire), and his wife Jane Heckington. The estate is today open to the public and is the setting for a popular equestrian event, the Burghley Horse Trials.

Pedigrees, elaborated by Cecil himself with the help of William Camden, the antiquary, associated him with the Cecils or Sitsyllts of Altyrennes in Herefordshire, and traced his descent from an Owen of the time of King Harold and a Sitsyllt of the reign of King William Rufus. The connection with the Herefordshire family is not so impossible as the descent from Sitsyllt; but the earliest known authentic ancestor of the Lord Treasurer is his grandfather, David, who, according to Burghley's enemies, kept the best inn in Stamford, Lincolnshire. David somehow secured the favour of Henry VII, to whom he seems to have been Yeoman of the Guard. He was Sergeant-of-Arms to King 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 Lord Burghley.

William, the only son, was put to school first at Grantham and then at Stamford. In 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. 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 he married (December 21, 1546) Mildred, daughter of Sir Anthony 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, became the wife of Sir Nicholas (and the mother of Sir Francis) Bacon.

Early Career
William Cecil's early career was spent in the service of the Duke of Somerset (a brother of the late queen, Jane Seymour, who was Lord Protector during the early years of the reign of his nephew, the young King Edward VI). Cecil accompanied Somerset on his Pinkie campaign, being one of the two Judges of the Marshalsea, i.e. in the courts-martial. The other was William Patten, who states that both he and Cecil began to write independent accounts of the campaign, and that Cecil generously communicated his notes for Patten's narrative, which has been reprinted more than once.

Cecil, according to his autobiographical notes, sat in Parliament in 1543; but his name does not occur in the imperfect parliamentary returns until 1547, when he was elected for the family borough of Stamford.

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 Hugh Latimer's instigation, illegally set up in Somerset House to hear poor men's complaints. He also seems to have acted as private secretary to the Protector, and was in some danger at the time of the Protector's fall in October 1549. The lords opposed to Somerset ordered his detention on 10 October, and in November he was in the Tower.

Cecil ingratiated himself with Warwick, and on 15 September 1550 he was sworn in as one of King Edward's two secretaries. He was knighted on 11 October 1551, on the eve of Somerset's second fall, and was congratulated on his success in escaping his benefactor's fate. (Somerset, who had been a powerful figure during the early part of the reign of Edward VI (28 January 1547–6 July 1553), was disgraced and executed on Tower Hill in January 1552.)

In April 1551 Cecil became Chancellor of the Order of the Garter. But service under John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland was no bed of roses, and in his diary Cecil recorded his release in the phrase ec niisero aulicofacius liber et lneijuris. His responsibility for Edward's illegal devises of the crown (a document which barred both Elizabeth and Mary, the remaining children of Henry VIII, from the throne, in favour of Lady Jane Grey) has been studiously minimized by Cecil himself and by his biographers. Years afterwards, he pretended that he had only signed the devise as a witness, but in his apology to Queen Mary I, he did not venture to allege so flimsy an excuse; he preferred to lay stress on the extent to which he succeeded in shifting the responsibility on to the shoulders of his brother-in-law, Sir John Cheke, and other friends, and on his intrigues to frustrate the Queen to whom he had sworn allegiance.

There is no doubt that Burghley saw which way the wind was blowing, and disliked Northumberland's scheme; but he had not the courage to resist the duke to his face. As soon, however, as the duke had set out to meet Mary, Cecil became the most active intriguer against him, and to these efforts, of which he laid a fall account before Queen Mary, he mainly owed his immunity. He had, moreover, had no part in the divorce of Catherine or in the humiliation of Mary in Henry's reign, and he made no scruple about conforming to the religious reaction. He went to Mass, confessed, and out of sheer zeal and in no official capacity went to meet Cardinal Pole on his pious mission to England in December 1554, again accompanying him to Calais in May 1555.

It was rumored in December 1554 that Cecil would succeed Sir William Petre as Secretary of State, an office which, with his chancellorship of the Garter, he had lost on Mary's accession to the throne. Probably the Queen had more to do with the falsification of this rumor than Cecil, though he is said to have opposed, in the parliament of 1555 (in 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, 1732–1735, 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.

Reign of Elizabeth I of England
By that time Cecil had begun to trim his sails to a different breeze. He was in secret communication with Elizabeth before Mary died, and from the first the new Queen relied on Cecil as she relied on no one else. Her confidence was not misplaced; Cecil was exactly the kind of minister England then required. Personal experience had ripened his rare natural gift for avoiding dangers. It was no time for brilliant initiative or adventurous politics; the need was to avoid Scylla and Charybdis, and a via media (middle way) had to be found in Church and State, at home and abroad. Cecil was not a political genius; no great ideas emanated from his brain. But he was eminently a safe man, not an original thinker, but a counselor of unrivaled wisdom. Caution was his supreme characteristic; he saw that above all things England required time. He restored the fortunes of his country by deliberation. He averted open rupture until England was strong enough to stand the shock.

There was nothing heroic about Cecil or his policy; it involved a callous attitude towards struggling Protestants abroad. The Huguenots and the Dutch were aided just enough to keep them going in the struggles which warded danger off from England's shores. But Cecil never developed that passionate aversion from decided measures which became a second nature to his mistress. His intervention in Scotland in 1559–1560 showed that he could strike on occasion; and his action over the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, proved that he was willing to take responsibility from which Elizabeth shrank.

Generally he was in favor of more decided intervention on behalf of continental Protestants than Elizabeth would admit, but it is not always easy to ascertain the advice he gave. He has left endless memoranda lucidly setting forth the pros and cons of every course of action; but there are few indications of the line which he actually recommended when it came to a decision. How far he was personally responsible for the Anglican Settlement, the Poor Laws, and the foreign policy of the reign, how far he was thwarted by the baleful influence of Leicester and the caprices of the Queen, remains to a large extent a matter of conjecture.

His share in the religious Settlement of 1559 was considerable, and it coincided fairly with his own somewhat indeterminate religious views. Like the mass of the nation, he grew more Protestant as time wore on; he was readier to persecute Papists than Puritans; he had no love for ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and he warmly remonstrated with John Whitgift over his persecuting Articles of 1583. The finest encomium was passed on him by the queen herself, when she said, "This judgment I have of you, that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gifts, and that you will be faithful to the state."

Later Years
From 1558 for forty years, the biography of Cecil is almost indistinguishable from that of Elizabeth and from the history of England. When she came to the throne in 1558, she appointed him Secretary of State. Of personal incident, apart from his mission to Scotland in 1560, there is little. He represented Lincolnshire in the parliament of 1559, and Northamptonshire in that of 1563, and he took an active part in the proceedings of the House of Commons until his elevation to the peerage; but there seems no good evidence for the story that he was proposed as Speaker in 1563. In January 1561 he was given the lucrative office of Master of the Court of Wards in succession to Sir Thomas Parry, and he did something to reform that instrument of tyranny and abuse. In February 1559 he was elected Chancellor of Cambridge University in succession to Cardinal Pole; he was created M.A. of that university on the occasion of Elizabeth's visit in 1564, and M.A. of Oxford on a similar occasion in 1566.

On 25 February 1571, in anticipation of the impending marriage between Cecil's daughter Anne (b. 1556) to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, she created him Baron Burghley. The fact that he continued to act as Secretary of State after his elevation illustrates the growing importance of that office, which under his son became a secretary of the ship of state. In 1572, however, Lord Winchester, who had been Lord High Treasurer under Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, died, and Burghley succeeded to his post. It was a signal triumph over Leicester; and, although Burghley had still to reckon with cabals in the council and at court, his hold over the queen strengthened with the lapse of years. Before he died, Robert, his only surviving son by his second wife, was ready to step into his shoes as the Queen's principal adviser. Having survived all his rivals, and all his children except Robert and Thomas, Burghley died at his London house on 4 August 1598, and was buried in St. Martin's church, Stamford.

His younger son, Sir Robert Cecil (later created Baron Cecil, Viscount Cranborne and finally Earl of Salisbury), inherited his political mantle, taking on the role of chief minister and arranging a smooth transfer of power to the Stuart administration under King James I. His elder son, Sir Thomas Cecil, who inherited the Barony of Burghley on his death, was later created Earl of Exeter.

Private Life
Burghley's private life was singularly virtuous; he was a faithful husband, a careful father and a considerate master. A book-lover and antiquary, 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, and Burghley was a great builder and planter. All the arts of architecture and horticulture were lavished on Burghley House and Theobalds, which his son exchanged for Hatfield House. His public conduct does not present itself in quite so amiable a light. 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" (in other words, flexible rather than unbending) and he was not the man to suffer for convictions. The interest of the State was the supreme consideration and to it he had no hesitation in sacrificing individual consciences. He frankly disbelieved in toleration; that State, he said, 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 coercive measures were political and not religious. To say that he was Machiavellian is meaningless, for every statesman is so, more or less; especially in the 16th century men preferred efficiency to principle. On the other hand, principles are valueless without law and order; and Burghley's craft and subtlety prepared a security in which principles might find some scope.

Nicholas White
The most prolonged of Cecil's surviving personal correspondences is with an Irish judge, Nicholas White, lasting from 1566 until 1590; it is contained in the State Papers Ireland 63 and Lansdowne MS 102, but receives hardly a mention in the literature on Cecil.

White had been a tutor to Cecil's children during his student days in London, and the correspondence suggests that he was held in lasting affection by the family. In the end, White fell into a Dublin controversy over the confessions of an intriguing priest, which threatened the authority of the Queen's deputised government in Ireland; out of caution Cecil withdrew his longstanding protection, and the judge was imprisoned in London and died soon after.

White's most remarked-upon service for Cecil is his report on his visit with Mary, Queen of Scots in 1569, during the early years of her imprisonment by Queen Elizabeth. He may have published an English translation of the Argonautica in the 1560s, but no copy has survived. 1585 Susan De Vere 1490 - 1589 Christopher Peyton 99 99 1547 Anne Eden 1515 Richard Eden 1522 Margaret Peyton 1534 - 1612 Sir Christopher Peyton 78 78 1555 - 26 FEB 1600/01 Henry Eden 1398 Richard Cecil 1430 Richard Cecil 1455 - 1535 David Cecil 80 80 1457 Philip Cecil 1435 Margaret Phillips 1467 - 1532 Jane Dicons 65 65 1518 Isabel Cecil 1523 Margaret Cecil 1525 - 1562 Elizabeth Cecil 37 37 1527 - 1573 Agnes Cecil 46 46 1524 Roger Cave 1550 Sir Thomas Cave 1455 - 1521 Thomas Reade 66 66 1581 - 1636 Robert Reade 55 55 1490 - 1556 Thomas Reade 66 66 1499 - 1575 Anne de Hoo 76 76 1523 - 1588 Thomas Reade 65 65 1542 Katherine Reade 1536 - 1627 Robert Reade 91 91 1545 - 1604 Thomas Reade 59 59 1550 - 1625 Mary Stonehouse 75 75 1556 - 1623 Andrew Reade 67 67 1536 - 1598 Alice Poole 62 62 1559 - 6 MAR 1604/05 Alice Cooke 1554 Robert Reade 1566 Henry Reade 1568 William Reade 1570 George Reade 1558 Thomas Reade 1562 John Reade 1560 Alice Reade 1579 John Reade 1583 Thomas Reade 1486 Agnes Reade 1460 - 1534 Margaret Cecil 74 74 1484 Margaret Reade 1488 William Reade 1492 Robert Reade 1595 - 1680 Esdras Reade 85 85 1573 Elizabeth Bourchier 1540 - 1623 William Bourchier 83 83 1544 - 1578 Alice Bourchier 34 34 1546 - 1578 Mary Bourchier 32 32 1606 - 1662 Ruth Reade 56 56 1540 - 20 JAN 1585/86 William Reade 1542 Rebecca Mennis 1579 - 1621 William Reade 42 42 24 FEB 1585/86 - 1621 Lucy Heneage 1562 Matthew Reade 1564 John Reade 1566 Edmund Reade 1568 Cecilia Reade 1570 Mildred Reade 1572 Lucy Reade 1575 Richard Reade 1577 Thomas Reade 1604 - 1685 John Reade 81 81 1618 William Reade 1608 Rebecca Reade 1610 Grace Reade 1611 Jane Reade 1613 Thomas Reade 1621 Anne Reade 1528 - 1567 John White 39 39 1547 - 1626 Thomas White 79 79 1549 - 1631 Agnes Wright 82 82 14 MAR 1570/71 - 1603 Walter White 1528 - 16 MAR 1575/76 Mary Walsingham 1587 John Reade 1526 - 1564 Mary Brockett 38 38 1551 John Reade 1553 James Reade 1572 Mary Reade 1579 - 1650 Thomas Reade 71 71 1583 Compton Reade 1574 Elizabeth Reade 1591 Catherine Reade 1579 Richard Reade 1601 - 1656 William Reade 54 54 1556 - 1610 Dorcas Bellame 54 54 1581 Edward Reade 1504 - 1579 Joanna Mildmay 75 75 1525 - 1589 Walter Mildmay 64 64 1545 - 1581 Anne Palmer 36 36 1574 Thomazine Peyton 1568 Sir Christopher Peyton 1547 Christian Mildmay 1549 Anthony Mildmay 1551 Humphrey Mildmay 1552 Winifred Mildmay 1554 Martha Mildmay 1508 - 1581 Thomas Mildmay 73 73 1542 John Mildmay 1540 Sir Thomas Mildmay 1547 William Mildmay 1535 - 1583 Thomas Hatcher 48 48 1552 Susan Browne 1541 - 1600 Thomas Fanshawe 59 59 1567 Henry Fanshawe 1593 Frances Cecil 1595 Catherine Cecil 1575 - 10 MAR 1625/26 Elizabeth De Vere 1542 - 1582 Frances Radcliffe 40 40 1590 - 1665 Abigail Downing 75 75 17 MAR 1523/24 - 1564 George Downing 1548 Barnaby Downing 1552 - 1610 George Downing 58 58 1550 Margaret Downing 1581 Naomi Downing 1583 Joseph Downing 1585 Emanuel Downing 1587 Nathaniel Downing 1593 Joshua Downing MAR 1595/96 Anne Downing 1597 Elnathan Downing 1578 - 1624 Alice Fanshawe 46 46 1556 Frances Cecil 1559 William Cecil 1566 - 1624 Margaret Cecil 58 58 1564 Elizabeth Cecil 1561 - 1616 Ambrose Smith 55 55 1588 Rev. Ambrose Smith 1598 - 1648 Henry Smith 50 50 1590 Ellen Smith 1592 Margaret Smith 1594 Anne Smith 1596 Frances Smith 1567 Catherine Cecil 1573 Mary Cecil 1574 Susan Cecil 1574 Elizabeth Cecil 1577 Dorothy Cecil 1580 John Downing Generated by GenoPro®. Click here for details.