For forty years, William Cecil's life was almost the history of Elizabethan England
William Cecil advised Elizabeth I for nearly her entire reign, so closely that one historian said his biography from 1558 is hard to separate from hers. He survived a dangerous plot to crown Lady Jane Grey, persuaded the queen to execute Mary, Queen of Scots, and founded a dynasty that produced two prime ministers.
Cecil was born on 13 September 1520 in Bourne, Lincolnshire, son of Sir Richard Cecil of the Burghley estate near Stamford. His grandfather David had risen in the service of Henry VII and, his enemies liked to say, kept Stamford's best inn. The family claimed Welsh roots, Cecil being an anglicised form of Seisyllt. At fourteen William went to St John's College, Cambridge, where he learned unusual Greek from Roger Ascham and John Cheke, and fell for Cheke's sister Mary, prompting his father to move him to Gray's Inn in 1541.
His career began under the Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector for the boy king Edward VI, whom he accompanied on the Pinkie campaign of 1547. After Somerset fell, Cecil won over John Dudley and was sworn in as a secretary of state on 5 September 1550. When Dudley, now Duke of Northumberland, schemed in 1553 to pass over Mary and Elizabeth and crown Lady Jane Grey instead, Cecil disliked the plan but signed it. Once the duke rode out to confront Mary, he worked busily against him, and those efforts largely earned him Queen Mary's pardon.
Having managed Princess Elizabeth's lands and joined her circle at Hatfield, he became her Secretary of State in 1558 and Lord High Treasurer from 1572. His grand aim was a united, Protestant British Isles: finish the conquest of Ireland, bind Scotland in alliance, and make a strong navy England's shield. He won a firm Anglo-Scottish alliance, intervened in Scotland in 1559 and 1560, and in 1587 pressed Elizabeth to execute Mary, Queen of Scots, after she was implicated in an assassination plot.
Cecil was no zealot. He backed Huguenots and Dutch rebels just enough to keep them fighting, and generally wanted bolder support for continental Protestants than the queen allowed. He left mountains of memoranda weighing every option yet rarely recorded which one he advised. He died on 4 August 1598, and his son Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, carried the family's influence into the next reign.
Source: William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley
