Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury

The Right Honourable The Earl of Salisbury KG, PC
The Earl of Salisbury by John de Critz the Elder ca. 1602
Lord High Treasurer
In office 4 May 1598 – 24 May 1612
Monarch	James I
Preceded by	The Earl of Dorset
Succeeded by	Commission of the Treasury The Earl of Northampton, First Lord
Lord Privy Seal
In office 1598–1612
Monarch	Elizabeth I James I
Preceded by	The Lord Burghley
Succeeded by	The Earl of Northampton
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
In office 8 October 1597 – 1599
Monarch	Elizabeth I
Preceded by	In commission
Succeeded by	In commission
Secretary of State
In office 5 July 1590 – 24 May 1612
Monarch	Elizabeth I James I
Preceded by	William Davison
Succeeded by	John Herbert
Personal details
Born	Robert Cecil (1563-06-01)1 June 1563 City of London, England
Died	24 May 1612(1612-05-24) (aged 48) Marlborough, Wiltshire England
Spouse(s)	Lady Elizabeth Brooke
Relations	The Lord Burghley (Father)
Residence	Hatfield House
Alma mater	St John's College, Cambridge

Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, KG, PC (1 June 1563? – 24 May 1612) was an English administrator and politician.

Life

He was the son of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley and Mildred Cooke. His half-brother was Thomas Cecil, 1st Earl of Exeter and philosopher Francis Bacon was his first cousin.

After his education at St John's College, Cambridge, Salisbury was made Secretary of State following the death of Sir Francis Walsingham in 1590, and he became the leading minister after the death of his father in 1598, serving both Queen Elizabeth and King James as Secretary of State. He fell into dispute with Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and only prevailed upon the latter's poor campaign against the Irish rebels during the Nine Years War in 1599. He was then in a position to orchestrate the smooth succession of King James, maintaining a 'secret correspondence.' For most of his working life he served as spymaster for King James.

King James raised him to the peerage on 20 August 1603 as Baron Cecil, of Essendon in the County of Rutland, before creating him Viscount Cranborne in 1604 and then Earl of Salisbury in 1605. Lord Salisbury was extensively involved in matters of state security. The son of Lord Burghley (Queen Elizabeth's principal minister) and a protégé of Sir Francis Walsingham (Elizabeth's principal spymaster), he was trained by them in matters of spycraft as a matter of course. In 1603 his brother-in-law Lord Cobham was implicated in both the Bye Plot and also the Main Plot, which were an attempt to remove James from the throne and replace him with Lady Arbella Stuart.

Salisbury served as both the third chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin and chancellor of the University of Cambridge between 1601 and 1612. In addition, the Cecil family fostered arts: they supported musicians such as William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons and Thomas Robinson.

In 1589 Cecil married Elizabeth Brooke, the daughter of William Brooke, 10th Baron Cobham, and his second wife, Frances Newton. Their son, William Cecil was born in Westminster on 28 March 1591 and baptized in St Clement Danes on 11 April. Elizabeth died when their son was six years old. He succeeded his father as Earl of Salisbury.

Portrayals

• He appears as the character "Lord Cecil" in the opera Roberto Devereux (1837) by Gaetano Donizetti
• In the BBC TV drama serial Elizabeth R (1971), "Sir Robert Cecil" is played by Hugh Dickson.
• In the TV miniseries Elizabeth I, Cecil is played by Toby Jones.
• In the alternate history novel Ruled Britannia, predicated on the victory of the Spanish Armada in 1588, he and his father organise the English resistance movement against the Spanish with the help of William Shakespeare.
• Robert Cecil was portrayed as the unsympathetic, conniving antagonist of the play, Equivocation, written by Bill Cain, which first premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2009. In the play, it is suggested that Cecil was behind the conspiracies of the gunpowder plot in order to kill King James and the royal family. Cecil was first portrayed by Jonathan Haugen. The character in the show was given a serious limp, and is said to hate the word "tomorrow" and to know every detail about everything that goes on in London.
• He is portrayed extremely unsympathetically in "The Desperate Remedy: Henry Gresham and the Gunpowder Plot" by Martin Stephen (ISBN 0316859702), as malevolently self-centred, exploiting the plot to try to bolster his own position in face of his unpopularity.
• He is a minor character in the children's novel Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease, where he is portrayed positively.
• Robert Cecil is portrayed sympathetically in the historical mystery series featuring Joan and Matthew Stock, written by Leonard Tourney, where he is a patron to the main characters. The first novel is The Players' Boy is Dead
• Sir William Cecil features prominently in Irish playwright Thomas Kilroy's play 'The O'Neill' (1969), in which Kilroy uses Cecil to challenge the myth surrounding Gaelic Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone just after the latter's victory over the English at The Yellow Ford. Cecil's dramatic function is to demonstrate the complexity of history as opposed to simplistic pieties that would turn O'Neill into yet another victim of the English. Cecil 'obliges' O'Neill to reenact the past so the audience witnesses the moral dilemma of a man torn between two cultures and keenly aware of the advance of modernity in a troubled political, cultural and religious context.
• He is portrayed unsympathetically by Edward Hogg as a malevolent hunchbacked villain in Roland Emmerich's movie Anonymous.
• He was a major character at the 2012 Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire, portrayed by actor Nate Betancourt.
• He was a major character at the 2012 New York Renaissance Faire, portrayed by actor J. Robert Coppola

External links

• http://www.thepeerage.com/p1183.htm#i11825
• Archival material relating to Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury listed at the UK National Archives

Political offices
Preceded by Sir Francis Walsingham	Secretary of State 1590–1612	Succeeded by Sir Ralph Winwood
In commission Title last held by Sir Thomas Heneage	Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster 1597–1599	In commission Title next held by Sir John Fortescue
Preceded by The Lord Burghley	Lord Privy Seal 1598–1608	Succeeded by The Earl of Northampton
Preceded by The Earl of Dorset	Lord High Treasurer 1608–1612	In commission First Lord: The Earl of Northampton
Honorary titles
Vacant Title last held by The Lord Burghley	Lord Lieutenant of Hertfordshire 1605–1612	Succeeded by The Earl of Salisbury
Preceded by The Viscount Howard of Bindon	Lord Lieutenant of Dorset 1611–1612 With: The Earl of Suffolk	Succeeded by The Earl of Suffolk
Peerage of England
New creation	Earl of Salisbury 1605–1612	Succeeded by William Cecil
New creation	Viscount Cranborne 1604–1612
New creation	Baron Cecil 1603–1612
Head of State of the Isle of Man
Preceded by Henry Howard	Lord of Mann 1608–1609	Succeeded by William Stanley