Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury

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

Early life

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

Robert was small and hunchbacked, in an age which placed much importance on physical beauty, and he endured much ridicule as a result, but his father recognised that Robert had inherited his own political genius. While Burghley was fond of both his sons, he is said to have remarked that Robert could rule England, but Thomas could hardly rule a tennis court.

Cecil attended St John's College, Cambridge in the 1580s, but did not take a degree. He also attended "disputations" at the Sorbonne. In 1584 he sat for the first time in the House of Commons, representing his birthplace, the borough of Westminster. 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 baptised in St Clement Danes on 11 April. Elizabeth died when their son was six years old. They also had one daughter, Frances (1593-1644), who married Henry Clifford, 5th Earl of Cumberland.

Secretary of State

Following the death of Sir Francis Walsingham in 1590, Burghley acted as Secretary of State, while Cecil took on an increasingly heavy work-load. 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. Essex's unsuccessful rebellion in 1601, which resulted in his final downfall and death, was largely aimed at Cecil, who was to be removed from power and impeached. Whether Essex intended that Cecil should actually be put to death is unclear. It is to Cecil's credit that he persuaded the Queen to treat the rebels with a degree of mercy unusual in that age: Essex himself and four of his closest allies were executed, but the great majority of the rebels were spared, and Essex's denunciation of his sister Penelope, Lady Rich as the ringleader of the rebellion was tactfully ignored.

Cecil was extensively involved in matters of state security. As the son of Queen Elizabeth's principal minister and a protÃ©gÃ© of Sir Francis Walsingham (Elizabeth's principal spymaster), he was trained by them in spycraft as a matter of course. The "Rainbow portrait" of Queen Elizabeth, decorated with eyes and ears, may relate to this role.

Cecil, like his father, greatly admired the Queen, whom he famously described as being "more than a man, but less than a woman". Despite his careful preparations for the succession, he clearly regarded the Queen's death as a misfortune to be postponed as long as possible. During her last illness, Cecil boldly told the Queen that she must go to bed. Elizabeth roused herself one last time to snap at him: "Must is not a word to be used to princes, little man... your father had he lived would never had dared to speak to me so".

In 1603, his brother-in-law Lord Cobham, along with Sir Walter Raleigh, was implicated in both the Bye Plot and the Main Plot, an attempt to remove James from the throne and replace him with his first cousin Lady Arbella Stuart. Cecil was one of the judges who tried them for treason: at Raleigh's trial Cecil was the only judge who appeared to have some doubts about his guilt. Though they were found guilty and sentenced to death, both Cobham and Raleigh were reprieved at the last minute, almost certainly due in part to Cecil's pleas for mercy, although the King kept his intentions unclear until the very last minute.

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. Although James would often speak disparagingly of Cecil- "my little beagle"- he gave him his absolute trust.

James persuaded Salisbury to exchange his Hertfordshire House Theobalds for the royal palace at Hatfield, a relatively old-fashoned property. Cecil proceeded to rebuild Hatfield Palace as Hatfield House.

Cecil was the principal discoverer of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605: when he first learned of it, and to what extent he acted as an agent provocateur, has been a subject of controversy ever since.

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.

His motto was "Sero, sed serio", which can be translated as 'late but in earnest'.

The Kingdom of Ireland was a major source of concern and expense during his time in government. The Nine Years War there ended with the leader of the rebels Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone submitting to the Crown and being restored to his estates following the Treaty of Mellifont (1603). Four years later Tyrone led his followers into exile during the Flight of the Earls. The response of the government was to plan a Plantation of Ulster, to share out Tyrone's lands between the Gaelic Irish lords and settlers from Britain. In 1608 Sir Cahir O'Doherty launched O'Doherty's Rebellion by attacking and burning Derry. In the wake of O'Doherty's defeat at Kilmacrennan a much larger plantation was undertaken.

In 1610-11 Cecil worked hard to enact the Great Contract, under which the King would give up all his feudal or customary sources of revenue in return for a fixed annual income of Â£200,000. The project was dear to Cecil's heart but neither the King nor his Parliament showed much enthusiasm for it, and it lapsed when the King, against Cecil's advice, dissolved Parliament in 1611. This was a double blow to Cecil, who was sick and old before his time, and conscious that the King greatly preferred the company of his male favourites.

Death

In poor health, and worn out by years of overwork, Salisbury went on a journey to take the waters at Bath, but obtained little relief, and started the journey home. He died of cancer, in considerable pain, at Marlborough, Wiltshire, on 24 May 1612. He was buried in Hatfield parish church in a tomb designed by Maximilian Colt.

Portrayals

He appears as the character "Lord Cecil" in the opera Roberto Devereux (1837) by Gaetano Donizetti; he also appears in the opera Gloriana (1953) by Benjamin Britten.
In the BBC TV drama serial Elizabeth R (1971), "Sir Robert Cecil" is played by Hugh Dickson.
In the HBO 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 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 0-316-85970-2), 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
He is portrayed sympathetically in the novel 1610 by Mary Gentle.
He was played by Christopher Peck in the premier of the musical "Remember Remember" by Lewes Operatic Society in Autumn 2008

References

External links

The Peerage
Archival material relating to Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury listed at the UK National Archives

Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury

Minggu, 28 Juni 2015