Death of Lord Burghley

One of Elizabeth I's court favourites died on August 4th, 1598, aged 77.

By Richard Cavendish
Published in History Today Volume 48 Issue 8 August 1998

William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, was Lord High Treasurer of England when he died, aged seventy-seven, in his London house in Covent Garden. Sprung from a comfortably-off country gentry family with connections at court, Cecil had made his way up originally as personal secretary to Protector Somerset after Henry VIII's death. Highly intelligent, prudent, shrewd and titanically industrious, he was thirty-eight when Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558. She immediately appointed him her principal secretary. 'This judgement I have of you,' she told him, 'that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gift, and that you will be faithful to the State, and that without respect of my private will you will give me that counsel that you think best.'

For almost the next forty years Cecil was at Elizabeth's side as her chief minister and trusted counsellor and though she frequently drove him almost to distraction, he was always true to her confidence in him. In his last illness she came to nurse him personally, sitting by his bedside and feeding him with a spoon, and she once told him that she did not wish to live any longer than she had him with her, a remark that brought tears to his eyes.

In private life Cecil was a kindly, gentle man, a lover of books and learning, a builder of great houses, including Burghley House at Stamford, and a bold gardener, who spent much time and money on importing and acclimatising trees from abroad. He married two exceptionally gifted women. The first was Mary Cheke, sister of the great Greek scholar Sir John Cheke. After her death in 1543 he married Mildred, one of the brilliant daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke, who was rated as one of the most learned women in England (her sister Anne was Sir Francis Bacon's mother).

An adminstrator of genius with a vast, whale-like maw for detail , Cecil spent his working life voyaging thriough tumultous oceans of papers of which he left tens of thousands behind him. He was a fluent writer in Latin, French and Italian as well as English, and and he spawned documents on a heroic scale. His prodigious appetite - perhaps desperate need - for work eventually damaged his health. In his final years he suffered agonies from decayed teeth and the gout, and he had been ill long before his final passing, though he attended meetings of the queen's council almost to the end. He finally took to his bed late in July 1598, often tearfully wishing for death. At the end he called his children and grandchildren about him and took leave of them. As the hours went on after midnight, he said: 'Oh, what a heart have I that will not die!' and rebuked the doctor for trying to revive him. His last recorded words were, 'The Lord have mercy upon me', and about 7 o'clock in the morning of August 4th he passed quietly away. His funeral was conducted with elaborate splendour in Westminster Abbey and his body was taken to be buried in St Martin's church in Stamford, his Lincolnshire home.