CECIL, William, Visct. Cranborne (1591-1668), of Hatfield, Herts., Cranborne, Dorset and Salisbury House, The Strand, Westminster.

Cecil was born at Westminster in 1591. His grandfather, the 1st Lord Burghley (Sir William Cecil†), had been lord treasurer for nearly two decades, while his father, Robert Cecil†, would help to maintain the family’s political dominance in England for the next 21 years. These two facts shaped Cecil’s early life. He numbered Elizabeth I among his godparents, and began to attend Court regularly by 1603 at the latest. HMC Hatfield, v. 71; xv. 143; VCH Herts. Fams. 113-14. His mother had died in 1597, while his father, who was normally preoccupied with affairs of state, treated him indulgently. Cecil possessed little aptitude for formal education. In March 1600 Sir Walter Ralegh† noted his reluctance to study, a problem which was exacerbated by his undisciplined upbringing. Just three months after Cecil’s admission to Cambridge University in 1602, his tutor complained that his academic progress was being disrupted by frequent absences with his father. However, this warning was evidently ignored, and in March 1605 the same tutor observed that, while there was nothing wrong with Cecil’s ‘wit, capacity and memory ... the delights of the Court have greatly estranged ... his mind from his books’. VCH Herts. Fams. 113; HMC Hatfield, x. 84; xii. 406; xvii. 81-2; xviii. 271, 318.

In truth, Cecil was much better suited to courtly life. His ‘manly and graceful’ deportment was commended as early as 1603, while three years later the countess of Devonshire described him as ‘a perfect horseman’, who ‘can neither be outridden, nor matched any way’. His status as the heir to James I’s principal English adviser ensured that the king regularly requested his company, while he also found favour with Prince Henry. HMC Hatfield, xv. 143; xvii. 102, 631; xviii. 130, 394. He was created a knight of the Bath in January 1605, and when his father was elevated to the earldom of Salisbury four months later, Cecil acquired the honorary title of Viscount Cranborne, the name deriving from a Dorset estate acquired by the earl in 1601. Stone, 34. Around the same time, he received degrees from both Cambridge and Oxford, and was admitted to Gray’s Inn. However, these achievements were merely honorary, and by the following year Salisbury was being openly criticized for the unusual amount of freedom that he allowed his son. Somewhat late in the day, the earl registered that Cranborne had not yet mastered the most basic elements of the university curriculum. Accordingly, his tutor was ordered to improve his instruction, while Cranborne was banned from keeping hounds or racehorses until his work improved. Under pressure, he absorbed enough Latin to perform a disputation at Cambridge in December 1607, while a few months later he began a new course of study devised by his father’s client, Richard Neile, dean of Westminster. Chamberlain Letters ed. N.E. McClure, i. 232; HMC Hatfield, xix. 131, 369, 465-6; xxiv. 140-1.

Nevertheless, this stricter regime was shortlived. During 1608 Salisbury allowed his heir back to Court, and placed him in Prince Henry’s service. In July of that year a marriage was agreed between Cranborne and Katharine Howard, daughter of Salisbury’s political ally, the earl of Suffolk. The wedding went ahead in December, but the union was left unconsummated, and Cranborne was instead packed off to the Continent to continue his education. HMC Hatfield, xx. 273-4; Chamberlain Letters, i. 259, 268, 273, 300. Claims that Cecil first went abroad in early 1608 derive from two letters miscalendared to that year through a misinterpretation of ‘new style’ dating: Oxford DNB; HMC Hatfield, xx. 50, 104-5. James I provided him with an introduction to Henri IV of France, who received him warmly, and predictably Cranborne spent several months attending the French Court. HMC Hatfield, xx. 285-6; xxi. 19, 35. However, he was obliged to keep up his academic studies, sending progress reports back to England, and he penned a rather cursory diary in tolerable French while touring the country during the summer and early autumn of 1609. Greatly impressed by the Roman remains in Provence, which he may have inspected in the company of Inigo Jones*, he also briefly crossed into Switzerland to investigate the radical Protestant city of Geneva. Ibid. xxi. 123, 104-13; E. Chaney, review article, Burlington Mag. cxxx. 633- 4. After wintering in Paris, Cranborne asked to join the prospective French military expedition to Cleves, but this scheme was abruptly terminated by Henri IV’s assassination in May 1610. In the ensuing chaos, Cranborne ignored his father’s instruction to withdraw to the Low Countries, and instead returned to England. HMC Hatfield, xxi. 170, 208, 220, 237; Chamberlain Letters, i. 297, 300.

Back in London, Cranborne participated in Prince Henry’s investiture as prince of Wales on 4 June, helping to carry the king’s train. Winwood’s Memorials ed. E. Sawyer, iii. 179; Procs. 1610 ed. E.R. Foster, i. 98. Meanwhile, Salisbury had run into trouble in Parliament over his Great Contract proposals, and he urgently needed new allies in the Commons. When a vacancy unexpectedly arose at Weymouth, the corporation was invited to elect Cranborne, and after an initial refusal he was returned on a blank indenture. SP14/55/20, 23; C219/35/1/119. He took the oath of allegiance on 23 June, having already been named three days earlier to the committee for the New River repeal bill, doubtless on account of his local knowledge as a Hertfordshire resident. Cranborne was also appointed on 23 July to help manage the conference with the Lords at which the Commons requested the exemption of the monopolist Sir Stephen Proctor from the royal pardon. CJ, i. 442a, 443a, 454a. He was not recorded as contributing to the debates on the Great Contract, and missed the whole of the final session of 1610, for on 13 Sept. he resumed his foreign travels, accompanied by his brother-in-law, Henry Howard*. HMC Hatfield, xxi. 237-8; Winwood’s Memorials, iii. 213.

Cranborne’s second journey was more wide-ranging, and encompassed France, Savoy, Italy, Austria, Germany, and the Low Countries. As before, he enjoyed an automatic entrée to all the courts that he encountered, but this time he apparently travelled reluctantly. Following a serious fever which confined him to Padua for nearly three months, he insisted on returning home, and reached London again in May 1611. HMC Hatfield, xxi. 237-49; CSP Dom. 1603-10, pp. 645, 653; 1611-18, p. 30. Supplied by Salisbury with a generous annual allowance of £2,000, he resumed his duties in Prince Henry’s entourage, participating enthusiastically in the Court’s New Year festivities, and riding high in his young master’s favour. In May 1612 he succeeded to the earldom of Salisbury. However, the deaths of his father and Prince Henry, barely seven months apart, proved to be major setbacks in his career. Stone, 30; Chamberlain Letters, i. 330-1.

The new earl was famously dismissed by Clarendon (Edward Hyde†) as ‘a man of no words, except in hunting and hawking, in which he only knew how to behave himself’. Salisbury’s actual record belies this reputation. Nevertheless, he lacked his father’s political acumen, and proved unable to work successfully with the Court’s main power brokers, such as the Howards, the 3rd earl of Pembroke, and the duke of Buckingham. Clarendon, Hist. of the Rebellion ed. W.D. Macray, ii. 543; Stone, 115-16. His broad estates and extensive local offices made him Hertfordshire’s greatest single electoral patron during the 1620s, with perhaps 20 successful nominations across the county and its two boroughs. He also asserted patronage rights at Old Sarum, with more mixed results. L. Stone, ‘Electoral Influence of the 2nd Earl of Salisbury’, EHR, lxxi. 385-99. However, he had to wait until 1626 for a seat on the Privy Council, while his subsequent captaincy of the gentlemen pensioners carried no real weight at Court. Salisbury’s patronage of radical Protestants doubtless distanced him from Charles I’s increasingly Arminian religious policies, and he sided with Parliament during the Civil War. Following the abolition of the House of Lords, he sat for King’s Lynn in the Rump, and also represented Hertfordshire in the first two Cromwellian Parliaments. After the Restoration Salisbury sued out a royal pardon, but lost most of his remaining offices. He died in December 1668, and was buried at Hatfield. His son Charles, who sat for Hertford in both the Short and Long Parliaments, had predeceased him, and he was succeeded by his grandson, James, who was currently a Member for Hertfordshire. Stone, Fam. and Fortune, 115; HMC Hatfield, xxiv. 285; VCH Herts. Fams. 115.