William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (sometimes spelled Burleigh) (13 September 1520 – 4 August 1598), KG was an English statesman,
William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (sometimes spelled Burleigh) (13 September 1520 – 4 August 1598), KG was an English statesman, the chief advisor and good friend of Queen Elizabeth I for most of her reign (17 November 1558–24 March 1603), twice Secretary of State (1550–1553 and 1558–1572) and Lord High Treasurer from 1572. Cecil was born in Bourne, Lincolnshire in 1520, the son of Richard Cecil, owner of the Burghley estate (near Stamford, Lincolnshire), and his wife, Jane Heckington. Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Burghley, William Cecil, , elaborated by Cecil himself with the help of William Camden the antiquary, associated him with the Cecils or Sitsyllts of Allt-Yr-Ynys, Walterstone on the border of Herefordshire and Monmouthshire, and traced his descent from an Owen of the time of King Harold and a Sitsyllt of the reign of William Rufus. The connection with the Herefordshire family is not so impossible as the descent from Sitsyllt; but the earliest known authentic ancestor of the Lord Treasurer is his grandfather, David, who, according to Burghley's enemies, kept the best inn in Stamford. David somehow secured the favour of Henry VII, to whom he seems to have been Yeoman of the Guard. He was Sergeant-of-Arms to Henry VIII in 1526, Sheriff of Northamptonshire in 1532, and a Justice of the Peace for Rutland. His eldest son, Richard, Yeoman of the Wardrobe (d. 1554), married Jane, daughter of William Heckington of Bourne, and was father of three daughters and the future Lord Burghley. William, the only son, was put to school first at The King's School, Grantham and then at Stamford School, which he later saved and endowed. In May 1535, at the age of fourteen, he went up to St John's College, Cambridge, where he was brought into contact with the foremost educationalists of the time, Roger Ascham and John Cheke, and acquired an unusual knowledge of Greek. He also acquired the affections of Cheke's sister,
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