io6 



GARDENS OLD AND NEW. 



bishopric, and he may well have built here as else- 

 where on the lands of the See. A later bishop, Dr. 

 Thomas Goodricke you see his large face still on a 

 tomb slab in Ely Cathedral after the monasteries 

 were dissolved, gave King Henry all the Hatfield 

 lordship and manor for the site of Icklington Priory 

 and other lands nearer to his Ely palace. Thereafter 

 Hatfield bears a great part in the Tudor chapter of 

 history. Edward VI. was first a king within the 

 walls of the old palace, his uncle Hertford bringing 

 him hence, so some say, to London before King 

 Harry's death was known to the people. In the next 

 reign the Princess Elizabeth was packed hither by her 

 sister to the charge of Sir Thomas Pope, a knight 

 who gave his ward such a splendid Shrovetide merry- 

 making that his Royal mistress let him know very 

 shortly that she misliked such follies. Hatfield sent 

 out another sovereign to England when Queen Mary 

 was dead ; for it was in Hatfield Old Palace that 

 Queen Elizabeth held the first of her many Councils. 

 Then it was that, riding with other Ministers and 

 Secretaries, Cecil came for the first time to Hatfield 

 Sir William Cecil, afterwards to be Lord Burghley, 

 who, here on the lands where his race was to dwell, 

 met the Queen in whose service two generations of 

 Cecils were to mount so high. 



Half a century from that day a king's whim 

 made Hatfield the seat of Burghley's son. In that 

 time the house of Cecil had, by sheer service to State 

 and sovereign, raised itself to be a ruling power in 

 the State. They are, indeed, a rare example of a 

 family raised to high place by a clean genius for 

 statecraft. They appear suddenly at the end of the 

 Middle Ages, bringing nothing with them. The 

 dawn of the Tudor period sees them start. Stripped 

 for the race in this new age, which offers a career to a 

 man of wit and industry, Davy Cyssell, the father of 

 them all, comes forward with a light purse and a 

 pedigree which may begin with himself. The author 

 of these lines has been at some pains to prove that 

 Lord Burghley's belief in his kinship with Seycills, or 

 Cyssells, of Allt yr Ynys, on the Welsh border of 

 Herefordshire, had a base in fact. Yet these Seycills, 

 although they came to be much glorified in heralds' 

 parchments, seem, when sought at home, to be but 

 yeomen or small gentry, who could at best find a 

 grandfather for our Davy, leaving to Davy's famous 

 grandson the task of discovering for them a long line 

 of ancestors to the Conquest and beyond it. So truly 

 were the Cecils the children of the Tudor age that 

 the present writer has been able to show Davy 

 Cyssell, their founder, marching in from Wales with 

 the first Tudor king on his way to Bosworth Field. 

 That Davy fought on that great day of the hunting 

 of the White Boar there can be little doubt, seeing 

 that he is discovered in the first list of King Henry's 

 Yeomen of the Guard. He was written a yeoman 

 by rank when Sir David Philippe, a Welsh knight of 

 the Lancaster faction, settled him near himself at 

 Stamford. Doubtless the yeoman was one of those 

 tall men our Tudor kings loved to have about them, 

 and Stamford soon found him a wife, the daughter of 

 John Dycons of the Tabard Inn, with a portion to 

 her name. When she was in her grave Davy Cyssell 

 looked a step higher, wedding the twice-widowed 

 heiress of a Lincolnshire squire. At Stamford he 

 pushed forward from town councillor to alderman 

 and mayor, and thence to be a member for the 

 borough, a high sheriff of the county and escheator. 



All this time he had one foot in the Court, setting 

 down his yeoman's halberd and taking up the mace 

 of a sergeant-at-arms. With all this prosperity the 

 soldier was untamed in him, and he had come to be 

 an old man when we find a litigant wailing to the 

 magistrates that Master Davy Cyssell had all but 

 settled their dispute out of hand by drawing iron 

 upon him. He died a squire, full of years, in 1541, 

 according to " Fuller's Worthies," with a grandson 

 near him who was to be a peer of England. During 

 his lifetime he had made Court interest for his son 

 Richard, who from a king's page became Yeoman of 

 the Robes and Gentleman of the Privy Chamber. 

 Those about the King's person in his day were like to 

 profit by the fall of the monasteries, and Richard 

 Cecil, as the name was then written, had his share 

 of the lands of Stamford Priory, St. Michael's 

 Nunnery and Croyland Abbey. Like his father, he 

 married himself with care, and all was ready for the 

 founding of a great family when his young son 

 William made a false step. The work of grandfather 

 and father might all have gone for naught when 

 William, a scholar at Cambridge, must needs wed the 

 portionless daughter of a bedell's widow, which 

 widow had been reduced to keeping a Cambridge 

 wine-shop. The mishap was soon repaired by the 

 young wife's death ; and when her brother was the 

 learned Sir John Cheke, always at King Edward's 

 elbow, that early marriage may have stood William 

 Cecil in good stead. If error it was, we may take it 

 as the only one in the life of a born diplomatist. 

 History will tell us how William Cecil mounted from 

 Secretary of State under Edward VI. to be Lord of 

 Burghley and Knight of the Garter under a Queen in 

 whose service he died, worn out, her chief and wholly 

 indispensable Minister for forty years. Cecil 

 influence could make his son and heir Earl of Exeter 

 and a Garter Knight, but from the first this son of 

 the Cambridge marriage was not to be trained to his 

 father's task. On a travelling tutor's report of him 

 from Paris the despairing father mourned him as "a 

 spending sot, only fit to keep a tennis-court." But 

 though Thomas Cecil despised books and was careless 

 of statecraft, he had the makings of a man after old 

 Davy Cyssell's heart, for he was ever ready to 

 volunteer where blows were going, for the Low 

 Country campaigns or the Border wars, against Scots, 

 Spaniards or Yorkshire rebels, and when the Armada 

 was off our coast Sir Thomas Cecil was on an English 

 ship's quarter-deck. From him descend that elder 

 line of Cecils who are still at their seat by Stamford 

 town. The Hatfield Cecils come from his younger 

 brother Robert, the true heir of the great Burghley 

 tradition. 



Robert Cecil, the builder of Hatfield, had all 

 against him but his own staunch heart and sound 

 wits. This descendant of the fighting yeoman was a 

 little creeping figure, dwarfish and crook-hacked, with 

 none of his father's liberal learning and Renaissance 

 culture. The son of Burghley's marriage with that 

 most learned lady Mistress Mildred Cooke, he 

 enjoyed a great estate under a marriage settlement, 

 but his expenses kept him poor. His kinsmen 

 intrigued against him, and he had never the art of 

 making friends. But, like his father, he had all the 

 art of government in his fine wits, and though the 

 dynasty changed and favourites went up and down, 

 Robert Cecil held his seat unmoved. To Elizabeth 

 he was her " elf," to James the " pygmy " and the 



