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Patronage, Culture and Power: The Early Cecils 1558-1612 By Pauline Croft New Haven, GT: Yale University Press, 2002
This beautifully produced book showcases the cultural patronage of Tudor England's most spectacular success story, the Cecil family. Thanks to the remarkable political career of William Cecil, who built his career during the reign of Edward VI and subsequently established himself as Elizabeth I's most important councillor, the previously obscure Cecils rose to conspicuous wealth and a social eminence that has endured to the present day. Cecil himself was knighted in 1551 and created 1st Baron of Burghley in 1571, while his sons Sir Thomas Cecil and Sir Robert Cecil fared even better, becoming, respectively, 2nd Baron of Burghley and 1st Earl of Exeter and 1st Earl of Salisbury. Both the Exeter and Salisbury lines survive today as marquessates, with the Salisbury Cecils, in particular, having a remarkable record of sustained involvement in British politics at the highest level.
This collection of essays focuses on the cultural patronage of these first two generations of noble Cecils-Sir William and his sons-and their wives and children. As befits an addition to the Yale Studies in British Art series, many of the chapters in this book are devoted to the visual arts, but the various contributions span a fair range of cultural achievements, and there is much here that will be of interest to readers of this journal. As Pauline Croft lays out in an efficient introduction, the essays in this volume essentially move from the Cecils' extraordinary efforts literally to build themselves into the forefront of the English peerage through the contents and entertainments that decorated those buildings to conclude with the Cecils themselves.
One of the striking features of this book is the Cecils' truly immense investment in building, which is explored in a series of essays by Malcolm Airs, Jill Husselby, Caroline Knight, Claire Capper, John Newman, and Annabel Ricketts. In addition to Theobalds, which was one of the wonders of the age, Cecil houses included Burghley House, Wimbledon, and Hatfield, as well as grand mansions in Westminster and smaller building projects such as Pymmes, Cranborne, and Wothorpe Lodge. This Cecil edifice complex reflected not only the classic desire of "new men" to house themselves in a...