“My little elf”, “pygmy”, or “little beagle”; this was how Elizabeth I and James I referred to Robert Cecil; after his father's death, the most powerful and successful adviser of the Crown.
Elizabeth said to his father William that she employed him for his good mind rather than his bad legs, and the same applied to Robert. He suffered from scoliosis and was only about 5 feet 4 inches tall. Yet he was indispensable to both monarchs.
Elizabeth I was reliant on William Cecil until his death in 1598. The Dictionary of National Biography says that “by him more than any other single man, during the last 30 years of his life, was the history of England shaped”. This is not an unfair assessment and deserves an article on its own, but it was under this tutelage from his father that Robert learnt his statecraft.
Robert was an MP for Westminster in the parliaments of 1584 and 1586, and for his county of Hertfordshire in 1589, 1593, 1597 and 1601. He was knighted in 1591 and made Secretary of State in 1596, although he had carried out the duties of that post for some years before. He had to wait until the reign of James I to receive his initial ennoblement as Baron Cecil of Essendon before being promoted to Viscount Cranborne in 1604, Earl of Salisbury in 1605, and made a Knight of the Garter in 1606.
Cecil was utterly loyal to his principal. His workload was enormous, and he never conspired or cheated his sovereign. He died with debts of £38,000, then an enormous sum, which is quite an indicator of his honesty. The 16th and 17th century statesmen normally enriched themselves at the expense of the state, and James I was a lavish monarch.
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