Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/364

344 prayer in English, and the validity of changes made in the King's minority. He promised obedience in general terms. A few days after, William Cecil, the Protector's secretary, This being the first occasion on which I have had to mention Cecil, some account may he useful as to who and what he was. David Cecil, his grandfather, alderman of Stamford, had a son Richard, who went to London, and found service at the Court, becoming yeoman of the wardrobe to Henry VIII. Being a good servant, he grew in favour; he was made at last constable of Warwick Castle, and on the dissolution of the monasteries received a grant from the King of Stamford Priory and other property in Northamptonshire. The wife of this Richard was daughter and heiress of William Heckington, of Bourne, by whom he had three daughters Margaret, married to Robert Carr, of Stamford; Elizabeth, married to Sir Thomas Wingfield, of Upton; Anne, married to Thomas White, of Nottingham; and one son, William, the statesman known to history, born on the 13th of September, 1520. William Cecil was at school first at Grantham, afterwards at Stamford; from whence, at the age of fifteen, he went to St John's at Cambridge, where his academic course—Greek lectures, sophistry lectures, &c.—was successfully accomplished, and where he made the acquaintance of Sir John Cheke, whose sister Mary he married. At Cambridge he was present at the terrible and never-to-be-forgotten battle between Cheke and Gardiner on the pronunciation of the Greek epsilon, which convulsed the academic world; and thence, in 1541, he removed to Gray's Inn, and became a law student. Mary Cheke dying, he married a second time, in 1545, Mildred, daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, of Gyddes Hall, eldest of five sisters; Anne, the second of whom, became the wife of Nicholas Bacon, and mother of Francis; Katherine, the third, married Sir Henry Killegrew. Elizabeth married, first, Sir Thomas Hoby, and afterwards Lord Russell. The youngest, less distinguished in her posterity, married a Sir Ralph Rowlet.William Cecil, introduced at Court by his father, was patronized by Henry, who gave him the reversion of a place in the Common Pleas; and at Henry's death, at the age of twenty-seven, he became secretary of the Duke of Somerset, whom he attended to Musselburgh, where the name of Cecil was nearly brought to an abrupt conclusion by a Scotch cannon-ball. In this capacity of private secretary to the Protector we see him now, being twenty-eight years old. waited on him with more specific