The Alchemical Patronage of Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley

Unfortunately we can only speculate on the degree to which Cecil‘s own library
resembled that of his colleague and friend. Pamela and David Selwyn suggest that it would
have dwarfed Smith‘s library in both size and scope. 63 Intellectual inclination and means
allowed Cecil to take full advantage of the burgeoning European print industry. By the
time of his death, Cecil had accumulated what was likely one of the largest libraries of both
printed and manuscript material in England. 64 The books Cecil so voraciously collected
would provide compelling evidence as to his intellectual interests. Despite this, no serious
attempts have been made to reconstruct the contents of Cecil‘s library.
The dispersal of Cecil‘s books in the century following his death has made such a
task extremely difficult. According to Cecil‘s descendant Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 5th
Marquess of Salisbury, Cecil left the vast majority of his books to his elder son Thomas. 65
It seems that the library was auctioned off in 1687 after the death of Robert Bruce, 1 st Earl
of Ailesbury, who inherited the collection through his wife, Cecil‘s great-great-
granddaughter. 66 Although the auction purported to contain ―the main part of the Library
of that Famous Secretary William Cecil, Lord Burghley‖, a large proportion of the books
listed were published after Cecil‘s death. 67 These and likely some of the earlier works were
from Ailesbury‘s own library. However, as Ailesbury assembled his library in the years
after the Restoration in 1660, it is not unreasonable to assume that a considerable
proportion of the approximately 1,700 books published before 1598 had been part of
Cecil‘s library. 68 He certainly owned most of the listed manuscripts. 69 Caroline Bowden
therefore argues that the sixteenth-century books in the sale catalogue allow us to draw
63 Palmela Selwyn and David Selwyn, ‗―The profession of a gentleman‖: Books for the Gentry and the
Nobility (c. 1560 to 1640), in Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (eds.), The Cambridge History of
Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 501-02.
64 Ibid., p. 502.
65 Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, ‗The Library at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire‘, The Library, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1963, p.
86.
66 T. F. Henderson, ‗Bruce, Robert, second earl of Elgin and first earl of Ailesbury (bap. 1626, d. 1685)‘, rev.
Victor Stater, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 2004; online edn, May 2009
[http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3757].
67 Anon, Bibliotheca Illustrissive Catalogus Variorum Librorum, London, 1687, p. i.
68 Henderson, ‗Bruce, Robert‘.
69 Sears Jayne, Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance, Godalming, 1983, p. 132.
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