e Herefordshire family is not so impossible as the descent
from Sitsyllt; but the earliest authentic ancestor of the lord treasurer is
his grandfather, David, who, according to Burghley's enemies, "kept the
best inn" in Stamford. David somehow secured the favour of Henry VII., to
whom he seems to have been yeoman of the guard. He was serjeant-at-arms to
Henry VIII. in 1526, sheriff of Northamptonshire in 1532, and a justice of
the peace for Rutland. His eldest son, Richard, yeoman of the wardrobe (d.
1554), married Jane, daughter of William Heckington of Bourne, and was
father of three daughters and Lord Burghley.

William, the only son, was put to school first at Grantham and then at
Stamford. In May 1535, at the age of fourteen, he went up to St John's
College, Cambridge, where he was brought into contact with the foremost
educationists of the time, Roger Ascham and John Cheke, and acquired an
unusual knowledge of Greek. He also acquired the affections of Cheke's
sister, Mary, and was in 1541 removed by his father to Gray's Inn, without,
after six years' residence at Cambridge, having taken a degree. The
precaution proved useless, and four months later Cecil committed one of the
rare rash acts of his life in marrying Mary Cheke. The only child of this
marriage, Thomas, the future earl of Exeter, was born in May 1542, and in
February 1543 Cecil's first wife died. Three years later he married (21st
of December 1546) Mildred, daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, who was ranked by
Ascham with Lady Jane Grey as one of the two most learned ladies in the
kingdom, and whose sister, Anne, became the wife of Sir Nicholas, and the
mother of Sir Francis, Bacon.

Cecil, meanwhile, had obtained the reversion to the office of _custos
rotulorum brevium_, and, according to his autobiographical notes, sat in
parliament in 1543; but his name does not occur in the imperfect
parliamentary returns until 1547, when he was elected for the family
borough of Stamford. Earlier in that year he had accompanied Protector
Somerset on his Pinkie campaign, being one of the two "judges of the
Marshalsea," _i.e._ in the courts-martial. The other was William Patten,
who states that both he and Cecil began to write independent accounts of
the campaign, and that Cecil generously communicated his notes for Patten's
narrative, which has been reprinted more than once.

In 1548 he is described as the protector's master of requests, which
apparently means that he w