Mary Wriothesley, Countess of Southampton
Mary Wriothesley, Countess of Southampton Mary Browne, became the wife of Henry Wriothesley, 2nd Earl of Southampton, at the age of thirteen and the mother of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. Widowed in 1581, she was Dowager Countess of Southampton until 1595, when for a few months until his death she was married to the courtier Sir Thomas Heneage. In 1598 she married lastly Sir William Hervey; the daughter of Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montagu, by his first marriage to Lady Jane Radcliffe, a daughter of Robert Radcliffe, 1st Earl of Sussex, Lady Margaret Stanley, Mary Browne had a twin brother, but they lost their mother in the childbirth. Before 10 December 1558 Montagu married Magdalen Dacre, by whom he had three sons, Sir George and Henry, three daughters, Elizabeth and Jane. On 19 February 1565/66 at the age of thirteen Mary Browne married, at her father's house in London, Henry Wriothesley, 2nd Earl of Southampton, a royal ward who himself was aged only twenty, the son of Jane Cheney and the deceased 1st Earl of Southampton.
In 1566 Southampton reached the age of twenty-one, but he did not gain control of his estates until 7 February 1568. He found himself with six residences and an income of between £2,000 and £3,000, so "lived in a grand way, maintaining a large and lavish household". However, Mary's life with Southampton was troubled by his political difficulties stemming from his "fervent Catholicism". By Southampton Mary had an only son, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, two daughters, who died before 1573, Mary, who married Thomas Arundell, 1st Baron Arundell of Wardour. On 6 October 1573 Southampton wrote with great happiness to his friend Sir William More to give news of the birth of his son; the next six years were a period of stability, with the Queen granting Southampton small signs of favour. Following his mother's death in 1574 he began to build a great new country house at Dogmersfield. Mary and Southampton continued on affectionate terms until about 1577, but by he had forbidden her to see a man named Donsame, described as "a common person", after that development the couple's relationship worsened.
In 1580, Southampton learned that Mary had been seen at Dogmersfield with Donsame and he put her away from him, after which she was forced to live under surveillance on one of her husband's Hampshire estates. Mary denied adultery and accused a servant, Thomas Dymock, of having caused the suspicion between herself and her husband. There arose a dispute between Southampton and his father-in-law over his treatment of his wife, which years Robert Persons blamed on the Roman Catholic conspirator Charles Paget. Lord Montagu wrote to Mary, asking his daughter to explain herself, Mary sent him a copy of a letter she had sent Southampton by their son, which her husband had refused to read, she said to her father in a postscript That yowr Lordship shalbe witnes of my desier to wyn my Lorde by all such meanes as resteth in me, I have sent yowe what I sent him by my little boye. Butt his harte was too greate to bestowe the reading of it, coming from me. Yett will I do my parte so longe as I am with him, but good my Lorde, procure so soone as conveniently yowe may, some end to my miserie for I am tyred with this life.
Mary did not see her son again until after his father died the following year, on 4 October 1581, leaving an estate worth £1097 a year, when she became Dowager Countess of Southampton. In his Will, Southampton named Thomas Dymock and Charles Paget as executors, Mary contested this with some success, supported by the Earl of Leicester. By 11 December 1581 there was a settlement between her and the executors under which Dymock was still to receive generous bequests but had to relinquish the administration of the estate to Edward Gage. Queen Elizabeth sold the wardship and custody of Mary's young son to Lord Howard of Effingham for £1,000. Howard transferred the custody to Lord Burghley, but kept control of the young peer's estates, as a result late in 1581 or early in 1582 the new Earl of Southampton aged eight, came to live at Cecil House in the Strand; this did not prevent Henry from spending some time with his mother, who on 14 October 1590 wrote to Burghley to thank him for entrusting her son to her for a long time.
For fourteen years the Dowager Countess remained a widow. On 2 May 1594, she married as his second wife the courtier Sir Thomas Heneage, Vice-Chamberlain of the Queen's Household, but Heneage lived another five months. Having drawn in advance substantial sums in connection with his office, he died owing the crown £12,000. In 1596, his widow, his executrix, had made two large payments, but the Queen's auditors advised her that there was still more than £7,800 owing. According to Akrigg, in order to repay this substantial debt Mary had to draw on her own resources. Between 5 November 1598 and 31 January 1598/99, Mary Heneage married thirdly Sir William Hervey, lived another nine years, dying in October or November 1607, she left a will proved on 14 November in which she gave instructions for her burial at Titchfield "as near as may be unto the body of my honorable and dearlie beloved Lord and husband Henrie late Earle of Southampton". On 17 November 1607 Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel, wrote to the Earl of Shrewsbury that "Old Southampton... is dead, hath left the best of her stuff to her son, the greatest part to her husband, the most of which I think will be sold and dispersed into the hands of many men"
Matthew Arundell
Sir Matthew Arundell of Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, known between 1552 and 1554 as Matthew Howard and after his death sometimes called Matthew Arundell-Howard, was an English gentleman and member of parliament in the West of England. Although the ancestor of a family of Roman Catholic recusants, Arundell himself conformed to the Church of England. A member of the ancient knightly family of Arundell of Cornwall, Arundell was the son of Sir Thomas Arundell and of Margaret Howard, a sister of Queen Katherine Howard, his maternal grandparents were Lord Edmund Howard, the third son of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, Joyce Culpeper. His great aunt Elizabeth, Countess of Wiltshire, was the mother of Anne Boleyn, thus the first cousin of Arundell's mother as well as being the mother of Queen Elizabeth I, he was a descendant of the 11th century landowner Roger de Arundell, who possessed a substantial estate of twenty-eight manors in Wiltshire and Dorset at the Domesday Book survey, his ancestors on his mother's side included the Varangian chieftain Rurik, founder of the Rurikid dynasty.
Arundell had a younger brother and two sisters and Jane. Little is known of their early lives, except that after the execution of their father in 1552 their mother took her children to live in the Holy Roman Empire, where the family used the name of Howard. For this reason, Arundell is sometimes referred to as Matthew Arundell-Howard. In 1554, two years after his father's death, when he was about twenty-one, the Arundells were "restored in blood", meaning that their father's attainder was reversed so far as it affected them, Arundell succeeded in regaining most of his father's lost estates in Dorset and Wiltshire. Arundell had been contracted to marry Katherine, one of the daughters of Thomas Wriothesley, 1st Earl of Southampton, but in the event she married Sir Thomas Cornwallis. In 1559 Arundell married Margaret Willoughby, a daughter of Sir Henry Willoughby, of Wollaton and wife Anne Grey; as a child Margaret and her sister and brother had been taken in by Henry Grey, 3rd Marquess of Dorset, his wife, Frances Brandon, after their father was slain in the suppression of Kett's Rebellion in 1549, had grown up with Dorset's daughters, Lady Jane Grey, Lady Katherine Grey, Lady Mary Grey.
Margaret was present at Mary Grey's secret marriage on 16 July 1565 to the Queen's serjeant porter, Thomas Keyes, was bequeathed a tankard of gold and silver in Mary Grey's will. As a young lady Margaret had served in the household of Princess Elizabeth at Hatfield House. Sir Thomas Arundell's main seat, Wardour Castle, had been held by knight service of the Earl of Pembroke, so had escheated to Pembroke in 1552. In 1570 Arundell was able to buy it back to live in, together with the manor of Sutton Mandeville, the next year Lord Pembroke granted him the site of Shaftesbury Abbey; as well as living at Wardour, the Arundells kept a town house in London. They had two sons. Arundell served in several official capacities, including as Sheriff, custos rotulorum, Deputy Lieutenant of Dorset. Apart from his administrative tasks in the West of England, where his estates lay, Arundell was twice a Member of Parliament; the borough of Shaftesbury in Dorset sent him to sit as one of its burgesses in the House of Commons in the parliament of 1555.
In 1563 he was elected as the knight of the shire for Breconshire in Wales. At Westminster he followed the powerful William Cecil, in 1574 was knighted by his cousin Queen Elizabeth, his brother Charles Arundell was a recusant and fled the country after the Babington Plot. In the 1580s he was seen as a leader of the English Roman Catholic exiles in France. Arundell's own elder son was imprisoned as a suspected Imperial spy, but Arundell himself conformed to the Church of England. In 1588, Arundel was one of a small number of knights considered for a peerage on account of "great possessions"; the following year he was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant for Wiltshire. Sir John Harington, a courtier claimed as the inventor of the water closet, reported an occasion at Wardour in the early 1590s at which a conversation about sanitation first prompted his interest in the subject. Apart from Harington, those present were Arundell and his son Thomas, Thomas's wife, her brother Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, Sir Henry Danvers.
However, fifty years Wardour Castle still depended on medieval garderobes as privies. In his final months Arundell was in pain from bladder stones. Following his death on 24 December 1598 he was buried at the parish church of Tisbury. In his Will, proved on 6 February 1598/99, he gave £2,000 – at the time an enormous sum, equal to twice the annual income of his more powerful connection the Earl of Southampton – to the poor; as Custos Rotulorum of Dorset he was succeeded by Sir Walter Raleigh. Arundell's son Thomas distinguished himself in battle against the Turks in the service of the Emperor Rudolf II, who created him a Count of the Holy Roman Empire; this foreign title annoyed Queen Elizabeth, who in 1597 imprisoned Thomas Arundell in the Fleet as a suspected Roman Catholic spy, but nothing could be proved against him and Thomas was soon released into Arundell's custody. In 1605, some years after Arundell's death in 1598, his elder son was summoned to the House of Lords by King James I as Baron Arundell of Wardour and was suspected of being one of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators.
The title survived until the death of John Arundell, 16th Baron Arundell of Wardour, when it became extinct. Matthew Arundell at thepeerage.com
Wiltshire
Wiltshire is a county in South West England with an area of 3,485 km2. It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset, Hampshire, Gloucestershire and Berkshire; the county town was Wilton, after which the county is named, but Wiltshire Council is now based in the county town of Trowbridge. Wiltshire is characterised by its high wide valleys. Salisbury Plain is noted for being the location of the Stonehenge and Avebury stone circles and other ancient landmarks, as a training area for the British Army; the city of Salisbury is notable for its medieval cathedral. Important country houses open to the public include Longleat, near Warminster, the National Trust's Stourhead, near Mere; the county, in the 9th century written as Wiltunscir Wiltonshire, is named after the former county town of Wilton. Wiltshire is notable for its pre-Roman archaeology; the Mesolithic and Bronze Age people that occupied southern Britain built settlements on the hills and downland that cover Wiltshire. Stonehenge and Avebury are the most famous Neolithic sites in the UK.
In the 6th and 7th centuries Wiltshire was at the western edge of Saxon Britain, as Cranborne Chase and the Somerset Levels prevented the advance to the west. The Battle of Bedwyn was fought in 675 between Escuin, a West Saxon nobleman who had seized the throne of Queen Saxburga, King Wulfhere of Mercia. In 878 the Danes invaded the county. Following the Norman Conquest, large areas of the country came into the possession of the crown and the church. At the time of the Domesday Survey the industry of Wiltshire was agricultural. In the succeeding centuries sheep-farming was vigorously pursued, the Cistercian monastery of Stanley exported wool to the Florentine and Flemish markets in the 13th and 14th centuries. In the 17th century English Civil War Wiltshire was Parliamentarian; the Battle of Roundway Down, a Royalist victory, was fought near Devizes. In 1794 it was decided at a meeting at the Bear Inn in Devizes to raise a body of ten independent troops of Yeomanry for the county of Wiltshire, which formed the basis for what would become the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry, who served with distinction both at home and abroad, during the Boer War, World War I and World War II.
The Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry lives on as Y Squadron, based in Swindon, B Squadron, based in Salisbury, of the Royal Wessex Yeomanry. Around 1800 the Kennet and Avon Canal was built through Wiltshire, providing a route for transporting cargoes from Bristol to London until the development of the Great Western Railway. Information on the 261 civil parishes of Wiltshire is available on Wiltshire Council's Wiltshire Community History website which has maps, demographic data and modern pictures and short histories; the local nickname for Wiltshire natives is "Moonrakers". This originated from a story of smugglers who managed to foil the local Excise men by hiding their alcohol French brandy in barrels or kegs, in a village pond; when confronted by the excise men they raked the surface to conceal the submerged contraband with ripples, claimed that they were trying to rake in a large round cheese visible in the pond a reflection of the full moon. The officials took them for simple yokels or mad and left them alone, allowing them to continue with their illegal activities.
Many villages claim the tale for their own village pond, but the story is most linked with The Crammer in Devizes. Two-thirds of Wiltshire, a rural county, lies on chalk, a kind of soft, porous limestone, resistant to erosion, giving it a high chalk downland landscape; this chalk is part of a system of chalk downlands throughout eastern and southern England formed by the rocks of the Chalk Group and stretching from the Dorset Downs in the west to Dover in the east. The largest area of chalk in Wiltshire is Salisbury Plain, used for arable agriculture and by the British Army as training ranges; the highest point in the county is the Tan Hill–Milk Hill ridge in the Pewsey Vale, just to the north of Salisbury Plain, at 295 m above sea level. The chalk uplands run northeast into West Berkshire in the Marlborough Downs ridge, southwest into Dorset as Cranborne Chase. Cranborne Chase, which straddles the border, like Salisbury Plain, yielded much Stone Age and Bronze Age archaeology; the Marlborough Downs are part of a 1,730 km2 conservation area.
In the northwest of the county, on the border with South Gloucestershire and Bath and North East Somerset, the underlying rock is the resistant oolite limestone of the Cotswolds. Part of the Cotswolds AONB is in Wiltshire, in the county's northwestern corner. Between the areas of chalk and limestone downland are clay vales; the largest of these vales is the Avon Vale. The Avon cuts diagonally through the north of the county, flowing through Bradford-on-Avon and into Bath and Bristol; the Vale of Pewsey has been cut through the chalk into Greensand and Oxford Clay in the centre of the county. In the south west of the county is the Vale of Wardour; the southeast of the county lies on the sandy soils of the northernmost area of the New Forest. Chalk is a porous rock, so the chalk hills have little surface water; the main settlements in the county are therefore situated at wet points. Notably, Salisbury is situated between the chalk of marshy flood plains; the county has green belt along its western fringes as a part of the extensive Avon green belt, reaching as far as the outskirts of Rudloe/Corsham and Trowbridge, preventing urban spr
Virginia
Virginia the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States located between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" due to its status as the first English colonial possession established in mainland North America and "Mother of Presidents" because eight U. S. presidents were born there, more than any other state. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth are shaped by the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Chesapeake Bay, which provide habitat for much of its flora and fauna; the capital of the Commonwealth is Richmond. The Commonwealth's estimated population as of 2018 is over 8.5 million. The area's history begins with several indigenous groups, including the Powhatan. In 1607 the London Company established the Colony of Virginia as the first permanent New World English colony. Slave labor and the land acquired from displaced Native American tribes each played a significant role in the colony's early politics and plantation economy.
Virginia was one of the 13 Colonies in the American Revolution. In the American Civil War, Virginia's Secession Convention resolved to join the Confederacy, Virginia's First Wheeling Convention resolved to remain in the Union. Although the Commonwealth was under one-party rule for nearly a century following Reconstruction, both major national parties are competitive in modern Virginia; the Virginia General Assembly is the oldest continuous law-making body in the New World. The state government was ranked most effective by the Pew Center on the States in both 2005 and 2008, it is unique in how it treats cities and counties manages local roads, prohibits its governors from serving consecutive terms. Virginia's economy has many sectors: agriculture in the Shenandoah Valley. S. Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency. Virginia has a total area of 42,774.2 square miles, including 3,180.13 square miles of water, making it the 35th-largest state by area. Virginia is bordered by Maryland and Washington, D.
C. to the north and east. Virginia's boundary with Maryland and Washington, D. C. extends to the low-water mark of the south shore of the Potomac River. The southern border is defined as the 36° 30′ parallel north, though surveyor error led to deviations of as much as three arcminutes; the border with Tennessee was not settled until 1893, when their dispute was brought to the U. S. Supreme Court; the Chesapeake Bay separates the contiguous portion of the Commonwealth from the two-county peninsula of Virginia's Eastern Shore. The bay was formed from the drowned river valleys of the James River. Many of Virginia's rivers flow into the Chesapeake Bay, including the Potomac, Rappahannock and James, which create three peninsulas in the bay; the Tidewater is a coastal plain between the fall line. It includes major estuaries of Chesapeake Bay; the Piedmont is a series of sedimentary and igneous rock-based foothills east of the mountains which were formed in the Mesozoic era. The region, known for its heavy clay soil, includes the Southwest Mountains around Charlottesville.
The Blue Ridge Mountains are a physiographic province of the Appalachian Mountains with the highest points in the state, the tallest being Mount Rogers at 5,729 feet. The Ridge and Valley region includes the Great Appalachian Valley; the region includes Massanutten Mountain. The Cumberland Plateau and the Cumberland Mountains are in the southwest corner of Virginia, south of the Allegheny Plateau. In this region, rivers flow northwest, into the Ohio River basin; the Virginia Seismic Zone has not had a history of regular earthquake activity. Earthquakes are above 4.5 in magnitude, because Virginia is located away from the edges of the North American Plate. The largest earthquake, at an estimated 5.9 magnitude, was in 1897 near Blacksburg. A 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck central Virginia on August 2011, near Mineral. The earthquake was felt as far away as Toronto and Florida. 35 million years ago, a bolide impacted. The resulting Chesapeake Bay impact crater may explain what earthquakes and subsidence the region does experience.
Coal mining takes place in the three mountainous regions at 45 distinct coal beds near Mesozoic basins. Over 64 million tons of other non-fuel resources, such as slate, sand, or gravel, were mined in Virginia in 2018; the state's carbonate rock is filled with more than 4,000 caves, ten of which are open for tourism, including the popular Luray Caverns and Skyline Caverns. The climate of Virginia is humid subtropical and becomes warmer and more humid farther south and east. Seasonal extremes vary from average lows of 26 °F in January to average highs of 86 °F in July; the Atlantic Ocean has a strong effect on southeastern coastal areas of the state. Influenced by the Gulf Stream, coastal weather is subject to hurricanes, most pronouncedly near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. In spite of its position adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean the coastal areas have a significant continental influence with quite large temperature differences between summ
Wardour Castle
Wardour Castle is located at Wardour, on the boundaries of Tisbury and Donhead St Andrew in the English county of Wiltshire, about 15 miles west of Salisbury. The castle was built in the 1390s and destroyed in 1643 and 1644 during the English Civil War, it is managed by English Heritage who have designated it as a Grade I listed building, is open to the public. The castle was built on land owned by the St Martin family, but when Sir Lawrence de St Martin died in 1385 it was handed over to John, the fifth Baron Lovell for reasons unknown, it was built using locally quarried Tisbury greensand, with William Wynford as the master mason, after Baron Lovell had been granted permission by Richard II in 1392. It was inspired by the hexagonal castles in fashion in parts of the Continent in France. After the fall of the Lovell family following their support of the Lancastrian cause during the Wars of the Roses, the castle was confiscated in 1461 and passed through several owners until bought by Sir Thomas Arundell of Lanherne in 1544.
The Arundells were an ancient and prominent Cornish family, the principal branches of which were seated at the manors of Lanherne, Trerice and Menadarva in Cornwall. The family held several estates in Wiltshire; the castle was confiscated when Sir Thomas — a staunch Roman Catholic — was executed for treason in 1552, but in 1570 was bought back by his son, Sir Matthew Arundell a Sheriff and Custos Rotulorum of Dorset. The Arundells, led by Thomas Arundell, 1st Baron Arundell of Wardour, subsequently became known as some of the most active of the Catholic landowners in England at the time of the Reformation. During that conflict, Thomas Arundell, 2nd Baron Arundell of Wardour, was away from home on the King’s business and had asked his wife, Lady Blanche Arundell, aged 61, to defend the castle with a garrison of 25 trained fighting men. On 2 May 1643 Sir Edward Hungerford, with 1,300 men of the Parliamentarian Army, demanded admittance to search for Royalists, he was laid siege, setting about the walls with guns and mines.
After five days the castle was threatened with complete destruction. Lady Arundell agreed to surrender, the castle was placed under the command of Colonel Edmund Ludlow. Lord Arundell had died of his wounds after the Battle of Stratton, his son, Henry 3rd Lord Arundell, next laid siege to his own castle, blew up much of it and obliged the Parliamentary garrison to surrender in March 1644; the family recovered power through the English Commonwealth and the Glorious Revolution, until the eighth Baron, Henry Arundell, borrowed sufficient funds to finance rebuilding. This was done by the prominent Palladian James Paine. Paine left the Wardour Old Castle as an ornamental feature. In stylistic terms the New Castle is not a castle at all, but a symmetrical neoclassical country house with a main block built around a central staircase hall and two flanking wings. Paine integrated the ruins of the Old Castle into the surrounding parkland, intending it to be viewed as a romantic ruin; the castles and new, have been featured in several films.
The Old Castle appeared in the 1991 Kevin Costner feature Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, more was used as a film location for The Journey to Aresmore released in 2016. The New Castle served as the dance school in Billy Elliot; the cover of Sting's album Ten Summoner's Tales was photographed inside Old Wardour Castle. The castle's ground level was altered around the 18th century. In the Middle Ages, it sloped away much more steeply so that the building stood on the end of a low ridge of land; the approach to the main front door is supposed to have been protected by a wide ditch crossed by a drawbridge, with a portcullis, though there have been no surviving remains of these. Between the towers at the level of the battlements are the remains of a projecting gallery or barbican which would have been used to defend the front entrance. Above the portal over the front entrance is the Arundell coat-of-arms and a description of the Arundell's possession of Wardour, erected by Sir Matthew Arundell in 1578 to celebrate his recovery of the property after the family lost it when Sir Thomas Arundell was executed in 1552.
Above the coat of arms is the head of Christ in a niche with the inscription: Sub nomine tuo stet genus et domus. When the south-west side of the castle was blown out in an explosion in the 17th century, the courtyard would have changed from a dark and claustrophobic place to a light, spacious sanctuary, it would have been in the shape of a hexagon, there would have been four or five storeys formed around it on all sides. In the 1570s, most of the original medieval windows and doors would have been replaced. In the centre of this interior courtyard, there is a well. Evidence gathered from other castles from the same era suggests that there would have been an elaborate and impressive roof over the well and painted with the emblems of the Lovells and the Arundells; the grotto of Old Wardour Castle was the last addition to the landscape. It was built in 1792 by Josiah Lane of Tisbury, who at the time was a well-known builder of garden ornaments and other grottos in the area, he was commissioned to build the artificial cave, complete with dripping water and ferns from brick and stone from the ruins of the castle.
The grotto incorporates three standing stones, removed from the stone circle at Tisbury. The Arundells returned to Old Wardour in the 1680s after having been forced to leave the castle in 1644, they built a new, smaller house just outside the castle wall whi
William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley
William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, was an English statesman, the chief advisor of Queen Elizabeth I for most of her reign, twice Secretary of State and Lord High Treasurer from 1572. Albert Pollard says, "From 1558 for forty years the biography of Cecil is indistinguishable from that of Elizabeth and from the history of England."Cecil set as the main goal of English policy the creation of a united and Protestant British Isles. His methods were to complete the control of Ireland, to forge an alliance with Scotland. Protection from invasion required a powerful Royal Navy. While he was not successful, his successors agreed with his goals. Cecil was not an original thinker. In 1587, Cecil persuaded the Queen to order the execution of the Roman Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, after she was implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth, he was the father of Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury and founder of the Cecil dynasty which has produced many politicians including two prime ministers. Cecil was born in Bourne, Lincolnshire, in 1520, the son of Sir Richard Cecil, owner of the Burghley estate, his wife, Jane Heckington.
Pedigrees, elaborated by Cecil himself with the help of William Camden the antiquary, associated him with the Welsh Cecils or Seisyllts of Allt-Yr-Ynys, Walterstone, on the border of Herefordshire and Monmouthshire. Cecil is an anglicisation of the Welsh Seisyllt. Lord Burghley acknowledged that the family was from the Welsh Marches in a family pedigree painted at Theobalds; the Lord Treasurer's grandfather, David had moved to Stamford. David Cecil secured the favour of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, to whom he was yeoman of the chamber, he was elected Member of Parliament for Stamford five times, between 1504 and 1523. He was Sergeant-of-Arms to Henry VIII in 1526, Sheriff of Northamptonshire in 1532, a Justice of the Peace for Rutland. He, according to Burghley's enemies, kept the best inn in Stamford, his eldest son, Yeoman of the Wardrobe, married Jane, daughter of William Heckington of Bourne, was father of three daughters and the future Lord Burghley. William, the only son, was put to school first at The King's School and Stamford School, which he saved and endowed.
In May 1535, at the age of fourteen, he went to St John's College, where he was brought into contact with the foremost scholars of the time, Roger Ascham and John Cheke, acquired an unusual knowledge of Greek. He acquired the affections of Cheke's sister and was in 1541 removed by his father to Gray's Inn, without having taken a degree, as was common at the time for those not intending to enter the Church; the precaution proved useless and four months Cecil committed one of the rare rash acts of his life in marrying Mary Cheke. The only child of this marriage, the future Earl of Exeter, was born in May 1542, in February 1543 Cecil's first wife died. Three years on 21 December 1546 he married Mildred Cooke, ranked by Ascham with Lady Jane Grey as one of the two most learned ladies in the kingdom, whose sister, was the wife of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the mother of Sir Francis Bacon. William Cecil's early career was spent in the service of the Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector during the early years of the reign of his nephew, the young Edward VI.
Cecil accompanied Somerset on his Pinkie campaign of 1547, being one of the two Judges of the Marshalsea. The other was William Patten, who states that both he and Cecil began to write independent accounts of the campaign, that Cecil generously contributed his notes for Patten's narrative, The Expedition into Scotland. Cecil, according to his autobiographical notes, sat in Parliament in 1543. In 1548, he is described as the Protector's Master of Requests, which means that he was clerk or registrar of the court of requests which Somerset at Hugh Latimer's instigation, illegally set up in Somerset House to hear poor men's complaints, he seems to have acted as private secretary to the Protector, was in some danger at the time of the Protector's fall in October 1549. The lords opposed to Somerset ordered his detention on 10 October, in November he was in the Tower of London. Cecil ingratiated himself with John Dudley Earl of Warwick, after less than three months he was out of the Tower. On 5 September 1550 Cecil was sworn in as one of King Edward's two secretaries of state.
In April 1551, Cecil became chancellor of the Order of the Garter. But service under Warwick carried some risk, decades in his diary, Cecil recorded his release in the phrase "ex misero aulico factus liber et mei juris". To protect the Protestant government from the accession of a Catholic queen, Northumberland forced King Edward's lawyers to create an instrument setting aside the Third Succession Act on 15 June 1553. Cecil resisted for a while, in a letter to his wife, he wrote: "Seeing great perils threatened upon us by the likeness of the time, I do make choice to avoid the perils of God's d
Aldeburgh
Aldeburgh is an English town on the North Sea coast in the county of Suffolk, to the north of the River Alde. It was home to the composer Benjamin Britten and has been the centre of the international Aldeburgh Festival of arts at nearby Snape Maltings, founded by Britten in 1948, it remains an arts and literary centre, with an annual Poetry Festival and several food festivals and other events. As a Tudor port, Aldeburgh was granted borough status in 1529 by Henry VIII, its historic buildings include a Napoleonic-era Martello Tower. Second homes make up about a third of its housing. Visitors are drawn to its Blue Flag shingle beach and fisherman huts, where fresh fish are sold daily, by Aldeburgh Yacht Club, by its cultural offerings. Two family-run fish and chip shops are cited as being among the best in the country. Alde Burgh means "old fort" although this structure, along with much of the Tudor town, has now been lost to the sea. In the 16th century, Aldeburgh was a leading port, had a flourishing ship-building industry.
The flagship of the Virginia Company, the Sea Venture is believed to have been built here in 1608. Aldeburgh's importance as a port declined as the River Alde silted up and larger ships could no longer berth, it survived on fishing until the 19th century, when it became a seaside resort. Much of its distinctive and whimsical architecture derives from that period; the river is now home to a sailing club. Aldeburgh is on the North Sea coast, about 87 miles north-east of London, 20 mi north-east of Ipswich and 23 mi south of Lowestoft. Locally it is 4 mi south of 2 mi south of the village of Thorpeness, it lies just north of the River Alde, with the narrow shingle spit of Orford Ness all that stops the river meeting the sea at Aldeburgh – instead it flows another 9 mi to the south-west. The beach is shingle and wide in places, allowing fishing boats to draw up onto the beach above the high tide, but it narrows at the neck of Orford Ness; the shingle bank allows access to the Ness from the north, passing a Martello tower and two yacht clubs at the site of the former village of Slaughden.
Aldeburgh was flooded during the North Sea flood of 1953 and its flood defences were strengthened. The beach received a Blue flag rural beach award in 2005; the town is within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and has a number of Sites of Special Scientific Interest and nature reserves in its local area. The Alde-Ore Estuary SSSI covers the area surrounding the river from Snape to its mouth, including the whole of Orford Ness; this contains a number of salt mudflat habitats. The Leiston-Aldeburgh SSSI extends from the northern edge of the town to cover a range of habitats including grazing marsh and heathland, it includes Thorpeness Mere and the North Warren RSPB reserve, an area of wildlife and habitat conservation, nature trails run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Two smaller geological SSSI units lie on the southern edges. Aldeburgh Brick Pit, of 0.84-hectare, shows a clear stratigraphy of Red Crag deposits above Corralline Crag. Aldeburgh Hall Pit is a shallow pit 0.8 ha in area, featuring a section of Corralline Crag.
It is seen as one of the best sites in Britain for Neogene fauna. The town's churches include the pre-Reformation Anglican parish church of St Peter and St Paul and the Catholic Church of Our Lady and St Peter. Aldeburgh lies within the East Suffolk non-metropolitan district. Aldeburgh ward, which includes Thorpeness and other communities, had a population of 3225 in the 2011 census, when the mean age of the inhabitants was 55 and the median age 61, it is within the Suffolk Coastal parliamentary constituency represented by Therese Coffey, having had John Gummer for a member from 1983 to 2010. This is seen as a safe seat for the Conservatives. Aldeburgh was a Parliamentary Borough from 1571, returned two Members of Parliament, the right to vote being vested in the town's freemen. By the mid-18th century it was considered a rotten borough, as the votes were under the control of a City of London merchant, Thomas Fonnereau: and memorably described it as "a venal little borough in Suffolk", it lost its representation under the Great Reform Act of 1832.
In 1908 Aldeburgh became the first British town to elect a female mayor: Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, whose father, Newson Garrett, had been mayor in 1889. In 2006, Sam Wright became Aldeburgh's town crier and mace bearer at 15, so the youngest in the world. Aldeburgh is linked to the main A12 by the A1094 road; the B1122 leads to Leiston. There are bus services to Leiston, southward to Woodbridge and Ipswich, northward to Halesworth; the nearest railway station is at Saxmundham on the East Suffolk Line. This provides hourly services to Lowestoft. Aldeburgh railway station opened in 1860 as the terminus of the Aldeburgh Branch Line from Saxmundham, but was closed in 1966 under the Beeching Axe; the RNLI station in the town was operating two lifeboats in 2016. The Aldeburgh Moot Hall is a Grade I listed timber-framed building, used for council meetings for over 400 years; the Town Clerk's office remains there and it houses the local museum. It was built in about 1520 and altered in 1654; the brick and stone infilling of the ground floor is later.
The hall was restored and the external staircase and gable ends were rebuilt in 1854–1855 under the direction of R. M. Phipson, chief architect of the Diocese of Norwich, in which Aldeburgh stood. There are monuments in the town. A unique quatrefoil Martello Tower stands at the isthmus leading to the Orford N
