The Reputation of Robert Cecil: Libels, Political Opinion and Popular Awareness in the Early Seventeenth Century

Abstract

On 29 April 1612 the London letter writer John Chamberlain penned another of his regular epistles to his friend Sir Dudley Carleton, ambassador in Venice. For weeks a chief news item had been the declining health of the Lord Treasurer, Robert Cecil Earl of Salisbury. ‘I wish I could send you better assurance’ Chamberlain wrote, ‘but as far as I can learn there is more cause of fear than hope’. Salisbury was journeying to Bath, where he had often sought relief before, but he had been ‘very yll by the way yesterday and was almost gon once or twise’. His death was assumed to be imminent. ‘He is alredy much lamented and every man sayes what a misse there wold be of him and indeed [he] is much prayed for’. The news later in June was more of a surprise. Salisbury's passing, on the return journey from Bath, had been followed not by the expected tributes to his irreplaceability, but by a flood of ‘outragious speaches’.