Speaker: Stephen Alford
Topic: Robert Cecil: Statesman and Spymaster of Tudor and Stuart England
Venue: Vinson Lecture Theatre
Time: 10:00-11:00 Friday 13 September
Talk Summary:
Robert Cecil, statesman and spymaster, lived through a dramatic and threatening period in English history. Elizabeth II had no clear successor and enemies both external and internal threatened to destroy England as a Protestant state, most spectacularly with the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot. Cecil stood at the heart of the Tudor and then Stuart state, a vital figure in managing the succession from Elizabeth I to James I & VI, warding off military and religious threats and steering the decisions of two very different but equally wilful and hard-to-manage monarchs. The promising son of Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister Lord Burghley, for Cecil there was no choice but politics, and he became supremely skilled in the arts of power, making many rivals and enemies.
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Stephen Alford is the author of The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He taught for 15 years at Cambridge University, where he was a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of History and a Fellow of King’s College. He is now Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Leeds. His latest book is All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil (Allen Lane).