The Alchemical Patronage of Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley

otherwise. The dull, elderly, bureaucrat is merely a figment of recent popular fiction. 26 The
major fault with Alford‘s work, however, is the selectivity of his coverage. For example,
Alford‘s treatment of the last ten years of Cecil‘s career is completely inadequate. This last
decade, which engaged England in a desperate war with Spain, and in which Court politics
descended into open factionalism, is considered in far less detail than the rest of Elizabeth‘s
reign. 27 Unsurprisingly, Alford also fails to consider Cecil‘s views on alchemy. Aside from
passing reference to the alchemists John Dee and Richard Eden, Alford mentions none of
alchemical projects examined in this thesis. 28
A few instances of Cecil‘s alchemical patronage have been partially described in
biographies of other Tudor statesmen, notably Mary Dewar‘s Sir Thomas Smith (1964) and
Ralph Sargent‘s The Life and Lyrics of Sir Edward Dyer (1935). Dewar devoted a chapter to
Sir Thomas Smith‘s involvement in the Society of the New Art, using far more sources
than Strype, and hence wrote a much more accurate account. However, she paid little
attention to the scheme‘s broader implications, and misunderstood the manner in which
the project ended. 29 Sargent‘s account of Edward Dyer‘s role as Cecil‘s emissary to Edward
Kelley also improved on that given by Strype, but he still only examined a minority of the
sources relating to the episode. 30 Neither author focussed on Cecil‘s role as a patron of
alchemy.
Monographs dealing with particular elements of either Cecil‘s career or the
Elizabethan regime have begun to provide a more well-rounded view of the Elizabethan
period. Yet, even when these studies have examined closely related topics, Cecil‘s
alchemical patronage has been studiously ignored. In ‗The Economic Patronage of William
Cecil‘, Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes provide a detailed and insightful overview of Cecil‘s
26 Alford‘s examples of history having remembered Cecil as a dull bureaucrat are either from older works
such as John Neale‘s biography of Queen Elizabeth, or recent cinema such as Shekhar Kapur‘s Elizabeth
(1998); Alford, Burghley, p. xii.; John Neale, Queen Elizabeth I, London, 1973.
27 Alford, Burghley, pp. 296-331.
28 Ibid., p. 17.
29 Mary Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, London, 1964, pp. 149-155.
30 Ralph Sargent, The Life and Lyrics of Sir Edward Dyer, Oxford, 1935, 2 nd Edition, 1968, pp. 97-122.
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