The Alchemical Patronage of Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley

among students and teachers, with a number of related topics approved for formal
university debates, including a debate on the possibility of alchemical transmutation. 40
Historians have largely ignored those aspects of university learning outside the
official curriculum and pursued through private discussion. The careers of Cecil‘s friends
and fellow scholars suggest these encompassed elements of the alchemical and occult
learning advocated by humanist scholars such as Cornelius Agrippa. Alford argues that
Cecil shared the interests of ―a club of young, energetic and clever men who loved
scholarship and learned from one another‖ and that this gave him ―friends for life‖. 41
However, he fails to explore the implication of many of these friends‘ fascination, and even
obsession, with both the philosophy and practice of alchemy. It seems unlikely that Cecil
shared so much with his intellectual contemporaries but stopped short of alchemy. In fact,
the letters Cecil later exchanged with his former classmates and tutors clearly reflected their
shared enthusiasm for alchemy.
Cecil had a close association with both of the leading lights of the Cambridge
humanist movements, John Cheke and Thomas Smith. Students and later lecturers at
Cambridge, Cheke and Smith had a devoted following, and in championing the new, more
authentic, but controversial, pronunciation of Greek, they exemplified the new humanist
attitude towards knowledge. 42 Less evident from the historiography, however, is both
men‘s interest in alchemy.
Initially acting as Cecil‘s tutor, John Cheke became a close friend of his student.
Such was Cecil‘s familiarity with the Cheke family, that in 1541 he made the
uncharacteristically impulsive decision to marry Cheke‘s younger sister, Mary. 43 The family
were not wealthy or influential and, to Cecil‘s father‘s mind at least, it was a disastrously
40 Feingold, ‗The Occult Tradition‘, p. 78.
41 Alford, Burghley, p. 18.
42 Nauert, Humanism and the Culture, p. 187.
43 Read, Mr Secretary, p.27.
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