Herefordshire Through Time
Herefordshire Through Time
Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520/1-1598), was the chief advisor and Lord Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth I. He served at Court for 40 years through three reigns. He worked closely with his cousin, Blanche Parry, the Queen's confidante. Cecil established an efficient secret service and groomed his second son, Sir Robert Cecil, to succeed him. Lord Burghley's grandfather, David Sitsylt, moved from Alt-yr-Ynys, Walterstone (HER 6191) in the south-west of Herefordshire, to Lincolnshire in the 1480s. However, Sitsylt/Cecil cousins continued to live in the original family home. Alt-yr-Ynys was a small manor house with a fine Tudor ceiling in the parlour and some stained glass windows, one of which is the Cecil coat-of-arms now in Walterstone Church. An account of the 1597 funeral of William Cecil of Alt-yr-Ynys at Walterstone Church survives in a letter from Paul Delahay to Lord Burghley in the Salisbury Manuscripts. (Source: Ruth Richardson)
[Original author: Toria Forsyth-Moser, 2003]