It was not until the summer of 1599 that he received his first preferment. He was made president of the council of the north. The instructions addressed to him by the queen give a most curious account of the condition of Yorkshire at this time, and of the widespread discontent that prevailed. Lord Burghley is charged to resort to strong measures to reduce the recusant gentry to obedience, and to hunt down the papists and the priests. He showed no reluctance to obey his orders, and before he had been in office two months he writes to his brother, Sir Robert Cecil, boasting, ‘Since my coming I have filled a little study with copes and mass-books.’ In October 1600 he had leave of absence, and being in London during the so-called rebellion of Robert, earl of Essex, in the following February, he took a leading part in suppressing the foolish riot and in proclaiming Essex a traitor with due formalities. In recognition of his service he was made a knight of the Garter, and installed at Windsor 20 May 1601. On the accession of James I (1603) he was sworn of the privy council, and on 4 May 1605 he was created Earl of Exeter. In April 1609 his wife, Lady Dorothy, died, and about the same time Sir Thomas Smith, master of requests to James I, being carried off by a fever, Lord Exeter consoled himself for his own loss by marrying Sir Thomas Smith's widow, though she was thirty-eight years his junior; she was daughter of William, fourth lord Chandos.
He appeared but little at court after this—indeed, he was nearly seventy at the time of his second marriage. He had suffered a great deal from the gout for many years before, and he spent most of his time at Wimbledon House in comparative retirement, though his name occurs now and then upon commissions, upon all of which he certainly did not serve. The last years of his life were embittered by the scandalous lawsuits in which he found himself entangled through the quarrels that arose between his grandson and heir, Lord Roos, and the violent and wicked woman to whom that son was married. The story of the hateful business may be read in Mr. Gardiner's ‘History of Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage.’ Lord Exeter died 7 Feb. 1622, in his eightieth year, and was buried in Westminster Abbey three days after, in the chapel of St. John the Baptist, where a splendid monument to his memory still exists.
It is clear that the first Lord Exeter was a person of very ordinary abilities, and that if he had been born of other parentage we should have heard nothing of him. By his first wife, Lady Dorothy, he had a family of five sons and eight daughters. His eldest son, William, who succeeded to the earldom, was the father of the despicable Lord Roos who died before him, in 1618, and as he had no other son the earldom passed to Sir Richard Cecil, the first earl's second son, from whom the present Marquis of Exeter is lineally descended. The third son, Sir Edward Cecil, was created Viscount Wimbledon 25 July 1626, but dying in 1638 without male heirs the title became extinct [see Cecil, Sir Edward, Viscount Wimbledon]. Of his daughters, Elizabeth married, first, Sir William Hatton, and secondly Sir Edward Coke. The violent quarrel between this lady and her second husband was a cause célèbre before the law courts in 1617. Lord Exeter imitated his illustrious father in founding a hospital for twelve poor men and two women at Liddington in Rutlandshire, and was a liberal benefactor to Clare College, Cambridge. By his second wife he had a daughter, who died in infancy. His widow survived him more than forty years. She died in 1663 and was buried in Winchester Cathedral.
[Many of the authorities for the life of Thomas Cecil are given under Cecil, William, Lord Burghley. To them must be added: Calendars, Domestic, covering all the period of his life, passim; Birch's Court and Times of James I; Nichols's Progresses of Eliz. and Jas. I; Strype's Annals, II. i. 36, and elsewhere through his works; Cooper's Annals of Cambridge, ii. 278; Gardiner's Hist. of James I, vol. iii. chap. iii.; Spedding's Bacon's Life and Letters, vi. et seq.; Collins's Peerage, ‘Marquis of Exeter,’ ii.; Life and Times of Sir Edward Cecil, lord Wimbledon, by C. Dalton, 2 vols. 8vo, 1885; Froude's Hist. of England, vol. ix.; Motley's United Netherlands, i. and ii.; Col. Chester's Westminster Abbey Registers, p. 21, n. 5. There is a curious document quoted in the fourth report of the Hist. MSS. Commissioners, p. 125, which appears to throw some doubt upon the marriage of Thomas Cecil to Dorothy Nevill. The fact of that marriage is so certain that it is not worth while to discuss the matter here.]
CECIL, THOMAS (fl. 1630), engraver, has the credit, rare in artists of his period, of being an Englishman. Beyond this there is not much to be said. John Evelyn speaks highly of him, and he seems to have been well thought of by his contemporaries. He was working in London 1627–35. The portrait of Henry VIII prefixed to some copies of the first edition of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's ‘History of Henry’ is by Cecil. His best works are portraits, often from his own drawings, ‘executed entirely with the graver.’
