Sir robert cecil biography of william

NOTE

The following biography of Sir Robert Cecil, 1st earl of Salisbury, is copied from Alexander Brown’s The Genesis of the United States, vol. 2, pp. &#;

Cecil, one of the most powerful individuals in the late court of Elizabeth I and early court of James I, was the consummate bureaucrat, and in this capacity, rather a visionary when it came to implementing needed reforms affecting foreign policy and the state treasury. Cecil had close ties to the London merchants, and favored policies that protected and fostered England’s fledgling mercantile capitalist economy, as had his father before him. Cecil’s public interest in profiteering also took a private turn (e.g., his development in of the New Exchange in the lower Strand, which Croft says “accelerated the steady movement of commerce westwards outside the older confines of the City” of London), and he was personally involved with the Virginia Company and related imperial enterprises. Brown&rsq