A Sight Full of Woe: The Cecil Family and Their Monuments c.1580–1620

Abstract

This essay is the first collective analysis of the monuments of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and his family. Between 1580 and 1620 Burghley and his son Robert Cecil were prolific patrons of monuments for themselves and their immediate family members in Westminster Abbey and near their country houses at Stamford, Lincolnshire, and Hatfield, Hertfordshire. Their commissions were typical of Elizabethan monuments: they reflected the maxim that magnificence in memory should be proportionate to the honour the dead enjoyed in life, they focused on aristocratic concerns to transfer land and power from one generation to the next, and they replaced the early sixteenth-century fear of purgatorial suffering with the Protestant hope of the resurrection. Unusually, however, the Cecils’ monuments included emotionally charged inscriptions, recording for posterity their grief at the death of wives, mothers and daughters, as well as pride in their progeny and legacy. This case study demonstrates that early modern objects such as monuments to the dead could communicate love and grief, mirth and despair, hope and happiness to future generations through their words and images.