William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley
5 of 45 portraits of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley
© National Portrait Gallery, London
William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley
by Unknown artist
oil on panel, after circa 1585
22 in. x 16 1/4 in. (559 mm x 413 mm)
Transferred from The British Museum, London, 1879
Primary Collection
NPG 525
Sitterback to top
- William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (1520 or 1521-1598), Lord High Treasurer. Sitter associated with 45 portraits.
Linked publicationsback to top
- Saywell, David; Simon, Jacob, Complete Illustrated Catalogue, 2004, p. 89
- Strong, Roy, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, 1969, p. 30
Events of 1585back to top
Current affairs
Anglo-Dutch treaty of alliance against Spain is signed at Nonsuch Palace.Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester arrives in the Netherlands with 7,000 soldiers to fight for the Dutch Protestant cause and is appointed Governor-General of the Netherlands.
An expedition, funded by Sir Walter Ralegh and led by his cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, establishes an ill-fated colony on Roanoke Island. The area is named Virginia after Queen Elizabeth I.
Art and science
Miniature of Sir Walter Ralegh is painted by Nicholas Hilliard at about this time.The publisher Robert Waldegrave is imprisoned for printing Puritan books.
The explorer John Davis discovers the strait named after him between Greenland and Canada while searching for the Northwest Passage to the Far East.
International
Henry III of France bows to pressure from the militant Catholic Henry, Duke of Guise to sign the Treaty of Nemours, which revokes all toleration of Huguenots. Opposition to the legal heir to the crown, the Protestant Henry of Navarre provokes the final French War of Religion.Sack of Antwerp by Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma, the Hapsburg Governor of the Netherlands. The city's pre-eminence as a centre of international commerce is lost to Amsterdam.
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