nce in point of years was but that which naturally divided
the father and the son. Both were Prime Ministers of England, rehearsing
by anticipation the relations between the two William Pitts--the
statesmen who guided, first, the _Seven Years' War_, from 1757 to 1763;
and, secondly, the French Revolutionary War, from the murder of Louis
XVI. in 1793 to the battle of Trafalgar in October, 1805. Sir William
Cecil, the father, had founded the barony of Burleigh, which
subsequently was raised into the earldom of Exeter. Sir Robert Cecil,
the son, whose personal merits towards James I. were more conspicuous
than those of his father towards Queen Elizabeth, had leaped at once
into the earldom of Salisbury. Through two centuries these distinguished
houses--Exeter the elder and Salisbury the junior--had run against each
other. At length the junior house ran ahead of its elder, being raised
to a marquisate. But in this century the elder righted itself, rising
also to a marquisate. In an ordinary case this would not have won any
notice, but the historic cradle of the two houses, amongst burning feuds
of Reformation and anti-Reformation policy, fiery beyond all that has
ever raged amongst men, fixed the historic eye upon them. Neck and neck
they ran together. Hatfield House for the family of Salisbury, Burleigh
House (founded by the original Lord Burleigh) for the family of Exeter,
expressed in the nineteenth century that fraternal conflict which had
commenced in the sixteenth. Personal merits, if any such had varied and
coloured the pretensions of this or that generation, had, in the midst
of wealth and ease and dignity, withdrawn themselves from notice, except
that about the splendid decennium of the Regency and the second
decennium of George IV.'s reign, no lady of the Court had been so
generally acceptable to the world of fashion and elegance, domestic or
foreign, as the Marchioness of Salisbury, whose tragical death by fire
at Hatfield House, in spite of her son's heroic exertions, was as
memorable for the last generation as the similar tragedy at the Austrian
Ambassador's continued to be for the Court and generation of
Napoleon.[45] It is not often that two kindred houses, belonging in the
Roman sense to the same _gens_ or clan, run against each other with
parity of honour and public consideration through nearly three
centuries. The present representative of the Exeter house of the
Cecils[46] was not individually considered a