David Cecil

Notes

http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Probate/PROB_11-92-316.pdf

The draft and final versions of David Cecil’s will establish that he married secondly a wife named Jane or Joan [Roos?]. The provisions by which he bequeaths her the plate and household stuff which was hers before their marriage suggest that she was a widow when he married her, perhaps the widow of the Stamford glover and alderman, John Dyccons whose will David Cecil was charged with administering.

For the draft and final versions of David Cecil’s will, in which he mentions his wife, Jane or Joan, his two sons, Richard Cecil and David Cecil, and his daughter, Joan Cecil, see TNA PROB 11/29/71, and ‘Sir David Cecil’s Will’, supra.

In the two versions of his will, David Cecil leaves bequests to his unmarried daughter, Joan Cecil, and states that his current wife is her ‘natural mother’. He does not make the same statement with respect to either of his sons, Richard Cecil and David Cecil, and it seems likely they were his sons by his first wife, Agnes, and that therefore the testator’s grandmother was David Cecil’s first wife, Agnes.

Joan Cecil married Edmund Browne of Stamford. See the Browne pedigree in Corner, George R., ‘Robert Browne’, in Tymms, Samuel, ed., The East Anglian, Vol. I, (Lowestoft: Samuel Tymms, 1864), pp. 180-2 at: GoogleBooks

Through his aunt, Joan Cecil Browne, Lord Burghley was distantly related to the playwright, John Lyly