Due to the current Coronavirus pandemic, all Lord Burghley 500 celebrations will take place in 2021. Our website is updated regularly so all dates listed below are correct. If you have any queries or concerns, please feel free to email burghley@burghley.co.uk and our team will get back to you as soon as possible.
Join us for our series of special lectures on Lord Burghley from renowned speakers.
Professor Stephen Alford - Friday 10th September 2021
This lecture will explore the first Lord Burghley’s world and political imagination, examining what drove him to work as hard as he did for queen and kingdom. It will consider his relationships with Queen Elizabeth, his fellow courtiers and his family. It will examine, too, some of the most decisive moments in Elizabethan politics through his eyes. And it will explore the centrality of Stamford and Burghley to William Cecil’s powerful sense of family and dynasty and of the obligations he had to his ‘country’.
Stephen Alford is the author of Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (2008) and The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I (2012). A former Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, he has held the Chair in Early Modern British History at the University of Leeds since 2012. He is a Patron of the Lord Burghley 500 Foundation and is currently writing a political life of the first Lord Burghley’s younger son, Robert Cecil.
Stephen Alford's lecture will take place in the Great Hall, with drinks in the Orangery from 6pm and the lecture from 7pm.
Dr. Anna Keay - Thursday 23rd September 2021
'Elizabeth, Leicester and the Elizabethan Garden at Kenilworth'
Anna Keay's lecture will take place in the Great Hall, with drinks in the Orangery from 6pm and the lecture from 7pm.
Anna will discuss the remarkable garden created at Kenilworth Castle in the 1570s by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who, with Lord Burghley, was one of the key courtiers and ministers at the court of Elizabeth I. Perhaps the best recorded Elizabethan privy garden, it was at the heart of Elizabeth I’s long visit to the castle in 1575, and the subject of an ambitious restoration by English Heritage in 2009. The talk will discuss the garden and its significance and the challenges and issues which were tackled in re-creating it.
Dr Anna Keay, formerly Curatorial Director at English Heritage, is now Director of the Landmark Trust.
Dr. Suzannah Lipscomb - Friday 8th October 2021
On William Shakespeare’s death, Ben Jonson, paid the bard a compliment that continues to define our attitude to Shakespeare: ‘He was not of an age, but for all time’. Shakespeare’s talent is so rare that it is easy to think of him as a man out of time. But, in fact, he was born in a rural market town in the early years of Elizabeth I’s reign, and formed by the social, religious, and political worldview of the period - the very same world inhabited by his namesake William Cecil, Lord Burghley. To examine this world - a time of huge demographic, economic, social, religious, and cultural change - tells us much, in turn, about Shakespeare and Burghley themselves.
Suzannah Lipscomb's lecture will take place in the Great Hall, with drinks in the Orangery from 6pm and the lecture from 7pm.
Associate Professor Jennifer Alexander - Thursday 4th November 2021
Symbols, Secrets and Stonemasons: New Insights on the Roman Stair at Burghley'
Jennifer Alexander's lecture will take place in the Great Hall, with drinks in the Orangery from 6pm and the lecture from 7pm.
Dr. Simon Thurley - Thursday 11th November 2021
'The Tudors: Art, Architecture and Burghley House'
Simon Thurley's lecture will take place in the Great Hall, with drinks in the Orangery from 6pm and the lecture from 7pm.
Lesley Smith - Friday 12th October 2021
'Lesley Smith as Queen Elizabeth I'
Lesley Smith's lecture will take place in the Great Hall, with drinks in the Orangery from 6pm and the lecture from 7pm. With live music played by Elizabethan Minstrel Dante Ferrara.
