With such friends in the dominant party as Cooke, Cheke, Cranmer, and Seymour, it is not surprising that William Cecil’s career emerged from obscurity and uncertainty almost as soon as the new Government was established. For a young man of twenty-seven he had already not done badly. His father was still alive, but in the first year of Edward VI. the office of _custos brevium_, of which the old King had given him the reversion five years before, fell in, and this brought him, in salary and fees, £240 per annum (£6, 13s. 4d. salary and rest fees at the four law terms), and in addition to this, according to his household biographer, the Lord Protector appointed him his Master of Requests soon after assuming power. That he held some such office from the summer of 1547 is certain, as from that date forward great numbers of letters exist written to him in relation to suits and petitions addressed to the Protector. The office, as then constituted, appears to have been an innovation, as being attached to Somerset’s personal household,[12] and intended to relieve him from the trouble of himself examining petitions and suits. In any case Cecil’s assiduity and patience appear thus early to have been acknowledged, to judge by the tone of most of his correspondents, many of whom belonged to a much more exalted social position than himself. In June 1547 Sir Thomas Darcy informs him[13] that (evidently by order) he had inquired into the love affair between “Mistress Dorothy” and the young Earl of Oxford—who was a ward—and desires to know whether the Protector wishes the match to be prevented or not; and in the following month Lady Browne wrote to him in terms of intimate friendship, begging him to use his influence with Somerset to appoint her brother to the coming expedition to Scotland.[14]