Thirty years ago, before gender history had entered the arena, an influential, if largely monochromatic, interpretation of Elizabeth I's reign was in vogue. This traditional model, rooted in seventeenth-century vignettes of Tudor politics which had been summarily rejected by J. A. Froude in the nineteenth century,¹ had been reaffirmed by Conyers Read and Sir John Neale in the three decades before 1960.² Read and Neale had evolved similar, if separately derived, arguments that stressed the monarchy and independent judgement of Elizabeth I, the indispensable but inescapably secondary roles played by her leading privy councillors such as Sir William Cecil and Sir Francis Walsingham, and the pervasive nature and extent of court factionalism. Both Read and Neale saw Elizabeth as supreme in policy-making and unrivalled in power, even if her influence was most often exercised negatively through the veto rather than constructively through decision-making. As to factionalism, this was held to be endemic on the basis of the alleged rivalries first between Cecil, later lord Burghley,³ and Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, the queen's first favourite, and then after Leicester's death between Burghley and his son, Robert Cecil, and Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex. This schematic and seemingly definitive interpretation commanded wide, if uncritical, assent, to the point where vestiges of it have recently reappeared in susan Doran's survey of Elizabeth's matrimonial diplomacy, where it is argued that the queen took her decisions independently, and yet her courtship negotiations foundered because of the political and religious shibboleths which divided her privy council.⁴

Read, and to a lesser extent Neale, had constructed credulous and mutually contradictory accounts. In the minds of these writers, Elizabeth's supremacy, which Froude had sharply questioned on the grounds of her procrastination, mercurial temperament, and failure to consult or accept advice, was a preconceived assumption rather than an opinion to be tested or investigated. In particular, while Read maintained that factionalism was driven by (largely foreign) policy disputes between privy councillors over a period of three decades, Neale attributed it to the competition at the court and its environs for patronage. In a celebrated essay on the Elizabethan political scene, Neale decontextualised and effectively turned into a rationale of politics an impromptu gibe by Spenser: 'For nothing there is done without a fee:/ The Courtier needs must recompensèd be.'⁵

No less controversially, Neale argued for the rise of a puritan parliamentary opposition.⁶ He maintained that Elizabeth was never a Protestant in the fully-reformed (or Calvinist) idiom of the Marian exiles and that she had been forced in 1559 to accept a more radical religious settlement than she would have preferred.⁷ The result was the rise of an organised puritan opposition in the house of commons. Neale was misled by his belief in the parliamentary activities of a puritan 'choir', but was correct to question Elizabeth's commitment to 'forward' Protestantism and to argue that the crux of the Reformation lay in the relationship of private belief to public performance. People had been forced to think critically on issues of conscience, and the infrequent, but cumulative, collisions between the queen and her Protestant élite (that pace Neale included bishops and privy councillors and their surrogates or 'men of business', and not merely the 'unofficial' voices of parliamentary puritanism) sparked a burgeoning political consciousness that by the last decade erupted in the confrontations between common and civil lawyers over Cawdrey's case (1591), ex officio procedure and the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical court of high commission,⁸ and most spectacularly in the parliamentary conflicts over monopolies and the prerogative in 1597 and 1601.⁹

For his 'whiggish' view of parliament and politics, Neale would be castigated by G. R. Elton and his revisionist school,¹⁰ but while Neale was mistaken on a variety of facts and grounds, the veracity of his emphasis on ideology in Elizabethan politics has never been satisfactorily addressed and since Elton's abrasive critiques has too often been settled by default.

A distinguished narrative trilogy by Wallace MacCaffrey, published between 1969 and 1992,¹¹ together with his later biography of Elizabeth¹² and a much earlier article discussing the role of patronage in politics,¹³ stimulated fresh approaches. These included the nature and shape of the régime and the political process, the queen's role in policy-making, the public and private relationships between the queen and her leading councillors and these councillors and each other, and the distinctive characteristics, preoccupations and tone of each successive decade of the reign. If old platitudes were to be abandoned, a new agenda would be required that incorporated more fluid and socially-derived conceptualisations and anchored them in specific and comparative chronological contexts.

Elizabeth's is a long reign. To re-evaluate simply the sources at the Public Record Office, the British Library and Hatfield House would consume a scholar's entire professional career, not to mention the rarely-consulted collections in Scotland, the Netherlands, France, and Spain. Snapshots and short cuts seem inevitable, and yet it is precisely for this reason that myths and half-truths have proved so resilient. MacCaffrey's trilogy remains at heart a conventional political narrative, but it initiated what is likely to be a slow process of reassessment, precisely because it gives such careful attention to personalities and provides a taxonomy of continuity and change. No longer is it easy to invoke a linear or reductionist model such as court factionalism or the rise of a puritan parliamentary opposition.

By the time that MacCaffrey's trilogy was completed, a revolt against constitutional history had occurred. During the 1980s, it began to be realised that the Tudor 'constitution', which Elton had conceptualised in institutional and legal terms, was neither as inflexible nor as uncontested as had been claimed, but was closer to an organic entity.¹⁴ Elton's methodology was empiricist and revisionist. It avowed that a definitive or 'authentic' account of the 'constitution' could be derived from a meticulous investigation of the legal and institutional structures of the embryonic English 'state'. This approach privileged 'central' and 'formal' structures of power at the expense of 'local' and 'informal' ones, and in the process bolstered older views of Elizabeth's supremacy in policy-making: she was, after all, the queen. But she was also a woman in an age where stereotyped male opinion considered female rule to be exceptional and unnatural. By 1990 Elton's model had been rejected by both political and gender historians. For the former, the 'constitution' was seen to be no more than a protocol that subsumed the assumptions of the politically aware about what might or might not be done. For the latter, it was clear that Elton and his school saw no reason to investigate either the means whereby Elizabeth transcended her gender, or the relationship of prescription and practice in discussions of female monarchy.

Paradoxically, the focus of literary scholars on the 'staging' of power and on the process that Stephen Greenblatt termed the 'circulation of social energy' between 'authority' and the subject tended (briefly and unintentionally) to reinforce Elton's emphasis on the rise of the centralised 'state', even if the 'state' in this sense derived from the dynamic cultural exchange between rulers and the ruled and was not an empirical abstraction.¹⁵ However, the priorities set by social, religious and intellectual historians such as Keith Thomas,¹⁶ Patrick Collinson¹⁷ and Quentin Skinner¹⁸ ensured the demise of constitutional history. This was the era of the Renaissance and Reformation. Social and economic expansion, the invention of printing, the influence of classical and Italian humanism on political ideas and language, antiquarian and topographical investigations, and widely publicised clashes over temporal and ecclesiastical jurisdiction ensured that competing ideals of monarchy and polity were in play. Far from there being an 'authentic' view of monarchy, there was a divergent range of opinions on kingship and tyranny, virtue and civic duty, nobility and meritocracy, political participation and representation, 'counsel' and the 'best state' of a respublica.¹⁹

Recent work by literary scholars and historians suggests that close attention will need to be paid to the intellectual and rhetorical traditions that underpinned Elizabethan political culture, and to the history of ideas.²⁰ The history of politics and the history of ideas are mutually informing. Contextualisation and cross-reference between them are obligatory. Nor in respect of personalities will it suffice to concentrate merely on the careers of those of the first rank such as Burghley, Leicester and Walsingham. Studies of lesser figures to complement those by Michael Graves on Thomas Norton,²¹ Mary Dewar on Sir Thomas Smith,²² and A. G. R. Smith on Sir Michael Hickes²³ will be required. subjects will include Nicholas Throckmorton, Henry Killigrew, Thomas Wilson, Robert Beale, William Davison, Bernard Hampton and others, who were variously employed as ambassadors, conciliar agents, clerks, messengers and surrogates. Their careers provide insights into the working methods and assumptions of privy councillors, and into the secretarial and intelligence-gathering establishments of the court and conciliar circle, which in turn can be linked to the educational and rhetorical traditions that informed Tudor politics. Purely institutional studies are already available, but their focus is distorted by the revisionist preference for investigations of an institution through an analysis of its 'normal' functions. In almost every case, rationalisations have had to be made that condition what 'normal' functionality is deemed to comprise, an approach that is all too apparent in the current literature on parliament.²⁴ Useful monographs exist on the court of chancery,²⁵ the court of wards,²⁶ the privy council,²⁷ and the crown lands.²⁸ But, whatever else revisionism has achieved, it has failed to deliver genuinely political studies, since politics is less about the procedures or 'normal' functions of institutions than about the interrelationships of, and interactions between, people, institutions and ideas, or indeed about the 'abnormal' activities of institutions.

The point matters, since Elizabethan politics were not consensual. Policy disputes arose, notably over religion, the queen's marriage, the succession, the intervention in the Netherlands, and the trial and execution of Mary queen of Scots. Again, considerable evidence exists for the latter half of the reign of bribery, embezzlement, and a scramble for patronage and fees among second- and third-tier members of the court establishment, who sought rewards primarily from first-rank officials with their lucrative positions in the exchequer or the court of wards: Burghley in his heyday received 60-100 letters a day from suitors and clients.

such evidence does not reinforce the case for factionalism. Until the rise of Essex, policy disputes, with few exceptions, were between a broadly united privy council on the one side, and an isolated Elizabeth on the other, rather than between courtiers and councillors themselves.²⁹ Again, after the ruinous wars of Henry VIII and Protector Somerset and the sales and dispersal of the ex-religious lands, the crown had little solid patronage in its gift and what there was tended to be strictly rationed.³⁰ Competition at court - most visible after 1585 and possibly stimulated by the prospect of military and naval pickings after Leicester's intervention in the Netherlands - existed less between courtiers and councillors than within and between their clientèles, where a thirst for political intelligence or gossip was rife and the competition for office and profit were predicated upon unrealistic expectations of the extent of a patron's reach. At the highest level of politics, the significance of policy and patronage as explanations of factionalism - the models of Read and Neale - has been exaggerated. In a series of articles since 1982, Simon Adams has argued persuasively and in depth that relationships between politicians of the first rank were essentially cordial and collegial, ruffled only occasionally by clashes or disagreements and rarely interrupted by the jockeying for place and position that occurred incessantly lower down the political and social scale.³¹

Before Essex's rise, the evidence for factionalism or endemic antagonisms in the privy council is slight. By the mid-1590s, when 'backbiting' is finally agreed either to have emerged or to have been seriously in prospect, Burghley was stricken by gout and Leicester and Walsingham were several years dead. Paul Hammer argues that the Essex-Cecil feud was scarcely endemic before Burghley's own death in 1598, for Burghley was himself one of Essex's guardians and early patrons, and a mutual respect existed between them even when they disagreed or came into conflict.³² When the Essex-Cecil contest came to a head, moreover, issues wider than personalities or competition for patronage were involved. Cultural and military topics were fundamental, as Mervyn James suggested, notably the clashes between differing conceptions of 'honour' and of military and civic virtue, and over Essex's demands for a military and naval offensive in Europe and the Atlantic rather than a purely defensive war strategy.³³ Only after 1598 is the case for court factionalism incontestable, but, even then, neither Read's nor Neale's rationale is sufficient to encapsulate it, since a combination of political, ideological and patronage-related issues were present and not simply one of these alternatives.

To reject a factional model of politics before the last decade is not to deny that clashes arose, usually involving Leicester at the height of his ambition to marry the queen, a desire to which the great regional magnates - the earls of Arundel, Pembroke and Northampton - took exception.³⁴ Nor does it deny the earl of sussex's collision with Leicester and Walsingham during the Anjou marriage negotiations in 1579, when the latter pair were briefly exiled from court and the queen considered bringing some Catholics onto the privy council. However, the context in 1579 was sussex's incredulity at a sudden change of attitude by Leicester and Sir Christopher Hatton to Elizabeth's proposed marriage: they had switched from moderate support to outright opposition. sussex was a vehement, if uncritical, advocate of the Anjou match. Studies by Natalie Mears of the original memoranda, some of which have been misattributed to Burghley,³⁵ show (pace Blair Worden)³⁶ that it was indeed sussex, and not Burghley or Leicester, who had taken the maverick view on issues such as absentee monarchy. It is far from the case that Burghley and Leicester were at odds in the successive stages of the debates. There is no clear-cut evidence that Burghley had strongly supported Anjou even in the early stages of the negotiations. And by October 1579, Burghley, Leicester, Walsingham, Hatton, Sir Walter Mildmay, Sir Henry Sidney and Sir Francis Knollys were united in their opposition to the match. Mears has argued that the crux was not factionalism in 1579, but 'the significantly different views of the roles of the council and the queen in counselling', especially the conviction of the majority of the opponents of the match that the queen should accept their advice. (sussex was the privy councillor arguing that Elizabeth should make her own decisions.)

Under pressure of external and internal Catholic and nonconformist threats and of imminent war in Europe and Ireland, the Elizabethan polity assumed the characteristics of a confessional state: one in which the Protestant élite at both central and local levels felt outnumbered and beleaguered, but among whom adversity fostered a perception of national identity defined almost in terms of Protestant citizenship.³⁷ The exception is the queen herself, who repeatedly failed to live up to the Protestant and international credentials her privy councillors had imagined for her. The most extreme recent critique of Elizabeth's monarchy will be found in the work of Christopher Haigh,³⁸ but even in Doran's more traditional assessments she is depicted as a ruler far less in control than the Elizabeth of Read and Neale, and one far less adept at diplomacy.³⁹

Far from dividing her privy councillors, Elizabeth's conservatism and indecisiveness served to unite them. The State Papers, Cecil manuscripts, and Harleian and Lansdowne collections are littered with their expressions of anxiety and mutual support. 'Our partes [sic] is to counsell', Burghley informed his colleague Sir Ralph Sadler on the eve of the Northern Rising.⁴⁰ But all too often, Elizabeth refused to listen to advice. By 1572, Burghley was compiling a list of 'Certen matters wherin the queen's majestie's forbearing and delayes hath produced, not only inconveniences and incress of expences, but also dangers.'⁴¹ Leicester, as master of the horse and Elizabeth's first favourite, enjoyed unusual access to the queen. Yet even he was unable to persuade her to make decisions. He and Walsingham got nowhere in the 1570s in their campaign to forge an alliance with the Dutch and German Protestant states and send an expedition to the Netherlands. As Leicester complained in 1578, 'Our conference with Her Majesty about affairs is both seldom and slender.'⁴² Knollys, who by temperament as well as close kinship to Elizabeth felt able to resort to plain speaking, told her straight out that it was impossible for her 'most faithfull cownsellors' to govern her state well unless she could find it in herself to 'Resolutelie followe theire opynions in waightie affairs'. As he put the case: 'A generall in the fielde seinge an enterprice to be taken' could select some of his captains to consider the feasibility of the plan. What was the point if the general then acted 'contrarie to theyre opynions'?⁴³ His pleas were ignored. As Mary Crane has argued, Elizabeth, when under pressure to take decisions, took refuge in humanist-classical idioms to claim that she needed to be 'advised' on matters touching her crown and state, thereby turning recognition of the need for 'counsel' into the excuse for rejecting her councillors' advice.⁴⁴ To insulate her sovereignty, she invoked the Tacitean concept of arcana imperii - the 'secrets of rule' or 'mysteries of state' - the issues which, if discussed without the sanction of the ruler, pierced the veil of 'imperial' sovereignty. In this respect, Elizabeth's classical and humanist education were fundamental to her politics.

The hottest topics were the queen's marriage, the Protestant succession, and the fate of Mary queen of Scots - notably in the wake of the Ridolfi and (later) Babington plots; foreign policy (especially in Scotland, France and the Netherlands), and the 'further reformation' of the Church of England, which 'forward' Protestants and others with Calvinist theological convictions knew to have been but 'halfly reformed' by the religious settlement of 1559. Whenever these issues were ventilated in the privy council or in parliament, as in 1563, 1566, 1571, 1572, 1584-5, and 1586-7, Elizabeth sought to forbid or limit discussion.

As John Watts has argued for an adjacent century, the essence of monarchy was the concept of the sovereign ruler who was obliged to rule in the interests of the respublica, and who therefore needed 'counsel' and advice.⁴⁵ 'Counsel' made the exercise of sovereign power legitimate, but whether it was expressed in court, council, or parliament, was not constitutionally prescribed. Like her father and sister before her, Elizabeth held 'counsel' to be a duty and not a right.⁴⁶ As she not infrequently strictured, her privy councillors were councillors 'by choyce, and not by birth, whose services are no longer to be used in that publike function than it shall please her Majestie to dispose of the same.'⁴⁷ Like Henry VIII and James I, she took an 'imperial' view of her regality in church and state, which she derived immediately from God. In consequence, she expected her word to be accepted without discussion. She fumed against the earls of Leicester and Pembroke in 1566 for furthering the succession debates in the House of Lords, and she exiled Leicester and Walsingham from court in 1579 for their opposition to the Anjou match. She privately impugned those 'wrangling subjects' who challenged her judgement on marriage and the succession, and denounced those in parliament 'whos eares wer deluded by pleasing perswations of comen good'.⁴⁸ As Collinson and Stephen Alford have observed, the quasi-'republican' and 'conciliarist' stances that Burghley and the privy council expounded and imagined during the clashes of 1563, 1566, 1584-5 and 1587 took shape primarily as 'emergency' responses to the need to ensure Elizabeth's safety and the security of the Protestant state in the face of the queen's own (apparent) inertia and conservative political instincts.⁴⁹

This was the context in which Neale argued for the rise of a puritan opposition in the Elizabethan parliaments. His emphasis on political thought and on the rise of a 'politics of necessity', triggered by religion and the disputed issue of the succession, has recently been reconsidered by Alford. In 1566, when Elizabeth instructed Burghley to stop abusing (as she saw it) her 'private answers to the realm' by pursuing her marriage and the succession in parliament, he ignored her commands, and covered reams of paper with pro and contra arguments and with drafts and redrafts of civil theses in defence of his case for urgent action as well as sending his secretary, Bernard Hampton, who was also clerk to the privy council, to act as clerk to the commons' committee that was revising the subsidy bill. Alford has shown that it was not Neale's 'puritan radicals' who were responsible for annexing a petition for the queen's marriage to the subsidy preamble, but Burghley and Hampton. Burghley himself was the draftsman. He used Hampton as his agent, and he collaborated with the group of six MPs responsible for revising the main clauses of the bill.⁵⁰

Burghley's contingency plans should the queen die or be assassinated, which were developed in the two decades between 1563 and 1584-5, were equally radical. They provided that, in the event of Elizabeth's death, the privy council and parliament should not fail to act despite the lapse of their authority. His drafts for the succession variously envisaged a 'Council of State', 'Great Council' or 'Grand Council' which would form a provisional government in the absence of a ruler and which would adjudicate the claims of candidates for the succession in conjunction with parliament.⁵¹ Not only was this aristocratic republicanism par excellence, one wonders how, if at all, Burghley's schemes differ from the initial stages of the Revolution of 1688, when a committee of peers and privy councillors formed themselves into a provisional government in the absence of the king.⁵² His plans later became redundant, but not until Mary's execution in 1587, when the succession of her son, the Protestant James VI, became (at least theoretically) assured.

Following the Babington plot, when Elizabeth refused either to settle the Protestant succession or to sign the death warrant for the queen of Scots, Burghley told Walsingham, 'We stick upon Parliament, which her Majesty mislikes to have, but we all persist, to make the burden better borne and the world abroad better satisfied'.⁵³ When push came to shove, Burghley took a position extremely close to a view of parliament as the 'court' of Protestant public opinion, a standpoint far removed from Elton's 'functionalist' view of parliament as the crown's instrument for securing legislation and taxation^.54

Again, in February 1587, when Mary's execution warrant was signed but not delivered, Burghley summoned ten other privy councillors to a cabal in his private chamber at court and directed the immediate despatch of the warrant to commissioners at Fotheringhay.⁵⁵ He drafted letters appointing the commissioners. A further covering letter (sold at Sotheby's, London, on 16 December 1996), signed by nine councillors, including Burghley, Leicester, Walsingham, Hatton, Howard, Hunsdon and Knollys, justified their action as taken 'for [the queen's] speciall service tending to the safety of her royall person and universall quietnes of her whole Realme'.⁵⁶ As in 1584-5 in the case of the Bond of Association and Act for the Queen's Safety, Burghley appropriated a vocabulary of necessity linked to 'the safety' and 'preservation' of the 'queen' and 'state' in his attempt to emasculate the fact that the privy council acted clandestinely, a blatant act of quasi-republicanism for which Elizabeth sought to hang her secretary, William Davison, by royal prerogative (i.e. summarily and without trial) for surrendering the warrant to Burghley, an act for which Davison was later tried and sentenced in the star chamber.

Neale's focus on parliamentary 'puritanism' rather than on Burghley's model of parliamentary 'conciliarism' was anachronistic, but his underlying view that parliament under Elizabeth served as the platform of a Protestant confessional élite should be resuscitated, if in a subtler and more nuanced form.⁵⁷ In what Collinson calls the 'acephalous' conditions of Elizabeth's reign,⁵⁸ the binary opposition latent in the theory of monarchy since the reign of Henry VIII was played out: the tension between Elizabeth's view of her 'imperial' monarchy - the idea that sovereignty was vested in her alone - and the conviction of Burghley and the privy council that sovereignty lay in the queen-in-parliament if the Protestant state was to be safeguarded and preserved.⁵⁹ When set into the context of debates concerning late-Elizabethan and early-Stuart parliaments and the rise of 'absolutist' and 'constitutional' models of political thought, the impact is obvious: what is contested is the roles of gender and ideology in Tudor and early-Stuart politics and the extent to which revisionism has failed adequately to deal with them.⁶⁰

The crux is increasingly gender. surveying the second half of the sixteenth century from the vantage-point of James I's reign, Francis Bacon commented on the 'strangest variety' of reigns: that of 'a child; the offer of an usurpation ... the reign of a lady married to a foreign Prince; and the reign of a lady solitary and unmarried.'⁶¹ Until Collinson's intervention, the 'acephalous' nature of female monarchy under Elizabeth I had scarcely been observed, but since 1990 there has been a spate of works on the topic.⁶² As Carole Levin frames the agenda, 'In studying Elizabeth we can ask, how did she transcend her gender and her unmarried, childless state, and in what ways was she trapped by it?'.⁶³ Or as Helen Hackett reformulates this, how far did the extremes of praise represented by the 'cult of Elizabeth' represent 'the feverish adulation of figures of female power which patriarchal societies tend to produce' in response to their 'repressed anxieties at the disruption of hierarchy and the physical otherness which a powerful woman represents'?.⁶⁴

Bacon claimed that Elizabeth had 'allowed herself to be wooed and courted, and even to have love made to her', observing that these 'dalliances detracted but little from her fame and nothing at all from her majesty'.⁶⁵ In pursuit of this theme, Catherine Bates argues that politicians exploited the 'rhetoric of courtship' to put sensitive issues on the agenda, to flatter or manipulate the queen, to pursue their own private interests, or generally to 'handle' their subordination to a woman ruler. Yet Bates acknowledges the limits of 'amorous courtship', which was in practice neither commonly nor effectively deployed as a model for (male) courtiers outside the bounds of fictive literature. Except for such 'favourites' as Leicester, Hatton, Sir Walter Ralegh and Essex, with whom Elizabeth flirted and for whom she exhibited genuinely erotic feelings, the 'rhetoric of courtship' operated chiefly as a metaphor for those continually obliged to reinvent and reinterpret their relationships to the queen. In other words, the rhetoric served less as a model of sexual politics than as a conceit to enable courtiers and privy councillors to sublimate, and thereby neutralise, their political frustrations in order to 'come to terms' with 'their marginality' and 'uncomfortably subordinate roles' to a female ruler.⁶⁶

By this reading, Elizabeth might still be accounted supreme and unrivalled in politics  - as in the versions of Read and Neale - since it could be argued that the conduct of the 'game' of courtship was Elizabeth's most effective tool of policy and that the 'wavering, prevaricating, and normally dismissive behaviour' which was understood to be archetypical of the 'conventionalized mistress' provided her with her weapons of manipulation and manoeuvre.⁶⁷ In order to beat her male courtiers at their own game, she changed the rules and capitalised on the power granted to her by virtue of her gender.

While open to debate, it is likely that this interpretation underestimates the disillusionment and indecision that pervaded the court and its politics. Hackett's deconstruction of the queen's iconic 'cult' suggests that we should be cautious about taking idealisations of Elizabeth at face value, and accept that the most graphic and familiar representations of the queen may be back-projections, contributing to posthumous symbolic interpretations of her life that exaggerated the extent to which she remained in control with an exemplary grasp on policy and decision-making.⁶⁸

Elizabeth was a charismatic personality. And yet her political vulnerability is clear, especially in the first decade of the reign. England had a monarch who (in the eyes of the Catholic powers) was a woman, a bastard, a heretic, unmarried, and challenged as to her title and right of succession to the throne by Mary, queen of Scotland and dowager queen of France.⁶⁹ A woman's right to rule had been challenged in print by John Knox, whose First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women mobilised a myriad of authorities to support his misogynist view.⁷⁰ Knox had urged the subjects of a female ruler to acts of resistance. Furthermore, as Roger Mason has argued, it was the English alone, as already a covenanted nation, whom Knox had explicitly incited to rebellion in 1558 to fulfil the 'divine ordinance' and to destroy the 'horrible monster' (Mary Tudor) who reigned over them.⁷¹

When Elizabeth ascended the throne in her sister's place, Knox was answered by the Marian exile, John Aylmer, whose An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe subiectes, written and published in 1559, was an apology for Elizabeth's rule.⁷² Often cited as a 'defence' of her r´gime, it is improbable that Aylmer's was an 'official' apologia or that it met with royal approval. As Hackett remarks, it was distinctly 'faint praise',⁷³ since Aylmer did little more than appropriate and endorse the Protestant iconography of female monarchy as depicted in the City of London's coronation pageants for Elizabeth.⁷⁴ He argued that the gift of a female ruler was proof of God's 'secret purpose' and 'wonderful works'.⁷⁵ He invoked Deborah and Judith as regal prototypes,⁷⁶ but his slant was closer generically to Knox's polemic than is conventionally acknowledged, and closer still to the stance Knox took in his defence of the First Blast to Burghley in which he held that Elizabeth might be queen, but only if she 'shall confess' that it was the 'extraordinary dispensation' of God's mercy that legitimised her rule.⁷⁷ Both Aylmer and Knox indexed their positions on Elizabeth's accession against Calvin's opinion that female monarchy was ordained by the 'peculiar providence' of God. Women's rule deviated from the 'proper order of nature', but exceptionally there were special women who were 'raised up by divine authority' to rule in order to become the 'nursing mothers' of the church.⁷⁸

Elizabeth never accepted that her monarchy was the result of a 'miracle' or an 'extraordinary dispensation' of God, indeed she fulminated against this opinion for years. Her reasons were not feminist,⁷⁹ but dynastic. Her case was summarised in 1563 or 1566 by Thomas Norton in a paper that put in capsule form the exchanges of 1559. As Norton summarised her objections: if her title were to be established 'by God's special and immediate ordinance' without any regard to her hereditary right and title, it 'setteth all her subjects at liberty, who acknowledge no such extraordinary calling.' Furthermore, a title established solely by an 'extraordinary miracle' of God left the validity of the dynastic claim and title unresolved. 'It carrieth a present title to the next heir male, and so an evident means to destroy allegiance, to advance ambition, rebellion and treason'. Elizabeth would be left with 'no defence by law but an ostentation of God's dispensation against law, in which case the pope and papists may as easily say that the queen ought not to be queen though she have right.'⁸⁰

If this were not enough, Aylmer had argued later in the Harborowe that the 'regiment' of England was not a 'mere' or unrestrained 'monarchy', but an Aristotelian 'mixed polity' in which sovereignty rested in the queen-in-parliament. 'If the parliament use their privileges, the King can ordein nothing without them. If he do, it is his fault in usurping it, and their follye in permitting it'.⁸¹ This was an assertion so close to Burghley's model of parliamentary 'conciliarism' that the cracks were scarcely visible. From Elizabeth's viewpoint, one can only say that with 'friends' like this, who needed enemies? Aylmer's thesis of 'mixed polity' was almost identical to that invoked during the Admonition Controversy by Thomas Cartwright, the presbyterian leader, whom Aylmer, as bishop of London, imprisoned. Cartwright claimed that the Elizabethan polity was a 'mixed estate'. The queen shared her sovereignty with the privy council and parliament, a notion which was as much political heresy in Elizabeth's eyes as presbyterianism was doctrinal heresy.⁸² The irony is that it was a heresy shared by Burghley. The most powerful and subversive critique of the monarchy of Elizabeth I did not derive from puritanism or the literature of political exclusion, it emanated from the heart of the privy council.

That Elizabeth and Burghley had dissonant political creeds was a hypothesis mooted by Collinson in 1987, and independently explored by others since.⁸³ It cannot be pursued in detail here. The rub, of course, is the limits to which interpretations based on gender should be taken. Elizabethan politics pivoted on the relationship of the queen to her (male) privy councillors. Gender was 'inseparable' from each and every one of these instances.⁸⁴ Yet the fact remains that if the queen was periodically under siege from her councillors until the execution of the queen of Scots, it was not solely because of gender. The monarch was in English law androgynous. The theory of the king's 'two bodies' was rehabilitated and refined.⁸⁵ In particular, the Protestant iconography of the London civic pageants of 1559 which Aylmer had endorsed, and which reached its zenith in John Foxe's depiction of Elizabeth in the Acts and Monuments, was equally applicable to a male or female ruler and had already been anticipated in the case of a male in the brief reign of Edward VI.⁸⁶ The privy council's overriding priorities were the Reformation and the Protestant succession. On this Neale had been sure-footed, whether or not he was mistaken concerning Elizabeth's personal religion and standpoint on the settlement of 1559, and despite his misreading of parliamentary 'puritanism' throughout her reign.

The issue of the religious settlement is especially treacherous.⁸⁷ If Norman Jones's reinterpretation of the events of 1559 is correct, tension between Elizabeth and her privy council could not have existed on religious grounds, and yet Jones's bald assertion that Elizabeth was 'as Protestant as Jewel, Grindal or Cox' is unwarranted by the evidence,⁸⁸ as is Winthrop S. Hudson's assumption that the queen inclined, like most of her first generation of bishops, towards the Swiss Confessions and the Zurich model of 'pure' religion,⁸⁹ a statement it would be hard to reconcile with any of the evidence surrounding the making of the religious settlement and its aftermath. The contradictions of Elizabeth's personal religion have recently been exposed in an outstanding essay by Collinson, an analysis which casts doubt on previous easy assumptions.⁹⁰

Irrespective of Elizabeth's private faith, she maintained a vice-like grip on the Church of England and on the pace of change.⁹¹ The Henrician model of strict separation between the administrations of church and state was scrupulously preserved. The privy council was excluded from almost every matter concerning the 'further reformation' of religion beyond the enforcement of the status quo. It is almost as if the history of Elizabeth's reign was her commentary on the settlement of 1559. This is best illustrated by her rejection in 1566 of the so-called 'alphabet' bills, which were designed to give statutory confirmation to the Thirty-Nine Articles and the reform of ecclesiastical abuses. Her intransigence in the face of all criticisms of adiaphora, episcopacy, or the liturgies of the established church were legendary, hence it cannot be stressed enough that the 'alphabet' bills were not the products of 'unofficial' puritan agitation in the house of commons, as Neale supposed.⁹² The bills had been approved by convocation and were introduced into parliament with the (admittedly covert) support of the bishops and privy council.⁹³ When, in 1571, five of these bills reappeared, they once again enjoyed episcopal support, and were actually promoted in the commons by a committee that included the five privy councillors in the house.⁹⁴ These privy councillors only ran for cover when William Strickland introduced his bill for the reformation of the Book of Common Prayer along lines familiar to mainstream puritanism since the onset of the Vestiarian Controversy.

When Elizabeth claimed in response to such bills that parliament was an inappropriate forum for the debate of ecclesiastical matters which properly belonged to convocation, she was disingenuous to the point of misrepresentation, since she herself had exercised her prerogative to thwart episcopal initiatives on exactly these same issues in the church's own legislative assembly.⁹⁵ It is hardly surprising that in these circumstances the privy council was tempted to doubt her Protestant credentials.

Hackett's deconstruction of the Elizabethan 'cult' illustrates the ways in which the queen's death revived interest in her early life. Elegists rediscovered the images and regal prototypes of Protestant monarchy invoked at the beginning of the reign, in particular Deborah and Judith, and staged them alongside Cynthia and Gloriana.⁹⁶ This was a classic exercise in myth-making. Although supposedly the icon of Protestantism, Elizabeth was simply not 'Protestant' enough for the leaders of her privy council, notably Burghley and Walsingham, who shared a providential view of history and believed that the Reformation had to be disseminated by every available means, even if Burghley took a cautious position as compared to Leicester and Walsingham on the issue of military intervention in the Netherlands. Innate to Burghley was his fear that failure in the matter of the 'British' (i.e. English and Scottish) Reformations would incur the wrath of God on himself and the realm.⁹⁷ It is an almost apocalyptic view, which impelled him into clandestine action against Elizabeth. Whether or not religion or gender was the trigger of his 'conciliarist' outlook is une question mal posée. Both were pervasive, but the balance of proportions is unclear and depends on the view one takes of Elizabeth herself. There can be no easy consensus. To reconstruct definitively the politics of Elizabeth will require us to go beyond a mere analysis of political events and enter the minds of the protagonists themselves.

END NOTES

1. Influential, but questionable, vignettes are inter alia in William Camden's Annals of Queen Elizabeth, begun in 1597 and completed by 1617, and Robert Naunton's Fragmenta regalia, compiled in the 1630s. For critical commentary, see Adams, S. L., 'Favourites and Factions at the Elizabethan Court', in Asch, R. G., and Birke, A. M., ed., Princes, Patronage and the Nobility: the Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age c.1450-1650 (Oxford: OUP, 1991), pp. 265-87; McGurk, J. J. N., 'William Camden: Civil Historian or Gloriana's Propagandist?', History Today, XXXVIII:4 (1988), pp. 47-53; Collinson, Patrick, 'William Camden and the Making of History', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, VIII (1998), pp. 139-63.

2. Read, Conyers, Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 1925); Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London: Cape, 1955); Read, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (London: Cape, 1960); Neale, J. E., Queen Elizabeth I (London: Cape, 1934); Neale, The Elizabethan House of Commons (London: Cape, 1949); Neale, 'Sir Nicholas Throckmorton's Advice to Queen Elizabeth on her Accession to the Throne', English Historical Review, LXV (1950), pp. 91-8; Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 2 vols. (London: Cape, 1953-7); Neale, 'The Elizabethan Political Scene', Proceedings of the British Academy, XXXIV (1948), pp. 97-117.

3. For clarity's sake, William Cecil will hereafter be referred to as Burghley.

4. Doran, susan, Monarchy and Matrimony: the Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996).

5. Mother Hubberd's Tale, ll. 515-16, in de Sélincourt, E., ed., Spenser's Minor Poems, (Oxford: OUP, 1960), p. 210; Neale, 'The Elizabethan Political Scene'.

6. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments.

7. Neale, J. E., 'The Elizabethan Acts of supremacy and Uniformity', English Historical Review, LXV (1950), pp. 304-32.

8. Guy, John, 'The Elizabethan Establishment and the Ecclesiastical Polity', in Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: CUP), pp. 126-49; Hampson, J. E., 'Richard Cosin and the Revitalisation of the Clerical Estate in late Elizabethan England' (St Andrews Ph.D., 1997).

9. Sacks, David Harris, 'The Countervailing of Benefits: Monopoly, Liberty, and Benevolence in Elizabethan England', in Hoak, D. E., ed., Tudor Political Culture, (Cambridge: CUP), pp. 272-91.

10. Elton, G. R., 'Parliament', in Haigh, Christopher, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I (London: MacMillan, 1984), pp. 79-100; Elton, The Parliament of England, 1559-1581 (Cambridge: CUP, 1986); Elton, 'Lex terrae victrix: the Triumph of Parliamentary Law in the Sixteenth Century', in Dean, David, and Jones, N. L., ed., The Parliaments of Elizabethan England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 15-36; Graves, M. A. R., 'Thomas Norton the Parliament Man: an Elizabethan M.P., 1559-1581', Historical Journal, XXIII (1980), pp. 17-35; Graves, 'The Management of the Elizabethan House of Commons: the Council's "Men of Business"', Parliamentary History, II (1983), pp. 11-38; Graves, The Tudor Parliaments: Crown, Lords and Commons, 1485-1603 (London: Longman, 1985); Graves, Elizabethan Parliaments, 1559-1601 (London: Longman, 1987); Dean, David, Law-Making and Society in Late Elizabethan England: the Parliament of England, 1584-1601 (Cambridge: CUP, 1996).

11. MacCaffrey, W. T. (1969). The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime: Elizabethan Politics, 1558-72 (London: Cape, 1969); MacCaffrey, Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572-1588 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981); MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588-1603 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992).

12. MacCaffrey, W. T., Elizabeth I (London: Arnold, 1993).

13. MacCaffrey, W. T., 'Place and Patronage in Elizabethan Politics', in Bindoff, S. T., Hurstfield, J., and Williams, C. H., ed., Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale (London: Athlone), pp. 95-126.

14. Elton, G. R., The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge: CUP, 1953); Elton, The Tudor Constitution, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: CUP, 1982); Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, 4 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 1974-92). For a summary of the critiques of Elton with full bibliographical references, see Guy, John, ed., The Tudor Monarchy (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 2-10.

15. S. J. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: the Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: OUP, 1988).

16. Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Penguin, 1978).

17. Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Cape, 1967); Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519-1583: the Struggle for a Reformed Church (London: Cape, 1979); Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society, 1559-1625 (Oxford: OUP, 1982); Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: St Martin's, 1988).

18. Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 1978); Skinner, 'Sir Thomas More's Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism', in Pagden, A., ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: CUP, 1987), pp. 123-57; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: CUP, 1996).

19. Burns, J. H., Lordship, Kingship and Empire: the Idea of Monarchy, 1400-1525 (Oxford: OUP, 1992); Burns, The True Law of Kingship: Concepts of Monarchy in Early-Modern Scotland (Oxford: OUP, 1996); Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought; Guy, John, 'The Henrician Age', in Pocock, J. G. A., ed., The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), pp. 13-46; Guy, John, 'The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England', in Hoak, ed., Tudor Political Culture, pp. 292-310; Bowler, Gerald, 'Marian Protestants and the Idea of Violent Resistance to Tyranny', in Lake, P. G., and Dowling, M., Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 124-43; Mason, R. A., Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1998); King, J. N., Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989); King, 'The Royal Image, 1535-1603', in Hoak, ed., Tudor Political Culture, pp. 104-32.

20. Crane, Mary T., '"Video et Taceo": Elizabeth I and the Rhetoric of Counsel', Studies in English Literature, XXVIII (1988), pp. 1-15; Alford, Stephen, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British succession Crisis, 1558-1569 (Cambridge: CUP, 1998); Guy, John, 'Tudor Monarchy and its Critiques', in Guy, ed., The Tudor Monarchy, pp. 78-109.

21. Graves, M. A. R., 'Thomas Norton the Parliament Man: an Elizabethan M.P., 1559-1581', Historical Journal, XXIII (1980), pp. 17-35; Graves, Thomas Norton: the Parliament Man (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).

22. Dewar, Mary, Sir Thomas Smith: a Tudor Intellectual in Office (London: Athlone, 1964).

23. Smith, A. G. R., Servant of the Cecils: the Life of Sir Michael Hickes, 1543-1612 (London: Cape, 1977).

24. Elton, 'Parliament', in Haigh, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I, pp. 79-100; Elton, The Parliament of England, 1559-1581; Elton, 'Lex terrae victrix: the Triumph of Parliamentary Law in the Sixteenth Century', in Dean and Jones, ed., The Parliaments of Elizabethan England, pp. 15-36; Graves, M. A. R., The House of Lords in the Parliaments of Edward VI and Mary I: an Institutional Study (Cambridge: CUP, 1981); Graves, The Tudor Parliaments: Crown, Lords and Commons, 1485-1603; Loach, J., Parliament Under the Tudors (Oxford: OUP, 1991); MacCaffrey, W. T., 'Parliament: the Elizabethan Experience', in Guth, D. J., and McKenna, J. W., Tudor Rule and Revolution: Essays for G. R. Elton from his American Friends (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), pp. 127-47; Roskell, J. S., 'Perspectives in English Parliamentary History' in Fryde, E. B., and Miller, E., ed., Historical Studies of the English Parliament, 2 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 1970), II, pp. 296-323.

25. Jones, W. J., The Elizabethan Court of Chancery (Oxford: OUP, 1967).

26. Hurstfield, J., The Queen's Wards: Wardship and Marriage under Elizabeth I (London: Cape, 1958).

27. Pulman, M. B., The Elizabethan Privy Council in the Fifteen-Seventies (Berkeley: California UP, 1971).

28. Hoyle, R. W., ed., The Estates of the English Crown, 1558-1640 (Cambridge: CUP, 1992).

29. Adams, S. L., 'Faction, Clientage and Party: English Politics, 1550-1603', History Today XXXII:12 (1982), pp. 33-9; Adams, 'Favourites and Factions at the Elizabethan Court', in Asch and Birke, ed., Princes, Patronage and the Nobility, pp. 265-87; Hammer, P. E. J., 'Patronage at Court, Faction and the Earl of Essex' in Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), pp. 65-86.

30. Adams, S. L., 'The Patronage of the Crown in Elizabethan Politics: the 1590s in Perspective', in Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I, pp. 20-45; Peck, Linda Levy, 'Peers, Patronage and the Politics of History', in ibid., pp. 87-108; Dietz, F. C., English Public Finance, 1485-1641, 2 vols. (2nd edn., London: Cass, 1964); Hoyle, ed., The Estates of the English Crown, 1558-1640.

31. Adams, S. L., 'Eliza Enthroned? The Court and its Politics', in Haigh, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I, pp. 55-77; Adams, 'Faction, Clientage and Party', History Today, pp. 33-9; Adams, 'The Dudley Clientèle in the House of Commons, 1559-1586', Parliamentary History VIII (1989), pp. 217-39; Adams, 'Favourites and Factions at the Elizabethan Court', in Asch and Birke, ed., Princes, Patronage and the Nobility, pp. 265-87; Adams, 'The Dudley Clientèle, 1553-1563', in Bernard, G. W., ed., The Tudor Nobility (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992), pp. 241-65; Adams, '"Because I am of that Country & Mynde to Plant Myself There": Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and the West Midlands', Midland History, XX (1995), pp. 21-74; Adams, 'The English Military Clientèle 1542-1618', in Giry-Deloison, C., and Mettam, R., ed., Patronages et clientélismes, 1550-1750: France, Angleterre, Espagne, Italie (Villeneuve d'Ascq and London: Centre de l'Histoire de la Région du Nord et de l'Europe du Nord-Ouest and Institut Français, 1995), pp. 217-27; Adams, 'Baronial Contexts? Continuity and Change in the Noble Affinity, 1400-1600', in Watts, J. L., ed., The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Stroud: sutton, 1998) pp. 155-97.

32. P. E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: the Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585-1597 (Cambridge: CUP, 1999); Hammer, 'Patronage at Court, Faction and the Earl of Essex' in Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I, pp. 65-86.

33. James, M. E., Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP, 1986), pp. 416-65.

34. Pembroke later changed his mind, and supported Leicester's suit. Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony, p. 58. See also pp. 215-17, where Doran concurs with Adams on the lack of faction, but emphasizes the importance of these clashes. This argument is repeated in Doran, 'Why did Elizabeth not Marry?', in Walker, J. W., ed., Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), pp. 50-3.

35. Natalie Mears, 'The Elizabethan Polity in Transition: Marriage, succession, and Catholic Conspiracy c.1578-c.1582' (St Andrews Ph.D. dissertation, 1999), especially chapter 2. Dr Simon Adams is also working on these memoranda, and I am indebted to him for sending me a photocopy of Mildmay's rebuttal of sussex's letter of 28 August 1578 (Northants RO, F[M]P 111), where absentee monarchy is considered.

36. Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia' and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, Yale UP, 1996), pp. 97-114.

37. Helgerson, R., Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992); Peltonen, M., Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570-1640 (Cambridge: CUP, 1995); Patterson, A., Reading Holinshed's Chronicles (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994); Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England.

38. Haigh, Christopher, Elizabeth I (London: Longman, 1988); Haigh, 'Introduction', in Haigh, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I, pp. 1-25; Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: OUP, 1993).

39. Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony, p. 217.

40. Pulman, M. B., The Elizabethan Privy Council in the Fifteen-Seventies (Berkeley: California UP, 1971), p. 52.

41. Pulman, The Elizabethan Privy Council, p. 239.

42. Williams, P., The Tudor Regime (Oxford: OUP, 1979), p. 32.

43. Public Record Office, London, SP 12/49, fo. 57v; Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity, pp. 33-4.

44. Crane, Mary T., '"Video et Taceo": Elizabeth I and the Rhetoric of Counsel'.

45. Watts, J. L., Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), pp. 16-17, 25-8.

46. Guy, 'The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England', in Hoak, ed., Tudor Political Culture, pp. 294, 298-99, 301-3.

47. Collinson, Patrick, 'The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I', Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, LXIX (1987), pp. 394-424, appendix.

48. Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity, p. 156.

49. Alford, Stephen, 'Reassessing William Cecil in the 1560s', in Guy, ed., The Tudor Monarchy, pp. 233-52; Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity, p. 157; Collinson, 'The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I'.

50. Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity, pp. 148-56.

51. Public Record Office, SP 12/28/20 (fos. 68-9); SP 12/176/22, SP 12/176/28, SP 12/176/29, SP12/176/30; Henry E. Huntington Library, Ellesmere MS. 1192, annotated and corrected by Burghley; Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, I, pp. 112-13; II, pp. 44-57; Elton, The Parliament of England, 1559-1581, p. 362; Collinson, P. 'The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis', Proceedings of the British Academy, LXXXIV (1995), pp. 51-92; Collinson, 'The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth', pp. 418-22; Guy, John, Tudor England (Oxford: OUP, 1988), pp. 270, 332-3. Guy, 'The 1590s: the Second Reign of Elizabeth I?', in Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I, pp. 14-15.

52. Beddard, Robert, A Kingdom without a King: The Journal of the Provisional Government in the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford: OUP 1988).

53. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, II. p. 104.

54. Elton, 'Parliament', in Haigh, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I; Elton, The Parliament of England, 1559-1581.

55. British Library, Harleian MS. 290, fo. 219-22v. I am grateful to Mark Taviner for this reference.

56. Sotheby's sale of 16 December 1996, lot 40 (purchased by Lambeth Palace Library).

57. Collinson, Patrick, 'Puritans, Men of Business and Elizabethan Parliaments', Parliamentary History, VII (1988), pp. 187-211.

58. Collinson, 'The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I'.

59. Guy, 'Tudor Monarchy and its Critiques', pp. 95-104.

60. For contrasting views, see Sommerville, J. P., Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 (London: Longman, 1986); Sommerville, 'Richard Hooker, Hadrian Saravia, and the Advent of the Divine Right of Kings', History of Political Thought, IV (1983), pp. 229-45; Burgess, G., The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603-1642 (London: MacMillan, 1992); Sharpe, K., Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford: OUP, 1978); Rabb, T. K., and Hirst, D. M., 'Revisionism Revised: Two Perspectives on Early Stuart Parliamentary History', Past and Present, LXCII (1981), pp. 55-99.

61. Spedding, J., et al., ed., The Life and Letters of Francis Bacon, 7 vols. (London: Longman, 1861-74), III, p. 250.

62. See especially, Levin, Carole, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1994); Hackett, Helen, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: MacMillan, 1995); Frye, susan, Elizabeth I: the Competition of Representation (New York: OUP, 1993); Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony; Bassnett, susan, Elizabeth I: A Feminist Perspective (Oxford: Berg, 1988); Heisch, A., 'Queen Elizabeth I: Parliamentary Rhetoric and the Exercise of Power', Signs, I (1975), pp. 31-55; Heisch, 'Queen Elizabeth I and the Persistence of Patriarchy', Feminist Review, IV (1980), pp. 45-54; Richards, J. M., 'Love and a Female Monarch: the Case of Elizabeth Tudor', Journal of British Studies, XXXVIII (1999), pp. 133-60; Bates, C., The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 1992); Teague, F., 'Queen Elizabeth in her Speeches', in Cerasano, S.P., and Wynne-Davies, M., ed., Gloriana's Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1992), pp. 63-78.

63. Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King, p. 4.

64. Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen, p. 240.

65. Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship, p. 45.

66. Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship, pp. 46-88.

67. Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship, p. 45.

68. Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen, pp. 198-230.

69. MacCaffrey, The Shaping of the Elizabethan Régime, pp. 41-70; Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity, pp. 43-70; Jones, N. L., 'Elizabeth's First Year: the Conception and Birth of the Elizabethan Political World', in Haigh, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I, pp. 27-53.

70. Knox, John, On Rebellion, ed. Mason, R. A. (Cambridge: CUP, 1994); Jordan, C., 'Women's Rule in Sixteenth-Century British Political Thought', Renaissance Quarterly, XL (1987), pp. 421-51.

71. Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal, pp. 139-64; Dawson, Jane, 'The Two John Knoxes: England, Scotland and the 1558 Tracts', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XLII (1991), pp. 556-76.

72. Collinson, 'The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I'; Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity, pp. 34-40; Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen, pp. 49-52; Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King, pp. 11-14; Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony, pp. 8-10; McLaren, A. N., 'Delineating the Elizabethan Body Politic: Knox, Aylmer and the Definition of Counsel, 1558-1588', History of Political Thought, XVII (1996), pp. 224-52.

73. Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen, pp. 49-55.

74. The coronation pageants were privately promoted by the city guilds. They were not part of the official public procession which had been organized by the Office of Arms of the Heralds. Recent scholars assume that Elizabeth had personally overseen these pageants or their scripts, but this interpretation is questionable. The fact that a letter of 3 January 1559 from the queen to Sir Thomas Cawarden, Master of the Revels and Tents, and other Revels Office documents record the loan of costumes by that Office to the city guilds, is not proof of the queen's supervision of the pageants or of her endorsement of the view of monarchy which they propagated. It should be noted that the Revels Office and Office of Works frequently cooperated with the city guilds over interior decoration, carpentry, and the construction of temporary edifices. Cawarden may himself have solicited approval for loans to the guilds. A forward Protestant, active in Edward VI's reign in 'abolishing and defacing of the idolatry', Cawarden would have fully supported the images and messages of the pageants. As to the contents and printing history of the pamphlet, The quenes maiesties passage through the citie of London to westminster the daye before her coronacion (2 edns., London: R. Tottill, [1559]), they fail to establish Elizabeth's prior approval of the pageants or their scripts. On the contrary, as Richards notes at one point, the relationship of the pamphlet's retrospective account to the actual events of the precoronation procession itself is questionable; Richards, 'Love and a Female Monarch', pp. 145-6. Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen, pp. 41-9, acknowledges that the pageants were the work of the City, and that the love between the queen and her people was most likely a good deal less spontaneous than the retrospective pamphleteer pretended. However, she infers from the loan that Elizabeth gave her patronage and approval to the pageants. Only if the heralds or officials of the privy chamber had liaised with the guilds in their preparations could this have been assumed. The point cannot be pursued further here. For recent discussion, see Bergeron, D. M., 'Elizabeth's Coronation Entry (1559): New Manuscript Evidence', English Literary Renaissance, VIII (1978), pp. 3-8;  McCoy, R. C., '"The wonderfull spectacle": the Civic Progress of Elizabeth I and the Troublesome Coronation', in Bak, J. M., ed., Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic Ritual (Berkeley: California UP), pp. 217-27; Richards, 'Love and a Female Monarch', pp. 144-53.

75. An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe subiectes, agaynst the late blowne Blaste, concerninge the Government of Wemen (Amsterdam: Da Capo Press facsimile edn., 1972), sigs. B2v-3v.

76. An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe subiectes, sigs. B3v, D2v, O4r.

77. British Library, Harleian MS. 7004, fo. 2.

78. Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony, p. 10.

79. Cf. Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen, pp. 238-9.

80. British Library, Additional MS. 32091, fos. 168v-9.

81. An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe subiectes, sigs. H2v-3r; Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity, pp. 34-6.

82. Guy, 'The Elizabethan Establishment and the Ecclesiastical Polity', pp. 127-30.

83. Collinson, 'The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I'; Guy, 'The 1590s: the Second Reign of Elizabeth I?'; Alford, 'Reassessing William Cecil in the 1560s'; Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity, pp. 9-42.

84. Willan, Diane, 'Gender, Society and Culture, 1500-1800', Journal of British Studies, XXXVII (1998), p. 459.

85. Axton, Marie, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan succession Question (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977).

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