What were the political dynamics of the reign of Elizabeth I? Were Elizabethan politics collegial or factional? and if politics were collegial, why were there so many clashes between queen and Parliament? The debate has raged, but the issues have rarely been clear-cut. This lecture argues that politics were fundamentally collegial, but that where friction occurred, it concerned important matters of state on which Elizabeth held fixed views, or was inclined to indecision or procrastination. The argument was between Cecil and the Privy Council on the one side, and the queen on the other. There was no "government" or "opposition" split within the Elizabethan conciliar regime.

1. Were Elizabethan politics factional?

1. the traditional argument for factionalism predicated moderates (Cecil, Sussex) against Protestant ideologues (Leicester, Walsingham) in Court and Privy Council, or else on the supposition of war versus peace parties in the Council (Conyers Read).
2. Conyers Read and Sir John Neale established factionalism as the central phenomenon of Elizabethan Court politics, yet the basis for their factions -- policy or patronage -- were different and their arguments were in any case relatively weak.
3. comments by near-contemporary observers have created the bulk of the confusion. In the 1630s Sir Robert Naunton organized his vignette of the Elizabethan Court around the topic of "factions" and "favourites". He said of Elizabeth, "She ruled much by factions and parties, which she herself both made, upheld and weakened, as her own great judgement advised". This oracular proposition has been accepted at face value, but it is a travesty of Elizabethan politics.
4. the scurrilous tract, Leicester's Commonwealth, wove a web of lies and misleading assertions in order to accuse the earl of Leicester, the queen's first favourite and Cecil's supposed political rival, of creating a "puritan faction" to control the realm. Dr Simon Adams has consistently downplayed or rejected these arguments, and his approach has become the basis of the standard interpretation of the reign. This is not to deny that factionalism was introduced into the Court by the second earl of Essex in the mid-1590s. But that is a quite different phase, and a quite different argument. Nor was Essex's rise to power factional, as Neale and others had assumed.
5. Cecil and Leicester/Walsingham were all agreed that the Protestant cause required a coordinated international response. Cecil was more cautious than Leicester and Walsingham on the matter of military overextension, but that is not factionalism but judgement.
6. BUT the second earl of Essex attempted to build a factional base in the mid-1590s. His power in counties and Court-country (national) networks included over 12 deputy lieutenants. He wanted the military and not the civilian administration to run the war effort of the 1590s, and raised the dichotomy between civilian and military rule. The post-1596 period had a strong factional element.

2. Matters which Elizabeth did not allow to be discussed, or at any rate, she did not take the advice of the Privy Council when they arose.

Here the agenda comprises:

1. Clashes on the decision to intervene in Scotland in 1559-60;
2. Clashes of 1563 and 1566 on the queen's marriage and succession;
3. Clashes of 1572 and 1586-7 on Mary, queen of Scots and again in 1584-5 on the Bond of Association
4. Clashes on the intervention in the Netherlands in 1585.
5. Clashes over the execution of Mary, queen of Scots

Elizabeth more or less "invented" the idea of arcana imperii, or "mysteries (matters) of state". Her privy councillors sought to persuade the queen to marry and to settle the succession. They themselves turned to Parliament and public opinion:

In relation to the clashes listed at (1)-(3):

1. Cecil wished to depose Mary queen of Scots even during her personal rule in Scotland, and the correspondence with his agents and with Mary's opponents in Scotland shows that Cecil sought not only to establish responsible conciliar government in Scotland, but that he could happily brook regicide if this was the only way to defeat the powers of Catholic darkness (as he saw them) which themselves sought to use Mary as an agent.
2. Cecil wished to incorporate Scotland (and possibly Ireland also) within an "imperial" British state under Elizabeth as queen and empress. While Elizabeth also talked this language, there was a very important difference in that Cecil saw a fully-Protestant Britain as the necessary precondition of the survival of Protestant England, and for this reason he wished to pursue a vigorous politics of culture: i.e. Protestant cultural colonialism within the British Isles. This was the essence of his case for the intervention in Scotland in 1559, and his position was so radical on that occasion that even Bacon, his brother-in-law, opposed him in the Privy Council. Cecil finally got his way, and Elizabeth was bludgeoned into the intervention in support of the Lords of the Congregation, but this was the moment that Cecil discovered the queen's conservatism -- threatened to resign, etc.
3. Cecil and the Privy Council wanted to persuade Elizabeth to marry and to settle the succession to the throne. Elizabeth refused to do both these things. What we have in the clashes of 1563 and especially 1566, is evidence of spontaneous speeches by those who were Cecil's men of business or were within his conciliar orbit, and also there is massive evidence of Cecil ignoring the queen's express instructions, verbal and written, to stop pursuing the issue of her marriage and the succession, and also ignoring her instructions not on any account to link to the grant of taxation imminent in 1566 the issues of the succession or her promise of 1563 to marry. Cecil flatly ignored the queen's express commands, and covered reams of paper with pro and contra arguments and with drafts and redrafts of position papers in defence of his case for action. The strategy advocated by Dudley and his circle was that Elizabeth should name an heir instead of marrying. That preferred by Cecil was that she should marry and have children before it was too late. Cecil lobbied openly in the Privy Council and covertly in the House of Commons by sending his secretary, Bernard Hampton, to a committee with pre-packaged drafts of a preamble to a bill that linked taxation to the Queen's duty to marry and settle the succession.
4. We see in these documents Cecil's private attempts at self-fashioning. Was he the personal servant of the queen, or the "public servant of the Protestant state"??
5. In Elizabeth's reign the tension was played out between the queen's high view of kingship -- the idea that sovereignty was vested in her alone -- and the conviction of Cecil and his supporters on the Privy Council that "the preservation of the [Protestant] state of this realm" took precedence. Prof. Collinson has noticed this, and called it "monarchical republicanism". Others have called it the doctrine of "mixed" polity. In political theory, this was the beginning of the classical conceptualization of the "state" as an ideal. Moreover, in the hands of puritan-inclined authors, this was a "state" which gave a political role to Parliament and to the House of Commons. In this respect, there was a grain of truth in Neale's volumes on the history of Parliament.
6. There were also times when Cecil actively conspired, force majeure, to "protect" the Protestant state at the expense of the queen's instructions. (Cf. Cecil's notes for the succession in 1563 and 1584-5.) If the queen's presumed heir to the throne was to be the Catholic, Mary queen of Scots, then Cecil and the Privy Council intended to infringe the Crown's sovereignty and the subvert the rules of succession if the worst happened. As I have several times remarked, what Cecil and the Privy Council planned was comparable in many points of detail with what happened in 1688-9. In this way it can be argued that the most powerful and subversive critique of the Tudor monarchy did not derive from the Marian exiles in the 1550s or presbyterianism in the 1570s and 1580s: it emanated from the very heart of the conciliar regime.

The clashes over the intervention in the Netherlands:

1. The first major clash was in 1576-7, when Elizabeth authorized diplomacy in support of the Protestant cause in the Netherlands, but then refused to act on it. This caused massive friction with the Privy Council, and the issue rumbled on until 1585.
2. Cecil and Leicester/Walsingham were much closer on this issue than the conventional historiography has suggested.
3. From 1576 onwards, the Privy Council was pushing for financial aid to the Dutch against Elizabeth's reluctance. Cecil wrote sympathetically to Walsingham, and supported both financial aid and alliance too. NB Cecil warned Elizabeth in autumn of 1584, "Your strength abroad, it must be in joining in good confederacy, or at least intelligence with those that would willingly embrace the same".
4. There was no factional dimension to debates of 1584-5. On the contrary, councillors and MPs compared the queen's wrong-headed attitude to the Netherlands and Scotland (since 1559!).
5. Climax reached in debates of July 1585. Privy Council sought:
   
   • "protection" from Spain and the Guise conspiracy;
   • urged creation of Protestant coalition;
   • urged reinforcement of militia and navy;
   • hinted that Elizabeth should accept the sovereignty of the Netherlands;
   • concern at encirclement by Hispano-Guise alliance.
6. Leicester finally allowed to take expeditionary force to Netherlands, but when he arrived he was told not to do anything by the queen. When he accepted the offer of governor-general from the States without consulting Elizabeth, he was recalled and ruined. Moreover, he failed to recoup the costs of raising and equipping his forces, which contributed to the breakdown of his health and death in September 1588.

The clashes over the execution of Mary, queen of Scots

1. These revealed the full implications of the dissonance between Elizabeth and the Privy Council. The warrant's delivery was authorised by the Privy Council, who acted out of a sense of utter frustration at Elizabeth's reluctance to put the death sentence pronounced against Mary into effect. The letter that the Council attached to the execution warrant justified their action as taken "for [the queen's] special service tending to the safety of her royal person and universal quietness of her whole Realm".
2. In this matter, the Council acted not only clandestinely, but in defiance of Elizabeth's most recently expressed instructions, a blatant act of republicanism for which she sought to hang her secretary, William Davison, by royal prerogative (i.e. summarily and without trial) for allowing the warrant to leave his possession. For three months, Cecil feared that her wrath would usurp the rule of law, and relations between the queen and Council took four months to return to anything approaching normality.

3. Essex and the final "decade" of the reign

1. Mary Stuart's execution was a watershed as significant as the death of Henry VIII. James VI of Scotland became the heir (presumptive) to the English throne: he was male, Protestant and available. No longer was it necessary for the Privy Council to embrace quasi-republican ideas. As a result, there was a swing to the right. The atmosphere became claustrophobic and authoritarian: it has even been argued that the period between 1587 and 1603 was so fundamentally different from what had gone before that it should be called Elizabeth's "second" reign.
2. This drift to authoritarianism was underpinned partly by the anxiety engendered by the war with Spain and the rebellion in Ireland, partly by irrational fears of religious nonconformity and recusancy, and partly by the economic turmoil that was the result of a succession of bad harvests, rising prices and outbreaks of plague and influenza. In the 1590s, privy councillors and magistrates became obsessed with issues of state security, the subversiveness of religious nonconformity, and the threat of "popularity" and social revolt.
3. The changed emphasis was mirrored at Court, where the deaths of several of the "first" generation of Elizabethan privy councillors -- including Leicester, Walsingham and Mildmay -- and the ambition of the earl of Essex, fused with the poverty of the Crown and the competition for patronage to usher in a phase of unusually intense factionalism, self-interest and instability.
4. Essex tried to monopolize "counsel": he staked his claim to Leicester's mantle of the European Protestant cause. But he made mistakes. By the end of 1596 the feud between Essex and Robert Cecil had escalated into a factional battle to dominate the Privy Council and control both royal policy and the succession to the throne. Essex rebelled in 1601 and was executed.