Abstract
This book takes us into the heart of the ‘cold-war’ struggles of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. During the second half of the sixteenth century, the confessional division between Catholics and Protestants increasingly dominated European diplomacy. While Queen Elizabeth was uncomfortable with religious analyses of international or domestic relations, the majority of her key advisers adopted that perspective and sought to form English policy within its terms. In an ambitious attempt to decipher the war of words and publicity during this period, Peter Lake demonstrates that for most of the Queen’s reign English Catholic polemic provoked the reactions that formed Tudor policy. Far from the traditional view of English Catholics being pushed to the margins, he puts them back into the mainstream of Elizabethan politics. He asserts that through their ‘libels’ and ‘secret histories’ Catholics were able to set the political agenda of the Tudor state. With its faction fighting, intrigues, conspiracies, and spies, this is a world in which George Smiley would have felt at home.
The author is able to draw upon a distinguished record of publishing on Catholic history and the Elizabethan and early Jacobean religious, political, and cultural scenes. In this latest study, he deploys a series of specific ‘moments’ to chart the propaganda ‘dialogues’ between the Protestant group who staffed the Elizabethan regime and their Catholic opponents. The book is divided into seven sections that run across three decades from the late 1560s to the end of the reign and chart these dialogues in detail. Each section deals with particular issues that became the focus for a polemical exchange conducted through public publicity performances, ranging from proclamations to plays and rumour-mongering to sermons, in addition to the main written material circulating in printed and manuscript forms. The propaganda produced by both sides described a secret struggle for control of English policy and the mind of Queen Bess. Each group asserted they were revealing to an unsuspecting world what was ‘really happening’. Once these secret histories and conspiracy theories reigned supreme, it was little surprise that the polemic itself helped create the very activities that were being denounced. In addition to the ‘moments’, Lake employs two specific cases, those of Dr Parry and of Dr Lopez, to present micro-histories of how that conspiracy-laden atmosphere could change lives and bring death to individuals. Their stories show the seamier side of the protestations of Ciceronian virtue emanating from the Queen’s Protestant regime and in particular from the circle around her Secretary and chief advisor, William Cecil, Lord Burghley.
Lake does a remarkable job of tracking how the polemical exchanges formed complex dialogues that fed upon each other as successive revelations were produced. Original propositions, usually from Catholic authors, were transformed, as if reflected through distorting mirrors, to emerge as the assumptions underlying Elizabethan political debate, publicity, and policy. He also explains the seeming mismatch between the confessional allegiances of the participants and the remarkably non-religious or ‘politique’ tone of the polemical battle. Debates between Protestants and Catholics about doctrines or religious practice are not the stuff of which this genre of secret histories is made.
The politics of the Tudor state created a remarkably inward-looking ‘empire’ that was increasingly restricted to the Elizabethan equivalent of the Westminster bubble, comprising the royal court and its main base in London and Catholic political effort was primarily directed within these confines. That targeting confirms the apparent lack of concern among the Catholic leadership about those distant parts of the Tudor kingdoms where the practice of Catholicism remained strong. Since it is focussed upon Elizabethan media and the ‘mode of public politicking’ (p. 468), this book also pays scant attention to anywhere a long way from London.
In a more general sense the book’s analysis and categories have a tendency to be drawn into the world they describe; the perspective of the English ruling elite. That group understood the problems of the Tudor state within English terms, no matter whether they concerned Ireland or Mary, Queen of Scots. Many subsequent Tudor historians have followed the English elite in treating the ‘problem’ of the Scottish Queen almost exclusively as one dimension of the Elizabethan succession crisis. Since her position lay at the heart of much Catholic strategy the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, runs like a thread through the book and two of the selected ‘moments’, the Norfolk marriage proposal and Mary’s execution, relate directly to her cause. Lake displays a fine awareness of the broader European context provided by the Papacy, the European Catholic powers and the continental sources for English polemic, but the book is weaker on the wider British context within Tudor Ireland and Stewart Scotland. The extensive discussion of John Leslie’s defence of Mary, Queen of Scots, for example, is described as a contribution to the English debate thereby neglecting its Scottish significance.
Lake is well aware there is a fine line for historians to tread between regarding the secret histories as self-fulfilling prophecies and treating them as, in some sense, accurate descriptions of the operation of Tudor government. This has led him to challenge the idea of the ‘monarchical republic’ of Elizabeth I, a term coined in Patrick Collinson’s famous lecture and essay of 1987. While acknowledging a monarchical republic was probably an aspiration for many of her councillors, the author underscores the important corrective that Queen Elizabeth ensured this was never the way in which affairs were actually conducted. What he is also able to demonstrate is how much the Bond of Association of 1585, one of the key examples of those ‘republican’ views, was a response to the Catholic propaganda drive of the previous year. In the complex politicking Lake describes, Queen Bess remained an extremely important third party and, as the book title indicates, whether she was portrayed as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ reflected the many different views articulated by both the Protestant and Catholic polemicists.
This study of almost 500 pages in length is packed with a magnificent array of analysis and intriguing information about the murky polemics and labyrinthine politics of Elizabethan England. Unfortunately, it is a dense book and the reader does have to work hard to mine the treasures within its pages. As the author candidly mentions in the Acknowledgements, one of his best friends is ‘allergic to [his] prose style’ (p. vi). However, the division into short chapters within the seven sections and a judicious use of the index do make the volume rather more manageable. Bad Queen Bess? is not an easy read, but there is so much on offer that it is worth considerable effort.