Abstract
Historians of sixteenth-century England have finally realized, better late than never, that war mattered to the Tudor monarchs and their subjects. This delay is surprising, for, as Cliff Davies pointed out nearly forty years ago, England was one of the most militarized states in early modern Europe, with proportionately more of its inhabitants under arms than in contemporary France or Spain. Recently Mark Charles Fissel, Paul Hammer, Steven Gunn, James Raymond, and Rory Rapple, among others, have reminded us of the various ways in which war and military institutions shaped the development of the Tudor state. Neil Younger’s book on the Elizabethan lieutenancy and the county militias in the years of war between 1585 and 1603 is very much in this historiographical mould. It is a work of immense scholarship and detailed archival work because, as Younger reminds us, the county lieutenancies usually left no dedicated archives, leaving the historian to piece together from surviving private and public records the relationships between the crown, county elites, landowners, and those who actually served in and paid for the militia. Younger argues that the experience of war against Spain (fought in the Low Countries, in France, and on the high seas) and against the Irish rebels (and their Spanish allies) was one of the most important factors in shaping the nature of the Elizabethan regime. During the final two decades of the reign the pressures of war and the demands for taxation and military service were as instrumental in shaping local responses to the regime as the much better known factors of social turmoil, religious dissent, and court faction. The command of the county’s military resources was an important way in which the regime could flex its muscle at a local level, and Protestant gentry were often promoted above the nobility, whose Catholic sentiments were regarded with suspicion by the crown. The system worked well because, in typically English fashion, it relied on the cooperation of local landowners and leading townsmen. It worked too because both Elizabeth and her subjects imagined the war to be short-lived and defensive, a reaction to a specific external Catholic threat. Thus the type of coercive and invasive institutions and procedures which could have led to conflict never had cause to develop.
While Younger is excellent on the political importance of the lieutenancy and its role in the development of later Elizabethan political culture, he is perhaps less secure when discussing the specifically military aspects of the system. The way in which the county militias responded to the changing nature of weaponry and tactics is not covered in the same detail; as Younger concedes, ‘the issue of militia training is particularly difficult to pin down’ (p. 141). There are, nevertheless, plenty of examples of innovation and change in the use of weapons and armour, and more perhaps could be made of the material culture of war in these years. Younger points out that the Elizabethan militia system is difficult to fit into the linear pattern of war and the development of the state favoured by proponents of the ‘military revolution’ debate, for with the outbreak of peace many Elizabethan institutions and procedures ‘withered away’. Yet the complex and varied ways in which the demands of war affected the relationship between rulers and ruled ‘encouraged the development of habits of government and almost imperceptibly drove the development of the state’ (p. 240). This book certainly adds to the richness of our understanding of the Tudor state and the important role that war played in the lives of Elizabethan men and women. Younger is to be congratulated on a book that is ambitious and wide-ranging, and based on an impressive amount of archival research. It makes a significant contribution to an expanding field of enquiry.