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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 December 2021
Royal counsel in Tudor England has been a central historiographical theme for over twenty years. This review offers a critical assessment of the state of the field. It appraises historical and literary scholarship on both the theory and practice of royal counsel. Among other themes, it discusses the concepts of evil counsel and arcana imperii. The review concludes by suggesting priorities for future enquiry, including the need to think more carefully about which areas of English government still required royal decision-making, and therefore counsel, in this period. The article also charts the rise of conciliar ‘government under the king but not by the king’ and shows that Tudor counsel often happened the wrong way around: the monarch advised the privy council on the direction of state policy. It calls for a new administrative history in early modern studies, with a renewed focus on institutions and their procedures, to complement existing strengths in the fields of political culture and political thought.
1 A word about this piece's scope: it centres around works published since the 1990s, but older works are brought in wherever appropriate. Although historians of Europe and the middle ages have also explored the theme of counsel, this article concentrates on Tudor England, since a longer time span or broader geographical range could not have been properly digested in a review of this length. The Tudor focus has been interpreted liberally to include works which partly extend back into the fifteenth century or forward into the early Stuart period. The final version of this article was submitted in August 2021.
2 ‘counsel, n.’, OED Online; Cavill, Paul, ‘The politics of counsel in England and Scotland, 1286‒1707, ed. Jacqueline Rose’ (review), English Historical Review, 133 (2018), p. 937CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Stephen Alford, Kingship and politics in the reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 2002), p. 29; Michael Bush, The Pilgrimage of Grace: a study of the rebel armies of October 1536 (Manchester, 1996), p. 283.
4 John Guy, ‘Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell and the reform of Henrician government’, in Diarmaid MacCulloch, ed., The reign of Henry VIII: politics, policy and piety (New York, NY, 1995), pp. 51‒2; Jeffrey Goldsworthy, The sovereignty of parliament: history and philosophy (Oxford, 1999), ch. 4.
5 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Introduction: the problem of political counsel in England and Scotland, 1286‒1707’, in Jacqueline Rose, ed., The politics of counsel in England and Scotland, 1286‒1707, Proceedings of the British Academy, 204 (Oxford, 2016), pp. 3‒5.
6 Mum and the Sothsegger has been discussed more recently alongside other Lancastrian political literature in Jenni Nuttall, The creation of Lancastrian kingship: literature, language and politics in late medieval England (Cambridge, 2007), esp. ch. 4. On Fortescue's views of counsel, see also Alan Cromartie, ‘Common law, counsel and consent in Fortescue's political theory’, in Linda Clark and Christine Carpenter, eds., The fifteenth century IV: political culture in late medieval Britain (Woodbridge, 2004).
7 Arthur B. Ferguson, The articulate citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, NC, 1965), p. 76; James M. Dean, ed., Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger (Kalamazoo, MI, 2000), p. 84.
8 Ferguson, Articulate citizen, 90, 169. This idea was also expressed by later humanists such as John Cheke and Thomas Smith: see J. M. Anderson, The honorable burden of public office: English humanists and Tudor politics (New York, NY, 2010), pp. 21, 69. Thomas More's views on counsel are discussed in the fourth section of this article.
9 Thomas Elyot, The boke named the governour (1531), ch. 27, fo. 238v.
10 Quentin Skinner, The foundations of modern political thought, I (Cambridge, 1978), ch. 8.
11 See his first book: J. A. Guy, The cardinal's court: the impact of Thomas Wolsey in Star Chamber (Totowa, NJ, 1977).
12 John Guy, ‘The rhetoric of counsel in early modern England’, in Dale Hoak, ed., Tudor political culture (Cambridge, 1995), p. 309.
13 Glenn Burgess, ‘The impact on political thought: rhetorics for troubled times’, in John Morrill, ed., The impact of the English Civil War (London, 1991), p. 74.
14 Guy, ‘Rhetoric of counsel’, pp. 294, 297. In another book chapter published in 1996, Guy argued that the first of these languages originated in the late fifteenth century: see John Guy, ‘The Henrician age’, in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The varieties of British political thought, 1500‒1800 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 14.
15 McLaren, A. N., ‘Delineating the Elizabethan body politic: Knox, Aylmer and the definition of counsel, 1558‒1588’, History of Political Thought, 17 (1996), p. 225Google Scholar n. 5.
16 A. N. McLaren, Political culture in the reign of Elizabeth I: queen and commonwealth, 1558‒1585 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 48.
17 Rose, Jacqueline, ‘Kingship and counsel in early modern England’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011), pp. 48, 50Google Scholar.
18 Goldie, Mark, ‘The ancient constitution and the languages of political thought’, Historical Journal, 62 (2019), p. 4Google Scholar.
19 Guy, ‘Rhetoric of counsel’, p. 299.
20 David Colclough, Freedom of speech in early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2005), esp. ch. 1.
21 See also Paul, Joanne, ‘The best counsellors are the dead: counsel and Shakespeare's Hamlet’, Renaissance Studies, 30 (2016), pp. 646‒65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which argues that Shakespeare dramatizes the Renaissance maxim optimi consiliarii mortui (‘the best counsellors are the dead’), i.e. that books are better counsellors than living men.
22 F. W. Conrad, ‘The problem of counsel reconsidered: the case of Sir Thomas Elyot’, in Paul A. Fideler and T. F. Mayer, eds., Political thought and the Tudor commonwealth: deep structure, discourse and disguise (London, 1992).
23 Joanne Paul, Counsel and command in early modern English thought (Cambridge, 2020), ch. 3. Cf. Rose, ‘Introduction’, p. 12. For the fear of flattery among early modern humanists, see Donald Stump, Spenser's heavenly Elizabeth: providential history in The Faerie Queene (Cham, 2019), chs. 2‒3; Rose, ‘Kingship and counsel’, pp. 49–50.
24 The latter two are also discussed in Ivan Lupić, Subjects of advice: drama and counsel from More to Shakespeare (Philadelphia, PA, 2019), pp. 21‒2, 168.
25 Paul, Counsel and command, p. 10. Reason of state (ragion di stato) was an Italian buzz-phrase popularized in the 1580s which never seems to have meant very much, but could be described simplistically as political pragmatism exercised for the good of the state, which in extreme cases might involve over-riding the letter of the law. See Peter Burke, ‘Tacitism, scepticism, and reason of state’, in J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge history of political thought, 1450‒1700 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 480‒1.
26 Paul, Counsel and command, p. 216.
27 Ibid., p. 1.
28 Joanne Paul, ‘Obliquus ductus: indirect political advice in the Renaissance’, in Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Political advice: past, present and future (London, 2021), 47.
29 S. B. Chrimes, English constitutional ideas in the fifteenth century (Cambridge, 1936), 40.
30 John Watts, Henry VI and the politics of kingship (Cambridge, 1996), p. 109.
31 Thomas Park, ed., Nugae antiquae: being a miscellaneous collection of original papers, in prose and verse; written during the reigns of Henry VIII. Edward VI. Queen Mary, Elizabeth, and King James, I (London, 1804), p. 44.
32 Peter Hunter Blair, An introduction to Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 217‒18, 221.
33 Paul, Counsel and command, pp. 12, 173, 180.
34 According to the traditional conception, the Lords were counsellors and the Commons were petitioners, but by the Elizabethan period, it was fairly common to state that the House of Commons also had a counselling function: see G. R. Elton, The parliament of England, 1559‒1581 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 17, 24‒5; P. R. Cavill, The English parliaments of Henry VII, 1485‒1504 (Oxford, 2009), p. 115; G. O. Sayles, The functions of the medieval parliament of England (London, 1987), p. 36; Paul Seaward, ‘The parliamentary way of counsel’, in Kidd and Rose, eds., Political advice, p. 85. For Stuart resistance to the idea of parliamentary counsel, see also Colclough, Freedom of speech, pp. 120‒1. J. G. A. Pocock has suggested that this ideological battle was connected to the developing idea that parliament's purpose was the ‘preservation of liberty’: The Machiavellian moment: Florentine political thought and the Atlantic republican tradition (2nd edn, Princeton, NJ, 2003), p. 340.
35 The word ‘probouleutic’ originally referred to councils in Athens and elsewhere (the Athenian example was 500 strong) which prepared material for discussion by the general assembly. See Lynette G. Mitchell, ‘Greek government’, in Konrad H. Kinzl, A companion to the classical Greek world (Oxford, 2006), pp. 373‒4. For another historian's use of the word in an English context, see A. F. Pollard, The evolution of parliament (London, 1920), pp. 98 n. 2, 282.
36 Hannah Coates, ‘The Moor's counsel: Sir Francis Walsingham's advice to Elizabeth I’, in Helen Matheson-Pollock, Joanne Paul, and Catherine Fletcher, eds., Queenship and counsel in early modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2018), p. 192; Brendan Kane, ‘Elizabeth on rebellion in Ireland and England: semper eadem?’, in Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle, eds., Elizabeth I and Ireland (Cambridge, 2014), p. 266; Houlbrooke, Ralph, ‘Queenship and political discourse in the Elizabethan realm. By Natalie Mears’ (review), Parliamentary History, 26 (2007), p. 245CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kesselring, K. J., ‘Queenship and political discourse in the Elizabethan realm. By Natalie Mears’ (review), History, 91 (2006), p. 627CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
37 Hammer, Paul E. J., ‘Queenship and political discourse in the Elizabethan realm. By Natalie Mears’ (review), Journal of Modern History, 80 (2008), p. 129Google Scholar. I am told there will be a full critique of the concept in David Crankshaw's three-volume Proceedings of the privy council of Queen Elizabeth I, 1582–1583; I am grateful to the author for giving me a summary of this forthcoming work.
38 British Library (BL), Cotton Vespasian MS C/VII, fos. 326r–327v.
39 Natalie Mears, Queenship and political discourse in the Elizabethan realms (Cambridge, 2005), p. 34; Acts of the privy council of England (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1895) (APC), XI, pp. 87‒96; The National Archives (TNA), PC 2/12, pp. 439‒41.
40 Michael Barraclough Pulman, The Elizabethan privy council in the fifteen-seventies (Berkeley, CA, 1971), p. 164.
41 Mears, Queenship and political discourse, p. 35; Jacqueline D. Vaughan, ‘Secretaries, statesmen and spies: the clerks of the Tudor privy council, c. 1540 – c. 1603’ (Ph.D. thesis, St Andrews, 2007), pp. 58‒9.
42 Mears, Queenship and political discourse, p. 36; TNA, SP 52/10, fos. 68r–69v; APC, VII, p. 214.
43 Mears, Queenship and political discourse, pp. 33–4; John Guy, ‘Introduction. The 1590s: the second reign of Elizabeth I?’, in The reign of Elizabeth (Cambridge, 1995), p. 14.
44 Mears, Queenship and political discourse, p. 40.
45 Helen Matheson-Pollock, ‘Counselloresses and court politics: Mary Tudor, queen of France and female counsel in European politics, 1509‒1515’, in Matheson-Pollock, Paul, and Fletcher, eds., Queenship and counsel, p. 63.
46 Coates, ‘Moor's counsel’, p. 188.
47 Ibid., p. 191.
48 E.g. TNA, SP 12/17, fos. 1r‒4r. This consultation was drawn up on 1 May 1561 after fifteen councillors reached consensus ‘without any Manner of Contradiction or doubt’ (a customary phrase in such documents). The privy council meeting is not recorded in the official register, which is defective from 12 May 1559 to 28 May 1562: see APC, VII, pp. 103‒4.
49 Pulman, Elizabethan privy council, p. 60.
50 Susan Doran, ‘Elizabeth I and counsel’, in Rose, ed., Politics of counsel, p. 164. Interestingly, the council sometimes put up a united front, even if members had seriously disagreed on some issue: see Susan Doran, Monarchy and matrimony: the courtships of Elizabeth (London, 1996), p. 173.
51 Rose, ‘Introduction’, pp. 30‒6.
52 Elton, Parliament of England, pp. 24‒5.
53 Ibid., p. 377.
54 Doran, Susan, ‘1603: a jagged succession’, Historical Research, 93 (2020), p. 445CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This example, of course, was not strictly an instance of royal counsel as defined at the outset.
55 John Watts, ‘Counsel and the king's council in England, c. 1340‒c. 1540’, in Rose, ed., Politics of counsel, pp. 66, 77. For the original expression of Elton's view, see G. R. Elton, The Tudor revolution in government: administrative changes in the reign of Henry VIII (London, 1953), pp. 337‒8.
56 David Carpenter, The struggle for mastery: Britain, 1066–1284 (London, 2004), p. 348.
57 See also the classic administrative study of the medieval council: J. F. Baldwin, The king's council in England during the middle ages (Oxford, 1913), which discusses the complications of defining and categorizing assemblies of various functions and sizes described in contemporary sources as the king's council.
58 Doran, ‘Elizabeth I and counsel’, p. 166. The full speech at Hatfield is reproduced in Park, ed., Nugae antiquae, I, pp. 66‒8; and Elizabeth I, Collected works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago, IL, 2000), pp. 51‒2.
59 Rose, ‘Kingship and counsel’, 58. Absolutism is the exercise of arbitrary, unchecked royal authority, and should be distinguished from tyranny, as defined in note 142. It was theoretically possible for an absolute monarch to rule benignly (although it could be argued, of course, that a ruler with more power is more likely to act tyrannically).
60 Michael A. R. Graves, Henry VIII: a study in kingship (Harlow, 2003), pp. 79‒80.
61 Sir John Fortescue once said that chamberlains and household men ‘can not counsele’ the king, but he was talking about ability rather than rights: see The governance of England, ed. Charles Plummer (Oxford, 1885), p. 350.
62 Pulman, Elizabethan privy council, p. 53.
63 Christopher Haigh, Elizabeth I (illustrated edn, Abingdon, 2001), p. 108.
64 Louis A. Knafla, Law and politics in Jacobean England: the tracts of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere (Cambridge, 2012), p. 210.
65 Jacqueline Rose, ‘William Davison and the perils of advice in Elizabethan England’, in Kidd and Rose, eds., Political advice, p. 75.
66 Seaward, ‘The parliamentary way of counsel’.
67 McLaren, Political culture, ch. 2.
68 Patrick Collinson, Godly people: essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), p. 169. Indeed, writing in 1588, the puritan satirist ‘Martin Marprelate’ mentioned Alymer's Harborowe in an apparent attempt to embarrass the author in his mature years: Oh read over D. John Bridges (East Molesey, Surrey: Robert Waldegrave, 1588) (The Epistle; STC no. 17453), p. 3.
69 McLaren, Political culture, pp. 46‒8, 103.
70 Ibid., p. 41.
71 Ibid., ch. 7, p. 150.
72 E.g. John Neale, Elizabeth I and her parliaments (2 vols., London, 1953–7).
73 McLaren, Political culture, ch. 5. The idea is apparently influenced by Collinson, Patrick, ‘The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 69 (1987), pp. 394‒424Google Scholar. It has been taken up by other scholars, e.g., Anne-Marie E. Schuler, ‘Counsel, political rhetoric, and the chronicle history play: representing conciliar rule, 1588–1603’ (Ph.D. thesis, Ohio State University, 2011), p. 115. An alternative contemporary metaphor described the council as the monarch's ‘eye’: see G. R. Elton, ‘Tudor government: the points of contact. II. The council’, in Studies in Tudor and Stuart politics and government, II (Cambridge, 1983), p. 34.
74 Greg Walker, Reading literature historically (Edinburgh, 2013), p. 13.
75 Ibid., p. 15.
76 Greg Walker, Plays of persuasion: drama and politics at the court of Henry VIII (Oxford, 1991), p. 149. See also Greg Walker, The politics of performance in early Renaissance drama (Cambridge, 1998), esp. ch. 2.
77 Greg Walker, Writing under tyranny: English literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford, 2005), esp. ch. 17.
78 Colin Burrow, ‘How not to do it: poets and counsel, Thomas Wyatt to Geoffrey Hill’, in Kidd and Rose, eds., Political advice, p. 59.
79 Paulina Kewes, ‘“Jerusalem thou dydst promyse to buylde up”: kingship, counsel and early Elizabethan drama’, in Rose, ed., Politics of counsel, p. 171.
80 Kewes, ‘“Jerusalem”’, pp. 176‒7. For some representative analyses of Gorboduc, see Stephen Alford, The early Elizabethan polity: William Cecil and the British succession crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 30‒3; Kevin Dunn, ‘Representing counsel: “Gorboduc” and the Elizabethan privy council’, English Historical Review, 33 (2003), pp. 279‒308; Lupić, Subjects of advice, ch. 3 (which also discusses Cambises); Walker, Politics of performance, ch. 6. For another discussion of Gorboduc and Cambises side by side, see Dermot Cavanagh, ‘Political tragedy in the 1560s: Cambises and Gorboduc’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, eds., The Oxford handbook of Tudor literature, 1485‒1603 (Oxford, 2009), p. 349.
81 Kewes, Paulina, ‘“Plesures in lernyng” and the politics of counsel in early Elizabethan England: royal visits to Cambridge and Oxford’, English Literary Renaissance, 46 (2016), pp. 333‒75CrossRefGoogle Scholar (quotation from p. 339).
82 E.g. Patrick Collinson, ‘Pulling the strings: religion and politics in the progress of 1578’, in Jayne Elizabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight, eds., The progresses, pageants, and entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2007); Tim Moylan, ‘Advising the queen: good governance in Elizabeth I's entries into London, Bristol, and Norwich’, in Donald Stump, Linda Shenk, and Carole Levin, eds., Elizabeth I and the ‘sovereign arts’: essays in literature, history, and culture (Tempe, AZ, 2011); Siobhan Keenan, The progresses, processions and royal entries of King Charles I, 1625‒1642 (Oxford, 2020), esp. ch. 2; Aidan Norrie, ‘Biblical typology and royal power in Elizabethan civic entertainments’, Royal Studies Journal, 8 (2021), pp. 54–78.
83 J. Christopher Warner, Henry VIII's divorce: literature and the politics of the printing press (Woodbridge, 1998), ch. 3.
84 Younger, Neil, ‘Drama, politics, and news in the earl of Sussex's entertainment of Elizabeth I at New Hall, 1579’, Historical Journal, 58 (2015), pp. 343‒66Google Scholar.
85 McGovern, Jonathan, ‘Allegory as counsel: “The Garden Plot” and the Anjou marriage negotiations of Queen Elizabeth I’, Studies in Philology, 117 (2020), pp. 743‒68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Stubbes, see Mears, Natalie, ‘Counsel, public debate, and queenship: John Stubbs's The discoverie of a gaping gulf, 1579’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), pp. 629‒50Google Scholar.
86 Scott C. Lucas, ed., A mirror for magistrates: a modernized and annotated edition (Cambridge, 2019). On this text's evolution over sixty years, see Harriet Archer, Unperfect histories: the mirror for magistrates, 1559‒1610 (Oxford, 2017). For its political significance, Scott C. Lucas, A mirror for magistrates and the politics of the English Reformation (Amherst, MA, 2009).
87 Peter Mack, Elizabethan rhetoric: theory and practice (Cambridge, 2002), p. 170.
88 Anderson, Donald K. Jr, ‘Kingship in Ford's Perkin Warbeck’, ELH, 27 (1960), pp. 188‒9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
89 Hexter, J. H., ‘Thomas More and the problem of counsel’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal concerned with British Studies, 10 (1978), 57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
90 Paul, ‘Obliquus ductus’, p. 47; Andrew Hadfield, ‘The political world of Fulke Greville’, in Russ Leo, Katrin Röder, and Freya Sierhuis, eds., Fulke Greville and the culture of the English Renaissance (Oxford, 2018), p. 265.
91 Hexter, ‘Thomas More’, pp. 57‒8, 64. A similar argument was made in Ferguson, Articulate citizen, p. 178.
92 Hexter, ‘Thomas More’, p. 65. Similar ground was trodden five years later in an article by Dominic Baker-Smith, with fewer jokes: ‘“A fool among knaves”: the humanist dilemma of counsel’, Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies, 1 (1983), pp. 1‒9.
93 Paul, ‘Obliquus ductus’, pp. 50‒1.
94 Walzer, Arthur, ‘Rhetoric of counsel in Thomas Elyot's Pasquil the Playne’, Rhetorica, 30 (2012), pp. 1‒21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walzer, Arthur, ‘The rhetoric of counsel and Thomas Elyot's Of the knowledge which maketh a wise man’, Philosophy & Rhetoric, 45 (2012), pp. 24‒45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alistair Fox, ‘Sir Thomas Elyot and the humanist dilemma’, in Alistair Fox and John Guy, eds., Reassessing the Henrician age: humanism, politics and reform, 1500‒1550 (Oxford, 1986); Christine M. Knaack, ‘Law, counsel, and commonwealth: languages of power in the early English Reformation’ (Ph.D. thesis, York, 2015), ch. 2.
95 Blair Worden, The sound of virtue: Philip Sidney's Arcadia and Elizabethan politics (New Haven, CT, 1996), p. 151.
96 Alice Hunt, ‘Marian political allegory: John Heywood's The spider and the fly’, in Pincombe and Shrank, eds., Oxford handbook of Tudor literature, p. 349. On this poem, see most recently Greg Walker, John Heywood: comedy and survival in Tudor England (Oxford, 2020), ch. 14.
97 Lupić, Subjects of advice, pp. 4, 14, 15, 171.
98 Ibid., pp. 3‒4, 6, 113.
99 J. R. R. Tolkein, The two towers: being the second part of The lord of the rings (London, 1954), p. 126.
100 Lupić, Subjects of advice, p. 6.
101 Guy, ‘Rhetoric of counsel’, p. 289; Patrick Collinson, ‘The downfall of Archbishop Grindal and its place in Elizabethan political and ecclesiastical history’, in Godly People, p. 381.
102 Thomas Wyatt, ‘Mine own John Poyntz’, in Emrys Jones, ed., The new Oxford book of sixteenth century verse (Oxford, 1991), p. 90.
103 E.g. Anon., Here begynneth the enterlude of Johan the Evangelyst (1550), sig. B4v.
104 Andy Wood, The 1549 rebellions and the making of modern England (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 155–64. Jonathan McGovern, ‘Communication and counterinsurgency under the Tudors, from the Lincolnshire rebellion to the Northern rising’ (Ph.D. thesis, York, 2019), p. 5 n. 23. There was also the legal consideration that, theoretically, the king could do no wrong.
105 Nicholas Vincent, ‘King John's evil counsellors (act. 1208‒1214)’, ODNB Online.
106 Michael Prestwich, Plantagenet England, 1225‒1360 (Oxford, 2005), p. 36; Henry F. T. Marsh, ‘Richard II's rejection of counsel in the Westminster Chronicle and Thomas Walsingham's Chronica maiora’, in Erik S. Kooper and Sjoerd Levelt, eds., The medieval chronicle 13 (Leiden, 2020), p. 211.
107 Steven Gunn, Henry VII's new men and the making of Tudor England (Oxford, 2016), p. 3.
108 Peter Lake, Bad Queen Bess? Libels, secret histories and the politics of publicity in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2016), ch. 14; Peter Lake, How Shakespeare put politics on the stage: power and succession in the history plays (New Haven, CT, 2016), p. 3 and passim.
109 Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, Henry VIII (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1875), IV, no. 1318.
110 Blair Worden, ‘Favourites on the English stage’, in J. H. Elliott and L. W. B. Brockliss, eds., The world of the favourite (New Haven, CT, 1999); Walker, Reading literature historically, p. 52. See also Curtis Perry, Literature and favouritism in early modern England (Cambridge, 2009).
111 One of my undergraduate students, Chen Ziming, included a discussion of this subject in his end-of-term paper.
112 William Cecil, A memorial presented to Queen Elizabeth, against Her Majesty's being engross'd by any particular favourite (1714), p. 14.
113 Millstone, Noah, ‘Evil counsel: the Proposition to bridle the impertinency of parliament and the critique of Caroline government in the late 1620s’, Journal of British Studies, 50 (2011), pp. 813‒39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coast, David, ‘Speaking for the people in early modern England’, Past & Present, 244 (2019), p. 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
114 Frances Donaldson, Edward VIII (Philadelphia, PA, 1975), p. 355.
115 Polydore Vergil, Proverbiorum libellus (1509), fo. 39r. It originated in Gellius, Attic nights, IV.5.
116 Rose, ‘Kingship and counsel’, p. 49; Paul, Counsel and command, pp. 16‒26.
117 Colclough, David, ‘Parrhesia: the rhetoric of free speech in early modern England’, Rhetorica, 17 (1999), pp. 177‒212CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lupić, Subjects of advice, ch. 5. Michel Foucault can be credited with arousing modern scholars’ interest in parrhesia: see, e.g., Michel Foucault, Fearless speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles, CA, 2001).
118 Guy, ‘Rhetoric of counsel’, pp. 297‒8. This had long been the case: King Æthelred II, defeated by the Danish in the early eleventh century, was given the epithet ‘unraed’ (no counsel) by later chroniclers, implying that this was the cause of his misfortune.
119 Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, pageantry and early Tudor policy (Oxford, 1969), p. 358; David Rundle, ‘“Not so much praise as precept”: Erasmus, Panegyric, and the Renaissance art of teaching princes’, in Y. L. Too and N. Livingstone, eds., Pedagogy and power: rhetorics of classical learning (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 148–69.
120 It is likely that Crankshaw's forthcoming Proceedings of the privy council will make a definitive contribution to this subject.
121 Holmes, P. J., ‘The last Tudor great councils’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), p. 16Google Scholar; S. J. Gunn, Early Tudor government (Basingstoke, 1995), p. 49. For Anglo-Saxon great councils, see Patrick Wormald, ‘The age of Offa and Alcuin’, in James Campbell, Eric John, and Patrick Wormald, eds., The Anglo-Saxons (Ithaca, NY, 1982), pp. 126–7.
122 H. G. Koenigsberger, George L. Mosse, and G. Q. Bowler, eds., Europe in the sixteenth century (2nd edn, Harlow, 1989), p. 284.
123 G. A. Lemasters, ‘The privy council in the reign of Mary’ (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1971), p. 107.
124 Raven, Matt, ‘Magnate counsel and parliament, c. 1340‒1376: the place of the Lords in the era of the Commons’, Parliamentary History, 38 (2019), p. 309CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Janet Coleman, ‘A culture of political counsel…’, in Cesare Cuttica and Glenn Burgess, eds., Monarchism and absolutism in early modern Europe (Abingdon, 2012), p. 22; J. E. A. Jolliffe, Angevin kingship (2nd edn, London, 1963), ch. 8.
125 Thomas Smith, De republica Anglorum (1583), pp. 34–5, 44.
126 It retained another minor, residual counselling function in the form of speeches addressed to the monarch, but this was not an efficient way of conducting serious business: see McGovern, Jonathan, ‘The presentation of the Speaker of the Commons in Tudor parliaments: pageantry, persuasion and management’, Parliamentary History, 39 (2020), pp. 364, 374‒6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seaward, ‘The parliamentary way of counsel’, p. 86.
127 Alford, Stephen, ‘Politics and political history in the Tudor century’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), pp. 538‒9Google Scholar; McLaren, Political culture, pp. 138‒9.
128 Walters, John, ‘John Donne's sermons: counsel and the politics of the dynamic middle’, English Literary Renaissance, 50 (2020), pp. 391‒416CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
129 Peter Lake, ‘“The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I” (and the fall of Archbishop Grindal) revisited’, in John F. McDiarmid, ed., The monarchical republic of early modern England: essays in response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot, 2008), p. 142. The same passage is discussed in Collinson, Patrick, ‘If Constantine, then also Theodosius: St Ambrose and the integrity of the Elizabethan Ecclesia Anglicana’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30 (1979), p. 217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
130 Collinson, ‘Downfall of Grindal’, pp. 376–7; Patrick Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583: the struggle for a reformed church (London, 1979), ch. 13.
131 Peter E. McCullough, Sermons at court: politics and religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean preaching (Cambridge, 1998), ch. 2, p. 65.
132 H. G. Richardson, ‘The English coronation oath’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 23 (1941), pp. 131‒2; J. R. Maddicott, The origins of the English parliament, 924–1327 (Oxford, 2010), pp. 2, 36, 99; Paul Brand, ‘Henry II and the creation of the English common law’, in Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent, eds., Henry II: new interpretations (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 229‒30; B. Wilkinson, The later middle ages in England, 1216‒1485 (London, 1969), p. 134; F. W. Maitland, The constitutional history of England (Cambridge, 1919), pp. 60‒1.
133 Charles O. Hucker, ‘Ming government’, in Denis C. Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote, eds., The Cambridge history of China, VIII (Cambridge, 1998), p. 50.
134 John Fortescue, De laudibus legum angliae: a treatise in commendation of the laws of England (Cincinnati, OH, 1874), p. 232.
135 Jean Bodin, On sovereignty: four chapters from the six books of the commonwealth, ed. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge, 1992), p. 21. For the passage in the original French version, see Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la république (Paris, 1576), p. 138. But for royal pressure on parliament, see George Bernard, Who ruled Tudor England: paradoxes of power (London, 2021), pp, 82–3.
136 Bush, M. L., ‘The Act of Proclamations: a reinterpretation’, American Journal of Legal History, 27 (1983), pp. 33–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This article also summarizes earlier work on the subject by E. R. Adair and G. R. Elton. For more on delegated legislation, see John Baker, The Oxford history of the laws of England, VI (Oxford, 2003), pp. 82–3.
137 B. Wilkinson, Constitutional history of England in the fifteenth century (London, 1964), 195.
138 Jonathan McGovern, ‘Was Elizabethan England really a monarchical republic?’, Historical Research, 92 (2019), p. 524; A. F. Pollard, ed., Tudor tracts, 1532–1588 (London, 1903), p. 175.
139 McGovern, Jonathan, ‘The development of the privy council oath in Tudor England’, Historical Research, 93 (2020), p. 285CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
140 Lemasters, ‘Privy council in the reign of Mary’, p. 1.
141 Carpenter, Struggle for mastery, p. 293; John Guy, ‘Monarchy and counsel: models of the state’, in Patrick Collinson, ed., The sixteenth century, 1485‒1603 (Oxford, 2002), p. 122.
142 Medieval and Renaissance thinkers distinguished between a tyrant ‘out of defect of title’ (i.e. a usurper) and a tyrant ‘with respect to actions’ (i.e. a cruel despot). The humanist formulation about an uncounselled king implied that a king would naturally become the latter if not restrained by counsel: it did not consider the possibility that he might be restrained equally well by constitutional machinery. See d'Entrèves, Alexander P., ‘Legality and legitimacy’, Review of Metaphysics, 16 (1963), p. 687Google Scholar.
143 Edward Gibbon, The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, III (London, 1776), p. 636.
144 McGovern, ‘Monarchical republic’, p. 526. This article slightly overstates the queen's independent authority.
145 It had, however, been possible to apply the royal signature with a stamp since at least as far back as the reign of Henry VI, a practice followed intermittently under the Tudors. See Bertram Wolffe, Henry VI (new edn, New Haven, CT, 2001), p. 88; Elton, Tudor revolution in government, p. 281; Laura Flannigan, ‘Signed, stamped, and sealed: delivering royal justice in early sixteenth-century England’, Historical Research, 94 (2021), pp. 267–81; TNA, SP 10/9, fo. 4r. Note that the signet, originally a personal royal seal, had its own office by the fifteenth century and was held in our period by the principal secretary. See Angela Andreani, The Elizabethan secretariat and the Signet Office: the production of State Papers, 1590‒1596 (Abingdon, 2017), p. 175.
146 Park, ed., Nugae antiquae, I, pp. 169, 175‒6.
147 McGovern, ‘Garden plot’, p. 751.
148 Smith, De republica Anglorum, p. 43; David Potter, ‘Foreign policy’, in MacCulloch, ed., Reign of Henry VIII, p. 101. John Aylmer thought differently: see G. R. Elton, The Tudor constitution: documents and commentary (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1982), p. 16.
149 Elton, Tudor constitution, p. 88. For advice tendered to the queen in this regard, see Wallace T. MacCaffrey, The shaping of the Elizabethan regime: Elizabethan politics, 1558–1572 (Princeton, NJ, 1968), pp. 41–2.
150 See, e.g., Doran, Monarchy and matrimony. Henry VIII's will stipulated that Mary and Elizabeth could not accede to the throne if they had taken a husband without the assent of the (Edwardian) privy council: this clause does not count as an exception to the principle, since it only regulated their conduct as princesses: see Thomas Rymer, ed., Foedera, XV (London, 1713), 113 (summarized in Letters and papers, XXI (2), no. 634).
151 Scard, Margaret, ‘The Elizabethan nobility: a recount and a reassessment of Elizabeth's reasons for creating noblemen’, History, 106 (2021), pp. 41–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John Impey, The practice of the office of sheriff and under sheriff (4th edn, London, 1817), p. 8.
152 Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, MS L.a.97, fo. 1r.
153 Susan Doran, ‘The queen’, in Susan Doran and Norman Jones, eds., The Elizabethan world (Abingdon, 2011), p. 44.
154 For one example out of very many, see MacCaffrey, The shaping of the Elizabethan regime, p. 210.
155 See, e.g., Kewes, Paulina, ‘Henry Savile's Tacitus and the politics of Roman history in late Elizabethan England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 74 (2011), p. 545CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The most famous appeal to the concept of arcana imperii is in Charles I's answer to the Nineteen Propositions (1642).
156 W. S. Holdsworth, ‘The prerogative in the sixteenth century’, Columbia Law Review, 21 (1921), pp. 554–71; Gunn, Early Tudor government, p. 189.
157 33 Hen. VIII, c. 21, §3; Journal of the House of Lords (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1767), I, pp. 176, 264.
158 Norman Wilding and Philip Laundy, eds., An encyclopaedia of parliament (4th edn, London, 1972), p. 655.
159 Journal of the House of Lords, II, p. 142.
160 Elton, Parliament of England, p. 124; G. R. Elton, ‘Parliament in the sixteenth century: functions and fortunes’, in Studies in Tudor and Stuart politics and government, III (Cambridge, 1983), p. 180.
161 Eric Ives, ‘Henry VIII: the political perspective’, in MacCulloch, ed., Reign of Henry VIII, p. 14.
162 Susan Doran, Elizabeth I and her circle (Oxford, 2015), pp. 221‒2; Park, ed., Nugae antiquae, I, p. 358.
163 TNA, SP 14/190, fos. 133r–133v.
164 D. E. Hoak, The king's council in the reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 1976), p. 140.
165 Lemasters, ‘Privy council in the reign of Mary’, pp. 123–9; Ann Weikel, ‘The Marian council revisited’, in Jennifer Loach and Robert Tittler, eds., The mid-Tudor polity, c. 1540–1560 (London, 1980), pp. 56–9.
166 Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes, ‘The earlier Elizabethan succession question revisited’, in Doubtful and dangerous: the question of succession in late Elizabethan England (Manchester, 2014).
167 BL, Add. MS 48027, fos. 636r–636v; Paul E. J. Hammer, The polarisation of Elizabethan politics: the political career of Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 59; Rose, ‘William Davison’, p. 77. William Davison, who became the scapegoat, was only briefly imprisoned, and he never paid a fine of 10,000 marks imposed by Star Chamber, so one wonders whether Elizabeth was in on the whole thing: Wernham, R. B., ‘The disgrace of William Davison’, HER, 46 (1931), pp. 632‒6Google Scholar.
168 Christopher Haigh, Elizabeth I (London, 1988), pp. 69–70.
169 G. R. Elton, ‘King or minister? The man behind the Henrician Reformation’, in Studies in Tudor and Stuart politics and government, I (Cambridge, 1974); G. W. Bernard, ‘Elton's Cromwell’, in Power and politics in Tudor England (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 117–23; Wolffe, Henry VI, p. xix. For an extended demonstration of Henry VIII's importance in directing policy, see G. W. Bernard, The King's reformation: Henry VIII and the remaking of the English church (New Haven, CT, 2005).
170 Hennessy, Peter, ‘What are prime ministers for?’, Journal of the British Academy, 2 (2014), p. 214Google Scholar.
171 For a defence of constitutional history, see Orr, D. Alan, ‘A prospectus for a “new” constitutional history of early modern England’, Albion, 36 (2004), pp. 430‒50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
172 Joanne Paul, ‘Sovereign council or counseled sovereign: the Marian conciliar compromise’, in Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte, eds., The birth of a queen: essays on the quincentenary of Mary I (New York, NY, 2016).
173 Lemasters, ‘Privy council in the reign of Mary’, p. 103.
174 The ‘new political history’ is defined in Mears, Natalie, ‘Courts, courtiers and culture in Tudor England’, Historical Journal, 46 (2003), pp. 703–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
175 Flannigan, ‘Signed, stamped, and sealed’, pp. 271–9; Andreani, Elizabethan secretariat; Malcolm Vale, Henry V: the conscience of a king (New Haven, CT, 2016). One also awaits Crankshaw's Proceedings of the privy council, mentioned earlier. I might also mention my own forthcoming monograph The Tudor sheriff: a study in early modern administration.
176 For the new administrative history in medieval studies, see John Sabapathy, Officers and accountability in medieval England, 1170–1300 (Oxford, 2014), p. 19.
177 McGovern, ‘Monarchical republic’, p. 523.
178 Skinner, Quentin, ‘Sir Geoffrey Elton and the practice of history’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 7 (1997), p. 313CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
