Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (review)

This important study explores two main topics: the politics of the Elizabethan court, embracing both the making of policy and political discussion, and political debate in the Elizabethan realms. It focuses on the period when the issues of marriage and the succession were major sources of concern, and some councillors were allegedly ready to invoke 'quasi-republican ideas' in order to justify putting pressure on the queen to act in accordance with their advice. NatalieMears argues convincingly that at no stage of the reign did the privy council enjoy either a monopoly of counsel or the initiative in the making of policy. Elizabeth took advice from groups of councillors outside council meetings; from mixed groups drawn both from the ranks of the council and from outside it; and from non-councillors. Though often hesitant in face of risk, she took the leading role in making the most important decisions. The council's executive role was more important than its advisory one. The queen viewed her government as personal and absolute. Her advisers, chosen above all on the basis of trust and intimacy, were her servants. She did not feel accountable to them. Elizabeth, DrMears insists, did not use 'probouleutic' meetings of councillors (i.e., ones that discussed particular issues prior to their presentation in the council) as a means of preventing councillors from presenting a united front against her. They had been employed by previous Tudor monarchs and were a normal part of the counselling process in continental monarchies. Dr Mears believes that the councillors' predominantly positive and deferential responses to Elizabeth's queenship and readiness to accept her lead in policy-making call in question the idea that they believed England to be a 'mixed polity' in which the queen was bound to act on their advice. When, however, Natalie Mears concedes that councillors sometimes 'sought to mediate (the queen's) receipt of information, manipulated it to encourage her to make specific decisions, and criticised her refusal always to accept their advice', she makes the line dividing her position from the one she is challenging seem a pretty fine one.

Within the court, Dr Mears argues, affairs of state were the subject of lively debate outside the innermost circles. The court in turn served as a conduit for the diffusion of news into larger spheres by means of letters and word of mouth. The chapter making these arguments is, Natalie Mears recognizes, the link between the two different halves of her book, the hinge between two panels of a diptych.

The second theme of the study is the more problematic in terms both of definition and of evidence. Her starting point is John Stubbe's pamphlet against the Anjou marriage project, The Discouerie of a Gaping Gulf (1579). Mears persuasively suggests that Stubbe was impelled to write the pamphlet by his own powerful concerns rather than being commissioned or encouraged to do so by councillors hostile to the scheme, as has been argued hitherto. The strong likelihood that Stubbe wrote independently 'raised the possibility that a forum for public debate existed in Elizabethan England'. But what sort of forum? Here Mears turns to the concept of the 'public sphere', which, as defined by Jürgen Habermas, above all in his influential account of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (first published in 1962, and translated into English in 1989), has given rise to some lively recent discussion among historians. Habermas himself attributed the precocious development of the British 'public sphere' to a cluster of changes that followed the Glorious Revolution, above all, perhaps, the abolition of censorship, which (he claimed) allowed the introduction of 'rational-critical arguments' into the press, and facilitated the latter's development into a means of bringing political decisions before the public. His short section on the 'Model Case of British Development' depicts an eighteenth-century political world in which opposition to and criticism of the government were accepted facts of life. Forced to work with...