Elizabeth I and Her Circle by Susan Doran (review)

In her most recent book, Susan Doran, a prolific, wide-ranging historian of Elizabethan England, has performed a remarkable act of integrative interpretation. Surveying Elizabeth Tudor’s lifespan from birth to death, Doran organizes her narrative as an overlapping sequence — a “circle” of relationships comprising three broad groupings: kin, courtiers, and councilors. “Kin” are addressed in four opening chapters: “Parents and Siblings,” ”The Suffolk Cousins,” “Mary Queen of Scots,” and “James VI of Scotland.” The next four chapters focus on the “Courtiers”: Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester; Sir Christopher Hatton; Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex; and, in a surprising and illuminating turn, on the select group of ladies of the bedchamber and the privy chamber who attended to Elizabeth in such intimate matters as dressing her, serving her meals, and sleeping with her in her chamber. The final three chapters examine the “Councillors”: Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley; Sir Francis Walsingham; and Sir Robert Cecil.

It becomes apparent, as Doran’s narrative progresses, that these groupings are anything but mutually exclusive. Rather, they are facets of an encompassing social and political dynamic that situated well-born, propertied individuals in a network of relationships that interconnected family and monarchy. An analogy originating in classical philosophy undergirded the interconnections: a well-run state would operate like a well-run household. In Tudor England the ramifications of this linkage of family and polity are conspicuous, most notably in the vexed ongoing problem of the royal succession, in which Edward VI figures both as son to Henry VIII and brother to Mary and Elizabeth, who are both sisters and political antagonists. Mary, Queen of Scots likewise figures as Elizabeth’s second cousin and her most prominent rival for the throne. Kinship is also the factor (together with religion) that determines James VI of Scotland, Mary’s son, as the successor to the Virgin Queen. But, as Doran observes more broadly, “the family connectedness” of the “elite women” who served in Elizabeth’s bedchamber and privy chamber displays “a pattern that is equally evident when tracing the family networks of the male office-holders at court. Today we might disapprovingly brand this narrow inner circle as a nepotistic clique, but that would be anachronistic. All Renaissance courts functioned in this way” (200). Similarly, there is such extensive overlap between Doran’s groupings of “Courtiers” and “Councillors” in Elizabeth’s circle that the distinction has the force of an expository convenience only.

Of greatest significance, however, for our present-day understanding of the interconnections of family and polity in Elizabethan England is the personal, immediate character of the queen’s interactions with those individuals who comprised her close circle. Doran stresses this point at the outset of her discussion: “Sixteenth-century monarchical government operated through the interplay of individual personalities rather than through bureaucratic institutions and structures. Elizabeth’s relationships were pivotal to the substance and style of national political life in her reign” (1).

As a consequence, Doran’s narratives of Elizabeth’s one-on-one (or lightly mediated) interactions with this or that ranking personage develop as a thickly textured weave in which the personal is indistinguishable from the political because the two have become one. Every decision or action undertaken or not taken in the national or international domain by the queen raises the issue of another’s trustworthiness — whether one is speaking the truth (or manipulating or deceiving) and also whether one will be true to one’s word.

Centering the exercise of her sovereignty on issues tied to her royal prerogative — “religion, foreign affairs, dynastic marriage, and the succession” (222) — Elizabeth demanded her courtiers’ unconditional loyalty, compliance (or at least non-resistance), and prompt implementation of her will when she reached a determination or decision. She additionally required that her own concerns as England’s sovereign take absolute priority over her courtiers’ private lives and attachments as well as their state of health where the position of principal secretary or primary...