Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I by Peter Lake (review)

Peter Lake's new study of Elizabethan politico-religious conflicts extends both his recent efforts to relocate Catholic texts and culture at the center of early modern English historical studies and his techniques of reading literary and polemical texts as historical evidence. Lake examines the ongoing dialogue between, on the one hand, Latin and vernacular Catholic texts and, on the other, Elizabethan Protestant polemics: despite their common use of paranoid, conspiracy-obsessed discourse, they highlight the national and international. political and religious stakes involved in such subjects as the mixed monarchy, religious persecution or toleration, the succession question, the uncertain boundary between Church and State, foreign intervention for religious or political reasons, and papal temporal (and deposing) power. Lake focuses on several crisis moments from the late 1560s through the early 1590s, highlighting the texts generated by the Northern Rebellion (1569) and the prospective match of the Duke of Norfolk with Mary, Queen of Scots; Queen Elizabeth's negotiations for a royal marriage with the French Catholic Duke of Anjou; the conspiracies and assassination plots associated with the Scottish queen; the 1588 Spanish Armada and its aftermath; and the resurgence of Catholic polemic in the early 1590s following new anti-Catholic legislation.

Departing somewhat from ordinary historiographical procedures, Lake devotes a lot of space to the close examination of each of the propagandistic texts he has chosen—not only summarizing what is said in them, but also including a very large. number of quotes in order to "animate and inhabit imaginatively, certain sorts of Catholic political thought" (p. 4): he enters the mindset of the authors he discusses and ventriloquizes their voices, repeatedly postponing critical analysis. He argues that the Catholic texts pioneered the kinds of political critique that were elaborated throughout the seventeenth century and that, without them, our understanding of Elizabethan politics is distorted.

William Cecil, Lord Burghley, emerges as the main shaper and defender of the English Protestant state, usually hiding behind other authors (such as his client Thomas Norton) or the pose of anonymity to produce answers to Catholic libels and critiques of the Elizabethan regime. "Bad Queen Bess" is not really the focus of the book, since she is the explicit target only in the most radical of the Catholic pamphlets. Most of the Catholic texts, addressing religious and political moderates, eschewed religious controversy and directed their attack on those who served the Queen. Though Lake (rightly) identifies Leicester's Commonwealth. (The copy of a letter written by a Master of Art. [1584]) as "one of the great political tracts of the early modern period" (p. 116), a masterpiece of Catholic propaganda employing the "evil counsellor" trope to criticize the Earl of Leicester as a Machiavellian villain, most of the other tracts were aimed at Burghley (and other agents of the regime). Lake criticizes the notion that, according to Patrick Collinson and others, there was an Elizabethan "monarchical republic." He acknowledges the national and international constraints under which Queen Elizabeth operated as well as the attempts of Cecil and others to use parliament and popular opinion to control her behavior, but he thinks it goes too far to characterize Elizabethan government in "republican" terms.

In an age of minimal political transparency that generated fantasies about secret Machiavellian machinations, "secret histories" and libels could fill the vacuum, the space Lake carefully explores in this important study. He makes two interesting points about the uses of media by both Catholic and Protestant polemicists: first, that the Catholic texts written in Latin (such as Nicholas Sander's viciously libelous De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani. [1585]), addressed primarily to a Continental audience, were more politically radical and hostile to the English Queen than the ones presented in English, and, second, that, largely because of the limits of what Queen Elizabeth would tolerate, some responses...