Dissing the Monarchical Republic

peter lake's bad queen bess? is part of his exploration of the early modern public sphere, now extended into the propaganda wars waged between Elizabeth's regime and its Catholic critics and enemies. The book, which began life as the 2011 Ford lectures at Oxford, begins in the 1560s with the publicity for and against Mary Stuart's claim to the English throne and the Treatise of Treasons of 1572. Next, it takes up the Anjou Match and Leicester's Commonwealth and the birth of what Lake calls "the Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I." Conceptually, this leads into a chapter on what Lake terms "Burghley's commonwealth" and the struggle of ideas that surrounded the bond of association and its aftermath, focusing on Thomas Bilson's entertaining True Difference between Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion of 1585. Rejecting the monarchical republic as a construction of a circle of Protestants around Burghley, Lake suggests that it was an invention of "moderate Puritans," not a real thing. The book ends in the 1590s with the "tragicomic fate" (449) of Dr. Lopez, who was executed for plotting to assassinate Elizabeth in a moment of anti-Spanish propaganda launched by the Earl of Essex.

Through each phase, Lake concentrates on "public politics," which he defines as the "ideological politics of pitch-making," sometimes very limited in audience, but often aimed at a "promiscuously general" public (9). Public politics occurred in print, in manuscript, in the theater, in gossip—anywhere attempts at influencing perception were made. Because they were political, they were not noisily confessional. They were cooler, trying to convince those who could be convinced, exploiting anxieties about secular issues. But because they were also about power, they looped back to the confessional positions being defended. One of the best things about this book is Lake's ability to see how his authors were using their normative claims to justify themselves with "politique" polemics (5). In short, religion and politics were in dialogue, but even contemporaries had a hard time distinguishing between them. When Burghley insisted that the state executed no one for religion, was he making a religious or political argument?

Concentrating on the Catholic "libels," like Leicester's Commonwealth, and the regime's responses, Lake contends that the political world portrayed by the Catholics cut close to the bone of Elizabethan political reality—hence, "Bad Queen Bess" and her even worse confederate, Lord Burghley. Burghley emerges, seemingly against Lake's will, as the main protagonist. He it is who manages the regime's defense, writing some of the polemics himself and commissioning others to write them. Sometimes he wrote in defense, and sometimes he took the offensive, broadcasting Elizabeth's preferred version of reality in forms that ranged from direct propaganda to parliamentary laws and royal proclamations.

When it comes to Lord Burghley, Lake often uses language that his Catholic libelers would have approved, such as "Burghley and his mates," Burghley's "kitchen cabinet," and other dismissive descriptions. But what Lake is describing is the functioning of a well-managed team effort to keep people on Elizabeth's side. Lake points out that this propaganda was protecting the power of Burghley and his "mates," without noting that Elizabeth's power depended on it.

But what if Elizabeth died? The historiography has taught us to see a "monarchical republic" lurking just beneath the surface of such efforts as the bond of association. Lake definitively rejects this interpretation: "it seems a bridge too far to claim that Elizabethan England was in any meaningful sense actually a monarchical republic" (472). The responses, for instance, to Leslie's defense of Mary Stuart's claim to the throne are decidedly unrepublican, based more on English history and law than the Roman republic. Ironically, Lake finds that the last defender of monarchical republicanism was Robert Parsons, whose Conference about the Next Succession claimed England had an elective monarchy, prompting James VI to refute him in print.

Lake...