The great theme of Elizabethan political history in recent decades has been the reconstruction of political culture. Many scholars have explored how Protestantism, classical republicanism, legal theory, noble traditions, and responses to the queen’s gender shaped the principles and practices of the Elizabethan elite. Their work, however, has concentrated primarily on the first half of the reign, on the regime’s establishment and survival in the face of rebellion and threatened assassination, on debates about the queen’s marriage and the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots. The 1590s constituted what John Guy has called a second reign, one with different problems and new influences, and one hitherto less explored in this vein. As the queen aged, so the succession became a pressing issue. As war with Spain dragged on, so difficult strategic decisions loomed. As supporters of the queen and bishops denounced Presbyterian agitation, so authoritarian formulations leaked into wider political debate. As French royalists justified state power against Huguenots and Leaguers alike, so the traffic in ideas from the Continent bolstered resistance theory less than in the heyday of Coligny and William the Silent. As Catholic exiles slated the queen’s councillors as cynical Machiavels and canvassed the people’s right to resist, so these alarming notions gained currency even as they were refuted. As Tacitus succeeded Cicero as a favored aid to political reflection, so brooding on corrupted courts soured injunctions to public service. As Shakespeare and others probed English history for material, so entertainment and popular political education threatened to go hand-in-hand.

Where William Cecil has stood at the center of the rediscovery of early Elizabethan political culture, Alexandra Gajda rightly places Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, at the eye of this later storm, following, but greatly refining, the suggestive work of Mervyn James. As she shows by deep reading in the manuscript and printed remains of the age, from correspondence and policy tracts to histories, poems, and plays, contemporary debate on the earl’s career suggests that there was much more to it than a few swaggering campaigns and a failed rising. His enthusiasm for vigorous war against Spain focused not only Protestant anti-popery, but also the denunciation of Philip II’s tyranny framed by the émigré thinkers he patronized, Antonio Pérez and Alberico Gentili. His favor to both Calvinist Reformers and Catholics eager to negotiate toleration matched the irenicism of James VI, his own preferred candidate to succeed the queen. His conviction that enemies at court were turning Elizabeth against his efforts to serve the public good fit the widespread reading of the reign as a weak tyranny like that of Domitian or Richard II, a situation in which his friends worried that he would “speak in a highe stile” (157) to a monarch too governed by fearful passion to see the merits of his services. His desire to do visible good to his country, as a great nobleman of active virtues should, too easily looked like a subversive bid for popularity amid frustration at his inability to control his own reputation: as he complained in 1600, “shortley they will play me in what forms they list upon the stage” (174). Where Essex, who wrote a lost commentary on Tacitus, may have seen himself as Agricola, the annalist’s admired father-in-law, whose “manhood and fierce courage,” in the words of Sir Henry Savile, aroused the suspicions of a “jelous Souerayne” (230), others all too easily thought differently. As Essex’s friend Sir Robert Sidney noted in the margin of his copy of Tacitus, “A conning traitor wil for his treason pretend the care of his cuntreys good” (193). Such vivid depiction of the many dilemmas of Essex’s career does not solve all the puzzles of the politics of the 1590s, but illuminates many of them even as other scholars are examining them from other angles. While reason of state and the politics of history have been under discussion for some time, new work on Catholic polemic, succession debates, chivalry and noble politics, local governance and the burdens of war is appearing day by day. The second great wave of the recovery of Elizabethan political culture is well under way and this book will play an important part in it.