Bad Queen Bess? makes an important contribution to understanding the political culture of early modern England by advancing two main lines of argument: first, that Catholic thought and polemic was central, rather than peripheral, to the Protestant state established in the reign of Elizabeth, and second, that the forms, genres, and media of the exchanges between supporters and critics of the regime brought forth something akin to a public sphere, which Lake calls a “politics of publicity” or a “public politics.” From narrower disciplinary perspective, Lake addresses the concept of “monarchical republicanism” developed by Patrick Collinson and others. From a broader perspective, Lake’s attention to the intensely dialogic and often libelous exchanges of the Elizabethan moment offers a model for thinking about how a field of public discourse is constituted, both nationally and transnationally.

The book covers almost the entirety of Elizabeth’s reign through a focus on conjunctures, such as the Norfolk match and Ridolfi plot, the proposed Anjou match, the Babington plot, and the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, that foregrounded persistent issues of princely and courtly conduct, confessional allegiance and/or conflict, and dynastic succession. A chapter on French pamphlets written in the context of that nation’s confessional and dynastic conflicts, translated into English and used by the regime to indirectly address its critics, suggests the range of Lake’s investigation. The materials he excavates share a generic orientation he calls “libellous secret history” in which tropes of evil counsel, claims of tyranny and dynastic conspiracy, and potted biblical, classical, and national histories produce “a way of narrating and analyzing the course of recent history in terms of the secret manoeuvres of various political agents, all driven, despite their assertions to the contrary, by the will to power, money and status, rather than by any commitment to the (always already linked) causes of true religion and the commonweal” (5). Catholic writers promised to reveal the real operations of the regime, and the regime, officially or unofficially, answered with equally conspiratorial accounts defending itself. The effect, time and again, was to create a mutually affirming discourse despite the appearance of opposition.

An immense weight of scholarship and archival evidence underlies Lake’s discussion, demonstrated by dense paraphrases and quotations from the sixteenth-century material and extensive footnotes acknowledging indebtednesses to and disagreements with the historiographic record. Unfortunately, there is no bibliography, and tracking either the scholarly arguments or the dozens of tracts and pamphlets is difficult. The e-book version allows for keyword search—not a satisfactory substitute, as Oxford University Press surely knows. Lake himself manages the fine-grained and exhaustive discussion of his material by salting it with modern catchphrases, such as “exercising the nuclear option,” “going for the jugular,” and “wannabe courtier.” An uncanny glimpse of vituperative public discourse in the twenty-first century emerges against the ground of sixteenth-century verbosity.

The question of a public sphere or spheres significantly predating the idealized construct whose origin Habermas located in eighteenth-century England has vexed historians and cultural critics ever since the widespread translation of Habermas’s work. The essays collected by Lake and Steven Pincus in The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (2007) canvas a variety of scenarios that complicate the notion by calling attention to the active participation of agents of the state, the permeable boundaries between public and private actions and/or discourse, and shifting configurations of particular publics. Lake’s foregrounding of libelous secret histories as a narrative genre that forcefully enters the field of public discourse and confounds the possibility of rational critical debate is a crucial intervention. (Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell’s The Murder of King James I [2015] makes a similar and similarly detailed case for the importance of untruths and libels as formative elements of a public sphere well into the seventeenth century.) Lake’s assiduous research brings to attention drafts, notes, annotations—distinctly unpublic material—and shows its impact on what comes to be published in manuscript or print. He is attentive to the variety of forms that shape public discourse and their intermedial relations. Yet, writing about two unpublished manuscript tracts, he remarks that they were public despite their not reaching “the apotheosis of print” (207). The importance of manuscript circulation in early forms of the public sphere challenges any such hierarchical conception, as Noah Millstone’s very recent book, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (2016), makes clear. And the question of orality—not residual orality, but orality as a matrix of public conversation—bedevils our literate practices. Lake’s (and other historians’) favored terms for the oral—rumor and gossip—will not do; we need a more thoughtful theorization of the oral and one place to start would be with Lake’s pamphlet material, which describes a range of oral practices, often in passing, that would refine our modeling of early modern publicity.