Introduction

Modern biographies characterize Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) as an author, courtier, diplomat, knight, parliamentarian, and, in the Netherlands, military commander and governor of Flushing.Footnote ¹ This study sheds new light on Sidney as the patron of pioneering legal scholarship: in the form of a manuscript treatise by John Hammond (1542–90) on Roman civil law and the broader law of nations regarding questions of jurisdiction and immunity for princes, diplomats, and magistrates. These legal topics were especially relevant to the circumstances of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1542–87), during her English captivity from 1568 to 1587, and of Bernardino de Mendoza (1540–1604), Spain’s resident ambassador at London, expelled in 1584 for political conspiracy on Mary Stuart’s behalf amid the Throckmorton Plot of 1583. Mendoza’s expulsion complemented the English regime’s policy with the previous Spanish ambassador, Guerau de Spes (d. 1572), and with Mary Stuart’s ambassador John Lesley (1527–96), bishop of Ross, both expelled from London for conspiring on her behalf in the Ridolfi Plot of 1571.Footnote ² The context of 1583, though, prompted the Privy Council of Elizabeth I (1533–1603) to commission professional legal opinions on diplomatic immunity by the Protestant Italian and French jurists Alberico Gentili (1552–1608) and Jean Hotman (1553–1636), who both defended Mendoza’s immunity from English jurisdiction and later published treatises on the privileges and responsibilities of ambassadors.Footnote ³ Both Gentili and Hotman already knew Sidney in the early 1580s, as clients of his uncle, Sir Robert Dudley (1533–88), First Earl of Leicester.Footnote ⁴ In 1585, Gentili dedicated his treatise De Legationibus (On embassies) to Sidney, lauding him as the ideal ambassador.Footnote ⁵ Gentili’s and Hotman’s commentaries on diplomatic rights by civil law and the law of nations proved seminal for theorizing international relations. Hammond’s treatise complemented their scholarship in discussing international law following the Throckmorton Plot. Its chief innovation was to address the topic of diplomatic immunity as important but ancillary to a central focus on the vexed question of royal immunity, relevant directly to Mary Stuart herself. In previous centuries, royal immunity had been taken for granted, without extensive formal analysis of the legal topic.

Hammond’s treatise aimed to define political privilege by identifying discrete realms of legal sovereignty. In this regard, it complemented the République (1576) of Jean Bodin (1530–96), although it discussed that general topic less extensively and reached a conclusion different from Bodin’s defense of absolute monarchy. Hammond wrote his treatise in English rather than in Latin, an unusual circumstance for civil-law discourse. One extant copy notes that it was originally commissioned by Sidney.Footnote ⁶ This little-known claim has been associated with Sidney’s fiction of the late 1570s and early 1580s, but the manuscript evidence requires further examination, both within the document that names Sidney and in another extant copy of Hammond’s treatise. This study reevaluates the material circumstances of these two manuscript copies, substantiating the case for Sidney’s patronage more precisely in relation to textual transmission. From that textual analysis, new perspectives arise on the legal argument itself as a response to an anonymous shorter text. The evidence connects Hammond’s argument both to Sidney as patron and to the inner regime of Elizabeth I. In considering political and personal motives for the commission and the copying of Hammond’s treatise in the mid-1580s, this study reassesses Sidney’s seemingly disparate activities from summer 1584 to summer 1585 in relation to the Parliament of 1584–85. In doing so, it argues that Sidney commissioned Hammond’s legal opinion with various factors in mind: the Throckmorton Plot and Mendoza’s diplomatic immunity; English fears of further conspiracy and prospective criminal justice against Mary Stuart following the 1584 Bond of Association and the 1585 parliamentary Act for the Queen’s Surety; the precarious state of international Protestant alliances in 1584–85; and, most importantly for Sidney, his own prospective future as a foreign magistrate.

This argument’s focus on the politics of jurisdiction in 1584–85 constitutes a shift in approach to the documentary evidence for Sidney’s legal patronage. Published surveys of Sidney as a literary patron have not mentioned Hammond or his work.Footnote ⁷ The manuscript claim for Sidney’s legal patronage was discovered in an unpublished study by Henry Woudhuysen that affirms the topic of civil law as generally relevant to Leicester’s and Sidney’s concerns with Protestant rebellion in the Netherlands of the late 1570s, observes legal language of international jurisdiction within Sidney’s Old Arcadia (1578–81), and notes the intellectual context of Gentili and Hotman in 1583 with an eye to Leicester as patron.Footnote ⁸ Subsequent biographies of Sidney have noted the Hammond connection without interpretive commentary, claiming general dates of 1585 or 1586, most recently hinting at a circumstantial relation to Sidney’s involvement with Anglo-Scottish diplomacy in summer 1585.Footnote ⁹ This emphasis on diplomacy in the mid-1580s complements the recent citation of Hammond’s treatise within a literary comparison of Gentili’s works on diplomacy and warfare with plotlines Sidney added to his incomplete New Arcadia (ca. 1583–85). That brief reference posits the important premise that legal patronage helped Sidney prepare himself intellectually for future diplomacy.Footnote ¹⁰

In building upon this idea, the present study addresses Hammond’s full argument on diplomatic immunity in relation to royal immunity, revealing its rhetorical structure as a response to an anonymous legal argument that supported the English indictment of Mary Stuart for treason. Hammond’s treatise refutes some legal premises of that anonymous argument and refines others, holding the use of civil-law sources to a high professional standard. Hammond’s pioneering discussion of royal immunity highlights diverse concepts and contexts of international law from the ancient Roman Empire to sixteenth-century Europe. Hammond’s conclusion, notably, does not defend the prospect of Mary Stuart’s indictment for English treason by any specific codified law in its own right. Rather, in the end, it concedes a natural-law right to political self-defense amid the precepts of Roman civil law and the law of nations. There Hammond’s treatise specifies political conspiracy as grounds for self-defense, while citing traditional English treason law and emphasizing the danger of defining treason too loosely. These qualifications, together with a consistent emphasis on demarcating the authority of magistrates, convey on Hammond’s part a measured consciousness of the 1584 Bond of Association and its impact on the new legal circumstances that arose in 1585 as the Act for the Queen’s Surety, regarding Privy Council jurisdiction on matters of conspiracy and treason. These perspectives on the text and context of Hammond’s treatise provide a new framework within which to assess more precisely Sidney’s motives for patronage.

Through analysis of Hammond’s treatise in this context—with an eye also to Robert Beale (1541–1601), a clerk of the Privy Council who collected a copy of it around the time of Mary Stuart’s indictment, in 1586—Sidney’s little-known parliamentary activities in 1584–85 acquire new coherence in relation to his diplomacy and other advocacy for the international Protestant cause. The manuscript evidence for Hammond’s treatise indicates a commission by Sidney and indirect reception not only by Beale but also by Sidney’s father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham (ca. 1532–90), who was Elizabeth I’s principal secretary of state, and by the queen’s chief counselor, Sir William Cecil (1521–98), Baron Burghley and lord treasurer. Burghley acted as Mary Stuart’s “nemesis,” masterminding the legal prosecutions against her in 1568 and in 1586 for political and religious reasons.Footnote ¹¹ From 1572 onward, he sought her execution, in collaboration with Walsingham and Beale.Footnote ¹² The transmission of Hammond’s legal opinion to these men in the mid-1580s signals its status as an ingredient within the Elizabethan regime’s crucible of policy and political theory. Before, during, and just after the Parliament of 1584–85, Burghley and Walsingham pursued legal and extralegal means to indict Mary Stuart for treason, while at the same time recruiting clients to formulate new political and legal theories for justifying both this campaign against the Queen of Scots and the Elizabethan regime’s anticipated military intervention in the Netherlands. These strategies within Elizabeth I’s inner circle at this crucial juncture of her reign have prompted recent historians to dub her regime a “monarchical republic.”Footnote ¹³ This context provides a new impetus for reconsidering Sidney’s own legal interests and political policies. Solicitation of an expert legal opinion need not imply agreement with its argument. Evidence gaps obscure Sidney’s precise thoughts on Mary Stuart’s legal immunity, and history precludes his views on her trial in 1586 and her execution in 1587, because he died in the Netherlands during her trial. Yet a comparison of Sidney with Hammond and Beale in the parliamentary context of 1584–85 helps shed light on how Sidney balanced international law, English statute law, political and professional expediencies in England and mainland Europe, religious ideology, and his own moral sensibilities.

This new biographical approach to Sidney and the Parliament of 1584–85 bears broader implications regarding Sidney in relation to both Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart amid diplomacy of the late 1570s and early 1580s. The currently prevailing views on Sidney and these two queens converge within a study by Blair Worden that mentions the manuscript reference to Sidney’s legal patronage as an aside to its thesis on Sidney’s fiction as topical allegory: that is, an argument for Sidney as a zealous “forward Protestant,” rooted in the biographical premise that his advocacy for defending an international Protestant cause, especially in the Netherlands, propelled him toward a consistent opposition to Elizabeth I’s policies on Mary Stuart and on a prospective English alliance with the French Duke of Anjou, Francis Valois (1555–84).Footnote ¹⁴ On Sidney and Anjou, that interpretation has been revised substantially. Amid changing European politics in 1580–81, as Anjou gained sovereignty in the Netherlands of the northern States General, Leicester’s and Sidney’s shared policy in opposing his marriage negotiations with Elizabeth I shifted remarkably toward open support for an English alliance with him, whether or not he married Elizabeth I.Footnote ¹⁵ Whatever the queen’s personal views on Anjou might have been amid their public engagement in 1581, she lavished money upon him in 1581 and 1582 as an indirect means to help sustain the rebel provinces’ Protestant identity.Footnote ¹⁶ Then and in the mid-1580s, her policy in the Netherlands complemented that of Leicester and Sidney. This revised perspective on Sidney’s policy regarding Anjou in 1578–82 prompts a reconsideration of Sidney’s policy on Mary Stuart, now including Hammond and Beale as points of reference.

In applying the revised perspective on Sidney and Elizabethan foreign policy to the case of Hammond’s treatise, this study reconsiders certain premises of Sidney biographies in recent decades: that is, a supposed loss of royal favor in 1579–80 and a conscious effort by the queen to keep Sidney at bay politically, a resulting disillusionment on Sidney’s part, and the idea that Leicester became a political liability for Sidney in the early 1580s.Footnote ¹⁷ Recent scholarship rooted in wide-ranging documentary evidence suggests otherwise. Elizabeth I’s cautious and indirect activism with the Netherlands complemented her regime’s policy of diplomacy in Germany and Denmark to monitor and promote a broad-based international Protestant cause, for which aim Sidney’s 1577 embassy to Germany proved a crucial turning point.Footnote ¹⁸ In the early 1580s, Sidney and Beale served as experts on German affairs for the Elizabethan Privy Council and for foreign emissaries seeking to build upon the work of Sidney’s 1577 embassy.Footnote ¹⁹ Elizabeth I showed consistent favor toward Sidney as a valued courtier and diplomat, especially in the early 1580s, with extraordinarily generous free financial gifts to help defray his expenses.Footnote ²⁰ Sidney’s activism for an international Protestant cause proved consistent in policy from the late 1570s through the mid-1580s. In 1584–85, this study argues, Sidney’s foreign policy cohered with that of Elizabeth I regarding Scotland, France, and the Netherlands. Based on the politics of mainland Europe in these years, she and her regime prepared for Leicester to lead open military aid to the Dutch rebel provinces. Sidney’s Scottish diplomacy of 1585 supported his queen’s policy for securing a Protestant English succession, in favor of an alliance with Mary Stuart’s son, King James VI (1566–1625). In 1584–85, there is no evidence for direct involvement by Sidney in the campaign of Burghley and Walsingham against Mary Stuart, despite Sidney’s circumstance of living in Walsingham’s household. When Sidney commissioned Hammond’s treatise on international law and the authority of magistrates—amid royal favor and loyalist devotion to the international Protestant cause, including efforts to secure a Protestant English succession—his primary concern was not his father-in-law’s campaign with Burghley against Mary Stuart but, rather, a strategic preparation for his own anticipated service under Leicester as a foreign magistrate in the Netherlands. Sidney acquainted himself with an expert legal opinion on complex issues of international jursidiction in 1584–85 for his own sake as a prospective governor in the Dutch rebel provinces, expecting that soon he would wield legal authority and military command at a crucial site of European political and religious conflict.

Manuscript Evidence: Dates and Contexts

Hammond’s treatise on international jurisdiction survives in two known manuscript witnesses, both scribal copies in distinct English secretary scripts (with Latin quotations in italic script) and both connected to the Elizabethan Privy Council. The copy that mentions Sidney resides in the British Library within a volume of Beale’s papers containing many documents relevant to Mary Stuart.Footnote ²¹ At the end of this scribal copy’s text, prior to a final secretarial docket that Beale provided for the document as a whole, there appears a separate note in Beale’s hand: “This was written as I haue herd by Doctor Hamond: at the request of Sir Philipp Sidney” (fig. 1).Footnote ²² A final postscript in Beale’s hand then reaffirms Hammond’s authorship without qualification (fig. 2), as does a marginal note in his hand at the beginning of this copy (fig. 3). Although Beale admits he learned of Hammond’s authorship and Sidney’s commission secondhand (“as I haue herd”), his clear confidence in the authorship claim gives reason to infer a similar confidence in his source of knowledge for the claim of Sidney’s patronage. Beale’s final docket, which reaffirms Hammond’s authorship, dates the legal document within the topical context of Mary Stuart’s treason trial: “Written before the going of the lordes and other her Majesty’s Commissioners to Fotheringay” (fig. 2). Mary Stuart arrived at Fotheringhay, Northamptonshire, on 25 September 1586; the commissioners of her legal trial (consisting of Privy Counsellors and selected nobles) went there on 11 October 1586, and Beale traveled there from London to deliver the verdict of her guilt for treason on 19 November 1586.Footnote ²³ Beale’s language implies that Hammond’s treatise was “Written” sometime prior to 11 October 1586 and that Beale’s scribal copy was produced near that time. Beale’s other postscript referred to the work’s original patron as “Sir Philipp Sidney” (fig. 1) sometime after Sidney was knighted, in January 1583.Footnote ²⁴ So, from Beale’s notations alone, his scribal copy and probably Hammond’s composition can be dated within the mid-1580s.

Figure 1. Beale’s ascriptions of authorship to Hammond and original commission to Sidney. BL, Add. MS 48027 (Yelverton MS 31), fol. 396^v (detail). Courtesy of the British Library.

Figure 2. Beale’s title and docket for his copy of Hammond’s treatise. BL, Add. MS 48027 (Yelverton MS 31), fol. 397^v. Courtesy of the British Library.

Figure 3. Beale’s marginal note on Hammond’s authorship. BL, Add. MS 48027 (Yelverton MS 31), fol. 380^r (detail). Courtesy of the British Library.

The other extant copy of Hammond’s legal treatise, preserved at Kew in the National Archives among state papers pertaining to Mary Stuart, bears further witness to the text’s transmission history within the Elizabethan regime.Footnote ²⁵ The Calendar of the State Papers relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots provides an abridged modern rendition of this document’s text, citing it as a copy “in the hand of Burghley’s clerk” and imposing a date of October 1586.Footnote ²⁶ Though collected in the nineteenth century among papers on Mary Stuart from 1586, the document itself bears no date. According to current specialists on the secretariats of Burghley and Walsingham, this manuscript’s handwriting does not fit that of their senior secretaries, but the document almost certainly reached the desk of Walsingham, who likely shared it with Burghley.Footnote ²⁷ Its contents include Hammond’s treatise and a short anonymous argument against Mary Stuart’s legal immunity within England, to which Hammond’s work responds. Both items in this volume are written in the same scripts, copied together by the same hand as two discrete documents. Clear evidence for this division appears in the manuscript’s scribal and secretarial notations. At the foot of the third page, the initial argument’s last sentence ends with a mark indicating the conclusion of a paragraph (fig. 4). Then, at the head of the next page (the verso side of the same manuscript leaf), an enlarged upper margin boasts an ascription of authorship for a new section of the manuscript, by “Doctor Hammond” (fig. 5). What follows is a full copy of Hammond’s legal opinion.Footnote ²⁸

Figure 4. Conclusion of anonymous legal argument. TNA, SP 53, vol. 20, fol. 72^r (doc. 23, p. 3) (detail). Courtesy of the National Archives.

Figure 5. Beginning of Hammond’s treatise. TNA, SP 53, vol. 20, fol. 72^v (doc. 23, p. 4) (detail). Courtesy of the National Archives.

The abridged and modernized edition of this manuscript in the Calendar of State Papers elides all structural division and thus also obscures the authorship, textual parameters, and rhetorical structure of Hammond’s treatise.Footnote ²⁹ That Calendar record understandably misled the generally excellent British Library catalogue of Beale’s papers within the Yelverton collection, which deems Beale’s copy of Hammond’s text incomplete by three pages.Footnote ³⁰ Rather, both manuscript witnesses to Hammond’s treatise contain complete texts. The copy in the National Archives, in contrast with Beale’s copy, presents Hammond’s text within its rhetorical context. This manuscript probably was produced more directly for Walsingham than for Burghley, given its location among the secretary of state’s papers rather than with Burghley’s papers in the Lansdowne collection or at Hatfield House.Footnote ³¹ In general terms, it is safe to infer that this copy was generated for the purpose of Mary Stuart’s treason trial.

Collation of the two textual witnesses for Hammond’s treatise suggests that the copy owned by Beale derived from that of Walsingham and Burghley (probably consulted by both). Both scribal copies are neat and professional, with little variation. Yet when the copy from Walsingham’s papers corrects its own language, the text of Beale’s copy tends to follow those corrections. For example, toward the beginning of Hammond’s commentary, “pointe argument” becomes “argument.”Footnote ³² The most significant instance of this pattern occurs within a crucial portion of Hammond’s conclusion, analyzed below. Exceptions to this scribal trend prove minor in content. This inference of transmission from Walsingham or Burghley to Beale complements Beale’s note indicating a secondhand knowledge of the legal treatise’s authorship by Hammond and its commission by Sidney. Although the material evidence provides no direct commentary on the context in which Sidney commissioned Hammond’s treatise, a likely scenario comes into focus through working backward from these records of its transmission history with an eye to biographical and political contexts.

Most likely, Walsingham procured a copy of Hammond’s treatise for himself and Burghley from Sidney’s papers, then informed Beale of the legal document’s original production, probably while supplying his own text of Hammond’s work for copying in 1586–87. Beale was a clerk of the Privy Council and a trusted client of Burghley and Walsingham. He had been Walsingham’s close political associate for more than a decade; the two men’s wives were sisters, and they both owned homes in London and in Barn Elms.Footnote ³³ Sidney had married Walsingham’s daughter in September 1583 and lived for the first two years of his marriage in Walsingham’s houses at London and Barn Elms.Footnote ³⁴ This living arrangement helped assuage Sidney’s perennial debts, while also keeping him near the heart of diplomatic intelligence.Footnote ³⁵ One can be sure that Sidney and Walsingham regularly discussed the matter of Mary Stuart’s captivity during this time. Walsingham would have had access to Sidney’s papers, including Hammond’s legal opinion, before and after his son-in-law’s death in mid-October 1586. In that year, Walsingham discovered Mary Stuart’s complicity in the Babington Plot and thus had more motivation than ever to collect the anonymous argument against her and Hammond’s response, then share them with Beale as material relevant for the legal prosecution. This scenario would help explain Beale’s docket connecting his copy of Hammond’s text to the context of Mary Stuart’s trial, including its statement on a terminus ad quem of October 1586. Thus, by this biographical logic, the manuscript transmission of Hammond’s legal opinion would have proceded from Hammond to Sidney, then from Sidney’s papers to Walsingham and Burghley, and then from them to Beale.

The full docket for Beale’s copy of Hammond’s treatise clarifies Beale’s own complicity in the political agenda of Burghley and Walsingham against Mary Stuart, while also framing the questions of context and intentions for Sidney’s legal patronage. At the end of the document, after Beale’s postscript mentioning Hammond and Sidney, he describes the treatise as follows: “A defense of the Roman Civill lawe, and of the Generall lawe of the world, vntruly surmised to fauour the Impunity of Mary late Quene of Scottes, not withstanding her notorious, and horrible treasons against the Queen’s most excellent Majesty” (fig. 2). Here Beale conveys his own political antagonism toward Mary Stuart’s conspiratorial activities, which he deems “notorious, and horrible treasons” against Elizabeth I. His language in assessing Hammond’s treatise, though, proves more ambiguous. He defines its legal foundations clearly: by “the Generall lawe of the world,” Beale means the law of nations (ius gentium). Yet the adjective “surmised” could point in two directions with “defense” as its referent. If Beale means that Hammond’s treatise construes its own argument in favor of Mary Stuart’s legal immunity from English jurisdiction, then the wording of this docket imposes a distance between Hammond’s treatise and Beale’s reception of it. On the other hand, if Beale means “vntruly surmised [by others],” then this description implies an agreement with Hammond on Beale’s part, contrasted with what unnamed other people have supposed Hammond’s argument to be.Footnote ³⁶ Either way, the language and tone of Beale’s docket convey his political agenda of legally indicting the former Queen of Scots for treason. He viewed her as a threat to the Elizabethan regime and to England’s Protestant identity.

As early as 1572, Beale had impressed upon Burghley and Walsingham various political and religious imperatives for an aggressive policy seeking not only Mary Stuart’s exclusion from the English succession but also her execution.Footnote ³⁷ In this copy of Hammond’s treatise, Beale penned his glosses on authorship, patronage, and a terminus ad quem during or after Mary Stuart’s trial, probably in late 1586 or early 1587. If written in 1586, his adjective in the title “Mary late Quene of Scottes” would mean “formerly”; if written after 8 February 1587, it would indicate her death. In either context, Beale’s titular docket for his copy of Hammond’s treatise conveys a consciousness of debate over its argument’s implications regarding Mary Stuart, whether the disagreement be his own with Hammond or, instead, others’ with him and Hammond. From the analysis of Hammond’s treatise below, it can be inferred that Beale probably condoned Hammond’s argument and would have valued it as a resource for defending the Elizabethan regime’s execution of Mary Stuart. This motive could partly explain Beale’s choice to collect Hammond’s treatise alone, without the shorter and less sophisticated anonymous argument to which it responds. Beale’s glosses claim that Sidney commissioned Hammond’s argument sometime earlier than when Beale’s copy was made. These perspectives on the work’s transmission history provide a useful framework for asking, when did Sidney seek Hammond’s legal opinion? For what purposes did he do so? To what extents did his motives for patronage and his interpretation of Hammond’s treatise cohere with or diverge from Beale’s later investment in collecting a copy of it?

Though these questions about Sidney’s legal patronage cannot be answered with certainty, they can be contextualized more precisely amid politics of jurisdiction involved with the Parliament of 1584–85 in relation to Mary Stuart. This Parliament proved momentous in issuing two statutes that redefined English treason law. The 1585 Act for the Queen’s Surety defined as treasonous any conspiracy against Elizabeth I. A complementary statute of 1585 targeted English Jesuits and their affiliates as traitors to the Crown. Both laws emerged as matters of national defense in reaction to the failed Throckmorton Plot of 1583. The Act for the Queen’s Surety was conceived largely in relation to an extraparliamentary oath, the Bond of Association, generated by Burghley and Walsingham and circulated widely throughout England prior to the commencement of Parliament in November 1584.Footnote ³⁸ The statute against Jesuits took a firm stance on the increasingly controversial question of expatriate English Catholics, defining them as English subjects. The Bond of Association aimed to unite the English regime and the English populace under an oath of mortal vengeance upon anyone who might undertake or benefit from the murder of Elizabeth I, specifying claimants to the English throne and excluding from the succession such offenders and their heirs. The parliamentary Act for the Queen’s Surety legally substantiated this preemptive call for justice with an important shift in terms: if an heir to the throne were proven innocent of collusion with conspiracy or rebellion, then he or she could retain the claim to dynastic succession. This English statute targeted most directly Mary Stuart and her son, James VI of Scotland—proactively so, in case of further plotting on behalf of her status as heir apparent to the English Crown. Yet, like Mendoza, neither Mary Stuart nor James VI was an English subject. Hence the impetus for legal opinions on international jurisdiction in relation to the new statute law on conspiracy as treason.

Sidney and Hammond both served in the Parliament of 1584–85, which, given this circumstance and other indirect biographical connections, seems plausible as the context wherein Sidney commissioned Hammond’s commentary on international law. Hammond’s knowledge of civil law had been commended to Sidney’s uncle, the Earl of Leicester, by Gabriel Harvey (1553–1631), who also studied civil law and enjoyed Leicester’s patronage.Footnote ³⁹ Sidney knew Harvey. It has been suggested that they first met at Cambridge in 1571, although Sidney probably went to court in the latter half of that year, after leaving Oxford; so, the connection most likely began through Leicester in 1577.Footnote ⁴⁰ In January 1577, as Sidney prepared for his influential diplomatic mission to Germany, he consulted with Harvey on the practical utility of ancient Roman historiography by Livy (Titius Livius, 59 BCE–17 CE).Footnote ⁴¹ Hammond’s treatise also highlights Livy’s Ab urbe condita (History of Rome from its foundation), among many other sources on Roman civil law, in discussing questions of diplomatic and royal immunity. Its commission marks a later instance of Sidney’s strategic intellectual preparation for imminent political service involving complex international relations. Given the circumstantial biographical connections from 1577, it can be conjectured that before or during the Parliament of 1584–85 either Harvey or Leicester brought to Sidney’s attention Hammond’s expertise in civil law, and that Sidney might have met Hammond in person amid parliamentary service in the early months of 1585. Hammond was chancellor of the diocese of London and served in the House of Commons on committees debating a petition for ecclesiastical reform levied by Beale, for which the House of Lords’s committee included Leicester, Burghley (lord treasurer), and Sidney’s brother-in-law, Sir Henry Herbert (ca. 1538–1601), Second Earl of Pembroke.Footnote ⁴² These men could have alerted Sidney to Hammond’s legal expertise. Sidney served on committees treating various economic concerns, as well as on a committee for the Jesuits bill that passed through the Commons and the Lords.Footnote ⁴³ In this context of 1584–85, amid seminal parliamentary debates on politics of jurisdiction, it makes sense that Sidney would request a professional commentary on international jurisdiction from Hammond, whom he might have met recently in person.Footnote ⁴⁴

Whereas Sidney possessed some knowledge of international law, Hammond and Beale were employed consistently by the Privy Council for their legal expertise. While traveling Europe in the early 1570s, Sidney took it upon himself to gain knowledge of Roman civil law: the name “Philippo Sidneyo nobile Anglo” (Philip Sidney, noble Englishman) appeared among the witnesses for a doctoral exam in civil law taken by the Catholic Englishman and future Jesuit priest John Hart (d. 1586) in Padua, 7 June 1574.Footnote ⁴⁵ There, at a young age, Sidney showed an intellectual interest in international law, combined with an irenic sensibility regarding English Catholics. A decade later, the aristocratic English scholar Henry Howard (1540–1614) discussed ancient Roman civil law with Sidney in personal correspondence. Howard, a suspected Catholic under house arrest for his involvement in the Throckmorton Plot, cited directly the Corpus juris civilis (Body of civil law) of Justinian I (ca. 482–565) and then alluded to it playfully amid his appeal to Sidney for aid toward clearing Howard’s name and thus increasing his domestic liberties.Footnote ⁴⁶ Howard assumed in Sidney at least some facility with such legal discourse, though probably not much familiarity in comparison with Howard’s academic authority as a reader of civil law at Cambridge.Footnote ⁴⁷ Hammond, in contrast with Howard, wielded an unquestionably loyalist position of legal authority in the early 1580s. The Privy Council frequently recruited Hammond for religious examinations due to his professional experience not only in Chancery but also in High Commission and other tribunals for ecclesiastical jurisprudence. For that purpose, Hammond sometimes collaborated with Beale and with Burghley’s long-standing parliamentary client Thomas Norton (d. 1584), of Gorbuduc literary fame: most notably with the interrogation and torture of the Jesuit priest Edmund Campion (1540–81), whose execution became emblematic amid polemical debate of the 1580s.Footnote ⁴⁸

On religious politics as a legal matter, Hammond and Beale shared similar individual ideologies but acted with different public personas. In 1583, it was Hammond’s legal opinion on papal authority and the international ramifications of Elizabeth I’s 1570 excommunication that Burghley commissioned while preparing the regime’s polemical defense of its actions against English Catholics, entitled The execution of justice in England (1583).Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1583–84, the Privy Council sought Hammond’s opinion on Beale’s legal opposition to articles of conformity for religious worship imposed by the archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift (ca. 1531–1604), who aimed to suppress nonconformist Protestant preaching. Hammond agreed with Beale and with Burghley that Whitgift’s new measures were impractical and extreme, and he shared with both men the view that English episcopal authority existed not for any divine right of its own but, rather, due to royal supremacy and the statute of 1559 on religion. Yet in the Parliament of 1584–85, Hammond’s legal opinion, or at least his public political persona, proved more moderate than Beale’s on the question of reforming ecclesiastical jurisdiction.Footnote ⁵⁰

In this heated context of late 1584 and early 1585, more than in January 1577, questions remain about Sidney’s motives for legal patronage. He was certainly privy to the campaign of Burghley, Walsingham, and Beale against Mary Stuart, mainly via Walsingham. At the same time, knowing the queen’s mind on ecclesiastical jurisdiction, like Walsingham more than Burghley or Beale in 1584–85, Sidney tactfully avoided confrontation on that religious issue, whether or not he and Walsingham shared with Elizabeth I or with each other the same theology or specific views on worship within the English church.Footnote ⁵¹ Perhaps it was Hammond’s similar political caution that drew Sidney toward his legal expertise over that of Beale. Beale, like Sidney, sought knowledge of international law for its utility in political service, and he had studied extensively for decades, perhaps beginning in 1558–59, amid a correspondence with Francis Baudouin (1520–73), a professor of civil law at the University of Heidelberg.Footnote ⁵² Through sustained legal scholarship, Beale commanded more expertise than Walsingham, who had studied at Padua in the mid-1550s.Footnote ⁵³ Thus Walsingham likely sought Beale’s opinion on the Hammond document in 1586, at which point Beale procured his own copy. Beale’s copy was designed for usability, adding subject headings for easier navigation of the text, as well as scholarly marginal glosses. Sidney knew Beale through mutual friendships, including both Walsingham and Sidney’s mentor Hubert Languet (1518–81), whom Beale had introduced to Walsingham in 1571 and whom Walsingham had introduced to Sidney in 1572.Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet upon meeting Beale in 1578, after Languet’s urgent recommendation, Sidney’s cautiously gracious response suggests a lack of personal affection toward Beale on Sidney’s part: “For Beale I will do whatever friendly service I can,” Sidney wrote to Languet, “partly because he deserves it but mostly because of your commendation.”Footnote ⁵⁵

In foreign policy, although Sidney’s and Beale’s diplomatic sights in mainland Europe complemented each other, Sidney had distinct political horizons. Sidney had been groomed for diplomacy and prospective governance his whole life by elite ministers of the English Crown. His father, Sir Henry Sidney (1529–86), served as president of the Council of Wales and the Marches since 1560, was a member of the queen’s Privy Council from 1575, and represented the Crown three times as lord deputy of Ireland, thus wielding political and religious authority as a magistrate within three distinct realms of Elizabeth I’s sovereignty.Footnote ⁵⁶ When Henry Sidney composed a memoir of his Irish service in 1583, he probably aimed for Philip to become lord deputy.Footnote ⁵⁷ Philip Sidney already had maintained a privileged social status throughout mainland Europe, as both the son of a viceroy to Elizabeth I and a favored nephew to Leicester. The former credential allowed him to speak directly with sovereign princes as peers.Footnote ⁵⁸ Sidney’s connection to Leicester helped him cultivate a close relationship with leaders of the Dutch rebel provinces, especially William I, Prince of Orange (1533–84), who held Leicester and Sidney in high esteem and briefly intended that Sidney marry his daughter in 1577.Footnote ⁵⁹ From the deaths of Orange and Anjou in summer 1584 to the official Anglo-Dutch alliance established at Nonsuch in summer 1585, the Elizabethan regime’s support for a broad-based international Protestant cause, implemented covertly but consistently since the French Wars of Religion had commenced in 1562, suddenly leaned toward the prospect of a public military intervention in the Netherlands led by Leicester.Footnote ⁶⁰ When Sidney commissioned Hammond’s treatise on international jurisdiction, was he motivated more by his own prospective role in the Low Countries with Leicester than by Walsingham’s campaign with Burghley and Beale against Mary Stuart? This question frames both the analysis of Hammond’s treatise and the ensuing discussion of Sidney’s politics in 1584–85 with an eye to the Elizabethan regime’s foreign policy and patronage.

Hammond’s Legal Opinion

Hammond’s treatise addresses the nature of international jurisdiction regarding sovereigns, magistrates, ambassadors, and private foreigners, from the ancient Roman Empire to sixteenth-century Europe, concluding with an anomalous emphasis on English treason law. Its material context in the copy probably owned by Walsingham reveals a rhetorical engagement with the question of Mary Stuart in relation to English treason law, but Hammond’s work itself does not directly address that topic. The brief anonymous argument against Mary Stuart to which Hammond responds begins with an assertion that the former Queen of Scots has committed “high Treason” against both Elizabeth I and “the whole State of this Realme,” amid which circumstance the only matter in question remains that of jurisdiction for legal trial and punishment.Footnote ⁶¹ By “high Treason” the author presumably means Mary Stuart’s involvement with the Throckmorton Plot, which had occurred prior to the new language on conspiracy as treason in the Act for the Queen’s Surety. This ad hominem premise of guilt remains uncontested both in this text and in Hammond’s response. Indeed, Hammond avoids any direct references either to Mary Stuart or to Mendoza, focusing exclusively on the legal issues. Perhaps this approach by Hammond implies a tacit recognition of the 1585 parliamentary statute and thus a production date thereafter. Or, rather, Hammond’s professional sensibilities prompted him to discuss the issue of treason only via the legal topic at hand: jurisdiction and the question of royal immunity. In this regard, the context of his authorship could have been before, during, or after the Parliament of 1584–85. Hammond’s legal argument conveys a high professional standard in critiquing and refining the prior claims against Mary Stuart, while also a tacit but acute consciousness, at least in the treatise’s conclusion, of the political crisis and new legal circumstances in 1585.

The anonymous competing argument entails four premises. First, it concedes that Mary Stuart has not “expresly” submitted herself to the English jurisdiction of Elizabeth I, claiming instead that she has done so “priuilie” by default: “For as soone as euer she committed any Treason in England thereby ipso facto she did against the Queenes Maiesties superioritie and submitted her selfe to the Queenes Ma[ies]ties iurisdiction.”Footnote ⁶² As sources for this first premise, the argument quotes from Domitius Ulpianus (d. 228) and from Paolo di Castro (1360?–1441). Then the text addresses very briefly a second civil-law premise: that someone who is not a legal subject of a given realm cannot be indicted for treason therein. Quoting from Boniface Vitalinus, this argument contests that premise, claiming without a clear explanation that Mary Stuart could be held liable for treason against Elizabeth I within England despite not being an English subject.Footnote ⁶³ A third point of argument cites the legal position of Pope Clement V (Raymond Bertrand de Got, 1264–1314, r. 1305–14) in contesting the sentence of treason against King Robert of Naples (ca. 1275–1343) issued by Emperor Henry VII (1275–1313) in 1313. Here the author applies to that case a slippery logic and rhetoric of jurisdiction, asserting rather mischievously that, regarding Mary Stuart, even “the Pope her holy Fathers owne iudgment” validates prospective punishment by Elizabeth I for criminal offenses within England.Footnote ⁶⁴ The document’s concluding section highlights the legal premise that ambassadors could lose diplomatic immunity in cases of criminal offense, deploying it as a platform for the thesis that Mary Stuart remains liable to criminal punishment as a former Scottish monarch residing within Elizabeth I’s realm: “She is here in England though in name and dignitie a Prince, yet towching Iurisdiction a priuate person” now “extra regnum” while her son James VI rules Scotland.Footnote ⁶⁵

Hammond refutes the first premise and refines the second. His introductory section frames the question at hand, reiterating the supposition of treason (but not judging it) and emphasizing that the legal stakes revolve around the issue of royal immunity within an international context. A hypothetical concession ensues as a preliminary judgment of the opposing argument. If a person of princely status residing abroad were indeed susceptible to foreign laws to the same degree as “a common stranger,” Hammond claims, then “the doubt” at hand (i.e., prosecution of Mary Stuart for treason) could indeed be “fully resolued”; and, if it were possible to prove that central premise, the opposing author might have provided “more apt and pertinent matter” than what appears in the arguments as they stand.Footnote ⁶⁶ Then Hammond dismisses outright the other author’s first premise as illogical to the point of “verie strange absurditie, and neither by the Lawe warrantable, nor by any other good learning.” That proposed “fancy of voluntarie submission,” Hammond emphasizes, transgresses not only logic but also ethics of natural law: “if offences may binde where submission doth not, and againe submission where no hold can may be taken of the offence, it cannot be possibl[i]e true that euerie offence worketh a submission: for it is a matter in nature monstrous, that the effect should at any time be seuered from the cause.” He explains that the other author’s citation of Paolo di Castro misrepresents a distinction between “priuiledge” and “common right” regarding the jurisdiction of magistrates within ancient Roman civil law. The contexts Castro discusses entail “subiectes of the Romane Empire, and not any that is forreiner to that State”; thus, the opposing author’s “deuice of secret submission” regarding Mary Stuart proves, in Hammond’s view, “as needles, as in it selfe it is sencelesse.”Footnote ⁶⁷ On the second premise levied upon a quotation from Boniface Vitalinus, Hammond again corrects his opponent’s misrepresentation of source material. He explains that Vitalinus, as well as other more authoritative sources such as Oldrado da Ponte (d. 1335), articulates a premise whereby if a private foreign visitor to a sovereign realm were caught in conspiracy against its monarch or regime, while not bound legally to either in any way as a subject, then legally the person could be punished as a criminal but not under charges of treason. Thus, Hammond emphasizes, the opposing author’s point constitutes a rhetorical corruption of the legal thought, and the issues at stake remain diplomatic and royal immunities.Footnote ⁶⁸

For the opposing argument’s third and fourth premises, Hammond provides more-extensive and subtle responses. On Pope Clement V’s opposition to the edict condemning King Robert of Naples for treasonous rebellion against Emperor Henry VII, Hammond explains that the argument partakes retroactively in a politique legal maneuver of that early fourteenth-century context. Canon lawyers had provided Pope Clement V with a politically expedient argument for legal immunity predicated on the premise that King Robert was from Sicily and thus not under the imperial jurisdiction of Henry VII. Eminent civil lawyers of the fourteenth century, including Baldus de Ubaldis (1327–1400), had debunked that premise in relation to the Neapolitan king’s circumstances. The late sixteenth-century argument for prosecution of Mary Stuart cites that fourteenth-century precedent with a reference to (as Hammond puts it) “Robert king (as he saith) of Cicilie,” and thereby invests itself rhetorically and politically in the same game of smoke and mirrors regarding jurisdiction and treason. Historical circumstances matter for legal judgment, Hammond maintains, and if King Robert’s Neapolitan sovereignty did exist within the compass of Henry VII’s imperial jurisdiction, then the treason charge could be upheld.Footnote ⁶⁹ This historical example proves significant for recognizing how Hammond’s response to the third premise complements the legal distinctions he draws in responding to the fourth and most important premise, which occupies the majority of his treatise.Footnote ⁷⁰ Therein, Hammond’s commentary—like those of Gentili and Hotman on diplomatic immunity, written at nearly the same time—proves pioneering.

Hammond’s argument highlights the law of nations relevant to ambassadors (ius gentium) as a matter distinct from specific tenets of ancient Roman civil law. For the concept of diplomatic immunity, Hammond begins with Livy’s Ab urbe condita, claiming that its account in book 2 of the conspiring emissaries sent to Rome by former king Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (d. 495 BCE) conveys an impression of ius gentium that protects ambassadors not only from local jurisdiction for criminal punishment, but also from the broader legal right to enact retributive justice against an enemy. He deploys this ancient example toward a broader discussion of the issue, including references to the sixteenth-century controversy wherein a gentleman named Maraviglia (a.k.a. Merveilles), an Italian-French secret agent of King Francis I (1494–1547) in Milan, was executed by the Duke of Milan’s order. Hammond contests the stance on this issue taken by a 1574 polemical treatise, Le reveille-matin des François et de leurs voisins (The wake-up call for Frenchmen and their neighbors), as well as a complementary premise of the anonymous English argument against Mary Stuart, which claims that ambassadors are susceptible to foreign jurisdiction for criminal offenses. Here Hammond notes distinctions among ancient Roman legates, tribunes, and ambassadors, and he emphasizes that the case of Maraviglia’s execution in Milan did not involve an official emissary or ambassador of France. Regarding official ambassadors who conspire against a sovereign where they reside, Hammond concedes that a breach of ius gentium validating criminal punishment could occur in the instance of an ambassador personally taking arms against the local sovereign.Footnote ⁷¹ This emphasis on jurisdiction in relation to military aggression complements Hammond’s concluding section, on international law for princes.

On this ultimate question of royal immunity from foreign jurisdiction, Hammond claims that the matter has not been debated explicitly due to its presumed existence throughout history, and for this reason he ventures a more extensive and tentative discourse on ancient Roman civil law, including the jurisdiction and military command of sovereign magistrates (imperium), in relation to natural law regarding self-defense. In sources cited by the other author, he explains, “the difference of persons priuate and publique sheweth not who is punishable or who is not punishable, but who hath exercise of iurisdiction and who hath none.”Footnote ⁷² From here, Hammond tacitly addresses the opposing argument’s final and most essential emphasis that Mary Stuart, while in status a prince of royal birth, no longer rules Scotland. Hammond distinguishes between “royall dignitie” and “royall authoritie,” the latter including imperium among monarchs and magistrates. Whereas royal dignity should be recognized and upheld everywhere, and while sovereign command cannot be exercised outside of one’s own realms, the issue for Hammond lies not in legal submission to another jurisdiction but rather in a mutual “equitie” of immunity and liability that this treatise articulates in relation to nonroyal “Strangers” within a foreign realm, who “should be for their owne partes harmeles[,] and reason it were there should be as well allowed order to reforme them, as their is prouicion & regarde to defende them.”Footnote ⁷³

Immediately following that claim, addressing this thorny question of criminal “reforme” at least regarding common persons, Hammond grants that natural law allows for public vengeance upon heinous criminal offenses by nonsubjects, for which the procedure lies in the hands of magistrates. The question of princes, though, warrants extensive discussion and qualification of legal principles and historical examples. Political hierarchy matters in civil law, Hammond notes, including immunities and privileges for magistrates with imperium beyond those of prefects, for instance. Diverse cases cited range from ancient examples outlined in histories by Sallust (86–35 BCE) and Plutarch (45–120 CE) to commentary on prisoners of war under Charles V (1500–58) and Francis I. For the latter topic, Hammond emphasizes that, legal right aside, “nature and ciuilitie” lean toward “moderat[i]on.”Footnote ⁷⁴ On the famous case of Jugurtha according to Sallust, Hammond distinguishes between “Pollicie” and “iustice” with an eye to the Roman Republic’s “equitie” in upholding the political integrity of its public assurance for Jugurtha’s safe passage.Footnote ⁷⁵ Such equitable judgment does not grant license for future criminal offense. By these calculations, Hammond concedes that “forreine Princes[,] notwithstanding any graunte of safetie, be in iustice and reason subiect to all degrees of correction,” at which point he reiterates his earlier emphasis on mutual equity between resident foreigners and sovereign rulers, extending it now to the specific topic of treason.Footnote ⁷⁶

This concession by Hammond regarding limits of royal immunity, based on a shift in focus from international jurisdiction per se to a reciprocal equity in international law, serves as a foundation for his treatise’s conclusion, which conveys a message of moderate self-defense in policy. He reminds readers that the tyrannies exercised by certain Roman emperors substantiate the danger of defining treason too loosely. Then, prior to citing English statute law on treason from 1352, in the reign of Edward III (1312–77), Hammond claims,

Here Hammond deploys a cautionary concession probably written in the context of 1584–85, most likely just before or just after the parliamentary Act for the Queen’s Surety. Hammond explicitly cites only the old treason law; yet according to his account, beyond regicide and armed rebellion, breaches of immunity include conspiracy against the monarch in its own right. Whereas England’s tradition of treason law applied directly to subjects of the realm, in 1585 it had been “expressly set down by law” that conspirators against the Crown could be punished unofficially and even legally prosecuted for treason by a jurisdiction more elastic than just that of the monarch. In the first legal phrase Hammond quotes here, “Qui maiestatem læserit,” the term maiestatem can be interpreted to mean the monarch or perhaps instead the dignity of the royal office. In the context of 1584–85, the Bond of Association’s public authorization of vigilante justice against treasonous conspiracy may help explain both the diction and the underlying anxiety of Hammond’s earlier language in characterizing due criminal punishment, for individuals and for the state, by order of natural law (“the Lawe of all ages”), as “libertie of iust reuenge, comitting for the most parte the execucion thereof into the handes of the Magistrate for auoyding confusion.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Self-defense falls within the category of “naturall actions, wherein difference of a Countrie maketh no diuersitie,” Hammond concludes, and England possesses the laws and the mettle to defend itself from treasonous conspiracy and prospective foreign invasion. In doing so, though, the English regime should proceed with caution, privileging both “factes certaine” and the standard channels of authority.Footnote ⁷⁹

This shift in Hammond’s legal argument toward political policy conveys a delicate balance of Roman civil law, the broader law of nations rooted in natural law, English statute law, political expediency in the current moment of crisis, and Hammond’s own moral sensibilities. Hammond’s balanced but anxious legal consciousness pierces to the heart of the 1585 political crisis regarding Mary Stuart’s English captivity. She had signed the 1584 Bond of Association, and the 1585 Act for the Queen’s Surety was designed to hold her accountable for conspiracy against the Elizabethan regime as a matter of treasonous activity. Yet if she were immune to domestic English law by civil law and the law of nations, then she should not be held to trial (much less condemned to execution) by the English statute of 1585. The anonymous opinion, paired with Hammond’s among Walsingham’s papers, attempts to circumvent that legal obstacle outright. Hammond’s response partly resists and partly revises that argument against Mary Stuart by eliding her name and circumstances while holding the issue of royal immunity to a high professional standard of legal judgment. Hammond’s conclusion softens the edges of a European legal tradition that normally would thwart action against Mary Stuart by default, while at the same time expanding the range of treasonous activity in England to include conspiracy against the Crown. In the crucial passage quoted above, the copy of Hammond’s text among Walsingham’s papers preserves material evidence regarding its own source text suggesting that Hammond viewed the legal parameters of such treason as circumscribed geographically within England. The scribal revision within the copy from Walsingham’s papers, which was adopted in Beale’s scribal copy, eliminates the English geographical boundary: “conspyring within his Realme enimies.”

The Elizabethan Regime and Sidney’s Politics

Both the conclusion of Hammond’s argument and this textual revision within its transmission history complement recent historiography on policy formation and legal patronage at the heart of the Elizabethan regime in 1584–85. Private transactions of legal patronage by the queen’s chief counselors emanated from covert inner-regime policy negotiations that were formulated at least partly in reaction to polemical attacks in the public sphere (by exiled English Jesuits, among others). This process of policy formation impacted parliamentary politics. Recent scholarship has connected the regime’s pending military intervention in the Netherlands of 1584–85 with a continuum of diverse polemical exchange and policy negotiation involving Mary Stuart from the early 1570s through the 1580s that revolved around accusations of tyrannous evil counsel within the Elizabethan regime.Footnote ⁸⁰ A wave of propaganda in summer 1584, for instance, firmly distinguished Elizabeth I from her chief counselors. Polemical works of this moment, most notably the treatise known as Leicester’s Commonwealth (1584), construed themselves as loyalist appeals for legitimate dynastic succession in England, arguing for the preservation of Mary Stuart’s status as heir apparent, followed by her son, James VI of Scotland.Footnote ⁸¹ At least to some degree, that polemical campaign galvanized Burghley’s experiments with the Bond of Association and a hypothetical interregnum plan in 1584–85. Amid the Parliament of 1584–85, aiming to exploit and even transcend the Bond of Association, Burghley drafted a proposal for new measures that would allow the Privy Council to extend its jurisdiction into a liminal period between monarchs were Elizabeth I to be assassinated, granting a hypothetical temporary authority to summon Parliament and prosecute conspirators for treason.Footnote ⁸² According to Burghley’s proposal, this Magnum Consilium Coronae Angliae (Great Council of the English Crown) would be formed from the Privy Council and Parliament to judge the law of succession and appoint the next monarch.Footnote ⁸³ This measure, which met with resistance from the queen and did not make its way into the parliamentary bill for her safety, would have helped protect the Protestant regime from total collapse if a conspiracy killed the queen, while also empowering the Privy Council to take legal action against Mary Stuart were she involved.Footnote ⁸⁴

This political context of 1584–85 also prompted a political think tank of sorts among certain clients of Burghley, Walsingham, and Leicester. The texts produced, some as manuscripts and some for print, bear witness to an experimental period of testing political theories for the sake of policy formation and propaganda. These arguments against the English succession of Mary Stuart and James VI applied and revised diverse angles of appeal: natural law, broad views of human history (including scripture) and the law of nations, English royal prerogative rooted in common law, the authorizing powers of Parliament and magistrates, and comparison with political and legal structures of authority in Germany, Scotland, and France. These works’ incorporation of Protestant resistance theories helped justify English intervention in the Netherlands from a more moderate religious perspective than had been deployed against Mary Stuart in a parliamentary campaign of 1572; yet these arguments of the mid-1580s still could not provide a firm legal foundation for magisterial breach of sovereign authority within England.Footnote ⁸⁵ This negotiation of law and policy amid the atmosphere of political crisis in 1585 brings into focus the conclusion of Hammond’s treatise on international jurisdiction, which purposefully but cautiously blurs the lines of Roman civil law for the sake of a natural-law appeal justifying English political self-defense against international conspiracy within England. The textual revision noted above within Hammond’s conclusion suggests a desire on the regime’s part to amplify the scope of Hammond’s legal argument. That implicit agenda fits the regime’s political motives for other legal patronage at this time, as well as Walsingham’s and Beale’s motives for collecting copies of Hammond’s treatise in 1586–87.

Sidney’s commission of Hammond’s treatise in 1584–85 occurred in this moment of legal and theoretical self-examination within the Elizabethan regime, probably more in relation to himself and Leicester with an eye to the Netherlands than to Walsingham and the question of Mary Stuart. In 1584–85, Sidney most likely anticipated that he would soon be sent to the Netherlands with Leicester to serve as a secondary or tertiary military commander and foreign magistrate. The deaths of Anjou and Orange in summer 1584 precipitated a new phase of crisis for Elizabethan foreign policy, leading to the military intervention of 1585. The summoning of Parliament on 22 October 1584 followed the Privy Council’s decision by consensus two days earlier: England would begin forming a military alliance with the Dutch provinces, whether or not France joined.Footnote ⁸⁶ Hence the convergence of policy objectives and legal interests summarized above for the Elizabethan inner regime. Documentary evidence suggests that the only hesitation within the Privy Council regarding Sidney’s appointment with Leicester in 1585 was on Burghley’s part in deciding between Sidney and his own son, Sir Thomas Cecil (1542–1623), for the governorships of Brill (in Holland) and Flushing (in Zeeland).Footnote ⁸⁷ Dutch ambassadors negotiating the two treaties of Nonsuch specifically requested Sidney for Flushing.Footnote ⁸⁸ That request complemented unofficial earlier calls from the Dutch rebel provinces, throughout the late 1570s and early 1580s, seeking English aid led by Leicester and Sidney.Footnote ⁸⁹ Given Sidney’s connections in the Netherlands, presumably he learned at least generally of the new Dutch statutes established for the provinces of Holland in 1580, Zeeland in 1583, and Utrecht in 1584. These statutes constituted Protestant revision of Roman law.Footnote ⁹⁰ Sidney’s political ambition involved governance in these provinces as a foreign magistrate, and he probably knew little about the specific workings of Dutch parliaments and local magistrates.Footnote ⁹¹ Thus, before, during, or shortly after England’s Parliament of 1584–85, it makes sense that Sidney would commission an expert opinion on international law relevant to Mary Stuart, to European diplomacy, and, most significantly, to the general nature and parameters of magistrates’ authority.

Whereas Hammond’s argument in demarcating political jurisdiction helps explain the regime’s motives for collecting his treatise in 1586, the work’s content does not explicitly connect Sidney’s motives to Mary Stuart. Hammond emphasizes the importance of maintaining authorized channels of political authority, but his conclusion on self-defense against conspiracy does not specify an executive authority for punishing treason. After the parliamentary legislation of 1585, that function was not restricted to Elizabeth I alone. The Act for the Queen’s Surety imposed a broader definition of treasonous activity including prospective heirs to the Crown, such that the Privy Council and Parliament could put such persons on trial without requiring the monarch’s permission, and this new law motivated Walsingham to seek incriminating evidence against Mary Stuart.Footnote ⁹² From August 1586, when Walsingham reported to his queen on Mary Stuart’s complicity in the Babington Plot, he, Burghley, and Beale avidly pursued her execution as a means of securing England’s Protestant identity amid and beyond the Elizabethan reign. They proceeded from the Privy Council’s jurisdiction, with their queen’s tacit support despite her major reservations about the execution itself.Footnote ⁹³ It is worth conjecturing that at the conclusion of Hammond’s treatise, with its turn toward political policy, he bore in mind this aspect of Privy Council jurisdiction: probably in 1584–85 (likely 1585), after the Bond of Association and shortly before or after the parliamentary bill for the queen’s safety became statute law in March 1585. Hammond’s concern about due legal procedure by magistrates complemented the treatise’s conclusion, since the Privy Council functioned as the highest court in Elizabethan England. When Walsingham and Beale collected copies of Hammond’s treatise in 1586–87, they faced a real circumstance of “factes certaine” for Mary Stuart “conspyring with” various “enimies” to the English Crown from within England, with evidence already in hand for the Privy Council’s legal procedings of 1586.Footnote ⁹⁴ The Babington Plot involved a double agent among servants of Sidney’s wife within Walsingham’s own household, but at that point Sidney was already in the Netherlands.Footnote ⁹⁵ No evidence links Sidney directly to the campaign against Mary Stuart pursued by Burghley, Walsingham, and Beale.

Regarding James VI, on the other hand, evidence for Sidney’s Anglo-Scottish diplomacy of 1585 connects him with Elizabeth I’s policy more directly than with that of Walsingham and Burghley. The queen’s Scottish policy of 1584–85 operated in tandem with her French policy, for which she employed Sidney directly. From summer 1584, following Anjou’s death, Elizabeth I sought support from Henri III of France (1551–89) while negotiating a new alliance with the Dutch rebel provinces.Footnote ⁹⁶ She sent Sidney as her emissary to Paris, but Henri III evaded contact while Sidney was still en route.Footnote ⁹⁷ The French ambassador in London, Michel de Castelnau (1518–92), Lord of La Mauvissière, proved apt not only in highlighting Sidney’s French title as a gentleman of the royal bedchamber but also in connecting Sidney’s embassy to Anglo-Scottish politics.Footnote ⁹⁸ From summer 1584, Elizabeth I also sought a new alliance with James VI. In winter 1584–85, amid Scottish diplomacy, she steered the Act for the Queen’s Surety away from Burghley’s and Walsingham’s language in the Bond of Association, allowing James VI a possibility of retaining his right to the English succession if his mother were convicted of treasonous conspiracy but he were innocent.Footnote ⁹⁹ In summer 1585, for a new phase of Anglo-Scottish diplomacy concurrent with Anglo-Dutch negotiation of the treaties signed at Nonsuch, Elizabeth I sent as an emissary Sidney’s friend and fellow ambassador from 1577, Edward Wotton (1548–1628), who discussed new terms for an Anglo-Scottish defensive league against the newly allied Catholic powers of Spain and France. From England, Sidney contributed regularly to that diplomatic mission as an intermediary between Wotton; the Scottish rebel Archibald Douglas (ca. 1555–88), Eighth Earl of Angus, residing in England by tacit consent of the Elizabethan regime; and James VI’s ambassador Patrick Gray (ca. 1550–1611), Master of Gray. Sidney supported Angus while also advocating the settlement of an annual English pension for James VI to help secure his loyalty to the Elizabethan regime.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

This diplomacy built upon Sidney’s decade-long interest in meeting and serving James VI as Elizabeth I’s prospective Protestant successor.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Sidney was proactive within his interpersonal network. In July 1583, presumably in preparation for a Scottish embassy that Walsingham undertook in August 1583, Sidney had reconnected with Angus, whom he had met at London in 1581, while also opening lines of correspondence with Angus for Jean Hotman and for Jacques Ségur de Pardaillan (d. 1589), an emissary from the Protestant king of Navarre, Henri Bourbon (1553–1610).Footnote ¹⁰² In summer 1585, Elizabeth I’s pension offer to James VI had nearly doubled (from £2,500 to £4,000) since Walsingham’s embassy, when he had acted coldly toward James VI while encouraging rebellion among the anglophile Scottish lords, including Angus.Footnote ¹⁰³ In sharp contrast with Walsingham in 1583, Sidney’s diplomatic charisma in 1585 left a positive impression upon the Scottish king.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In this respect, at this point of crisis for the Elizabethan regime, Sidney’s diplomacy supported his queen’s policy with James VI.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This summer of 1585, Hammond probably wrote or had written recently his treatise for Sidney.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Given a lack of other data on Sidney and Mary Stuart in 1584–85, it seems that Sidney chose to channel his activism on the English succession more toward the queen’s Scottish policy than toward that of his father-in-law.

Amid Sidney’s diplomacy on behalf of the international Protestant cause, which included the security of England’s Protestant identity, documentary evidence suggests that he sympathized personally with potential victims of the 1585 statute laws on treason while strategically balancing that concern with rewards of royal favor. In August 1583, Castelnau claimed to Mary Stuart that Sidney had voiced personal sympathy toward both her Catholicism and her circumstances.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Privately, in March 1585, Sidney commiserated in great friendship and religious sympathy with the Catholic aristocrat Lady Elizabeth Kitson (1547–1628, née Cornwallis).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This act of irenic compassion occurred a month after Sidney’s involvement with the Jesuits-bill committee.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ No record of Sidney’s vote survives, but surely he recognized the political difference between radical and moderate Catholicism.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Certain family members were Catholics of various social ranks, including aristocrats in England and Spain.Footnote ¹¹¹ Sidney and his father knew and admired Campion, whose missionary project with Robert Parsons (1546–1610) coincided with the Anjou marriage negotiations, and whose execution for treason in 1581 sparked ongoing international controversy.Footnote ¹¹² Earlier that year of Campion’s arrest and death, Sidney had served on a parliamentary committee regarding increased fines for Catholic recusancy.Footnote ¹¹³

Whatever votes Sidney cast in the parliamentary contexts of 1581 and 1585, amid his most desparate financial need, Elizabeth I granted him a royal patent whereby he would benefit financially from the forfeiture of convicted Catholics’ properties in the early 1580s.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Sidney claimed that amid pressure from his creditors and personal distaste for benefiting from others’ misfortune due to religious difference, he would need at least £3,000 from that funding source to justify the “clamor” he would receive as a consequence (presumably among his Catholic family members and associates).Footnote ¹¹⁵ The gains for Sidney were considerable when they came: probably close to his target of £3,000 by 1586.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Most conspicuously, an extant “Note of money Leviable vppon the Recusantes and Clergy” allocates £2,000 to Sir Philip Sidney, alongside the same amount to Sir Thomas Cecil and £8,000 to Leicester.Footnote ¹¹⁷ These payments probably came toward the end of 1585, when Leicester, Sidney, and Cecil were the three Englishmen assigned positions of military command for the Dutch rebel provinces. Leicester could supply many of his own troops through English retinues and neo-feudal authority in Wales.Footnote ¹¹⁸ For Cecil and Sidney, the Crown funded companies of conscripted soldiers. Sidney’s company of two hundred footsoldiers on the queen’s payroll was Welsh, probably due to his father’s position as president of the Council of Wales and the Marches.Footnote ¹¹⁹ That Welsh company at Flushing supplemented twenty companies of Walloons and Flemings in Sidney’s regiment provided and funded by the States-General.Footnote ¹²⁰ There in the Netherlands lay Sidney’s ambitions and the regime’s for him.

This perspective prompts a reconsideration of the premise that if Sidney voted in favor of the 1585 treason law against Jesuits and their associates, perhaps the impetus was at least partly personal, tied to a perception of Jesuit authorship for the 1584 polemical treatise in dialogue commonly dubbed Leicester’s Commonwealth.Footnote ¹²¹ This anonymous treatise on the English succession probably was authored at least partially by Parsons, who had escaped England after his missionary campaign with Campion, and it proved the most infamous and influential work of that summer’s anti-regime polemical campaign.Footnote ¹²² Leicester’s Commonwealth was printed at mainland European presses first in English and then, a year later, in French and Latin versions; it circulated widely in manuscript; and it was targeted for suppression by a royal proclamation of October 1584 and by a parliamentary bill against libelous books.Footnote ¹²³ Sidney wrote his Defense of Leicester in 1584 as a direct reponse to Leicester’s Commonwealth, and this context associates him with the politics of polemic emphasized above. Yet Sidney’s own argument avoided any discussion of specific policy or political theory, focusing instead on the personal character of Leicester, his relation to Leicester, and the anonymous libeler’s unethical character, thus foregrounding Sidney’s family honor and the general nature of libel.Footnote ¹²⁴

Sidney’s text, intended for print but not published until the eighteenth century, responded not to the political crisis of succession and Privy Council jurisdiction but rather to family circumstances targeted briefly within Leicester’s Commonwealth: generally, the Dudley-Sidney family’s honor, and, specifically, Leicester’s second marriage, of 1578, and the recent death of his son, Robert Dudley Jr. (1581–84), Lord Denbigh, whom Leicester’s Commonwealth mentions in tandem with Sidney.Footnote ¹²⁵ The tragic death of young Lord Denbigh brought for Sidney a renewed status as heir apparent to the consolidated Dudley inheritance of Leicester and Leicester’s elder brother, Sir Ambrose Dudley (ca. 1530–90), Third Earl of Warwick, and thereby also new security to Sidney’s financial and political future.Footnote ¹²⁶ The Defense of Leicester’s forceful emphasis on Dudley ancestry complements a Sidney-family pedigree roll produced for “Sir Phillipe Sidney knight” in the mid-1580s: compiled after Sidney’s knighthood and marriage by Leicester’s client Robert Cooke (d. 1593) and penned at least partly by Robert Glover (1544–88), a herald connected with Burghley and Walsingham to whom one of the regime’s manuscript responses to Leicester’s Commonwealth has been ascribed.Footnote ¹²⁷ This pedigree roll concludes with a large heraldic device surrounded by captions listing personal histories of diplomatic and political service for Sidney, his father, and a purported fourteenth-century ancestor, Sir William Sidney (fig. 6).Footnote ¹²⁸ Here, as with the commission of Hammond’s treatise, Sidney’s motives seem entrenched in the confluence of his financial and family circumstances with his foreign policy and his personal political ambition. Perhaps ambition and foreign policy came at the expense of English Jesuits. In the Parliament of 1584–85, whatever Sidney’s individual vote and intent might have been, the statute against Jesuits imposed another measure of religious intolerance for the sake of political stability in deference to the queen’s supremacy over the English church, this time asserting more forcefully her jurisdiction over expatriate English subjects.

Figure 6. Pedigree roll for Sir Philip Sidney. Bodleian Library, MS Eng. b. 2152 (R), bottom leaf. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library.

In the Parliament of 1584–85, Sidney served on the Jesuits-bill committee with his close friend Fulke Greville (1554–1628) and with Beale,Footnote ¹²⁹ and all three men would have viewed that legislation against English Jesuits as justified at least partly by their shared concern with the prospective collapses of English and international Protestantism in 1584–85. That context warranted new parliamentary activism. Whereas Leicester and Walsingham did not normally manipulate parliamentary appointments for specific ideological reasons, in 1584 they actively recruited for the House of Commons based at least partly, it seems, on sympathy for intervention in the Netherlands.Footnote ¹³⁰ Financial investments with parliamentary stakes also complemented this political concern. Walsingham, Beale, and Sidney’s father all held shares in the English mining industry, and consistent parliamentary opposition to the iron mills’ consumption of woodlands near London had prevailed for the first time in 1581.Footnote ¹³¹ Hence Philip Sidney’s participation in the 1584–85 committees on timber and on the preservation of woods near Cambrook in the Sidneys’ home county of Kent.Footnote ¹³² In 1583–84, the political component of Sidneian financial investment in the iron industry had been amplified, given Philip Sidney’s appointment as an officer of the Ordnance, for which his official duties included overseeing the defensive military concern of repairs at Dover Harbor ordered by parliamentary statute in 1581, a supervision involving the transport of munitions and other ironwork for which supplies were low.Footnote ¹³³ These activities at Parliament and the Ordnance coincided with Sidney’s thoughts on global strategy for England’s defense, which included a cooperation with English Catholics toward emigration to transatlantic colonies that could help England remain securely Protestant and also compete with Spanish imperial expansion.Footnote ¹³⁴ The concern for colonial ventures in relation to political and religious stability helps explain Sidney’s participation in the 1584–85 parliamentary committee on letters patent for Walter Ralegh (1554–1618) regarding transatlantic exploration and plantation.Footnote ¹³⁵

If in early 1585 Sidney anticipated a position as magistrate in the Dutch rebel provinces, as argued above, then his interest in a transatlantic naval venture later that year can be read in a new light. In the first week of September 1585, he and Greville traveled to Plymouth to converse with Sir Francis Drake (1540–96) and Dom Antonio (1531–95), the prior of Crato and pretender to the Portuguese throne, about those two men’s imminent West Indies voyage. Sidney knew Drake from the parliamentary committee on Ralegh’s letters patent, and he had collaborated with Dom Antonio in 1581.Footnote ¹³⁶ Dom Antonio arrived 7 September 1585, when letters from him and Sidney were sent to court.Footnote ¹³⁷ By September 12, contrary rumors circulated: one that Sidney would leave with them overseas, another that he meant only to send them off at Plymouth.Footnote ¹³⁸ On September 13, Walsingham claimed to William Davison (d. 1608), the queen’s new ambassador in the Netherlands, that Sidney planned to join Drake’s voyage out of “despair” in having not yet been assigned the governorship of Flushing.Footnote ¹³⁹ A shipboard record for September 14 notes that Sidney and Greville traveled in Drake’s vessel for an hour or two and then disembarked.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Greville’s account decades later indicates that he and Sidney had kept their Plymouth trip a secret at court, that Drake’s ships were not ready for the overseas voyage, and that Sidney left Plymouth upon receiving an urgent summons to court with news that he would accompany Leicester to the Dutch rebel provinces.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Some biographers read Sidney as secretly but genuinely intent on a strategic career turn across the Atlantic, which he happily redirected upon news of his appointment in the Netherlands.Footnote ¹⁴² Sidney had supplied Drake’s voyage with military goods from the Tower in July 1585, but he acted with the written consent of Walsingham and Leicester; thus, these records need not suggest a covert operation by Sidney circumventing Walsingham’s wishes.Footnote ¹⁴³ Another biographer interprets Sidney’s encounter with Drake at Plymouth as a gambit to sway Elizabeth I toward granting him the governorship at Flushing.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ If at this moment the regime’s hand were forced into assigning Sidney that position by a rumor of his imminent departure elsewhere, the stratagem might have been Walsingham’s in favor of Sidney at Flushing and Burghley’s son at Brill (rather than vice versa), not Sidney’s at Walsingham’s expense.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ According to Greville, Sidney’s alleged motive for the trip to Plymouth was to see Dom Antonio, and that aim should be taken seriously in relation to the international Protestant cause, together with Greville’s emphasis on Drake.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ From Sidney’s perspective, in the early 1580s and in 1586, English support for Dom Antonio’s claim to Portugal and its colonies constituted a significant component of geopolitical strategy.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Thus, if Sidney expected a military position alongside Leicester, it makes sense that he would consult with Dom Antonio in September 1585 on the threshold of their pending ventures to different parts of the world.

Sidney’s geopolitical perspective on England, mainland Europe, and overseas colonies complemented his parliamentary activities and work for the Ordnance in 1584–85, his diplomacy on behalf of the international Protestant cause, and his probable motive for commissioning Hammond’s treatise. Sidney’s cosmopolitan and irenic vision for English colonization emanated from his long-standing investment in a broad-based Protestant cause amid religious strife. Irenic Protestant advocacy in the European context, especially as articulated by Sidney’s associate Jean Hotman, emphasized dialogue among the established Catholic and Protestant churches, reinforced by the advocacy of virtuous aristocrats and magistrates for the sake of political stability, based on the premise of religion’s public nature.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ This concern for civic governance motivated new investigations of international law. Sidney’s political ambition probably explains why he did not accept an invitation in August 1585 to govern the Virginia colony.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Letters patent for overseas plantation such as those received by Ralegh provided land rights but not the deputized legal authority of a magistrate. English common law was to be the default foundation for colonies, and full political authority therein, including military command and the administration of justice (imperium in ancient civil law), emanated from the monarch’s Privy Council.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Sidney expected to wield a higher level of political authority abroad. His patronage of Hammond’s treatise constituted a strategic gesture of intellectual preparation for his ongoing diplomatic career and his anticipated position as a foreign magistrate in the Netherlands.

Conclusions

The two extant copies of Hammond’s legal treatise, analyzed together, substantiate Beale’s claim for its patronage by Sir Philip Sidney. For Hammond’s opinion on Roman civil law and the broader law of nations regarding diplomatic and royal immunities, this study has elucidated the argument itself, as well as its material context of legal debate, its most relevant political contexts in 1584–85, and its textual transmission history. Sidney commissioned Hammond’s legal opinion in 1584–85, during or shortly after his involvement in that winter’s momentous Parliament. The legal opinion proceeded from Hammond to Sidney, then from Sidney’s papers to Walsingham and probably Burghley in 1586, then from Walsingham and Burghley to Beale in 1586–87. Hammond’s treatise responded directly to an anonymous short legal argument in favor of Mary Stuart’s prosecution for treason under English law, an argument that had compared briefly the question of royal immunity with the issue of diplomatic immunity. The lengthy counterargument by Hammond focused on the legal issues, without explicitly mentioning either Mary Stuart or Mendoza. In doing so, it revised and qualified the legal premises upon which the opposing argument had been erected, concluding with a claim for the English regime’s natural-law right to political self-defense against conspiracy and other aggression toward its monarch. This concession at the end of Hammond’s treatise complemented new parliamentary legislation on conspiracy in the Act for the Queen’s Surety, which became statute law in March 1585 and thereafter licensed the Privy Council to indict conspirators for treason by its own jurisdiction, apart from the queen. This correlation with political context helps explain why Walsingham and Beale collected copies of Hammond’s treatise, to fuel their collaboration with Burghley against Mary Stuart.

Regarding Sidney as patron of Hammond’s legal scholarship, however, biographical evidence for motives points away from Mary Stuart and toward the Netherlands as a central focus for the international Protestant cause. Although Sidney certainly recognized Mary Stuart as a magnet for international conspiracy in 1584–85 and thereby a threat to the Elizabethan regime, no evidence links him to the antagonistic agenda of Burghley, Walsingham, and Beale, who sought her trial and execution as an essential means of securing England’s Protestant identity during and beyond Elizabeth I’s reign. Instead, in 1584–85, Sidney’s Protestant activism gravitated toward his queen’s foreign policy, amid defensive military preparations and hypothetical colonial ventures. Given Sidney’s diplomatic successes, his royal favor, and his privileged position alongside the Privy Council via Walsingham, Leicester, and his father, he anticipated in 1584–85 that soon he would be sent with Leicester to support the Dutch rebel provinces. In commissioning Hammond’s legal treatise, Sidney acted strategically for his own political interests and proactively for a broader Protestant cause.