In Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Peter Lake seeks to chart the way that pro- and anti-Elizabethan forces wrote to instantiate or reinforce competing realities. While the writings of both sides frequently “told lies, sometimes of heroic proportions,” each “incorporated more than enough elements of contemporary political and ideological reality to have presented to contemporaries an extraordinarily plausible account” of political events within the kingdom (89). While Lake refers to the Treatise of Treasons, composed in 1572 and circulated in 1573, when making these statements, throughout his analysis he makes it clear that both sides were operating from within the realm of competing ideological realities, and thus neither had a monopoly on objective truths regarding the Elizabethan politics. Furthermore, while opponents operated from different sides of the confessional divide in England, any efforts to separate religious from secular elements in Elizabethan political writings are ahistorical and should be avoided. Of the many points Lake makes, that is perhaps the strongest, since sixteenth-century writers would not have understood the modern distinctions between religious and nonreligious thought and rhetoric.

The large body of scholarship about Elizabethan England can make efforts to say anything new about her reign daunting, which is one reason that Lake's approach is welcome. While he does not wholly ignore works written in defense of Elizabeth, the focus is always on what he terms the “libelous secret history” genre, which used “the notion of evil counsel”—among other elements—as a central theme to attack Elizabeth's regime (5). Throughout his analysis Lake takes seriously the arguments and writings of those opposed to Elizabeth, seeking to understand the authors’ motives as well as their arguments in an effort to avoid the presentism that has sometimes marred analyses of the period. However, in spite of Lake's commitment to placing analysis of Elizabethan political writings into their proper context, his analysis sometimes falls short of that goal.

Lake's analysis of the Treatise of Treasons reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of his approach. Treatise of Treasons, which was “the first direct application to English politics of the libelous secret history,” has “a central significance” for Lake's argument (70). This work presented William Cecil and Nicolas Bacon as the primary “evil counselors,” who had “no ‘substantial religion’ but only ‘certain imaginative opinions,” which drove them to “befame her [Mary, Queen of Scots] as an adulteress, a murderess, a papist, a competitioner of your [Elizabeth's] crown” (72–73). Thus, the author of the Treatise, who may have been John Leslie, did not set up his work strictly along confessional lines. He denied that Elizabeth's counselors had any legitimate religious beliefs, but that they were instead engaged in Machiavellian attacks on the old nobility. That Cecil and Bacon happened to profess to be Protestants while the old nobility, represented by the Duke of Norfolk and the legitimate queen of Scotland, Mary, were Catholic was of little relevance. After all, stirring up support for the traditional nobility against new men like Cecil would be easier than undertaking a dispute over religion.

Of course there were other works that were part of this public discourse that did not shy away from taking an explicitly religious tone, such as the anonymously authored Leicester's Commonwealth (1584). But when authors took an overtly religious approach to their writings, it was always linked to the larger political context. For example, when Leicester's Commonwealth was published the hoped-for marriage between Queen Elizabeth and the Catholic duke of Anjou buoyed the hopes of English Catholics for a normalization of their position within England (97–98). This reminder that a presentation of sixteenth-century political disputes as either “Protestant” or “Catholic” is needlessly reductionist is most welcome indeed.

However, in other ways Lake loses sight of the context that he maintains is so important. For example, he repeatedly refers to the works he analyzes as addressed to the court of public opinion, but he does so with no overt consideration of who that public might be. At one point he notes that what he refers to as “reality” is, in one instance, a reference to “what the averagely informed contemporary knew or thought they knew about what had just happened, was happening now, and might be about to happen next,” but what sort of “averagely informed contemporary” Lake is referring to is left to the reader's imagination (469). There are very few moments when Lake considers the growing complexity of the reading public in Elizabethan England, as when he mentions “leading townsmen, as well as the gentry” in his discussion of the bond of association or his reference to the queen's personal letter to the “Mayor and aldermen of London” of 1584 (159, 232). Perhaps Lake assumes that his readers will automatically recognize that he really means the nobility and upper gentry of England when he refers to the “public” in public opinion. If so, he should have both clarified that position and explained why the burghers and tradesmen did not matter to this debate, given their economic importance and the very real pressure such groups could exert through mechanisms such as riot. Other elements of context are lacking—such as the execution of numerous Catholics prior to the parliamentary debates of 1572, which Lake argues were aimed primarily at the “public,” whoever that might be, and shaped by a desire to avoid the brush of “sourness and cruelty” toward those of the “Romish religion” (159). Surely public knowledge of these executions would have complicated these parliamentary efforts to appear clement.

In short, Lake has produced an interesting analysis of political discourse in Elizabethan England that goes far toward taking Catholic writings seriously and considering them on their own merits. However, Lake falls short in his quest to place these writings fully within their context, which he states is necessary if we are to understand them properly. Therefore, while his analysis of individual works is both interesting and useful, Bad Queen Bess? is also somewhat wanting.