Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations, 1558-1630

Abstract

Abstract This volume deals with royal dynastic politics during the post-Reformation period. The royal succession and the business of marriage into other royal and princely families were central to public politics. But the Reformation raised questions in some parts of Europe about how far hereditary right was necessarily the key to deciding the path of the succession, and whether other issues might not be taken into account in identifying where and with whom royal power should be located and whether the sovereign should, under certain circumstances, have to make concessions to particular readings of spiritual authority. In that context, the claim here is not only that the conventional historiography on the Reformation in the British Isles fits, as it obviously does, into that account of dynastic politics but also that the substantial archival and printed records relating to post-Reformation Catholicism of various kinds can be reintegrated into mainstream versions of English and British history during the period.