Love and a Female Monarch: The Case of Elizabeth Tudor

Abstract

Much of the importance of what we call “political ideas” lies precisely in their being political-operative and effective to the extent that they are deployed in actual situations, in the relationships that are characteristic and constitutive of concrete political system.It is a commonplace of Tudor history that one distinctive feature of the reign of Elizabeth Tudor was the panache with which she wooed her English subjects. Such activity has been treated much more as an aspect of her “instinct for romantic leadership,” much less as a subject for serious historical study. This article sets out to redress that dismissive stance and argues that the language and processes of her “wooing” encapsulated an intersection of humanist beliefs and Tudor policy, with serious political purposes and significant political implications. Since the 1960s, a new orthodoxy in the study of political thought has stressed the importance of paying attention to the audiences for whom, and the contexts within which, particular political ideas were expressed, but there has been little effect of this trend on Tudor political studies. Historians have paid only passing attention to whole new genres of Tudor political discourse, let alone to the increasing Tudor range of strategies for presenting fundamental political propositions to an ever-widening audience. The introduction of print, the polemical function of Tudor homilies, Tudor royal proclamations, and court-sponsored political pamphlets all carried important messages. Such evolving forms contained within them implied redefinitions of relationships between subject and monarch. The reign of Henry VIII reflected the evolution of a qualitatively new concept of the sovereign monarch, drawing on an increasingly unqualified doctrine of allegiance.