The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558-1569 (review)

Abstract

190 Reviews are so numerous that perhaps a more apt title would have been 'The Time of Thomas More'. David Tulloch Department of History Victoria University of Wellington Alf ord, Stephen, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and Succession Crisis, 1558-1569 (Cambridge Studies in Early M o d e m British History), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998; cloth; pp. 286; R.R.P. £35.00. Sir William Cecil is perhaps the best-known — and certainly the mos often quoted — politician of the Elizabethan era. Created Baron of Burghley in 1571, he is almost universally treated in modern historiography as being Queen Elizabeth's political soul mate, even her alter ego. As Patrick Collinson once put it, Elizabeth and Cecil (or Burghley) have become welded together by historians 'as if they were the front and rear legs of a pantomime horse'. Stephen Alford seeks to pull this unnatural creature apart and to show Cecil, as it were, in his true spots: a politician whose views were often distinctly different from those of his queen and w h o was both willing and able to propose solutions which diverged radically from her conservative stance. In many ways, this book is a pre-history of the curious 'monarchical republicanism' which Collinson detected among England's social arid political elite in the 1570s and early '80s. Exploring the books and ideas which shaped Cecil's education at Cambridge and Gray's Inn during the 1530s and '40s, Dr Alford explains w h y a whole generation of Protestant English gentlemen believed that they had a positive duty to counsel the queen through court, council or parliament, and how Elizabeth's frequent unwillingness to heed their advice created a severe tension between their innate loyalty to their monarch and their passionate concern to preserve the integrity of the state. Although Alford perhaps underplays the impact of political events of the mid-Tudor period on this process, he succeeds very well in demonstrating how repeated crises in the 1560s forced Cecil (and many of his colleagues on the privy council) to contemplate measures which would have had Reviews 191 radical implications for the English polity. In 1559, for example, Cecil was so concerned about affairs in Scotland that he proposed the formal deposition of Mary Stuart and the transfer of her crown to the earl of Arran. Such ideas remained utterly unacceptable to Elizabeth, but they prefigured Cecil's o w n later thoughts in the 1560s, and again in the mid-1580s, about h o w England might cope with the profound uncertainties over the succession which Elizabeth herself consistently refused to resolve. This book also places great emphasis upon the role of language in politics and policy-making, reflecting both the 'linguistic turn' which has influenced m u c h recent historiography and the unique richness of Cecil's surviving papers. Other key themes include the indivisibility of domestic, 'British' and Continental issues in the politics of the 1560s (despite the best efforts of nineteenth-century cataloguers and twentieth-century historians to inscribe artificial distinctions upon them) and the pervasive influence of a mind-set which analysed the contemporary international scene in providential and, indeed, conspiratorial terms. The latter point — 'the strength of what can be too easily dismissed as paranoia' (p. 187) — is important not only because it helps to explain Cecil's ideas and actions. According to Alford, a shared belief in an international Catholic conspiracy against England also united the privy council during the 1560s and therefore undermines any factional analysis of politics of the sort advanced by Conyers Read and m a n y other scholars. For Alford, cooperation is the hallmark of the privy council in the 1560s, not faction. In his view, debates among the councillors — 'when they disagreed at all' — occurred essentially over 'the application of practical policy': the basic premises of each debate were essentially accepted by all councillors, but debate might ensue over the risks and ramifications of taking specific actions. This wholesale dismissal of faction from the politics of the 1560s m a y be going too far. It is noteworthy that this book focuses almost exclusively on the privy council and says...