War, Virtue, and the State

Abstract

Abstract Elizabeth’s last favorite, Robert Devereux second earl of Essex, has long been associated by historians with both the patronage of avant garde political ideas and a rise of factionalism within the court. This chapter re-examines both views by placing the earl’s career in a longer-term perspective, identifying major strands of continuity between his outlook and behavior, and those of previous Elizabethan swordsmen like the earl of Leicester and Sir Philip Sidney. It shows how Essex’s circle built upon but simultaneously reconfigured established patterns of thought and conduct. Essex’s outlook centered on his views about connections between the state—a concept he invoked with great frequency—and a set of noble virtues and virtuous passions, involving honor, courage, and public service that he associated with himself and his followers. He saw those virtues as opposed by the “base” qualities he associated with his court adversaries and, increasingly, the queen and her aging ministers. His critique of the queen and court built upon earlier Catholic polemical arguments, which he stripped of their partisan confessional dimensions. It was also influenced by readings of the Roman historian Tacitus, although Tacitean histories did more to reinforce and refine attitudes the earl and his circle already held than to provide an original template for political interpretation.