Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction The 1590s: the second reign of Elizabeth I?
- 1 The patronage of the crown in Elizabethan politics: the 1590s in perspective
- 2 Regnum Cecilianum? A Cecilian perspective of the Court
- 3 Patronage at Court, faction and the earl of Essex
- 4 Peers, patronage and the politics of history
- 5 The fall of Sir John Perrot
- 6 The Elizabethan establishment and the ecclesiastical polity
- 7 Ecclesiastical vitriol: religious satire in the 1590s and the invention of puritanism
- 8 Ecclesiastical vitriol: the kirk, the puritans and the future king of England
- 9 Social strain and social dislocation, 1585–1603
- 10 Lord of Liberty: Francis Davison and the cult of Elizabeth
- 11 The complaint of poetry for the death of liberality: the decline of literary patronage in the 1590s
- 12 Summer's Last Will and Testament: revels' end
- 13 The theatre and the Court in the 1590s
- Index
1 - The patronage of the crown in Elizabethan politics: the 1590s in perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction The 1590s: the second reign of Elizabeth I?
- 1 The patronage of the crown in Elizabethan politics: the 1590s in perspective
- 2 Regnum Cecilianum? A Cecilian perspective of the Court
- 3 Patronage at Court, faction and the earl of Essex
- 4 Peers, patronage and the politics of history
- 5 The fall of Sir John Perrot
- 6 The Elizabethan establishment and the ecclesiastical polity
- 7 Ecclesiastical vitriol: religious satire in the 1590s and the invention of puritanism
- 8 Ecclesiastical vitriol: the kirk, the puritans and the future king of England
- 9 Social strain and social dislocation, 1585–1603
- 10 Lord of Liberty: Francis Davison and the cult of Elizabeth
- 11 The complaint of poetry for the death of liberality: the decline of literary patronage in the 1590s
- 12 Summer's Last Will and Testament: revels' end
- 13 The theatre and the Court in the 1590s
- Index
Summary
In February 1597, after learning of the initial discussions of the naval operation that would become known as the ‘Islands Voyage’, Sir Francis Vere observed to Sir Robert Sidney: ‘Of my Lord of Essex's going to sea, I am sorry to hear, unless I could persuade myself that before his going he would furnish the court with offices, for that it will else prove his adversaries work whilst he is absent.’ These comments were no doubt an allusion to the events of the previous summer, when Sir Robert Cecil was finally successful in obtaining formal appointment as Principal Secretary of State while Essex was absent on the voyage to Cadiz, but their general import is no less interesting. They contain several of the apparent truisms of Elizabethan Court politics: the competition for patronage, the need for a constant presence at Court, and the dual function of office under the crown as both the prize and the instrument of politics. Such commentary is found throughout Sidney's correspondence, which since its publication in 1746 has been one of the best-known sources for the Court politics of the 1590s. The editor, Arthur Collins, then noted to a friend that in the Sidney Papers ‘the intrigues of Queen Elizabeths court [are] more fully set forth than has been published and wch shows how the Cecilian Faction Reigned’.
Quite ironically, perhaps, this eighteenth-century perception of the relationship between the patronage of the crown and Elizabethan Court factions is shared by the most advanced modern scholarship.
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- Information
- The Reign of Elizabeth ICourt and Culture in the Last Decade, pp. 20 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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