The issue of literary patronage is important for all students of the reign of Elizabeth I to address, as patronage is the site where the mechanisms of Literature's rôle in the ordering of society can be observed. Literature is potentially a very powerful tool in the political process, for it can imaginatively articulate prevailing cultural, ideological and social values in such a way as either to elicit assent to them, or else to serve as a focus for questioning, dissent and resistance. The earlier Tudor monarchs seem fully to have appreciated this, as both Henry VII and Henry VIII took pains to harness the political potentiality of writers. Henry VII imported Continental poets such as Bernard Andre and Pietro Carmigliano to embellish his exploits with complimentary verses and humanist historians such as Tito Livio dà Forli and Polydore Vergil to amplify his magnificence by writing accounts of his life and reign for a Continental audience. Similarly, Henry VIII hired John Skelton as orator regius to mark significant state occasions (such as royal victories in battle, births, and deaths) with appropriate verses, and sponsored a variety of prose propagandists from Thomas More to Thomas Starkey and Richard Morrison to present the stance of his administration on issues relating to the Reformation. Given the assiduous attention that the first two Tudors devoted to literary patronage as a means of magnifying their dynasty, it is all the more startling that Elizabeth I became progressively less inclined to dispense it, so that by the final decade of her reign very few writers were attaining the rewards they thought they deserved, whether financial or otherwise.