Taking its lead from a famous scene in 2 Henry IV and drawing upon the latest historical scholarship, this chapter surveys the modernization of England’s military capacity during the reign of Elizabeth I. By contrast with the success of England’s naval revival, the parallel effort to overhaul the antiquated county militia system and to create armies for service abroad achieved only partial success. While bows and bills were gradually replaced by guns and pikes and a proportion of each county’s militia was formed into “trained bands,” the sheer scale of the effort meant that the modernization of England’s military capacity on land always remained a frustratingly incomplete endeavor. Even so, Elizabeth’s privy council and the lord lieutenants of the counties made greater progress in this effort than has typically been recognized and managed to sustain war on multiple fronts over a period of more than twenty years.

Since the time of Queen Elizabeth I herself, notions of ‘faction’ have been considered profoundly important for understanding Elizabethan high politics. Perhaps the most vitriolic piece of political criticism of the reign, Leicester's Commonwealth, accused the earl of Leicester of deliberately building up a ‘faction’ to control the realm and ensure that his brother-in-law, the earl of Huntingdon, became Elizabeth's successor. In the early seventeenth century, a number of writers, such as William Camden and Sir Robert Naunton, looked back on Elizabeth's reign and lauded the queen for her ‘princely’ skill in ‘balancing’ factions. Although such praise was bestowed with more than half an eye to the political controversies of their own day about the monopolizing of royal favour, this view of Elizabeth proved to be highly influential over the succeeding centuries. In modern times, Conyers Read re-emphasized the notion of faction when he suggested that the foreign policy of Elizabeth's reign needed to be understood as the product of a long-term struggle between rival ‘factions’ on the Privy Council. In the late 1940s, J. E. Neale refocussed the terms of debate over faction. Influenced by the views of Naunton and by his own research into the politics of parliamentary elections, Neale reasserted the link between faction and patronage, rather than with matters of policy. In the words of a subsequent essay by Wallace MacCaffrey which elaborated on Neale's theme, Elizabethan political life was seen to be centred on an unending struggle between rival factions for ‘place and patronage’.