Peter Costello
Bad Queen Bess: Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Elizabeth I
by Peter Lake (Oxford University Press, £35.00)
It is often remarked that in modern Britain all that children learn of history are the Tudors and the Nazis. This is meagre diet, but there are universal truths to be learned from both periods.
Prof. Peter Lake is the author of several books focused on the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, which used individual cases and incidents to open up explorations of overlooked social, religious and political affairs in England.
In this 500-page, densely written book he takes a different, broader approach. Written for an academic audience – which entails debating individual points with individual historians – its general theme cannot but be of the greatest interest to those concerned with historical aspects of Catholicism in these islands.
Central to his approach is a view that the older narrative and analytical histories of this period had, to a very surprising extent, actually marginalised just what was being used by the governments of the day as their central point of policy, the fear of Catholicism.
Threat
The Catholic threat in the hands of Cecil and Burghley was discussed, but from the government angle. What were all too often overlooked were the views and publications of the Catholics themselves, both within the realm and abroad in France, Spain and Portugal.
Dr Lake now seeks to demonstrate, through detailed analysis, how the libellous “secret history” – which claimed to reveal the inner truth of Catholic plots against or about the inner life of the court, became a central mode of controversy. What seems to be surprising is that what the Catholics said at the time, scurrilous as it was about the nature of the oppressive regimes under Henry and Elizabeth, have as the result of more recent research – he mentions, for instance, The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy – to be very close to the truth. The famed glories of the Tudors are badly tarnished as a result.
This is a very detailed book, but one instance might be mentioned in a short review. There is a long discussion of Robert’s Parsons 1558 book on the origin and progress of the Anglican schism, printed in France, which makes astonishing reading – royal passions, illicit and incestuous relations, claims that Anne Boleyn was actually Henry’s daughter by her elder sister – all very lurid indeed.
The truth of these claims might be disputed; but what concerns Peter Lake are the modes and methods of political manoeuvres between state power and the oppressed Catholics.
For the same colourful and trenchant techniques of propaganda were used by the government too, as is made clear. Some of the documents discussed were the secret work of Lord Burleigh and Robert Cecil by their own hand.
But the notion, so popular since the 17th Century, that the Catholic story of England is a marginal one, is here turned upside down.
There is another, larger dimension too. “I have been telling a largely English story here,” Prof. Lake concludes his account of Parson’s book, “but the fact remains that the English story makes no sense viewed outside [a] European context”.
Rather, events in England were a function of, sometimes a central and sometimes a peripheral part of, a wider dynastic and confessional crisis or conjunction. It was a situation in which contemporaries all over Europe – in Paris, Madrid, Rome – saw events and operated upon them using the same narrative forms and tropes of libellous “secret history”.
The “Good Queen Bess” of British popular history was seen by some Catholics as being influenced by evil-minded, even atheistic, counsellors. But others took a more extreme view and wanted her overthrown or assassinated. Plots against the Queen’s life were constantly rumoured –there is a discussion here of the trial of an unfortunate Portuguese medical man Dr Lopez, a great sensation of the day.
However, all through these debates the reader will catch echoes of what goes on today. Plots and conspiracies and lies are as active in the realm of politics and religion as ever they were. The pamphlets of this era in later centuries turned into a government controlled press, and today into the free for all blogosphere where actual truth can be at a discount. Believing the worst about ones foes remains a common habit of us all; as the Trump campaign illustrates.
Though it demands a well-informed background in the period, this is a fascinating and enlightening read, from which many general lessons about human behaviour can be derived. But it might perhaps have been written more fluently. The author’s penchant for a too often jarring juxtaposition of academic jargon with modern British slang should have been worked over by the copy editor. However, Peter Lake himself is charmingly frank about the nature of his often clunky prose style.