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Now back in print, this comprehensive collection of essays by Simon Adams brings to life the most enigmatic of Elizabethans--Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Adams, famous for the unique depth and breadth of his research, has gathered here his most important essays looking at the Elizabethan Court, and the adventures and legacy of the Earl.
Together with his edition of Leicester's accounts and his reconstruction of Leicester's papers, Adams has published much upon on Leicester's influence and activities. His work has reshaped our knowledge of Elizabeth and her Court, Parliament, and such subjects of recent debate as the power of the nobility and the noble affinity, the politics of faction and the role of patronage. Sixteen essays are found in this collection, organized into three groups: the Court, Leicester and his affinity, and Leicester and the regions.
This volume will be essential reading for academics and students interested in the Elizabethan Court and in early modern British politics more generally.
Introduction
1. Faction, clientage and party: English politics, 1550–1603
2. Eliza enthroned? The Court and its politics
3. Favourites and their factions at the Elizabethan Court
4. The patronage of the crown in Elizabethan politics: the 1550s in perspective
5. The Eltonian legacy: politics
6. The Court as an economic institution
7. Queen Elizabeth’s eyes at Court: The Earl of Leicester
8. The Dudley clientele, 1553–63
9. A Puritan crusade? The composition of Leicester’s expedition to the Netherlands, 1585–86
10. The Dudley clientele and the House of Commons, 1559–86
11. A godly peer? Leicester and the Puritans
12. The gentry of north Wales and Leicester’s expedition to the Netherlands, 1585–86
13. The Composition of 1564 and Leicester’s tenurial reformation in the lordship of Denbigh
14. Office-holders of the borough of Denbigh and the lordships of Denbighshire in the reign of Elizabeth I
15. ‘Because I am of that countrye & mynde to plant myself there’: Leicester and the West Midlands
16. Baronial contexts? Continutity and change in the noble affinity, 1400–1600
Index