Most historians of Elizabethan England will have encountered Robert Beale’s archive at some stage in their research. It forms the most substantial part of the British Library’s Yelverton collection (Additional MSS 48000–48196) and is one of the most important surviving caches of material from this period. David Scott Gehring’s welcome new biography sheds a great deal of light on Beale himself, aptly described as a man “in the second tier of administration and royal representation” (255). Beale was a great traveler around Europe—sometimes reluctantly so—and Gehring is chiefly interested in his international activities, though he does not neglect other relevant themes. Given its broad and generous focus, the book will be of value to scholars in many different areas.

Gehring expertly traces Beale’s early life and education. He was not an Oxbridge man. His education at the free school at Coventry in the 1550s was interrupted by the accession of Mary I in 1553. In the company of his uncle Sir Richard Morison and other religious exiles, he travelled to the Continent to escape persecution, first to Strasbourg and then to Zurich. There he heard lectures from great reformers and was tutored by John Aylmer, later Bishop of London, who was a harsh taskmaster and aroused Beale’s lifelong animosity. After Zurich, Beale went—somewhere. We are not sure where, but it could have been Italy or Germany; Gehring suggests Heidelberg, and this reviewer for one is not inclined to argue. After Heidelberg he removed to Wittenberg, accruing even more international experience.

Beale started his state career as a kind of unofficial ambassador, tagging along on various English embassies in Germany and France. He soon came to the attention of the Protestant regime, notably Cecil, Leicester, and Walsingham (later his brother-in-law). Eventually he became one of the regime’s key assets. Though he was a talented man, his career was retarded because he got involved in a controversy known as the Tempestas Halesiana (1563–4). To cut a long story short, he wrote two Latin treatises in favor of the legitimacy of a 1560 marriage between Lady Katherine Grey and Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. This was political dynamite, for if Beale was right, it would follow that the child of this union, also called Edward Seymour, was a credible (Protestant) heir to the throne. The chief promoter of the Grey–Hertford cause was John Hales (Beale’s step-uncle, popularly known as Clubfoot Hales), who spent four years under house arrest for having incurred the queen’s ire. Though Beale escaped punishment, he spent the next decade under a cloud.

Beale’s first secure appointment came in 1572, when he was sworn as one of the clerks of the privy council, probably through Leicester’s intercession. He proved himself invaluable to England’s supreme executive, even serving as de facto principal secretary during Walsingham’s absence in 1583. In 1592, he wrote his celebrated “Treatise of the Office of a Councillor and Principal Secretary” (first printed in 1925), one of the best sources available to historians of Elizabethan government. He was also an active parliament man and continued his ambassadorial work. On embassy in 1577, he was robbed by pirates and missed the birth of his first child: a sorry reminder of the selflessness expected of public servants. The golden thread running through all of Beale’s international activities was his interest (and, by extension, the government’s interest) in establishing a pan-European Protestant alliance. This was a pipe dream, given the complex geopolitical reality, and given Protestant theologians’ love of controversy and polemic.

In the 1580s, Beale came into conflict with Archbishop Whitgift, who had been investigating Puritans in the Court of High Commission; Beale said his methods amounted to a Spanish Inquisition and called for tolerance in adiaphora. Thanks to Lord Burghley’s protection, he was not punished for his frankness of speech. In 1587, he was sent to Holland with the Earl of Leicester, recently appointed governor-general of the United Provinces. In 1593, he was dismissed from the House of Commons for his forthright attacks on the ecclesiastical establishment. By this stage, Leicester and Walsingham were dead, so he had lost two of his three protectors; only Burghley remained. He found himself increasingly sidelined until his death in 1601, though the government continued to make use of his knowledge and experience.

Gehring demonstrates an enviable knowledge of political, diplomatic, and religious history. Readers less well versed in these fields may embarrassedly find themselves driven to the search engine to remind themselves of certain matters, such as what a Gnesio-Lutheran stood for. The book draws on a wide range of primary and secondary material in numerous languages, allowing the author to draw new connections between men and ideas; for example, Gehring notes that Beale probably became aware of the work of George Buchanan through the intermediation of their mutual acquaintance, Hubert Languet (82). This is the sort of insight that can only come through extensive reading and reflection; superficial scholars would never notice such a thing. The bibliography lists no less than fifteen foreign archives in which Gehring has conducted research.

Gehring sets the record straight on a number of points. For example, he shows that the date of death recorded for Beale in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is two days out, and that Beale had a whole litter of children, not just one, as is commonly asserted. He also modestly announces new archival findings, such as unattributed letters by Beale that have been badly calendared. One surprising omission is that Gehring does not say all that much about Beale’s archive in its own right, though he makes extensive use of it. Beale’s archive might have merited its own chapter, since it is arguably the most important thing about the man.

This book is extremely well researched. The author has packed as much information as possible into each paragraph, making a close and detailed text that requires very careful attention. One feels at times that there is too much detail about peripheral issues; trimming the book down by about a quarter and introducing more paragraph breaks would have made it an easier read. Having said that, a lot of the incidental information is valuable, such as the discussions of the mechanisms by which carpetbaggers were placed into borough seats in parliament (98–99, 158). The usual smattering of typos (e.g., “nineth” on p. 163, “Mercant Adventurers” on p. 259) suggests once again that OUP needs better proofreaders. However, there are no serious accuracy issues, and one never doubts the expertise of the author.

It is hard to write animated biographies of early-modern figures. Nevertheless, Gehring does not lose sight of Beale the man. We hear of his ambitions, his wife and children, the houses in which he lived, his health problems, his money troubles. We discover that his enemies called him “vehement and bitter,” while his allies called him “worthy and grave;” no doubt there was some truth to both descriptions (256). He was a Protestant ideologue who feared the aggrandizement of Catholic Spain, and as such he “sometimes saw the world in very black and white terms” (259). But he also had a liberal side: he donated to a hospital in Coventry, and he opposed torture on ethical grounds, unlike most of the privy council, for whom it was a normal way of getting state enemies to squeal. All in all, this is a richly rewarding study that can be recommended to all historians of Elizabethan England.