In Writing under tyranny (2005), Greg Walker argued that the exceptional political pressures applied to writers, as well as to a whole political class, in the 1530s had an effect on literature no less profound than Thomas Cromwell's impact on the state, ‘a reinvention of the role of the author in English culture’. Scott Lucas continues this theme into the beginnings of one of the most enduringly popular of mid-Tudor texts, A mirror for magistrates. First conceived in the equally disturbed first year or so of Mary Tudor, and subsequently reborn to a best-seller status under Elizabeth i and James i, the Mirror appears not as a bland ‘mirror’ of consensual ‘Tudor ideas’ but as a political act in itself. William Baldwin, who masterminded what in origin was no more than a collection of individual tragedies, appealed to Elizabethan magistrates ‘to allow the literary realm to be an unfettered discursive space for political critique’. To read this text in this way is to enter a new world of ‘new historicism’, with sharper and more intelligent teeth than the vogue created twenty-five years ago by Stephen Greenblatt. We have travelled some distance from Lily B. Campbell, whose edition of the Mirror (1938), which influenced E. M. W. Tillyard, turned even the ultimate responsibility of earthly kings to the King of Kings into a piece of comfortable wisdom. The decision of the Marian printer John Wayland to reprint the de casibus sequence of John Lydgate's Fall of princes, and to add the more recent tragedies of fifteenth-century magnates (an enterprise stopped in its tracks by Stephen Gardiner, and then taken up again by Baldwin in 1563) was the device of a disgruntled group of Edwardian veterans to make sense of the end of all their hopes in the death of Edward vi, preceded by the execution of Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset. So this is a Marian piece, which enjoyed sixty or seventy years of afterlife beyond 1558. We are now familiar with the use of historical examples to make a contemporary case. Lucas invites us to extend that understanding to A mirror for magistrates. Regardless of the Mirror's intention to comment, covertly, on the moral failings and fall of the Edwardian regime, it was possible for the Warwickshire magnate Sir John Newdigate, whose father was eight years old when Somerset was executed, to pay particular attention to the Mirror. He was addressing, in 1606, Sir Fulke Greville, friend of Sir Philip Sidney, who had praised the Mirror in his ‘Defence of poetry’ (‘I account the Mirror of Magistrates meetly furnished of beautiful parts’), and who, according to Newdigate, had opposed the ‘metamorphosing’ of ‘our moderate form of monarchie into a precipitate absoluteness’. ‘What the Mirror offered Elizabethan and Jacobean governors was an image of the English magistrate as a man of enormous power, fierce independence and awesome responsibility.’ Watch this space.