Written by one of our leading scholars of early modern England, based upon his Ford Lectures at Oxford, this is a deep dive into the political culture of Queen Elizabeth's reign, noteworthy as perhaps the first dive, or at least the deepest, to explore the interrelationship between Roman Catholic politics and the formal goals and priorities of the Protestant regime. At its heart is what Peter Lake calls new “modes of politique analysis and pitch-making” which developed in Queen Elizabeth's reign and “represented a major new development in the ways in which English politics was thought about and practiced” (482). The texts in question were the various libels, polemics, and conspiracy theories—like Stubbs's Gaping Gulf on the Protestant side, and Leicester's Commonwealth on the Catholic side—which imagined the Queen herself as the victim of evil counselors, atheists, and machiavels, who sought to divert the rightful succession for their own corrupt purposes.

What these conspiracy theories had in common, and what so fascinates Professor Lake, is that by necessity they renarrated the recent history of their own times through their distorting confessional and polemical lenses; and these narrations bear an eerie resemblance to certain modern and supposedly less distorted historiographical arguments about Elizabethan politics. In particular, Lake has noticed that the historiographical view of Elizabethan England as a “monarchical republic”—the story in which William Cecil and his associates, imagining themselves as citizens-within-subjects, planned to safeguard the commonwealth by excluding Mary Stuart from the throne and ruling temporarily without a monarch in case of Elizabeth's untimely death—looks a lot like their own propaganda to excuse a political program which, from a Catholic perspective, looked like a campaign by evil counselors to divert the lawful succession. This observation becomes the lever which Lake uses to pry open the “public” politics of Elizabethan England, in which different (mostly confessional) interests reinterpreted one another's actions in front of a promiscuous audience of readers (or listeners or theater-goers), in order to sway the opinions of a very broad swath of society whose opinions could potentially have been decisive in the conflict that would have erupted if the Queen had in fact died before her time. This is a book about turning points in history that failed to turn (Elizabeth was not, after all, assassinated) but which nonetheless fundamentally changed the way politics functioned, opening it to the bitterness of ideology and the dangers of public opinion.

Most of the book, then, is an exhaustive account of those public politics, and the ways that Catholics and Protestants appropriated and responded dialectically to one another's arguments. At the most basic level, the point is that Elizabethan politics make no sense unless Catholics are included; or, perhaps more accurately, the only kind of sense they would make is the propagandistic view of the Protestant conspiracy theorists themselves, which historians have adopted hook, line, and sinker. A larger argument, suggested broadly at the end of the book although not pursued in detail, is that the new, libelous politics of Queen Elizabeth's reign invented and set the stage for the libelous politics of the seventeenth century which, as the resent work of Alastair Bellany and Tom Cogswell has shown, were instrumental in delegitimizing the Stuart monarchy.

This is a very great book indeed, the product of decades of research and profound thinking about how the Elizabethan regime looked from the outside rather than through the eyes of its architects and apologists. It marks the culmination of Lake's work over the past twenty years, drawing together strands in his thought going back to his early work on anti-popery, his work on the public sphere, and his work on Catholic political culture.

I would make only two critical comments. First, a caveat emptor: there is very little in this work about “bad Queen Bess.” Elizabeth appears often as a supposed victim of evil counselors, and often as a damsel in distress requiring the protection of her loyal servants, but only occasionally as a villain rather than a victim; this is not a sustained account of negative representations of Gloriana, as was attempted some years ago in a little book of essays called Dissing Elizabeth. Second, while I take no issue with the book's analysis, there are moments when Lake's opposition to the “monarchical republic” thesis grows beyond his own evidence into a kind of dialectical argument that mirrors the dialectics in his sources. That is, Lake argues that the monarchical republic did not really exist: it was whitewashed special pleading for illegal attempts to alter the succession, repeatedly smacked down by Elizabeth herself in what was, after all, a monarchical monarchy. But on the other hand, one might argue, the Catholics who uncovered this dastardly Cecilian plot had their own version: they, too, portrayed themselves as active citizens with a duty to counsel the monarch, and they, too, reached out to a concerned and politicized public. So maybe, alongside showing that the maximal version of the “monarchical republic” suggested by Patrick Collinson did not really exist, Lake has also shown that a more minimal version—the intensive use of classical tropes and resources to construct political legitimacy for dangerous religious positions—was more prevalent than we had previously thought.