Robert Beale (c. 1541-1601) was one of the foremost (and certainly the best documented) of the 'second-rank' figures that inhabited the inner rings of the Elizabethan polity, and who in many senses characterised the politics of the age. Beale was educated first at Coventry and then abroad during the Marian exile. Here he imbibed of the cosmopolitan Protestantism that was to characterise and also control his subsequent years of service to Queen, Country and commonwealth. His academic, linguistic and legal training also formed the basis of his secretarial and administrative skills that provided the backbone to his public political life. Beale became an integral figure in mid-Elizabethan political society first through his connections with Cecil, Leicester and Walsingham and then through his service as a diplomatic specialist and as a Clerk of the Privy Council. His entire public political life was motivated and controlled by a complex matrix of conceptions of service. First, service to Walsingham in Paris as a secretary and familiar; second, service to Cecil and Leicester and other Privy Councillors as an administrator and a source of counsel, and third service to Elizabeth as Queen and figurehead of the nation. The final controlling ideological impulse for Beale was his service to the more intangible concepts of a distinctly protestant English commonwealth, combined at the same time with a more widespread notion of a pan-European community of reformed protestants. Beale's public political life provides an exceptionally well-documented microcosm of many of the concerns that motivated his contemporaries and of the arenas in which these concerns were acted out. As such, the clearer and more detailed picture of Beale that emerges also adds considerably to our understanding of mid-Elizabethan political society.

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This dissertation is an investigation of the military functions of the office of lord lieutenant in the years 1585 to 1603. The lieutenants commanded the county militias, and the main goal of this study is to determine whether or not they were vital to military efficiency in the late-Elizabethan years. By vital, it is meant did the lieutenants make a noticeable difference in a country's performance in preparing sufficient men and arms for service. Emphasis is placed on William Cecil, first Lord Burghley, lieutenant of Essex, Hertfordshire and Lincolnshire because he was typical of many lieutenants in that he was involved in national government as a privy councillor and Lord Treasurer in addition to being an absentee lieutenant. Like all lieutenants, he relied on his deputies to oversee the actual work of mustering and levying men in the counties. Many of those deputies would later become members of the commissions of musters that replaced lieutenants in many counties after 1590. The fact that many lieutenancies were not renewed calls the importance of the office into question. Burghley's approach to the job is explored and his deputies compared to those of several other counties. Then other lieutenants, including Sir Christopher Hatton, George Talbot, William Brooke, Charles Howard of Effingham, Henry Carey and Roger North, are compared to Burghley. The musters and levies, the chief military functions, which took place under Burghley from 1587 until his death in August 1598 are compared with those in other counties. Burghley's former counties had no lieutenants from late 1598 through the rest of Elizabeth's reign in March 1603. During these later years, a commission of musters supervised the militias in those counties, making it possible to compare the difference, if any, the two types of command had on military competence. The findings here are that there are no major differences between counties with lieutenants and those without them. The office of lord lieutenant had no major impact on military efficiency.

This thesis examines the use and interpretation of praemunire from its fourteenth-century creation to the English break with Rome. Although much has been written on praemunire in the Tudor period, when Henry VIII and Thomas Wolsey used the offence to intimidate their rivals in the years preceding the break with Rome, little work has been done on the offence in the century-and-a-half before this date. The central point of this thesis is to connect the creation of the offence of praemunire in the fourteenth century to this sixteenth-century use, to see how it changed from an offence designed to protect both the ecclesiastical and temporal spheres in England from an encroaching papacy, to one that could bring low the mightiest of England’s churchmen. As this thesis deals primarily with how the offence changed over time, the chapters follow a broadly chronological structure. Chapters one to three look at the fourteenth-century creation of the writ of praemunire facias, the Statutes of Praemunire, and the offence of praemunire that they created. Chapters four and five look at the spiritual responses to the offence in the fifteenth century. Chapter four looks at the papal reactions to praemunire and the ostensibly similar provisors legislation. Chapter five looks at the contemporary records of convocation to measure English ecclesiastical opinion of praemunire in the fifteenth century. Chapter six look at the legal interpretation of the offence, from the deposition of Richard II to the accession of Henry VII, to see how the offence was confirmed as one that could be used against the English ecclesiastical courts. Finally, chapters seven and eight examine the use of praemunire in the Tudor period, and reassess the high-profile events in the sixteenth century based on this new understanding of praemunire.

Despite a wealth of scholarship on the Tudors’ printed and visual propaganda, little has been written on how the population received this material. Doubts over how far either media penetrated a largely illiterate society with questionable access to the visual arts have likely been partly responsible, but as studies increasingly disprove these assumptions the need to address this gap becomes more pressing. After establishing that the governments from Henry VIII to Elizabeth were interested, to varying extents, in propagating particular messages to their subjects, this thesis employs a diverse range of sources to analyse popular responses to official pamphlets, portraits and other visual iconography. Primarily using inventories, the ownership of these different types is examined, in particular exploring the mixed motives that underlay the display of monarchical portraits and royal devices. Broadly positive reactions to propaganda are then discussed, similarly uncovering the different, potentially subversive reasons that drove people to accept government materials. The evidence of marginalia in surviving copies of polemical works is then used to show both the different approaches taken to reading official books, and how people engaged with several specific pamphlets, illuminating the success of particular arguments and propagandistic techniques. Finally, negative reactions to government images and books are investigated, highlighting not only opposition but, conversely, more evidence of propaganda’s positive impact. Analysing reception in these ways not only permits judgements about the extent and nature of propaganda’s success; it also provides valuable insights into important historiographical debates, like the progress of the English Reformation and the potential emergence of a public sphere, besides more generally revealing widely-held attitudes that underpinned sixteenth-century society and conditioned the relationship between rulers and ruled.

This thesis examines the relationship between the commemorative strategies of English noblemen in the period 1485-1572 and their identity both as individuals and as a social group. In particular, it will look at the Howard dukes of Norfolk in the context of their peers. The five chapters each address a different aspect of noble identity. The first two chapters deal with the importance of kinship and of status. The importance of kinship is evident across commemorative strategies from burial locations to the heraldry displayed at funerals to the references to ancestry in elegies. Having achieved a particular status, noblemen were defensive of their rank and the dues accorded to it. Funerals were designed to reflect social status and the choice of burial location could also indicate a concern with status. However, there was not always a correlation between the scale of commemoration and status. The third chapter examines the role that service to the Crown played in noble identity. Late medieval ideals of military service and a chivalric culture survived well in to the sixteenth century and traditional commemorative forms remained popular, even amongst noblemen newly ennobled from the ranks of the Tudor administration. Chapter four addresses the importance of local power to the nobility of the period. Burial and commemoration acted as a visible reminder of the social order and were of benefit in maintaining local stability. Noblemen could also use their death as a means of demonstrating good lordship through charity and hospitality. The final chapter examines the importance of religion to a nobleman's identity during a century of turbulent religious change. Studying commemorative strategies allows us to trace noble responses to religious change, the constraints on their public show of belief, and the ways in which they could express individuality.