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WORK TITLE: London’s Triumph
WORK NOTES:
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BIRTHDATE: 1970
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
Phone: +44 (0)113 343 3606; http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/profile/20041/946/stephen_alford
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1970, in Telford, England; married; children: Matilda.
EDUCATION:Attended University of St. Andrews.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, British Academy postdoctoral research fellow and junior research fellow of Fitzwilliam College, 1997-99, Ehrman senior research fellow in history at King’s College, 1999-2012, became assistant lecturer, lecturer, and senior lecturer in history; University of Leeds, Leeds, England, professor of early modern British history, 2012–, and department chair.
MEMBER:Royal Historical Society (fellow).
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Stephen Alford has won the reputation of a meticulous yet highly readable historian. He focuses his expertise upon the complicated era of Shakespeare and Marlowe, Sir Francis Drake, Mary Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth the Virgin Queen. His subjects tend, however, to be the unheralded or underestimated powers behind the throne and the entrepreneurs whose accomplishments contributed to England’s rise to global prominence.
Alford was born in the British Midlands and educated in Scotland. He spent fifteen years at Cambridge University before moving to Leeds in 2012. Alford teaches early modern British history, which spans roughly the time period from 1500 to 1750.
Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI
The boy-king Edward VI, son of Henry VIII, reigned for only five or six years, dying at age fifteen of an undetermined pulmonary illness. Alford paints him as the ruler-in-training who laid the groundwork for the spectacular reign of his half-sister Elizabeth I. In Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI, Alford deviates from the prevalent focus on Edward’s role in the success of the English Protestant Reformation. Instead he explores the political maneuverings that shaped the youth’s historical legacy. Robert Braddock noted in Renaissance Quarterly that Alford “studied how politics actually worked and discovered a surprising degree of continuity and stability.”
The young king was by necessity subject to the guidance of councilors and other members of the royal court. This resulted in a shift from the concept of governance by royal prerogative to polity by “parliamentary consent,” as Dale Hoak described it in his Albion review. In dozens of documents contemporaneous with Edward’s reign, Alford sees “a maturing king beginning to assert himself,” Braddock reported, as evidenced in part by the dying youth’s determination to control his succession. Both Braddock and Hoak mentioned flaws in Alford’s thesis, but they found the work to offer a valuable perspective on Edward’s legacy. Alford also offers a more recent summary of Edward’s life in Edward VI: The Last Boy King, intended for a general audience.
Burghley
Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I is the story of a young man who rose from the shadows of Edward’s court to become Lord High Treasurer to Elizabeth I. In his faculty profile at the University of Leeds Website, Alford described him as “the most powerful man in Elizabethan England.” Cecil was a complicated man. This defender of the Protestant cause at Edward’s court served the business interests of the young king’s primary counselors, then turned his back on them to save himself. The scourge of Catholicism tortured priests, destroyed churches, and eventually arranged the execution of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, but he briefly embraced Catholicism to gain influence over Edward’s half-sister Mary Tudor. Cecil’s relationship with Elizabeth was often contentious, as he urged her in directions that she opposed–and sometimes rejected, but there were times when he virtually ran the country. According to D.R. Bisson’s assessment in Choice, Alford “regards Cecil as a committed Protestant determined to defend his faith.”
“Here,” wrote Michael Questier in Catholic Historical Review, “is the master polemicist and ideologue who formulated some of the crucial theoretical and legal defenses of the Elizabethan regime.” To Questier, Burghley is an “intensely readable biography.” Leanda de Lisle observed in the Spectator: “Alford’s scholarly but pacey biography reads so fluently, and his subject’s career is so rich, it felt over too quickly.” She added that Cecil “really leaps from the page … as politician and propagandist, … dynamic, ruthless and with a long reach.”
The Watchers
In The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, Alford emphasizes that Elizabethan England was in dire straits. English Protestants were quite literally terrified of a Catholic takeover of the monarchy and the entire country. The pope had declared the Protestant Elizabeth a heretic and a bastard. European priests and English expatriates schemed to infiltrate the country. Nearly 500 native priests plotted against her; political and religious radicals devised plans to murder her and replace her with her imprisoned cousin, the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. The Spanish king Philip II was waiting in the wings; he had already attempted three invasions. The final danger: Elizabeth was childless and resolutely determined to remain that way. With no legitimate heir, the very House of Tudor was under threat of extinction.
Elizabeth’s defenders schemed relentlessly to protect the realm by any means necessary. The Watchers is “a page-turning tale of assassination plots, torture, and espionage,” reported a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. The queen’s secret agents even concocted a phony plot to rescue Mary from prison in order to trick her into incriminating herself in the treason.
“Alford has written an exhilarating and well-researched history,” observed Tessa Minchew in Library Journal. Patricia Treble commented in Maclean’s that “Alford weaves an exciting tale of intrigue, mystery and danger from the spies’ and traitors’ points of view.” Alan Judd summarized in the Spectator: “If you want to know the inside story of that struggle, … this is the book to read.”
London's Triumph
Elizabethan England was an economic hinterland compared to the wealth and glamour of European trading cities like Antwerp, but times were changing. London’s Triumph: Merchant Adventurers and the Tudor City is Alford’s story of a place and a time when entrepreneurship and serendipity combined to bring a stagnant backwater to life. The city of London teemed with foreigners, who brought with them visions of the riches of China and the untapped treasures of the New World. Merchants and adventurers saw opportunities everywhere, and the destitute monarchy envisioned much-needed sources of income from expanded trade routes. Clever investors devised ways to bypass anti-usury laws and profit from money-lending ventures. Religious violence on the continent drove European traders to the safer harbors west of the English Channel.
Alford shines his spotlight on the men who made it happen. There was Anthony Jenkinson, an unknown seafaring merchant who accidentally ended up in medieval Russia at the table of Ivan the Terrible. There was the geographer and travel writer Richard Hakluyt, who made it possible to populate, then colonize, the future Commonwealth of Virginia. Countless others made contributions, and Alford shares their stories great and small. According to Jessie Childs, writing in the London Guardian, “he throws out long threads … and weaves them into an exceptionally rich and variegated fabric.” His “stories bring the past to life in warmly human terms,” observed a commentator in Kirkus Reviews, “as do [his] evocative descriptions of the city’s changing landscape and architecture.” “Alford’s touch is sure,” reported Lucy Wooding on the Times Higher Education website; “to read this book is to stand abashed at the achievements.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Albion, fall, 2003, Dale Hoak, review of Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI, p. 466.
Booklist, August 1, 2012, Gilbert Taylor, review of The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, p. 21; October 15, 2017, Bryce Christensen, review of London’s Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare’s City, p. 10.
Catholic Historical Review, October, 2009, Michael Questier, review of Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I, p. 837.
Choice, July, 2009, D.R. Bisson, review of Burghley, p. 2190.
Christian Science Monitor, December 18, 2012, Emily Cataneo, review of The Watchers.
Contemporary Review, September, 2002, review of Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI, p. 188.
English Historical Review, April, 2003, G.W. Bernard, review of Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI, 496.
Guardian (London, England), July 6, 2013, Keith Thomas, review of The Watchers, p. 18.
History Today, September, 2008, Derek Wilson, review of Burghley, p. 61.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2012, review of The Watchers; October 1, 2017, review of London’s Triumph.
Library Journal, September 15, 2012, Tessa Minchew, review of The Watchers, p. 78.
Maclean’s, January 21, 2013, Patricia Treble, review of The Watchers, p. 57.
New Statesman, January 9, 2015, review of Edward VI, p. 41.
New Yorker, February 11, 2013, review of The Watchers, p. 109.
Publishers Weekly, July 2, 2012, review of The Watchers, p. 54. October 9, 2017, review of London’s Triumph, p. 57.
Renaissance Quarterly, autumn, 2003, Robert C. Braddock, review of Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI, p. 879.
Spectator, July 5, 2008, Leanda de Lisle, review of Burghley, p. 40; September 8, 2012, Alan Judd, review of The Watchers, p. 35; April 22, 2017, Sinclair McKay, review of London’s Triumph, p. 38.
ONLINE
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (April 20, 2017), Jessie Childs, review of London’s Triumph.
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (September 12, 2017), review of London’s Triumph.
Times Higher Education, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/ (April 27, 2017), Lucy Wooding, review of London’s Triumph and author interview.
University of Leeds Website, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ (March 11, 2018), author profile.
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (December 16, 2017), Alice Padwe, review of London’s Triumph.
Professor Stephen Alford
Professor of Early Modern British History
s.alford@leeds.ac.uk
+44 (0)113 343 3606
Summary: Chair in Early Modern British History
Biography
I studied at the University of St Andrews, where I was taught by John Guy, before moving in 1997 to the University of Cambridge as a British Academy Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of History and a Junior Research Fellow of Fitzwilliam College. In 1999 I was elected Ehrman Senior Research Fellow in History at King’s College, Cambridge. I stayed at King’s as a Fellow when I joined the Cambridge Faculty of History as an Assistant Lecturer, a Lecturer and finally a Senior Lecturer. In 2000 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I left Cambridge to come to Leeds as Professor of Early Modern British History in September 2012.
Research interests
My principal interests lie in the history of politics, political thought and monarchy in sixteenth-century Britain. For a long time I have worked on the life and career of William Cecil, first Baron of Burghley (1520-98), <
Current research projects
My main research interest at the moment is the history of the City of London in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. I am also revisiting the life and reign of King Edward VI in a short study to be published by Penguin.
Publications
My doctoral dissertation at St Andrews was published in the series of Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558-1569 (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Cambridge University Press also published my second book, Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI, in 2002. Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (Yale University Press, 2008) was shortlisted for the Marsh Biography Award. My latest book, The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, which was published in 2012 by Allen Lane/Penguin Press in the United Kingdom and Bloomsbury Press in the United States, was one of the Books of the Year in both the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times.
School of History publications
Postgraduate supervision
I should welcome enquiries from potential MA and PhD students with interests in all aspects of early modern British history
Teaching
I teach at all three undergraduate levels, including a third-year Special Subject on ‘The Tudor discovery of Russia, 1553-1603’ (HIST3686).
I hope one day to teach a postgraduate module on the historical thought of R.G. Collingwood.
Golden opportunities
Sinclair McKay
Spectator. 333.9843 (Apr. 22, 2017): p38+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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London's Triumph: Merchant Adventurers and the Tudor City
by Stephen Alford
Allen Lane, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 294
Tudor merchants--shivering in furs in tiny creaking ships, sailing through the ice of unknown winter seas--knew something that today's careworn EU and civil service officials might be irritated to hear: that despite all travails, trade deals can sometimes be sexy, thrilling and epic.
In 16th-century London, plans to open up fresh trading routes across the world were also about vaulting leaps of fantastical imagination, and naturally also about slavering greed. Down by the Thames, men of property would dream of alien Cathay, and of realms where the beaches, they thought, would glitter brilliant red and green with loose rubies and emeralds. Men were crossing oceans with ever-greater cartographical confidence: much better a private ship than a vulnerable caravan of mules trekking the bandit-haunted silk roads. England was opening itself up not merely to a new age of Reformation but also to the start of modern economics: speculation and investment backed by loans.
So even without today's endless Punch-and-Judy pub-fight drama of Brexit, it is very pleasing to have a book that focuses specifically on the rise of London as a global trading city in the Tudor era. Like all the best stories, it is about the timeless tides of power and influence. 'Merchants had an international view,' notes the historian Stephen Alford, 'whose values and merits sometimes transcended those of Europe's sovereign powers ...' Sometimes!
In the late medieval years, Antwerp was at the centre of European commerce. Merchants from many kingdoms mingled in its Bourse, guaranteed 'freedom of movement' and dealing in goods--rich spices, precious metals, gorgeous cloth--from faraway lands. The nascent banking dynasties --Fugger and Hochstetter--went to Antwerp too; and in the wake of the bankers came a taste for fine art, tapestries and stained glass. The yobbish Tudor English were deemed to lack the effortless sophistication of their continental counterparts.
Indeed, by the mid-16th century, the Tudor throne was hopelessly in debt, despite Henry VIII's rapacious monastery-stripping; and here came one of those subtle shifts of power (certainly more subtle than the earthquake of the Reformation). Usury was forbidden in England: but gradually, throughout the century, ways were found --legal and semantic--by which money could be loaned for reasonable sums of interest, and this coincided with a sharpening desire for sea-borne trade.
Tudor London also came to enjoy another huge trading advantage. The kingdoms of Europe were roaring with religious violence, and this was too great a hindrance to merchants everywhere; conflict constipated flows of goods. London --with its relative stability--became a peaceful harbour. And so it was that ships filled with furs, wines and minerals increasingly jostled along the wharves of the Thames.
Alford's approach is to avoid the familiar subjects of Tudor politicking and Thomas Cromwell, and focus instead on London's great mercantile families: the Greshams, the Hakluyts and the Ishams, as wells as the bankers and money men. Shakespeare and John Dee also make an appearance. Alford is interested in the flavour of an increasingly cosmopolitan city life: the food, the clothes, the claret in merchants' cellars, the stage dramas, the burning plagues. And through the men of enterprise we see modern capitalism being born.
There are terrific encounters: the merchant Anthony Jenkinson, writes Alford, had a talent for 'the unknown, the alien, and the unfamiliar'. In 1557, he was hoping to find a sea route to Cathay via Scandinavia. Instead, he landed at Vologda, one of Russia's main ports, and from there was driven by sled to the court of Ivan the Terrible, who was 'covered all over in gold and precious stones'. The nascent Muscovy Company was cemented, and the appetite among London's merchants for even further economic discovery was sharpened.
Alford's book, though a little loose in structure, is consistently illuminating and filled with pleasing resonance. He observes that the painted portraits of these London power brokers were filled with symbolism. Then, as now, the City was a realm unto itself. Indeed, the crown was in great need of the City's ingenuity: how else were the royal coffers to be filled? It was Thomas Gresham who brought the Royal Exchange to London; this was the edifice that came to overshadow Antwerp's Bourse. Among the colonnades, even those with no business there were attracted to it simply for the spectacle of fortunes being made.
But with trade came ferocious international competition; and with the global inroads made by Spanish, Dutch and Portugese fleets, ambition became imperial and implacably ruthless. Lands such as America were there first to be 'planted' with colonists and then controlled.
By the sunset of the Elizabethan age, London's mayor Sir Stephen Soame was among the investors to put money into a voyage 'to the East Indies and the other islands and countries thereabouts', intended to compete with the Dutch. The East India Company, the next stage of England's economic evolution, would become one of the remorseless engines of imperial growth. In the days and years to come, what style of empire will Dr Liam Fox conjure for us?
Caption: An English merchant bargains with an Indian in a 16th-century cotton tapestry
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
McKay, Sinclair. "Golden opportunities." Spectator, 22 Apr. 2017, p. 38+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498477736/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c9a8878e. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Edward VI: the Last Boy King
New Statesman. 144.5244 (Jan. 9, 2015): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
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Edward VI: the Last Boy King
Stephen Alford
This brief study of Henry VIII's short-lived heir is one of five initial offerings in the new Penguin Monarchs series (the others are Henry VIII himself, Charles I and Georges V and VI). All are written by experts and condense years of scholarship in order to give an overview of each ruler. Here Stephen Alford describes England's last boy king (he reigned for less than seven years), who was just beginning to assert himself and shake off his self-interested advisers when he died, aged 15. Alford pitches Edward as one of history's most intriguing might-have-beens.
Allen Lane, 98pp, 10.99 [pounds sterling]
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Edward VI: the Last Boy King." New Statesman, 9 Jan. 2015, p. 41. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A398828669/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=76f2306b. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
The Watchers
The New Yorker. 89.1 (Feb. 11, 2013): p109.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
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In 1586, an English brewer put encoded letters into waterproof tubes, dropped them in casks of ale, and delivered the casks to the moated manor where Mary, Queen of Scots, was imprisoned. One letter, written by Mary's Catholic supporters, contained a plot to liberate her and kill Queen Elizabeth. Mary replied encouragingly, but the brewer was actually working for Elizabeth's spies. The secret agents who labored to prove Mary's guilt and bring about her execution are the stars of this meticulous chronicle. Alford, a historian, tracks the careers of the men whose "vigilance and suspicion" and "determined suppression" of Elizabeth's enemies were, he suggests, what enabled the Queen to escape assassination and her country to avoid invasion by French and Spanish forces intent on returning England to Catholicism. Elizabeth's spies routinely used the rack for interrogations; torture was then, as now, justified as a means of protecting "the security of the state."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Watchers." The New Yorker, 11 Feb. 2013, p. 109. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A318355312/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5f370ad6. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
The Watchers: a Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I
Patricia Treble
Maclean's. 126.2 (Jan. 21, 2013): p57+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Rogers Publishing Ltd.
http://www2.macleans.ca/
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THE WATCHERS: A SECRET HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH I
Stephen Alford
Elizabeth I was the Gloriana, the virgin queen who reigned over England's Golden Age, the Renaissance of Shakespeare, Sir Francis Drake and Sir Philip Sidney. Yet behind that beautiful facade, her 45 years in power were dogged by threats of invasion, treason and treachery. Her Catholic enemies, both domestic and foreign, were determined to rid Europe of the woman deemed a bastard heretic unworthy of the throne. Her closest advisers, especially spymaster Francis Walsingham, spent considerable time, and a large chunk of the treasury's gold, stamping out any threat to their sovereign. He planted loyal Protestants within Catholic exile groups as couriers so he could intercept their communications, and even knew about one invasion force's plans before its top commanders did.
Using letters and documents that have somehow survived from the era, including amazingly frank communications from Walsingham or his minions, <
Against all odds, the spymaster, his agents and successors proved successful. In 1603, Elizabeth died of natural causes in her own bed. Her successor was the son of her cousin, Mary. And, to the dismay of Elizabeth's enemies, a Protestant.
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Please note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Treble, Patricia. "The Watchers: a Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I." Maclean's, 21 Jan. 2013, p. 57+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A315919649/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e643992f. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
The English inquisition
Spectator. 320.9602 (Sept. 8, 2012): p35+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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The Watchers: A Secret Life of the Reign of Elizabeth I
by Stephen Alford
Allen Lane, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 398, ISBN 9781846142604
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Early on in this fascinating history Stephen Alford makes an important point: because Elizabeth I and the settlement between monarchy, church and state survived, because the threat of foreign invasion was thwarted or failed to materialise, and because the sense of national identity fostered by the Tudors proved robust, we see that first Elizabethan age as a confident and assured success story. But to those involved it was far more precarious, with victory anything but assured and survival a daily challenge.
Alford dramatises this by imagining Elizabeth's assassination in St James's Park, followed by invasion by the superpower, Spain. Aided by popular uprisings, the live burnings of Elizabeth's ministers and clergy--who history would have portrayed as an aberrant heretical clique--and the suppression of English translations of the Bible, England would have returned to the Catholic fold as Hapsburg England under the hero of Christendom, King Philip of Spain. For much of Elizabeth's reign this was a plausible scenario.
Alford's subject is the intelligence organisation at the heart of the militarily weak Elizabethan state, and the question as to whether the 'more obsessively a state watches, the greater the dangers it perceives'. The organisation was run mainly by the Queen's secretary, Thomas Walsingham, 'the cool, organising intelligence at the centre of things'. After his death in 1590 it was overseen by the two Cecils, William and Robert, the father and son team who effectively ran the country.
Walsingham was an austere, devoutly religious man who amassed no fortune and who was deeply influenced by witnessing the 1572 St Bartholomew's Day massacres in Paris when up to 6,000 Protestants were butchered. That was what he, the Cecils and their queen were convinced would happen if Elizabeth were deposed. 'There is less danger,' he concluded, 'in fearing too much than too little.'
He was ably assisted by Thomas Phelippes, a cryptographer of genius who was also a successful recruiter and runner of agents (a rare combination). Mary, Queen of Scots, who probably thought he worked for her, described him as 'of low stature, slender every way, dark yellow-haired on the head, and clear yellow-bearded ... eaten in the face with small pocks'. Like his master and others on the Privy Council, Phelippes's religious faith was inextricably entwined with the security of the state, a phrase first used at this time. This nexus of beliefs, reinforced by the threat of invasion and the horrifying prospect of religious civil war, became, in Alford's words, 'the politics of raw survival', a struggle in which all means were justified.
What exactly was the threat? There were three attempted Spanish invasions--the landing of 500 Spanish troops in Ireland in 1580 and the armadas of 1588 and 1596- and a number of plots to assassinate Elizabeth, justified in advance by successive popes. None of these plots amounted to much, although the aspiration was real enough, despite one plotter's disarming description of his own plans as 'the dangerous fruits of a discontented mind'. Fuelling it all was the passionate desire of the English Catholic resistance, with the backing of the major continental powers, to replace Elizabeth with Mary, Queen of Scots or, after Mary's execution in 1587, with Philip of Spain.
Figures are inevitably imprecise, but Alford estimates that Walsingham had some 40 to 50 reporting agents at home and overseas, ranging from such figures as Anthony Munday--a collaborator of Shakespeare's--to the comically conceited William Parry--'born for self-destruction'--to the sinister and effective Robert Poley, who was with Christopher Marlowe when he was killed. (For me, the only disappointment in this book is Alford's dismissal of the evidence for Marlowe's association with Walsingham as 'sketchy and circumstantial' without apparently taking into account the Privy Council resolution of 29 June 1587 urging Marlowe's college not to withhold his degree since during his absences he had 'done Her Majesty good service, employed as he had been in matters touching the benefit of his country.').
According to one estimate, the enemy Walsingham's network penetrated so successfully comprised around 300 English emigres on the continent, including influential figures from the nobility and gentry. Over 40 years around 471 priests secretly worked to save English souls or spread sedition--depending on your point of view--of whom 294 were imprisoned, 116 executed and 91 banished. Men such as William Allen, their principal organiser, and Edmund Campion, their most inspirational martyr, sincerely believed they were doing God's will in fighting for the soul of England.
It was Allen's account of Campion's brutal death that turned Campion into a martyr, a curious part of which was Allen's sale--within months of the event--of alleged bits of Campion's rib as holy relics. As Alford shows, it was impossible for this struggle to be only religious: martyrs were simultaneously counter-revolutionaries backed by hostile foreign powers. The protracted cruelty of hanging, drawing and quartering and the use of the rack (conventional for the period, upon authorisation by the Privy Council, which memorably thanked the torturers for their 'pains') undoubtedly helped the state to win the security war, while arguably losing the propaganda war.
Was it justified? Alford concludes that the government 'was absolutely right to believe the truths of plots and conspiracies and plans for invasion and assassinations'. However, they 'overestimated their enemies' intelligence, cunning and organisation'. What gave the struggle its venom was the context, the religious wars that ravaged 16th-century Europe.<< If you want to know the inside story of that struggle,>> the dark heart of calculation and the fight for survival, then<
Judd, Alan
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The English inquisition." Spectator, 8 Sept. 2012, p. 35+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A305563119/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=09352f56. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I
Derek Wilson
History Today. 58.9 (Sept. 2008): p61.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 History Today Ltd.
http://www.historytoday.com/about-us
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Burghley
William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I
Stephen Alford
Yale University Press 412pp 25 [pounds sterling]
ISBN 978 0 30011 896 4
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The Tudor dynasty was served by a remarkable succession of highly talented executives. From the time of Wolsey to that of Robert Cecil there were few years when the crown was not able to rely on wise, dedicated and able ministers. Indeed, sixteenth-century England owed more to them than to the monarchs they advised. William Cecil, the 1st Baron Burghley, was a distinguished member of that breed. Stephen Alford rightly describes him as possessing 'the best political mind of his generation'.
He was certainly in a position of influence longer than any other royal councillor who could possibly claim to rival him. At the age of twenty-eight he was already a member of the inner circle that ran the country on behalf of Edward VI. He was still advising Elizabeth I hall a century later. Simply to survive during such a period of violently competing ideologies was in itself an achievement. To head the governmental machine throughout the greater part of Elizabeth's reign demanded political acumen of the highest order.
Stephen Alford's biography takes the reader at a brisk pace through Burghley's remarkable life. He gives due weight to the difficult years of Edward and Mary, years that might so easily have proved fatal to a young man still on the fringes of power. But, of course, it is Burghley's relationship with Elizabeth which is the core of the book. It was never an easy relationship because the queen was the most exasperating, changeable, indecisive, penny-pinching woman to serve and because she and her minister held different views about England's destiny and its place in the world. Burghley and several of his conciliar colleagues believed that the country was threatened by an international Catholic conspiracy and that Elizabeth was in constant danger from murderous plots. It therefore followed that the queen's Catholic subjects should be kept under close surveillance and, even more importantly, that the royal (and Protestant) succession should be secured, preferably by Elizabeth's marriage. She refused to take a partisan stance and she certainly had no intention of sacrificing herself on the altar of matrimony for the sake of her people. Burghley had the well-being of the Protestant nation at heart. Elizabeth had the well-being of Elizabeth at heart (for all her high-flown oratory to the contrary). This meant that, as Patrick Collinson has written in his book Elizabethans, 'There were two governments uneasily coexisting in Elizabethan England: the queen and her council.' Alford illuminates the inevitable tensions inherent in this situation and gives us a glimpse (which is, perhaps, all we can ever hope for) of how, from the three-way dynamic of queen, council and parliament, the miracle of Elizabethan government was established.
A new biography of William Cecil by a leading historian of the Tudor period is an important undertaking and students of the Elizabethan age as well as history lovers will not want to be without this book. h reveals both the private and public Cecil. Alford describes his subject's family relations, his expensive building projects at Theobalds, Cecil House and Burghley House, his lavish entertaining, his health problems, his amassing of great wealth as well as his role in national and international politics. Alford acknowledges the occasions on which Cecil 'bent the rules', most notably over the doctoring of Mary Stuart's Casket Letters. He describes the circumstances which impelled Burghley to go behind Elizabeth's back (as she most assuredly went behind his). This is, therefore, a fair, honest and detailed appraisal of the man who steered England through one of the most difficult and dangerous periods of the nation's history.
It may, therefore, seem to be something of a quibble to point out a couple of aspects of Burghley's character and career that are, strangely, missing. Firstly and most fundamentally there is the question (one is tempted almost to say the 'enigma') of his religion. Ir Catholic recusancy was one problem of the regime, Puritan militancy was another; but we can discern little from this book about how far he was sympathetic of antagonistic towards Protestant extremism. For example, what part did he play in the conflict between Elizabeth and Archbishop Grindal, whom she debarred from exercising his official functions? It is valuable to be reminded that Cecil was a long-time friend and patron of John Foxe, whose Book of Martyrs was so enormously influential. Yet the assessment that he 'believed in England's true religion' does not get us very far.
Alford is also light on other relationships which were crucial to the development of policy. What did Cecil make of Walsingham's heart-on-sleeve Puritanism? More importantly it would have been helpful if his long and variable relationship with Robert Dudley could have been put under the microscope. After all, Cecil did contemplate (or, perhaps, just threaten) resignation over the 'inappropriate' influence of 'Sweet Robin'. The nature of the remarkable Elizabeth-Robert-William triumvirate is not only of fascination to romantic novelists.
Perhaps this is just to say that one would have liked another hundred pages of an already substantial book. Any biographer of Burghley is confronted by an enormous amount of original material. To select and to condense it into a coherent and readable summary is an achievement for which many readers will, as I am, be grateful
Derek Wilson is the author of Out of the Storm: The Life & Legacy of Martin Luther (Hutchinson, 2007).
Wilson, Derek
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wilson, Derek. "Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I." History Today, Sept. 2008, p. 61. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A185165965/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5be45817. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
A keen sense of duty
Leanda de Lisle
Spectator. 307.9384 (July 5, 2008): p40+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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BURGHLEY: WILLIAM CECIL AT THE COURT OF ELIZABETH I
by Stephen Alford
Yale, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 412, ISBN 9780300118964
[telephone] 20 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655
William Cecil, Lord Burghley, would be delighted that in his historical afterlife he remains the old man he died as, after 40 years of power. The frail flesh and white beard projects the image of the dull bureaucrat we remember: ideal cover for an ideologue who makes Donald Rumsfeld appear warm and fuzzy, and a spin doctor whose fictions retain, after 400 years, a powerful hold on the culture of the English-speaking world.
'Terrifying' is an adjective Stephen Alford deploys on more than one occasion to describe Cecil, and with reason. Cecil began his political career in the household of the future Protector Somerset, surviving his master's fall to become Secretary of State to the boy King, Edward VI. In this role he helped introduce the most radical religious changes England saw before the Puritan Commonwealth. Organs and figurative art were torn out of churches, and books taken from university libraries and burned. When Edward fell fatally ill in 1553, Cecil was faced with the prospect of a Catholic queen in Mary I. Along with many in the Protestant elite, he signed a document backing the exclusion of Mary, and the future Queen Elizabeth, from the succession in favour of the doomed Lady Jane Grey.
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There is groundbreaking work here on how Cecil flourished, nevertheless, during the subsequent reign of Mary I. He befriended Cardinal Pole, while, at the same time, anti-Marian propaganda, advertising the martyrdom of Lady Jane Grey, was being printed on his estate. Alford also charts his relationship with the future Queen Elizabeth before she re-appointed him as Secretary of State on her accession in 1558. Cecil liked clever women. His wife, Mildred, was one of the most highly educated women of her generation, and he counted several other remarkable women amongst his friends. They included the Queen Dowager, Katherine Parr, (until her death in 1548) and Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, sometimes known as 'the mother of English Puritanism'. This ability to get on with formidable women, combined with his political talents, must have played its part in the trust he was able to build with Elizabeth, and it is her reign that is the principal focus of Alford's attention.
Alford carefully deconstructs the traditional picture of Cecil, revealing his partnership with the Queen in all its troubled complexity. Elizabeth was Protestant, but never Protestant enough for Cecil. He helped impose on her a religious settlement that was far more radical than she would have liked, and determined to preserve it. Cecil waged 'a war on evil', in which Catholics represented the forces of Satan, justifying the use of torture and the execution of priests, while doing all in his power to secure the royal succession, in ways Elizabeth agreed with or not. For ten years Elizabeth, the dynastic legitimist, maintained the claims of the Catholic, foreign Mary, Queen of Scots to be her heir, over those of Protestant, English, Lady Katherine Grey, and was at loggerheads with Cecil over it. Both these royal cousins were, in the end, destroyed: Katherine Grey by the Queen, while Cecil succeeded in having Mary Stuart executed.
In his latter years Cecil lost much of his old religious radicalism but he maintained a sense of duty to a Protestant nation beyond the reign of a single monarch. Critics often complained they were living in a Cecilian Commonwealth, and although Cecil saw himself as always the loyal servant, they had a point. It was as a citizen, not as a loyal subject, that he had had the death warrant against Mary, Queen of Scots delivered and this sense of civic responsibility, shared and inherited by others, would pose problems for Elizabeth's autocratic Stuart successors.
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Leanda de Lisle 's The Sisters Who Would be Queen: The Lives of Katherine, Mary & Lady Jane Grey, will be published by Harper Press in September .
de Lisle, Leanda
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
de Lisle, Leanda. "A keen sense of duty." Spectator, 5 July 2008, p. 40+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A303643639/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fc890431. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI. (Reviews)
Contemporary Review. 281.1640 (Sept. 2002): p188.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
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Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI. Stephen Alford. Cambridge University Press. [pounds sterling]40.00. 233 pages. ISBN 0-521-66055-6. The reign of the boy-king, Edward VI, has come under close examination in recent years. Much of this has concentrated on his religious policies whereas this study examines the political and constitutional relationships within which the 'reformation' took place. Edward's reign was not just important for the destruction of our ancient churches and their liturgies but because it set the stage for Elizabeth I's reign. Those who served Elizabeth I had begun their schooling in government under her half-brother. Dr Alford has given us some fascinating new insights into this period. He has adopted a different approach and has avoided the 'high political narrative' of previous histories. His concern is more with the conceptual and practical expression of Edward VI's kingship, the commitment of the men governing in the King's name' and the importance of an unmarried soverei gn. Edward emerges not as the shuttlecock in a game of rival courtiers but as a King in his own right. Without Edward's reign one would not have had the stability that marked Elizabeth I's. Edward VI defined the monarchy Elizabeth I inherited, that is of a Crown whose power was shared with the Council and Parliament.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI. (Reviews)." Contemporary Review, Sept. 2002, p. 188. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A91971280/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a6440381. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I
Michael Questier
The Catholic Historical Review. 95.4 (Oct. 2009): p837+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 The Catholic University of America Press
http://cuapress.cua.edu/journals.htm
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Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I. By Stephen Alford. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2008. Pp. xx, 412. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-300-11896-4.)
Sir William Cecil stands like a colossus across the later sixteenth century. It is virtually impossible to think about Elizabethan politics without reference to him. This is not just because he was for so long the queen's principal secretary and, subsequently, lord treasurer, or because his son, Robert, took up where he left off, or even because his papers are the first port of call for so many researchers, but, even more, because he was so deeply implicated in the formation of policy and because he was so ideologically committed to many of the political causes that defined the period.
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It is clear, too, that his life may have been dominated by his service to the queen but if she was a mistress whom he was dedicated to serving, he frequently did this in a manner that she appeared not to want. This does indeed redress the balance of so much of the often stultifying historical industry of the cult of Elizabeth. Here one gets a real sense of the struggles at court between Elizabeth and her leading councillors, and of the monarchical republicanism that has figured so heavily in Alford's earlier work on the period.
It is, perhaps, a difficult thing, in the literary format of biography, to maintain a balance between high political narrative and the central subject of the study, the principal and principled man of affairs whose private life was blameless, at least compared to many of the other colorful characters of the Elizabethan court, and yet who generated real hatred from a range of enemies. If he was the sober, learned, and scholarly public servant of this study, were his detractors peddling gutter politics in their attacks on him? But if they were not, was his ethic of service a mere facade for Machiavellian evil and greedy acquisitiveness on a gargantuan scale? Ultimately biography is not the ideal vehicle in which to offer an extended treatment of these issues. But still, it offers a very accurate guide to the problems that were thrown up by the often chaotic structure of the late Tudor monarchy and that made Cecil so central to them. And it also reminds us, under the label either of Protestant scholar-councillor or Machiavellian scoundrel, how supremely successful Cecil was in shaping and dominating Elizabethan politics.
MICHAEL QUESTIER
Queen Mary College, University of London
Questier, Michael
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Questier, Michael. "Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I." The Catholic Historical Review, vol. 95, no. 4, 2009, p. 837+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A210604642/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=067081d1. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI
Dale Hoak
Albion. 35.3 (Fall 2003): p466+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 North American Conference on British Studies
http://www.albion.appstate.edu/
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Stephen Alford. Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. xiii, 233. $55.00. ISBN 0-521-66055-6.
The reign of Edward VI, though brief (1547-53), witnessed events that fundamentally altered British culture and politics. Edward's Protestant Reformation transformed the theology, liturgy, and structure of the English Church, a transformation that helped re-shape the language, culture, and mentality of English-speaking people. Politically, the peculiar conditions of a royal minority brought lasting changes in the theory and practice of kingship, as the men around the boy-king sought to reformulate the terms of Henry VIII's "imperial" legacy. Together these changes constituted what Stephen Alford rightly calls a "defining moment" in the development of Tudor monarchy (p. 63). In Kingship and Politics in the reign of Edward VI, Alford addresses the nature and significance of this "moment" by concentrating on two questions, how evangelicals--chiefly court preachers--conceived of "godly" kingship and how the king's councillors adapted themselves to the extraordinary conditions of Edward's minority, since they, and not the king, were empowered to govern. These are not new questions, but Alford seeks to approach them in a new way by claiming "to take ... seriously" both the theory and practice of Edward's kingship (p. 2). On the first point, the scripturally-based conception of godly monarchy, Alford succeeds brilliantly by his careful, deep reading of nearly one hundred originally printed Tudor works (for which he helpfully provides the STC numbers), including more than fifty by Edwardian evangelicals. Only Catharine Davies has apparently read all of the tracts printed in 1547-53; her broad, thematic study, A religion of the Word: The defence of the Reformation in the reign of Edward VI (2002) compliments Alford's inquiry, which also covers three key texts by Marian exiles: it is refreshing to be reminded that the views of John Ponet, John Knox, and Christopher Goodman on monarchy really bear the stamp of their Edwardian experiences.
For evangelical theorists, Edward VI and those who counseled him bore the scripturally-driven obligation to push forward the radical Reformation; they would destroy the Antichrist, the pope, and all popish practices in England by exploiting to the full the powers of the royal supremacy. Here imperial kingship and godly Reformation fused, a fusion which "became the critical element of Edwardian culture" (p. 112). When Stephen Gardiner, the conservative opponent of the regime, countered this "imperialist" view by appealing to the Cromwellian principle of Reformation by statute, Edwardian apologists were forced to concede that their Reformation necessarily rested on <
Alford is at his best showing how such views permeated intimate networks of printers, preachers, and university scholars, and how the bonds of family and friendship linked such men to courtiers and councillors. Using previously untapped manuscripts at King's College, Cambridge, for example, Alford shows how Sir John Cheke, provost of King's and tutor to the king, became a point of contact between the regime and the academic community. The resulting picture is vital to an understanding of how court politics worked, but on the question of the actual practice of kingship, 1547-53, Alford's account falls short of a reliable, satisfactory analysis. For example, there is no discussion of Edward's all-important coronation oath, the revised, unprecedented nature of which, first noticed by Percy Schramm in 1937, advertised what sort of kingship Edward's evangelical counselors initially wanted. Alford insightfully deduces that at fourteen, Edward certainly thought himself capable of governing. Indeed, even before he turned fourteen, Edward exhibited a precocious grasp of the business of kingship. But his council memoranda and occasional appearances in the special committee "for the state" were not, as Alford thinks, evidence that he was actually governing as a king counseled. On the contrary, such evidence confirms how exceptionally adroit was the duke of Northumberland's handling of both a willing, admiring young king and the personnel of the king's privy chamber. Two eye-witnesses not cited by Alford, including William Thomas, clerk of the privy council, explained the secret workings of Northumberland's highly personalized system in the privy chamber: here was the reality of Edward's kingship, a politics which comprehended the appearance of a king counseled. Despite such gaps. Alford's important book deepens our appreciation of how Edward VI's Reformation generated a new vision of English monarchy.
DALE HOAK
College of William & Mary
Hoak, Dale
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hoak, Dale. "Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI." Albion, vol. 35, no. 3, 2003, p. 466+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A114975347/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4bf42468. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Stephen Alford. Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI
Robert C. Braddock
Renaissance Quarterly. 56.3 (Autumn 2003): p879+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 The Renaissance Society of America
http://www.rsa.org/RQ.HTM
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 233 pp. + 6 b/w pls. index, tbls. bibl. $55. ISBN: 0-521-66055-6.
The reign of Edward VI can no longer claim to be a neglected period of Tudor historiography. W.K. Jordan's two-volume biography, which amplified the traditional "good duke, bad duke" dichotomy, prompted a revisionist reversal of the two stereotypes led by Barrett Beer, Michael Bush, and Dale Hoak, but none of their works focused on the King himself. That changed in 1999 with Jennifer Loach's posthumous biography in the Yale English Monarchs series and Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation. Now the recent publication of Stephen Alford's Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI leads the reviewer to ask whether we really need another study of this short reign. Alford amply demonstrates that we do, because where earlier scholars examined bureaucratic structures and saw years of instability and factional strife, he <
Alford begins by examining the nature of kingship as it was taught to the young king in his classroom and sermons at court. These taught him to take counsel from the godly, but that he was answerable only to God. His task was to continue his father's reform by bringing God's word to his subjects. Although Stephen Gardiner would object that the church bequeathed by Henry VIII required the supremacy of king-in-parliament, Edward was taught to see himself as much an emperor and supreme head as his father had been.
Acknowledging that there would always be tension between theory and practice when the emperor was a child, Alford next examines the dynamics of the years of Somerset's protectorate, asking what did the protector's fellow councillors expect him to do. He concludes that it was neither Somerset's assumption of authority nor his governing through his personal household that they objected to, but his high-handed exercise of that authority. He refused to take advice, openly taunting other members of the Privy Council, and when he failed to maintain justice, the council withdrew its support, and he was doomed. Alford concludes, "The protectorate had not failed, but Edward Seymour had" (99).
For Alford, the next four years were the formative years of Edward's kingship, and he sees in them stability and the gradual emergence of a maturing king. Cecil was central to that stability. Previously Somerset's personal servant, he engineered the fall of Bishop Gardiner, and thereby made the transition to royal service as principal secretary. One of Alford's particular strengths is his detailed explorations of the network of family ties and "Cambridge connections" which Cecil was able to call upon.
Alford concludes his study by looking to the early years of Elizabeth's reign when many of the same men who had guided the young king reemerged into political life. Not surprisingly they proceeded to refashion their old networks of trust based upon kinship, friendship, and a common outlook on the problems facing the new queen.
ROBERT C. BRADDOCK
Saginaw Valley State University
Braddock, Robert C.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Braddock, Robert C. "Stephen Alford. Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI." Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 3, 2003, p. 879+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A110027474/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d9e1a6bf. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI
G.W. Bernard
The English Historical Review. 118.476 (Apr. 2003): p496.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 Oxford University Press
http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/
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by Stephen Alford (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2002; pp. 233. 40 [pounds sterling]).
This book promises rather more than it delivers. Alford's quarry is what he presents as the 'political culture' of what he miscounts as 'the five-and-a-half years' of the reign of Edward VI (p. 1). What he in fact offers are detailed and interesting summaries of, and explication of the illustrations in, a range of printed books from the reign and shortly afterwards, especially those defending and urging religious reforms, some informative elaborations of the connections, family and personal, between those involved in government and politics, and general commentaries on the historiography of the reign. Too allusive and selective for the typical student, the book offers little that is surprising for the scholar (e.g. the remark that 'men of rank and political influence in the late medieval English polities had important responsibilities in their local "countries"' (p.146). MacCulloch's Cranmer, showing the growing involvement of the adolescent king in matters of state, and Adams's and Hudson's explorations of the survival and re-emergence of courtier--administrators from the reign of Edward VI in the early years of Elizabeth, in particular anticipate Alford's findings. The notion of 'political culture' proves to be something of a will-o'-the-wisp: a fashionable abstraction that reads rather well in a grant application for a postdoctoral fellowship, but proves frustratingly intangible in the subsequent research. Such a concept lures Alford into emphasizing continuity and consensus. He repeatedly minimizes the political clashes of the reign: the fall of Thomas Seymour, the coup against Somerset, and Somerset's final fall, are all understated. Moreover Alford's readers will take away little sense of any divisions within the ranks of those who broadly favoured protestant reform; of the damaging impact of war; of the passions reflected in the religious and social risings of 1549; of rulers' pursuit of their own material advantage. If, instead of belittling those historians who seek to establish a political narrative and who study the workings of government, he had drawn more fully on their findings, he would have been able to offer a more nuanced account. Moreover, he has not avoided the danger faced by historians whose books are based on the study of works of contemporary propaganda, namely that of falling for it. That several preachers and writers presented the young Edward as a reforming Josiah eloquently illuminates their own values and hopes, but must be used with great caution as evidence that Edward himself was--and would, as he grew older, remain--a precocious and committed protestant. That, in Elizabeth's reign, John Foxe and many others would look back to Edward's reign as the touchstone of protestant reformation again illustrates their aspirations very clearly, but it cannot be accepted as an uncomplicated description of Edwardian religion and politics. All too readily, this would-be reappraisal of 'political culture' becomes an unquestioning reworking of contemporary polemic.
G. W. BERNARD
University of Southampton
Bernard, G.W.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bernard, G.W. "Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI." The English Historical Review, vol. 118, no. 476, 2003, p. 496. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A102139302/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ece77203. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
The Watchers
Emily Cataneo
The Christian Science Monitor. (Dec. 18, 2012): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
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Byline: Emily Cataneo
Our culture is saturated with images of Elizabethan England: Shakespearean actors at the Globe Theater; one of England's most famous monarchs presiding over a golden age; glamour and courtliness, prosperity and peace.
Elizabeth's legacy seems inevitable from a twenty-first century standpoint. But it wasn't always so. Late sixteenth-century English society was actually in some ways an unstable, dark and desperate place. In The Watchers: The Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, historian Stephen Alford tells the story of the spies, the plots, the threats of foreign invasion, the torture and the intrigue in Elizabeth's four-decade reign. Although some sections of Alford's book are repetitive, overall, the book is a thought-provoking portrait of the darker side of Elizabethan society.
Alford, a fellow in history at King's College, Cambridge and the author of three other books about Elizabethan history, lays out compelling evidence that the Elizabethan period was a tenuous time for England. The Spanish Hapsburgs and the Pope believed Elizabeth was a heretic, an atheist, and a bastard. England lived with the constant threat of foreign invasion, the threat of an attempt on Elizabeth's life, and the presence of Mary Stuart, a potential claimant to the throne. In his introduction, Alford says if Elizabeth were murdered in 1586, a successful foreign invasion would have been launched, England would have been reconciled to the Pope, and the Protestant experiment would be remembered as a decades-long aberration in English history.
Alford continually reminds us of the dire threats facing Elizabethan England, but the story of the reaction to those threats makes up the bulk of the book, that of the spies, courtiers and advisers who fought a war of espionage against danger both nebulous and real. Alford introduces us to a vast cast of characters in "The Watchers": Anthony Munday, the writer and adventurer who infiltrated Catholic scholars in Rome; William Allen, the leader of Catholic exiles in Europe who supported foreign invasion of England; and Thomas Phelippes, a right-hand man to Elizabeth's secretary Sir Francis Walsingham and a gifted cryptographer. These men participated in a decades-long dance of intrigue as priests plotted to infiltrate England, dissidents plotted to murder Elizabeth and Catholics plotted to free Mary Stuart, also known as Mary, Queen of Scots.
Mary, Queen of Scots is one of the most famous and important characters in Alford's story. She was a claimant to the English throne, a prisoner in England and a potential liability to her cousin Elizabeth. Elizabeth's government executed Mary in 1587 after it discovered the Babington Plot, which sought to assassinate Elizabeth and crown Mary as queen. The execution rocked the Elizabethan world because it called into question the divine sanctity of monarchy.
Alford's tales of specific plots and spies are interesting to a point, but by the time he reaches the 1590s, these episodes become repetitive: coded letters, double agents and torture at the Tower of London figure prominently into most chapters. These tales are more interesting when considered as a bundle, rather than individually; they paint a picture of a society in the throes of fear, uncertain of its survival.
But the most thought-provoking aspects of Alford's book are the larger questions about the implications of these spies' and courtiers' actions. For example, the decision to execute Mary Stuart, and its implications for the institution of monarchy, reverberated for centuries. Other seminal actions taken by the players in the book include the Act for the Queen's Surety, a 1585 statute that was remarkable because it authorized the government to pursue any pretender to the throne simply because of a conspiracy organized in his or her name - in other words, a license for revenge.
The largest question implied by Alford's book is, did the ends justify the means? Alford stresses in his introduction and conclusion that Elizabethan England was not the world's first police state, as some other historians have theorized. But England in the 1500s was certainly on the road towards becoming a modern state, and many of the players in Alford's book committed dubious acts in the name of national security. For example, as Walsingham and Phelippes labored to uncover the Babington plot, they doctored a letter from Mary Stuart to ensure they would have enough evidence to convict her of treason.
Readers will easily be able to extrapolate Alford's narrative into larger historical questions: were the actions of these men justified to preserve the Protestant realm? How far will fear drive government, and how far should fear drive government, even when that fear is completely justified and understandable? By painting such a vivid picture of a society clinging to existence, Alford both illustrates the true zeitgeist of Elizabethan England and leaves his readers with these questions, which will linger long after they finish reading the book.
Emily Cataneo is a journalist and book critic based in Boston.
Emily Cataneo
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cataneo, Emily. "The Watchers." Christian Science Monitor, 18 Dec. 2012. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A312799988/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6b97fb79. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Review: Paperbacks: The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I by Stephen Alford (Penguin, pounds 9.99)
The Guardian (London, England). (July 6, 2013): Arts and Entertainment: p18.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
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Byline: Keith Thomas
The age of Elizabeth I, often celebrated as a period of glorious national achievement, was one of intense insecurity. Beset by enemies at home and abroad, the queen knew her hold on the crown was precarious. The Catholic powers of Europe regarded her as a heretic and a bastard. Pope Pius V tried to depose her. Philip II of Spain attempted armed invasion. The loyalty of English Catholics was always in doubt. In response government ministers created a network of spies, informers and agents provocateurs, whose activities form the subject of Alford's absorbing book. Like Elizabeth I's agents, today's security services use surveillance, intercept communications, infiltrate training camps, bribe informers and make
pre-emptive arrests. Whether they also forge messages, employ agents provocateurs and engage in entrapment, we don't know, but it would be surprising if they didn't; methods of espionage have been remarkably constant over the centuries, and Alford reminds us that most governments will stop at little if national security is at stake.
Keith Thomas
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Review: Paperbacks: The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I by Stephen Alford (Penguin, pounds 9.99)." Guardian [London, England], 6 July 2013, p. 18. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A335962794/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=af287e47. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
London's Triumph: Merchants,
Adventurers, & Money in Shakespeare's
City
Bryce Christensen
Booklist.
114.4 (Oct. 15, 2017): p10.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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* London's Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, & Money in Shakespeare's City. By Stephen Alford. Dec.
2017. 304p. Bloomsbury, $28 (9781620408216). 942.05.
Standing in the heart of early seventeenth-century London, John Earle surveys "a heap of stones and men"
and hears "a strange humming or buzz, mixed of walking, tongues, and feet." In this fascinating history of
Tudor London, Alford helps readers to recognize the most significant of this burgeoning municipality's
stones and men and to tease out the globe-shaping meaning of its dynamic buzz. Readers will relish what
Alford tells them about the wrought stones of St. Paul's Cathedral, Drapers' Hall, the Royal Exchange, and
other major London edifices. But far more fascinating are the men who move through these buildings--
resourceful merchants such as John Isham, bold explorers such as Anthony Jenkinson, and shrewd
financiers such as Thomas Gresham. And in the humming buzz such men collectively generate, readers will
discern the sound of a metropolis awakening to its global destiny, challenging Antwerp, Madrid, Lisbon,
and Augsburg in its international sweep. So widely does Tudor London pursue its interests that Alford's tale
carries readers to China, Persia, Russia, and the Americas. Shakespeare counts as just one of the vibrant
contemporary voices--dramatists, diarists, and preachers--Alford quotes to convey the excitement and
controversy in this remarkable city's ascent. Renaissance urban life unfolds as stirring drama.--Bryce
Christensen
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Christensen, Bryce. "London's Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, & Money in Shakespeare's City."
Booklist, 15 Oct. 2017, p. 10. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512776042/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3a240b13.
Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
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London's Triumph: Merchants,
Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare's
City
Publishers Weekly.
264.41 (Oct. 9, 2017): p57+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
London's Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare's City
Stephen Alford. Bloomsbury, $28 (304p)
ISBN 978-1-62040-821-6
Alford (The Watchers), a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, reveals how increased trading activity and
bold speculation resulted in London's significant economic and physical growth over the 16th century.
Alford avoids delivering a dry financial account; instead, his swift chronology of fiscal maturation
highlights the specific acts and lives of men such as Royal Exchange founder Thomas Gresham and the
unfortunate Michael Lok, who financed Martin Frobisher's failed search for Cathay. Daring merchants of
varying economic means appear as worried yet energetic investors, moneylenders, and explorers. Their
stories offer a glimpse into the merchant class as a whole, as Alford explores the specific homes and
businesses of notable figures. Sources include family histories, official records, and a 15-page Flemish
panoramic sketch. Tradecentric Antwerp and its ties to London receive the initial focus, contextualizing
Londoners' understanding of textiles and trade tactics. Alford then covers the fruitful forays of Englishmen
Anthony Jenkinson to Russia and Richard Hakluyt to the New World. Fraught negotiations over Asian trade
receive scant attention, with substantive trade gains getting more emphasis than unproductive diplomatic
efforts. Alford eloquently shows how Renaissance merchants and global exploration allowed London to
come of age, transforming from a city subordinate to other European hubs into an ambitious player with
financial might. It's a vibrant depiction of London's rising merchant class during the Tudor era. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"London's Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare's City." Publishers Weekly, 9 Oct.
2017, p. 57+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A511293360/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=33b6720d. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
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Alford, Stephen: THE WATCHERS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2012):
COPYRIGHT 2012 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Alford, Stephen THE WATCHERS Bloomsbury (Adult Nonfiction) $35.00 11, 13 ISBN: 978-1-60819-009-
6
Alford (History/Cambridge Univ.; Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I, 2008, etc.) is an
expert on all things Elizabethan, and his intimate knowledge of the queen's ministers and the period's
political history guarantees the accuracy and thoroughness of this rip-roaring story. The religious makeup of
16th-century England had bounced from Protestant to Catholic and back again with each succeeding
offspring of Henry VIII. Her country's future relied upon Elizabeth's strength. The lack of a successor and
England's isolation and defenselessness produced obsessive vigilance on the part of Lord High Treasurer
William Cecil (Baron Burghley) and Principal Secretary Francis Walsingham. As the author notes, the more
obsessive the vigilance, the greater the danger perceived. That there was a real threat in the 1580s is without
doubt. Philip II of Spain, Mary Queen of Scots, exiled Catholics and priests in France all worked
unceasingly to usurp, overthrow or murder Elizabeth. Mary, first cousin to the queen, had the strongest
claim to the succession. Her Catholic supporters in France plotted unceasingly during her two-decade
imprisonment. The threat from Philip took some years to materialize, but England's interference in the
struggle of the Low Countries against Spanish rule pushed him to join the Pope's Great Enterprise against
Elizabeth. The third threat, posed by priests trained at the English seminary in France, was more insidious.
Over the course of 40 years, Elizabeth's hounds identified nearly 500 priests active in England; 116 of those
met the gruesome fate of being hanged or drawn and quartered. Tracing the devious machinations of rebels
and intelligence agents alike, Alford makes brilliant use of the intercepted letters, illegal publications and
incendiary pamphlets found in the Elizabethan archives. A great spy novel--except that it's all true.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Alford, Stephen: THE WATCHERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2012. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A302274061/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=527ac20d.
Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
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Alford, Stephen. The Watchers: A Secret
History of the Reign of Elizabeth I
Tessa Minchew
Library Journal.
137.15 (Sept. 15, 2012): p78.
COPYRIGHT 2012 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Alford, Stephen. The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I. Bloomsbury, dist. by
Macmillan. Nov. 2012. c.400p, illus, bibliog, index. ISBN 9781608190096. $35. HIST
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Literature regarding Elizabethan espionage often focuses a very bright spotlight on the riveting figure of
Queen Elizabeth's "spy-master," Sir Francis Walsingham. However, Alford (history, Kings Coll., Univ. of
Cambridge; Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I), who already has several Tudor histories
under his belt, has given readers a more holistic view of the intelligence-gathering personnel and processes
employed by the Elizabethan state in its understandable, yet merciless, quest for security. Weaving together
the stories of conspirators such as Francis Throckmorton, well known to today's readers on the subject, with
those of far less documented agents such as Charles Sledd,<
the dangerous interplay of national defense and repression. VERDICT This title should appeal to those
interested in the roots of modern espionage, the government of Elizabeth I, Tudor history, or European
political/religious history. Even readers more familiar with the key players in the dramatic Elizabethan
security apparatus may enjoy this refreshing take on the subject.--Tessa Minchew, Georgia Perimeter Coll.
Lib., Clarkston
Minchew, Tessa
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Minchew, Tessa. "Alford, Stephen. The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I." Library
Journal, 15 Sept. 2012, p. 78. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A303072364/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cf3a9954.
Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
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The Watchers: A Secret History of the
Reign of Elizabeth I
Gilbert Taylor
Booklist.
108.22 (Aug. 1, 2012): p21.
COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I. By Stephen Alford. Nov. 2012. 400p.
Bloomsbury, $35 (9781608190096). 942.055.
The biographer of the Virgin Queen's de facto prime minister (Burghley, 2008) enters the vortex of
Elizabethan espionage, which readers of the era will find irresistible. Building his account directly from
documents compiled by Elizabeth's spymaster, Francis Walsingham, Alford shrewdly analyzes their
contents and their writers' motives. Depicting Walsingham repeatedly confronting the conundrum of
assessing the trustworthiness of agents, Alford delves into characters connected with conspiracies against
Elizabeth. To detect plots, Walsingham infiltrated spies among English Catholics, spies whose loyalty could
change and whose variable talents for deception and betrayal become visible in Alford's accounts. Setting
actions amid the anxieties in which Elizabeth's councilors operated--fears of her death, of Spanish invasion,
of the succession claim by Mary, Queen of Scots--Alford affords an explanation of their fight with
Catholicism and fine human-interest dramas about the spies with which they waged it. Some of the latter
warrant lengthy detailing (like Anthony Munday, who later worked with Shakespeare), while others flit
furtively through Alford's narratives. Embedding them in the skein of Elizabethan London, Alford
perceptively portrays the intelligence system of a queen perpetually popular with history buffs.--Gilbert
Taylor
Taylor, Gilbert
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Taylor, Gilbert. "The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2012, p. 21.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A299886194/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bd4195e6. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A299886194
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The Watchers: A Secret History of the
Reign of Elizabeth I
Publishers Weekly.
259.27 (July 2, 2012): p54.
COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I
Stephen Alford. Bloomsbury Press, $35 (416p) ISBN 978-1-60819-009-6
Alford, a fellow in history at Cambridge University, has delved deeply into 16th-century archives to unearth
a history of the dark underside to the Elizabethan golden age--<>. When Elizabeth I ascended to the throne in 1558, Protestants saw her as the rightful
heir; Catholics regarded her as. the godless Henry VIII's bastard daughter who had usurped the throne from
its legitimate occupant, Mary, Queen of Scots. Thus, throughout Elizabeth's reign, she was targeted by foes
both within and outside the kingdom, from the 471 English priests working to return England to the
Church's fold, to the power-grabbing rulers of France and Spain. A perfect storm of Elizabeth's
childlessness, Europe's religious wars, and the assassinations of Protestant leaders elsewhere, intensified the
anxieties of Elizabeth's ministers. Her spies thus resorted to deception, interrogation, and even doctoring
evidence to destroy both real and perceived threats to the queen's safety--including Mary Stuart, who was
executed for treason in 1587. Her execution "jolted" the Elizabethan world "on its axis." While the
government's extensive spy network maintained a precarious peace during Elizabeth's reign, Afford vividly
makes the point that its effectiveness actually undermined the monarchy, with repercussions that extended
well into the next century. B& illus., maps. Agent: George Lucas, Inkwell. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I." Publishers Weekly, 2 July 2012, p. 54.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A297137181/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=39562baf. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A297137181
3/3/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Alford, Stephen. Burghley: William Cecil
at the court of Elizabeth I
D.R. Bisson
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
46.11 (July 2009): p2190.
COPYRIGHT 2009 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
46-6411
DA358
2007-42537 CIP
Alford, Stephen. Burghley: William Cecil at the court of Elizabeth I. Yale, 2008. 412p bibl index afp ISBN
9780300118964, $45.00
This is the first comprehensive study of William Cecil to appear since Michael Graves's William Cecil,
Lord Burghley (1998). Unlike Graves, Alford (Cambridge) seeks to understand both the public career and
personal life of his subject. He sheds light on Cecil's obscure origins, demonstrates the enduring importance
of his links with the humanist circle he knew at Cambridge, and limns out his early career as the
indispensable man of business for the dukes of Somerset and Northumberland, the great nobles who
dominated the short reign of the boy-king Edward VI. The relentless focus on Cecil means that much
important context receives scant attention. Alford says nothing of the risings of 1549, and he gives less
attention than needed to Cecil's relations with his great patron, Elizabeth. He<< regards Cecil as a committed
Protestant determined to defend his faith>> at home and abroad. Alford seems blind to the unattractive side of
Cecil's character: he abandoned both Somerset and Northumberland to save his skin, turned Catholic in
order to ingratiate himself with the hated Mary I, and ruthlessly harried Mary, Queen of Scots, to her death.
Summing Up: Recommended. ** Upper-division undergraduates and above.--D.R. Bisson, Belmont
University
Bisson, D.R.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bisson, D.R. "Alford, Stephen. Burghley: William Cecil at the court of Elizabeth I." CHOICE: Current
Reviews for Academic Libraries, July 2009, p. 2190. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A266633172/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ae26ba80.
Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A266633172
LONDON'S TRIUMPH
Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare's City
by Stephen Alford
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KIRKUS REVIEW
The transformation of the English capital from a provincial backwater to a cosmopolitan dynamo, courtesy of urban merchants who spearheaded global trade, exploration, and colonization.
Alford (Early Modern British History/Univ. of Leeds; Edward VI: The Last Boy King, 2014, etc.) makes expert use of individual lives to bring London’s various stages to life. Thomas Wyndout, who died in 1500, inhabited a stable, Catholic, late-medieval world of time-honored rituals and work lives ordered by the rules of trade guilds. Richard Gresham built his fortune through trade with Antwerp, the mercantile and financial center of Europe, then parlayed carefully cultivated connections with powerful royal officials to ascend to lord mayor of London in 1537. His son Thomas saw that London’s merchants could expand English trade beyond Europe and rival Antwerp as lender to the crown. In 1553, explorers searching for Cathay wound up in Russia instead, and the resultant Muscovy Company, whose charter members worked hand in glove with the queen’s government, made manifest “the interplay of money and political power” that shaped London’s growth. Striving immigrants also played an instrumental role, as can be seen in the odysseys of Dutch expatriate Cornelis Spierincks, a Calvinist who, like many others on the continent, sought refuge from Catholic persecution in now-Protestant England, and his son, who moved out from an émigré community to become a true Londoner. These and many other <
Solid scholarly history written with an accessible verve that will appeal to general readers.
Pub Date: Dec. 5th, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62040-821-6
Page count: 288pp
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12th, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1st, 2017
London’s Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare’s City
By Stephen Alford Bloomsbury USA 336 pp.
Reviewed by Alice Padwe
December 16, 2017
How a hamlet on the Thames unfurled its wings in the 16th century.
How did London rise from its position as a “modest satellite of a European system of international trade” in 1500 to a city boasting of commerce stretching to Russia, the Far East, and the New World by 1620?
In this book about “merchants, adventurers, and money,” historian Stephen Alford follows the careers of those whose successful (and occasionally failed) enterprises contributed to the power and prosperity of the city. He also provides background on the commercial scene in Tudor London and explains the paths to advancement in the city.
Little is known about the rise of some key figures. Anthony Jenkinson, navigator and negotiator, was the son of a rural innkeeper in Leicestershire. No records show how he found his way to the Ottoman Empire, but “in his early twenties, he had his own ship, men and cargo and Suleiman’s safe conduct.” About a decade later, Jenkinson was in Russia consolidating operations of an English trade enterprise, the Muscovy Company, and feasting as an honored guest of Ivan the Terrible.
Others did not spring from obscurity: Geographer and promoter of English colonies in the New World Richard Hakluyt was the ward of a successful barrister (also named Richard Hakluyt) who taught his young cousin about physical and political geography. Financier Thomas Gresham’s father, Richard, was a flourishing merchant who enjoyed the support of Cardinal Wolsey and Wolsey’s protégé, Thomas Cromwell.
Both Cromwell and the senior Gresham were involved with trade in the Low Countries, where Antwerp was a major commercial center. Richard Gresham, elected lord mayor of London and knighted, was eager to have an exchange building in London that would rival the Antwerp bourse. Although he did not live to see that building as his monument, his son Thomas, who, as Alford puts it, “was his father’s greatest legacy,” did.
Successfully negotiating terms for repayment of King Edward VI’s substantial debt, and nimbly going from the service of Protestant King Edward to Catholic Queen Mary after a brief hiatus, Thomas Gresham managed to get the magnificent Royal Exchange completed during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
Thomas Gresham’s financial expertise and Jenkinson’s navigational ability started the two men on their respective paths, but without their excellent diplomatic and negotiating skills, neither would have achieved the success that helped London consolidate its gains.
Something of the spirit of these men can be seen in the name of one of the earliest trading companies: the Company of Merchant Adventurers, which began in the Middle Ages. The names of companies formed in the 16th and early 17th centuries demonstrate the increasing scope of London’s trade: the Muscovy Company, Turkey Company, Levant Company, Virginia Company, and East India Company.
In addition to those who ventured abroad, others who spent most of their lives in London were essential to the city’s growth. The scholarly resources and time-keeping devices of John Dee, as well as the maps and descriptions in Hakluyt’s three volumes of Principal Navigations, not only aided navigators but inspired investors.
Alford says he purposely kept famous names at the margins of his book, but without the royal charters and monopolies granted by the monarchs of the time, entrepreneurs would not have been able to negotiate trade agreements with foreign sovereigns. Queen Elizabeth, although known for her reluctance to open her purse, invested in some of the enterprises, including the slave trade.
Alford intersperses his accounts of these companies and the men who led them with descriptions of London, contrasting the glories of commercial success with the squalor and poverty of much of the city and its inhabitants.
He describes the spread of the city as its population rose from 50,000 in 1500 to 200,000 in 1600, and discusses problems arising from the influx of people from the English countryside and of those escaping religious warfare in Europe, as well as of the usual mix of foreign traders doing business in London.
The author devotes space to the change in attitude from the church prohibition of usury (with various methods of lending money to get around this) to the acceptance of what was instead called interest.
He points out that the partnership between commerce and government was essential for success. The folly of sailing abroad with dreams of riches in Cathay — without accurate knowledge of the land or ocean — is eventually replaced by successful voyages following the dissemination and publication of information gathered by voyagers.
The final chapter is primarily devoted to a cursory description of how London has changed since 1620. The author, whose earlier book was The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, seems much more comfortable in the Tudor and Jacobean city. His preceding chapters hold the reader’s attention more than do these pages that rush through the modern streets. It was those earlier sections that did, indeed, show that London between1500 and 1620 was “a place of formidable dynamism.”
Alice Padwe, who has edited books ranging from history texts to spy thrillers, and who enjoys reading books about London, would love to explore the city on foot more often.
London’s Triumph by Stephen Alford review – merchant adventurers and Tudor boomtime
This fresh account of the rise of the English capital as a global metropolis never loses sight of the city’s searing inequality
Jessie Childs
Thu 20 Apr 2017 02.30 EDT Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 09.21 EST
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Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn and Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in the TV adaptation of Wolf Hall.
Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn and Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in the TV adaptation of Wolf Hall. Photograph: Giles Keyte/BBC/Company Productions Ltd
Inside Samuel Pepys’ favourite church, St Olave’s on Hart Street, stand monuments to aldermen, mercers, knights of the realm and directors of the East India Company. Out in the churchyard, via a gateway studded with stone skulls – “like a jail”, wrote Dickens, who renamed the place St Ghastly Grim – are the plague victims. They lie alongside “a man blackamore”, found dead in the street in 1588, and two African maidservants of a Jewish-born Portuguese physician. Interred here, too, are the scant remains of an Inuit baby, who perished within weeks of being taken from Baffin Island, Canada, by the explorer Martin Frobisher. Here, in microcosm, is Tudor London, a city of commerce, immigration, adventure, disease, celebrity, curiosity, money, power and risk. As Stephen Alford makes clear, “London was both a triumph of riches and a triumph of poverty.” This is a book about travel, trade and the rise of London as a global metropolis, but it does not neglect the churchyard.
In 1500, London was marginal and underwhelming. Paris had more people; Antwerp had bigger markets; Augsburg in Bavaria had the bankers and Florence the art. London didn’t even have a bourse. A century later, the city was booming. Her population had quadrupled and her river teemed with ships full of caviar, tobacco and silk. She had a Royal Exchange and a global reach. In Arctic waters seamen encountered islands called Cape Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s Foreland and Charing Cross, which was just south of West England. “Not an infant of the curtailed skinclipping pagans but talk of London as frequently as of their Prophet’s tomb at Mecca,” wrote the satirist Thomas Nashe in 1599. Such a statement could not even have been conjured at the beginning of the century.
Success was born against a backdrop of deteriorating relations with Europe, and of crushing disappointment. The Arctic islands were frozen markers of a failure to find a northern sea route to Cathay, the fabled empire of the Great Khan, who reportedly possessed Mexican quantities of bullion. English adventurers never found a way of sailing through ice, but from the first attempt to navigate a north-eastern passage in 1553 came Anglo-Russian contact and – with time and diplomacy – exclusive trading privileges for what became known as the Muscovy Company. Royally chartered and fiercely protectionist, it even claimed rights over any navigation or discovery made by “sailing [from England] northwards, northeastwards, and northwestwards, or any parts thereof”. It was England’s first joint-stock company and the model for mercantile – and eventually colonial – endeavour in the Levant, the East Indies and Virginia.
There have been many books on the merchant adventurers and still more on Tudor London, but in showing how fundamental each was to the success of the other, London’s Triumph feels very fresh. Alford, professor of early modern British history at the University of Leeds, and the author of The Watchers, a deservedly acclaimed book on Elizabethan spies, is outstanding on the mercantile networks that enmeshed not only the livery companies and the court of aldermen, but also parish councils, immigrant communities and Westminster. <
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John Stow, born in London in Henry VIII’s reign, remembered fetching warm milk from a nearby farm. Thomas Cromwell stole a patch of his father’s garden. Stow’s A Survey of London is a sepia-tinted lament for the good old days and has found echoes in subsequent generations of Londoner. Others celebrated and stimulated change. Sebastian Cabot, who was Venetian by birth, Spanish by training and a Londoner by adoption, was the founder and first governor of the Muscovy Company. “It is hard to imagine London’s global ambitions getting quite the start that they did without his energy and vision,” writes Alford. Word was spread by Richard Hakluyt, whose anthology of traveller tales, The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598-1600) might be read as a 1.76m-word national epic. For him and others in the post-Reformation landscape, this was God’s work.
London became a magnet. By the mid-century, fewer than two in 10 new freemen in the livery companies were London-born. John Isham came from Northamptonshire, made a small fortune in textiles, bought an estate in his home county and retired. His portrait confirms that he was “a man of very good stomach to his victuals”. Others sought asylum from religious persecution and civil war. Alford introduces us to some splendid names: Jan Bones, Melchior van Asse, Jacob Cool – members of the Dutch congregation of the Austin Friars, near Bishopsgate. The city called them “strangers”, queried their status and curtailed their freedoms, and yet, in its rough way, provided some kind of sanctuary.
Might all these new people, all this money and oozing self-confidence, distort London’s moral compass? That was the fear
Might all these new people, all this money and oozing self-confidence, distort London’s moral compass? That was the fear. “Woe to that abominable, filthy and cruel city,” a sermon began in 1577, “she heard not the voice, she received not correction, she trusted not in the Lord.” The dread, shared by playwrights and preachers, was that citizens might buckle under the lure of lucre and the challenge of change. Antonios could so easily become Shylocks and trade lapse into usury. The fictional fat cat in Thomas Wilson’s Discourse Upon Usury might pay lip service to a preacher’s denunciation of moneylending, but had no intention of abandoning “so sweet a trade for a few words of his trolling tongue”.
London was a place of searing and visible inequality. In the shadow of grand houses overcrowded tenements squatted. In 1579, there were three privies to 85 people in Tower Street – which returns us to Tower Street Ward, St Olave’s in Hart Street, the church and the yard.
One can’t imagine that the woman who abandoned her son in the Royal Exchange in 1601 gave much thought to the birth of the East India Company a few months earlier. And yet London did achieve something extraordinary in the 16th century. Her greatest asset was, and remains, her intellectual capital. Alford rightly marvels at the courage, tenacity and chutzpah of the visionaries who took on the “Meta Incognita”, the “unknown limits” of the world. Anthony Jenkinson’s name rolled off the tongues of Ivan the Terrible, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Shah of Persia. With no contacts, no training, no knowledge of the terrain nor climate, people nor language, just a spirit of enterprise, infinite patience and a consignment of unappealing kersey cloth, he managed to convince the strong men of the East that England was worth a trade deal. This might be a book for ministers to take on holiday in the summer.
• London’s Triumph is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £15 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
London’s Triumph: Merchant Adventurers and the Tudor City, by Stephen Alford
Book of the week: The rise in London’s trading fortunes owed much to foreign visitors, finds Lucy Wooding
April 27, 2017
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By Lucy Wooding
Old St Paul's Cathedral
Source: Bridgeman Collection
In 1500, England was a backwater – an isolated and comparatively uninteresting kingdom whose language reached no further than Calais, and whose trading activities took place under the shadow of the great mercantile centres of Europe, most particularly that of Antwerp. A century later, London had emerged from those shadows to assert its own trading strength, reaching out beyond Europe to Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the East Indies and America. Stephen Alford’s book tells the story of London and its merchants, but more than that, it relates a history of transformation and adventure, of foreign encounters and the construction of a diverse, polyglot and resourceful city.
Alford charts the rise of mercantile London by weaving together the life stories of the men and women who expanded and enhanced it in their pursuit of prosperity, and who turned their vague and often reckless imaginings into global exploration. Anthony Jenkinson, seemingly destined for an unremarkable life in Market Harborough, found himself in Aleppo when Suleiman the Magnificent rode in at the head of his armies; he was on easy terms with Ivan the Terrible, and travelled to the Caspian Sea and to Persia in search of trade routes. John Sanderson, a sour-tempered Londoner who had been thought unpromising at school, went on to serve in Constantinople; he travelled to Egypt where he saw the Sphinx, visited Antioch, Aleppo, Tripoli and Damascus, and was shipwrecked twice. The characters in this book all excelled in achieving the unexpected. At times, as with the search for the Northwest Passage, their enterprises ended in debt and disgrace. Yet many of their endeavours were astoundingly successful, and their willingness to embark for the Arctic, the Baltic, or across the Atlantic, in frail wooden ships, armed only with a few precious books and instruments and a selection of textiles, still beggars belief.
From these adventures, often driven by the determination of just a handful of people, came the Muscovy Company, the Levant Company, the East India Company and the settling of Virginia. The combination of enthusiastic, if often wayward, cosmography and the more mundane imperatives of the rag trade forged a startlingly successful partnership. Be warned, however, that this is no triumphalist tale of how doughty Englishmen, through their dogged individualism, sowed the seeds of the British Empire. On the contrary, Alford’s book reminds us, in timely fashion, that almost everything that made early modern London a great city was copied or borrowed from our much more skilled and sophisticated European neighbours. We learned navigation from the Genoese and Portuguese, printing and cartography from the Dutch and the Germans, and banking from the Italians; when the Royal Exchange was built, it was designed by an architect from Antwerp and constructed by Flemish bricklayers. The adventurers of this book are those who knew how to build on the wisdom and experience of others, and whose bookshelves were laden with tomes in French, Italian, Latin, Greek and Arabic; and who, arriving unexpectedly in Moscow, seem to have muddled through in Polish, Italian and Greek.
Alford’s book is attentive to the material realities of Tudor London, from the stink of the Fleet river to the packed tenements of the poor and the vastness of St Paul’s Cathedral, almost a third larger than Notre Dame in Paris, and where debts were settled by the font. As one Elizabethan bishop fumed, the cathedral comprised “the south alley for popery and usury, the north for simony, and the horse fair in the midst for all kinds of bargains, meetings, brawlings, murders, conspiracies, and the font for ordinary payment of money”. Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange offered a superior replacement, in a vast Renaissance building big enough to hold 4,000 merchants; it was meant to equal the great bourse of Antwerp, which one poet had described as “a small world wherein all parts of the great world were united”. Gresham was marking London’s arrival on the European stage.
The achievements chronicled in this book were only possible because of the foreigners who brought their expertise to England. This prompted concerns about the number of immigrants piling into London, and there were sporadic bursts of outright hostility, not least when harvests failed, epidemics hit and tempers became fraught. The Elizabethan government was mostly intelligent enough to see the value of the “strangers”, however, as well as being moved by the plight of those who came as refugees fleeing religious persecution in their own countries. If poets and playwrights poked fun at the immigrants, they also showed them as part of the life of the city. Thomas Dekker’s comedy The Shoemaker’s Holiday, first performed in 1599, revolved around a young nobleman disguised as a Dutch shoemaker in order to pursue the girl he loved, but the joke depended on the audience being able to understand the mock Dutch in which the character spoke. Tudor London was a multilingual city, where the strangers integrated with relative ease.
Although this is a work of popular history, it avoids the usual traps of mawkishness and needless fantasy that often bedevil this particular genre. It ranges widely over subjects that many others have covered in more depth, so at times the fabric is stretched quite thin, but apart from a tendency to disparage late medieval London, <
Around the year 1600, a group of playwrights, one of them Shakespeare, collaborated in writing the play Sir Thomas More . Slightly to the alarm of the Court, this dealt with the riots of 1517 when the houses of foreign merchants had been attacked by a disaffected mob. The most striking part of the play, perhaps, was the speech where Thomas More spoke to his fellow citizens about the people they were menacing. He warned them how such persecution offended against all humanity: “Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, /Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage, /Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation…”
London’s Triumph shows us the grand visions and human incongruities of commerce. But it also shows us a city contending with immigration, religious difference and the threat of violence. London’s response was resourceful, resilient and creative; it was prepared, on the whole, to welcome foreigners and to learn from them. Fired not only by the lure of wealth but by the untrammelled possibilities of the imagination, it engaged with the wider world on a scale never before envisaged. The unspoken comparisons that haunt this story are unavoidably poignant.
Lucy Wooding is fellow and tutor in history, Lincoln College, University of Oxford.
London’s Triumph: Merchant Adventurers and the Tudor City
By Stephen Alford
Allen Lane, 336pp, £20.00
ISBN 9780241003589
Published 27 April 2017
The author
Stephen Alford
“I was born in Telford in Shropshire, and grew up in its post-industrial landscape in the Thatcher years,” says Stephen Alford, professor of early modern British history at the University of Leeds. “My family had long worked in the old heavy industries – for about 200 years the men of every branch of my family were colliers. Nonconformity was a big theme of my upbringing, and perhaps there is just a hint of puritan work ethic in my makeup!”
As a child, he recalls, “I think I always liked to ask questions. Certainly I enjoyed books and comics right from the start, and took to history very early, strongly encouraged by my family and teachers at primary and comprehensive school. I loved the Ladybird history books (my first was Oliver Cromwell): the pictures and artwork are still very much fixed in my mind.”
What was Alford like as an undergraduate?
“My wife feels she should answer this one! I always feel that I sort of fumbled my way through my undergraduate years at St Andrews. My family had no experience of university, and so there were no expectations hung around my neck. I had no clear sense of what I wanted to do at the end of it, but I loved the work and the fantastic teaching (with all the blessings of a pre-modular and pre-VLE age), and had huge fun; I probably spent too much of my time in pubs and the university union.
He adds: “Having four undergraduate years rather than three was a huge privilege. Looking back on that time, and on my postgraduate years, I am amazed at what I did, without (as I remember it at least) any great agonies or anxieties. The cluelessness of youth – of living in the moment, with space and freedom to think and enjoy, without the burdens of grinding continual assessment – possessed for me a wonderful creativity.”
His research presently focuses on the City of London in the early modern era. Has he a favourite spot in the city where the era he writes about in this book seems most alive and present to him?
“I have never been a Londoner, although I have always loved London as a visitor and have very happy memories of PhD research in the old Students’ Room of the British Library (then in one of the wings of the British Museum) and the Victorian solemnity of the Public Record Office on Chancery Lane. I like the incongruity of those few tiny survivals of pre-Great Fire London overshadowed by the huge modern buildings of the City.
“Probably my favourite spot is at the corner of Seething Lane and Hart Street and the church of St Olave, where so many of the characters I write about in the book seem somehow to meet. There is something so neatly perfect in the tomb of the Bayning brothers, Andrew and Paul, two early 17-century Levant Company and East India Company merchants,” Alford adds.
Like his previous book The Watchers, also a Book of the Week in these pages, London’s Triumph is informed by the author’s serious scholarship, but addresses that fabled creature, the educated general reader. What is the secret to writing for that audience?
“For me it’s a case of embracing the pain of writing and endless re-writing, as well as curbing a natural inclination to pack in everything, to over-complicate things and to show off knowledge – resigning oneself to the fact that readers (and colleagues) will only ever see a fraction of the research behind a book. I try to make it all look effortless, but it most certainly isn’t.
“I work hard at expressing myself in plain words, returning all the time to some old and treasured points of reference: George Orwell (everything, but especially The Politics of the English Language), Graham Greene (once again everything), Herbert Read (English Prose Style) and Somerset Maugham (The Summing Up). I try to deploy good, robust narrative (a form that makes many academic historians nervous), and work to recover past voices. I want (especially as I get older) to strip everything back to essentials, without jargon or verbiage. Of course I wouldn’t have got very far at all without a highly perceptive and persuasive literary agent, Peter Robinson, and a wonderful and inspiring editor, Simon Winder.”
He adds: “A final comment is that the ‘educated general reader’ is no creature of fable: she and he exists in the many tens of thousands!
Reading London’s Triumph in the post-Brexit present, are we right to wonder why it is not more widely known how polyglot the London of centuries ago was?
“In some ways we might use the book as a marker of how far we have come in nearly half a millennium. Certainly it is a reminder that to reach out beyond boundaries and borders, and to see the possibilities in otherness and difference, has been a long and painful struggle. Sixteenth- and 17th-century Londoners show us the fantastic ability of human beings to withstand extraordinary strains and challenges – and yet perhaps also how thin the surface crust of decency and tolerance is. Long views and perspectives are essential. What Brexit has shown, in a depressing but not at all surprising way, is how limited our sense of a shared and collective history is, and the vulnerabity of huge constituencies of people to highly selective and distorted nationalist views of the past.”
If he could change one thing about his institution, the University of Leeds, what would it be?
“Leeds is by far the most positive, encouraging and collegial institution I’ve worked in. But if I could change one thing, it would be to reverse the heavy cutting of the library budget, which makes it increasingly difficult to write a book like London’s Triumph, and to do serious research in the arts and humanities more generally – particularly at a time when ever more is expected of us in terms of teaching excellence and scholarly productivity. Where books and libraries suffer, there seem to be in modern universities seemingly inexhaustible funds for grand architectural statements and wobbly IT projects – the 21st-century condition, perhaps!”
What gives him hope?
“My daughter, Matilda, whose energy and joie de vivre inspire me every day.”
karen.shook@timeshighereducation.com