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