Peter Lake. Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I

Peter Lake’s importance in the historiography of the Elizabethan period is undisputed. He has helped bring Catholics into the mainstream of Elizabethan political history and inserted the “public sphere” into the vocabulary of early modern historians. In Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Lake encapsulates and extends these two themes. His aim here is to investigate what he sees as a new genre of political discourse, one that he calls a “libellous secret history.” This genre, he says, was evident in a wide range of appeals to the public, including polemical tracts, prayers, drama, and performances such as public executions. The secret histories were alternative narratives about political life that members of Elizabeth’s Protestant regime and its Catholic opponents devised to influence “various publics” at home and abroad (9). Invoking conspiracy theories and the evil counselor mode of interpretation, the propaganda of each side claimed to be revealing to an unsuspecting public the true stories about what was “really happening” in their world. In dialogue with each other, the narratives provided “the stuff of political thought.”

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