scholarly journals William Herle and the English Secret Service

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Michael Patrick Gill

<p>This thesis examines William Herle's life through his surviving letters to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and other Elizabethan Privy Councillors. It emphasises the centrality of the Elizabethan patronage system to Herle's life, describing how his ties to Cecil helped Herle escape prison, avoid his creditors, and gain recompense for his service to Elizabeth. In exchange for Cecil's protection, Herle became deeply involved in Elizabethan intelligence networks, both domestic and foreign, throughout the 1570s and 1580s. Herle helped uncover plots against Elizabeth, passed vital information about events in the Spanish Netherlands back to England, and provided analyses of English foreign policy for his superiors. Despite his vital role, Herle never experienced true success, and died deeply in debt and abandoned by his patrons. Herle's life allows us wider insights into Elizabethan government and society. His experiences emphasises the inefficient nature of the Tudor foreign service, which utilised untrained diplomats who gained their position through political connections and were left to pay their own way through taking out loans they had little hope of repaying. Similarly, the numerous law suits which Herle describes in his letters are absent from official records, implying that Tudor society was even more litigious than previously assumed. Herle's life-long status as a gentleman, despite being arrested as a pirate and frequently imprisoned for debt, reinforces the lack of social mobility in Elizabethan England. His focus throughout his life on the need to support the 'Protestant Cause,' and his fear of an international Catholic conspiracy was shared by Cecil, Leicester, and Walsingham, and shows how deeply religious divisions affected English foreign and domestic policy.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Michael Patrick Gill

<p>This thesis examines William Herle's life through his surviving letters to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and other Elizabethan Privy Councillors. It emphasises the centrality of the Elizabethan patronage system to Herle's life, describing how his ties to Cecil helped Herle escape prison, avoid his creditors, and gain recompense for his service to Elizabeth. In exchange for Cecil's protection, Herle became deeply involved in Elizabethan intelligence networks, both domestic and foreign, throughout the 1570s and 1580s. Herle helped uncover plots against Elizabeth, passed vital information about events in the Spanish Netherlands back to England, and provided analyses of English foreign policy for his superiors. Despite his vital role, Herle never experienced true success, and died deeply in debt and abandoned by his patrons. Herle's life allows us wider insights into Elizabethan government and society. His experiences emphasises the inefficient nature of the Tudor foreign service, which utilised untrained diplomats who gained their position through political connections and were left to pay their own way through taking out loans they had little hope of repaying. Similarly, the numerous law suits which Herle describes in his letters are absent from official records, implying that Tudor society was even more litigious than previously assumed. Herle's life-long status as a gentleman, despite being arrested as a pirate and frequently imprisoned for debt, reinforces the lack of social mobility in Elizabethan England. His focus throughout his life on the need to support the 'Protestant Cause,' and his fear of an international Catholic conspiracy was shared by Cecil, Leicester, and Walsingham, and shows how deeply religious divisions affected English foreign and domestic policy.</p>


Author(s):  
David M. Webber

Having mapped out in the previous chapter, New Labour’s often contradictory and even ‘politically-convenient’ understanding of globalisation, chapter 3 offers analysis of three key areas of domestic policy that Gordon Brown would later transpose to the realm of international development: (i) macroeconomic policy, (ii) business, and (iii) welfare. Since, according to Brown at least, globalisation had resulted in a blurring of the previously distinct spheres of domestic and foreign policy, it made sense for those strategies and policy decisions designed for consumption at home to be transposed abroad. The focus of this chapter is the design of these three areas of domestic policy; the unmistakeable imprint of Brown in these areas and their place in building of New Labour’s political economy. Strikingly, Brown’s hand in these policies and the themes that underpinned them would again reappear in the international development policies explored in much greater detail later in the book.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Deborah Welch Larson ◽  
Alexei Shevchenko

This chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book draws on social identity theory (SIT) for insights into how status concerns and social identity shape Chinese and Russian foreign policy. SIT argues that social groups strive to achieve a positively distinctive identity. When a group's identity is threatened, it may pursue one of several identity management strategies: social mobility, social competition, or social creativity. Using SIT as a framework, the book addresses several questions. First, how important were status considerations in shaping Chinese and Russian foreign policy? Second, why did China and Russia choose a particular strategy in a given context for improving their state's international standing? Third, how effective were their chosen strategies as measured by the perceptions and beliefs of the leading states.


2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-349
Author(s):  
John Kirton

The direction and pace of efforts to co-ordinate the foreign policy making process within the executive branch of middle-size states may depend on subtle but cumulatively important shiefs in domestic and external environments. The experience of the Canadian government from 1976 to 1978 suggests the effects which four types of environmental change can have. The approach of a federal election was accompanied by a reduced emphasis on the formal procedures of the structured cabinet committee System instituted in the early years of the first Trudeau government. An increased threat to national unity, as registered in the November 1976 election of a Parti Québécois majority provincial government, concentrated decisional activity at the very centre of government, and had only indirect effects on the formal foreign policy planning process. Concern with persistent economic dilemmas, registered most clearly in the imposition of an expenditure restraint programme in August 1978, directly increased the use of the budgetary process and prompted moves toward foreign service integration. And the intensification of a decline in tension in relations with the United States, and the accompanying emergence of new global problems, led, in turn, to a transfer of dynamic, creative co-ordinatively-oriented leadership into the Department of External Affairs, a reorganization of the Department, and a strong stress on re-orienting its role toward that of a modem central policy agency.


Author(s):  
Douglas Foyle

Dramatic changes in the way the public acquires information and formulates its attitudes have potentially altered the opinion and foreign policy relationship. While traditional approaches have treated public opinion on domestic and foreign matters as largely distinct, the culmination of a series of changes may eliminate the effective distinction between foreign and domestic policy, at least in terms of how the American political system operates. All the factors central to the opinion and foreign policy process, such as information acquisition, attitude formation, media effects, the effect of opinion on policy, and presidential leadership now appear to mirror the processes observed at the domestic level. This analysis reviews historical trends in the literature on public opinion and foreign policy that has focused on the rationality of the public’s opinions, the structure of its attitudes, and its influence on foreign policymaking. The traditional Almond-Lippmann consensus portrayed an emotional public with unstructured attitudes and little influence on foreign policy; however, revisionist views have described a reasonable public with largely structured views on foreign policy that can, at times, constrain and even drive those policies. More recently, the rise of “intermestic” issues, contain both domestic and international elements, such as globalization, inequality, terrorism, immigration, and climate change, have interacted to transform the domestic and international context. The bulk of this analysis highlights emerging new research directions that should be pursued in light of the changes. First, scholars should continue to evaluate the “who thinks what and why” questions with particular attention to differences between high- and low-information individuals, the effect of misinformation, and information sources. In doing so, research should build on research from non-American contexts that points to the important influences of societal and institutional factors. In addition to continued examination of traditional demographic factors such as partisanship and ideology, additional attention should turn to consider potential genetic and biological foundations of attitudes. Finally, researchers should continue to evaluate how the new media environment, including social media, affects how the public accesses information, how the media provides information, and how political elites attempt to shape both. Given these changes, scholars should consider whether it continues to make sense to treat public opinion dynamics regarding foreign policy as distinct from domestic policy and its implications.


Worldview ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 3-6
Author(s):  
Paul F. Power

When Senator J. William Fulbright recently called for an an end to certain myths in American foreign policy he provoked, not unexpectedly, a debate over basic issues. Some of these are issues that Prime Minister Nehru grappled with in his long political career, issues that are neatly summed up in the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence found in the preamble of the Sino-Indian Agreement on Tibet, signed April 29, 1954.Although the Tibetan treaty expired in 1962, the norms in the preamble continue to play a vital role in world affairs.


1967 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Bradford Burns

Mounting Anxieties, frustrations, and fears in Brazil effected a change of government by military force at the end of March of 1964. President Joáo Goulart fled to an Uruguayan exile. Congress, urged by the military, conferred supreme executive power on Marshal Humberto Castelo Branco. Many other sweeping changes followed. None was more complete than the about-face taken in foreign policy.Castelo Branco spoke out early and unequivocally in his regime in favor of a return to more traditional policies. The graduation exercise of the foreign service school, the Instituto Rio-Branco, on July 31, 1964, provided the propitious place and moment for him to outline the foreign policy goals of his government. He paid homage to the ideals consecrated by tradition: world peace, disarmament, selfdetermination, non-intervention, and anti-colonialism. Moving into the more pragmatic realm of national interests, the president emphasized that his government's foreign policy aimed to increase national power through social and economic development.


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