Elizabeth I and Counsel

This chapter focuses on Elizabeth I’s statements about counsel that appeared in printed works (such as her Sententiae,published prayers and proclamations), public orations (especially to parliament) and confidential letters to princes and royal servants. It argues that Elizabeth adopted imperial, humanist and providential modes of counsel in fashioning herself as a virtuous and godly prince. She maintained that it was the ruler’s prerogative to choose their own councillors; that rulers had to apply wisdom and God’s help in discerning whose counsel was in the interests of the realm; and finally, that if monarchs consistently and wilfully took evil counsel, God would punish them by bringing disorder, war and defeat to their realms. Her rhetoric, moreover, mirrored her practice. Therefore, it was political, not constitutional, issues that divided Elizabeth from those privy councillors who complained that she did not follow their particular advice.

Counsel and the King’s Council in England, c.1340–c.1540

The later Middle Ages are generally seen as a formative period in the history of the English king’s council. Beyond this, however, there is confusion and disagreement, much of it centring on two questions — first, whether there were revolutionary — or even evolutionary — changes in the king’s council in this period, and if so, when they occurred and what caused them; and second, how important ‘the council’ was in realising the functions and principles associated with ‘counsel’. This chapter re-examines these questions, surveying the historiography, considering some of the problems facing the historian of counsel and discussing the political needs that the king’s council was required to meet. If conciliar arrangements are placed in their political and constitutional setting, it becomes possible to see them in fresh ways — first, as consistently multi-faceted, and second, as subject to change in response to the altered conditions of the later fifteenth and the sixteenth century.

‘Jerusalem thou dydst promyse to buylde up’: Kingship, Counsel and Early Elizabethan Drama

Historians of counsel have mostly shied away from early Elizabethan drama, while literary critics have not fully taken on board the recent advances in the historiography. This chapter makes a case for a more holistic, interdisciplinary approach to both counsel and the drama. It argues that early Elizabethan plays, both elite and popular, constituted an important form of counsel to the monarch and the ruling classes. An overview of how the plays engaged with counsel is followed by a fresh contextual reading of a popular biblical interlude, Kyng Daryus (1565), which is demonstrated to have formed an integral part of the godly campaign for further reformation. Appearing at the height of the Vestiarian Controversy, Kyng Daryus is shown to invoke the promised restoration of the Jerusalem Temple to promote the ideal of godly counsel, effectively mobilising the wider public in its defence.

‘Lele consail for the comoun profite’: Kings, Guardians and Councils in the Scottish Kingdom, c.1250–1450

The history of royal government in Scotland between 1250 and 1450 is one of recurrent crises and absences. The use of royal councils as a formal or informal means of providing or augmenting the authority of the crown forms an identifiable strand in the history of these two hundred years in tandem with the appointment of individual regents or groups of regents. By examining the use of councils for under-age or absent kings and the evidence for the employment of conciliar bodies by adult monarchs, this chapter demonstrates that, rather than following a distinctive Scottish approach to government, the kingdom’s rulers and political class drew on common models of council in response to specific political contexts.

Councils, Counsel and Consensus in Henry VIII’s Reformation

Henry VIII knew that a true Christian prince sought and considered counsel and weighed it in his conscience before acting. Council and counsel were therefore highly important to him in the crisis over his divorce and the royal supremacy. The discarding of his first great minister, Thomas Wolsey, led to an overt revival of conciliar activity in the early 1530s. This chapter argues that Henry used such structures of counsel, including what looks very like a traditional ‘great council’, less to seek advice than to build consensus around his chosen policies. Counsel as such seems to have been received by him in less formal and inevitably less well-documented contexts, evidence for which is used in this chapter to show not only how the conciliar process might work, but also how the ideal of honest and freely spoken counsel was strained by Henry’s increasing determination to have his own way.

Councils, Counsel and the Seventeenth-Century Composite State

This chapter explores how the lack of a fully developed system of British councils contributed to friction in the seventeenth-century dynastic union. British councils were occasionally mooted, involving joint mutual representation of Englishmen and Scots on each kingdom’s privy council, or an additional new British council to resolve disputes. At their most ambitious, such notions involved a wholesale rethinking of the British — even European — state system. However, they were rarely implemented, and many writers on union did not discuss British councils. This conclusion explores why counsel, rather than councils, was left to do the work of lubricating the multiple monarchy, and how its failure to do so exploded in both English and Scottish resentment of foreign counsels in the years around 1700. The two decades after the Revolution of 1688 were a liminal period in which old and new ideas about counsel, parliamentary power and fiduciary monarchy blended.

Locality, Polity and the Politics of Counsel: Royal and Urban Councils in England, 1420–1429

Historians have tended to examine royal and municipal councils in later medieval England as fundamentally incongruous institutions: the former an advisory body of a political character, and the latter an executive and representative body that served as a battleground for warring socio-economic classes. In this chapter, the king’s council and urban councils are shown, instead, to be units with similar functions and purposes, which both went through periods of greater regulation and standardisation in response to political crises. Moreover, a case study of the years 1420–9 reveals that royal and urban councils not only drew from a shared fund of political ideas, but also responded to one another’s activities. The ‘politics of counsel’, in this respect, can be used to demonstrate the mutually reinforcing contributions of crown and locality to political culture and political practice.

Consultation, Counsel and the ‘Early Stuart Period’ in Scotland

The impact on Scotland of the union of 1603 remains contested, with many seeing 1625 as more significant. Some believe that the advent of ‘absentee monarchy’ in 1603 coincided with a failure in counsel-giving mechanisms, ultimately leading to the revolution of 1637–8. Others reject the concept of ‘absentee monarchy’, and some argue that earlier institutional developments allowed government to function without daily royal participation. This chapter examines how central government sought and received counsel during James VI’s reign, exploring the diversity of institutional contexts, secular and ecclesiastical, for counsel. It traces developments before and after 1603 to assess the regal union’s impact and perceptions about the king’s departure. Considering one key individual’s views in 1625 highlights the importance of institutional mechanisms for counsel-giving and their perceived failures by that point. The continuities recognised by English historians between the reigns of James I and Charles I were also present in Scotland.

Sir Edward Hyde and the Problem of Counsel in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Royalist Thought

Arguments about good and evil counsel were central to political argument in England on the eve of Civil War. This chapter explores counsel’s continuing significance for one genre of royalists who continued to use it after 1642 both to depress parliament’s claim to sovereignty and to refute calls from their own side for Catholic or Presbyterian–Covenanting alliances. Men like Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, wanted a prestigious privy council, yet consistently gave counsel outside it owing to their emphasis on the conciliar oath to provide secret, morally sound, advice. They complained about malign advisers, but also criticised monarchs for bad decisions. Seeking moral rather than institutional restraints on monarchy, they demonstrate how, in the mid-seventeenth century, institutional councils were less important than counsel —a diffuse element of friendship and sociability as well as a quotidian political activity.

Counsel and Conscience in Lancastrian England

The minority of Henry VI compelled the English governing cadre, faced with the heavy burden of his predecessor’s foreign conquests and unfinished wars, to clarify its notion of ministerial responsibility, a process which can be observed through the internal council memoranda which have occasionally survived. This new genre of documentation, terse and practical in tone and usually in the vernacular, is common to most European polities from the second decade of the fifteenth century, and seems to replicate closely the rhythm of the spoken word; it can therefore expose the underlying values of councillors which more artfully confected documents keep hidden. Councillors’ memoranda reveal a sense of obligation sharpened by recently articulated notions of equity and of private conscience, in the wake of Henry V’s vigorous stimulus to lay religion, and show that the notions of public duty learnt in his service survived through the reign of his successor.