Proceedings of the Privy Council of Queen Elizabeth I, 1582-1583, Gebunden

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Important edition of central government records for Elizabeth I makes vital information available to historians.

By 1540, the Privy Council had been established as the Crown's principal policy-making and executive arm. Under the later Tudors, it governed England on the sovereign's behalf, functioning as an elite corporate board, and imbued with a sense of collective responsibility. Policy was implemented chiefly by issuing orders in the form of letters and warrants. Unfortunately, the institution's internal records are imperfect; the Elizabethan registers, which for much of the period disclose attendance at Council meetings and briefly notice out-going correspondence, are lost for almost a third of the reign altogether. Moreover, the extant registers are themselves incomplete; for reasons that are still not entirely clear, the Council's clerks failed to record a substantial number of dispatches, even on matters of considerable political importance, which nevertheless survive today, either as originals or as contemporaneous copies, lying scattered in numerous manuscript collections both public and private. The collected Proceedings, of which this volume is the first, will fill the gaps not only among the registers, but within them. Wherever possible, the texts of actual dispatches are married up with the corresponding register entries, enabling historians to consult entire documents, rather than rely upon the clerks' often crude summaries. Above all, the sources, and the topics to which they relate, are fully contextualised through reference to the latest scholarship.

The volume inaugurating the present series, covering the period June 1582 to June 1583, has a special claim to attention, in that it presents, in Part I, the text of a newly discovered original Privy Council register, which has been missing [presumed destroyed] since before 1619. This manuscript contains 672 entries. The actual dispatches for that year are assembled in Part II. Between them, the register and the collected dispatches disclose conciliar activity in a myriad of diverse areas: in foreign affairs [e. g. efforts to cope with the consequences of Don Antonio's attempt to claim the Portuguese throne and with the ramifications of the Raid of Ruthven in Scotland]; in religious affairs [e. g. proceedings against Catholic recusants and the organizing of collections for the relief of Geneva]; and in social and economic affairs [e. g. moves to limit new building in London and to prevent the spread of plague]. Ireland was frequently a major item on the agenda, albeit jostling for attention amid numerous cases requiring investigation and / or arbitration - cases turning on such issues as ecclesiastical patronage, bankruptcy, bigamy, forgery and piracy. This important edition of central governmental records, and particularly the register now brought to light, will thus be of special interest to all those concerned with the history of the Elizabethan State in that pivotal decade.