Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia > Status Update

‘Essex’s cup ran over. In early June, while still on the Munster campaign, he received news of Cecil’s appointment as Master of the Wards. It had happened again: once Devereux was away from the Queen, his enemies had got to her, and clever, stay-at-home Sir Robert had come out ahead. Essex was trapped in a cursed land where nothing went right; his best efforts earned only scorn and criticism’

‘Unfortunately Essex’s financial sweet was not without its occupational and political sour sauce. He had to share his mistress’s favour with that knave Raleigh. Worse, he had to struggle with the hidden eddies and dark currents of the Queen’s mind, and in doing so he twice blundered - once in February and again in July - and revealed the defects of his personality that would in the end destroy him.’

‘Anthony Cooke was destroyed by his own outstanding incompetence. He was clearly one of those economic malcontents who were ‘not able to live at home but on beggry’, and whom Lord Burghley instinctively suspected of potential treason. Cooke, however, like most of his generation, blamed his failure not on ineptitude but on the enemy who was ever ready to take advantage of his mistakes and to slander him’

Not the easiest read! Goes on a lot about classical literature, what contemporaries believed about paranoia etc.

‘Once the Reformation broke out, conspiracy took on more sinister and far more cosmic proportions, but nevertheless the conviction prevailed that heresy and its even uglier stepsister sedition were the product of tiny groups of conspiring individuals determined upon private profit... More and most of his society continued to view the religious upheaval as the work of a handful of evil men and women‘

‘Botolf and Philpot had operated as minor malcontents outside the gilded focus of power about the sovereign; Dr Parry, whatever the truth of his undertaking - inept and fatal counter-espionage or religiously inspired fanaticism - was a predictable hazard in an era of ideological hypertension. In contrast, Sir Thomas Seymour’s abortive palace revolution.. struck at the aristocratic core of political authority’

‘When Philpot questioned whether he could possibly capture the gate or whether 600 men could take and hold the entire port. Botolf countered with two other pieces of information. First, he explained that ‘we shall have aid, both by sea and by land within a short space’.... Second, money would shortly be made available for Philpot to purchase, ‘even if it cost a thousand marks or more’’