Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

of Art in Cambridge to his friend in London’. 15 In the 1590s, Catholic polemicists writing against William Cecil, Lord Burghley also confected attacks on the English establishment as letters written by imaginary English travellers: Richard Verstegan’s An Advertisement Written to a Secretarie of my Lord Treasurer of Ingland (1592) and Robert Parsons’s Newes from Spaine and Holland (1593) purported to be the confidential dispatches of English intelligencers. The vast anonymous treatise The State of Christendom , written by Anthony Bacon with other members of Essex’s secretariat in 1594-5, adopted a similar epistolary framework, presenting its defence of Elizabeth’s foreign and domestic policy as a newsletter from an English catholic exile loyal to the queen. 16 The epistolary framework adopted by Essex, then, clearly establishes that his tract had a public purpose of the highest significance – to convince its readers of the dangers of making peace with the Spanish tyrant. In this respect, Essex’s treatise against the peace was also one of a large number of similar position papers that circulated in manuscript during this period, arguing either for or against the putative peace with Spain. These were all also widely copied, and contributed to a vigorous semi-public debate about the desirability of peace with the catholic enemy which would persist until the Treaty of London signed between England and Spain in 1604; significantly all the other tracts debating war or peace were anonymous. 17 Essex’s Apologie , however, was defiantly personalised, framing the strategic and ideological case for continued war with Spain within a self-aggrandising account of his own biography and his martial career: ‘I haue thought good to answere some obiections of my detractors’. 18 In the wider exchange of tracts pro- and contra- the putative peace with Spain, Essex’s Apologie was unique in two respects: first, that it was printed (against his will or not); second, in that it enshrined its fierce arguments against the peace within an autobiographical framework.

15 D. C. Peck ed., Leicester’s Commonwealth: the Copy of a Letter Written by a Master of Art of Cambridge (1584) and Related Documents (Athens, Ohio, 1985). 16 Victor Houliston, ‘The Hare and the Drum: Robert Persons’s Writings on the English Succession, 1593-6’, Renaissance Studies (2000), 14:2, 235-250. For polemic of the period more generally see Peter Lake, Bad Queen Bess: Libels, Secret Histories and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (2016). 17 See Gajda, ‘Debating War and Peace’; Gajda, ‘War, Peace, Commerce and the Treaty of London 1604’, Historical Research , 96: 274 (2023), 459-472. 18 Essex, Apologie , sig. Ar-v.

20