Book description
Tudor England abounded with traitors great and small, whose
ill-timed, self-defeating and irrational antics guaranteed their
failure. Yet from the inept and calamitous intrigues of 'Sweet-Lips'
Gregory Botolf in 1540 and Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour during the
reign of Edward VI, to the bungling efforts at a palace coup by Robert
Devereux, second Earl of Essex, during the final years of Elizabeth's
reign, treason didn't prosper. Modern historians tend to dismiss the
wave of political disasters as the works of men of unsound mind. Here,
Lacey Baldwin Smith re-evaluates this mania for conspiracy in the
light of psychological and social impulses peculiar to the age.
Tudor England accepted unquestioningly the conspiracy theory of
history; it assumed the existence of evil; and it instinctively
believed that a greater and usually malicious reality lay behind
outward appearance. Sensible men were for ever on guard against their
Iago, dedicated to evil for its own sake, who lurked under the guise
of a trusted friend or servant. Father's advised their sons, 'Love no
man: trust no man'; contemporary literature and drama reflected and
reinforced this belief, as did the essentials of Tudor education which
taught students how to dissemble convincingly upon a public stage.
By looking at the behaviour of the flamboyant Robert Devereux (who
bore all the hallmarks of paranoia) as a case study in political
hysteria, Lacey Baldwin Smith examines the ways in which insecurity in
the midst of political and religious revolution was obsessive and
self-perpetuating, and produced throughout the kingdom a state of
hysteria that was unique to the sixteenth century.
Lacey Baldwin Smith is Professor of English History at Northwestern
University, Illinois. The recipient of M. A. and Ph. D. degrees from
Princeton University, he has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Guggenheim
Fellow, a Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of London and a
Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
