This book is about the politics and political culture of the ‘last decade’ of the reign of Elizabeth I, interpreted to mean the years from 1585 to 1603. It will open with a proposition, which goes like this: there were two reigns of Elizabeth I, each with distinctive features. Her ‘first’ reign ended about 1585 with the dispatch of an English expeditionary force to the Netherlands. This seemingly dramatic reversal of the queen's non-interventionist foreign policy was followed by the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and by the outbreak of war with Spain and her ally, the French Catholic League. Mary's execution resolved one political and constitutional crisis, but precipitated another. For the war engulfed multiple theatres: English forces were deployed in France, the Netherlands, the Atlantic and latterly Ireland. Costs and casualties were high. England was several times threatened with encirclement by the superior forces of the Counter-Reformation.

The physical and emotional strains were acute. In politics the anxiety of courtiers fused with the poverty of the crown and the competition for patronage to kindle factionalism, self-interest and instability which – in the shape of Essex's frustrated ambition – sparked an attempted coup. In the country xenophobia, war-weariness, and the turmoil created by rising prices, bad harvests and outbreaks of plague and influenza, fomented particularism and resistance to the crown's fiscal and military demands. All this, in turn, triggered an authoritarian reaction from privy councillors and magistrates, whose emphasis on state security, the subversiveness of religious nonconformity, and the threat of ‘popularity’ and social revolt became obsessional.