In February 1597, after learning of the initial discussions of the naval operation that would become known as the ‘Islands Voyage’, Sir Francis Vere observed to Sir Robert Sidney: ‘Of my Lord of Essex's going to sea, I am sorry to hear, unless I could persuade myself that before his going he would furnish the court with offices, for that it will else prove his adversaries work whilst he is absent.’ These comments were no doubt an allusion to the events of the previous summer, when Sir Robert Cecil was finally successful in obtaining formal appointment as Principal Secretary of State while Essex was absent on the voyage to Cadiz, but their general import is no less interesting. They contain several of the apparent truisms of Elizabethan Court politics: the competition for patronage, the need for a constant presence at Court, and the dual function of office under the crown as both the prize and the instrument of politics. Such commentary is found throughout Sidney's correspondence, which since its publication in 1746 has been one of the best-known sources for the Court politics of the 1590s. The editor, Arthur Collins, then noted to a friend that in the Sidney Papers ‘the intrigues of Queen Elizabeths court [are] more fully set forth than has been published and wch shows how the Cecilian Faction Reigned’.

Quite ironically, perhaps, this eighteenth-century perception of the relationship between the patronage of the crown and Elizabethan Court factions is shared by the most advanced modern scholarship.