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It has become commonplace to argue that sixteenth-century England was not really a monarchy but rather a monarchical republic in which governance was shared between the court and a variety of other political bodies.1 Parliament, of course, was the first and foremost of these, but other local entities also exercised power in a semiautonomous fashion. As Patrick collinson has demonstrated, in towns such as Swallowfield, men of modest standing could debate questions of policy and engage in a limited form of self-rule because of their jurisdictional remoteness from the central government.2 counties without powerful resident lords often developed into gentry republics where the real locus of authority was not the court but prominent local families.3 Furthermore, even the court itself was not a cohesive sovereign body. The queen did not govern on her own but through a council that often differed with her on matters of policy and that was capable of imagining itself as ruling on its own should she die without an heir. This form of "self-direction" is particularly evident in the Bond of Association in which the queen's council not only vow to avenge her death but also imagine themselves ruling in her place.4 Such statements have led to the idea that in Elizabethan England "citizens were concealed within subjects."5 Practices normally associated with a republic were viewed as compatible with the English form of government, which emphasized the collaborative nature of the relationship between the monarch and other representative political bodies, such as parliament at the national level and various magistracies and councils at the local level.
Andrew Hadfield and Patrick cheney have both argued that these implicitly republican practices had a significant impact on English writers, especially during the 1590s when economic and political stresses created an atmosphere of crisis in the country.6 In response to the uncertainties of Queen Elizabeth I's last decade, a discourse of republicanism developed in which the virtues associated with active citizenship were contrasted with the vices that existed at court. This discourse was not predicated upon abandoning the monarchy in favor of a republic but rather upon the need to inculcate the political virtues that had traditionally been associated with the ancient Romans.7 These virtues had supposedly flourished after the Tarquins had been expelled...