Organized Violence and the Elizabethan Monarchical Republic

Lecture presented by Malcolm Smuts, Professor of History, UMass Boston

“The monarchical republic” is a term coined by historian Patrick Collinson to emphasize the degree to which government in late sixteenth century England depended not just on the Queen’s personal authority but the activities of a royal council that often had its own political agenda and the crown’s need to rely on local participation in carrying out its policies. This lecture seeks to extend and qualify Collinson’s argument in two ways: first by examining the role of military violence in both the theory and practice of Elizabethan governance and second by comparing the use of arbitrary violence as a tool of state power in the Queen’s two kingdoms, England and Ireland. Smuts argues that England’s Protestant elite was prepared to use violence in either kingdom to defend its power and had in fact constructed machinery with which to do so. In England, it proved unnecessary to use that machinery, whereas in Ireland a particular set of circumstances magnified a reliance on brutal and repressive methods of state control.