The Elizabethan succession question in Roger Edwardes's 'Castra Regia' (1569) and 'Cista Pacis Anglie' (1576)

Abstract

Roger Edwardes's 'Castra Regia' challenges the perception that Elizabethans were diametrically opposed to the queen's refusal to establish the succession in the fifteen-sixties and provides an insight into the undervalued dimension of support for Elizabeth's royal prerogative in matters of succession. Charting the changing nature of Edwardes's views on the succession into the fifteen-seventies with his second succession tract, 'Cista Pacis Anglie', this article provides a guide to the development of the succession debate from the polemical tracts of the fifteen-sixties to the well-documented concerns of William Cecil and Thomas Digges in the fifteen-eighties.