Introduction: Regnum Cecilianum

Abstract

This is a book about realpolitik and drama in the ‘Elizabethan’ era (1558–1603). I would prefer to use the dates 1547–1612 because this period marks a shift in which English domestic policy is wedded to a new global foreign policy run not by monarchs but by a conglomeration of forces recognizable as the ‘state.’ This epoch features the rise of a ‘Regnum Cecilianum,’ or ‘Cecilian Regime’ initiated by Sir William Cecil (created Lord Burghley in 1571), and inherited by his second son, Robert. The regime was a concatenation of powers emanating from previous developments in the English state, powers greatly enhanced by England’s decisive break from Roman Catholicism. Henry VIII’s estrangement from Rome in the 1530s was a crucial turning-point in domestic relations, but its impact on foreign policy was far less significant than the later Cecilian construction of a Protestant state church as a precondition for both domestic repression and external aggression. Whereas Henry’s break with Rome did not alter centuries of English hostility toward France, the Cecilian regime severed England’s traditional alliance with Spain and then attacked the Spanish Empire as part of a larger expansion of wealth and power simultaneously devised to siphon off domestic energies into foreign adventures.¹

we study our history backwards

& that must be the beast’s most fatal message

that we die to learn it well.

A. B. Spellman, ‘In Orangeburg My Brothers Died,’ from Vietnam and Black America, p. 168