The ‘mixed monarchy’ enacted in Elizabeth's reign was rooted in a theoretical framework of revived Aristotelian and Polybian ideas of a mixed constitution, infused with theological terminology and metaphors, and newly prominent in the wake of the conciliar movement and the reformation. But it would have been inconceivable without the local habitation provided, in England, by the regnal sequence after Henry VIII of one short-lived minor king and three queens. In Elizabeth's reign, one anonymous writer explicitly recognised the unprecedented character of England's history since the Henrician Reformation. The author of The History of the Reign of King Henry the Eighth, king Edward the Sixth, Queen Mary, and part of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, dateable on internal evidence to the late 1570s, justifies the interest of his work on the basis of the innovative enactments of kingship which have occurred since the advent of the Tudor dynasty: