“The whole world”, wrote Hooker, “consisting of parts so many, so different, is by this only thing upheld; he which framed them hath set them in order.” Thomas Starkey was one of the many theorists who translated the implications of an ordered creation into terms of policy and governance. More than a generation before Hooker he had pointed to “the good order and policy by good laws stablished and kept, and by heads and rulers put in effect; by which the whole body, as by reason, is governed and ruled …”. The concept of order is often taken for granted as Tudor commonplace, written into the basic attitudes of the age. Yet it was not until relatively late in the sixteenth century, when the gentry sought access in increasing numbers to the new humanist education disseminated by the grammar-school foundations and in the universities, that a style of thinking previously restricted to metropolitan and university circles of clerical and lawyer intellectuals became increasingly the common possession of the whole governing class. Implicit in the concept of order was the tradition, primarily of Aristotelian rationalism, in terms of which generalized propositions could be stated, and a discourse sustained which could claim universal validity. Thus the idea of a natural, social and political “order” became possible, with a single integrated structure and common texture throughout, in which the part found its point and purpose in a relationship to the whole.