In a recent article, Caroline M. Hibbard noted that recent work on Tudor-Stuart recusancy has focused on the enforcement of royal and statutory policy on the local level and has examined the social composition of the recusant community. These studies have revealed that the recusant community was not dominated by priests, not subject to the political directives of the papacy, and not plotting rebellion. The problem inherent in these local studies, as Professor Hibbard points out, is that they do not explain why the English were anti-Catholic and they do not examine the international character of the English Catholic Community. This article is an attempt to view the recusant problem from the perspective of the monarch and the privy council, because both monarch and privy council were aware of the international character of Catholicism and both stated clearly in their policies toward recusants the grounds of their objection to the Catholic community. An analysis of the recusancy policy established by Elizabeth between 1559 and 1574 reveals that her primary objection to the recusants was not religious but political. The recusants denied a fundamental claim of the monarch: the headship of the church and, therefore, the claim that the monarch was the source of all power within the realm. This article, then, will examine the ways in which she wished to contain a minority who denied her supreme power in the realm and the circumstances which caused the queen and the council to change that policy.

When Michael Drayton began work on Poly-Olbion, his vast poetic description of England and Wales, he committed himself to a course of action which was seriously to endanger his career. Drayton's reputation as a poet was injured by his faith in that strange, unfashionable poem, and he found himself increasingly out of touch with the main literary developments of his time. In his old age, fortunately, it led him to compose much of his most original and delicately beautiful poetry. The significance of Poly-Olbion in Drayton's life and art, however, has seldom been understood by the poet's biographers and critics, who have usually regarded it either as a charming eccentricity or as an unfortunate deviation from his true line of development. To Drayton, however, Poly-Olbion was his major work, innovating, he believed, a major new genre. When the first part was published in 1612, he boasted “My Poeme is genuine, and first in this kinde”; ten years later, bitter and depressed at its failure but determined to press on, he still proudly proclaimed that “it was a new cleere way, never before gone by any.” On its fortunes he was prepared to stake his literary reputation, and, as events were to prove, his commitment to “this strange Herculean toyle” (PO, 30:342) lasted well over thirty years.

Northop Frye has written that the epic, as Renaissance critics understood it, “is not a poem by a poet, but that poet's poem: he can never complete a second epic unless he is the equal of Homer, and hence the moment at which the epic poet chooses his subject is the crisis of his life. To decide to write an epic … is an act of considerable courage, because if one fails, one fails on a colossal scale.” The decision to write a poem on the scale of Poly-Olbion, whether “epic” in the strict sense of the word or not, involved Drayton in a similar risk. The spectres of ridicule and detraction haunted him for the rest of his life, and only his growing conviction of the political and literary importance of his magnum opus enabled him to continue writing.

Relationships between the representatives of British imperial expansion and the people of the regions which came under their influence have long been subjected to scholarly investigation. Such studies have focused on economic interdependencies, racial tensions, and military confrontations. In the case of India the best discussion of cultural interactions was presented fifty years ago by Percival Spear who examined the “social life of the English in eighteenth century India.” Spear was much concerned with the attitudes which the British developed towards the peoples of India in a period of transition which later led to “many of the problems of racial relations in India.” He pointed out that the early English traders were not burdened with color prejudice and were willing to adopt Indian customs when useful or profitable. As the number of Europeans, especially soldiers and women, increased in India, the early tolerance was overwhelmed by the view that Indian society was stagnant and morally inferior.

Subsequent evaluations of British attitudes in eighteenth century India have differed little from Spear's picture. George Bearce emphasized the sense of wonder many Englishmen held toward India and that their motivation in going there was primarily one of profit. He also underscored what Spear had previously noted, that “the British relied principally on British prejudices and thought, rather than a knowledge of India or standards devised from Indian experience.” The British believed that India had little to offer the West intellectually and that the climate combined with despotism had created a society incapable of change. There were rare exceptions to such generalizations, particularly in the period after Clive's success. Scholars such as William Jones and officials such as Warren Hastings came to have a greater appreciation for Indian culture. However, even Hastings measured Indian society by European standards, which led in less perceptive minds to “an acutely messianic form of racial pride and religious smugness.” By the turn of the nineteenth century most Europenas had adopted the “Peter Pan theory” of Asians as unchanging children. Subsequently, the inflexible attitudes of Evangelicals and Utilitarians produced “a ruling class consciously isolated and imbued with a sense of racial superiority.”

Since the time of the British “Great Depression,” and with increasing urgency as the relative decline of the British economy has gathered pace in the twentieth century, economists and economic historians have sought to explain both depression and decline and to suggest remedies. Until recently, it has been fashionable to ascribe the decline to the failings of British management, often working in conjunction with workers and trade unions, and to focus attention particularly on the failure to innovate, to adopt inventions which would have significantly lowered British production costs and improved international competitiveness in the manufacturing industries which were the basis of British prosperity. In the last fifteen years, however, studies of specific industries and investment decisions have made this global explanation for British decline less attractive, so much so that a recent summary of these studies can conclude that: