As the noble elites in Elizabethan England were preparing their anti-imperial and anti-papal strategies, they received welcome assistance from the civil lawyer Alberico Gentili, a protestant refugee interested in combining his Roman law expertise with the kind of humanist statesmanship that was appreciated by his English interlocutors and that had flourished among North Italian city-states at the time of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Gentili wrote on the need to combine insights from history with a critical “philosophical” attitude – an orientation he identified in jurisprudence. He insisted on limiting the jurisdiction of theologians to the internal world of the faithful and on the absolute duty of obedience to the king, even when he had turned a tyrant. But Gentili remained blind to the principles of good government that were being developed under the anti-legal vocabulary of the ragion di stato by Italian Counter-Reformation strategists such as Giovanni Botero.

Reason of state discourses see a renewed preoccupation with the divide between public and private. Even as there is an increased understanding of the need to keep state secrets, there are likewise increasing attempts to peer into hearts and minds of rulers. At the centre of this tension is the counsellor, whose position between public and private remains in contention. It is the emerging language of ‘interests’ which shows this tension most clearly. The counsellor is to advise according to the interest of the state, and not his own private interest. The more public a counsellor can be, the more likely he is to give advice in line with this state interest. Three problems emerge from this model, however. First, how can the counsellor be both secretive and public? Second, how can a private individual abandon his personal interests? And, third, a recurring issue, what if the counsellor knows the state’s interests better than the monarch: should his counsel then become command? These are the issues which come to the fore in the mid-seventeenth century, born of tensions apparent in the reason of state tradition.