Robert Persons, Popular Sovereignty, and the Late Elizabethan Succession Debate

Abstract

This article explores how, and why, Robert Persons's A conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland (1594) scandalized late Elizabethan England. By invoking the spectres of popular sovereignty and political resistance, Persons, as is well known, threatened to disrupt the succession of James VI of Scotland to Elizabeth I's throne. In doing so, however, he also undermined the very notion that the English crown passed by succession at all. After discussing Persons's political thought, this article examines the responses to it by such writers as John Hayward, Henry Constable, Peter Wentworth, and James VI himself. Their turn towards natural law as a basis for James's title was, it is argued, a direct consequence of the Conference’s argument. As well as shining long-overdue light on Hayward's political thought, the article thus argues that the reception of Persons's Conference was a significant influence on the development of English political thought in the early seventeenth century.

The Paradox of the Valentine Thomas Affair: English Diplomacy, Royal Correspondence and the Elizabethan Succession

“…The narrative which Persons constructed to carry his arguments on the succession concerned a meeting of friends and their shared concerns following the failure of Wentworth and Bromley in Parliament. 90 While the narrative was fictional, it did reflect the ongoing anxiety over the succession and the concerns many of the English political class held regarding the possibility of a Scottish succession. It also argued, as a number of Parliamentary debates had, that the succession should be determined by Parliament, and as the history of those discussions can attest to, those debates were firmly against James's succession.…”