It is a commonplace of Tudor history that one distinctive feature of the reign of Elizabeth Tudor was the panache with which she wooed her English subjects. Such activity has been treated much more as an aspect of her “instinct for romantic leadership,” much less as a subject for serious historical study. This article sets out to redress that dismissive stance and argues that the language and processes of her “wooing” encapsulated an intersection of humanist beliefs and Tudor policy, with serious political purposes and significant political implications. Since the 1960s, a new orthodoxy in the study of political thought has stressed the importance of paying attention to the audiences for whom, and the contexts within which, particular political ideas were expressed, but there has been little effect of this trend on Tudor political studies. Historians have paid only passing attention to whole new genres of Tudor political discourse, let alone to the increasing Tudor range of strategies for presenting fundamental political propositions to an ever-widening audience. The introduction of print, the polemical function of Tudor homilies, Tudor royal proclamations, and court-sponsored political pamphlets all carried important messages. Such evolving forms contained within them implied redefinitions of relationships between subject and monarch. The reign of Henry VIII reflected the evolution of a qualitatively new concept of the sovereign monarch, drawing on an increasingly unqualified doctrine of allegiance.

The challenge Charles I prepared to fling at his accusers on 22 January 1649 has conditioned the thinking of generations of historians. “No earthly power can justly call me, who am your king, in question as a delinquent,” he proclaimed. He reminded those who presumed to judge him that they had been “born his subjects and born subjects to those laws, which determined, ‘that the king can do no wrong,’” a maxim that “guards every English monarch, even the least deserving.” Indeed, there was no established legal process that could hold Charles personally accountable for his actions, even if, as charged, he meant to overthrow the rights and liberties of his people. The tenet the king can do no wrong shifted responsibility onto those who carried out royal orders. Proponents of royal supremacy had seen in that maxim proof that kings were not only legally unaccountable but actually above the law.

However, an equally venerable English maxim explained that although “the king was under no man, he was under God and the law; for the law maketh the king.” To modern historians the two maxims seem contradictory. And the dramatic failure of the law in Charles's case has induced scholars to doubt the efficacy of this second maxim, to accept Charles's interpretation of its counterpart—that the king could do no wrong—and to shrug off as fine-sounding but unrealistic the strategies early modern Englishmen relied on to control kings. Both maxims, the one Charles sheltered under and the one he rejected, were designed to control his behavior.

In early October 1642, a tract of forest and deer chase in the Severn valley, northwest of Gloucester, known as Corse Lawn, became the site of a grisly spectacle. Richard Dowdeswell, a steward of the property, described the scene in a letter to Lionel Cranfield, earl of Middlesex, the absentee owner resident in Great St. Bartholomew in London. Dowdeswell delivered terrifying news of how “a rising of neighbors about Corse Lawn” destroyed more than 600 of Middlesex's deer in a “rebellious, riotous, devilish way,” a hideous consequence of what Dowdeswell termed “this time of liberty.” Dowdeswell rode to the scene from his estate at Pull Court, a few miles from the chase, and “appeased the multitude, yet some scattering companies gave out in alehouses that they would not only destroy the remainder of deer but rifle your Lordship's house at Forthampton and pull it down to the ground and not let a tree or bush stand in all the chase.” The deer massacre became an assault on the chase, the forest, and the manor house of Forthampton, an estate close to the chase but not included in the meets and bounds of the forest. Middlesex's tenant at Forthampton Court, his brother-in-law Henry Osborne, prudently moved his household to Gloucester until Dowdeswell acquired a formal statement of protection from the earl of Essex to defend the forest, the deer left in the chase, and the house in Forthampton.

Historians of British socialism have tended to discount the significance of religious belief. Yet the conference held in Bradford in 1893 to form the Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.) was accompanied by a Labour Church service attended by some five thousand persons. The conference took place in a disused chapel then being run as a Labour Institute by the Bradford Labour Church along with the local Labour Union and Fabian Society. The Labour Church movement, which played such an important role in the history of British socialism, was inspired by John Trevor, a Unitarian minister who resigned to found the first Labour Church in Manchester in 1891. At the new church's first service, on 4 October 1891, a string band opened the proceedings, after which Trevor led those present in prayer, the congregation listened to a reading of James Russell Lowell's poem “On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves,” and Harold Rylett, a Unitarian minister, read Isaiah 15. The choir rose to sing “England Arise,” the popular socialist hymn by Edward Carpenter:

As the singing stopped, Trevor rose to give a sermon on the religious aspect of the labor movement. He argued the failure of existing churches to support labor made it necessary for workers to form a new movement to embody the religious aspect of their quest for emancipation.