1. It is impossible to do justice in a short survey to the voluminous literature relevant to a study of the Elizabethan Court. Some points of caution might be noted. Among the most difficult sources to employ are the seventeenth-century histories and collections of anecdotes, for the portrait of the Court they provide is of questionable veracity. In this category are William Camden, Annales Rerum Anglicarum... Régnante Elizabetha (1615; English edn 1688; modern abridged edn, ed. W. T. MacCaffrey, Chicago and London, 1970); Thomas Fuller, The Worthies of England (1662; modern edn 1952); John Aubrey, Brief Lives (1813; modern edn 1949); and, in particular, Sir Robert Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia (1641; modern edn 1895). More reliable, and valuable for the unconscious glimpses into the Court they provide, are the few contemporary memoirs: used in this essay were The Memoirs of Robert Carey. ed. F. H. Mares (Oxford, 1972); The Private Diary of John Dee. ed. J. O. Halliwell, Camden Society XIX (1842), and ‘The Compendious Rehersal of John Dee... A° 1592, November 9’, in Johannis Confratis et Monachi Glastoniensis Chronica. ed. T. Hearne (Oxford, 1726); Elizabeth of England. Certain Observations concerning the Life and Reign of Queen Elizabeth by John Clapham. ed. E. P. and C. Read (Philadelphia, 1951); Sir John Harington, A Tract on the Succession to the Crown (AD1602), ed. C. R. Markham, Roxburghe Club (1880) and The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington. ed. N. E. McClure (Philadelphia, 1930).
2. The basic modern study of the institutions of the Court is E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, I (Oxford, 1923). For the Household, see also A. Woodward, ‘Purveyance for the Royal Household in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. n.s., XXXV, no. 1 (Philadelphia, 1945), and R. C. Braddock, ‘The Royal Household, 1540–1560: A Study in Office-Holding in Tudor England’ (Northwestern University PhD thesis, 1971). A. Jeffries Collins, The Jewels and Plate of Queen Elizabeth I: The Inventory of 1574 (1955), provides a useful account of the Jewel House and its Master, John Ashley; M. M. Reese, The Royal Office of Master of the Horse (1976), is more popular in style. G. E. Aylmer, The King’s Servants. The Civil Service of Charles I, 1625–1640 (1961), is the best introduction to the personnel of the early modern Court. Fundamental to any study of the Tudor Court is D. R. Starkey, ‘The King’s Privy Chamber, 1485–1547’ (Cambridge University PhD thesis, 1974); the Elizabethan Privy Chamber is studied in a similar manner in the article by Pam Wright in The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War. ed. D. R. Starkey (forthcoming, ?1984). (I am very grateful to the author for allowing me to see a draft of her article.)
3. In ‘Faction, Clientage and Party. English Politics, 1550–1603’, History Today, XXXII (1982), I have made some suggestions about the nature of Elizabethan factions.
4. The standard political histories and biographies of the reign all contain material of relevance, though not all their conclusions about Court politics should be accepted. The same applies to the studies of minor Court figures, which nevertheless provide useful information on personal relationships. In this category are E. K. Chambers, Sir Henry Lee. An Elizabethan Portrait Oxford, 1936); the two studies by C. A. Bradford, Blanche Parry, Queen Elizabeth’s Gentlewoman (1935), and Helena, Marchioness of Northampton (1936); and L. C. John, ‘Roger Manners, Elizabethan Courtier’, Hungtington Library Quarterly, XII (1948). The publicaton of H of C, 1509–1558. and H of C, 1558–1603 has, however, revolutionised the study of the Tudor political élite and will be fundamental for any future work on the membership of the Court.