against the ‘Monstrous Regiment [i.e. government] of Women’ with a
domestic version of the ‘mixed state’ argument: it did not matter if the
ruler was a woman, provided she ruled by counsel, since the monarch
was only one of three estates, and the image of the regiment of England,
‘and not the image but the thing indeed, is to be seen in the Parliament
house, wherein you shall find... the king or queen, which representeth
the monarch, the noblemen which be the aristocracy, and the burgesses
and knights the democracy’. Nevertheless the state of a woman ruler
who claimed jurisdiction even over ‘the state ecclesiastical’ was bound
to be a major political issue.^38 In 1580 Elizabeth had to tell the
Commons ‘not to deal with Matters touching her Majesty’s Person or
Estate, or touching Religion’, but accompanied the rebuke with assur-
ances of the queen’s ‘loving Care for the Advancement of religion, and
the State’ and for her subjects’ ‘happy and peaceable State’, and with an
acknowledgement of the zeal the Commons showed for ‘the State of the
Commonwealth’.^39 In the same session an MP, Arthur Hall, was called
to account for defaming ‘the whole State of the House’ [of Commons],
by questioning the supposed Anglo-Saxon origins of parliament, ‘to the
great Impeachment of the ancient Order and Government of this Realm,
the Rights of this House’ as the ‘third Estate of the Parliament’, and ‘the
Form of making Laws’.^40
In other uses of ‘state,’ references to the whole commonwealth and to
the regime that makes and enforces the commonwealth’s laws become
difficult to disentangle. Which—regime or commonwealth—does the
commission of 1561 mean that instructs the archbishop of York and
other bishops and nobles to exercise the crown’s jurisdiction over the
church and search out ‘all heretical opinions, seditious books, con-
spiracies, slanderous words, etc. against Queen or State’; or the Lord
Keeper’s declaration to parliament in 1562 that it had been called ‘for
Religion, Discipline, and Aid to the State’; or the Queen in 1570 when
she warns of ‘the danger that may grow to the State’ by the delay in
apprehending a rebel; or the denunciation of threats to ‘both church and
state and all’ in 1589 and to ‘her majesty and the state’ in 1590; or privy
council’s thanking of the bishop of London in 1602 for defending ‘Her
Majesty’s honour and the good of the State’ by getting the Jesuits to
reveal to him ‘dangerous purposes contrived against the State’?^41 And
314 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(^38) Elton, The Tudor Constitution, 16; OED, s.v. state, 27–32; Calendar of State Papers
Domestic[CSPD] 1601–3 & Addenda 1547–65(London, 1870), 510; A. N. McLaren,
‘Delineating the Elizabethan Body Politic: Knox, Aylmer and the Definition of Counsel,
1558–88’, History of Political Thought, 17 (1996).
(^39) Journal of the House of Commons[CJ], i. 75, 118–19, 126.
(^40) CJi. 126.
(^41) CSPD 1601–3 & Addenda 1547–65, 155, 211, 246, 510; CJi. 62; Journal of the House
of Lords, ii. 357–8.