ABSTRACT
The Cooke sisters, Mildred, Anne, Elizabeth and Katherine, were famous for their learning in their own day, and again in ours, and have recently received attention as woman writers (Lamb; Schleiner, 30-51; Croft). But one of them, Mildred (the eldest), came close to possessing political power in her own right, particularly in the early part of Elizabeth’s reign. She held no office of state, but she was courted, and her opinion sought, independently from her husband, and she was able to pursue her own ends due to the fact that she commanded both financial independence and privacy. The following general statements, by Barbara J. Harris, form a useful context for assessing her:
the world of kinship, the great household, client/patron relations, and the court conflated concerns that we would label as either personal or political and virtually ignored the distinction between the public and the private. Thus women moved unselfconsciously into the world of politics as they fulfilled their responsibilities as wives, mothers and widows ... the ease with which upperclass women intervened for their clients and servants shows that boundaries between public and private concerns as we understand them either did not exist or were extraordinarily permeable in the early Tudor period. ... Political historians ... must give due weight to informal channels of power in order to understand the political process in late fifteenth and early sixteenth century England. (260, 268, 282)
As a group, the Cookes are among the most politically significant women in Elizabethan England who were not of the blood royal, a status they achieved largely by their own efforts. In order to understand their achievements, we must first understand something about how they were brought up.
