ABSTRACT
A great deal of ink has been spilt of late on the prevalence, within the political culture of Elizabethan England, of certain strands of civic or classical republicanism. However, it is worth remembering that all this republican talk started with an article of 1987 by Patrick Collinson entided 'the monarchical republic of Elizabeth I', an article which was primarily concerned with a number of emergency plans put together by William Cecil and his clients in the early 1560s. For all that Collinson's earliest version of the monarchical republic was always set against the threat of Mary Stuart and of popery, his accounts of the phenomenon never discuss or indeed much mention, the activities or views of actual Catholics. In characterising the regime The Treatise was seeking to replace one conspiracy theory with another. In fact, The Treatise was written in direct response to the deployment of the popish conspiracy theory.
