ABSTRACT
In Elizabethan England there were circumstances favouring a kind of monarchical republicanism every bit as unusual as those which Pocock addressed in the seventeenth century. To have a monarchical republic you must have, a word interchangeable for the sixteenth century with republic, a commonwealth. But Scott Lucas, suggesting that the pervasiveness in Elizabethan England of a quasi-republican critique of monarchy has not been sufficiently explored and explained, finds part of the answer in that perennial favourite and best seller, A Mirror for Magistrates. Anne McLaren's essay reminds that a monarchy was what England under the Tudors was, in principle an unlimited monarchy. Even Sir Thomas Smith, for all his deeply internalized civic humanism, knew that England was an absolute monarchy, and said so: To be short the prince is the life, the head, and the authority of all things that be done in the realme of England.
