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:
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.
