ABSTRACT
Modern historians of Elizabethan England found themselves burdened with the same task of understanding the evidence and producing sensible analyses. Central to the German question is how the Elizabethan regime would engage their confessional brethren in the Holy Roman Empire and overcome the problems confronted in that relationship. For religious and political reasons, during the 1550s English and German Protestants looked to each other for their individual and mutual security in an increasingly tense environment. Elizabethan England's relationship with the Protestant Princes of the Holy Roman Empire is the widest and deepest to date. Incorporating English and German sources and scholarship, the analysis recounts some familiar events and personalities, but it also brings to light materials previously unknown or underutilized. For the modern observer the German question demonstrates England's broad and sustained interest in maintaining a working alliance with international Protestantism in general, and it offers an entry point for assessing English collaboration with Lutherans and the later German Reformed.
