Abstract
In his own day among the citizenry of London and the surrounding shires, William Fleetwood (ca. 1525–1594) was much better known as a hardnosed legislator and enforcer of Elizabethan law and order than as the author of obscure manuscripts like the Itinerarium ad Windsor.1 In a career spanning half a century, Fleetwood’s diverse resume of employments and distinctions represents the art of the possible that the English Renaissance and Reformation afforded for men of talent, discipline, and ambition like himself. A lawyer, jurist, antiquarian, parliamentarian, and legal scholar, noted for his savage wit, Fleetwood proved successful in cultivating the patronage of the two great Elizabethan favorites Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and William Cecil, Lord Burghley, to enjoy an enviable position within Tudor political society for much of Elizabeth I’s reign.2 Fleetwood repaid these favors to his benefactors in numerous ways, one of which was composing the Itinerarium ad Windsor.
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Notes
For a succinct discussion of Elizabethan political society, see Norman Jones, “Parliament and Elizabethan Political Society,” in Tudor Political Culture, edited by Dale Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 226–42.
Victoria County History: A History of the County of Lancaster, vol. 6, edited by William Farrer and J. Brownhill (London: Constable, 1911), 166–69. As P. W. Hasler has noted, “Authorities differ as to the legitimacy of his birth”: “William Fleetwood,” in History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1558–1603, edited by P. W Hasler (London: Boydell & Brewer, 1981), 133–38.
For an essay on the historiography of the English Reformation, see Eamon Duffy, “The English Reformation After Revisionism,” Renaissance Quarterly 59 (Fall 2006): 720–31.
See William Huse Dunham Jr., “Regal Power and the Rule of law: A Tudor Paradox,” Journal of British Studies 3.2 (May 1964): 24–56.
Victoria County History: A History of the County of Buckingham, vol. 2, edited by William Page (London, 1908), 347–53.
T. F. T. Baker, “William Fleetwood,” in History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1509–1558, edited by S. T. Bindoff (London: Boydell & Brewer, 1981).
Christopher W. Brooks, “William Fleetwood,” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthews and Brian Harrison (afterwards referred to as ODNB) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 28–30;
May McKisack, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 68;
and Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, ii, c. 1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 481, 488.
For a recent study, see Charles Beem, “Have Not Wee aNoble Kynge? The Minority of Edward VI,” in The Royal Minorities of Medieval and Early Modern England, edited by Charles Beem (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 211–48.
See Charles Beem, The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 63–99.
J. D. Alsop, “The Act for the Queen’s Regal Power, 1554” Parliamentary History, 14.3 (1994): 261–76.
John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 7:742–43.
For a reappraisal of Mary I’s legacy as “Bloody Mary” see Thomas S. Freeman, “Burning Zeal: Mary Tudor and the Marian Persecution,” in Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, edited by Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 171–205.
Henry Thomas Riley, Munimenta Gildhallœ (rpt. New York: Nabu Press, 2011), 1:42–43.
P. R. Harris, “William Fleetwood, Recorder of the City, and Catholicism in Elizabethan London,” Recusant History 7 (1963): 106–22.
A.O. Meyer, England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth (rpt. New York: Nabu Press, 2010), 118.
J. E. Neale, Elizabeth and Her Parliaments 1559–1581 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958), 85–128.
John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 324–25.
A. N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161–97.
Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie, edited by Edward Arber (London, 1868), 31.
J. E. Neale, The Elizabethan House of Commons (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1949), 344, 362, 397.
Michael A. R. Graves, The Tudor Parliaments: Crown, Lords and Commons, 1481–1603 (London: Longman, 1985), 115–29.
Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 145.
Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House, vol. 2: 1572–1582 (afterward referred to as Cecil Papers) (London, 1888), 74–80.
J. E. Neale, Elizabeth and Her Parliaments 1559–1581 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958), 246
“Folios 111–121: Material of various dates, incl. fourteenth century,” Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London: K: Henry VI, ed. R. R. Sharpe (London: Corporation of the City of London, 1911), 145–57. Part of Fleetwood’s history of Lancashire is printed in Edward Baines, Baines’ Lancashire (New York: 1868), 1:55.
See Dennis Moore, “Recorder Fleetwood and Tudor Queenship Controversy,” in Ambiguous Realities: Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by Carole Levin and Jeanie Watson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 235–51.
Constance Jordan, “Women’s Rule in Sixteenth Century British Thought,” Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987): 421–51. Leslie’s work drew heavily from Edmund Plowden’s earlier manuscript succession treatise.
See Marie Axton, “The Influence of Edmund Plowden’s Succession Treatise,” Huntington Library Quarterly 37 (1974): 209–26.
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See Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 56–96.
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Beem, C. (2013). William Fleetwood and Itinerarium ad Windsor . In: Beem, C., Moore, D. (eds) The Name of a Queen. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137272027_3
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