ABSTRACT
The premise that Tudor monarchs effectively deployed propaganda as aprominent political strategy has become a commonplace in studies of Tudor England, although to what end shifts with the interpretive winds. In mid-twentiethcentury accounts heralding Tudor monarchs’ political effectiveness, Edward Hall’s Chronicle – reputedly ‘the most ambitious of the inspired works of propaganda in the first half of the sixteenth century’ – was thought to have taught ‘one imperative’ political lesson: since rebellion and civil dissention would lead to the kingdom’s destruction, hierarchy and order were requisite.1 A few decades later, images of monarchical power and authority present in court spectacle and art sought the subjects’ good will and devotion, especially during the reign of Elizabeth I, whose ‘cult’, according to Roy Strong, was a triumph of propaganda. By the end of the twentieth century, the Tudors had become authoritarian despots who employed propaganda (and censorship) to disguise their failures. For the most part, because we have imposed an Enlightenment value system, we have misunderstood the role of both propaganda and censorship in Tudor England. During the reign of Elizabeth, propaganda and censorship rarely sought the same ends. Sometimes, however, they did, and these are the circumstances that reveal both the distinctive character of Elizabethan printed propaganda and the roles propaganda and censorship played in government administration.
