Communication and Counterinsurgency under the Tudors, from the Lincolnshire Rebellion to the Northern Rising

This thesis demonstrates that Tudor councillors and their clients raided the armoury of rhetoric to condemn sedition for over thirty years, using persuasive techniques which crossed confessional lines. It reconstructs, in fuller detail than has ever been attempted, the Tudor literary campaigns against rebels, tracing the origin and development of the anti-sedition oration. It begins by proposing a systematic framework for classifying early modern persuasive writings. Then, in analysing the major Tudor rebellions, it argues that governments employed a highly communicative style of politics at times of crisis. They opened emergency channels of communication with subjects, condemning disobedience but nonetheless listening to rebel grievances. Loyalist authors did not intend to subject government policy to public approval, or to communicate with the monarch by garnering public support: they were simply applying the Ciceronian idea that oratory is the best way to persuade the multitude. Tudor authors normally defend government policy not by appealing to the king’s absolute authority but by pointing out that policy had been approved by the king in Parliament.