This book re-evaluates the nature of Elizabethan politics and Elizabeth's queenship in late sixteenth-century England, Wales and Ireland. Natalie Mears shows that Elizabeth took an active role in policy-making and suggests that Elizabethan politics has to be perceived in terms of personal relations between the queen and her advisors rather than of the hegemony of the privy council. She challenges current perceptions of political debate and, by providing the first survey of the nature of political debate outside the court, re-evaluates how historians have and should conceptualise the 'public sphere'.