Profile
Peter Lake is working on three things at present. With Michael Questier he is writing a study of what one might term "the catholic counterfactuals" of Elizabeth�reign; that is to say, of the moments when a variety of marriages and dynastic shifts threatened, if not to overturn then certainly fundamentally to realign the religio-political make-up of the regime. These involve speculations about and attempts to control the succession, and in particular the prospects for change evoked by the projected matches between Mary Stuart and the Duke of Norfolk, Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou and the accession of James I. In particular Lake and Questier are concerned to examine the public positioning exercises, the justifications and ex post facto justifications and explanations provoked by these turning points that didn�turn. Their special focus of interest is certain Catholic loyalist modes of political polemic and analysis that sought to characterise the regime as some sort of politique conspiracy of evil counsel and the responses that this strand of analysis provoked. These run from the Treatise of Treasons through Leicester�commonwealth to the furore around Robert Parsons�reat tract "The conference about the next succession." Lake and Questier are tracing the resulting lines of force through a variety of media and will be paying particular attention to the drama, and especially the history play, as a popular medium and genre through which contemporary concern with and anxiety about questions of succession, conspiracy, legitimacy, evil counsel, and tyranny were canvassed before a socially mixed "popular" audience.
The second project is a short book written with Richard Cust on the political culture of the English gentry and the outbreak of the civil war, a book centred on a case study of Cheshire from the late 1620s to the outbreak.
The third is bringing together a number of previously published essays with a good deal of unpublished material in a collection of linked studies of English conformist thought from Hooker to Laud, to be published by CUP. A subsidiary element of this endeavour is a joint project with Anthony Milton on "the Anglican moment" of the 1590s.
Education- Clare College, Cambridge University BA in History, 1973
- Ph.D. in History 1978