SOURCE: Zim, Rivkah. “Dialogue and Discretion: Thomas Sackville, Catherine de Medici and the Anjou Marriage Proposal 1571.” Historical Journal 40, no. 2 (June 1997): 287-310.

In the following essay, Zim argues that Sackville's official correspondence to Queen Elizabeth and Thomas Heneage, composed while he was a diplomat in France, can be read as filled with carefully crafted rhetoric meant to influence decisions on royal succession and thus may be regarded as political literature in much the way that Gorboduc has been.

For most of his distinguished career as a statesman Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst (later first earl of Dorset) was also known as a poet and dramatist. He is now best known as the co-author of Gorboduc, the first blank-verse tragedy in English, which was performed at the Inner Temple's Christmas festivities of 1561 and, two weeks later, before the queen at Whitehall.¹ About the same time Sackville wrote a dedicatory sonnet in...