Bench and Bureaucracy

The late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods witnessed the emergence of a transitional figure in the crown's service, a person who was not yet fully a bureaucrat in the modern sense, but who nonetheless acted with a considerable degree of independence from the crown. This study focuses on Sir Julius Caesar, an exemplar of this new kind of officer of state, whose career assumes even greater interest because he was the most prominent civil lawyer of his generation.