Page "John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland" Paragraph 40

Since the 1970s, critical reassessments of the Duke of Somerset's policies and government style led to acknowledgment that Northumberland revitalized and reformed the Privy Council as a central part of the administration, and that he " took the necessary but unpopular steps to hold the minority regime together ".

Stability and reconstruction have been made out as the mark of most of his policies ; the scale of his motivation ranging from " determined ambition " with Geoffrey Rudolph Elton in 1977 to " idealism of a sort " with Diarmaid MacCulloch in 1999.

Dale Hoak concluded in 1980: " given the circumstances which he inherited in 1549, the duke of Northumberland appears to have been one of the most remarkably able governors of any European state during the sixteenth century.