Advisers or Decision-Makers?

This article analyses the unique position of secretaries and pensionaries in the governments of cities in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Northern Netherlands. At the centre of our analysis stands the tension which arose from the discrepancy between these officials’ extraordinary access to government knowledge and their formally subordinate and sometimes even foreign status. With particular attention for cases of conflict between these urban administrative officials and their ‘political’ superiors, this article explores the agency of secretaries and pensionaries in influencing urban governance through (informal) power, discretionary space, and influence on policy-making. This broad study argues that local context and individual networks provided urban administrative officials with considerable scopes of action, which adds a new facet to our understanding of late medieval and early modern governance in its day-to-day practice.