In The Politics of Counsel in England and Scotland (2016), Jacqueline Rose argues that studying early modern political counsel poses problems of evidence, for official sources and chronicles tend to “record decisions, not discussions”. In fact, chroniclers only partially show the debates which precede royal decisions. Meanwhile, late Elizabethan history plays increasingly focus on counsel on stage and thoroughly explore its discursive aspects. In so doing, they allow the audience to attend a representation of counsel in the making, thus subjecting the mechanisms of persuasion and deliberation to sharp scrutiny. This is particularly striking in plays which focus on young kings, as I shall argue: for the latter strongly rely on advice and are more likely to place trust in the wrong counselors. I have therefore chosen four plays which offer variations on the figure of the young sovereign and take us behind the scenes of deliberation: The Life and Death of Jack Straw (c. 1590-93), Shakespeare’s Henry VI I and II (c. 1591-92) and Thomas of Woodstock (c. 1591-95). These plays all somehow suggest that royal decisions even when founded on counsel are not taken for granted as royal authority comes to be questioned. In theory, deliberation consisted in the rational exploration of different options, ending with a logical and uncontested conclusion. If Jack Straw seems faithful to such an ideal conception of power, the three other plays are much more skeptical. In these plays, counsel is consistently staged as a practical problem, a highly rhetorical moment that can be subverted, making it harder for young kings to discriminate between good and bad advice. The manipulation of reasoning in turn highlights the precariousness of counsel and points to the potential arbitrariness in decision-making. The final decision, far from being the only definitive conclusion, seems arbitrary, as just one choice among many possibilities. So I’d like to show how these history plays, by recreating “conciliar performances”, reveal how uncertain and contingent the art of political deliberation may be.