Conquest and Union

Fashioning a British State 1485-1725

Steven G. Ellis, Sarah Barber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317894223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The British Isles is a multi-national arena, but its history has traditionally been studied from a distinctively English -- often, indeed, London -- perspective. Now, however, the interweaving of the distinct but mutually-dependent histories of the four nations is at the heart of some of the liveliest historical research today. In this major contribution to that research, eleven leading scholars consider key aspects of the internal relations of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales in the early modern period, and the problems of accommodating different -- and resistant -- cultures to a single centralizing polity.
The contributors are: Sarah Barber; Toby Barnard; Ciaran Brady; Keith M. Brown; Jane Dawson; Steven G. Ellis; David Hayton; Philip Jenkins; Alan Macinnes; Michael Mac Craith; and John Morrill.

CHAPTER ONE

The fashioning of Britain

John Morrill,

Selwyn College, Cambridge

Anthem no. 51 in a collection published in 1662 to be sung in Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin, opens as follows:

O God that are the well-spring of all peace

Make all thy gifts in Charles his reign increase

England preserve, Scotland protect,

Make Ireland in thy service perfect.

That all these kingdoms under Great Britains king

may be watered by the Gospel Spring.

Oh never let unhallowed breath have space

to blight these blossoming buds of union

But let us all with mutual love embrace

One Name, One king and one Religion.¹

This is one swallow that did not make a summer. There never has been a single geopolitical term for ‘the British Isles’. This must be the first and salutary lesson for anyone seeking to develop a holistic approach to the history of these islands. This book confronts a thicket of paradoxes. We are asked to tell a tale of two islands, to tell a story of what were emerging as three kingdoms, one of which had been fabricated by the will of another, and to seek to make sense of the relations of four emerging nations, each of which had an identity shaped or at least deeply stained by its contact with -mingling with – the others.

It is a story of dynastic ambition and dynastic chance. In the sixteenth century the family which provided the five monarchs who ruled three of the nations came from king-less Wales. They in turn were supplanted by a family from Scotland. In due course, a new constitutional balance and a new multicultural dynamic was made possible by an agreement of the representatives of three of the nations sitting in two of the parliaments to admit an undistinguished continental European family to govern all three kingdoms and all four nations. It was an appropriately incoherent outcome.

This chapter must seek to unravel some of these competing ambiguities. The first part will seek to unravel the skeins of argument, especially by distinguishing two processes: it will distinguish the dynamics of state formation from the formation of national consciousness; the middle section of the chapter will suggest a model for exploring the dynamics of state formation within a European context; the final part will offer some tentative applications of this model during the first half of the seventeenth century.

NATIONS AND STATES

Our starting-point must be the work of John Pocock whose plea for ‘British History: a new subject’ has been the rather delayed-action inspiration behind most recent developments in the field.² In 1975 he called us to a holistic approach to what he has termed ‘the Atlantic archipelago’, insisting that we must adopt a pluralistic approach which recognizes but does not exaggerate the extent to which such a history must contain ‘the increasing dominance of England as a political and cultural entity’.³ He went on to say that British history must show how the component parts of these islands ‘interacted so as to modify the conditions of one another's existence’,⁴ and that ‘British history denotes the historiography of no single nation but of a problematic and uncompleted experiment in the creation and interaction of several nations’.⁵

His theme has been taken up mainly by medievalists, and finds perhaps its fullest expression in the work of Robin Frame, who summed it up:

The whole of the British Isles form a historical context that deserves more attention than it has so far received…. There is value in trying to assemble their history in ways that make it more than the sum of ‘Welsh History’, ‘Scottish History’, ‘Irish History’ and ‘English History’. Of course there is endless work to be done within these hallowed categories. Comparative studies are another desideratum. But comparisons by their very nature assume, and even reinforce, the solidity and separateness of whatever is compared. As well as looking over partition walls, we need to do some thinking about the design of the building itself.⁶

There is no reason why this should be less true of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries.

Our second – and less widely recognized – starting-point should be Hugh Seton-Watson's Nations and States. Se ton-Watson traces the development of what he terms ‘the continuous nations’ (the English, Scottish, French, Iberians and Russians), the modern nations (Germans, Italians and Greeks), the artificial nations created by European settlement outside Europe (Mexicans, Australians and Americans), diasporic nations (Jews and Chinese) and so on.⁷ His magisterial study, largely ignored by historians of the Atlantic archipelago, reminds us of the complexity of the relations between ethnicity, nationality and polity. He has pointed out the confusions that abound in the concept of the nation-state (‘at most a half truth,’ he tells us, ‘what is arguably true is that we live in the age of the sovereign state’).⁸ International relations are the relations between states not between nations; the United Nations, like the League of Nations before it, exists to keep the peace between states, not nations. It is rare and not common for a nation to be co-terminous with a state, and it is not necessarily a source of stability when it is so; states can exist without a nation, or with several nations among their peoples. Most states have had national minorities within them.⁹ It is a logical consequence of Seton-Watson's work to say that historians of most ‘states’ need to consider the presence of several nations within and straddling the frontiers of their ‘state’.¹⁰

It is clear, then, that if ‘British’ history is to have any meaning it is both a history of state-building, of the development of political, administrative, social, cultural institutions appropriate to a state developed by dynastic accident and short-term political expediency, and it is a study of the development of a multinational or multicultural state such as has been the norm rather than the exception in European, indeed, world history. Historians of these islands need to realize that the existence of several nations within a loosely structured polity is the norm in European history and not the exception.

The work of others sits comfortably with Seton-Watson's. It is important to remember the slow development of the term ‘nation’, and how recendy it spawned the terms ‘nationalism’ and ‘nationhood’. The work of Benedict Anderson on the nation as an ‘imagined’ community is important here: imagined both because of its elastic, finite boundaries and because the sense of nationhood prioritizes a deep, horizontal comradeship in the face of so many actual inequalities and exploitations. Anderson shows how it takes strong external threats to create such bonding. His picture of the nation as the heir to the collapse of religious and of dynastic realms reminds us how risky it is to assume too early an emergence of such horizontal bonding.¹¹ Even more important though is the work of Rees Davies whose recent survey of the ‘Peoples’ of the British Isles in the high middle ages argues that the key medieval concept is that of the ‘gens’, a people descended from a founding patriarch -the Latin root retained in such terms as ‘generations’ and, most tellingly, in ‘degeneration’, the term used by the English in Ireland to dismiss those of English birth and blood who intermarried with the Gaels and ‘went native’. Davies's account of the evolution of the various gentes on the British Isles is compelling at all kinds of levels, demonstrating how late and how contingent is the emergence of the four peoples (proto-nations) who were to interact in the early modern period.¹²

Seton-Watson's splendid book too reminds us how slow and how late was the emergence of Englishness and Scottishness.¹³ The English language – a kind of linguistic mayonnaise, where Anglo-Saxon oil blended with Norman yolks to become the common language of the inhabitants of England – quickened only in the fourteenth century; only when this was reinforced by a vernacular print culture and specifically by a vernacular bible and liturgy, and above all by the ubiquity and daily visibility of royal writs, can English national consciousness be said to have fully emerged. Yet the emergence of such consciousnesses elsewhere in the archipelago was slower. In polyglot Scotland, where four (perhaps five) regionally specific languages remained entrenched into the fifteenth century, Geoffrey Barrow can speak of Scottishness as possessing a ‘homogeneity that was not racial or linguistic but feudal and governmental’;¹⁴ those feudal and governmental elements were, of course, imported from England.

Is Trishness' any more evident in 1540 than the sense of ‘Spanishness’ or ‘Welshness’ by that time? The lack of a single political authority exercising any kind of authority over the whole of the island, the linguistic diversities that made for poor or non-existent communications among the inhabitants, the difficult terrain and manifest and manifold problems of communication, all of which inhibited internal trade, were common factors in the medieval experience of both Ireland and Iberia. All these factors and more – the existence of the English Pale and of the Lordship of the Isles which linked northeast Ulster to the Scottish Islands only fifteen miles away at the narrowest point – add to the parallels between Ireland and Wales, where regional differences in the Brythonic or Welsh (P-Celtic) language, geographical separateness, the inexorable economic contacts with urban centres across the Bristol Channel and Severn/Dee basins in England (that is with Bristol, Shrewsbury and Chester) are widely held to have militated against a single Welsh national self-consciousness at this time. Is it the case that Welshness and Irishness were the product of over-exposure to the English and of being treated as a single unit of government by the English?

Simply being an inhabitant of Ireland, then, does not create an Irish identity any more than being an inhabitant of Britain creates a British identity. Is Welshness, Irishness and even (to an extent) Scottishness a product of having Britishness thrust upon them – a product of accommodation with writ-culture and print-culture? This would explain the irony that while every Scot and every Welshman (and more arguably) every Irishman knew and perhaps knows the difference between being British and being Scottish, Welsh or Irish, and knows which if either to be and when, so many English -including notoriously Alan Taylor in his debate with John Pocock -will not see that there is a difference or cannot see that it matters.¹⁵ That nasty English habit of using the terms English and British interchangeably can in fact readily be found in the historical works published around the turn of the sixteenth century and readers of both Camden's Britannia and Milton's History of Britain would be forgiven for wondering what the significance of the distinction is.¹⁶ Even a late-seventeenth-century writer like Aylett Sammes who in his Britannia Antiqua Illustrata denied the Brutus-Trojan myth (that is the myth of a founding conqueror who gave England to his eldest son and Wales a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• List of abbreviations
• Glossary
• Preface
• Introduction The concept of British history
• 1. The fashioning of Britain
• 2. Tudor state formation and the shaping of the British Isles
• 3. Comparable histories?: Tudor reform in Wales and Ireland
• 4. Anglo-Scottish protestant culture and integration in sixteenth-century Britain
• 5. The Anglican Church and the unity of Britain: the Welsh experience, 1560–1714
• 6. The Gaelic reaction to the Reformation
• 7. Gaelic culture in the seventeenth century: polarization and assimilation
• 8. Scotland and Ireland under the Commonwealth: a question of loyalty
• 9. The origins of a British aristocracy: integration and its limitations before the treaty of Union
• 10. Scotland and Ireland in the later Stewart monarchy
• 11. Constitutional experiments and political expediency, 1689–1725
• Conclusion: a state of Britishness?
• Notes on contributors
• Maps
• Index