London, Spring 1533. Ambassador Eustace Chapuys painted the scene for his patron and correspondent, Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V: âall Englishmen, high and low, are in great alarm, and consider themselves as good as lost, believing that even if there should be no foreign invasion, civil war will break out and ruin them all. Great as their fears are,â he wrote, âand not without reason, the general indignation is still greater, for excepting 10 or 12 persons who surround the Lady [Anne Boleyn], all the rest of the nation are terribly afraid of disturbances in this country.â No matter what losses might ensue, Chapuys thus avowed, âstill they would wish Your Majesty to send here an army with which to destroy the poisonous influence of the Lady and her adherents, and make a new reformation of all the kingdom.â1 The diplomatâs alarm was palpable and, from his perspective and that of his sovereign, well-founded.
The previous week, the first in April, the English parliament had passed one of the most momentous statutes in British history, the Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome. Its vociferous preamble announced:
Those words inaugurated the revolutionary process of reform by which Englandâs chief legislative body repudiated allegiance to the pope and his Roman Catholic Church and vested whole, complete, supreme authority and jurisdiction over all matters and all persons, clerical and lay, in the king and in his kingdom, without outside interference. In vigorous terms, the statute legally recognized the status and standing of the Tudors as an imperial monarchy and the realm as an empire, sanctified by generations of royal progenitors and their governments, and electrified the court, as Chapuys attests. It is a stirring yet apparently familiar scene, but when placed in a broader context harbors new meaning. For most, the Act of Appeals is significant because of its domestic role, a crucial step in Henryâs divorce from Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn, the birth of a princess who would become Queen Elizabeth I, the Reformation, and the creation of the Church of England. Simultaneously, and conversely, when we think of empire, we generally think of the world beyond Englandâs borders and beyond the 1530s, reserving the term for the era after the establishment of Jamestown in the early seventeenth century or, at best, Ireland in the late sixteenth. This false dichotomy, however, which artificially separates national from imperial in favor of a single, isolated world, leaves the full meaning and power of the statute obscure and makes it hard to understand a domestic act that asserted empire. A wider lens, however, reveals that as parliament sat that year, the twenty-fourth of Henry VIIIâs reign, that very crown claimed vast territories stretching from England to Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, and the New World. Henrician subjects were currently or very recently abroad in each locale, asserting Tudor rule there, and supported by writers at home who used the same old, authentic histories and chronicles cited in the preamble to legitimize and justify their activities. On both sides of the Atlantic, they flaunted the royal coat of arms, its domed imperial crown signifying the fullness of the wearerâs power by its closed top, three lions, and three fleurs-de-lis demonstrating the claim over England and France, and flanking red Cadwallader Welsh dragon and white Richmond greyhound or traditional English lion manifesting the familyâs lineage. Moreover, actual experiences abroad to date had shown that Tudor power would always be incomplete, limited in expanding to its fullest extent and in reaping the full benefits of that expansion, if it did not boast supreme authority over all concerns and all personnel, in church and in state. Set against this background, parliamentâs 1533 assertion was endowed with international implications and applications. The act made the king emperor in his realm (rex in regno suo est imperator), a self-governing, self-sufficient, and sovereign entity beholden to no foreign potentate, temporal or spiritual. It also reflected the territorially expansion visionâif not realityâof Tudor kingship. These two definitions of empireâto connote caesaropapal authority as well as rule over multiple territoriesâwere not discrete nor mutually exclusive for contemporaries; rather, they were closely related and reinforcing. A critical tool of Tudor statecraft, the statute responded to exigencies at home as well as abroad and was soon put to use in each arena. The making of Britain, the British Empire, and the British Atlantic world were part and parcel of one another.where by dyvers sundrie olde authentike histories and cronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this Realme of Englond is an Impire, and so hath ben accepted in the worlde, governed by oon Supreme heede and King having the Dignitie and Roiall Estate of the Imperiall Crowne of the same, under whome a Body politike compacte of all sortes and degrees of people, devided in termes and by names of Sp[irit]ualtie and Temporalitie, ben bounded and owen to bere nexte to God a naturall and humble obedience.2
This book recasts one of the most well-studied and popularly beloved periods in history: the tumultuous, 118-year span from the accession of Henry VII in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. Though authors and readers, scholarly and not, have been attracted to this period for its high drama and importance to national development, I offer a new narrative of the era that focuses simultaneously on another facet of the British past that has exercised a powerful grip on writers and audiences: imperialism. I argue that the sixteenth century was pivotal in the making of Britain and the British Empire in the Atlantic world. Unearthing over a century of probing into and theorizing about what lay beyond Englandâs borders, the book demonstrates that foreign enterprise at once mirrored, responded to, and provoked national politics and culture, while ultimately shaping the future trajectory of imperialism. It shows that territorial expansion abroad and consolidation and identity formation at home were concurrent, intertwined, and mutually reinforcing. I explore these knotted histories of British nation- and empire-building by examining the ventures undertaken by the Tudor crown and its subjects in six settings crisscrossing the Atlantic Ocean and all coinciding with critical junctures in the English story: France, Scotland, Ireland, Newfoundland, Virginia, and Guiana. Remarkably diverse in location, chronology, type, and level of existing scholarly treatment, these six projects have never been studied together nor all alongside concomitant domestic developments. Historians have dismissed some, like France and Scotland, as futile or largely unimportant in the Tudor period because they failed, judging success (often construed solely as permanent conquest and colonial settlement) to be a prerequisite for sustained study; other enterprises, such as Virginia and Ireland, are quite familiar, but have been held up as the seedbed of modern British imperialism in troublingly simplistic, linear, and teleological fashion; still others, like Guiana and Newfoundland, are known primarily to specialists and in isolation and also subjected to the declension narrative of inevitable colonial misadventure. Yet by valuing these different endeavors, as contemporaries did, and yoking them together, as other histories have not, this book reveals a burst of highly influential, intimately tied overseas efforts deeply connected to dynamics in Britain.
Tudor Empire, then, proposes a corrective for three fields of inquiry: British imperial history, Atlantic History, and Tudor history. It confronts the limits of the first, integrates while also stretching the bounds, and challenges the insularity and traditional periodization of the third, ultimately demonstrating the new, significant narrative that comes from merging the three.
In recent decades, scholars from across disciplines have completely transformed understandings of imperialism. Literature on the British Empire in particular has disrupted the once-unambiguous distinctions between metropole and colony, center and periphery, perceptions of the colonizer-colonized as simple or unidirectional from ostensibly superior, civilized colonizer to inferior, savage colonized, and assumptions of unquestioned British hegemony. The ânew imperial historyâ has been especially valuable, drawing together literary and cultural turns, gender and postcolonial theory, with insights gleaned from nationalist, Marxist, subaltern, and area studies approaches, to yield a new kind of approach. Censuring and countering western paradigms and essentialism, its practitioners have pursued a meaning of empire as contingent, multifaceted, and mutable, best studied via interrelated and porous analytical fields. For Kathleen Wilson, new imperial histories show, among other things, that âforging the nation,â also the subtitle of Linda Colleyâs incredibly important book Britons, was âinextricably bound to transnational and colonial developmentsâ and foreground the interrelationships between empire and Britain, âthe connection between what went on âout thereâ and what goes on âin here.ââ3 Yet characteristic of a general preference for examining later periods in the history of the British Empire, this approach has largely taken root among specialists in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Part of the goal of this book is to suggest that new imperial history might be more widely applicable, a means to explore nation and empire together in an earlier, early modern period and thereby deepen our understandings of both entities.
Whereas the new imperial history has dramatically reoriented scholarly sights for modern empire, Atlantic History has done the same for the early modern. Tremendously revealing for many scopes, the British subfield of this unit of analysis has directed our attentions to patterns, processes, and movements, of people, goods, and ideas, lost or overlooked in a nation-state, area, or regional approach and revealed the extent to which the British Empire was shaped, even defined, by its entanglement with contemporary, rival empires Spain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands; in a seminal critique, it has even encouraged some to embrace an even bigger, more global approach, finding a similar engagement, competition, cross-fertilization, and exchange across a wider geographical swath.4 British Atlantic scholarship has, however, privileged the post-1604 and, especially, post-1607 era, Anglo-America, and Ireland than earlier enterprise elsewhereâmuch as is the case for other studies of early modern British Empire. For a period in which Spanish captains, conquistadors, and colonists dominated the Caribbean and Central America and Portuguese merchants, mariners, migrants, and missionaries amassed navigation expertise and outposts in Africa and South America, British crossings were rarer, their presence impermanent, diffuse, and harder to measureâa comparative difference that has resulted in scholars treating the 1500s as a century of chiefly Iberian activity and is perhaps epitomized by J.H. Elliott, who opened his titanic Empires of the Atlantic World with an in-depth treatment of HernĂĄn Cortes and Christopher Newport (that is starting the Spanish Atlantic narrative in the sixteenth century, but holding the British Atlantic until the seventeenth).5 Scholars like Trevor Bernard have thus relegated England and Britain to latecomer status in that Ocean, in the New World, and in empire-building abroad, only beginning their histories in earnest in the seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries, following the unions of 1603 and 1707, when âinternal colonizationâ was more complete, British colonial possessions and populations increased, and permanent settlement within the confines of the modern United States began.6 In these renderings, which include volume one of the Oxford History of the British Empire edited by Nicholas P. Canny and titled Origins, the sixteenth century does not come to the fore as one of extensive English or British imperial activity, and the way in which significant enterprise closer to home, in France and Scotland, coincided with early, if abortive or ephemeral, efforts in the Americas is underexplored.7 As such, despite its vast possibilities as a means by which to tell an interconnected, integrative, cosmopolitan history of empire across seemingly disconnected, disparate areasâelementary characteristics of early British imperialismâthe Atlantic has yet to be fully tapped for the Tudor period, especially prior to the middle of Elizabethâs reign.
Alongside topic (British nation and empire) and geography (Atlantic), the third major strand of this book is its ch...