Tudor Empire: The Making of Early Modern Britain and the British Atlantic World, 1485-1603 3030628914, 9783030628918

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BRITAIN AND THE WORLD

Tudor Empire The Making of Early Modern Britain and the British Atlantic World, 1485–1603 Jessica S. Hower

Britain and the World Series Editors Martin Farr School of History Newcastle University Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK Michelle D. Brock Department of History Washington and Lee University Lexington, VA, USA Eric G. E. Zuelow Department of History University of New England Biddeford, ME, USA

Britain and the World is a series of books on ‘British world’ history. The editors invite book proposals from historians of all ranks on the ways in which Britain has interacted with other societies from the sixteenth century to the present. The series is sponsored by the Britain and the World society. Britain and the World is made up of people from around the world who share a common interest in Britain, its history, and its impact on the wider world. The society serves to link the various intellectual communities around the world that study Britain and its international influence from the seventeenth century to the present. It explores the impact of Britain on the world through this book series, an annual conference, and the Britain and the World peer-reviewed journal. Martin Farr ([email protected]) is General Series Editor for the Britain and the World book series. Michelle D. Brock (brockm@wlu. edu) is Series Editor for titles focusing on the pre-1800 period and Eric G. E. Zuelow ([email protected]) is Series Editor for titles covering the post-1800 period. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14795

Jessica S. Hower

Tudor Empire The Making of Early Modern Britain and the British Atlantic World, 1485–1603

Jessica S. Hower History Department Southwestern University History Department Georgetown, TX, USA

Britain and the World ISBN 978-3-030-62891-8    ISBN 978-3-030-62892-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62892-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Michael Foley / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Gertrude and Meyer, Irene and Louis.

Acknowledgments

Research and writing are only solitary acts by the most superficial of understandings; both endeavors require a great deal of help to be done even moderately well and I have received more than I could have ever reasonably expected. Conceived of and realized over the last fifteen years or so (by a conservative estimate), this book simply would not have been possible without the sage guidance and unflagging support of so many others. Though any and all errors are entirely my own, I am enormously grateful to those who contributed to this project, directly and indirectly, and made what often seemed like an impossible feat into a finished product. From 2006 to 2020, I received invaluable aid in the form of fellowships and awards from Union College, Georgetown University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Southwestern University, the Sam Taylor Fund, and the American Historical Association. Not only did these institutions and organizations bring me to archives, libraries, and conferences on both sides of the Atlantic, they introduced me to brilliant scholars who have left an indelible mark on me and my scholarship. In this vein, my deepest, most sincere gratitude is reserved for John Cramsie and Alison Games, for stoking, sustaining, and honing my interests in the British World through college and graduate school and for shepherding me and this project through every stage of the process, including innumerable moments of great doubt and unease. Without them, this book and, indeed, all that I do as a historian would not exist. They both know that I rarely if ever want for words, yet I will never be able to find enough to thank them sufficiently. I am also vii

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immensely grateful to Amy Leonard and Aparna Vaidik; Chandra Manning, Jim Collins, and Carol Benedict; Dane Kennedy and Linda Levy Peck for making my years in Washington, DC, so intellectually rich and for providing indispensable comments on this work and where it might bring me, at various stages along the way. Equally, Mary Fuller, Daniel K. Richter, and my fellow fellows at the NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on “English Encounters with the Americas, 1550–1610” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011 and the McNeill Center at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012–2013 exposed me to fascinating new ideas and new ways of thinking in Boston and Philadelphia, to great effect. My path ultimately led from Georgetown University to Georgetown, Texas, in August 2013, where Southwestern has allowed me to work as a teacher-scholar in the best of liberal arts environments, practicing what I have aspired to since my years at Union. My departmental colleagues, past and present, are nothing short of magnificent and this book is immeasurably better for them: Melissa K.  Byrnes, Thomas V.  McClendon, Steve Davidson, and Jethro Hernandez Berrones. In addition, I have benefited tremendously from the mentorship, encouragement, and collegiality of those beyond our corner of the Mood-Bridwell Building hallway: Alisa Gaunder, Eileen Cleere, Sandi Nenga, Emily Sydnor, Eric Selbin, Shannon Mariotti, Kimberley Smith, Helene Meyers, Jim Kilfoyle, Melissa Johnson, Alison Kafer, Brenda Sendejo, Michael Saenger, Sergio Costola, Patrick Hajovsky, Erin Crockett, Joshua Long, Katherine Grooms, Debika Sihi, John Ross, Tisha Temple Korkus, and Sarah Brackmann. Most of all, however, Southwestern has afforded me the opportunity to work with eight years of the brightest, most talented students I have ever met—not least in my seminars on the Tudors, British Isles, and British Empire. This book is so much better for them. When it came to turning this project from vision to reality, I was afforded the honor and privilege of working in the most impressive archives and libraries and alongside the most generous scholars and friends. Many thanks to the National Archives at Kew, British Library, National Archives of Scotland, National Library of Scotland, Trinity College Dublin, Cambridge University, Lambeth Palace Library, and Folger Shakespeare Library for the opportunity to study your collections. It was during these research trips and the conference presentations that went along with them that I was fortunate enough to join several phenomenal academic communities and maintain a host of vibrant networks with their members. Valerie Schutte, Carole Levin, Charles Beem, Suzannah

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Lipscomb, Darcy Kern, Rachel B. Herrmann, and James Goodman, you have inspired this project and its many offshoots at every turn; I am so grateful for what your perspectives have added to them and to the future trajectory of my research. Most of all, to the entire Britain and the World contingent, led brilliantly by Martin Farr, and, especially, the wonderful Michelle D. Brock, I am so appreciative of all that you have done for me and my career since the moment we met, not least your unwavering championing of this book and your efforts to make it as strong as it could possibly be. I am thankful too for the manuscript’s two anonymous peer reviewers, whose comments, critiques, and suggestions have vastly improved its substance and style, as well as the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan, in particular Molly Beck and Lucy Kidwell, for their hard work, unending enthusiasm, and careful attention. Finally, on a more personal note, I ultimately owe everything to my family and, beyond all others, my fellow historian, departmental colleague, and partner, Joseph E.  Hower. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for everything.

Contents

1 Introduction: “This Realme of Englond is an Impire”  1 2 “The direction which they look, and the distance they sailed”: The Birth of an Imperial Dynasty, 1485–1509 33 3 “Ungracious Dogholes”: Experiments in Empire, Ca. 1513–1527 87 4 “More Fully Playnly and Clerely Set Fourth to All the World”: England, Scotland, and “Thempire of Greate Briteigne” in the 1530s and 1540s149 5 “Recouer thyne aunciente bewtie”: Mid-­Tudor Empire over Mid-Tudor Crisis, 1550–1570209 6 “The very path trodden by our ancestors”: The Elizabethan Moment, 1570–1588269 7 “Travelers or tinkers, conquerers or crounes”: Tudor Empire in the Last Decade, 1588–1603333

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8 Conclusion: “Such an honourable seruice”395 Index405

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: “This Realme of Englond is an Impire”

London, Spring 1533. Ambassador Eustace Chapuys painted the scene for his patron and correspondent, Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V: “all 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,” he wrote, “and 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.” No matter what losses might ensue, Chapuys thus avowed, “still 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.”1 The diplomat’s 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: 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 1  Chapuys to Charles, 10 April 1533, Calendar of State Papers, ed. Pascual de Gayangos, Martin A.S. Hume, and Royall Tyler (London: Stationary Office, 1862–1954), 4:2:1058.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. S. Hower, Tudor Empire, Britain and the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62892-5_1

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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

Those words inaugurated the revolutionary process of reform by which England’s 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 Henry’s 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 England’s 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 2  24 Hen. VIII, c. 12, The Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols. (London, 1810–1828), 3:427–429, at 3:427. On the act’s development, meaning, and context, see G.R.  Elton, “The Evolution of a Reformation Statute,” English Historical Review 64, no. 251 (April 1949): 174–197; Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969 [1953]); Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1961); Elton, “The Tudor Revolution: A Reply,” Past & Present 29 (December 1964): 26–49; G.L. Harriss and Penry Williams, “A Revolution in Tudor History?” Past & Present 31 (July 1965): 87–96; Walter Ullmann, “This Realm of England is an Empire,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 30, no. 2 (April 1979): 173–203; John Guy, “Thomas Cromwell and the Intellectual Origins of the Henrician Reformation,” in Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics, and Reform, ed. Alistair Fox and Guy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986): 151–178; Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Roger Mason, “This Realm of Scotland is an Empire? Imperial Ideas and Iconography in Early Renaissance Scotland,” in Church, Chronicle, and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland, ed. Barbara E. Crawford (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1999), 73–91; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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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 VIII’s 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 wearer’s 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 family’s 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, parliament’s 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 vision—if not reality—of Tudor kingship. These two definitions of empire—to connote caesaropapal authority as well as rule over multiple territories—were 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. * * * 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

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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 England’s 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,

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civilized colonizer to inferior, savage colonized, and assumptions of unquestioned British hegemony. The “new imperial history” 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 “forging the nation,” also the subtitle of Linda Colley’s incredibly important book Britons, was “inextricably bound to transnational and colonial developments” and foreground the interrelationships between empire and Britain, “the connection between what went on ‘out there’ and what goes on ‘in here.’”3 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.

3  Wilson, “Introduction: Histories, Empires, Modernities,” A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1884 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10, 13. See also Colley, Britons: Forging a Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), as well as John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Gyan Prakash, After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Dane Kennedy, “Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24, no. 3 (1996): 345–363; Fredrick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Anthony G. Hopkins, “Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History,” Past and Present 164 (1999): 198–243; Catherine Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (NY: Routledge, 2000); Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford: Polity, 2002); Burton, After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); James Thompson, “Modern Britain and the New Imperial History,” History Compass 5, no. 2 (2007): 455–462; Stephen Howe, ed., The New Imperial Histories Reader (London: Routledge, 2010).

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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 elsewhere—much 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 4  Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Volume I: Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); David Armitage and Michael J.  Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (NY: Palgrave, 2002); Horst Pietschmann, ed., Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System, 1580–1830 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002); Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Games, Philip J. Stern, Paul W. Mapp, Peter A. Coclanis, “Forum: Beyond the Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2006): 675–742; Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 741–757; James Epstein, Rafe Blaufarb, Eliga H.  Gould, and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “AHR Forum: Entangled Empires in the Atlantic World,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 710–799; Colin Calloway, White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America (NY: Oxford University Press, 2008); Games, Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, ed., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); H.V.  Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, and J.G.  Reid, eds., Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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rarer, their presence impermanent, diffuse, and harder to measure—a 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 Hernán 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 “internal colonization” 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 5  J.H.  Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 6  Burnard, “The British Atlantic,” in Atlantic History, ed. Greene and Morgan, 111–136, especially 111–112. See also Anthony McFarlane, The British in the Americas, 1480–1815 (London: Longman, 1994); Armitage and Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World; Stephen J. Hornsby, British Atlantic, American Frontier: Spaces of Power in Early Modern British America (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2005); Steven Sarson, British America, 1500–1800: Creating Colonies, Imagining an Empire (London: Hodder, 2005). Formative examples include David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Steven Saunders Webb, Lord Churchill’s Coup: The Anglo-American Empire and the Glorious Revolution Reconsidered (NY: Knopf, 1995); Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Eliga H.  Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The ManyHeaded Hydra: Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000); T.M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire and the Shaping of the Americas, 1600–1815 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004); Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in the Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); William Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (NY: New York University Press, 2009); Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); John Mackenzie and Ned Devine, eds., Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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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 areas—elementary characteristics of early British imperialism—the Atlantic has yet to be fully tapped for the Tudor period, especially prior to the middle of Elizabeth’s reign. Alongside topic (British nation and empire) and geography (Atlantic), the third major strand of this book is its chronology (Tudor). In 1975, J.G.A.  Pocock called for a “new British history,” defined as “the plural history of a group of cultures situated along an Anglo-Celtic frontier” (thus including Ireland under “British,” as part of the British Isles, for lack of a better term—a usage also employed in this book), and their “expanding zone of cultural conflict and creation” in the Atlantic world and eventually across the globe.8 The approach has hugely enriched and diversified a hoary Anglocentric narrative, integrating the histories of three kingdoms and our nations, yet it remains only partly applied. Overwhelmingly, the new British history has, in practice, fixed on studying religious pluralism in Britain and Ireland after the Reformation, state-building processes from the 1603 union to those of 1707 and 1801, and the progress of Britishness vis-à-vis other, alternative national and ethnic identities9—that is, 7  Canny, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Origins of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 8  Pocock, “British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal of Modern History 47, no. 4 (December 1975): 605, 620. See also Pocock, “The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject,” American Historical Review 87, no. 2 (1982): 311–336; David Cannadine, “British History as a ‘New Subject’: Politics, Perspectives and Prospects,” in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. Alexander Grant and Keith Stringer (NY: Routledge, 1995), 12–30; Pocock, “The New British History in Atlantic Perspective: An Antipodean Commentary,” American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (1999): 490–500; Richard Bourke, “Pocock and the Presuppositions of the New British History,” Historical Journal 53, no. 3 (2010): 747–770. 9  Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: The History of Four Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds., The British Problem: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago, c. 1534–1707 (Basingstoke: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); L.W.B. Brockliss and David Eastwood, eds., A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c. 1750-c. 1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); M.G.H. Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685–1789 (London: MacMillan, 1997); Keith Robbins, Great Britain: Identities, Institutions, and the Idea of Britishness (Harlow: Longman, 1997); Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, eds., British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Glenn Burgess, ed., The New British History: Founding a Modern State, 1603–1715

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centralization, consolidation, and difference in the British Isles rather than encounters and activities further afield. It is my intent to heed David Armitage’s call for a corrective: “the reintegration of imperial and domestic history and union of the New British History with Atlantic History” for a century (the sixteenth) that has eluded three of these four categories.10 This is particularly crucial for Tudor Studies, which is locked in a stubborn attachment to the domestic narrative. Larger-than-life personalities coupled with all-consuming debates over church, court, and parliamentary politics overwhelm the literature, leaving some British and, especially, foreign contexts understudied, their influence on national dynamics inadequately understood.11 Excitingly, a recent, growing effort to explode the myth of insularity that is the Tudor historiographical mantle has taken root, toward the new British history and against English exceptionalism. Mapping the networks that bound England to its neighbors, this work has elevated the importance of political culture, highlighted the use of images and icons to express power, and situated the Tudor court as part of a Renaissance European milieu of mentalities, circles, and discourses.12 Moreover, specialists of sixteenth-century Ireland, (London: Tauris, 1999); Colin Kidd, ed., British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); J.  Smyth, The Making of the United Kingdom, 1660–1800: State, Religion, and Identity in Britain and Ireland (London: Longmans, 2001); Lisa Steffen, Defining a British State: Treason and National Identity, 1608–1820 (NY: Palgrave, 2001); Jane Ohlmeyer and Allan Macinnes, eds., The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002); Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Philips, eds., History, Nationhood, and the Question of Britain (NY: Palgrave, 2004); Armitage, ed., British Political Thought in History, Literature, and Theory, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Willy Maley, “The English Renaissance, the British Problem, and the Early Modern Archipelago,” Critical Quarterly 52, no. 4 (December 2010): 23–36. 10  Armitage, “Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?” American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999), 438. See also Armitage, “Making the Empire British: Scotland in the Atlantic World, 1542–1707,” Past and Present 115 (1997): 34–63; Armitage, ed., Greater Britain, 1516–1776: Essays in Atlantic History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 11  Grounded, for the post-Victorian era, in the works of A.F. Pollard and G.R. Elton, the scholarship here is immense and as such, I do not attempt an exhaustive treatment here. Specific arguments and their relationship to particular moments examined in this book are noted in turn within the appropriate chapter. 12  Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); John King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Roy Strong, The Tudor and Stuart Monarchy,

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Scotland, and Wales (in descending order of popularity and contention) have studied these territories in Tudor and Stewart administrative calculus and found the limits of southeast English and Lowland Scottish power and governance, secular and religious.13 Elsewhere, experts on Tudor-era 3 vols. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1990–1997); Guy and Fox, eds., Reassessing the Henrician Age; Dale Hoak, ed., Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jonathan Woolfson, ed., Reassessing Tudor Humanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Glenn Richardson, Renaissance Monarchy: The Reigns of Henry VIII, Francis I, and Charles V (London: Arnold, 2002); David Grummitt, ed., The English Experience in France c. 1450–1558: War, Diplomacy, and Cultural Exchange (Burlington: Ashgate, 2002); Susan Doran and Richardson, eds., Tudor England and its Neighbours (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); Susan Rose, Calais: An English Town in France, 1347–1558 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009); Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Alexander Samson, Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). 13  David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966); Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly 30, no. 4 (October 1973): 575–598; Bradshaw, The Dissolution of the Religious Orders in Ireland under Henry VIII (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565–1576 (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1976); Andrews, Canny, and P.E.H.  Hair, ed., The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America, 1480–1650 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978); Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Steven G. Ellis, “Crown, Community and Government in the English Territories, 1450–1575,” History 71, no. 232 (June 1986): 187–204; Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, 1560–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1988); Canny, “The Marginal Kingdom: Ireland as a Problem in the First British Empire,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 35–66; Ciaran Brady, The Chief Governors: The Rise and Fall of Reform Government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1588 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Ellis and Sarah Barber, eds., Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725 (London: Longman, 1995); Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: The Making of the British State (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995); Ellis, “Writing Irish History: Revisionism, Colonialism, and the British Isles,” Irish Review 19 (1996): 1–21; Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule (London: Longman, 1998); Kevin Kenny, ed., Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Ellis, The Making of the British Isles: The State of Britain and Ireland, 1450–1660 (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007); James A.  Murray, Enforcing the English Reformation in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); John Patrick Montaño, The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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i­dentity and nationhood, like Colin Kidd, have demonstrated, without slipping into anachronism, that such sentiments did exist in the early modern period, best understood as a plural blend of national identity and sensibility, ethnicity, patriotism, kinship, blood, race, religion, legal institutions, and history which could be amorphous and contradictory and were substantively different from modern, especially nineteenth- and twentieth-­century nation-states, nationality, and nationalism.14 Still, there is more to be done. As Neil Murphy explains in a seminal new book that places Henry VIII’s 1540s Boulogne venture in a colonial context, while the new British history shifted the historian’s gaze from south-eastern England and “opened up new and important ways of understanding how the Tudor regime operated across its various frontiers, it also reinforced the insular view of English history by focusing on the connections between the different territories that comprise the Atlantic archipelago—and from which the English lands in mainland Europe”—as well as, I would add, across other maritime spaces and throughout the century—“were largely excluded.”15 Few historians have sought to place Tudor ideas and actions in a wider frame or as more than mere coda relegated to the end of

Press, 2011); Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle, Elizabeth I and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Arthur H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI: The Apocalypse, the Union, and the Shaping of Scotland’s Public Culture (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1979); Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981); Jane E.A. Dawson, The Politics of Religion in the Age of Mary, Queen of Scots: The Earl of Argyll and the Struggle for Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Wormald, ed., Scotland: A History (NY: Oxford University Press, 2005), which includes a chapter by the highly significant and prolific Roger A.  Mason, whose work is particularly influential here, for example, his edited Scotland and England, 1286–1815 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1987); Katie Stevenson, Chivalry and Knighthood in Scotland, 1424–1513 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006); Trevor Herbert and Gareth Elwyd Jones, eds., Tudor Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988); Jones, Class, Community, and Culture in Tudor Wales (Cardiff: University College Wales, 1989). 14  Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31, no. 4 (1992): 309–329; Kidd, British Identities. See also Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Cathy L.  Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). This early modern meaning of nation and national sentiment is what I adopt herein, rather than any later—and much different—form, associated with nationalism. 15  Murphy, The Tudor Occupation of Boulogne: Conquest, Colonization and Imperial Monarchy, 1544–1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 11.

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otherwise English studies.16 Similarly, only a handful, most notably Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, have examined Britishness and Irishness prior to the union of the crowns or parliaments, when “Britain” was achieved politically, despite the presence of the word and the conception, even if inchoate and illusory, far earlier.17 This work must be done, in order to properly capture the reality, in all of its messiness, of the early modern world. A corollary of this research is to bridge the gaps separating the “First English Empire” spotted in twelfth- through fourteenth-century Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, the Hundred Years’ War fought over fourteenthand fifteenth-century France, and the “First British Empire” associated with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America. For R.R. Davies, Robert Bartlett, Anne Curry, and others, Plantagenet consolidation, annexation, and colonization, conquest, empire, identity, and “other”-ing could and should not be written separately, and, as John Gillingham in particular has pressed, it lent essential precedent to later generations, not least through the deeds of Henry II and writings of Gerald of Wales.18 16  Examples include Sean Cunningham’s recent biography of Henry VII, which has only one chapter detailing royal policy behind England, “Projecting Tudor Influence,” at the end of the book, Henry VII (London: Routledge, 2007), 251–273, as well as Patrick Collinson’s edited survey, The Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and John Morrill’s edited volume, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), which both consign non-English developments to two chapters. Of the notable exceptions, see for example Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power; Ellis, Making of the British Isles; Ellis and Barber, eds., Conquest and Union; Norman Davies, The Isles: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485–1603 (New York: Penguin, 2000). 17  Bradshaw and Roberts, eds., British Consciousness. 18  A.F.  McC.  Madden, “1066, 1776 and All That: The Relevance of English Medieval Experience of ‘Empire’ to Later Imperial Constitutional Issues,” in Perspectives of Empire: Essays Presented to Gerald S.  Graham, ed. J.E.  Flint and Glyndwr Williams (London: Longman, 1973), 9–26; Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Davies, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Robin Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100–1400 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); P.J.  Marshall, “The First British Empire,” Oxford History of the British Empire: Historiography, ed. Robin Winks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 43–52; Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000); Gillingham

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Nevertheless, the relative stability of British borders after 1450, the internal struggles faced by the English and Scottish kings in the fifteenth century, the loss of all but Calais from the Angevin Empire in France, and the dominance of the Renaissance and Reformation in periodizing the European past have lamentably cemented 1500 as a fault-line in English, British, and imperial history.19 As such, by refusing to shoehorn sixteenth-­ century events into earlier or later forms of imperial activity and appreciating the persistence of the more distant past in the sixteenth-century present and seventeenth-century future, this book too speaks in some small way to the need to narrow the even bigger gulf dividing medieval from early modern expansion and toys with the start date for Britain and its empire. * * * This book is a modest but vital response to the small cadre of scholars who have in fact explored the ideological or practical origins of early modern Britain and the British Empire in the Atlantic world; their work has encouraged, provided a framework for, and offered the vocabulary whereby I merge these two strains—the theoretical and the applied—and implement a new chronological and geographical scope to show that the entire Tudor era and much of the Atlantic archipelago, the European continent, and the Americas are critically significant to the development of British nation and empire. Anthony Pagden, David Armitage, Andrew Fitzmaurice, and Ken Macmillan have elevated and plotted the intellectual tides of the sixteenth century, exposing and privileging the imperial dimensions of early modern English, Scottish, and British political thought.20 Their work locates, in Pagden’s words, a “language of empire, and many of its fundamental The Angevin Empire (London: Arnold, 2001); Curry, The Hundred Years War, 2nd edn., (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). 19  John L. Watts, ed., The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998). 20  Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c.1500c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Armitage, Ideological Origins; Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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anthropological assumptions, [that] persisted from the sixteenth into the nineteenth century, and in many cases into the twentieth”—a body of law, discourse, and terminology rooted in antiquity, especially Rome, that was revived and invoked by Renaissance humanists, and brought to bear on other thought systems, like Church teachings, scholasticism, natural and common law, to undergird something “unquestionably new”: New World colonization.21 By examining this language and the early modern imperial ideology built upon it, these scholars have offered fundamental insights that, in turn, provide the foundation and vocabulary for this book. Most crucially, they have shown that the word “empire,” derived from the Latin imperium, contained multiple meanings in the Tudor-Stewart era. As Pagden and Armitage in particular first demonstrated, building on works by Richard Koebner and Walter Ullmann,22 it denoted independent, self-­ sufficient authority or “perfect” rule and the absolute, supreme sovereignty and jurisdiction of that single authority, a caesaropapal head uninhibited by external powers or internal rivals (befitting the Latin dictum, rex in regno suo est imperator—the king is emperor in his kingdom/ realm) as well as a diverse territorial unit embracing more than one distinct political community and, based on the Roman Empire’s model, expansionary in its aspirations.23 To return to Pagden’s perfect phrasing, “all of these meanings of imperium survive, and sometimes combine, throughout the entire period” he and I discuss.24 They were, as I argue above and below, intimately related and mutually reinforcing. In some cases, they operated together; in others, they operated separately. Moreover, they played out on multiple grand stages across the late fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, patronized by both the English and Scottish monarchies, promoted by polymaths and polemicists like William Elphinstone, John Dee, and Richard Hakluyt, and paraded on both sides of the Atlantic, as John Guy, Dale Hoak, Roger Mason, MacMillan, John Guy, Dale Hoak, and Peter Mancall have shown in the domestic contexts and Pagden, Armitage, Fitzmaurice, Macmillan, and others in the foreign, trotted out in a diversity of forms, from parliamentary speeches and statutes to chronicles, anthologies, and other forms of literature, to coinage, flags, and  Pagden, Lords of All, 6, 11.  Koebner, Empire, Chaps. 1, 2, and 3; Ullmann, “This Realm of England is an Empire,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 30, no. 2 (April 1979): 175–203. 23  Pagden, Lords of All, 12–19; Armitage, Ideological Origins, 29–35. 24  Pagden, Lords of All, 14. 21 22

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architecture, to actual policies tried and failed.25 Examining these instances is a chief goal of this book: to understand how the ideology and practice of empire developed as a function of time, place, and circumstance. Each chapter engages this question of how the word empire and various imperial concepts were employed in a different space. This book also takes several other cues from these intellectual historians, namely that, as for Fitzmaurice, state formation and empire-building are not merely parallel but consequentially linked phenomena, elucidating the ties between home and abroad26; that colonization was profoundly influenced by Renaissance humanism, marked by a nervous, much-disputed pursuit of glory understood in those terms (a duty to exercise virtue in active pursuit of the good of the commonwealth) rather than simple commerce, profit, and possession alone, again as per Fitzmaurice building on Armitage and Pagden27; and that, as MacMillan posits, the crown played a major, indispensable role in imperialism, lending its sovereign authority, expressing its legal right, and defending its subjects, beyond merely giving its name to private individuals28—a corrective to a vaulted historiography epitomized by David Hume, who wrote in 1762 that “Queen Elizabeth had done little more than give a name to the continent of Virginia.”29 I seek to complement, deepen, and extend this vital, vibrant literature in two fundamental ways: first, by pushing its chronological and geographical parameters; second, by connecting thought with action. For the former, the scholarship on imperial ideology does important work by guiding our gaze back to the classical world and toward the Renaissance and Reformation, yet their extra-archipelagic narratives rarely begin in earnest until the mid-sixteenth century or later, evincing the general reluctance to look prior to the reigns of Elizabeth and James for imperial activity that can at least partly be blamed on a rigid, intransigent, if not 25  Guy, “Cromwell and Intellectual Origins”; Hoak, “The Iconography of the Crown Imperial,” in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Hoak, 54–103; Mason, “This Realm of Scotland”; Dee, The Limits of the British Empire, ed. Ken MacMillan with Jennifer Abeles (London: Praeger, 2004); Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan Obsession for an English America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 26  Fitzmaurice, “The Ideology of Early Modern Colonisation,” History Compass 2, no. 1 (January 2004), 4. 27  Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America. 28  MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession. 29  Hume, The History of England (1762), ed. William B.  Todd, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 5:147.

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unchallenged, formulation of what constitutes British empire. For Armitage, the “British Empire was, above all and beyond all other such polities, Protestant, commercial, maritime and free” and, by extension, he argued that “the emergence of the concept of the ‘British Empire’ as a political community encompassing England and Wales, Scotland, Protestant Ireland, the British islands of the Caribbean and the mainland colonies of North America, was long drawn out, and only achieved by the late seventeenth century at the earliest,” even if he, crucially, submitted that both conceptual languages, Britishness and empire, existed in the sixteenth.30 MacMillan starts with the three voyages commanded by Martin Frobisher to the North Atlantic across 1576–1578 and charges that despite “an important exercise of sovereign authority that fundamentally involved the English crown and dictated a specific historical and legal relationship between the imperial center and the colonial peripheries, there was no ideological British Empire in late-Tudor and early-Stuart England.”31 Not insignificantly, both historians, like Pagden and Fitzmaurice, look chiefly, if not exclusively, at British activity in the New World. This book asks what happens when we foreground developments across the whole of 1485–1603 and throughout much of the Atlantic, within and beyond the British Isles and the Americas, letting contemporary sources and activities guide our assessments. For the latter, Michael Leroy Oberg’s review of Fitzmaurice’s book for the William and Mary Quarterly strikingly critiqued, by way of conclusion, that “no intellectual history is worth its weight if it cannot convincingly explain the connection between thought and action.”32 This book aims to do precisely that and, as such, bring these historians, who have largely stuck to the theoretical, into conversation with another formidable group, whose work equally informs my efforts. The ideological and, for lack of a better word, practical origins of Britain and the British Empire have too often been unnaturally and problematically divorced; both were crucial and entangled with one another. Grounded firmly in the applied, tangible, on-the-ground activity and experience scattered on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and beyond, a  Armitage, Ideological Origins, 8, 7.  MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession, 7. 32  Oberg, “Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 by Andrew Fitzmaurice,” William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 1 (January 2004), 173. 30 31

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small group of historians and literary scholars, including David Beers Quinn, Kenneth R. Andrews, Nicholas P. Canny, Joyce Lorimer, Patricia Seed, Karen Kupperman, Stephen Greenblatt, and Mary Fuller, have examined the complex of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century exploration, experimentation, and exchange.33 By prioritizing those who, for Kupperman, “actually spent time” abroad and with other peoples, their work illustrates the overlap between different types of activity, from military occupation or garrisoning to trading outpost, scientific laboratory, pirating or privateering base, and colonial plantation, which were rarely disassociated or even distinguishable for contemporaries, as Andrews has shown, and rejected the premise that only settlement-style imperialism in  locations associated with British rule in later periods was worthy of interest, as Kupperman, Lorimer, and Fuller have demonstrated.34 Positioning areas of limited, ephemeral, or vain adventuring for further study, these scholars suggest the feasibility and utility of examining the process of early modern empire-building in all of its unevenness, complexity, and failure to live up to promotional tracts and legal justifications. It is a suggestion that I look to take up in this book, and with reference to many of the same locations, most notably Roanoke, Newfoundland, and Guiana, appreciated by this cluster of scholars. The accomplishments of this field are tremendous and its importance in establishing a basis for this book is huge. Yet it is not without its weaknesses and they are, much as in the case of the intellectual histories, chronological, geographical, and topical. Most prominent, pre-eminent, and knotty is the specter of Elizabethan Ireland, on which the lion’s share of scholarship that argues for a Tudor empire hinges. For Quinn, Canny, and many who followed in their wake, the sixteenth century was significant to 33  Quinn, North American Discovery to First Settlements: The Norse Voyages to 1612 (NY: Harper and Row, 1977); Andrews, Trade, Plunder, Settlement; Canny, Kingdom and Colony; Lorimer, ed., English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550–1646 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1989); Seed, Ceremonies of Possession; Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony, 2nd edn. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Greenblatt, ed., New World Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Fuller, Voyages in Print; English Travel to America, 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Fuller, Remembering the Early Modern Voyage: English Narratives in the Age of Expansion (NY: Palgrave, 2008). 34  Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), x; Andrews, Trade, Plunder, Settlement, 6.

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the British imperial narrative, but only well into the reign of Elizabeth and only in Ireland and North America. Contending that England’s island neighbor was its oldest colony, they established 1560s and 1570s Ulster and Munster as a legal and experiential model, training ground for policies and personnel, and exportable “pattern,” the seedbed for subsequent exploits there and, especially, in Virginia.35 Though it accomplished an important, even necessary feat in introducing Ireland into the broader context of European expansion, the thesis is at once troublingly straightforward in its west-looking, outward thrust of nearly wholesale transference, exclusionary in its late century chronology and largely singular American comparison, and burdened by its sure knowledge, gleaned from hindsight, of Ireland’s fraught place in the British world. This book finds a more complicated process at work, one that spanned the length of the Tudor period, involved and tied together multiple theaters in Europe, the Atlantic archipelago, North and South America with shared ideas, individuals, and exercises, and thus transforms Elizabethan Ireland from genesis to one, mutable facet of a more complicated, contingent, and bigger story. Moreover, more generally, and magnifying these issues with the Ireland-as-testing-ground thesis, the literature on the practice of early empire tends to stress the second half of the century (when activity increased), center North America, West Africa, and the Caribbean (where activity focused) at the expense of Scotland and France, be cordoned off into bite-sized territorial spaces (like Guiana or Newfoundland), with little cross-fertilization or dialogue, and leave the imagined and the realized separate. I endeavor to reaggregate these pieces into a single, fuller narrative, allowing their resonances and dissonances to come to the fore. * * * This book, then, puts three vital areas of scholarly concern—Tudor Britain and Ireland, the sixteenth-century Atlantic world, and the theory and practice of the early British Empire—together with new analysis and reveals that the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. In contrast to 35   Canny, “Ideology of English Colonization”; Canny, Elizabethan Conquest; Karl S. Bottingheimer, “Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Westward Enterprise, 1536–1660,” in Westward Enterprise, ed. Andrews, Canny, Hair, 45–65; Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jane H. Ohlmeyer, “A Laboratory for Empire?: Early Modern Ireland and English Imperialism,” in Ireland and British Empire, ed. Kenny, 26–59.

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dominant modes of current historiography, it moves Tudor Studies beyond confessional and constitutional strife, outside the halls of Westminster and Whitehall, and envelops the entire era to find continuity where others have seen disruption; it pushes the origins of the British Empire back in time and beyond any Irish laboratory, offering a more complicated, multifaceted, and holistic history stretching from the late fifteenth century forward; and it places the British (English, Welsh, and Scottish) as well as the Irish with the Iberians, French, and Dutch in the sixteenth-century Atlantic, plotting, voyaging, and justifying activities beyond their domestic borders. The result is a new narrative of British history, national and imperial. Toward these ends, I draw on a variety of collections, archival and print, including state papers, correspondence, parliamentary, shipping, and court records, political philosophy, travel texts, and other written works, in tandem with paintings, coinage, and other material artifacts. My study hinges on a close, serious reading of imperial plots, especially those that ostensibly failed and have consequently been overlooked, and of the ways they were conceived of by the contemporaries who mounted them, even if it strikes us as surprising or impossible. Further, I privilege both ideological and practical attempts at territorial growth—two aspects of imperialism often treated separately. Adopting methods from history, literary studies, gender studies, political science, and art history, I examine what it meant to seek a  British empire in the sixteenth century; how that empire was expressed, challenged, and renegotiated, part and parcel of national developments; and how it reconceives well-trodden narratives of concurrent European upheaval and later imperial trajectories. With its broad scope and source base, the book breaks Tudor Studies out of a persistent insularity, confronts the chronological, geographical, and topical constraints of imperial scholarship, and integrates an Atlantic approach. It is among the first to link all three of these strands and literatures, to study British imperialism across the entirety of the sixteenth century and on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and to attempt to place the rich history of Tudor-era expansion in its national context. In so doing, it seeks to contribute to the reframing of early modern British history. Nevertheless, despite the importance and benefits of employing multiple, flexible definitions, approaches, and source bases as I attempt herein, it is just as necessary to recognize this book’s limits and aims. Not all activity that takes place overseas is imperial and not all activity in or practiced by peoples of the British Isles is British. Careful to avoid anachronism and

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teleology, this book takes contemporary language as its lead. It highlights projects that were understood by Tudor authors and audiences to be part of forging a British nation and empire, by their terms and their assessments, even if those same projects they have been devalued by later scholars. My selections are decidedly not, nor meant to be, comprehensive nor have I swept away their differences for the sake of simple argument. Rather, this book’s plural understanding of empire and of Britishness, again born of contemporary usage, dictates its sights and, in turn, its sites. Chosen for their appropriateness, variety, and interconnections, undertakings in six locations across the Channel, northern border, Irish Sea, and Atlantic Ocean from England are treated chronologically, in order to maintain the integrity of the English narrative (which functions as a through-line) and the overlap between different ventures. I arrange well-­ studied places, episodes, and characters with those that are lesser-known, putting them in conversation with one another and with domestic events. Crucially, this approach and incumbent organization allow me to transcend entrenched divisions and rethink how the sixteenth century is periodized in a novel way, another important contribution to Tudor Studies. Overwhelmingly, the field is written according to reign, religion, or gender: in the first scheme, each monarch is treated apart, despite continuity in statecraft or personnel, with the long-ruling Henry VIII and Elizabeth I garnering by far the most attention and Henry VII, Edward VI, and Mary I shunted to the margins as proto-Tudor and mid-Tudor crisis, respectively; in the second, Henry VIII, Edward, and Elizabeth are grouped together as the Protestant Reformation Tudors, leaving Henry VII and Mary sidelined or scorned; in the third, Mary and Elizabeth alone are compared based on their approaches to female kingship, with occasional reference to Edward for breaking the patriarchal mold.36 Weaving 36  Examples include S.T.  Bindoff, Tudor England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950); Elton, England Under the Tudors (London: Methuen, 1955); Guy, Tudor England; Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds; Robert Bucholz and Newton Key, Early Modern England, 1485–1714: A Narrative History, 2nd edn. (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2009); Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock, eds., Tudor Queenship (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010); Roger Lockyer, Tudor and Stuart Britain, 1485–1714, 3rd edn. (London: Routledge, 2013). Partial exceptions include the thematic, but still roughly chronological within each section and abiding by many of the same divisions outlined above, Collinson, ed., Sixteenth Century; Morrill, ed., Oxford Illustrated History; Robert Tittler and Norman Jones, ed., A Companion to Tudor Britain (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Rosemary O’Day, The Routledge Companion to the Tudor Age (Oxon: Routledge, 2010).

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together national and international, pivoting from location to location, this book challenges such traditional, easy narratives and finds new, interesting ways to conceive of the age. Further, arranged chronologically and with organic, often original points of rupture separating them, plans for and in France (especially Tournai), Ireland, Scotland, Newfoundland, Virginia, and Guiana afford the opportunity to make connections and observe change across time, space, and place, demonstrating that the matter of defining Britain or empire in the Tudor period also very much depends on perspective. At no point in its history were Tudor nation- or empire-building the work or agenda of a single individual—king, queen, or councilor, captain or colonist. Even specific enterprises under their command were subject to outside forces—indigenous, continental European, environmental, and otherwise. As a result, the impetus for centralization, consolidation, and expansion, the means by which they were carried out, and the ultimate objective changed over the course of the century, contingent upon circumstances on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Much as each section of this book addresses evolving conceptions of Britishness and empire, then, each one also looks at how the driver(s) of those processes shifted or remained the same, revealing a colorful and layered history that only such a wide and layout scope can. Generalizations are problematic—there was no one, single Tudor visionary or architect and even “private” ventures were rarely wholly private, frequently relying upon the crown for legitimacy and nominal support, necessitating investment from courtiers, and subject to parliamentary approval. This book finds, then, that much as we cannot artificially separate the domestic from the imperial or different modes of expansion from one another, we cannot always parse court from crown, merchant from theorist, colonist from promoter. Their plots, power, and purses were closely interwoven and often mutually dependent. Accordingly, I adopt a more holistic view, finding that like other facets of political culture, national and imperial thinking also reflected a broader milieu, a web of formal and informal advisors, elites, officials, parliamentarians, diplomats, lawyers, scholars, clergymen, merchants, sailors, pilots, and adventurers that stretched well beyond London or England. They shared multiple connections—political, social, financial, personal, intellectual—and relied on the monarchy for patronage. Of course, neither the composition of this group nor their status remained static. Certain figures, like William and Robert Cecil, were long-standing members, while others came and went more quickly, and sometimes rival interests, like West

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Country merchants out of Bristol and their London counterparts, competed for a piece of the action. Moreover, at no point was national sentiment or imperial trial dictated solely by or from the metropole. This book examines the balance of power within this network, the ideas that circulated within it as well as the schemes they tried to put into practice, and the indigenous peoples, local environments, and competing European influences that reoriented their plans. Finally, at the same time as these six geographies examined alongside English developments help uncover the multifaceted making of empire in the sixteenth century, they do the same for the equally multidimensional making of Britain and British identity. From the outset of this book, I describe Tudor efforts, national and imperial, as “British” where fitting for several reasons. First, at various points and in various instances, the Tudors and their apologists perceived of and styled the dynasty as British—more precisely, depending on context, a mixture of Welsh, British, and English. These layered identities, often put on and taken off like masks and greeted ambivalently, were essential for the Tudor monarchy from the start, on the domestic and international stages. Of primary relevance is the sheer fact that dynastic founder Henry VII and his paternal line hailed from Wales. He, his successors, and his detractors from Richard III onward  made much of the Tudors’ Welsh heritage and of the participation of Welshmen alongside Englishmen in their governments, alternately trumpeting and veiling these realities not only because they widened and, conversely, shrank their power base, but because they put a storied history and mythology, derived from the Brut chronicle and its offshoots, at their disposals. Using this rich source base, the first Tudor court claimed lineal descent from Welsh royalty Arthur, Cadwallader, and Madoc as well as British kings beginning with Brutus, the legendary founder of Britain. Henry VII also appealed to his material line and to his wife’s family, with their Plantagenet roots and rich medieval English heritage. By selectively portraying themselves as Welsh, British, and English and patronizing those who did the same in literature and art, the Tudors legitimized and strengthened their rule. To reflect this conscious and significant self-­ fashioning, I use the term “British” in Chaps. 2 and 3 when describing the nation and empire that Henricians sought to build when this is how they described those projects themselves. Likewise, I pay close attention to the nature and limits of British appeals in the first quarter of the sixteenth century and alternatively use “English” or “Welsh” where appropriate. I also show the ways in which Henry VIII expanded upon his father’s

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manipulation of the British past, contributing to increased use of the words “Britain” and “British” in Tudor speech and prose in the latter years of his reign and under his son, Edward VI. This shift toward more explicit invocations of Britishness and British empire is an essential one that took place in the context of national and imperial developments in the 1540s, which receive close treatment in Chap. 4. Though I demonstrate that this move was incomplete and that the Tudor crown and its subjects continued to assert their English and Welsh heritage as it suited them, mentions of Britain and what was British continued and evolved over the second half of the century, as I chart in Chaps. 5, 6, and 7. Not coincidentally, appeals to a British—rather than solely Welsh or English—past allowed the Tudors to claim a sizeable expanse of territory: Brutus, Arthur, and Madoc were all lauded as conquerors of foreign dominions, on both sides of the Atlantic. Not lost on contemporaries, it was a convenient and pragmatic choice for the Tudors and their subjects to flaunt the dynasty’s British roots. This leads to a second reason for using the adjective “British”: it accurately reflects the physical space that the Tudor crown claimed. By appealing to Brutus and his ilk, Henry VII and his kin invoked kings who ruled over the entirety of the British Isles, and beyond. According to legend, these ancient kingships were British, not merely English, and extended to include all four nations, three kingdoms, and one principality; as their direct, lineal descendants, Tudor kingships followed suit, to include England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Though Henry VII was circumspect in pushing his purported rights, he did push them, as Chap. 2 shows. His son and grandson, Henry VIII and Edward VI, were less guarded, as Chaps. 3 and 4 demonstrate, and explicitly called on these rights. As such, while Tudor empire was never truly British in practice in that it did not encompass England and Scotland, it was British in theory from 1485 and, increasingly, in name from 1542. This significant point has, I think, been obscured, again because the Rough Wooings did not succeed, yet failure does not mitigate importance or persistence in early modern thought. The geographical space that Henry VIII, Edward VI, Duke of Somerset Edward Seymour, and their agents asserted imperial authority over and fought for was British, rather than solely English. Borrowing their predecessor’s discourse, if not their obsession with Scottish conquest, Marin and Elizabethan circles similarly aspired to and argued in favor of an empire that was geographically British, as Chaps. 5, 6, and 7 illustrate. Indeed, many English polemicists and strategists, administrators, and

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soldiers across the century spent considerable time in multiple locations across the British Isles and drew extensively on those experiences as they set domestic and imperial policy. Moreover, even when Tudor imperial projects did not involve Scotland directly, they often operated in a British context. The crown’s nominal claims, the historic Anglo-Scottish enmity, and the realities of a shared island all meant that no Tudor court could consider expansion abroad without somehow implicating Scotland, while the operation of the English state was informed by Scottish developments. The landscape was British, even if these ventures were not, as my approach highlights. The nature of Tudor imperial geography dovetails with a third rationale for using “British”: the composition of those who participated in building Tudor empire, both ideologically and on the ground. From the very start of the dynasty—Henry Tudor’s landing at Milford Haven and campaign to Bosworth—those involved were British: English, Welsh, and Scottish. They were also Irish, as I explore at several key points in the book. Though our sources are imperfect and do not always specify national origin, naval, military, and court records do demonstrate the persistent role of members from all four nations in sixteenth-century expansion, even if their numbers were small and must be contextualized. Together, their contributions lend Tudor empire a British complexion. Beyond these multinational efforts abroad, the English were not alone in the promotion and defense of Tudor empire in text, from Scots James Henrisoun (or “Harrison) and John Mair (or “Major”) to the Welsh Humphrey Llwyd, studied in Chaps. 4 and 5. As they worked with others writing for and against the growth of Tudor empire across the century, these authors forged a distinctly British dialogue. Put simply, Tudor imperial ideology was the work of Scottish and Welshmen as well as Englishmen and Irishmen. Moreover, this book argues that the anti-Tudor imperialism of Scottish and Irish figures like James IV, Robert Wedderburn, and Earl of Tyrone Hugh O’Neill played a vital role in the development of Tudor thought. Pressed into the debate because their native realms were implicated in Tudor expansionary schemes, these individuals reflected, refracted, refuted, and conditioned Tudor arguments and actions. In other words, British and Irish ideas were fundamental to forging Tudor empire, from 1485 through to 1603. The conception of Britishness crystallized over the course of the sixteenth century, as a result of national and international developments; part of what this book does is chart that changing sensibility of what it meant to be British over time and space. Identity formation was, I argue, caused by and

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a cause of consolidation at home and enlargement abroad. It involved a shared language, law and legal system, political apparatuses, cultural norms and customs, and religion. Strikingly, though couched as British by some Tudor writers because they believed these attributes had (in the past) and should (in the future) rightly appertain to the whole of the British Isles, the hallmarks of Britishness as they defined it were actually southeastern English—its vernacular, its common law, its shire system. Accordingly, and perhaps paradoxically, some, especially late Tudor theorists contended that a British empire was best spread by native English ways and people. Their goal was to Anglicize as part of expanding and strengthening a British imperial entity. Throughout, then, this book uses the terms empire and British when the primary sources and the scholarly literatures it engages do and sees them as processes rather than in concrete existence, while nuancing ventures that are sometimes labeled English or proto-imperial because it is simpler or more common. They aptly describe what sixteenth-­ century agents sought to create, not necessarily what they did. This book does not assert that the Tudors created Britain or the British Empire, but rather that the sixteenth century was critical in the making of both. These two entities would change dramatically over the course of subsequent centuries, just as it did over the Tudor period. I also do not claim that the emergence of a British nation, empire, and Atlantic world were causally linked nor that they were merely parallel, but rather that national consolidation, identity formation, and territorial growth were concurrent, mutually reinforcing processes that fed off one another and occurred on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. * * * In six body chapters, Tudor Empire uncovers the form and function of imperial activity in the British Isles, France, and the Americas, and places that story within the context of English history, from the advent of the dynasty to its demise nearly 120 years later. Chapter 2 begins that analysis. Rising from relative obscurity and continental exile to victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, Henry Tudor came to the throne in dire need of legitimacy, security, and clout. Examining the period from the future king’s landing to just past his death in 1509, this second chapter places post-Wars of the Roses England in a broader, transnational context to reveal that Henry VII was much more multifaceted than his reputation as a paranoid miser would suggest and to

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unearth the British and imperial dimensions of his reign. I argue that armed with his half-Welsh parentage, the scholarly and spiritual inclinations of his mother Margaret Beaufort, and his experience in France, the first Tudor embarked on a successful program of defense and consolidation at home and exploration and experimentation abroad, all in response to exigency. To this end, the king and his court blended ancient legend and medieval history derived from the Brut and Galfridian chronicles with Renaissance humanist thought, imperial imagery, shrewd diplomacy, and patronage for overseas trade and adventure. For Henry VII, these were intimately connected undertakings that fed off of both public and mercantile interests and, together, they originated a Tudor imperial vision. In his quest for stability, solvency, and support, the king exhibited a truly offensive, active expansionary posture on both sides of the Atlantic. The plots that he conceived of and backed set powerful precedents and accrued valuable experience for his successors and their subjects—from appointing Edward Poynings as his deputy in Ireland, to sponsoring John Cabot in his voyages to Newfoundland, to negotiating with Scotland and France over dynastic politics and military policy, to adding the Cadwallader dragon to the royal coat of arms and naming his first-born child Arthur. Henry VII thus positioned his son and heir as the messiah of a new British imperial golden age (as royal flatterers waxed poetic), a mantle that the brash and mercurial Henry VIII readily assumed. When the second Tudor monarch ascended the throne in 1509, the situation in Britain and Europe looked quite different than it had a quarter-­ century earlier. Concentrating on two decades (the 1510s and 1520s) usually dwarfed by the marital and ecclesiastical spectacles that followed in the 1530s, Chap. 3 demonstrates how a more secure dynastic footing combined with Henry VIII’s impulse for continued annexation, personal ego, military and missionary opportunity, and cultural change at court to give rise to Tudor conquests in France, most notably the capture of Tournai in 1513. I find that this victory, in turn, inspired related plots in Ireland and Newfoundland in the second half of the decade and into the next. In each locale, Henry VIII and his subjects—English, Welsh, Irish, and Tournaisien—further engaged in the theory and practice of British empire. They experimented with imperial ideology, material culture, and actual administration over a foreign people and against continental rivals, temporal and spiritual. In particular, they provoked biting responses from Scotland, France, and Rome, all of whom sought to defend their own authority against an expansionary Tudor state. Each project and each

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dialogue with a threatened “other” or rival forced the Henrician court and its representatives to confront the possibilities and limits of Tudor power, parse the status of non-native subjects under the Tudor crown, and define the essential tenets of Britishness and British superiority—the overwhelmingly English norms, customs, and history that Tudor polemicists described as properly British and sought to instill throughout their dominions in the Isles, France, and the New World. Here, however, was a moment of activity that failed. Henry was forced to return Tournai to Francis I in 1519, while his westerly exploits in Ireland and Newfoundland hardly got off the ground. Yet failure did not preclude significance for contemporaries nor did it prevent carry-over into later projects. Crucially, the king’s actions also tested and, at times, reshuffled the political alignments of England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. As a result, the Tournai moment elucidates the ties binding overseas enterprise with key events closer to home, such as the death of James IV at Flodden Field. Rushing south across the border when Henry VIII crossed Channel, the Stewart king met his end in 1513 only after a prolonged discussion with Henry, Louis XII, and others on Scotland’s Auld Alliance with France as well as his own rights to the English throne. The Scottish defeat at Flodden and ensuing minority of James V, in turn, prompted Henry VIII to muse on his own claims to suzerainty over Scotland for the first time in his reign. To this point, Tudor claims over Scotland and thus to a truly “British” empire had remained theoretical and dormant; they were important, yet unrealized and largely unelaborated, pretensions. Complete with this British footnote, the 1510s and 1520s experience was key: when Henry VIII again indulged his ardent yearning for imperial greatness, the major changes that his government had enacted at home (from the Break and Royal Supremacy to the dissolution of monasteries to attempts to reform Ireland) mixed powerfully with past lessons, especially at Tournai. The result was the Anglo-Scottish “Rough Wooing” Wars of the 1540s, a protracted series of campaigns engineered and carried out by Henry VIII and Edward VI’s first regent, Protector Somerset—the subject of Chap. 4. When the public and, indeed, many scholars and students think of Henry VIII and ardent courtship, the king’s six wives immediately spring to mind. This chapter uses empire to break that connection. Waged with arms and armor as well as paper and ink, the Rough Wooings became far more than a means to marry the young Edward Tudor to the even younger Mary Stewart. Rather, as the adoption of an Atlantic frame that brings earlier and concurrent projects in France, Ireland, and

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Newfoundland into the picture shows, the fight brought English and Scottish observers into conversation about the nature of Britain and imperium, originating the concept of an empire of Great Britain and crystallizing the image of a Tudor empire that was explicitly British, Protestant, sovereign, expansionary, and pursued by word and sword. It was an ideological as well as a practical exercise in British Empire, even if the unequal union imagined by English, Scottish, and Welsh participants was not in fact achieved. The Wooings were a fundamentally important experience on both sides of the River Tweed. In Scotland, they were met with an ambivalent response. Most remained firmly pro-French and pro-Catholic and fashioned the first anti-British imperial discourse. However, a small (albeit growing) minority of pro-English Scots also joined the fray, in favor of Tudor imperialism, complicating the relationship between England and Scotland. It was an essential moment in the fascinating relationship between Scotland and the British Empire that has received so much study in the immediate run-up to 1707 and into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but remains relatively neglected in this earlier period. Focusing from 1550 to 1570, Chap. 5 examines an era in which the British Isles were awash in royal, spiritual, and diplomatic change. I argue that the period between the fall of Somerset’s regime and the end of the first Desmond Rebellion in Ireland, often dismissed by scholars for its mayhem and confusion or labeled a mid-century “crisis” with little bearing on events outside of Britain, was critical for British culture and politics and for the realm’s budding empire. The broader perspective of Tudor Empire lends this era cohesion, continuity, and consequence. Neither the “Evangelical” Edward VI’s minority and embattled succession, nor “Bloody” Mary I’s Catholicism and Habsburg marriage, nor even Elizabeth I’s accession and church settlement constituted clean ruptures from the past. Instead, these three decades proved the strength and durability of Tudor empire, a shared vision and conscious agenda that bound three seemingly antithetical reigns to one another and to the processes of expansion abroad and consolidation at home. From the second half of Edward’s reign, through Mary’s queenship, and into the early years of Elizabeth’s rule, the body of British imperial theory grew and amplified its message of a territorially expansive and sovereign Tudor empire. Reflecting a common intellectual milieu that enveloped the court, privy council, parliament, literati, and merchant interests, the crown and its subjects ushered in a new phase of British nation- and empire-building marked by a mix of continuity and change in direction, objectives, and sponsorship:

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mid-Tudor sights shifted away from the north and east (Scotland and France) and locked again on the west (Ireland and the Americas), as England reeled from the loss of Calais, its last remaining continental toehold, in 1558; the continuing Edwardian Reformation, Mary’s co-­ monarchy with Spanish King Philip II, and the tenor of the early Elizabethan polity meant that Catholic Spain replaced France as Britain’s primary rival and sometimes model in church, state, and colonization, a position that it would hold into the early seventeenth century; and in pursuit of these ends, private interests colluded with public ones to found new companies of adventure, like the Merchant Adventurers to New Lands chartered by Edward VI in 1553 and relaunched as the Muscovy Company under Mary I in 1555, and new plantation schemes, like the attempted settlements of King’s County (Offaly) and Queen’s County (Leix), with capitals at Philipstown and Maryborough, in 1550s Ireland. As royal servants and courtiers, MPs and lawyers, traders and prospectors began to take a more central role in instigating, planning, and setting forth imperial projects, the crown remained an active partner and participant. Edward, Mary, Elizabeth, and their respective councils all offered vital financial, strategic, and ideological contributions to the evolving Tudor empire, and the policies and products of their administrations within Europe were equally influential when it came to overseas adventure. Here again, the ventures launched under the auspices of these three monarchs question the dominant assumptions and paradigms of English, British imperial, and Atlantic studies. They set forth a new history of the much-maligned, yet rarely studied, mid-Tudor period. Without this essential mid-Tudor empire, the flurry of activity by monumental and much-studied Elizabethan figures like Hakluyt, Dee, Frobisher, Henry Sidney, Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Ralegh, and Francis Drake in the 1570s and 1580s seems sudden and innovative, perhaps even doomed to failure, thanks to inexperience. Chapter 6 demonstrates that these decades were indeed a crucial era of intense exploration, discovery, and on-the-ground experimentation bolstered by an organized spate of propaganda, as other scholars have shown. However, these activities were also deeply informed by their British and European settings and by past ventures. Thus contextualized in a broader chronological and geographical framework as never before, Gilbert’s Newfoundland, Ralegh’s Roanoke, and Sidney’s Ireland—the significant exceptions to a historiographical trend that privileges the Jacobeans as originators of Britain and its empire— become much more than the abortive prerequisites that set the stage for

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permanent colonization in the seventeenth century. We can see them as successful expressions of earlier experiences, mid-way points in a far lengthier story and aspects of an Atlantic-wide contest that was hurling England into outright war with Spain. Like other pivotal moments in the century, the Spanish Armada had a major effect on the development of early modern Britain and the British Empire. At home, 1588 trumpeted a providential, xenophobic, Protestant sense of Britishness and Hispanophobia; abroad, it merged with challenging circumstances on the ground in North America (not least the Algonquian Indians) to sound the death knell of the Roanoke colony and the search for the Northwest Passage, as all available ships and resources were pressed for defense of the realm. Ever since its launch and dismal wreck, the Armada has garnered interest and lofty claims of significance, whether the failure is blamed on poor planning and bad luck or credited to the benevolent “Protestant wind.” However, the attack’s paradoxical effect on Britain and British imperialism—clarifying England’s place in European politics, demonstrating the importance of its amity with Scotland, and bolstering the case for future imperial enterprise in theory, while halting actual adventures already underway—have received less attention. Further, scholars have not considered the ways in which the Armada augmented a pre-existing discourse of Tudor empire that stretched back to 1485. In this light, the Armada becomes, like Roanoke, a moment among many in which sixteenth-­ century nation and empire proved wedded, events at home both stymying and advancing expansion. As a handful of other scholars have also recognized, the long “last decade” of Elizabeth’s reign—dubbed the “nasty nineties”—was of critical importance to the history of early modern Britain. Yet the fifteen-year span from the Armada to the accession of James VI and I was no less transformational for the British Empire, as Chap. 7 shows. At war with Philip II and then his son Philip III in venues across the Atlantic world from Ireland, to the Americas, to the Caribbean, and fighting a draining Nine Years’ War against Gaelic and Anglo-Irish rebels, the Tudor crown and its subjects showed an increased commitment to consolidate from within and grow from without, addled by Spain, Ireland, and Rome, yet buoyed by providential triumphalism. Tightly tied to sectarian politics at court, parliamentary debates over monopolies, the reality of their childless and aging queen, confessional strife on the continent, the proliferation of travel narratives, and resistance to colonizing and Anglicizing measures across the Irish Sea, the imperial projects of the 1590s brought Ralegh to

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Guiana in search of gold and closer to the heart of the Spanish Empire, successive deputies to Ireland to combat the Earl of Tyrone and his anti-­ Tudor imperial discourse of “faith and fatherland,” and religious dissidents to Newfoundland to escape the Church of England, while armchair promoters primed Virginia for renewed attention at the dawn of the next century. These activities have been studied only rarely and only in isolation from one other and from earlier and domestic developments. I argue that none of the era’s projects were entirely new. At the same time, I show that they can shed new light on a riotous last decade of the Tudor dynasty and illustrate a quickening of imperial enterprise and sense of Britishness that links the experimental 1570s and 1580s to the tumultuous seventeenth century. Fueled by urgent struggles against a Catholic Iberian and Irish foe, late Elizabethan subjects brought a full century of overt, self-­conscious British imperialism to bear on its more well-known Stuart counterpart. Chapter 8, the conclusion, draws on a handful of early Jacobean sources, both print and archival, to demonstrate the significance and continued relevance of the nation and empire developed under the Tudors for the seventeenth century. Querying the traditional 1603 boundary between the Tudor and Stuart eras, it looks at the continuities and changes in domestic, European, and imperial policy across this dynastic divide and, by extension, reconsiders the Crown Union and the debates surrounding it. I argue that the projects launched under James VI and I in the first quarter of the seventeenth century were deeply influenced by the Tudor inheritance, especially the legacies of Queen Elizabeth’s last decade. Key late Elizabethan personnel like Robert Cecil remained in power, others like Walter Ralegh fell from favor, and Ireland, Virginia, and Guiana remained the chief foci of enterprise. This was not, however, a simple story of continuity and borrowing. Rather, I show how Stuart theorists and adventurers consciously and carefully applied, manipulated, omitted, and rejected bits of the Tudor past to serve their own ends, turning sixteenth-century exploits into tools by which to measure James’s kingship and set forth their own British and British imperial visions. Tudor Empire demonstrates that like the preamble to a domestic, parliamentary act that asserted empire, the internal affairs of England cannot be understood without looking further, to the rest of the Isles, to continental Europe, and to the Americas. This wider view changes our understanding of history: nation and empire develop symbiotically in the Atlantic world, and the long Tudor century becomes integral to the making of both Britain and the British Empire.

CHAPTER 2

“The direction which they look, and the distance they sailed”: The Birth of an Imperial Dynasty, 1485–1509

From London in late July 1498, the Spanish Ambassador to the courts of Henry VII and James IV wrote a lengthy report home to his monarchs, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, relating the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of a new regime in England and an established one in Scotland and commenting on the character of the two British kings and state of their realms. Offering an outsider (though not impartial) perspective at a pivotal moment, Pedro de Ayala’s remarks are telling, his emphases significant, reflective not only of the author and his subjects but also of his readership. Penned on the brink of the sixteenth century, the letter is a snapshot of the birth of a Tudor empire and of the British Atlantic World in which it emerged, operated, and developed. Ayala’s first important move was his scope, taking the English, the Scots, and their forays into continental Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean as a single comparative unit, with its commonalities, differences, and fissures—a British orbit all under the author’s ambassadorial purview and expertise. He began by describing the “old enmity” between England and Scotland and his frustration with it, underscoring English violence north of the border and the necessity of peace between these two kingdoms of nearly equal size sharing a single island. The writer then shifted to France, the essential third party in British affairs: in England, Henry was bound up in the fight over Brittany, much to Louis XII’s chagrin; in Scotland, “the French are liked,” especially at court, where they adopt French habits and language; and, in France, the Dukes of Burgundy wear © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. S. Hower, Tudor Empire, Britain and the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62892-5_2

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“the ‘tan of St. Andrew’ in memory of the succor which Scotland sent.” Ayala then settled into a close study of James and Henry, the pair and their people distinct, if still part of a greater whole that, he obliquely suggested, might someday unite under the civil deficits of one compared to the other and the Spanish example. The Stewart king was learned, religious, honest, and liberal, loved by many and willing to take counsel, yet immodest, bellicose, and too courageous—significant issues for a naturally poor, indolent, vain, ostentatious, envious, and war-mongering people like the Scots. Only the presence of foreigners and overseas commerce had “taught them how to live” and improve. James’s “own Scotch language is as different from English as Aragonese from Castilian. The King speaks, besides, the language of the savages who live in some parts of Scotland and on the islands” Ayala related, using a loaded analogy specifically chosen for his “Highnesses… who are already masters of the whole of Spain.” Though recent royal efforts had helped bring the remoter islands into subjection, its “inhabitants speak the language and have the habits of the Irish.” With this, Ayala turned south, again stressing the proximity of England and Scotland before opening his discussion of Henry VII and English identity with comments on the new dynasty’s might and position. In the wake of the Wars of the Roses, the ambassador judged Henry’s crown “undisputed, and his government is strong in all respects.” Though still hemmed in by Parliament and Privy Council, Henry had “shaken off” elements of his “subjection” and was loved for his virtue, which Ayala tied to the Tudor king’s unusual heritage (English on his mother’s side, Welsh on his father’s) and upbringing (in France, observing the machinations of Louis XI, Francis II of Brittany, and Philip the Bold of Burgundy). Bridging the discussion of monarch and nation as he had for Scotland, he declared that the English king “would like to govern England in the French fashion… [and] has the greatest desire to employ foreigners in his service,” but “cannot do so; for the envy of the English is diabolical, and, I think, without equal.” While Henry looked for peace with Scotland and Europe, even if it meant strengthening the Stewart House, his people were resentful and petty: “The King alone, as being more intelligent, and not a pure Englishman, does not share this jealousy.” In fact, Ayala continued, “One of the reasons why he leads a good life is that he has been brought up abroad.” The report was not wholly favorable; it impugned Henry’s excessive love of money and highlighted the unusual influence of his mother Margaret Beaufort. However, from the xenophobic Hispanophile Ayala, lack of Englishness constituted a compliment of the highest order,

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bestowed upon an unlikely king of England who must have been flattered by the attention. After all, “[Henry] likes to be much spoken of, and to be highly appreciated by the whole world.” To this very end, of global reputation, was Henry’s most enterprising endeavor in 1498: New World travel, described here as one prong of a fuller royal policy focused on domestic consolidation, Scottish relations, European politics, and economic gain. Here too is the passage that gives the letter its Atlantic color. Ayala explained that over the past seven years, Bristol had been the launching point of two to four ships annually in search of the “island of Brazil and the seven cities.” Now certain that new land had been found, Henry “equipped” John Cabot, “another Genoese, like Columbus” to “discover certain islands and continents.” The ambassador continued, I have seen, on a chart, the direction which they took, and the distance they sailed; and I think that what they have found, or what they are in search of, is what your Highnesses already possess… I write this because the King of England has often spoken to me on this subject, and he thinks that your Highnesses will take great interest in it… I told him that, in my opinion, the land was already in the possession of your Majesties; but though I gave him my reasons, he did not like them.

Though he considered sending Cabot’s “mapa mundi” to Spain, Ayala defended his decision not to: he believed it “false, since it makes it appear as if the land in question was not the said islands.”1 The ambassador’s readers were formidable and invested, the fulcrum of European politics and diplomacy—secular and ecclesiastical—and heads of an emerging colonial empire with which they remain synonymous over five centuries later. Yet with Ayala’s help during that summer at the end of fifteenth century, Ferdinand and Isabella were looking to the lately established Tudors, as a potential ally if Katherine of Aragon’s betrothal to Arthur Prince of Wales went forward, a potential threat to peace if Henry could not ward off rebellion and sedition, and a potential competitor in trade, exploration, and discovery if his merchants and adventurers continued their overseas probing. Through the eyes of the most powerful monarchy in the history and historiography of European imperialism and their 1  Ayala to Ferdinand and Isabella, 25 July 1498, Calendar of State Papers, Spain, 19 vols. (London, 1862), 1:210.

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servant, an overlooked but equally vital player in that story comes into view, as does his broader world. With notes on Henry’s quest for strength and stability, his avarice, domineering mother, martial and marital policies, non-English past as well as its keen appreciation of European dynamics and Atlantic lens, Ayala’s letter encapsulates what is remembered, what is forgotten, and what is significant about the reign of the first Tudor king— the alien, upstart founder of the dynasty. During Henry VII’s rule, under his authority, and in his name, British subjects established the direction and set the distance of the Tudor empire, from England to Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, and the New World. When he looked out from the British Isles in 1498, Ayala captured a king, kingdom, and people in motion, ideologically and physically, at a date very near the middle of Henry VII’s kingship. Yet with all they show about national, European, and imperial circumstances, his observations beg for a still wider frame, to search out the origins and immediate consequences of what the embassy found. This hunt, in turn, uncovers a roughly twenty-five-year span stretching from Henry Tudor’s improbable defeat of sitting King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field through to the much-anticipated coronation of his eponymous son at Westminster Abbey. Taken in its full transnational context, the period from 1485 to 1509 was crucial to the advent and growth of the British nation and world, in theory and in practice. Amid perennial threats to his throne and succession, especially from the northern and western edges of his dominion, Henry VII worked symbiotically with court and subjects to channel dynastic illegitimacy, insecurity, and insolvency into consolidation and identity-building at home and experimentation and empire-building abroad—two doses of a single cure for the malaise induced by the protracted civil conflict that had begun thirty years earlier, in 1455, and fractured the realm into Yorkist and Lancastrian sides. Across his nearly quarter-century reign, Henry’s prime concern was to keep the crowns of England and France as well as the lordship of Ireland and principality of Wales firmly in his grip; however, his pursuit of this end, in close collaboration with the scholars, artists, merchants, travelers, and diplomats that he supported, was as much offensive, active, and expansionary as it was defensive, passive, and inward-­ looking. Fueled by the monarch’s Welsh descent and lengthy exile in France, a sophisticated blend of old and new cultural currents from medieval literature to Renaissance humanism, careful study of the shifting alignments and political philosophies of other European powers, and the pull of oceanic commerce and navigation, they transformed liabilities into

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sources of strength and durability. On both sides of the Atlantic, their efforts set powerful, useful precedent and garnered essential experience that would persist across the sixteenth century, not least thanks to the profound influence of this courtly milieu on the future Henry VIII. Fusing the domestic and the international, the landed and the maritime forces us to re-examine Henry VII and his reign, challenging the dominant paradigms that snub his era as a liminal, medieval coda or focus on either proving or vindicating his reputation as a paranoid, rapacious usurper.2 It reveals a king who presided over the creation and early execution of a Tudor British imperial vision. * * * On 22 August 1485, after a journey that began across the Channel in France, landed near Milford Haven in Wales, and finally ended across the border in the Midlands of England, a motley crew of English, Welsh, Scottish, and French soldiers led by Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, defeated Yorkist King Richard III and his army at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire.3 Their success is a lesson in contingency, exigency, and 2  For an excellent study of this historiography, see Steven J. Gunn, “Henry VII in Context: Problems and Possibilities,” History 92, no. 307 (2007): 301–317. Among the king’s champions, the most influential are promoters of the “New Monarchy” thesis, who charge that the king presided over a decisive break from war-torn late-medieval England and ushered in early modernity. His detractors have been buoyed by G.R.  Elton’s elevation of the 1530s, K.B. McFarlane’s social approach, and, most recently, the discovery of Richard III’s remains, as well as the strength of the paranoid avarice trope and an Anglo-centric unit of analysis. See J.P.  Cooper, “Henry VII’s Last Years Reconsidered,” Historical Journal 2, no. 2 (1959); 103–129; S.B.  Chrimes, Henry VII (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (1973); Elton, “Henry VII: Rapacity and Remorse” and “Henry VII: A Restatement,” Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974): 45–65, 66–99; Benjamin Thompson, ed., The Reign of Henry VII (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1995); Sean Cunningham, Henry VII (London: Routledge, 2007); Mark Horowitz, ed., “Who was Henry VII?” Historical Research 82, no. 217 (2009); William Penn, Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (London: Penguin, 2011). Steven G. Ellis, David Grummitt, and John M. Currin (for the British Isles and France) as well as J.A Williamson, D.B. Quinn, Evan T. Jones, and Kirsten Seaver (for North America) all point to the possibilities of a less insular approach. 3  Michael Jones, Bosworth, 1485: The Battle that Transformed England (NY: Pegasus Books, 2015); Glenn Foard and Anne Curry, Bosworth 1584: A Battlefield Rediscovered (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013); A.J. Pollard, ed., The Wars of the Roses (NY: St. Martin’s

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unlikelihood. Born in 1457, Pembrokeshire, not far from where he would disembark nearly thirty years later, Henry was the sole child of two members of the House of Lancaster, Edmund Tudor (half-brother to Henry VI) and Margaret Beaufort (a direct descendant of Edward III via John of Gaunt). When Edward IV and the House of York regained the throne in 1471, Henry took refuge at the Breton Court. There, he acted as a pupil, pawn, and sometimes participant in the intricate web of Anglo-French politics that followed the Hundred Years’ War and, after Richard seized power from his ill-fated nephews in 1483, in Lancastrian hopes for redemption.4 In this, the machinations of his mother and her allies were key, rallying anti-Ricardian sentiment in England and engineering approval for a marriage between Henry and Edward IV’s daughter and only living heir, Elizabeth of York—a union of the red and white roses—in Rome.5 The international complexion of the invasion and their circuitous, improbable route to victory at Bosworth all befit the challenger’s past, while fundamentally influencing his future rule. They fostered in him a deep-seated desire for peace and penchant for marital diplomacy, illustrated the importance of monarchical authority and security, lent the new regime a lasting British (English, Welsh, and Scottish) tenor, and foreshadowed the lasting importance of the Isles and France in Tudor calculus, with Wales and Brittany on their side and Ireland and Calais lasting hotbeds of Yorkist fervor. Though their background was French, the Plantagenets were English, and defiantly so, a national sentiment and xenophobic posture encouraged by the Hundred Years’ War and Wars of the Roses. During these two conflicts, elite Englishmen labored to define themselves against enemy outsiders, inferior “others” found within and outside the realm. A watershed came at the Council of Constance in 1414–1418, where an English Press, 1995); Michael Bennett, The Battle of Bosworth (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1985); Ralph A.  Griffiths and Roger S.  Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1985). 4  Gunn, “Henry VII (1457–1509),” ODNB (2008) and “Politic history, New Monarchy and state formation: Henry VII in European perspective,” Historical Research 83, no. 217 (August 2009): 380–392; Cunningham, Henry VII, 10–42; Chrimes, Henry VII, 3–49. 5  C.S.L. Davies, “Bishop John Morton, the Holy See, and the accession of Henry VII,” English Historical Review 102, no. 402 (January 1987): 2–30; Arlene Naylor Okerlund, Elizabeth of York (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 36–37; Michael K.  Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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representative asserted that “whether nation be understood as a people marked off from others by blood relationship and habit of unity or by peculiarities of language, the most sure and positive sign and essence of a nation in divine and human law,” England met each requirement, “a territory equal to that of the French nation.”6 Another followed in 1460–1461, when the invasion of Margaret of Anjou’s Lancastrian forces led to widespread accusations that the North was wild and barbarous by comparison to the civilized, truly English South.7 By 1500, these ideas were far enough along for an Italian observer to declare that “the English are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they say that ‘he looks like an Englishman”; “they have an antipathy to foreigners.”8 The rising tide of national feeling posed a significant problem for Henry VII, a non-English “other” by way of Wales and France, as Ayala’s dispatch well into the reign suggested. More immediately, writing in June 1585, Richard III was well aware of his challenger’s birth, backing, and bombast, and sought to take full advantage, demonstrating the seriousness of Henry’s foreign connections. Calling him an ambitious, covetous bastard, Richard claimed that “Henry Tydder” had bargained with his “auncient enemy of France” in pursuit of his “fals intent and purpose,” gaining their support by promising to “geve up and relese inperpetuite all the right, title, and cleyme that the Kyng[es] of Englond have, had, and 6  As quoted in Louise R. Loomis, “Nationality at the Council of Constance: An AngloFrench Dispute,” American Historical Review 44, no. 3 (April 1939): 508–527, at 524–525 and Ellis, “Crown, Community, and Government in the English Territories, 1450–1575,” History 71, no. 232 (June 1986): 187–204, at 194. On the rise of English national sentiment, see Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background (London: Macmillan, 1944); J.P.  Genet, “English Nationalism: Thomas Polton at the Council of Constance,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 28 (1984): 60–78; Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 7  Andy King, “The Anglo-Scottish Marches and the Perception of ‘the North’ in FifteenthCentury England,” Northern History 49, no. 1 (March 2012): 37–50; Huw Pryce and John Watts, eds., Power and Identity in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 8  Charlotte Augusta Sneyd, ed., A Relation or Rather a True Account, of the Island of England (London: Camden Society, 1847), 20–21, 23.

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ought to have to the Crowne and Reame of France… and exclude the armes of Fraunce out of the armes of Englond for ever”—a massive betrayal. Accordingly, “every true and naturall Englishman born must ley to his hands for his owen suerte and wele” to resist the coming invasion.9 Born of necessity, the Tudor response began before Henry’s crossing and grew into a concerted royal policy of first claiming Englishness and then, after his accession, a superior Britishness. Henry’s marriage, compacted in France, inaugurated the scheme. It not only united Lancaster and York, but naturalized and Anglicized the claimant and any offspring by binding them to a native-born Englishwoman. Henry then furthered the link by writing to his supporters in England, stressing that he was but “your poor exiled friend,” in need of aid “to the furtherance of my rightful claim” against his “homicide and unnatural” foe, who “now unjustly bears dominion over you.”10 By Bosworth, the future king’s rhetoric was even more fully formed, at least according to Edward Hall’s chronicle, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke (1548). Deploying English imagery and proclaiming his right there with added color from Antiquity, Henry enjoined his men to fight “like ramping lions… in the name of God and Saint George”11 against Richard, “an extreme destroyer of his nobility, and to his and our country and the poor subjects of the same,” “usurp[er of] our lawful patrimony and lineal inheritance,”12 and tyrant worse than Tarquin or Nero.13 Henry thus positioned the English-born Richard as the unnatural and unjust party in the fight. The discourse was ultimately successful, contributing to the vilification of Richard that followed his defeat and to a historiographical tradition legitimizing Henry’s English claim and his English identity, epitomized by Richard Grafton’s 1569 description of the Earl of Richmond as the prince who “returne[d] home againe into England, where he was both wished & loked for”14 to “gatte the Diademe and possession of the state royall and 9  “Richard III’s proclamation against Henry Tudor,” in A.F.  Pollard, ed., The Reign of Henry VII from Contemporary Sources, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1913), 1:4–5. 10  “Henry VII to his friends in England (1485),” in Kings’ Letters: From the Early Tudors, Part II, ed. Robert Steele (London: Chatto and Windus, 1907), 1. 11  “Henry’s alleged manifesto to his army on the eve of the battle of Bosworth… from Hall’s ‘Chronicle’,” Contemporary Sources, 1:6–10, at 10. 12  Manifesto, Contemporary Sources, 1:7. 13  Manifesto, Contemporary Sources, 1:8. 14  Grafton, A Chronicle at Large (1569), in Grafton’s Chronicle (London, 1809), 2:132.

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princely preheminence of this famous Empire and renowmed kingdome.”15 Significantly, however, Richard’s complaints held sway in the short-term, galvanizing and substantiating over two decades of plots against Henry VII, while helping to cement the alternative Tudor ideology that continued in opposition to it. Even as he asserted his Englishness, Henry also started to go further, setting the stage for an even stronger, more expansive territorial claim. He had landed in Wales for a reason: over the course of the week leading up to Bosworth, Henry and his supporters snaked their way through the country in a march that was about covering distance as much as securing his native powerbase, adding Welshmen to his retinue, assuring local magnates of a place in his government, and promising the Welsh a modicum of equality with their English counterparts.16 In so doing, he reminded his potential subjects that a Tudor regime offered more than just a claim to an English present, but a claim to a mythical British past immortalized by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannia (ca. 1136) and the Brut tradition, which his accession promised to recreate in the future. Henry’s heritage enabled him to tap into the entire Galfridian legend and its offshoots, from the oracle Diana’s instructions to Trojan exile (and Aeneas descendant) Brutus to travel past Gaul in search of the island that would bear his name and descendants, becoming a “second Troy” and begetting a “race of kings” to whom “the round circle of the whole earth will be subject,”17 to Merlin’s prophecies of a long-struggling but ultimately triumphant “Red Dragon [which] represents the people of Britain,”18 and King Arthur’s conquering feats in Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, France, Iceland, and more before his mystery-shrouded death,19 down to Cadwallader, the last British King.20 As humanist Polydore Vergil explained, “797 years before, there came one night to Cadwallader, last king of the Britons… some sort of an apparition with a heavenly appearance; this foretold how long afterwards it would come to pass that his descendants would recover the land. This prophecy, they say,

 Grafton, Chronicle, 2:157.  Chrimes, Henry VII, 42–43. 17  Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. by Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin, 1966), 65. 18  Geoffrey of Monmouth, History, 171. 19  Geoffrey of Monmouth, History, 213–261. 20  Geoffrey of Monmouth, History, 281. 15 16

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came true in Henry, who traced his ancestry back to Cadwallader.”21 Welsh bard Elis Gruffydd even recorded that Henry had been christened “Ywain,” the name of the last native Prince of Wales (Owain Glyndwr) and prophesized British conqueror of England.22 Scarcely one day after Bosworth, the victor released a circular letter naming himself “Henry by the grace of God, king of England and of France, Prince of Wales, and Lord of Ireland”23 and set off for London, diligently using his progress as an tool of “prestige propaganda.”24 Cutting his path with a grand display of white Richmond Greyhound and red Cadwallader Dragon, the heraldry later adopted by all four of his successors, Henry VII offered a merger of Englishness and Welshness into a Britishness that was more than the sum of its parts. Plans were quickly set in motion for his late October coronation at Westminster Abbey, evincing a palpable need for legitimacy by solemnization. Indeed, Henry saw to his own crowning some four months before his wedding and nearly two years before Elizabeth of York was crowned queen, all to ensure that he ascended by his own right and could rule independently.25 The capital was sumptuously decorated, the early evidence of Henry VII’s Renaissance style. Behind horses draped in cloth of gold and the new coat of arms26 and a massive armed guard that served as a warning to malefactors, Henry processed “bearing Reliques and other thinges accustomed to be brone in Coronacion… [like] A chalice of gold, a Patene of the same, a Sceptre wt the dove, and an other rode of golde,” powerful symbols of medieval English royalty.27 Recognized by the archbishop of Canterbury as “rightfull and indoubted enheritor by the Lawes of god and man to the Crowne [and] royall dignitie of England,”28 Henry 21  Denys Hay, ed., The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, A.D. 1485–1537 (London: Camden Society, 1950), 5. 22  Cunningham, Henry VII, 270–271. Even Ayala noted the special hold of such tales on British minds, writing to Ferdinand and Isabella that “the people of England believe in prophecies. In Wales there are many who tell fortunes,” relying on “signs and ceremonies which they perform,” 26 March 1499, CSPS 1:239. 23  “Circular letter of Henry VII,” Contemporary Sources, 1:11–12, at 12. 24  Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 106. 25  Anglo, Spectacle, 10–12. 26  “Little Device for the Coronation of Henry VII,” in Leopold G. Wickham, ed., English Coronation Records (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1901), 222. 27  “Little Device,” 226. 28  “Little Device,” 228.

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vowed to “graunt and keepe to the people of Englande the Lawes and customes to them as olde rightfull and devoute kinges graunted,” especially those of “glorious king Saynct Edwarde.”29 The lavish display matched the moment’s significance, taking advantage of a well-­documented medieval ritual to bolster a sense of English national identity critical to the success of his kingship, while temporarily sidelining the shows of Welshness and Britishness present in the months prior. Parliament amplified the message, combining practical provisions, like predating the reign to the day before Bosworth to attaint Ricardians, reversing Lancastrian attainders, and negating some Plantagenet law, with seminal statements on the new king’s right, including their very appearance when called in November 1485. The session opened with a reference-­ filled oration by John Alcock, welcoming Henry as an invincible second Joshua who had rescued the realm from an Ovidian cycle of violence, greed, and sedition and inaugurated an “age of gold for king and kingdom.”30 It then passed a bill on the king’s title, which vindicated Henry and his heirs as rightful inheritors of “the crowns of the realms of England and of France, with all the pre-eminence and royal dignity pertaining to them, and all other lordships belonging to the king overseas,” all “for the pleasure of Almighty God, the wealth, prosperity and security of this realm of England, the particular comfort of all the king’s subjects, and to avoid all ambiguities and questions.”31 Other statutes defined the monarch’s landed reach as stretching from newly annexed Lancaster and Cornwall to all territories held at any time by Henry VI or Edward IV in England, Ireland, Calais, or the Marches and filled his coffers with new subsidies.32 Later parliaments developed these themes. In January 1497, John Morton’s opening speech implicitly compared Henry to the Roman Scipio and the Holy Fathers, who put state, God, and law before personal safety to save their people from conquest, and James IV to Hannibal, chastising the Scots’ evil and illegitimate invasion of England in the same

 “Little Device,” 230.  “The Roll of the Parliament held at Westminster on 7 November in the First Year of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh,” Part I, in Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, eds. Chris Given-Wilson, Paul Brand, Seymour Phillips, Mark Ormrod, Geoffrey Martin, Anne Curry, and Rosemary Horrox (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), vi-267, col. a. 31  “Titulus Regis,” Parliament Rolls, vi-270, col. b. 32  Parliament Rolls, vi-270, col. b. and vi-274, col. a. 29 30

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breath.33 To Grafton, the late fifteenth-century agenda and discourse reflected Henry’s esteem of the English nacion his naturall counrimen… as a chiefe and principall part of hys duetie to see his realme, both adorned and beautified wyth good and profitable lawes, and statutes, and also to florish in vertuous exercises, and good and ciuyll maners, which shoulde be an occasion to cause all men to hope, that all thing would continually amend, from euil to good, from good to better, and from better to the best. Thys sure foundacion king Henry layde at the beginning of his raygne, entending theron continually to builde.34

Together, then, king and parliament forged a dynasty, grounded in law, as ample as its predecessors, and imbued with classical, biblical, and medieval allusion, with a naturalized English core and British monarchy, and eye toward imperial enlargement on those bases of superiority. In this same vein, the court carefully planned and executed another showpiece in 1486: the long-promised marriage between Henry and Elizabeth of York. It circulated a papal dispensation legitimizing and praising the match as the solution to “the longe and greuous veriaunce, contentions, and debates” dividing England, reissuing it three times over the next decade,35 and supported a series of pageants coinciding with the couple’s first progress. In York, the pair met representations of the first six King Henries who presented a scepter to Solomon, who in turn handed it to Henry proclaiming “Proof makith experience now souueraigne in your Space / Of purede witt to your blood of great Antiquitie,”36 and David, who celebrated this “Moost prepotent prince of power Imperiall… In maner mor noble” than Charlemagne.37 In Worcester, they were greeted by Henry VI, who called him his “cosyn” and “heire” and the Virgin Mary, who counseled him follow God who “shall guyde thee both by See

33  “The Roll of the Parliament of Henry VII of the Twelfth Year of his Reign,” 16 January–13 March 1497, Parliament Rolls, vi-509, col. a. 34  Grafton, Chronicle, 2:160. 35  Our holy fadre the Pope Innocent the .viij. To the p[er]petuall memory of this here after (1486). All early printed books were published in London unless otherwise stated. 36  “1486 York,” in Records of Early English Drama: York, eds. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 149. 37  “1486 York,” 150.

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and Lande,”38 all before the city’s gatekeeper lauded him as Noah, Jacob, Jason, and Caesar, concluding, “Welcome Scipio the whiche toked Hanyball / Welcome Arture the very Britan kyng / Welcome defence to England as a walle / Cadwaladers blodde lynyally descending / Longe hath bee towlde of such a prince comyng.”39 The spectacle thus reflected and pushed the new dynasty’s British and imperial aspirations, blending art, history, mythology, and prophecy to expect a future of English, but also extra-national, activity. Although the displays were self-serving, put on by cities hoping for patronage, the localities and the crown were working in tandem, as Bristol demonstrates: here, Galfridian king and town-­ founder Brennius appeared, mourning the decay of the port’s merchants and artificers and begging Henry to salvage the navy and cloth-making. Within days, the king ordered an inquiry into Bristol’s finances and offered crown aid,40 inaugurating a policy of maritime and commercial investment there that would persist across his reign. Early Tudor self-fashioning intensified at two other critical moments, Elizabeth’s pregnancy in 1486 and coronation in 1487, further solidifying the dynasty’s British and imperial associations as well as two of its most potent and celebrated icons: the union rose and the red dragon. Created by inscribing the white York within the Lancastrian red, the rose symbolized both national consolidation in the wake of civil war and, when topped by an imperial crown (domed or closed at the top to show the completeness of the wearers’ power) as was common in Tudor iconography, empire. One witness to its use on the York city gates in 1486 explained that the double rose, “so being togedre all floures shall lowte and evidently yeve suffrantie, showing the rose to be the prnicipall of all floures… and therupon shall come fro a cloud a croune covering the roses.”41 The remark implicitly conveyed the new regime’s horticultural hegemony over the Scots and their thistle as well as the French and their lily and thus subtly carried an imperial connotation. York’s pageantry followed this thread, as its founder Ebrauke recalled how “Of Right, I was regent and rewlid this 38   “First Provincial Progress of Henry VII,” in Records of Early English Drama: Herefordshire, Worcestershire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), ed. David N. Klausner, 406. 39  “First Provincial Progress,” 410. 40  David Harris Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Anglo, Spectacle, 33. Henry would visit Bristol again 1496, see Cabot Voyages, 43. 41  “1486 York,” 139.

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rigion / I subdewid fraunce, and led in my legence.”42 The full meaning and utility of the flower, however, waited in limbo until 19 September 1486. On that date, the king and queen’s first child was born and the emblem gained its true valiance. Henry and Elizabeth might have united the red and white in marriage, but their heir was the union rose incarnate. The birth also confirmed the dynasty’s Welsh and British color with another, equally powerful symbol: in a reward of sorts for her successful pregnancy, Elizabeth’s coronation pageant boasted a barge “garnysshed and apparellede, passing al other, wherin was ordeynede a great red Dragon spowting Flamys of Fyer into Temmys.”43 A male heir was the crown’s most important asset and the occasion of his birth demonstrates how Henry VII used British—especially British imperial—mythology to legitimize and strengthen his dynasty. First, in expectation of the birth, he moved his wife’s household to Winchester, a Roman town favored by Alfred the Great and the legendary site of Camelot.44 He then saw to the child’s baptism at Winchester Cathedral under the storied name of Arthur, as his leading humanists Bernard André, Giovanni de Gigli, and Pietro Carmeliano rushed to commemorate in prose and in verse adorned with intertwined roses and royal arms supported by angels and flanked by the greyhound and dragon.45 André’s language was particularly evocative in its classical and imperial imagery, commending the authors who had foretold Arthur’s return, celebrating Arthur as the King of Britain reincarnate, and describing how Apollo would calm western waters while the prince rolled his starry orb.46 The Italian, who would later serve as Arthur’s tutor, turned his subject into a classical emperor, descended from Olympus and crowned with laurel leaves to shouts of “Io Paean”!47 Court poet Carmeliano employed a  “1486 York,” 140.  Anne Lancashire, London Civic Theater: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times to 1558 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 143. 44  The association appeared in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (published in England the year of Bosworth). Robert Allen Rouse and Cory James Rushton, “Arthurian Geography,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arthurian Legend, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 218–234. 45  André, De Arturo sacrosancto fonte regnato in Memorials of King Henry the Seventh, ed. James Gairdner (London: 1858), 41–42; Gigli, Epithalamium de nuptiis, BL Harl. MS 336; Carmeliano, Brixiensis poete suasoria Leticie ad Angliam pro sublatis bellis ciuilibus et Arthuro principe nato epistola, BL Add MS 33736. 46  André, De Arturo, 42. 47  André, De Arturo, 41–42. 42 43

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structure and motifs fashionable among his continental counterparts, introducing these Renaissance techniques to England as he celebrated the end of civil war, the dawning of peace, and the prophesized return of a long-buried king, while de Giglis waxed similarly.48 Significantly, antiquarian John Leland connected this apparently British and even classical moment to English national sentiment, writing that upon Prince Arthur’s christening “Over al Te Deum Laudamus [was] songen, with Ringyng of Belles, and in the moest Parties, Fiers made in the Praysing of God, and the Rejoysing of every true Englisseman.”49 By linking reverence for the newly established Tudor dynasty to English, Welsh, British, and Greco-­ Roman imperial history and imagery, these humanist scholars complemented and extended what Henry VII had set in motion in 1485. Three more surviving children, Margaret, Henry, and Mary, born in 1489, 1491, and 1496, aided in the process. A 1498 pageant in Coventry pulled the various strands of court strategy together to fete Prince Arthur. One tableau featured the personification of Fortune, urged him to follow her and, by extension, follow in the paths of great emperors and scholars of Antiquity, like Caesar, Hector, Scipio, and Cicero50; another depicted English patron Saint George slaying the dragon51; and a third featured the Galfridian King Arthur, who appeared to counsel his “noble progeny” on his divine purpose: To sprede our name, Arthur, & actes to auaunce, And of meanys victorious to have such habundaunce, That no fals treitour, ne cruell tirrant, Shall in eny wyse make profer to your lande. And rebelles all falce quarrels schall eschewe, Thurgh the fere of Pallas, that favoreth your linage And all outward Enmyes laboreth to subdue, To make them to do to yewe as to me dyd homage.52

 Anglo, Spectacle, 46–47.  Thomas Hearne, ed., Joannis Lelandi Antiquarii De Rebvs Britannicis Collectanea (London: 1774), 4:204. 50  Mary Dormer Harris, ed., The Coventry Leet Book (Oxford, 1907), 2: 590. 51  Coventry Leet Book, 2:590–591. 52  Coventry Leet Book, 2:589–590. 48 49

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The message was clear: drawing comparisons to imperial history and validated in their Englishness by St. George, the Tudors had fulfilled Merlin’s prophecy and stood on the precipice of a new British Empire. As numerous as they were, celebrations alone could not sustain the dynasty, consolidate the realm, and increase its global reach. To augment these public displays of pageantry, poetry, and parliament, Henry VII undertook another major project, with the help of his courtiers and kin: turning the court into a premier cultural epicenter with a magnetic, European-wide pull—a manifestation of the monarchy’s aspirational stature and standing. As S.J. Gunn put it, the new court “expended considerable money and effort on the creation of a splendid and fashionable court, aiming to impress his own subjects with his power and majesty, and the ruling houses of Europe with the permanence and diplomatic weight of his dynasty,”53 thereby securing the national and international support vital to the regime’s survival. Equally, it aimed to provide counsel to the current ruler and schooling to his heirs. The immediate goal was precisely what the Milanese ambassador felt in 1497 London: “I could fancy myself at Rome.”54 A variety of circumstances aided crown efforts, some of its own making, others not. As David R. Carlson has shown, by the late fifteenth century, “a large and disproportionately influential English population had come to be convinced of the value of humanist training, to the extent that they demanded it for themselves or those whom they employed.”55 Further, Henry VII and his circle felt a particular proclivity, for three main reasons: first, the studia humanitatis was rooted in a reverence of the past and historical genealogy, the same ingredients central to the king’s dynastic strategy; second, the New Learning was in vogue—by championing it, the crown positioned the realm at the cusp of European intellectual development, to the excitement of English and non-English elites; third and most practically, the humanist curriculum promised to breed good kingship, even in the most inexperienced administrators or young children, on the basis of ancient example. Equally important were push factors like the over-production of humanists in Italy and political turmoil there following 53  Gunn, “The Courtiers of Henry VII,” English Historical Review 108, no. 426 (January 1993): 23–49, at 23. 54  Raimondo de Raimondi de Soncino to the Duke of Milan, 8 September 1497, in Calendar of State Papers Milan, 1385–1618, ed. Allen B. Hinds (London, 1912), 540. 55  Carlson, English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscripts and Print, 1475–1525 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 17.

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the 1494 French invasion, all in stark contrast to the growing demand in a newly peaceful and seemingly wealthy England.56 Renaissance Humanism and the Tudor House were thus a perfect match: scholars needed eager, rich patrons just as the crown needed legitimacy, prestige, lessons for governance, and training for its next generation. After 1485, significant numbers of foreign intellectuals came to seek fame and fortune in England, where they came to play a vital role in Tudor promotion, political philosophy, and activity. Influential in determining the mental world of the early Tudor court was Margaret Beaufort, England’s chief literary and collegiate patron in the 1490s and 1500s and a scholar in her own right, translating devotional texts as part of her intense spiritual practice. A shrewd political mind active in plotting Henry’s road to Bosworth, Margaret and her son were unusually close—a bond fixed, perhaps, by Edmund’s death before the birth, when she was only fourteen. She appears to have wielded enormous sway over Henry during his reign, as contemporaries and modern authorities have stressed, and she signed her letters “Margaret R,” invoking queenly status.57 Henry’s adoption of the Beaufort badge, a portcullis representing strength and security, gave expression to their relationship, while aptly mirroring their shared prime concerns.58 Like the union rose, the portcullis remained in use to 1603—a fitting monument to Margaret’s lasting dynastic significance. Margaret’s role took shape early: Parliament declared her femme sole in 148559 and, over the next two years, Henry gifted her considerable property and funds to help govern and supervise his children.60 Unusually well educated for her sex, Margaret’s unrequited love of esoteric Greek and Latin texts deemed inappropriate for women gave her a natural affinity for 56  Paul O. Kristeller, “The European Diffusion of Italian Humanism,” Italica 39, no. 1 (March 1962): 1–20; Hay, The Italian Renaissance in its Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 179–203; Albert Rabil, Jr., ed., Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). 57  Ayala to Ferdinand and Isabella, 25 July 1498, CSPS 1:210; Chrimes, Henry VII, 57, 109, 240; Cunningham, Henry VII, 21–25, 174; Penn, Winter King, 50, 94–104; David Starkey wrote that their correspondence “reads more like the letters of two lovers than of mother and son,” Henry: Virtuous Prince (London: HarperPress, 2008), 19. 58  Peter Cross and Maurice Hugh Keen, eds., Heraldry, Pageantry, and Social Display in Medieval England (London: Boydell, 2002), 133; Jones and Underwood, King’s Mother, 43. 59  “For the countess of Richmond,” Parliament Rolls, vi-284, col. b–vi-285, col. b. 60  Jones and Underwood, King’s Mother, 93–136; Linda Simon, Of Virtue Rare: Margaret Beaufort, Matriarch of the House of Tudor (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 97–106.

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the studia humanitatis, which she now had the position, clout, and funds to secure.61 With his mother’s encouragement, Henry soon played host to a laundry list of poet-orators, professional pedagogues, printer-­chroniclers, and artists, most educated at Padua, Rome, or (increasingly) Oxford and Cambridge and all of documentable humanist leaning, including André, Vergil, Carmeliano, de Giglis, John Skelton, John Holt, John Rede, William Hone, and Giles Duwes.62 What they created—a distinctive, unprecedented didactic establishment within the royal household—served as a template for sixteenth-century England and nurtured native humanists like Thomas More, John Colet, John Leland, and Thomas Smith. Despite internal variety, the New Learning’s attachment to history (classical, ancient, and medieval), moral philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, oratory, and political theory remained constant, duly inflecting royal education and monarchical policy to 1603.63 Beginning in 1491, then, a carefully constructed Renaissance world flourished at the Tudor court, suiting both Beaufort’s interests and the needs of an embryotic dynasty. The humanists’ task was to flatter and instruct the monarch and his family. Appropriately, André’s verses in celebration of Arthur’s birth earned him top position of royal tutor around 149664 and he chose a course of study that honored his earlier poem’s classicism: “in grammar, Guarino, Perotti, Pomponio, Leto, Sulpizio, Aulus Gellius, and Valla; in poetry, Homer, Virgil, Lucan, Ovid, Silius Italicus, Plactus, and Terence; in oratory, the De officiis, the Letters, and the Paradoxa stoicorum of Cicero, and Quintilian; and in history Thucydides, Livy, Caesar’s Commentaries, Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny,

 Jones and Underwood, King’s Mother, 74; Simon, Of Virtue Rare, 3–4.  Carlson, “The Royal Tutors of Henry VII,” Sixteenth Century Journal 22, no. 2 (1991): 253–279. 63  On English humanism, see Jonathan Woolfson, ed., Reassessing Tudor Humanism (London: Palgrave, 2002); Carlson, English Humanist Books; J.B. Trapp, Erasmus, Colet, and More: The Early Tudor Humanists and their Books (London: British Library, 1991); Fredric Seebolm, The Oxford Reformers: Colet, Erasmus, and More (Edinburgh: Everyman’s Library, 1914). On education, see Nicholas Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry: The Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy, 1066–1530 (London: Routledge, 1984); Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 59–101; Aysha Pollnitz, Princely Education in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 64  André, Vita Henrici Septimi, in James Gairdner, ed., Historia regis Henrici Septimi (London, 1858), 6–7. 61 62

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Valerius Maximus, Sallust, and Eusebius.”65 As André’s successor Skelton put it, this classicism was why the crown chose these men to acquaint “the honor of Englond… with the Musys nyne.”66 Of the some 2000 books owned by Skelton’s pupil, the future Henry VIII, close to a quarter were histories and another quarter works of philosophy. The inventory also demonstrates the porous divide between late-medieval and Renaissance thought, at least when it came to education, with items from the classical canon like Xenophon and Aristotle placed alongside Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Ranulf Higden, Jean Froissart and other Anglo-Saxon, Brut, Norman, and more recent chroniclers—all deemed necessary and useful for royal pedagogy, much as they were for Tudor self-fashioning.67 The move also reflects wider literary trends in the early 1500s, like the booming popularity of Thomas Malory, who outpaced Niccolò Machiavelli or Philip Melanchthon in readership.68 Moreover, these pairings shared topical similarities befitting the budding Tudor ideology; Suetonius’s History of the Twelve Caesars and Gerald of Wales’s Expugnatio Hibernica, for example, both concerned imperialism and statecraft.69 To use Skelton’s coupling, early English humanism was as much about elevating Alexander the Great as it was about Richard the Lionheart.70 It was also about 65  André, Vita Henrici Septimi, 43. André’s curriculum bears strong resemblance to what John Skelton created for the future Henry VIII, Juan Luis Vives for Mary I, John Cheke for Edward VI, and Roger Ascham for Elizabeth I. 66  Skelton, Agenst Garnesche in John Skelton: The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 132. 67  James P. Carley, ed., The Libraries of King Henry VIII (London: British Library, 2000); Carley, Books of Henry VIII and his Wives (London: British Library, 2005). 68  Gunn, “Chivalry and the Politics of the Early Tudor Court” in Chivalry in the Renaissance, ed. Anglo (Rochester: Boydell, 1990), 107–128. Geoffrey of Monmouth enjoyed something similar, see Walter Ullmann, “On the Influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth in English History,” in Speculum Historiale, eds. C.  Bauer, L.  Böhm, and M.  Müller (Freiburg, 1965): 257–276. 69  Carley, Libraries of Henry VIII, 217, 195–196. 70  In 1501, Skelton composed his Speculum principis, which extolled the relationship between Alexander and Aristotle, for his pupil, the future Henry VIII; in 1512, he presented him with a chronicle of the Crusades, Réctis d’un ménestrel de Reims, with instructive annotations suggesting it didactic use. A.S.G. Edwards, ed., Skelton: the critical heritage (London: Routledge, 1981), 130–131; Maurice Pollet, John Skelton: Poet of Tudor England (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1962); William Nelson, John Skelton, Laureate (NY: Russell & Russell, 1964); Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Robert S.  Kinsman and David R Carlson, eds., John Skelton and Early Modern Culture (Tempe: ACMRS, 2008).

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c­ oncretely connecting the Tudors to that storied history. Around 1505, Henry VII selected the Italian Vergil, a careful student of Suetonius, Livy, Pliny, Tacitus, Bede, Gildas, Higden, and the Brut, to write a humanist history of Britain from Brutus to Bosworth. As Denys Hay surmised, “Henry VII had more reasons that many other sovereigns for welcoming a defence of his dynasty which would circulate among the courts of Europe” and “justify the Tudors to the scholars of Europe.”71 The result was the Anglica Historia, fully drafted in manuscript by 1513. Despite his critique of Geoffrey of Monmouth for “manufacturing many silly fictions,” especially concerning King Arthur, and “passing it off as honest history by giving it the coloration of the Latin language,”72 Vergil acknowledged the existence of “the British nation and empire” founded by Brutus73 and asserted the primacy of the English crown over the entirety, explaining that “the whole of England… is now called by the double name of England and Scotland.”74 He then chronicled this world’s benchmarks and heroes, from “Constantine, a British ruler, as emperor of all the world” who bestowed “the imperial diadem as a gift” upon all English kings,75 through legitimate conquests of “rustic Wild Irishmen”76 and inferior Wales, Scotland, France by Edward I, Henry II, Edward III, and Henry V,77 to the present. In Henry Tudor, Vergil contended, Cadwallader’s “forecast that his stock would reign once more… [as] Henry VI had also predicted,” a closing that fixed the Tudors to both medieval English and ancient British pasts, national and imperial.78 Beyond yet intimately tied to and concurrent with these courtly activities, Margaret Beaufort expanded the universities, with professorships at Oxford and Cambridge and foundations of Christ’s and St. John’s Colleges 71  Hay, Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 9. 72  Vergil, Anglica Historia (1555), ed. Dana F. Sutton (Philological Museum, 2010), Book I, paragraph 19. Vergil kept the rest of the history intact and his skepticism ultimately backfired, encouraging Leland’s steadfast assertion of Arthur’s veracity, see Carley, “Polydore Vergil and John Leland on King Arthur: The Battle of the Books,” Interpretations 15, no. 2 (Spring, 1984): 86–100. 73  Vergil, Anglica Historia, Book I, paragraph 19. 74  Vergil, Anglica Historia, Book I, paragraph 1. 75  Vergil, Anglica Historia, Book III, paragraph 1. 76  Vergil, Anglica Historia, Book XIII, paragraph 9. 77  Vergil, Anglica Historia, Books XIII (Henry II), XVII (Edward I), XIX (Edward III), and XXII (Henry V). 78  Vergil, Anglica Historia, Book XXVI, paragraph 1.

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at the latter, and became an important patron to William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde.79 Her commissions helped grow the function and broaden the reach of the printing press, the English vernacular, and the Trojan histories, English chronicles, French romances, and devotional tracts that they published. As Caxton highlighted in the dedication to his 1489 Blanchardine and Eglantine, Margaret’s command “to reduce & translate it in to our maternal & englyshe tonge” stemmed from her appreciation of the power of “Auncyent hystoryes of noble fayttes & valiaunt actes of armes & warre, whiche haue ben achyeued in olde tyme of many noble prynces, lordes, & knyghtes.”80 Evincing the interconnectedness of this network, in the preface to his 1490 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid dedicated to Prince Arthur Caxton praised Skelton as one among “diverse other werkes oute of latyn in to englysshe not in rude and olde language. but in polysshed and ornate termes craftely.”81 By supporting the press and its products, the royal family at once demonstrated their Englishness and hardened the English language and Tudor-friendly British history as core elements of their national identity over “rude” alternatives. As a group and with indispensable crown patronage, this humanist circle justified the existence of the Tudor monarchy and then went further, defining its terms and characteristics, legitimizing its geographical parameters, educating its progeny, and writing its history. Borrowing from Antiquity and the medieval era, they favored terms like imperium, dominium, and colonia (all in Vergil’s Historia), the English vernacular (as epitomized by Caxton), genres and plot devices like the chronicle, dialogue, and speculum principis (appreciable in André’s curriculum and Skelton’s corpus), tropes and metaphors like the body politic, physician-­ patient, and prophecy (evident throughout the royal library, e.g., John of Salisbury, Galen, and the Sibyllae Tiburtina),82 and a realm that stretched from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and France to a fuzzy western edge (as in Geoffrey’s Historia). However, two factors somewhat blunted 79  Patrick Collinson, Richard Rex, and Graham Stanton, Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Professors of Divinity at Cambridge, 1502–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jones and Underwood, King’s Mother, 202–231. 80  Caxton, Blanchardyn and Eglantine (London, 1489), 1. 81  Caxton, Eneydos (London, 1490), “Prologue.” See also Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 23–50. 82  Carley, Libraries of Henry VIII, 154 (Salisbury), 81, 195, 204 (Galen), 160–161 and 164 (Sibylla).

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the impact of this thought during Henry VII’s own kingship: the instability of his throne, which made security paramount, and his age, which meant that his outlook was largely formed by the time he experienced sustained contact with humanist theory. As William Penn has suggested, “although Henry VII had a healthy respect for the latest classical scholarship, recognizing the prestige it brought him and his family, he remained a distant admirer.”83 This is not to say that Renaissance culture failed to affect the Tudor polity before 1509. First, it had the intended result of raising the court’s esteem in the eyes of Englishmen and Europeans and demonstrating the vitality and strength of his monarchy (belying a reality of rebellion and sedition), which bore fruit in important embassies and alliances. As the Milanese ambassador reported in 1497, “this kingdom is perfectly stable, by reason first of the king’s wisdom, whereof everyone stands in awe, and second on account of the king’s wealth.”84 Second, it vindicated a policy of domestic consolidation part and parcel of foreign activity. In this, another Italian observer’s words are most appropriate: “from the time of William the Conqueror to the present, no king has reigned more peaceably than he has, his great prudence causing him to be universally feared; and, though frugal to excess in his own person, he does not change any of the ancient usages of England at his court.”85 * * * As they praised English peace, continental observers also pinpointed its source, contributing mightily to lasting stereotypes of Henry VII. Milan learned “that in his Highness’s opinion he has need of no one, while every one needs him… his Majesty can stand like one at the top of a tower looking on at what is passing in the plain”86; Spain that “he spends all the time he is not in public, or in his Council, in writing the accounts of his expenses with his own hand.”87 Henry’s childhood travails and improbable rise coupled with the pretender threats and cyclical hostility with his neighbors during his reign deeply affected the king’s personality and policy. He hoarded money, monopolized control, and trusted few,88 but he also  Penn, Winter King, 182.  Soncino to the Duke of Milan, 8 September 1497, CSPM 540. 85  Sneyd, ed., A Relation, 46. 86  Soncino to the Duke of Milan, 26 January 1499, CSPM 601. 87  Ayala to Ferdinand and Isabella, 25 July 1498, CSPS 1:210. 88  Gunn, “Henry VII” and “Courtiers,” 26, 36–38. 83 84

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­ ursued power beyond England and Wales—a perfectly consistent aspect p of his kingship overlooked by modern scholars. Stirred by theory, experience, and circumstance, Henry’s Atlantic activities propped up domestic security, increased national sentiment, and established an imperial roadmap, ideological and practical, for his successors. These three stimulants made Ireland the first site of his attentions after Bosworth, breeding an uneven policy of conciliation, intervention, and Anglicization that set the stage for a full century of Tudor empire on the island.89 The crown benefited from a prolific literature backing up its interests in Ireland, one that was only strengthened by the humanist penchant for rediscovering historic rights and the identity politics of the late fifteenth century, which eagerly bought into claims of English superiority. Among the most useful pieces was Laudabiliter (1155), English-born Pope Adrian IV’s bull authorizing Henry II’s invasion to subdue the Irish, subject them to law, and take possession of the island in exchange for a yearly pension. Flaunted by Gerald of Wales in his Topographia and Expugnatio Hibernica, the bull justified conquest on religious and cultural grounds, tantamount to a crusade, and in agricultural terms: “consider how you may best extend the glory of your name on earth and lay up for yourself an eternal reward in heaven when… you labour to extend the borders of the Church, to teach the truths of the Christian faith to a rude and unlettered people, and to root out the weeds of vice from the field of the Lord… sow[ing] in them the acceptable seeds of God’s word” and “planting virtue.”90 Pope Alexander III confirmed the grant in 1171, judging it the best means to abolish the “filthy practices of that… barbarous nation”91 and sanctioning settlement of the population that would become known as Anglo-Irish or Old English. The bulls lent papal credence to otherwise largely secular claims of English overlordship and redoubled what Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Brut showed. By both heritages, Ireland was Henry’s dominion, even more so than for his Norman and English predecessors. Eyeing this very evidence, Elizabethan Edward Campion 89  Ellis, “Tudor State Formation and the Shaping of the British Isles,” in Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725, ed. Ellis and Sarah Barber (NY: Longman, 1995), 40–63, at 44. 90  The bull is printed in Eleanor Hull, A History of Ireland, Volume I (London: Harrap & Co., 1926), Appendix I. On Gerald’s use of it, see Anne Duggan, “The Making of a Myth: Giraldus Cambrensis, Laudabiliter, and Henry II’s Lordship of Ireland,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 3, no. 4 (2007): 107–126. 91  Hull, History of Ireland, Appendix I.

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a­scertained, “thus had the Brittaines an elder right to the Realme of Ireland, then by the conquest of Henry the 2. which title they never surcease to claime.”92 Also demonstrable by this early Tudor literary arsenal, especially its travel narratives, was Ireland’s suitability for exploration and expansion. For example, William Worcestre’s Itineraries (1478–1480) had charged that the “wild and empty” Ireland had been “peopled by Gombatruz, King of England,”93 then “subdued” by “Arthur the noble fighter”94 and “King of the British people,”95 but that those of “the Irish nation” were still short-tempered and vengeful, as in Gerald’s time.96 Moreover, the broader region was replete with fertile soil and crops97 and, he suggested, a critical port of call for western enterprise: among the “Islands of Ireland” was “Blasket… he who wishes to sail to the island of Brazil must [there] set his course.” Indeed, Worcestre recorded, on 15 July 1480, a ship belonging to John Jay Jr. (his nephew) and captained by one Lloyd “began a voyage from the port of Bristol at King Road to the Island of Brazil to the west of Ireland, ploughing the seas… news came to Bristol on Monday 18 September that the ship had sailed the seas for about 9 months, but had found no island and had been forced back by storms at sea to… Ireland to rest the ship and seamen.”98 The final two ingredients—experience and exigency—followed in 1486 and merged with court propaganda to embolden Henry, demonstrating how interests in domestic consolidation and overseas holdings could coalesce into action. That March, just five months after his coronation, the king appointed his uncle Jasper Tudor Lieutenant of Ireland. The preferment was less about Jasper (who never seems to have visited the place), than about the post itself and the signal Henry sent by placing it in the hands of his closest male relative: during the Wars of the Roses, Richard, third Duke of York (father to Edward IV and Richard III) and his kin,99 had used this very position to turn Ireland into a family stronghold, promoting the aspirations of the native “Home Rule” Lords, especially the 92  James Ware, Two Histories of Ireland. The one written by Edmund Campion, the other by Meredith Hanmer Dr of Divinity (Dublin, 1633), 28. 93  Worcestre, Itineraries, ed. John H. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 97. 94  Worcestre, Itineraries, 213. 95  Worcestre, Itineraries, 299. 96  Worcestre, Itineraries, 121. 97  Worcestre, Itineraries, 119. 98  Worcestre, Itineraries, 309. 99  R.S. Thomas, “Tudor, Jasper, Duke of Bedford (c. 1431–1495),” ODNB (2008).

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earls of Kildare, to govern with minimal English interference and earning their undying devotion to the Yorkist cause in return; for many Irish, the fate of Irish political autonomy seemed wedded to that of Richard’s House.100 An understanding of recent history all but ensured that Ireland would be a hotbed of sedition against a Tudor-Lancastrian regime—a fact that was not lost on the anxious Henry VII, who hastily called Kildare to appear before him at court to “devise for the bringing of his [Henry’s] land of Irland into pleyn obeissaunce and suche estate, welth and prouffitte as it hath be in tyme passed.”101 Then, came the circumstance: that winter, a boy called Lambert Simnel appeared in Dublin, announced as Edward, Earl of Warwick, son of George, Duke of Clarence and the sole York male heir, assuming that the Princes in the Tower were indeed dead.102 There, he found a ready reception among the family’s loyalist magnates and support from boy’s supposed aunt, Margaret of York, followed, culminating in his coronation as Edward VI in May 1487 as well as a parliament, coinage, and proclamations all in his name.103 English elites reported Henry’s alarm and preparedness to “sende an armi jn-to Irlonde jn haaste” against “hys rebellys and enemyes,”104 while the king committed himself to “the subduing of our said rebels” in what he emphatically called “our land of Ireland.”105 Instead, however, the pretender’s forces came to him and the two sides met on 16 June at the Battle of Stoke, dubbed the last battle of the Wars of the Roses by some modern historians. There, as the sixteenth-­ century Book of Howth explained in culturally loaded terms, “the Irishmen 100  On York’s appointment, which may have been a form of political exile, see Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On Ireland and the Yorkist cause during the civil wars, see David Grummitt, A Short History of the Wars of the Roses (NY: IB Tauris, 2013), especially 29–30 and 53–74. 101  “Instruccions yeven by the kinges grace unto h[is] counseillour and servant John Estrete to be shewed to Therl of Kildare,” 1486 (?), in Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III and Henry VII, 2 vols., ed. James Gairdner (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861), 1:91–93, at 91. 102  There is some evidence that Simnel later pretended to be the younger of those two princes, as André and Vergil reported. See Michael J. Bennett, “Simnel, Lambert (b. 1476/7, d. after 1534),” ODNB (2008). 103  “A letter of the Earl of Lincoln,” Contemporary Sources, 1:50. On Margaret’s support, see “Chronicle of Calais,” Contemporary Sources, 1:51; Bennett, Lambert Simnel and the Battle of Stoke (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). 104  Earl of Oxford (?) to Sir Edmond Bedyngfeld, May 1487, in Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, Part II, ed. Norman Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 453. 105  Henry VII to the Earl of Ormond, 13 May 1487, Kings’ Letters, 2:20.

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did as well as any naked men could do, and at length they were slain, about four thousand and more,”106 in a decisive Tudor victory. Attainting the rebels in November 1487, parliament did not mince words, calling the Yorkists traitors “contrarie to all trouth, knyghthode, honour, allegieaunce, feith and affyaunce, intendyng utterly to have slayne, murdred and cruelly destroyed oure forseid liege lorde and most Cristen prynce, to the uttermost and grettest adventure of [his] noble and roiall persone… [and] destruccion, dishonour and subvercion of all this realme,” against its “unyversall and comen wele.”107 Henry didn’t either, summoning the Irish lords before him to declare, “My masters of Ireland, you will crown apes,”108 and requesting that the pope excommunicate all implicated Irish bishops.109 Though Simnel attracted significant non-Irish followers, the rebellion had begun in “parties beyond the see” (as Parliament put it), and Ireland specifically, for a reason and the Tudor government was adamant that “sore and grevous punycion”110 was necessary “for an example hereafter, that non other be bold in like wise to offend.”111 Vergil treated the episode as a pedagogical tool for the young monarchy, highlighting the ease with which the Irish, who “had always uniquely loved King Edward [IV’s]’s name and stock”112 turned, just the first Tudor example of how “rascally youth might sow the seeds of new factionalism among the wild Irish, who are always very ready to rebel.”113 The language used by crown, parliament, and court after Stoke was purposeful, significant, and reflective of the wider discourses and displays that surrounded Henry’s kingship, emphasizing that the threat came from overseas but imperiled England, that it was unnatural and brutish, and that the king was their rightful overlord. The rhetoric was also lasting: in 1587, Raphael Holinshed rehearsed how Henry subdued “a great multitude of beggerlie Irishmen, almost all naked and vnarmed.”114 Simnel’s defeat and the shift in royal policy that  “From the ‘Book of Howth,’” Contemporary Sources, 3:261–265, at 264.  “An act of conviction and attainder,” 9 November- ? 18 December 1487, Parliament Rolls, vi-397, col. b. 108  Book of Howth, Contemporary Sources, 3:264. 109  “Henry VII to the Pope,” 5 July 1487, Letters and Papers, 1:94–96. 110  “An act of conviction and attainder,” 9 November- ? 18 December 1487, Parliament Rolls, vi-397, col. b. 111  “An act of conviction and attainder,” 9 November- ? 18 December 1487, Parliament Rolls, vi-398, col. a. 112  Vergil, Anglica Historia, Book XXVI, paragraph 5. 113  Vergil, Anglica Historia, Book XXVI, paragraph 24, describing the Warbeck plot. 114  Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587), 6:766. 106 107

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resulted meant that when the pretender threat reappeared in the 1490s, his efforts “within our land of Ireland, in the wild Irisherie,” as Henry described,115 were less successful. Yet both conspiracies would ultimately demonstrate that securing the crown in England was an archipelagic affair. The following summer, Henry sent Bosworth veteran and councilor Richard Edgecombe to Ireland with 500 men to effect “the sound rule of peace” by imprisoning rebels, granting pardons, and administering oaths of allegiance whereby the Irish swore to “be true feithfull and obeysaunt liegmen and subget unto my severaigne lord kyng Herry the vijth…aswell in thynges concernyng the suertie and well of his most noble persone, his hygh estate preemynence, dignitie and prerogative royall as in thynges concernyng the well and defence of the realme of England and land of Irland.”116 The form of submission (an oath) as well as its substance (precisely worded in English, ample in the power it ceded to Henry) and means (by way of an English-born Tudor intermediary) broke from the maximum Irish autonomy allowed by the Yorks, signaling a more interventionist, less conciliatory policy to come and establishing models for it. This may have been what Kildare feared when he pledged and received his pardon but refused to bond himself or his council to a forfeiture of his title and estates if he later reneged, declaring that “rather than they wuld do it, they wuld become Irish every of them.”117 In the context of James III of Scotland’s death in June 1488, the accession of James IV, and Franco-­ Breton unrest, the modified settlement temporarily appeased Henry, who left Kildare in place as deputy on Edgecombe’s departure. However, when the shifting climate of the early 1490s, including a new pretender plot, tested the earl’s loyalty, Henry took a heavier hand, determined to have “the reducying [of Ireland]… to a gode and lawefull ordre and obeisaunce, to the pleaser of God and the wele and profit of your said subjettes and land.”118 Despite Kildare’s protestations (on the heels of his refusal to come to court owing to “great daungiers and eminent periles” in

 “Henry VII to Gilbert Talbot,” 12 September 1497, Contemporary Sources, 1:162–163.  Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Henry VII, 2 vols. (London; Stationery Office, 1914), 1:225. 117  “The Voyage of Sir Richard Edgecomb into Ireland,” BL Cotton MS Titus B.xi, fols. 332–377, in Hibernica, or some antient Pieces relating to Ireland, ed. Walter Harris (Dublin, 1747–1750), 59–77, at 65. 118   Lords of Ireland to Henry VII, undated (ca. 1489–1493), Letters and Papers, 1:377–379, at 377–378. 115 116

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Ireland119) that “I am and shalbe duryng my lywe your true knyght”120 and promise to expand Tudor rule in Munster and Connaught by delivering Irish “whose ancesters was never bonden to noon of your progenytours kynges of England,”121 the crown dismissed and eventually arrested him.122 On 13 September 1494, Edward Poynings replaced Kildare as deputy of Ireland. Arguably the most important figure in early Tudor empire-­ building, Poynings had attended Henry VII in exile, accompanied his invasion, acted in the royal council and household, and served the crown in Calais, where he worked to stymie Yorkist sedition and grow English rule; after his Irish tenure, he would go on to serve Henry VIII’s expansionary ambitions in France. Ireland was a logical step for Poynings; his appointment, at the head of a 427-man-strong army and retinue of English-born administrators and legal experts newly chosen for his council, shows the extent of Henry VII’s interest in and concern for Ireland at this moment.123 The Annals of Ulster described Poynings’s departure “from the house of the king of the Saxons” and arrival in November 1494, a “Saxon knight… as justiciary over the Foreigners of Ireland.”124 Such terms stressed Poynings’s royal connections, Englishness, and outsider status, three critical pieces of his charge to, as Henry VII described it to Charles VIII of France, “impose order among the wild Irish, establishing there the same justice and good rule as in English.”125 Following a string of military expeditions and surrenders, Poynings opened the Irish Parliament at Drogheda in December, shuttling through a mass of legislation intended to rectify “the great and haynous abusions and errours late 119   Lords of Ireland to Henry VII, undated (ca. 1489–1493), Letters and Papers, 1:377–379, at 378. 120  Gerald Earl of Kildare to Henry VII, undated (ca. 1489–1493), Letters and Papers 1:380. 121  Gerald Earl of Kildare to Henry VII, undated (ca. 1489–1493), Letters and Papers 1:381. The Earl of Desmond defended Kildare’s refusal to travel to Henry VII, Letters and Papers 1:381–382. Kildare also protested his innocence, specifically in the latest pretender plot, to the Earl of Ormond in 1493, Letters and Papers 2:55–56. 122  “An Act of Attainder against the Earl of Kildare,” Contemporary Sources, 3:277. 123   Including Henry Deane and Hugh Conway. These appointments meant that Englishmen now dominated the Irish council, see Ellis, “Poynings, Sir Edward (1459–1521),” ODNB (2004). 124  “Annals of Ulster,” Contemporary Sources 3:276. Poynings landed in October, reaching Ulster in November. 125  Ellis, “Poynings.” As Ellis notes, Poynings’s actual instructions were more circumscribed, see Calendar of Patent Rolls Henry VII, 2:12–15.

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had within the land of Ireland, by reason of an usurpation or prtended prescription”126 and “contrary to all naturall allegeance, to the kings grieuous displeasure”127—including the one which he has since become synonymous. In all, the Poynings deputyship consolidated and expanded English authority, further defined Englishness against Irishness, and reimagined the metropole-periphery relationship, making the position what it would be under the Tudors: an English-born architect and executor of British imperial policy in Ireland. As S.B. Chrimes assessed, “by the time Poynings left Ireland fifteenth months later in December 1495, the course of Anglo-Irish history had been changed.”128 Beyond his official instructions, Poynings’s most obvious inspiration and starting-point was the previous century’s Statutes of Kilkenny (1367), instituted under Edward III to guard against English adoption of (or supposed degeneration into) Irish ways, native resurgence, and unrest. By prohibiting intermarriage and other familial relationships, mandating that the English use English names, language, fashions, and laws, and otherwise limiting contact between them, the articles defined and separated the Anglo-Irish from the Gaels as two, unequal communities under the authority of a superior English crown and its parliament in Ireland.129 Over a century later and under a new British House, the 1494–1495 Irish Parliament confirmed the Statutes of Kilkenny as still convenient for “the publike weale of the kings subiectes of Ireland, to keep them under due order and obeysance… [and] the said land continued in prosperitie and honour”130; declared that chief administrative and judicial positions could only be held at the king’s pleasure (rather than for life)131 and that neither peace nor war could be made without the governor’s license132; struck against loyalty to local lords rather than to the king133 and made all attempts to “procure or stirre Irishery or Englishry to make warre” against  10 Henry VII, c. 3, Contemporary Sources, 3:296–298, at 296.  10 Henry VII, c. 2, Contemporary Sources, 3:295–296, at 295. 128  Chrimes, Henry VII, 263. 129  “A Statute of the Fortieth Year of King Edward III,” in Tracts Relating to Ireland, Volume 2, ed. James Hardiman (Dublin: Irish Archaeological Society, 1843), 3–121. The statutes helped make Edward III with Henry II the major medieval exemplas in sixteenthcentury literature urging English intervention in Ireland. 130  10 Henry VII, c. 8, Contemporary Sources, 3:301–302. 131  10 Henry VII, c. 2, Contemporary Sources, 3:295–296. 132  10 Henry VII, c. 17, Contemporary Sources, 3:305–306. 133  10 Henry VII, c. 6, Contemporary Sources, 3:300–301. 126 127

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him high treason134; required license from the deputy for the keeping of large stores of arms135; and declared that only “one borne in the Realme of England” could serve as Constable in key castles,136 among other provisions.137 Most significant, however, were two acts now known as “Poynings’s Law.” Resting on appeals to the virtue, superiority, and legitimacy of English law, English monarchy, and English council for governing Ireland, the first declared that no Irish Parliament could be held without the crown’s prior consent under its Great Seal and that it could only consider “acts affirmed by the King and his Counsaile to be good and expedient for that land”138; the second that “all statutes late made within the said Realme of England, concerning or belonging to the common and publique weale of the same from henceforth be deemed good and effectual in… Ireland.”139 Poynings thus confirmed and lent new weight to a sense of English identity cast in opposition to an inferior foreign “other,” strengthened royal control over Ireland, and paved the way for future intervention. Vergil’s treatment of the deputyship illustrates its contemporary importance. There to “cleanse Ireland” of adversaries, Poynings exposed that in the mid-1490s, in all Ireland there are two kinds of men… one of these is tame and civilized… and they easily acquire English manners and for the most part understand the English language… All of these obey the King of England. The other kind is savage, uncouth, stupid, and fierce, and because of their neglect of refinement and boorish manners they are called the wild Irish.  10 Henry VII, c. 13, Contemporary Sources, 3:304.  10 Henry VII, c. 12, Contemporary Sources, 3:303–304. 136  10 Henry VII, c. 14, Contemporary Sources, 3:305. 137  For the full parliamentary record, see Philomena Connolly, ed., Statute Rolls of the Irish Parliament, Richard III-Henry VIII (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), 10 Henry VII. 138  10 Henry VII, c. 4, Contemporary Sources, 3:298–299, at 298. 139  10 Henry VII, c. 22, Contemporary Sources, 3:309–310, at 310. Note that by alternate numbering, these two statutes are c. 9 and c. 39. For further study, see Quinn, “The Early Interpretation of Poynings Law, 1494–1534,” Irish Historical Studies 2, no. 7 (1941): 241–254; R.  Dudley Edwards and T.W.  Moody, “The History of Poynings’ Law,” Irish Historical Studies 2, no. 8 (1941): 415–424; Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), especially 146–154; Ellis, Reform and Revival: English Government in Ireland, 1470–1534 (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1986); James Kelly, Poynings Law and the Making of Law in Ireland, 1660–1800 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), 1–14; Ellis, “Henry VII and Ireland, 1491–1496,” in England and Ireland in the Later Middle Ages, ed. J.F. Lydon (Dublin: Blackrock, 1981), 237–254. 134 135

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They have a number of petty kings who are constantly waging war against each other. For this reason they surpass the rest of the Irish in their ferocity, and, being most eager for innovation, next to theft and robbery they adore nothing more than uprisings.140

The court historian’s cautious conclusion, that “the plague of seditions was suppressed without being eradicated,” must also strike us as appropriate. Though he successfully executed political reform, raised new crown subsidies, and quelled the immediate threats to Henry’s kingship, Poynings left Ireland for England in late 1495, where he again turned his attentions to safeguarding the throne. In a cost-cutting maneuver smoothed over by Parliament’s reversal of the 1494 attainder against him,141 Kildare returned home as the crown’s deputy, specifically sworn to uphold the regime that Poynings had created.142 With policy engendered by historic claims, past experience, and new threats to an insecure and perhaps illegitimate dynasty, all carried out in collaboration with enterprising individuals at court and on the ground, Henry VII brought Ireland more squarely into the English orbit, clarified its legal and cultural place in that world, and offered tools for its subjugation as part of a Tudor empire. Befitting this new phase was new vocabulary: Poynings’s legislative program had included an act for “diches to be made aboute the Inglishe pale”—the very first recorded use of the word “Pale” for Ireland. Used to describe the areas around Dublin most firmly in Tudor control and, by extension, most firmly adherent to English culture and law, the term appears to have been a transplant from Poynings’s time in Calais, where the term was first used during his time there in 1493.143 The applicability and transference of the term from France to Ireland as well as its survival into modern usage to distinguish people or  Vergil, Anglica Historia, Book XXVI, paragraph 29.  “For the Earl of Kildare,” 14 October–21 December 1495, Parliament Rolls, vi-481 col. b–vi-482, col. b. 142  “Indenture between the Earl of Kildare, Walter, Archbishop of Dublin, Thomas, Earl of Ormond, and Sir James Ormond, made in the presence of the King and Council,” 6 August 1496, and “Articles sworn to by the Earl of Kildare in the presence of the King and Council before his return to Ireland as Deputy,” August 1496, in Henry VII’s Relations with Scotland and Ireland, 1485–1498, ed. Agnes Conway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 226–229, 230–232. 143  11 Henry VII, c. 34 in Relations with Scotland and Ireland, 215–216, at 215; Ellis, Defending English Ground: War and Peace in Meath and Northumberland, 1460–1542 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 28. 140 141

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behaviors beyond what is normal, customary, or civil all serve to underscore the lasting significance of this pivotal late fifteenth-century moment and the continuity across time and place in early imperialism that Poynings epitomizes. * * * When William Worcestre described his travels in England and Wales around 1480, he did so in a way that exemplified his understanding of the region as part of an older, wider, and decidedly British world and his tours as part of a new, broader impulse for exploration and discovery, geography, and ethnography.144 He explained that wrapped up in the great exploits of Caesar, Augustus, Claudius, and Constantine,145 “the island Britain gets its name from a certain Brutus, a Roman consul. It rises from North Africa and runs towards the west covering 800 miles in longitude by 200 in latitude… In it formerly lived the Scots and Picts, the Saxons and Britons” and “It has three large islands [off its shores]”: Wight, Man, and Orkney, “at the outer edge of the British realm beyond the Picts… So it is said of old in the proverbs regarding judges and kings: He shall judge Britain with her three isles.”146 From Brutus came “King Belin of Britain” and his brother “Brennus or Bran” who conquered France, Belin’s son Gombatruz who took Denmark and Ireland,147 the illustrious Arthur who “was twelve times leader in battle and twelve times victor, triumphing over the Saxons, Picts, and Scots… subduing the Irish, Iceland, Gothland, the Orkneys and throughout the south Norway, Denmark, Gaul, Aquitaine, and Gascony,”148 to “Cadwallader last King of the Britons.”149 For Worcestre, these achievements—though long past—demonstrated the existence of a single, vast British realm and were relevant to his journeys 144  As John R. Cramsie argued, Worcestre wrote “in a distinctly British frame of mind.” British Travellers and the Encounter with Britain, 1450–1700 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015). See also Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, c. 1307 to the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1998), 167, 322–40; K.B.  McFarlane, “William Worchester: A Preliminary Survey,” in England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1981), 199–224. 145  Worcestre, Itineraries, 43, 45. 146  Worcestre, Itineraries, 45. 147  Worcestre, Itineraries, 95. 148  Though his claim that Arthur kept the Round Table in Stirling, however, must have rankled many, Worcestre, Itineraries, 213, 7. 149  Worcestre, Itineraries, 179.

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and to those of other fifteenth-century men that he recorded alongside his own, like Lloyd’s to Brazil and Robert Hacon, “a seaman among the fishers of Cromer town, was of English birth and the first to discover the country of Iceland by accident.”150 In his hands, Gildas, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Nennius propped up the surge in voyaging, landed and maritime, lending it a historical and mythical genealogy. Seminal in generating such a unique perspective was the traveler’s own home city of Bristol, the Atlantic gateway where ships “from Spain, Portugal, Bordeaux, Bayonne, Gascony, Aquitaine, Brittany, Iceland, Ireland, Wales, and other parts weigh their anchors and set sail for.”151 This lens helped him see the Thames and Severn as “like two arteries of Britain. On them is used to ply vessels bearing its rich fruits for the sake of trade”152 and appreciate the Hebrides for its fir trees, used for “masts of ships.”153 Like Worcestre’s, Tudor sights looked beyond Ireland and from Bristol. In the first session of Henry VII’s reign, Parliament prohibited the import of Gascon wines except in “Englysshe, Irysshe, or Walshe mannys shyppe or shyppes,” manned by a majority from England, Ireland, Wales, Calais, or the Marches, citing “the grete mynysshynge and decaye that hath be now of late tyme of the navye within this reame of Englonde, and idlenesse of the maryners within the same”; without repair, “this noble reame… shall not be of habylite and power to deffende itselfe.”154 The act neatly brought together the king’s mutually reinforcing concerns for safety, overseas activity, and national identity, while also tapping into England’s seaborne mythos and recent decay. It was also rather accurate: under Edward IV, Lloyd had launched in 1480 and, the following July, two ships part-owned by Bristol customs official Thomas Croft departed the city with “forty bushels of salt” and “thentent to serch & fynde a certain Isle called the Isle of Brasile,” albeit with no record of their return.155 By contrast, Richard III had restricted shipping to Iceland in February 1484,156 part of the more general effect of the later Wars of the Roses to focus energies and purses inward. As D.B.  Quinn has shown, the years  Worcestre, Itineraries, 7.  Worcestre, Itineraries, 303. 152  Worcestre, Itineraries, 47. 153  Worcestre, Itineraries, 135. 154  “An Acte ‘for reperacyons of the Navee,’ 1 Henry VII, c. 8,” Contemporary Sources, 2:266–267, at 266. 155  Williamson, Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery, 188–189, at 189. 156  “Against Ships going to Iceland,” 23 February 1484, Letters and Papers, 2:287. 150 151

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1483–1490 are “blank of even the suggestion of evidence for a voyage” to the Americas.157 Henry manifested other inclinations, even if it risked mild international displeasure, writing in April 1491 that despite complaints from the King of Denmark, who claims “Islelonde, beyng in hys obeissiance,” so long as Tudor subjects “take noo thyng but that they treuly pay or agre for, and frendly entret… withowth eny robbyng,… we be content the seyd doggers [fishing boats] make their viages thedyr at their libertes.”158 The early Tudor polity thus held out a past and future of maritime security, wealth, and prowess, mining the national sentiment expressed in the Libel of English Policy, written ca. 1436 and still popular in Hakluyt’s time. The vernacular poem “exhort[ed] all England to keepe the sea, and namely the narrowe sea,” and “admiraltie,” together with Ireland and its “rude… wilde Irish,” Wales, Calais, and the Iceland trade out of Bristol to ensure merchandise, profit, security, and salvation for all Englishmen.159 By 1500, the characteristics that Henry VII’s parliament and court sought to cultivate had taken root, at least to an outsider: “the common people apply themselves to trade, or to fishing, or else they practise navigation; and they are so diligent in mercantile pursuits, that they do not fear to make contracts on usury.”160 Much like for the English and Irish aspects of his kingship, Renaissance Humanism fed into Henry’s related goals further afield. New Learning adherents revered and rediscovered science from classical Antiquity, like Ptolemy’s Geography, integrating it with Platonic and Aristotelian cosmography as well as medieval charts and TO formulations, and circulating seminal new pieces like Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi (1410) and Andrea Bianco’s world map (1436).161 Aided by Tudor patronage, their works spread into England at about the same time as travel narratives by Englishman John Mandeville and Marco Polo, promising gold, jewels, 157  Quinn, “The Argument for the English Discovery of America between 1480 and 1494,” The Geographical Journal, 127, no. 3 (September 1961): 277–285, at 279. 158  Henry VII to the Earl of Oxford, 6 April 1491, Contemporary Sources, 2: 253–254, at 253. 159  Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 3 vols. (London, 1598–1600), hereafter PN, 1:187–208, at 187 and 199. Hakluyt arranged the poem alongside charters, grants, laws, agreements, and chronicles demonstrating England’s longstanding richness in foreign trade. 160  Sneyd, ed., A Relation, 23. 161  James Robert Enterline, Erikson, Eskimos and Columbus: Medieval European knowledge of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 170–176; Nicolás Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), chapter 1.

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spices, textiles, and timber in distant, pagan lands like “Chipangu,” an island “in the high seas… so rich that no one can tell its wealth.”162 The “new” material made Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history even more appealing, lending Diana’s prophecy and Arthur’s conquests even more resonance and utility. On 5 March 1496, John Cabot would successfully channel this synergy into a patent from Henry VII: according to Milanese ambassador Soncino, the mariner had called his destination “Cipango… where he believes all the spices of the world have their origin, as well as the jewels.”163 In many ways, Tudor empire on the western side of the Atlantic began after Stoke, which occasioned a more self-assured posture and policy on the part of the government, new recognition in Europe, and an overall acceleration of trends already in motion. The 1487 parliamentary docket prioritized overseas trade, strengthening the Calais Staple in view of the king’s special commitment to the “conservacion and suertie” of the territory and “contynuance” of its market, prohibiting the export of raw woolen cloth from England, and required new certificates for ferrying foreign merchandise from port to port.164 In March 1489, the Anglo-­ Spanish Treaty of Medina del Campo confirmed this post-war climate; by pledging their daughter Katherine to Prince Arthur, mutual military support to Henry (especially against France), and easier trade with English merchants, Ferdinand and Isabella’s signatures praised and validated the Tudor House, which had already made its faith in the power of a wedding clear. Moreover, the pact had significant imperial dimensions and consequences. Described at the start as a “promise to assist one another in defending their present and future dominions against any enemy whatsoever,” its terms gave England leave to break the treaty and make peace with France without Spain’s consent if the “King of France voluntarily 162  L.F.  Benedetto, ed., and Aldo Ricci, trans., The Travels of Marco Polo (London: Routledge, 1931), 270–271. Royal printers published Mandeville in 1496 and 99. On their impact, see Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Anthony Bale, ed., The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); M.C. Seymour, Sir John Mandeville (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1993); Williamson, ed., The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery under Henry VII (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1962), 3–7. 163  Soncino to the Duke of Milan, 18 December 1497, CSPM 552. 164  9 November–18 December 1487, Parliament Rolls, vi-385–408, at vi-395, col. a. Henry’s new attention to Calais is also apparent in his 30 September 1487 proclamation on the exchange rate, Contemporary Sources, 2: 275–276.

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restore[d] Normandy and Aquitaine to England”—two indications that Henry harbored expansionary ambitions, including (but not limited to) an Angevin revival. New provisions which allowed subjects to “travel, stay and carry on commerce in the dominions of the other contracting party” without passports and “on the same footing as the citizens of the country in which they temporarily reside” speak to the burgeoning mercantile world and to the value both parties placed on it.165 Further, the alliance tightened communication as well as competition, giving England a front-­ row seat to Spain’s New World exploits, even shuttling them talented ambitious sailors. Giovanni Battista Ramusio later wrote that “news came that Signor Don Christophoro Columbo the Genoese had discovered the coast of the Indies, and it was much spoken of in the court of King Henry VII… where they said it was a thing rather divine than human to have found that way never before known to go to the East.”166 For Soncino, here lay the origins of the Tudors’ first transatlantic sponsorship: “Messer Zoane Caboto by name, of kindly wit and a most expert mariner. Having observed that the sovereigns first of Portugal and then of Spain had occupied unknown islands, he decided to make a similar acquisition for his Majesty” Henry.167 A most opaque yet tantalizing final link appears in 1507, when Katherine wrote on a potential union between a now-­widowed Henry and her sister that by doubling the affection between England and Spain, it would “also lead to the whole of Africa being conquered within a very short time, and in the hands of the Christian subjects.”168 On the very day that Spain ratified Medina del Campo, Henry commissioned an exceptional run of new coinage, displaying his likeness and royal arms, English and French. Among them was one of the first English coins to bear the imperial crown, a twenty-shilling double gold ryal that the king dubbed the “sovereign.” As D.M.  Metcalf and Dale Hoak have 165  Spain was given the same out if France restored Roussillon and Cerdaña. Treaty between England and Spain, 27–28 March 1489, CSPS, 1:34, emphasis added. 166  Ramusio, Primo Volume delle Navigationi et Viaggi (Venice, 1550), Cabot Voyages, 270–273, at 272. Ramusio claimed that his information came from a “Mantuan Gentleman,” who spoke to Sebastian Cabot. 167  Soncino to the Duke of Milan, 18 December 1497, CSPM 552. 168  Katherine of Aragon to Juana of Castile, 25 October 1507, CSPS 1:553. By reign’s end, France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Portugal were also vying for alliances (marital, martial, and commercial) with Henry, an indication of the dynasty’s European stature and connections, see Thomas Lopez to Emmanuel King of Portugal, 10 October 1505, Letters and Papers, 2:146–149; Maximillian to Henry VII, 20 July 1506, Letters and Papers, 2: 153–154.

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shown, the new legal tender literally circulated the Tudor monarchy’s imperial status and placed it on par with Maximilian I (future Holy Roman Emperor) and, more significantly, Ferdinand and Isabella, whose réal d’or and enriques donned the domed diadem.169 Over the next three years, Henry oversaw images in paint and stained-glass across England which amplified his imperial kingship by calling on the closed crown and figures of Constantine, Arthur, William the Conqueror, Edward the Confessor, Henrys IV, V, and IV, the last as part of a canonization campaign engineered to boost Tudor sanctity.170 Displays of empire were also on full view when Katherine and Arthur finally married in November 1501, after lengthy wrangling over the dowry and an evident need on the part of Ferdinand and Isabella to be fully convinced that England was more at peace than in the last 500 years, with “not a doubtful drop of royal blood remain[ing] in this kingdom, except the true blood of the king and queen… and above all, that of the lord prince.”171 Reminiscent of Henry’s coronation and own wedding, civic pageantry praised him as “he whom It hath pleasid God to accept and call,”172 feted the prince as “the secund now / Succeedyth the ffyrst Arthur In dygnyte,”173 and welcomed the “noble pryncesse Into Brytayn”174 by promising her that “the Realm of yowir worthy spowse arthuyr, / Shynyng In vertu, shall stand perpetually / Wyth the compasse of his noble progeny” and noting her descent from John of Gaunt175 (an Anglicizing measure). As they processed through Gracechurch Street, past roses, greyhounds, portcullis, and crosses of St. George, “on the highest of all the hole pagent arede dredfull dragon, holdyng a staff of iron, and on the staf a great crown of gold.”176 169  Hoak, “The Iconography of the Crown Imperial,” in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 54–103, at 65–70; Metcalf, Coins of Henry VII (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); C.E. Challis, The Tudor Coinage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978). 170  Including Great Malvern Priory Church, St. Mary’s Hall Coventry, St. Catherine’s Church Ludham, Alton Church Hampshire, and St. George’s Chapel Windsor. Hoak, “Iconography,” 70–75; Eamon Duffy, Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), especially 164–165. 171  De Puebla to Ferdinand and Isabella, 11 January 1500, Letters and Papers, 1:113–119, at 113–114. 172  C.L. Kingsford, ed., Chronicles of London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 247. 173  Anglo, Spectacle, 61. 174  Anglo, Spectacle, 84. 175  Anglo, Spectacle, 61. 176  The Antiquarian Repertory, 4 vols. (London: 1808), 2:264

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After the wedding, Henry wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella, declaring “the union between the two royal families, and the two kingdoms, is now so complete that it is impossible to make any distinction between the interests of England and Spain.”177 While these words were hyperbolic, the treaty had entailed a real foreign policy shift, requiring Henry to intervene against France while at the same time freeing him to do so. In his first years, the king had remained neutral, an expression of gratitude for the money, men, and ships that Charles VIII had supplied for the 1485 crossing. As such, though present in courtly rhetoric and imagery, the Tudor claim to France lay as dormant as it had under the later Plantagenets. Medina del Campo (and all that had led to it, in England and Ireland) coupled with the death of Duke Francis II and Valois aggression in Brittany both allowed and forced Henry to move across the Channel, mounting four expeditions in 1489–1492. In 1492 especially, multiple arms of government averred his purpose and legitimacy: Parliament granted subsidies so that the king could “passe over the see in to his realme of Fraunce and to reduce the possession therof, by the said grace, to hym and his heires, kinges of Englond, according to his rightfull title, wherby he trustith not only to bring this his realme to the auncien fame and honour, but also to inriche and set in profite, peace and tranquillite his subgettis of the same”178; the council of ordinance proclaimed Henry’s intent “for the recoveryng of his right” to “the crowne and regally of Fraunce” and “duchies of Normandy, Guyan’, Turayn’, and the countie of Mayne”179; and the mint struck a ryal with imperial crown on one side and arms of France in the center of a Tudor rose on the other.180 It was in this context of French claims, domed crowns, Spanish alliances, and Bristol voyages that Christopher Columbus supposedly sent his brother to entreat at the Tudor court—a context that helps to explain the myth’s emergence and persistence.

 Henry VII to Ferdinand and Isabella, 28 November 1501, CSPS 1:311.  “An act agaynst captaynes for not paying theire soldyers their wages, and agaynst soldyers going from their captaynes without licence,” 17 October 1491–1495 March 1492, Parliament Rolls, vi-457, col. a. 179  Currin, “‘To Traffic with War’? Henry VII and the French Campaign of 1492,” in The English Experience in France c. 1450–1558: War, Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange, ed. Grummitt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 106–131, at 108–109. Currin has thoroughly examined Henry’s policies, showing that the king did harbor French pretensions. 180  Challis, Tudor Coinage, 52. 177 178

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Perhaps, after his offensives faltered and Henry sued for peace at Étaples in November 1492, peddlers of a prophecy that “the kyng of Englande, shall demaynde his right of the crowne of Floure de Lice, the which he shall have sone after,” began to look for its fulfillment elsewhere in the dynasty.181 Indeed, as Iberians carved up the New World, ambassador Rodrigo Gonzalez de Puebla lamented, Former Kings of England possessed Brittany and Flanders. The present King of England does not possess either of the said countries, but is in a position to send great armies to succour the enemies of France… But as the King of France is so near and so powerful a neighbour, and yet pays tribute to the King of England, and pensions to the English, Henry esteems his friendship more than the whole of the Indies, especially when he sees that the whole Christian world combined can scarcely resist the King of France. The new King of France has even gone so far in his desire to oblige Henry as to abandon Scotland.182

Writing in August 1498, Puebla’s impressions were somewhat off target: Henry was interested in the Americas’, inspired by a potent combination of Spanish example and rivalry, claims to history and myth, and mercantile agency; at the same time, a new threat had gained strength, and exigency drew royal attentions north, to another site of Tudor imperial ambition. What Puebla failed to understand was how these two concerns fueled one another in the mid- and late 1490s, resulting in two hugely important dynastic feats: its final victory over Yorkist pretenders and the discovery of North America for its crown. * * * On 21 September 1496, James IV of Scotland invaded England alongside Perkin Warbeck, the claimant to the English throne who had spent the last five years trying to muster support in Ireland, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Holy Roman Empire by posing as Richard, Duke of

181  “The prenostacion of Alfons Frysaunn[c]e, clerke of Mayster Skalgaynes, astrologe to the Grete Turke, resident in the grete town Dary in Alexander,” in Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Middleton (London: 1911), 264. 182  De Puebla to Ferdinand and Isabella, 25 August 1498, CSPS 1:221.

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York (younger of the Princes in the Tower).183 Henry VII had long appreciated the northern threat, writing in 1485 that the Scots “of their inward and froward malice and unnatural disposicion entend the distruccion of us and our liege peaple,” especially in “our town and castel of Berwik, and… our marches there,”184 with “oure auncient enemyes the Scottes” supporting “certeyne our rebelles and traitours… ayenst their naturall dutees and allegaunces.”185 The Duke of Suffolk agreed, charging that the new dynasty faced “rebelles associate to his old enmys of Scotland, entending not only to trowble his peax, the nobles and subjects of this Reame to destroy… but also the lawes of this lond and holy Chirche to subvert.”186 Couched in feudal, legal, and historical terms, the new dynasty drew on a rich past of Anglo-Scottish hostility and, in references to the border, subtly recalled the assertions of English right to Scotland central to that fight. Higden’s Polychronicon (printed by de Worde in 1495) busted with evidence on the matter, citing invasion by William the Conqueror, oaths of fealty to Richard I, and claims by Henry II and others since 910,187 while Geoffrey of Monmouth had clearly described a single British kingship188 (now in the hands of the British Tudors) and the Baron’s Letter had proclaimed Edward I’s superiority, “suzerainty and direct overlordship” over Scotland.189 At Warbeck’s rise, Parliament enacted “that all Scottes dwellyng within this realme of Englond and Wales not made or herafter be made denezyn avoyde oute of this realme within .xl. daies… uppon peyn of forfeiture of all their godes and catalles and their bodies to prison,” to 183  On the relationship between James IV and Warbeck, from a Scottish perspective, see David Dunlop, “The ‘Masked Comedian’: Perkin Warbeck’s Adventures in Scotland and England from 1495 to 1497,” The Scottish Historical Review 70, no. 190, pt. 2 (October 1991): 97–128. 184  Henry VII to Lord Stanley, 15 October 1485, Contemporary Sources 1:19–20, at 19. 185  Henry VII to Henry Vernon, 17 October 1485, Contemporary Sources 1:21. 186  John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, to John Paston, 20 October 1485, Contemporary Sources 1:21–22, at 21. 187  The Book of Howth’s use of the Polychronicon is particularly useful here, see Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts, ed. J.S. Brewer, 6 vols. (London: 1871), 6:241–242. 188  Demonstrating that “the Britons once occupied the land from sea to sea.” Geoffrey of Monmouth, History, 54. 189  “The Barons’ Letter to Boniface VIII: from Lincoln, Feb. 12, 1301,” in Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church, ed. B.J. Kidd (London: Macmillan, 1941), 3:182–184, at 183; Michael Prestwich, “Colonial Scotland: The English in Scotland under Edward I,” in Scotland and England, ed. Roger Mason (Edinburgh: Donald, 1987): 6–17; J.R. Goldstein, “The Scottish Mission to Boniface VIII,” Scottish Historical Review 70, no. 189 (1991): 1–15.

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be followed by a “serche be made in every cite, borough and hundred of Englond and Wales for suche Scottes by the constables of the same, and yf any may be founde that they, and every of theym, be taken and arrested and their godes seased to the kinges use, and” sent, via the shortest route, back to Scotland.”190 The statute reinforced national safety, consolidation, and shared Anglo-Welsh identity via this historic “other,” much as earlier rhetoric had used France and Ireland. Henry similarly decried how “another feigned lad” and his Yorkist allies “promise to certain aliens, captains of strange nations, to have duchies, counties, baronies, and other lands, within this our royaume, to induce them thereby to land here, to the destruction and disinheritance of… our subjects the inhabitants of the same, and finally to the subversion of this our royaume.”191 Yet the message did little to thwart James or Warbeck. A cool greeting in England did force their retreat, however, when Henry levied unprecedented taxes to retaliate, Cornwall rose in rebellion, soon with “King Richard” as their ready figurehead.192 In July, Warbeck had responded to Tudor fashioning of his cause with a discourse strikingly like Richard III’s before Bosworth, augmented by new flourishes denouncing Henry’s paranoia, avarice, unworthy ministers: he proclaimed himself rightful and natural king over England, France, Ireland, and Wales, like all his “noble progenitors, Kings of England” before him, against the grandson of “Owen Tydder of low birth in the country of Wales” who came “from France and entered into this our realm” and cares not for “the wealth and prosperity of this land, but only the safeguard and surety of his person”193; with the support of “the right high and mighty prince, our dearest cousin the King of Scots,” Warbeck entered to subdue Henry’s “cursed and malicious intent,” illegitimate “mischief and misrule,” and “unlawfull impositions and grievous exactions.”194 With crown measures preventing him from using Ireland as Simnel had, Warbeck descended upon England  “Contra Scotos,” 17 October 1491–1495 March 1492, Parliament Rolls, vi-456, col. a.  Henry VII to Talbot, 20 July 1493, Contemporary Sources 1:93–95, at 94. 192  Soncino to Duke of Milan, 30 September 1497, CSPM 545. 193  “Perkin Warbeck’s proclamation,” Contemporary Sources 1:150–155, at 155, 150, 153. Italian reports also stressed Henry’s miserliness: “if fortune allowed some lord of the blood royal to rise and he had to take the field, he would fare badly owing to his avarice; and his people would abandon him… as they did King Richard.” Giovanni de Bebulcho to Messer Bartolomeo Chalco, Secretary to the Duke of Milan, 3 July 1496, CSPM 490. 194  “Perkin Warbeck’s proclamation,” Contemporary Sources 1:150–155, at 151, 154, 151, 154. 190 191

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“with 80 savage Irishmen and was received by the Cornishmen” in September 1497, “though everything favours the king, especially an immense treasure”—reporters not sparing the opportunity to press Tudor cultural, economic, and political superiority.195 After a failed attempt on Exeter and in the face of royal troops pushing west, the rebellion fizzled.196 While his humanist courtiers rushed to commemorate the victory197 and his ambassadors to proclaim the ascendancy of the union rose above “brambles and thorns of such a kind that the English had occasion not to remain peacefully in obedience to their king,”198 Henry excitedly announced a new truce with Scotland.199 The regime’s last pretender came before him at Taunton on 5 October and confessed “to be none Englishman born, but born of Tournay,” France.200 As in Ireland, early Tudor engagements with Scotland had stemmed from a blend of exigency (defend the throne) with vibrant British history and mythology (offensive right), which together fortified the dynasty. But despite Henry’s declaration of war, plans for a major attack in the wake of James’s invasion, and border fights under the Earl of Surrey, the strength of Stewart forces combined with the Cornish Rebellion and the new life it gave Warbeck prevented Henry from undertaking any sort of project in Scotland. Peace at home took precedence; cautious pragmatism would have to prevail here. The episode’s aftermath does, however, offer several flashes of imperial posturing toward England’s northern neighbor— beyond those implied by Henry’s claims to Britishness. In September 1497, after announcing Henry’s successes and dynastic strength against Scotland, Soncino remarked that “He garrisons two or three fortresses, contrary to the custom of his predecessors, who garrisoned no place.”201 Frustratingly, the ambassador does not name the fortresses nor their locations, but the comment’s placement suggests some connection to Scottish affairs and, by extension, the northern border. Later that year, Soncino  Summary of a letter from Soncino, 16 September 1497, CSPM 541.  Chronicles of London, 217–219. 197  “Skelton Laureate agaynste a comely coystrowne” (completed ca. 1498) (London, 1527). 198  Puebla to Ferdinand and Isabella, 11 January 1500, Letters and Papers, 1:113–119, at 113. 199  Chronicles of London, 222. On Henry’s eagerness, see “Fox’s Instructions,” 5 July 1497, Letters and Papers, 1:104–111. It also facilitated Arthur’s wedding, see Ferdinand and Isabella to Puebla, 27 April 1496, CSPS 1:113. 200  Henry VII to the mayor and citizens of Waterford, 17 October 1497, Contemporary Sources 1:173–176, at 175; Kingsford, ed., Chronicles of London, 219–222. 201  Soncino to the Duke of Milan, 8 September 1497, CSPM 540. 195 196

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added, “I am certain that [Henry] would devote his attention to glorious affairs, and would not suffer the French to boast with impunity of having so disgracefully suborned this imaginary enemy against him for so long.” But, he continued, the English are “restless,” James is young and spirited, and “the Scots, who have nothing to lose, are always willing for a war with England… [that] might cause mischief more quickly at home than abroad.”202 Reflecting the same sentiment in 1498, Ayala reported James’s bellicosity and English ambivalence toward a Hispano-Scottish alliance, for they “dislike the idea of the Scotch having the same honour as they have.” Though clarifying that the non-English Henry did not share this jealousy, the remark illustrates a sense of superiority on the part of the English—more than mere rivalry.203 The solution was the Treaty of Perpetual Peace (1502), which established nominally eternal amity between the two kingdoms by outlining new procedures for handling infractions, invoking the threat of papal excommunication, and promising Henry’s daughter Margaret to James IV. The pretender subtext is apparent, as the Stewart king agreed not to harbor anyone suspected of treason by Henry, even if both were given leave to aid existing allies against the other, so long as they did not invade his territories.204 More immediately, and most revealing that Henry had not in fact abandoned his dynasty’s British claims, is an anecdote set down by Vergil: according to his Anglica Historia, members of the Privy Council feared wedding a direct heir to “a foreigner.” But the king placated them, replying “‘I foresee that our realm would suffer no harm, since England would not [be] absorbed by Scotland, but rather Scotland by England, being the noblest head of the entire island, since there is always less glory and honor in being joined to that which is far the greater, just as Normandy once came under the rule and power of our ancestors the English.’”205 Indeed, Hall recorded that after the 8 August 1503 wedding, “all the Englishe lordes and ladyes returned into their countrey. geuynge more prayse to the manhoode, then to the good maner & nurture of Scotlande.”206 Henry’s comment, a loaded note  Soncino to the Duke of Milan, 18 December 1497, CSPM 553.  Ayala to Ferdinand and Isabella, 25 January 1498, CSPS 1:210. 204  Thomas Rymer, ed., Foedera, Volume 12 (London: Churchill Press, 1711), 24 January 1502, “Indentura pro Pace & Amicitia, inter Reges supradictos”; “Indenture on Treaty of Perpetual Peace,” 24 January 1502, NAS SP 6/29–30. 205  Vergil, Anglica Historia, Book XXVI, paragraph 41. 206  Hall’s Chronicle Containing the History of England, ed. Henry Ellis (London: 1809), 498. 202 203

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of English superiority over Scotland, has since become canon, largely thanks to Francis Bacon who repeated it (with more than a hint of irony) under James VI&I.207 In 1548, at the height of the Rough Wooings, polemicist Nicholas Bodrugan declared that from Brutus onward, successive Kings of England had demonstrated their title to Scotland, Synce whiche tyme vnto the daies of Kyng Henrye the .vii. graundfather to our soueraigne lorde that nowe is, albeit this realme hath been molested with diuersitie of titles, in whiche vnmete time neither law nor reason admit prescripcion to the preiudice of any right: yet did kyng Edwarde the forth next kyng of England by preparacion of war against the Scottes in the latter ende of his reigne sufficiently by al lawes induce the co~tinuaunce of his claime to thesame superioritie ouer theim.208

This compliment may not seem glowing, however the inclusion of Henry VII and appreciation of how the king preserved the Scottish claim, transmitting it from Plantagenet to Tudor while facing down threats is enormously telling. Bodrugan demonstrated that all of the evidence to support “restitucion of the name and Empire of greate Briteigne vnto [Edward VI]”209 was there under Henry. Royal efforts in the 1490s had kept its Scottish element intact; they had also fixed his equally crucial, and related, American one. Both permitted his successors to adopt a more aggressive posture and push the British imperial vision. An August 1947 Milanese report from London joined four new pieces of information, amplifying their proximity and connection: the Spanish and English had reached terms on their marital alliance, Tudor forces “were pursuing the Scots and following up the victory,” Henry had executed so many rebels that “his dominion may be considered much strengthened and permanent,” and “his Majesty sent out a Venetian…and he has returned safe, and has found two very large and fertile new islands. He has also discovered the seven cities, 400 leagues from England, on the western passage. The next spring his Majesty means to send him with fifteen or twenty ships.”210 In the letter, expansion abroad quite literally 207  Bacon, History of the Reign of King Henry VII, ed. J.  Rawson Lumby (Cambridge, 1902), 189. 208  Bodrugan, An epitome of the title that the Kynges Maiestie of Englande, hath to the souereigntie of Scotlande (London: 1548), sigs. g.iii.v–g.iiii.r. 209  Bodrugan, An epitome, sig. a.iii.v. 210  “News received from England,” 24 August 1497, CSPM 535.

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followed Spanish alliance, Scottish defeat, and domestic security. Indeed, the pillars were interdependent: Isabella, for example, declared amid Katherine’s marriage negotiations that “Henry must marry one of his daughters to the King of Scots,”211 while the “Venetian” (Cabot, sometimes recorded as Genoese) came to court via Bristol and Spain, where English interest in Atlantic travel was well known, and his story of new lands “lying in the British ocean” (a highly suggestive description from Vergil, denoting right) “was easily believed because the Spanish sovereigns in our time had found many unknown islands.”212 Cabot received the first British patent for transatlantic discovery on 5 March 1496, likely after an extensive interview with Henry (given the king’s style) and owing to substantial native English support for the “foreigner.”213 The document conferred unto him, his heirs, and deputies, “full and free authority, faculty and power to sail to all parts, regions, and coasts of the eastern, western, and northern sea, under our banners, flags and ensigns… to find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions, or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians.” With this tacit recognition of Iberian right, the crown declared its authority and purpose, charging the patentees to “conquer, occupy and possess whatsoever such towns, castles, cities and islands by them thus discovered… as our vassals and governors lieutenants and deputies therein, acquiring for us the dominion, title and jurisdiction of the same” and one-­ fifth of profits, barring other subjects from visiting without license and mandating that all voyages return to Bristol, exempt from most tariffs.214 The patent drew on several sources—its vocabulary and expectations implicitly and explicitly calling on feudal bonds, early travel narratives, Irish administration, Bristol expertise, Cabot’s understanding, and the dynasty’s love of iconography, mercantile interests, foreign policy, and sense of sovereignty; simultaneously, it was unquestionably novel, establishing royal prerogative to make such a grant, the right of first discovery, and the precedent for all future donations through the sixteenth century.  Isabella to de Puebla, 12 September 1496, CSPS 1:158.  Quinn, “Cabot, John (c. 1451–98),” DNB (2010); “Vergil on John Cabot,” Cabot Voyages, 224–225, at 225. 213  Soncino to the Duke of Milan, 18 December 1497, Cabot Voyages, 209–211, at 209. 214  Cabot Voyages, 49–53, which also takes up whether Henry VII knew of the Treaty of Tordesillas; H.P.  Biggar, ed., The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, 1497–1534 (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1911), 8–10, at 9. 211 212

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First departing from Bristol and then Ireland, Cabot made landfall in June, “700 leagues away” in “the country of the Grand Khan,”215 “where he hoisted the royal standard, and took possession for the king.”216 According to a 1544 map, they named it Prima Terra Vista and a nearby island St. John, noting evidence of inhabitants “dressed in the skins of animals,” with bows, arrows, lances, darts, slings, and clubs “for use in their wars,” large animals, and “infinite fish.”217 In a letter likely meant for Columbus, Londoner John Day explained that the crew spent a month reconnoitering the “cape of the mainland which is nearest to Ireland… believed to be the mainland that the men from Bristol found,” called “the Island of Brasil,” finding “tall trees of the kind masts are made,” rich soil, “manure of animals,”218 Brazilwood, silk, and fish so plentiful, Soncino added, that “this kingdom would have no further need of Iceland.”219 Day’s mentions of Ireland and Brazil were crucial, helping to solidify the former’s position in Tudor mental maps as a midway point in space, familiarity, and civility from home, while the latter established prior English right. Moreover, both reports crafted a New World commodity list, a template for future voyages which reflected not only what Cabot saw but also what the home market desired, like a temperate, fertile climate, textile industry, and naval power. Both too demonstrate how nation, empire, and identity as well as crown and adventurer were closely interwoven. Henry had “gained a part of Asia, without a stroke of the sword,” Soncino charged, and Zoane has his mind set upon even greater things, because he proposes to keep along the coast from the place at which he touched, more and more towards the east, until he reaches an island which he calls Cipango… he tells all this in such a way, and makes everything so plain, that I also feel compelled to believe him. What is much more, his Majesty, who is wise and not prodigal, also gives him some credence… Before very long they say that his Majesty will equip some ships, and in addition he will give them all the  “Lorenzo Pasqualigo’s letter from London,” 23 August 1497, Precursors, 13–15, at 14.  Soncino to the Duke of Milan, 18 December 1497, Cabot Voyages, 209. See Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 217  “The Eighth Legend of the World Map of 1544,” Cabot Voyages, 207. On its relevance, see Cabot Voyages, 25. 218  “Day [sometimes given as Jay or Hugh Say] to the Lord Grand Admiral,” Cabot Voyages, 211–214, at 212–213. 219  Soncino to the Duke of Milan, 18 December 1497, Cabot Voyages, 210. 215 216

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­ alefactors, and they will go to that country and form a colony. By means m of this they hope to make London a more important mart for spices than Alexandria. The leading men in this enterprise are from Bristol, and great seamen, and now they know where to go, say that the voyage will not take more than a fortnight, if they have good fortune after leaving Ireland… I also believe that some poor Italian friars will go on this voyage, who have the promise of bishoprics. As I have made friends with the Admiral, I might have an archbishopric…220

Venetian Lorenzo Pasqualigo too described Henry’s joy and colonial second act, adding that Cabot was now called “the Great Admiral… these English run after him like mad, and indeed he can enlist as many of them as he pleases, and a number of our rogues as well.”221 Greeted with crown reward, a pension “to hym that founde the new Isle,”222 and letters patent promising “VI englisshe shippes” from any port in “our obeisaunce” and any subject wishing to sail,223 Cabot’s 1497 enterprise engendered the earliest plot for British settlement in the New World, replete (quite provocatively) with penal and spiritual dimensions. As it happened, however, Henry lent only one ship to the May 1498 expedition to “serche for an Ile land… Rich & Replenysshid vvith Rych commodytees,” after which Cabot disappears from record.224 The difference between the projected venture and its reality illuminates the intertwined nature of the early British Atlantic World and the importance of crown patronage. Henry was attracted to Cabot’s offer, but barely out from under the Warbeck-Cornish rebellion, he sidelined exploration in favor of domestic stability and European diplomacy. Securing the realm and the Scottish and Spanish alliances meant demoting a venture that would pull men, ships, and supplies from home and risk Ferdinand and Isabella’s displeasure. It is fitting, then, that Henry returned to the 220  Soncino to the Duke of Milan, 18 December 1497, Cabot Voyages, 209–211. On the much-debated actual place of landfall, which ranges from Maine to Nova Scotia to Newfoundland and Labrador, and exploration, see Peter E. Pope, The Many Landfalls of John Cabot (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 24–40, 69–89. 221  Pasqualigo’s letter, Precursors, 14. 222  “Entries from the daybooks of the king’s payments,” “Grant of pension to John Cabot,” “Warrant for Payment of John Cabot’s Pension,” and “Payments of John Cabot’s Pension,” Cabot Voyages, 214–219. 223  Dated 3 February 1498, Precursors, 23–24, at 23. 224  The Great Chronicle of London, ed. A.H. Thomas and E.D. Thornley (London, 1938), 287–288.

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American arena in 1501—the year that Arthur wed Katherine, that the Spanish patented Alonso de Ojeda to “go setting up marks with the arms of their Majesties… so that you may stop the exploration of the English in that direction,”225 and that Gaspar Corte Real explored Greenland under an expansive grant from Emmanuel I.226 Demonstrating and further stoking revived Tudor interest was the appearance before the king in 1501 or 1502 of “iij men takyn In the Newe ffound Ile land… clothid In bestys skynnys and ete Rawe fflesh and spak such spech that noo man cowde undyrstand theym, and In theyr demeanure lyke to bruyt bestis whom the kyng kept a tyme afftyr, Of the whych upon (ij) yeris passid (afftir) I sawe ij of theym apparaylyd afftyr Inglysh men In westmynstyr paleys, which at that tyme I cowde not dyscern ffrom Inglysh men… But as ffor spech I hard noon of them uttyr oon word.”227 The earliest record of British-­ American contact on the eastern side of the Atlantic, the episode did several critical things: first, it showed that the New World could sustain human life, rendering future travel and even colonization viable; second, it demonstrated native barbarity as well as the power of English civility to improve (if not completely convert), lending a legitimizing mission and purpose to the Tudor presence and bolstering a sense of superior Englishness; third, it proved that Henry’s sailors had indeed reached and laid claim to distant lands and inhabitants, who seemingly signaled some acceptance of crown authority by coming to court. Despite its limits, then, Atlantic expansion strengthened the House’s reputation, fueled European competition, accumulated knowledge and experience, and both hardened and unsettled lines of identity. All four developments brought Azoreans João Fernandes, his brother Francisco, and João Gonsalves into welcoming British arms, where they partnered with Bristolmen Richard Warde, Thomas Ashehurst, and John Thomas in March 1501.228 In a lengthier and far more detailed patent than Cabot’s, Henry authorized the syndicate and its agents “to find, recover, discover,  8 June 1501, Cabot Voyages, 233–234, at 233.  “Pietro Pasqualigo, Venetian Ambassador in Portugal, to his brothers in Venice,” 19 October 1501, Cabot Voyages, 229–230. The original grant, dated 12 May 1500, is printed in Precursors, 35–37. 227  Great Chronicle, 320. Hakluyt reproduced the text almost exactly, but called them “Sauages” and attached Sebastian Cabot’s name to their arrival, see Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America (London: 1582), sigs. A3r–v. Pope argued that the Anglo-Azorean syndicate brought them back, see Many Landfalls, 167. 228  “Petition of Certain Merchants to Henry VII,” 19 March 1501, Precursors, 40. 225 226

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and search out” lands inhabited by “heathens and infidels, in whatever part of the world they may lie… unknown to all Christians,” set up royal banners, and, as crown vassals and deputies, “occupy, possess, and subdue these.” Further, the king declared his will that all “our subjects, wishing and desiring to visit these lands and islands thus newly found, and to inhabit the same” be allowed to do so, under the “full power and authority” of the patentees to govern, rule, and punish under “laws and statutes set up by them.” The grantees had leave to transport “merchandise and wares, gold and silver in bar, precious stones, and other goods” into any English port (primarily under usual customs rates), expel “strangers” by force, and appoint administrators, “in perpetuity by fidelity alone, without any composition or anything else being rendered” to the crown, “always excepting the dignity, dominion, regality, jurisdiction and suzerainty of the same, wholly reserved to us.” Finally, Henry naturalized Fernandez, Fernandez, and Gonzales, “born subjects of the king of Portugal,” and their heirs, to be “considered, treated, held, esteemed and governed as our true and faithful lieges born within our realm of England,” apart from customs, subsidies, and import dues.229 Unlike its predecessors, then, the 1501 patent significantly asserted a “recover”-able Atlantic past or right, a theory of actual or effective possession (as opposed to abstract claims or mere discovery alone), a colonial and commercial intent and plot for its execution, a reduced crown role, and the importance of national identity among adventurers and settlers (taking advantage of Portuguese navigational expertise, then smoothing over the issue). It evinces a new stage, an evolution from 1497 to 1498 to fit new, sixteenth-century circumstances and another crucial model for British imperial expansion. Though without material support from the crown or colonial success, the Anglo-Azorean cohort launched two voyages, raising Portuguese ire, renewing Tudor claims to the North Atlantic, and likely providing evidence of a Northwest Passage to Asia.230 Henry favored Francisco and Gonsalves with pensions “in consideracion of the true service which they have doon unto us to oure singler pleasure as Capitaignes into the newe founde lande,” evincing a turn toward “Newfoundland” as the name for

229  “In regard to the grant to Richard Warde and others,” Precursors, 50–59, at 51, 52, 54, 55, and 56. 230  As Williamson argued, see Cabot Voyages, 128–130.

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the region.231 New letters patent followed to both men, together with Ashehurst and Hugh Elyot, in December 1502, again stressing recovery, annexation, possession, and colonization, provided they avoid areas “first discovered by the subjects of our very dear brother and cousin the king of Portugal, or by the subjects of any other princes soever, our friends and confederates, and in possession of which these same princes now find themselves.”232 Elyot’s inclusion suggests a merger of sorts, to deal with the issue of competing patents: in a 1527 letter to Henry VIII’s ambassador to the Habsburg Court, one Robert Thorne declared that his father, Robert Thorne the elder, and “another marchant of Bristow named Hugh Eliot, were the discouerers of the New found lands”; John Dee then formalized the claim by writing it on a map in 1577–1580 and ascribing it to ca. 1494.233 Both Elyot and Thorne may have had ties to Cabot, whose patent also remained in force. By 1506, the new group was known as “the Company adventurers in to the new fownde ilondes.”234 A direct precursor to the Edwardian version (1553), Muscovy Company (1555), and Newfoundland Company (1610), the body demonstrates the crown’s sustained interest in Newfoundland, its channeling of intra-English competition to map and claim territories more effectively, and the use of an organizational formula that outlasted the dynasty. Several poorly documented voyages visited some combination of Greenland, Newfoundland, Labrador, and/or Nova Scotia under the new patent in 1503–1506, including one that paid 40 shillings “to a preste that goith to the new Ilande,” indicating a settlement or conversion plot, and another returned with “popyngais & catts of the mountayne with other stuf to the King’s grace,” suggesting courtly interest in the American environment.235 The final venture of the reign capped its achievements toward realizing a trans-Atlantic Tudor with a familiar name, but the event is muddied by conflicting and not-quite-contemporary sources. It seems that following a 231  Grant of Pensions, 26 September 1502, Cabot Voyages, 248–249, at 249. The payment is recorded on 262. 232  Letters Patent, 9 December 1502, Cabot Voyages, 250–261, at 251. 233  “The booke made by the right worshipful M. Robert Thorne in the yeere 1527,” PN, 1:214–221, at 219; “Dee’s Statements on the Date of the Discovery of North America,” Cabot Voyages, 201–202. 234   “The Company Adventurers to the New Found Lands,” 1506, Cabot Voyages, 262–263, at 263. 235  “Entries from the Daybooks of the King’s Payments,” 8 April 1504 and 25 August 1505, Cabot Voyages, 216.

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1505 grant, Henry sent “our well-beloved Sebastian Caboot Venycian”236 with two ships and up to 300 men subsidized wholly or in part by the crown in search of the Northwest Passage to Cathay, grounds for fishing or another commercial exploit, and/or colonial settlement in 1508–1509, all under his father John’s patent and perhaps in league with the Company or another Bristol-based initiative.237 There, he may have discovered what is now Hudson Strait and part of its Bay,238 found a place Cabot himself named “Baccallaos, bycause that in the seas therabout he founde so great multitudes of certeyne bigge fysshes much lyke vnto tunies (which thinhabitantes caule Baccallaos) that they sumtymes stayed his shippes,” and sighted people “couered with beastes skynnes: Yet not without thuse of reason” and with great stores of metal,239 before turning back from that “most barbarous parte” due to ice240 or mutiny.241 Counterintuitively, the murkiness surrounding the voyage demonstrates its sixteenth-century significance: no less than sixteen writers, British and continental, made note of the venture in this era and used it to suit their purposes, with few salient, overlapping details; the story was manipulable and manipulated. In the Tudor context, it offered evidence of crown patronage, a passage East, a rich and moderately hospitable climate, ethnographic information that confirmed perceptions of indigenous savagery, and, most of all, first discovery and naming (a tool of taking possession) for a British king by a British crew and captain “lookynge dayely” for the opportunity to return and pursue “hyd secreate of nature.”242 Indeed, we can see how promoters finessed this last piece, in particular, as national identity and Tudor imperial theory deepened: whereas Henry had called Sebastian Cabot a Venetian without gloss in 1505, Peter Martyr described him in 1516 as “a Venetian born by birth but carried by his parents whilst yet a child into the island of Britain” who served “Henry, King of Britain” but sailed at his own cost,243  “Grant of Pension to Sebastian Cabot,” 3 April 1505, Cabot Voyages, 265.  Williamson engages in an in-depth comparative study of the reports, see Cabot Voyages, 145–170. 238  Peter Martyr, The History of Travayle in the West and East Indies (1577), fols. 233r–v. 239  Richard Eden, trans., Martyr, The decades of the newe worlde or west India (1555), fol. 119r. 240  Eden, “Preface to the Reader,” in Martyr, Decades, sig. cir. 241  Humphrey Gilbert, A discourse of a discouerie for a new passage to Cataia (1576), sig. Diiir. 242  Eden, trans., Martyr, Decades, fol. 119r. 243   “Peter Martyr’s First Account of Sebastian Cabot’s Voyage,” Cabot Voyages, 266–268, at 267. 236 237

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and George Best proudly asserted that “Sebastian Cabot, an Englishe man, borne in Bristow, was by commandement of Kyng Henry the seauenth, in Anno .1508. furnished with Shipping, munition, and men” and took possession.244 For subsequent observers, Henry VII had not just established a new dynasty; he had established a claim to a British Empire in the New World. * * * In the mid-1530s, Venetian Marcantonio Contarini reported Sebastian’s voyage to the Senate, explaining that the mariner had come to England “with the desire of discovering countries” and left with two ships from the “father of the present Henry, who has become a Lutheran and worse”; he arrived back at court, “with a resolve to return to that project at a time when the sea should not be frozen,” but “found the King dead, and his son cared little for such enterprise.”245 Ramusio reported that upon his return, Cabot “found great disturbances, of the people in rebellion and of a war with Scotland. There was no further thought of sailing to those parts, for which reason [he] came to Spain, to the Catholic King and to Queen Isabella,” who provisioned him for Brazil.246 Though their intelligence and timelines are muddled,247 Contarini and Ramusio correctly identified two critical points: Henry VII’s son was a different king with different priorities, and the fates of Tudor England, Scotland, and America were deeply entwined. What they missed were a pair of corollaries: service in one part of the entangled Tudor empire served the rest and once circumstances changed, the dynasty’s second monarch did care for Newfoundland and Cabot. The Italians had something else right: Henry VII died on 21 April 1509, around the time of Cabot’s return. In a fitting testament to the late king’s accomplishments, that year also brought the very first mention of the New World in English vernacular verse to print—as “the newe fonde  Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discouerie (1578), 16.   “Marcantonio Contarini’s Report on Sebastian Cabot’s Voyage,” 1536, Cabot Voyages, 270. 246  Ramusio, again citing the “Mantuan Gentleman,” in Navigationi et Viaggi, Cabot Voyages, 272. 247  Ramusio seems to refer to the events of 1497 (rebellion and war with Scotland), yet Sebastian did not enter Spanish service until after the 1508 voyage. Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, 150–154; Pope, Many Landfalls, 61–62. 244 245

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londe”—marking the ascent of the language that served as a vehicle for the Tudor dynasty at home and abroad. Yet the text, poet-clergyman Alexander Barclay’s edition of humanist Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494), did more than translate the original’s classical references and American allusions; it counseled Henry’s second son and sole-surviving male heir after Arthur’s death in 1502 with new stanzas. Enlarging Brant’s contention that though some labor to study every unknown region, others “to knowe the nacions wylde” or map “Asye,” “Afryke and the newe fonde londe,” and “Ferdynandus that late was kyng of spayne, / Of londe and people hath founde plenty… is it foly to tende vnto the lore / And vnsure science of vayne geometry / Syns none can knowne all the worlde perfytely,” Barclay enjoined, “certaynly it is rebuke and shame / For man to labour onely for a name / To knowe the compasse of all the worlde wyde / Nat knowynge hym selfe, nor howe he sholde hym gyde.”248 The addition implied that Henry should first know himself—his person, his kingship, his realm, even his nearest neighbors—before venturing further afield. A later embellishment pushed this point, praising Henry VIII as “moste worthy by honour to ascende / Vnto a noble Diademe Imperyall” and with the ancestry, wisdom, justice, courage and strength greater than Hercules and Achilles by which “his roylme to meyntayne.”249 For, Barclay promised, if the “englysshe states… Submyt your selfe gladly to his empyre” and “If the Englysshe Lyon his wysdome and ryches / Conioyne with true loue, peas and fydelyte / With the Scottis vnycornes might and hardynes / Than is no dout but all hole chirstente / Shall lyue in peas welth and tranquylyte / And the holy londe come into christen hondes / And many a regyon out of the fendes bondes.”250 The poets’ words, original and appended, were well chosen: Henry VIII had been primed by his father, grandmother, humanist tutors, and courtiers to receive praise and council couched in appeals to history, myth, and national imagery. Indeed, his accession generated a scholarly frenzy: William Blount, fourth Baron Mountjoy fawned over “our king [who] does not desire gold or gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory, immorality” and thinks that without 248  Brant, The Ship of Fools, trans. Barclay, ed. T.H. Jamieson, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Patterson, 1874), at 2:24, 25, 26, 27. Pynson published the text. See also David Armitage, “Literature and Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume I: The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 99–123, at 111. 249  Ship of Fools, 2:205. 250  Ship of Fools, 2:206, 209

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“learned men… we should scarcely exist at all,” as he wrote to Desiderius Erasmus251; Skelton lauded “The Rose both White and Rede / In one Rose now dothe grow… Our king, our emperour, / Our Priamus of Troy /… moost soueraine / That ever Englond had”252; Stephen Hawes celebrated how “vnyd tytyls and worthy lygnage” now combined, “to reygne doutles Unyuersall his fame honour and larges” with an elaborate woodcut of the king receiving the imperial crown below a Tudor rose253; and Hall recorded the coronation pageantry, “more honorable then of the great Cesar,” with horses bearing the king’s titles to England, France, Wales, and Ireland and a castle erected near Westminster topped with “a greate Croune Emperiall, all the imbatellyng with Roses.”254 It was precisely the greeting that Henry VII had hoped for. As the next four decades would show, the young king principally agreed with Barclay and aspired to what the rest described. Though uninterested in a Crusade against the Turks, Henry VIII looked back to classical Antiquity, medieval history and literature, and his father’s legacy to set his sights on imperial sovereignty and territorial expansion in the British Isles, France, and the New World.

251  “Epistle 210,” 27 May 1509, in The Epistles of Erasmus, trans. Francis Morgan Nichols, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901–1918), 1:457–461, at 457. 252  Skelton, “A lawde and prayse made for our souereigne lord the kyng,” in The Poetical Works of John Skelton, ed. Alexander Dyce, 2 vols. (London: Rodd, 1843), 1:ix–xi. 253  Hawes, A ioyfull medytacyon to all Englonde of the coronacyon of our moost naturall souerayne lorde kynge Henry the eyght (1509), [2]. The wood-cut appears on [1]. 254  Hall’s Chronicle, 507–512, at 510.

CHAPTER 3

“Ungracious Dogholes”: Experiments in Empire, Ca. 1513–1527

In the spring of 1523, well into Henry VIII’s reign, the lawyer son of a blacksmith, merchant, and brewer from Putney and newly elected MP drafted a speech for delivery before the highest authority in the realm: the king in parliament. He began by noting the desire of all those gathered, himself included, “To recouer agayne by the sworde the Realme of Fraunce, belongyng to our most Redowbtid Souerayne by good and iust tytle … to the grete Inryching and enprosperyng of vs and all suche as hereafter showld lyue vnder hys obeysaunce and subieccion.”1 Henry was especially attached, the statesman appreciated, to “this so glorious, so profyttable and so wysshefull an enterpryse” against the “false and fleyghty,” malicious and “Arogant Nacion” “withoute any regarde hauyng ether to godde or Justyce,” ever willing to risk his own life in its pursuit.2 Yet the MP was sobered by present financial and logistical reality and by past “good experyence,” of the “most Saugge and Poletyke Prynce Kyng Henry the vijth of gracious memory … [who] when he passed the Sees to wyn the ryght in Fraunce he began fyrst to lay Seige to Bolayn, or euer he wold enter anye farther in to the land” and “our most Redowtyd 1  “A speech delivered in Parliament in presence of Henry VIII,” [April 1523], TNA SP 1/27, fols. 192r–207v, at fols. 193r-v (Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J.S. Brewer, James Gairdner, and R.H. Brodie, 28 vols. (London: PRO, 1862–1932), vol. 1, no. 2958 [hereafter LP, volume: entry]. There is no record that the speech was given. 2  “Speech,” 194r, 196r, 196v, and 196r.

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souerayne now raynyng beyng in purpose as I harde reportid goo as farre as Parres after the occupacion of his sawge Counsayle began Fyrst at Tyrouenne and … Tournay.” These holdings had “cost his hignes more then xxti suche vngracious Dogholes cowld be worthe vnto hym” and, the author continued, even if we invade Normandy, Brittany, or another French region, “I can se nothyng but manyfest dawngier on euery syde.”3 Henry was being goaded into unappreciative, inhospitable, even inferior lands. Aware that his warnings flew in the face of royal pleasure and policy, the MP hastened to provide an alternative, one that would satiate the appetite for territorial expansion, national aggrandizement, and historical legitimacy apparent in the plot and, moreover, breed ultimate success across the Channel and in other overseas dominions appertaining to the Tudor crown. He counseled Henry to use his magnanime Courage to conuert Fyrst and chief his hole intent and purpose not only to the ouer rennyng and subduyng of Skotland but also to Joyne the same Realme vnto his, Soo that both they and we myght lyue vnder oone Bessaunce Law and Pollecy for euer. He shold therby wyn the highest honour that euer dyd any noble progenitours synse thys Iland was fyrst Inhabyt… I alledge another commen sayng, who that entendyth Fraunce to wyn with Skotland let hym begyn, Whiche enterpret thus truely hyt ys But a Symplenesse for vs to thyncke to kepe possessions in Fraunce, [which] ys seuowryd from vs by the ocean see, and suffre Skotland Joyne vnto vs by nature all in oon Iland … whiche whan we haue ones Joyned vnto our polecy as a membre by nature dyscendyng apon the hole, than shall we therby have the experyence how to wyn and kepe other possessions of our most redowtyd souerayne of due ryght and enherytaunce belonging to his noble Crowne whiche we [have] in the parties of beyond the see…4

In its approach, style, and word choice, the speech betrayed the author’s acute understanding of the domestic state, its administration, and its 3  “Speech,” 202v, 203r, and 203v. “Dog” was a rather common descriptor for the French in Henry’s reign. See “News from France,” 1 April 1512, BL Cotton MS Calig. D VI, fols. 334r–335r, at 334r; “A Paper of Intelligence,” April 1515, BL Cotton MS Vit. B II, fols. 155r–156v, at 155r; “Assault on Frenchmen in London,” 18 December 1536, TNA SP 1/112, fols. 222r–226v, at 223r; Edmond Harvel to Henry, 27 August 1542,” TNA SP 1/172, fols. 134r–137v, at 135r; William Paget to William Petre, 27 May 1546, TNA SP 1/219, fol. 107r. 4  “Speech,” 206v–207v.

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foreign policy: England needed money, manpower, and strategic advantage to succeed against its European enemies; the sovereign king sought to rule foreign possessions, to convert them to an implicitly superior English law and civil society, in fulfillment and even excess of past deeds, and had French as well as British ambitions. Similarly, its logic and substance demonstrated oratorical skill and sharpness, with careful couching of potentially incendiary advice in terms of submissive kowtowing to the monarch as well as a central argument that overseas activity had to follow consolidation and growth in Britain. These were the lessons that the MP had gleaned from the opening years of Henry VIII’s kingship, a period of intensive trial and error in empire-building, and he had learned and refracted them well. In the years that followed, the craft on display in that April 1523 speech carried its writer, Thomas Cromwell, to the highest echelons of Tudor power and helped determine the course of history in the 1530s and 1540s.5 Cromwell’s words remind us that much like the statesman’s future career, the familiar Henrician narrative of divorce and schism, reform, rebellion, and war was rooted in “ungracious dogholes” of the 1510s and 1520s—a set of roughly contemporaneous experiments in Tudor empire that ranged from France to Scotland, Ireland, and the New World. This chapter argues for the significance of those projects and thus of the first two decades of Henry VIII’s reign more generally to the growth and development of Britain and its engagement with the wider Atlantic world. In these years, a more secure dynastic footing, persistent impulses to explore, annex, and recover new as well as old worlds and markets, military and missionary opportunism, chivalric airs and medieval mythology, the cultural currents of Renaissance Humanism, and claims of empire as both a marker of territorial expansion and national sovereignty coalesced to give rise to Henry’s conquest of Tournai, a Belgian city that was then under French rule, and James IV’s closely related invasion of England and death at Flodden Field, both in 1513. Stirred and emboldened by the simultaneous victories, the Tudor state then undertook a nearly six-year-long venture in the theory and practice of empire at Tournai, moving far beyond the 5  Though his name is not attached, Cromwell is generally accepted as author, see LP 3:2958; R.B.  Merriman, ed., Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1902), 1:30–46; Derek Wilson, In the Lion’s Court: Power, Ambition, and Sudden Death in the Reign of Henry VIII (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 264–265.

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necessities of military occupation in what became a seminal moment of quickening and trial, while the Stewart king’s demise triggered significant, heated debates on the future of Anglo-Scottish relations and the prospect of a British imperial future. A mix of past practices with contemporary conditions, both episodes built on Henry VII’s activities and accomplishments. Together, they constitute a pivotal and, in many ways, novel evolution of medieval and early Tudor policies, deeds, and aspirations; as historian J.J. Scarisbrick put it, “it is damaging historical surgery that cuts [Henry VIII] off from his ancestry—Edward I, Edward III and Henry V—for they, surely, were his models.”6 Moreover, Tournai and Flodden stimulated and influenced new, related plots in Ireland and the Americas, turning the era’s pursuit of empire into a truly Atlantic affair. Although Henry did not push his ostensible right to Scotland nor did he retain Tournai, these enterprises and those focused to the west of England accrued valuable, lasting imperial experience for the court, parliament, participants, and observers. They functioned as testing grounds for ideas, images, vocabulary, and administration over non-English and non-­Welsh “others” (to the north and overseas) and against a formidable continental rival (France), forcing the crown and its subjects to confront the strengths and limits of their current empire, define the tenets of their nation and national identity, parse the status of their foreign subjects, and govern their holdings abroad. In so doing, they fundamentally shaped the discourse and practice of British imperialism in hitherto unrecognized ways.7 * * *

 Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 23.  Among Tudor specialists, the shadow cast by the 1530s still looms large, while even the less restrictive parameters of New British and Atlantic histories largely exclude activities in France. Few exceptions include Richardson and Doran, Gunn, Currin, Grummitt, Kekenwich, Rose, Davies, Potter, Raymond, and Murphy, a significant portion of whom focus on Calais only. Tournai has slipped through the cracks of multiple historiographies, a consequence of its early date in a tumultuous thirty-seven-year reign, its location, the transience of Tudor rule there, and the Plantagenet past. The episode is either dismissed as the immature, futile posturing, ignored as a meaningless tangent, or lumped into the medieval period as a renewal of the Hundred Years’ War, see C.G. Cruickshank, The English Occupation of Tournai (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971)— the only full-length study in English; Elton, Reform and Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 39 and 48; Elton, England Under the Tudors (London: Methuen, 1955), 73–74; Scarisbrick, Henry 6 7

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The kingdom that Henry VIII inherited in 1509 looked quite unlike the one that Henry VII had won in 1485. The latter’s careful stewardship of the throne and its coffers allowed his son the luxury of jettisoning his father’s preference for “the arts of peace alone, without sword or bloodshed,” as André described,8 and indulging in the sport of war. Now, rather than staining royal hands, York blood pulsed through the monarch’s veins together with that of his Lancastrian and Welsh ancestors to confer new authority and increased legitimacy and to invigorate his kingship, as some of the greatest devotees of the New Learning in Northern Europe regaled him with the feats of ancient emperors and medieval kings from Caesar to Brutus, Arthur to Edward I and Henry V. Their work blended history and legend to offer conquering archetypes for Henry to lust after, especially in the British Isles and France, as the Calais garrison continued to commemorate the Agincourt victory annually and crown servants like Robert Wingfield rehearsed centuries of evidence to “shewe that the kynge hath good Righte to be kinge of fraunce” and define England favorably against this chief foil.9 Styled “roy d’Angleterre, et de France, et seigneur d’Irlande” or “rex Franciae et Angliae ac dominus Hiberniae,” Henry VIII’s early interests and activities abroad were more than mere diplomatic VIII, 21. Thomas Mayer plucked Tournai from obscurity in the 1990s, but his only interest was in its connection to the break with Rome, see “Tournai and Tyranny: Imperial Kingship and Critical Humanism,” Historical Journal 34, no. 4 (June 1991): 257–277; “On the Road to 1534: The Occupation of Tournai and Henry VIII’s Theory of Sovereignty,” in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11–30. Davies refuted Mayer to posit that nothing in Tournai transcended well-established English doctrine and practice, nor evoked novel doctrines of power—an important argument on borrowing but one which did not look to a wider Atlantic frame, see “Tournai and the English Crown,” Historical Journal 41, no. 4 (1998): 1–26. Compounding the problem and reinforcing the dominant domestic narrative, many scholars of Tudor Ireland find significance only after the Reformation in England, see Murray, Heal, Brady, Dunlop, Edwards, and O’Dowd. For a significant exception, see Quinn, “Henry VIII and Ireland, 1509–1534,” Irish Historical Studies 12, no. 48 (1961): 318–344. Similarly, treatments of Tudor interest in the New World focus on the middle years of Elizabeth’s rule and on, with cursory mention of John Cabot. 8  André, Annales Henrici VII in Memorials, ed. Gairdner, 84, my translation. 9  Robert Wingfield to Wolsey, 10 December 1515, BL Cotton MS Vit. B XVIII, fols. 222r–225v, at 223v. On Agincourt, see “Extract from ‘A Discourse Touching the Reformation of the Lawes of England,’” printed in Anglo, “An Early Tudor Programme for Plays and Other Demonstrations against the Pope,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20, no. 1/2 (Jan.–Jun. 1957): 176–179, at 178.

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ruse, juvenile aggression, egotistical brooding, or false bravado alone, fed by considerations beyond his love of martial display, envy of the larger dominions that Francis I and Charles V were poised to inherit, anxiety to prove himself on a grand stage, and pliability before senior councilors and continental powers—though these were contributing factors.10 As Victorian J.S. Brewer unwittingly remarked, Henry’s subjects “believed as fully in the right and title of their kings to France as we believe in our title to India or Ireland.”11 Contemporary Venetian Andrea Badoer reported, “The King … is 18 years old, liberal, warlike and loved by his subjects, provided with money and eager for war with the King of France” and readies his soldiers, “said to be against the King of Scotland.”12 Similarly, Vergil noted how Henry, “in the flower of his youth and abounding in wealth and power, thought the war [against France] should be undertaken … approved by the councilors, partly so the king’s keenness for warfare might not be destroyed.”13 The Milanese ambassador later added, “He is so eager over the enterprise that no one can put it out of his head, unless it be God Almighty.”14 Others, however, like Thomas Howard in 1511, urged Henry principally against the Scots, “by whose wanton means his Grace spendeth much money, and is more disposed to war than peace. Your presence shall be very necessary to repress this appetite.”15 As Louis XII told the Bishop of Ross in April 1512, “the King of England … only wants a pretext for war.”16

 Craig Taylor, ed., Debating the Hundred Years War: Pour ce que plusieurs (La Loy Salique) and A declaration of the trewe and dewe title of Henrie VIII, Camden Fifth Series, 29 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 31. See also Davies, “‘Roy de France et roy d’Angleterre’: The English Claims to France, 1453–1558,” Publications du Centre Européen d’Etudes Bourguignonnes (XIVe-XVIe siècle) 35 (1995): 123–132; Gunn, “French Wars,” 37–38; Tunstall and Wingfield to Henry, 18 July 1516, which made particular note of the limited extent of Tudor dominions compared to France and the Holy Roman Empire, BL Cotton Galba B IV, fols. 128r–130v. 11  Brewer, “Preface,” LP 3:cxl. 12  “Venice,” 6 December 1509, LP 1:264. 13  Vergil, Anglica Historia, Book XXVII, paragraph 5. 14  “Copy of Letters of the Protonotary Carazzoli, Milanese Ambassador at Rome,” 13 May 1513, CSPM 638. 15  Wolsey to Fox, 30 September 1511, BL Cotton Tit. B I, fols. 104r-v. 16  “Additional Instructions to the Bishop of Ross,” endorsed 21 April 1512, Flodden Papers, ed. Marguerite Wood (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1933), 32–33, at 32. 10

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Like the requisite domestic stability, funds, and justification, Henry’s opportunity to assert his expansive vision came from his father. After the crushing blow of Arthur Tudor’s untimely death in 1502, an unflappable Henry VII arranged for his second son’s promotion as both heir apparent and dynastic pawn, wedded to Katherine of Aragon. The June 1509 union brought Henry VIII into the knotty nexus of continental geopolitics, then dominated by the Italian Wars, and anticipated armed English intervention in support of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Venice, and the Pope against Louis XII. Shrewdly, members of this new Holy League repackaged the fight in terms attractive to Tudor sights, exhorting Henry “not to neglect so great an opportunity for the conquest of a crown whose title he bears … against his capital and natural enemy … and gain as much praise and glory as have ever fallen to the lot of any other king of England,”17 while promising that “as long as Ferdinand lives the French will never attack England.”18 Ambassador John Stile ran with the idea, explaining that “as the reame of France was lost by the ayde of Spayne from yowr nobyl predescessoros, that now the ayde of Spayne schal helpe yowr hyzghnys for to recover your most nobyl ryzchte ynherytance yn the reame of France.”19 Henry was convinced, describing the war as “kindled in order to defend the Church, and free it from the savage tyranny of the king of the French, who is the common enemy of all Christian princes.”20 Yet paradoxically, the move jeopardized another pillar of Henry VII’s diplomacy, the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, while also giving the Tudor House room to follow through on the British pretensions that its first king could not. Upon his accession, Henry VIII had confirmed the alliance, making James IV “rycht glade consideryng our tendernes of blode. God willyng we sal bere the sam good hart on to zow.”21 Before long, however, the pair were competing to purchase artillery and timber for field and

17  The Doge and Senate to Andrea Badoer, Ambassador in England, 21 December 1509, CSPV 2:24. 18  Ferdinand, King of Aragon, to Queen Katherine, 28 November 1509, LP 1:253. 19  Stile to Henry, 11 January 1510, LP 1:329 [796]. 20  Henry to the Cardinal Archbishop of York, 12 April 1513, Kings’ Letters, 2:84–94, at 85. 21  James IV to Henry, [11 June 1509], in Original Letters Illustrative of English History, ed. Henry Ellis, 3 vols. (London: Harding, Triphook, and Lepard, 1825), 1:63. See also “Scotland,” 29 June 1509, LP 1:88; James IV to Henry, 30 July 1509, LP 1:129 [369]; “Treaty with Scotland,” 29 August 1509, LP 1:153 [474]; “James IV of Scotland,” 28 November 1509, LP 1:252 [709].

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naval use from the continent,22 and Louis moved in to secure his Auld partner, “vexed at the differences between James IV. and Henry VIII.”23 In December 1511, the Stewart king complained to Pope Julius II that his brother-in-law “attacks the Scots by land and sea, slaying, capturing and imprisoning; he does not simply allow these hostilities, he deliberately orders them. … a fair inference [is] that the treaty is to be dissolved by the disagreement of both parts.”24 By February, James grew more desperate and begged Rome to intervene: “Kings, who ought to compose differences … take the opposite course. The only hope is the Pope, who should not allow one to be sacrificed to the ambition of the other.”25 The following month, on the heels of intelligence that the Spanish were trying to alienate Henry from James,26 Scotland offered France mutual assistance “in troops, subsidies, and in his proper person, if need be” against England and pledged that if either signatory died, the other would “support the lawful heir, and defend him against any adversaries having the support of England”—all to honor an alliance dating back to Charlemagne.27 Precedent and circumstance thus placed France and then Scotland squarely in Henry VIII’s cross-hairs by early 1512, when Henry appeared before Parliament to appeal for wartime taxation28 and his court saw pieces defending the French invasion on religious and dynastic grounds, complete with classical and expansionary imagery, through Pynson’s press. As one text declared, against cruelty in the mold of Zeno and with “God and saynt George theyr gyde… to recouere Fraunce is the direct moyn / Nowe 22  Thomas Spinelly to Henry, 26 June 1509, TNA SP 1/1, fols. 35r–37v; Henry to Spinelly, [1510], BL Cotton Galba B III, fols. 6r-v; Dunlop, “The Politics of Peace-Keeping: AngloScottish Relations from 1503–1511,” Renaissance Studies 8, no. 2 (June 1994): 138–161, at 153–156. 23  “Copy of Instructions to [Pierre Cordier, Doctor of Decrees],” 8 November 1511, Flodden Papers, 10–11, at 10. 24  James IV to Julius II, 5 December 1511, Letters of James the Fourth, cal. Robert Kerr Hannay, ed. R.L. Mackie (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society), 218–219. 25  James IV to Julius II and to the College of Cardinals, 12 February 1513, NRS SP 1/1, no. 209. In March 1512, James had appealed to Ferdinand to mediate between Louis and Julius, citing the old friendship between Spain and Scotland and Henry’s ties to both, Letters James IV, 237–238. 26  James IV to [the Bishop of Murray], 12 February 1512, LP 1:1058. 27  James IV to Louis XII, 6 March 1511–1512, Letters James IV, 232–234, at 232 and 233. 28  “Decimo quinto die Parliamenti,” Journal of the House of Lords, 64 vols. (London: 1767–1830): 1:12–13.

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is the tyme prophicied, now is the verray season / That the red Rose shuld were the crowne of Fraunce.”29 For Tudor ambitions across the Channel, Calais acted as a practical and intellectual entry point, especially after an initial campaign in Gascony— the first of Henry’s reign, in Summer 1512—collapsed.30 Seized in 1347 by Edward III, who (according to the translation of Froissart commissioned in 1521 from the city’s newest deputy and veteran of 1513’s French and Scottish ventures, Lord Berners) directed his officials to “go and take possession there and … repeople again the town with pure Englishmen,”31 Calais had a population of 12,000 (half of English descent) by the midsixteenth century and was ruled from London, though without representation in Parliament.32 The crown’s sole continental foothold, the city was of vital strategic and economic importance, serving as a defensive bulwark, offensive launch-pad, commercial entrepôt for textiles, wine, produce, meat, and fish, European lifeline, and lonely reminder of the Angevine Empire—as Henry, who would use Calais to mount three French invasions across his reign, was well aware. From 1509, the king, his deputy, and council worked to strengthen the holding, according to the belief that “as Calais is a town of war, the puissance of strangers’ blood within it and the marches should not be so great that the mere English cannot ‘rule the remanent of the inhabitants.’”33 Part of this process was defining the city’s residents and in terms that mimicked Irish discourse, most notably with a 1511 proclamation permitting “mere Englisshe” living in Calais to marry anyone living there, their children “taken as mere Englisshe”; those born in Calais to likewise intermarry, with their issue taken as “good Englisshe”; yet declaring that if any of the above should leave and inhabit elsewhere “owte of the Kinges obeyssaunce,” they will forfeit all lands and be

 Alexander Barclay [?], The Gardyners Passetaunce (ca. 1512), sigs. A3v and A5r-v.  Murphy, “Henry VIII’s First Invasion of France: The Gascon Expedition of 1512,” English Historical Review 130, no. 542 (February 2015): 25–56. 31  The Chronicles of Froissart, trans. Lord Berners, ed. G.C. Macaulay (London: Macmillan, 1904), 116. 32  H.F. Chettle, “The Burgesses for Calais, 1536–1558,” English Historical Review 50, no. 199 (July 1935): 492–501. 33  “Articles devised by the Deputy and Council of Calais to be shown to the King and lords of his Council,” 1509, TNA SP 1/231, fols. 42r–43v. 29 30

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“reputed and Taken afterward as straungiers.”34 After highlighting the value and clarifying the status of Calais, Henry followed his father-in-­law’s advice and led his army “to concert an invasion of France by England on the side of Calais” in late June 1513.35 Henry and his retinue used their arrival to press the legitimacy and imperial flavor of the expedition. Watching from Calais’s walls, clerk of parliaments John Taylor recorded, in loaded classical terms, “the King coming with his fleet (such as Neptune never saw before); saluted with such firing of guns from the ships and from the towers, you would have thought the world was coming to an end.”36 According to Hall, Henry wore “a riche brooch with ye image of sainct George, [and] ouer his riuett he had a garment of white cloth of gold with a redde crosse,” signaling his martial readiness and Englishness.37 In the city, Henry heard mass, amplifying the none-too-subtle message of his “Twelve Apostelles,”38 twelve new cannons “of unusual magnitude—each cast with the image of an apostle.”39 Across July and August, the king’s men marched out under “the standard wt the redde Dragon”40 and deeper into French territory, recruiting native guides along the way to compensate for their dearth of local knowledge. Each was assigned an English master and by turns threatened and rewarded to ensure good service and ward off treachery.41 Meanwhile, crown carpenters constructed the royal camp, surrounded by heavy artillery, a “howse of tymber with a chymney of yron” (the English model) for Henry’s lodging, and “on the topp of the pauilions stode the kynges bestes holdyng fanes, as ye Lion, ye Dragon, the Greyhounde, the

 “Englishmen at Calais,” 8 March 1511, TNA SP 1/2, fol. 41r.  Ferdinand King of Aragon to Ramon de Cardona, [11 January (?) 1513], LP 1:1559; CSPS 2:82. The previous year, Ferdinand recommended the English “march from Calais into Normandy,” 1512, LP 1:1461. 36  “Diary of John Taylor,” 1513, LP 1:2391[4284]. 37  Hall, The vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (1548), “King Henry the .viii.,” fol. xxvr. 38  “The Twelve Apostles and the Great Carrack,” 16 December 1513, LP 1:2510. 39  Taylor Diary, LP 1:2391[4284]. 40  Hall, Vnion, “Henry the .viii.,” fol. xxvir. 41  Cruickshank, Army Royal: Henry VIII’s Invasion of France, 1513 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 35–36. 34 35

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Antelope, the Done kow.”42 Most striking is a German report that describes Henry entertaining Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I in a tent dripping with cloth of gold and rich ornaments, replete with English beer, and beneath “a lion of gold holding the arms of England in its claws.”43 Befitting this display, upon the duo’s first victory “the Emperor was under the King’s standard, and when required to spread his standard refused to do so, [saying] he would that day be the servant of the King and St. George.”44 Symbolically at least, this was Henry’s enterprise, above an explicitly imperial counterpart, and it was at once English and Welsh, divinely sanctioned and classically described, steeped in the past, novel to the present, and adaptable in the future. Quite literally, the Tudor king traveled out from Calais, a medieval imperial city already settled by English subjects, toward Tournai, the site where Edward III had failed in 1340.45 Over late summer and early autumn 1513, the army seized two of Louis XII’s cities some fifty miles apart, first sending the French cavalry into speedy retreat in the aptly named Battle of the Spurs to take Thérouanne,46 then besieging Tournai, where “the kyng of England and of Fraunce commaunded them to yelde to hym his citee & to receaue him as there naturall lord, or he woulde put them and ther citee to swerde, fyer, and bloude.”47 On 22 September, Clerk of the Signet Brian Tuke proudly recorded, “this opulent, strong, fair and extensive city of Tournai surrendered,”48 while Taylor noted how Maximilian “put off for some days his entry into Tournay, that he might not detract from the King of England’s glory.”49 Yet the affair also had a British dimension: that very same day, a seventeenmonth-old James V was crowned King of Scotland in a rushed, muted ceremony at Stirling Castle.50

 Hall, Vnion, “Henry the .viii.,” fol. xxviiir.  “Henry VIII and Maximilian in Picardy,” 17 August 1513, LP 1:Appendix, no. 25. 44  Giles Ap … to Earl of Devon, 2 September 1513, LP 1:2227 [4431]. 45  Kelly DeVries, “Contemporary Views of Edward III’s Failure at the Siege of Tournai,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 39 (1995): 70–105. 46  Hall, Vnion, “Henry the .viii.,” fol. xxxiiiv. 47  Hall, Vnion, “Henry the .viii.,” fol. xxxvir. 48  Tuke to Richard Pace, 22 September 1513, CSPM 661. 49  Taylor Diary, LP 1:2391[4284]. 50  Andrea Thomas, “James V (1512–1542),” ODNB (2004). 42 43

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It is easy to dismiss Flodden as the poorly planned, poorly executed campaign in which James IV behaved more like a Valois lackey than a Stewart sovereign, honoring the Auld Alliance dictum that “whatever it pleases the king of France to command me, I shall do it,” and paid with his life.51 This is what Pasqualigo saw, that “the King of Scotland, King Henry’s brother-in-law, was waging war against him at the request of France.”52 Even Scottish diplomat and Flodden campaign supporter Andrew Forman admitted, as he asked for French aid, that “to be frank, James is doing what he does only for the love which he bears Louis.”53 Yet a view beyond the battle to the surrounding discourse and posturing reveals a seminal clash of two British imperial visions—one Tudor, one Stewart; Flodden was James’s negative response to Henry’s empire and a positive assertion of his own sovereign, expansionary kingship. First, James was acutely aware of his neighbor’s target: an empire that spanned north as well as southeast and west. Though the current invasion threatened France, James charged in April 1512, “Henry VIII has a fleet and army prepared for swift action, and Scotland is menaced.”54 Shortly after, France and Scotland reaffirmed their pact “for mutual help against the attempts of England” on both lands,55 and James complained of “serious injury from the English: their ships plunder and capture Scots… Their purpose seems to be to provoke… [Scottish] armed resistance and … papal displeasure.”56 “There is no doubt,” he told John of Denmark in early 1513, “that, if they conquered France, the English would proceed to occupy Scotland and the kingdoms nearest to her.”57 Indeed, a year before Flodden, Katherine wrote that three earls, two barons, numerous captains,

51  Robert Macquéreau, Traicté et Recueil de la Maison de Bourgoigne en forme de chronique, quoted in Gunn, “French Wars,” 30. 52  “Report of the Receipt of Letters,” 12 February 1512, CSPV 2:145. 53  Forman to Louis XII, 12 July [1512], Letters James IV, 253–256, at 255. 54  “Instructions for Carrick Pursuivant in his Mission to the King of Denmark,” 22 April 1512, Letters James IV, 244–245, at 244. 55  “France and Scotland,” 22 May 1512, BL Cotton Calig. B VI, fols. 30r–34v. See also “France and Scotland,” 10 July 1512, LP 1:1287[3303]; “Treaty of Alliance,” 12 September 1512, Letters James IV, 267–268; “Instructions by Louis XII to Monsieur de la Mothe,” 2 October 1512, Flodden Papers, 48–52. 56  James IV to [Cardinal?], 20 August 1512, Letters James IV, 265–266. 57  James IV to John of Denmark, 23 January 1512–1513, Letters James IV, 281–283, at 282.

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and 30,000 men prepared to march on Scotland, “not only for the defence of Berwick, but also to conquer and annihilate that kingdom.”58 In subsequent months, a new commission mandated that “all Scotchmen living in England should be deemed enemies … their goods seized and their persons banished,”59 evincing the identity politics that accompanied the mounting “greate wronges and vnkyndenes,” perversions of justice, equity, and kindness, and widening Anglo-Scottish rift that James spied.60 Even if somewhat cooled by the prospect of a two-front war,61 Henry sat poised to retake two rightful possessions, James to admit “no English superiority, in imitation of his ancestors, who had always kept the English out of their kingdom.”62 Yet the Stewart dynasty and its imperial status, visual and statutory, predated that of the Tudors, and Henry’s activities in 1512–1513 encouraged the Scots to reaffirm, even further those claims. In 1503, James had commissioned a Book of Hours to both commemorate and allay fears about his marriage to Margaret Tudor. The volume featured the king’s arms and portrait, each bearing the domed crown first deployed in Scotland by James III ca. 1485 and confirmed in 1469, when Parliament declared the king (in the wake of his acquisition of Shetland and Orkney) endowed with “ful jurisdictione and free impire within his realm”; as Roger Mason has argued, the Stewarts held out empire to “consolidate their territories, eliminate rival jurisdictions within them and assert their sovereign authority over their subjects,” even to underwrite expansion.63 Faced with the rise of his wife’s kin and all that undergirded it, James IV petitioned Rome for increased ecclesiastical privileges,64 liberally mixed imperial crowns with thistle, rose, and dragon iconography, donned symbols of St. George, staged a Round Table tournament, named his second son Arthur, legitimized the tradition that placed the Arthurian court at Stirling rather than

 Katherine to Cardinal Bainbridge, 18 September 1512, Letters James IV, 268–269, at 268.  “Scotchmen and Frenchmen in England,” 27 August 1513, TNA SP 1/5, fols. 24r–25r. 60  James IV to Henry, 26 July 1513, SP 49/1, fol. 15r. 61  Alain de Chantrezac to M. D’Aumont, 20 May 1512, LP 1:1201. 62  James IV to [Grand Master of Rhodes], June 1513, Letters James IV, 308–309, at 308. 63  Mason, “This Realm of Scotland,” 77 and 80. 64  James IV to Julius II, [1505], Letters James IV, 16–17; 1 February 1506–1507, Letters James IV, 54–55; [December 1509], Letters James IV, 163–164. 58 59

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in England, and claimed his own descent from Brutus65—all in the run-up to Flodden. Yet Louis goaded him further, reminding James in April 1512 of “the succession to the crown of England, to which he, by right of marriage, is the nearest heir, apart from his ancient right.”66 “If, by chance,” he added, “the King of England makes war in France, the King begs the King of Scots to pursue his rights,”67 and promised to “send to the King of Scots all the help he can to conquer the Kingdom of England.”68 Musters and other preparations followed in Scotland,69 as did reports that “many of the Scotch are dissatisfied with England, and say they have been plundered, and will have revenge”70—all despite Henry’s protest that he acted in the interest of James and all Christendom71 and warning to “our dearest brother” that favoring the French “is as contrarious to his weal and possibility of succession as to ours.”72 By 1513, Louis had sharpened his plea: “it is better that the King of England should have declared himself so that they should never trust him, but guard against him as their ancient enemy and make a great army to diminish his pride and reconquer the kingdom of England for the King of Scots, as having the real right to it.”73 In May, he directed James Ogilvy to “beg the King of Scots to break openly with the King of England and invade… [so] he may more easily

65  Katie Stevenson, “Chivalry, British Sovereignty and Dynastic Politics: Undercurrents of Antagonism in Tudor-Stewart Relations, c. 1490–c. 1513,” Historical Research 86, no. 234 (November 2013), 601–618. 66   “Louis XII’s Answer to the Secret Credentials,” [April 1512], Flodden Papers, 38–39, at 38. 67  “Instructions by Louis XII to the Bishop of Ross,” 4 April 1512, Flodden Papers, 27–28, at 28. 68  “Additional Instructions to Bishop of Ross,” 4 April 1512, Flodden Papers, 32–33, at 33. 69  Dacre to Henry, 20 July 1512, LP 1:1302[3326]. 70  Spinelly to Henry, 12 January 1513, LP 1:1566[3651]. 71  Henry to James IV, [31] July 1512, LP 1:1314[3346]. 72  Henry to Dacre, [31] July 1513, LP 1:1315[3347], which specifically noted France’s harboring of “our rebel Richard De la Pole” as the most immediate threat to the Tudor line. 73  “Instructions by Louis XII to the Seigneur de la Mothe,” 5 March 1512–1513, Flodden Papers, 66–68, at 67. “Memorandum of the Bishop of Moray’s Representation to Louis XII” [on or before 31 March 1513], restated both claims, Flodden Papers, 72–74.

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attain to the recovery of the crown of England.”74 Thirty years before Henry VIII declared war on Scotland with the explicit goal of imperial expansion, James IV had his own claim to England, similarly buttressed by history and force. It was only in reply that Henry, encamped outside Thérouanne, told a Scottish envoy, “I am the very owner of Scotland & [James] holdeth it of me by homage, and in so much as now contrary to his bounden duety he beinge my vassall, doth rebell against me, with Gods help I shal at my returne expulse him his realme.”75 And, in a letter penned to James that very day (12 August), he gave voice to the second, more unsettling, aspect of Stewart policy: lambasting James’s “vnaturall deameanour” and repudiation of God, blood, honor, law, and reason, Henry vigorously denied “the possybilitie that ye thynke to haue to the Realme whiche ye attempte to inuade.” For good measure, he threw in a jab at Scottish inferiority: “We cannot greatly marvaill [at James’s behavior], consideryng the auncyent accustumable maners of your progenitoures, whiche neuer kept lenger faithe and promyse then pleased theym.”76 Henry managed the last word, his men defeating the “cruel tyranny of the King of Scots.”77 News of Katherine’s fiery speech before Flodden “that English courage excelled that of all other nations”78 and the ensuing victory reached Henry at Tournai “by a messenger, who brought the Scotch King’s plaid with the royal arms upon it.”79 In England, news circulated of the defeat of the “cruel tyranny of the King of Scots,” the happiest victory in memory.80 Significantly and fittingly, contemporaries linked the two exploits.81 After confirming the arrival of James’s “rent surcoat… stained

74  “Instructions to Master James Ogilvy by Louis XII,” 8 May 1513, Flodden Papers, 79–80, at 79. 75  Hall, Vnion, “Henry the .viii.,” fol. xxixv. 76  Henry to James IV, 12 August 1513, TNA SP 49/1, fol. 16r. 77   Thomas Ruthall to Thomas Wolsey, 20 September 1513, TNA SP 1/5, fols. 47r–48v, at 47r. 78  Peter Martyr to Lud. Furtado, 23 September 1513, LP 1:2299[4464]). 79  Taylor Diary, LP 1:2391[4284]. 80  Ruthall to Wolsey, 20 September 1513, TNA SP 1/5, fols. 47r–48v, at 47r. 81  Antonio Bavarin to the Pesari of London, 12 October 1513, CSPV 2:337, noted these “three very grand victories.” Other examples include Ruthall to Wolsey, 18 September 1513, TNA SP 1/5, fols. 42r-v; Maximillian Duke of Milan to Henry, 20 November 1513, SP 1/7, fols. 29r–30v.

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with blood,” Tuke explained, “the traitor Scots, who dare not face England when the king was there, and sought to destroy her in his absence, have paid a heavy penalty.” “We have now,” he added, Thérouanne and Tournai; “I am greatly fatigued, writing good and joyful news, thank God, in every direction.”82 To the Duke of Milan, “the King was right in thinking that his intimation of the surrender of Tournai … was the more pleasant for the news of victory over the King of Scots about the same time.”83 After all, France and Scotland were part of the same Tudor inheritance, a point that must have been made obvious when Henry’s army headed north with “one banner of the cross of Saint George, one standard of the red dragon and four banners of our arms.”84 Most fittingly, André celebrated the Battle of the Spurs and Flodden together and in Latin, comparing Henry, “victorious in France and Scotland,” to Caesar and Augustus and adorning his title with royal arms, surrounded by red dragon and white greyhound and topped with an imperial crown, alongside red, white, and Tudor roses.85 With James IV dead and Scotland reeling,86 Henry flirted with fulfilling his British pretensions. To the recently elected Pope Leo X, Henry promised “not to fail to follow up his advantage [in Scotland]” and begged Rome to “revoke certain concessions made to the King of Scots which are injurious to England,” reduce St. Andrews to a bishopric, restore the archbishop of York’s Scottish authority, wait to dispose of any vacant Scottish sees “until Henry has expressed his wishes with regard to them,” and allow James to be buried at St. Paul’s.87 Meanwhile, he authorized raids

 Tuke to Pace, 22 September 1513, CSPM, 661.  Maximilian Duke of Milan to Henry, 27 November 1513, TNA SP 1/7, fols. 41rv , at 41r. 84  “Army against Scotland,” 1 August 1512, LP 1:1317. 85  André, Invocatio de inclita invictissimi regis nostri Henrici octavi in Gallos et Scotos victoria,” CP 277/1. 86  From Tournai, Henry wrote to the Duke of Milan that James was killed “with almost all his nobles and a vast number of his people,” 24 September 1513, LP 1:2300. 87  Henry to Leo X, 12 October 1513, LP 1:2355[4502]. Leo’s 29 November reply is LP 1:2469[4582]. Henry did indeed try to involve himself in Scottish ecclesiastical appointments, see Bishop of Worcester to Gavin Douglas, 6 June 1515, The Letters of James V, cal. Hannay, ed. Denys Hay (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1954), 23–24. These claims lasted: a 22 June 1515 letter to Wolsey described how the Scots owed obedience to England and to the Archbishop of York, BL Cotton Vit. B II, fols. 185r–186v. 82 83

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into Scotland88 and instructed Thomas Dacre to see the young King of Scots placed in the “handes and keping” of the King of England, to be “ordred and ruled by the Kinges grace” as “his protectour and defender.”89 Venetian ambassadors reported that Leo agreed, hoping to “reconcile France and England by letting the King of England have the rule of Scotland … because the Queen of Scotland is his sister and expects [her son] to inherit England as he has no children.”90 Evidently, Margaret did too, imploring Henry to “make haste with your Armye” by land and sea to stop those “vsurpinge ye Kinges Autorite,”91 while the minority government wrote frantically in James V’s name to Christian II of Denmark that “In the pride of victory, though it was won through Scottish inexperience and not by English valour, and promising himself unlimited success, Henry is preparing to invade this ancient and illustrious realm as soon as possible, threatening to blot out the Scottish name with fire and sword.”92 They begged for help to “defend the boy king’s sovereignty,”93 for “Henry, though he is the king’s uncle, is bent upon the reduction of Scotland and proposes to finish the business this summer [1515].”94 Even Ferdinand believed that Henry would persist “with the intention of conquering Scotland and abandoning his enterprise in France,”95 risking his future

88  Dacre to Henry, 22 October 1513, BL Cotton Calig. B VI, fols. 47r–49v; Dacre to Ruthall, 23 October 1513, BL Cotton Calig. B III, fols. 2r-v; Ruthall to Wolsey, 24 October 1513, BL Cotton Calig. B VI, fols. 40r–41v; Dacre to Ruthall, 29 October 1513, BL Cotton Calig. B III, fols. 12r-v; Thomas Lord Darcy to Henry, 20 March 1514, BL Cotton Calig. B II, fols. 339r–342v; Spinelly to [Henry], 1 July 1514, BL Cotton Galba B III, fols. 188r–189v. 89  “Instructions for Lord Dacre,” 1513, TNA SP 1/5, fols. 77r–78v, at 77r. 90  “Venice,” 8 January 1514, LP 1:2568. The feeling persisted, see 18 August 1514, LP 1:3173. On 23 November 1514, Leo counseled James to obey his uncle (LP 1:3470[5613]) as did Clement VII on 28 November 1524 (Letters James V, 108–109). 91  Margaret of Scotland to Henry, 23 November 1514, BL Cotton Calig. B I, fols. 178r–179v, at 178r. Later reports claimed that Henry planned to make Margaret’s eldest son King of England and youngest King of Scotland, see John Lord Flemyng to [Lord Hume?], 11 December 1514, BL Cotton Calig. B I, fol. 27r. 92  James V to Christian II, [16 January 1513–1514], Letters James V, 4–5, at 5. 93  Albany to Christian II, [After 7 April 1516], Letters James V, 29–30, at 30. 94  James V to Christian II, [April? 1515], Letters James V, 21. 95  Ferdinand to Pedro de Urea, his Ambassador at the Imperial court, [November 1513], LP 1:2475.

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support of the League,96 or dealing with France for control of Scotland.97 The wheels of Pynson’s press also turned with propaganda celebrating Flodden and Henry’s claims of Scottish overlordship.98 Yet for now, such British posturing came to little. The Tudor king focused on France, while Stewart subjects concluded that a “truce is advisable both for France and Scotland in her present crippled position, and in view of the king of Scotland’s tender years and his interest in the English throne.” Although Louis “advise[d] the Scots to keep an eye upon Henry, so as not to be caught unprepared for an attack,”99 his successor Francis I saw that at this juncture, “England did not intend war, whatever the outward appearance.”100 Nonetheless, “the menace of English hostility,”101 that “inveterate foe,”102 remained apparent to Scots well beyond 1515,103 as

 Ferdinand to Geronimo de Vich, his Ambassador at Rome, [September 1513?], LP 1:2860; to Quintana, 1 January 1514, LP 1:2554. Richard Wingfield agreed that governing Scotland would satisfy Henry in France, 18 April 1514, BL Cotton Galba B III, fols. 210r–211v. 97  “Ferdinand of Aragon,” [23 December] 1513, LP 1:2535. 98  In 1513, the crown commissioned three works on the topic: Epistola regis Scotorum ad Angliae regem, an epitaph by Carmeliano, and the anonymous Thordre and behavyoure of the right honourable Erle of Surrey … ayonst the kynge of Scots. Barclay’s Life of St. George and Skelton’s Ballade of the Scottysshe Kynge followed. A version of Tito Livio Frulovisi’s Vita Henrici Quinti was also prepared for the king in that year. See Carlson, “Alexander Barclay and Richard Pynson: A Tudor Printer and His Writer,” Anglica 113, no. 3 (1995): 282–302; Pamela Neville-Sington, “Press, Politics and Religion,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 3 vols., ed. Lotte Hellinga and J.B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3:576–607; Davies, “Tournai and Crown,” 14. 99  “Instructions by Albany to Master Ogilvy,” 13 June 1514, Letters James V, 10–12, at 10 and 11. For similar sentiment, see “Articles by Albany for Norge Herald,” 16 June 1515, Letters James V, 24–25. 100  “Instructions to Bordeaul, 3 November 1516, Letters James V, 32–34, at 33. 101  Albany to Leo X, 20 January 1516–1517, Letters James V, 37–38. 102  James V to Christian II, 22 April 1523, Letters James V, 92–93, at 93. 103  For example, see “Instructions to John, Lord Fleming, for France,” [April-May 1520], Letters James V, 76–77; [Bishop of Worcester to Foxe and Wolsey], 1514, BL Cotton Vitell. B II, fols. 90r–92v. The designs remained linked in Tudor minds as well: on 16 February 1517, Knight advised Wolsey to use any money in either fortifying Tournai or attacking Scotland, BL Cotton Galba B V, fols. 97r–100v, at 98v. 96

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did Henry’s perennial eagerness “to conquer the realm,”104 dredge up “old English claims to Scottish homage… [and] have Scotland at his will.”105 * * * Henry chose Tournai for many of the reasons his successors would choose their imperial outposts: historic right and mythic resonance, geographical location and economic viability, potential permanence and a route to further expansion, and a perceived inferiority in politics, culture, and religion—all at the expense of a European rival. Observers outside of Britain, like Julius de Medici, came to understand (with Henry’s help) that in “the business of Tournay,” the king was tapping into “an ancient custom.”106 Others called Thérouanne “the key of Picardy,”107 and “the king’s treasury”; Tournai was “the unsullied maiden”108 and, it bears repeating, Warbeck’s birthplace. From there, one remarked, “[Henry] could go the whole way to Paris without impediment, it being his intention to have himself there crowned King of France.”109 The region also boasted a wealthy bishopric, sizable population, loose allegiance to France (due to competing Imperial claims), strong fortifications, and renowned textiles, wines, and black marble; combined with its central waterway, somewhatisolated position, and reputation for self-sufficiency, it was a perfect, familiar complement to existing Tudor territories.110 “This magnificent city of Tournay, with its river Schalde, which Cæsar mentions by the same name,” 104  “Instructions to Patrick Wemyss for France,” [c. May 31 1525], Letters James V, 120–121, at 121. 105   “Instructions to M. de Sagnes, for Scotland,” 5 June 1525, Letters James V, 123–124, at 123. 106  Julius [de Medici] to Henry, 22 June 1517, SP 1/15, fols. 186r–187v, at 186r. 107  Antonio Bavarin, factor of the Pesaro firm in London, to the Pesari in Venice, 1 September 1513, CSPV 2:283. 108  Tuke to Pace, 22 September 1513, CSPM 661. 109  [Nicolo di Favri, of Treviso?] to Francesco Gradenigo, 12 October 1513, CSPV 2:333. Bavarin and Pasqualigo also assumed Paris was next, see CSPV 2:336 (to the Pesari of London, 12 October 1513) and 2:340 (to his Brothers in Venice, 22 October 1513). 110  Tuke to Pace, 22 September 1513, CSPM 1:660; Cruickshank, Occupation, 35, 128–132, 190. Tudor elite especially favored Tournaisien tapestries and cloth for clothing, see Jerningham to Wolsey, 25 January 1517, TNA SP 1/14, fols. 222r–223v; le Sellier to Wolsey, 5 May 1517, BL Cotton Calig. D VI, fols. 316r–317v; Erasmus to Peter Aegidius, 17 October 1516, LP 2:2455.

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to use Taylor’s words,111 at once mirrored, augmented, and paled by comparison to home, ideally suited for emulation of the great emperor. The discourse that accompanied the conquest was also significant and lasting. Hall chronicled how after Henry determined “to passe the see, in proper person for the recouery of his realme of Fraunce,” he “planted hys siege,” “came to the possession of the cytee of Tournay,” and entered bearing “tharmes of England, Fraunce, Ireland, & other the kynges dominions.”112 His diction reminds us that sixteenth-century mental maps conceived of France as “beyond the sea,” much like other holdings.113 Tuke described how Henry’s new subjects greeted him with acts of “spontaneous civility” and proudly announced, in terms nearly identical to Ralegh’s for 1590s Guiana, that as for this city “on whose walls was inscribed … this maiden has lost her maidenhood.”114 The king had, Peter Martyr wrote, “taken Tournay … slain the King and all noblemen of the Scots who were invading his realm,” and was on the verge of “crippling the pride of France,” but “now when his enemy is at his feet,” Ferdinand made peace with France. Bitter, Henry was forced to take a page out of his father’s book, signing his own treaty with Louis and giving the French king his sister Mary in marriage. Martyr explained Ferdinand’s impetus with a stunning comment: “he is afraid of the overgrowing power of England.”115 Though the Tudor reconquest had ended, its Tournai project took shape against a larger background of both “ancient custom” and “overgrowing power.” From the outset, crown and court worked to integrate Tournai into the realm as a permanent imperial possession. It began by instituting Tudor authority, obedience, and administration. In letters patent issued 23 September, Henry outlined as conditions of surrender that Tournai

 Taylor Diary, LP 1:2391[4284].  Hall, Vnion, “Henry the .viii.,” fols. xxxviv, xlvr. 113  For example, see James IV to Henry, 24 May [1513], Letters James IV, 306; “Order in Council,” 4 July 1513, LP 1:2065[4320]; “Speech,” 1523, TNA SP 1/27, fol. 200v. For comparison, see John Martyn, Mayor of Plymouth, to the PC, 26 June 1603, CP 100/136, noting “the Newfoundlande and other places beyond the seas.” 114  Tuke to Pace, 22 September 1513, CSPM 1:660; Hall repeated the claim, using the term “maydenhed,” as Ralegh would, see Vnion, “King Henry the .viii.,” fol. xliiiir. 115  Peter Martyr to Lud. F. Mendoza, 8 March 1514, LP 1:2707[4864]. For the AngloFrench treaty, see “Louis XII,” [May] 1514, BL Cotton Calig. E 1, fols. 27r–29v. 111 112

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transfer its allegiance to England, with all income appertaining, and accept full responsibility, financial and moral, for the siege, as he had come to restore English rule in France and given the city ample opportunity to acknowledge his sovereignty—a significant use of letters patent to secure and rule a new, foreign dominion.116 Tournai accepted, its spokesmen declaring that they did so “knowynge by reporte, your honoure, your wysedome, your iustyce, and noble harte, are contente to become your subiectes and vassalles,” according to Hall.117 A Treaty of Capitulation followed, given under Henry’s name and with his titles re-arranged as “King of France and England and Lord of Ireland.” It required that all residents, spiritual and temporal, renounce the “so-called King of France,” take “Henry, together with his heirs, and successors for their real King natural and sovereign Lord … [with all] rights and sovereignties, dignities, prerogatives, royal preeminences and jurisdiction” and monies as Louis had, and support a Tudor garrison of whatever size and duration Henry pleased. Dissenters had twenty days to resettle “in countries not currently hostile” to or otherwise against the king or his kingdoms—a sizeable swath of Europe in this era.118 All inhabitants were also compelled to swear to the king before Wolsey119 and, according to one draft, take additional oaths to be “true, undoubted and faithful subjects of our king” as “supremus rex,” obeying his laws, defending his regime, and seeking absolution from him alone, under pain of excommunication.120 Like the reassertion of Tournaisien rights and declaration against defamatory songs, ballads, and libels that followed,121 these provisions demonstrate a warranted sensitivity to risks from without and within: Ferdinand warned that “it is of the 116  “Traité de capitulation de la ville de Tournai,” 23 September 1513, in Adolphe Hocquet, “Tournai et l’occupation anglaise (1513–1519),” Annales de la Société historique et archéologique de Tournai, new ser., 5 (1900), 302–465, at 397–403; Cruickshank, Occupation, 5–6. 117  Hall, Vnion, “Henry the .viii.,” fol. xliiiiv. 118  “Traité de capitulation,” 23 September 1513, Annales, at 397, 399, 400. 119  Hall, Vnion, “Henry the .viii.,” fols. xliiiiv-xlvr. 120  “Tournay,” TNA SP 1/230, fols. 65r–66Bv; Mayer, “On the Road,” 14; Cruickshank, Occupation, 40. An “Obligation for the town” reaffirmed these provisions in January 1517, LP 2:2857. 121  “Lettres de Henri VIII… confirmant les privileges et libertés,” 30 September 1513, Annales, 403–404; “Defense de faire ‘chanchons, ballades ou libelles diffamatoires’ contre le Roi et les princes,” 14 October 1513, Annales, 408.

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nature of Frenchmen that they will not let Tournay be lost without doing their utmost to recover it”122; Thomas Spinelly asserted that the French are so resolved, for Tournai is as a blight on their reputation, a “perpetual brydell” on Flanders, and “a remembraunce & occacion vnto [the English] to make new enterprises agenst Fraunce”123; another report commented that “the people of Tournay complain that they are treated like dogs and will revenge themselves by some trick if not well watched.”124 Yet they also expose a developing theory of imperial kingship, in two forms: in a new territory abroad, carved out of a foreign land and added to a larger Tudor unit defined against its others, Henry broke the mold of his English and French predecessors to claim complete sovereignty over all subjects, clerical and lay. Perhaps the Tournaisiens had cause to be upset. Such sweeping, elastic jurisdiction endowed Henry with a supremacy that he lacked at home, where Parliament and the Church circumscribed his power. As an anonymous Italian presciently pointed out near the turn of the century, “this kingdom of England is not quite independent, I do not mean of the [Holy Roman] Empire, but of the Apostolic See,” reminding his readers that when William I set out to conquer England, “he did homage for it to Pope Alexander the Second.”125 Moreover, these claims targeted Tournai’s legal, commercial, military, and ecclesiastical realms as immediate areas of crown concern and control, marking them off as in need of reform, much as other imperial projects elsewhere would. In a French city less than 200 miles from London, an imperial experiment was underway. European ears were appropriately perked.126 With Henry set to return home now that the invasion was complete and the basic instruments of government in place, the administration needed a chief executive to assume rule. The position’s title, occupants, authority, and responsibilities were all highly significant. Filled by the crown, the office was called “governor,” “lord deputy,” or “lord lieutenant”—English terms grounded in Ireland and Calais, later applied in

 Ferdinand of Aragon to [Bernard de Mesa], [December] 1514, LP 1:3591.  “Spinelly,” May 1515, BL Cotton Galba B III, fols. 266r–267v, at 267r. 124  “A Paper of Intelligence,” [April] 1515, LP 2:399. 125  A Relation … of the Island of England, 53. 126  Milanese ambassador to the Emperor Paulo da Lodi reported the surrender immediately to the Duke of Milan, specifically emphasizing the capitulation, oath-taking, and “great pomp from the citizens” upon Henry’s entry, 23 September 1513, CSPM 662. 122 123

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America—and charged with the command over 5000 soldiers, of exclusively English birth, as well as effecting military, legal, and judicial reform.127 To fill the post, for the “suer kepyng … good order and iustice” of Tournai and profit of the commonweal of England, Henry chose Edward Poynings, a most experienced executor of Tudor rule abroad.128 Poynings was, like his title, an English import to Tournai via Calais and Ireland, and his reputation was built on his success in placating overseas dominions, ordering their native inhabitants, and spreading English ways. His preferment testifies to an implicit comparison between 1490s Ireland and 1510s France and desire to replicate and, with expanded power in a brand-new territory, even surpass the reforms that made the deputy famous under Henry VII—all made more explicit by remarks, like that of official Richard Sampson during Poynings’s tenure, that “the comyn peopyll ys there soo wylde” and seditious.129 At fifty-­four  years, however, Poynings proved too elderly for the task.130 In 1515, Henry replaced him with William Blount, fourth baron Mountjoy, another Tudor favorite and veteran of Calais, but with less military experience. Accordingly, Mountjoy’s record makes this pick even more revealing of Henry’s vision. The new governor’s reputation rested on his patronage of and participation in Renaissance arts, his experience intellectual and cultural, as a student of ancient and medieval history and literature. If Poynings represents the practical arm of early Tudor imperialism sent to govern the city, Mountjoy represents its equally important ideological one. Tellingly, Henry granted

127  “Tournay,” 5 October 1513, Annales, 405–406; John Wilsher to Wolsey, 30 April 1514, TNA SP 1/8, fols. 7r–8v; “Instructions to Sir Richard Wingfield, Deputy of Calais, to be declared and showed to the French Kyng,” [August] 1515, LP 2:827. Vergil emphasized the soldiers’ origin and put the number at 8000, Anglica Historia, Book XXVII, paragraph 14. All three titles were used, see “For William Blount,” 20 January 1515, LP 2:41; Richard Whettehyll to Wolsey, 13 March 1516, TNA SP 1/13, fols. 52r–53v; Richard Jerningham to Wolsey, 14 May 1516, TNA SP 1/13, fols. 149r–150v. On the position, see Steven Saunders Webb, The Governors-General: The English Army and the Definition of the Empire, 1569–1681 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). 128  Hall, Vnion, “Henry the .viii.,” fol. xlvv; 5 Hen. VIII, c. 18. 129  Sampson to Wolsey, 6 September 1514, TNA SP 1/9, fols. 70r-v, at 70r. 130  [Henry] to [Maximilian], [January] 1515, TNA SP 1/10, fol. 38r-v.

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the latter “merum et mixtum imperium ac jurisdictionem” to act “ad nos regaliam et coronam.”131 Indeed, Mountjoy’s administration ushered northern humanism from the halls of court into the empire at Tournai. There, the governor entertained friends Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More as well as their scholarly pursuits,132 working (unsuccessfully) to secure a Tournasien prebend for the former as he prepared the Novum Instrumentum (1516)133 and eagerly welcoming the latter’s “book on the Island of Utopia … so that until I can again enjoy his society, I may at any rate visit my More in Utopia” when it reached him in Tournai in 1517.134 The pairing of Utopia (1516) and Tournai was particularly appropriate, two contemporary, intertwined experiments in overseas empire-­building. Yet unrestrained in form or function, More mixed fiction and reality to represent a colony founded by a conquering king (Utopus) on an island “in that newefonnde parte of the worlde whiche is scaselye so farre from vs beyonde the lyne equinoctiall, as owre lyfe and manners be dissidente from theirs,”135 and issue a stark critique of “the moste vyctoryous and tryumphante Kynge of Englande Henry the ight”136 beneath a narrative cloak of abstraction. According to Utopia’s rubric, imperial expansion was only acceptable as a means to ease overpopulation, spread superlative laws and ways of life, and work “waste & vnoccupied grounde”137; to liberate a

131  “Nomination du lieutenant royal pour Tournai,” 20 January 1515, Annales, 427–429, at 427; Carley, “Blount, William, fourth Baron Mountjoy (c.1478–1534),” DNB (2008); Mayer, “Tournai and Tyranny,” 263. 132  More to Erasmus, [February] 1516, Epistles, 2:256–262. Erasmus described Mountjoy as his former pupil, see Erasmus to Servatius Rogerus, 8 July 1514, Epistles 2:141–151, at 146. 133  Erasmus to Ammonius, 23 December 1515, Epistles, 2:231; Sampson to Wolsey, 20 June 1516, TNA SP 1/13, fol. 224r; Erasmus to Sampson, 1 March 1518, Epistles, 3:347–348. 134  Mountjoy to Erasmus, 4 January 1517, Epistles, 2:452–453, at 452. Sampson also read Utopia in Tournai, indicating wider circulation there, see Sampson to Erasmus, 2 March 1518, Epistles 3:274–276. 135  More, A fruteful, and pleasaunt worke of the beste state of a publyque weale, and of the newe yle called Vtopia (1551), sig. O.iiii.r. More’s early pages, with its references to Vespucci in particular, lent the text an air of plausibility, sig. B.iii.v. 136  More, Utopia, sig. B.i.r. 137  More, Utopia, sig. I.v.v.

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people from tyranny138; and to fight against “hydeous sauage and fyerce, dwellynge in wild woodes and high mountaines… rude both in the buildinge of their houses & in their apparrell.”139 Further, More censured war against a “nexte neygheboures… vnder the coloure of some olde tytle of ryghte, suche as kynges doo neuer lacke,”140 and lamented “princes [who] haue more delyte in warlike matters and feates of cheualrie (the knowledge wherof I nother haue nor desire) than in the good feates of peace, and employe muche more study howe by right or by wrong to enlarge their dominions, than howe well and peaceablie to rule and gouerne that they haue all redie.”141 These comments doubled-down on the boldly ambivalent terms with which More had greeted the conquest of Tournai: “Warlike Caesar vanquished you, Tournai, till then unconquered, but not without disaster on both sides,” he wrote in 1513, “Henry a king both mightier and better than great Caesar has taken you without bloodshed. The king felt that he had gained honor by taking you, and you yourself felt no less advantageous to be taken.”142 Superficially, the prose was laudatory, Henry extolled as the emperor’s superior, but the verb “felt”—sensit in the original Latin—constituted lukewarm endorsement at best and poked at the king’s imperial claims, while More identified Henry as King of England alone, invalidating the invasion as the necessary work of a King of France. Moreover, in another epigram that year, More mused on the “Lust for Power,” charging that “among many kings there will be scarcely one, if there is really one, who is satisfied to have one kingdom. And yet among many kings there will be scarcely one, if there is really one, who rules a single kingdom well.”143 By the same token, however, More’s Utopia offered up an attractive, legitimate imperial model, encouraging the king to emulate Utopian achievements in the New World and other readers to “see and knowe the farre contreys of the worlde” as his principal character, Raphael Hythloday, had.144 Although Henry was already celebrated for  More, Utopia, sig. O.ii.v.  More, Utopia, sig. P.ii.r. 140  More, Utopia, sig. P.i.v. 141  More, Utopia, sig. C.i.r. 142  More, “Epigram 244,” in Gerard B.  Wegeman, Young Thomas More and the Arts of Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 110. 143  More, “Epigram 243,” in Wegeman, Young More, 110. 144  More, Utopia, sig. B.iii.v. 138 139

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“the favor he shows to men of letters, and the pleasure he takes in their company,” as Guillaume Budé fawned in 1518,145 Mountjoy brought the cultural currents central to Henrician empire to bear on its practical execution in France. In a letter to Erasmus written from Tournai in 1518, Sampson styled himself as “among the Nervii,” a Belgian tribe in Caesar’s era.146 The parallels that inspired pre-conquest imperial thought, then, also pervaded its exercise in the 1510s, helping to strengthen intellectual networks and print culture while demonstrating the entanglement of nation and empire—even after another Englishman, Richard Jerningham, replaced Mountjoy in 1517.147 The governor acted as Henry’s eyes, ears, and fists on the ground, as his supreme deputy, commander of his garrison, overseer of mercantile affairs, and head or “bayly by vertu of the kyng[‘s] [gra]nte” of the city’s judicial system, an Anglicized and more tightly crown-regulated version of the French original, bailli.148 In this, he was assisted by a “Council of Tournay,”149 that staple of statecraft prized by the Tudors as a foundational tenet of English humanism derived, like empire itself, from antiquity; by their reading of classical philosophy, good counsel bred good government, supplementing and sanctifying crown authority at home and abroad.150 Composed principally of the governor’s marshal, treasurer, and

 Budé to Pace, 29 April 1518, LP 2:4128.  Sampson to Erasmus, 2 March 1518, in Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 594–841, ed. Peter G. Bietenholz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 317. More also referred to Tournai as “Nerviae” in Epigram 244. 147  Jerningham and Council of Tournay to [Henry], 25 January 1517, LP 2:2825; on Jerningham’s appointment, Jerningham to Wolsey, 11 February 1517, LP 2:2902; [Jerningham] to [Wolsey], 4 April 1517, TNA SP 1/15, fols. 77r–78v. 148  Mountjoy to Wolsey, 12 July 1515, BL Cotton Calig. D VI, fols. 305r–306r, at 305r. 149  Henry to Jerningham and Council of Tournai, 26 March 1517, TNA SP 1/15, fols. 37r–38v. 150  For example, More’s Utopia, Thomas Starkey’s “Dialogue between Pole and Lupset” (1532), Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531), which drew on Aristotle’s Politics, Cicero’s De officiis, and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. On counsel, see Jonathan Woolfson, ed., Reassessing Tudor Humanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9–42; Fox and Guy, eds., Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform, 1500–1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal: Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Guy, “The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England,” in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Hoak, 145 146

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porter, the Tournai council was modeled on those of Calais and Ireland and England’s Privy Council, and was comprised exclusively of Englishmen, many with offices, influence, or incomes at home.151 These staffing choices facilitated close communication between crown, court, and dominion, but also underscore an abiding fear of the native population as disloyal subordinates. In 1515, several Tudor officials bemoaned the “lytenes and vnstablenes we fynde in theym that their w[ordes and] dedes agre not,” doubted whether “they be loyale true and f[aithful] subgettes to your highnes,” or were simply awaiting the return of French rule.152 Even Jean le Sellier, who “is vndoubtedly your true and feithfull subgett,” could not be trusted with “the secrecy of our charges… the citie cannot be kepte vnder [crown authority] except this grete garison be kepte here contynewelly.”153 Mountjoy added that “in the common people there he had but small trust.”154 Deepening this chasm between ruler and subject was the decision, likely borne of pragmatism and clemency, to retain a native institution, “les Consaulx”155 (also known as “the four councils” or “chiefs”), for routine civic and municipal affairs. Though still under English oversight, especially by way of the governor who observed their elections, intervened in any weighty business, and sought, at least in Mountjoy’s case, to style himself “the fifth with them,”156 the four councils were all Tournaisien by birth. Poynings called the “hed officers” chosen under his auspices in February 1514 “all auncient men and bee all lykehode off good

292–310; Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 151  Cruickshank, Occupation, 46–48. For those with offices in England and Calais as well as Tournai, see Worcester, Mountjoy, and Yonge to Henry, 9 September 1515, TNA SP 1/11, fols. 86r–87v, at 86v. 152  [C. Earl of Worcester, John Yong, and others] to Henry, 27 August 1515, BL Cotton Calig. D VI, fols. 198r–199v, at 198r. 153  Worcester and Yonge to [Henry], 18 August 1515, BL Cotton Calig. E I, fols. 60r–61v, at 60v. 154  Mountjoy to Wolsey, 8 September 1515, in Ecclesiastical Memorials, ed. John Strype, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), 1:1:15–16, at 15. 155  “Achats de blé faits par les Consaux sur l’ordre du gouverneur,” 30 September 1518, Annales, 435–436. 156  Mountjoy and Council of Tournai to Wolsey, 11 September 1516, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 1:2:14–16, at 16.

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condition,”157 yet the councils’ survival stoked native perceptions of Tudor authority as fleeting and hardened their commitment to self-rule, as the four tussled with governors, chafed at exclusion from other positions of power (civilian, military, and ecclesiastical), and offered an outlet for disobedience and discontent.158 As Sampson charged in 1516, except for Le Sellier, “all others expect so soon to return to their old master, they have no wish to oblige either the King or any Englishman.”159 Richard Whethill added that the town was pleased to see Tudor power waning, because it hopes to return to France.160 Mountjoy went so far as to complain to Wolsey that “if I had authority, and therewith to retain folks of their council, as wel might be don, I doubt not but I should know more of their privities and enterprizing than I can now,” and then recommended seizing “from the said inhabitants al their harness and habiliments of war; wherby we shalbe out of danger of them.”161 Whether because it was too controlling or too lax, the power-sharing proved untenable. At Tournai, the crown and its subjects tackled a perennial problem that haunted Tudor empire-building: how or whether to incorporate existing, ostensibly inferior indigenous people and systems into new imperial rule. With varying expertise and experience, the most basic attribute and prerequisite shared by all three governors, their councilors, and their soldiers was their Englishness; the four councils, by contrast, were Tournaisien, criticized by Tudor officials for remaining “at heart ‘good French.’”162 Only three men ever traversed these boundaries of identity, and even then incompletely and problematically: an unnamed “lernyd man of thys towne” made keeper of the royal seal of the bailliage by Poynings,163 Allard

 Poynings to Wolsey, 19 February 1514, TNA SP 1/7, fol. 166r-v, at 166r.  Cruickshank, Occupation, 45–46. 159  Sampson to Wolsey, 17 January 1516, TNA SP 1/12, fol. 84r. Intelligence from 1 August 1517 added that all Tournaisiens were loyal to the French King, BL Cotton Calig. D VI, fols. 321r–322v. 160  Whettehyll to Wolsey, 13 March 1516, TNA SP 1/13, fols. 52r–53v, at 52r. 161  Mountjoy and Council to Wolsey, 11 September 1516, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 1:2:14, 15. 162  Cruickshank, Occupation, 46. 163  Mountjoy to Wolsey, 12 July 1515, BL Cotton Calig. D VI, fols. 305r–306v, at 305r. 157 158

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Bentinck, former steward of Margaret of Savoy made receiver,164 and Jean le Sellier, who worked closely with Tudor officials and at Westminster but never joined the council. As Jerningham tellingly remarked in 1516, le Sellier is “the best Englishman that is born within Tournai” and, accordingly, “he is not a little hated among the Tournaisiens.”165 Le Sellier, for his part, challenged Bentinck as “an unfit person, who was not an English subject.”166 The exceptions prove the rule—Tournai was part of the Tudor realm, but separate from and less than it. The possession needed to be transformed to fit a specific, superior, national ideal that was emerging concurrently with and reinforced by imperial policy, against two, negative alternatives: Tournaisien and French. Natural-born Tudor subjects were exclusively trustworthy and solely capable of helping Henry secure and benefit from his dominion. From September 1513, then, the crown promoted the settlement of English subjects in Tournai, licensing the public sale of property, appraising and arranging for purchase of bailliage lands, and sending over workmen, soldiers, merchants, and clerics—all in the interests of raising money, establishing order, and resisting enemies.167 They also helped fill the void left by the hemorrhage of Tournaisiens who had fled after the conquest and refused to return so long as the city remained English.168 Though the number of migrants is hard to quantify, Spinelly referred to “the Englishmen resident in Tournay” (as well as their extreme unease there) in April 1515169 and a report sent the following February stressed

164  “Tournay,” [calendared March 1514, dated 30 November 1513], LP 1:2767; “Allard Bentick,” 20 December 1516, LP 2:2686. 165  Jerningham to Wolsey, 7 February 1516, TNA SP 1/12, fols. 160r-v, also quoted Cruickshank, “Le Sellier, Jean,” in The House of Commons, 1509–1558, ed. S.T. Bindoff, 3 vols. (London: 1982): 2:521–522. 166  “Jehan le Seelier to Wolsey,” February 1515, BL Cotton Calig. D VI, fol. 315r. 167  “Tournay,” 25 September 1513, LP 1:2303; Whettehill to Wolsey, 26 January 1516, TNA SP 1/12, fols. 117r–118v; Sampson to Wolsey, 20 June 1516, TNA SP 1/13, fols. 224rv ; Mountjoy and the Council of Tournai to Henry, 1 August 1516, LP 2:2236; “Tournay,” 24 January 1517, LP 2:2819; Wolsey to Jerningham, 16 January 1518, SP 1/16, fols. 110r–111v; Wolsey to Jerningham, 29 January 1518, TNA SP 1/16, fols. 122r–123v; John Stile to Henry, 11 February 1518, LP 2:3937. 168  “Henri VIII se plaint de l’abandon de Tournai par ses habitants,” 18 November 1513, Annales, 410–411; Jerningham to Wolsey, 7 February 1516, SP 1/12, fols. 156r–159v. 169  Spinelly to Henry, 19 April 1515, LP 2:335.

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intelligence “that many English are come to Tournay.”170 Moreover, an estimate from 1519 calculated over £232 due to English soldiers and £260 due to civilian Englishmen, as distinguished from “divers strangers dwelling within Tournay and Tournesis” and “strangers being under the obeisance of the King Catholic.”171 The most sizable and apparent English presence must have been in the garrison, where royal officials continually insisted on the importance of “reteyn[ing] a competent nombre of english men for watche and warde to be kept within the citee… for the better suretie of the same”172 and provided for their continued use of supplies from London.173 Their rhetoric cultivated a feeling of English superiority in governance and soldering, as they related to Henry that the Tournaisien “desyre is to haue an Englisshe capitaiyne with a certeyne nombre [of soldiers] … and then they to be bounde saufly and suerly to kepe the seid citie and to paye to your grace your heires and sucessours yerly your tribute with all other prehemynences… as they dyd when they were under thobeissaunce of Fraunce”; this approach, they explained, is far more profitable and beneficial to the crown than if “they [were] to chose a capitayne of their owne with a certeyn garyson and to geve theym yerely your tribute.”174 As Whethill warned, if the garrison is reduced, “the number of Inglishe men shalbe so litell that [the French] will not set by them but will take of the passage what [they] shall lyke.”175 To a similar end, in 1517, Worcester, Jerningham, and the council devised a set of articles “for the more ripe and better instruction of William Pawne and John Le Sellier, the King’s commissioners for the making of the King’s citadel at Tournay, and for the ordering of the same in every behalf.” With a list of works and estimate of required laborers organized by specialty, the document shows that the construction was being made along English lines, with English supervision, including a proclamation against stealing tools, playing dice or cards, drinking in houses during work hours, and interfering with the

170  “Andrieu de Zieundonck to the Maitre des Postes of the Archduke at Brussels,” 17 February 1516, BL Cotton Calig. E I, fols. 80r–81v, at 80r. 171  “Accounts for Tournay,” March 1519, TNA SP 1/18, fols. 67r–142v, at 107r–109r. 172  Wolsey to Jerningham, 29 January 1518, TNA SP 1/16, fol. 122r. 173  “Ordnance and Stores,” 17 April 1514, TNA SP 1/7, fols. 315r–320r. 174  Worcester, Mountjoy, and Yonge to Henry, 9 September 1515, SP 1/11, fol. 86r. 175  Whettehill to Wolsey, 10 August 1516, TNA SP 1/13, fols. 267r–268v, at 268v–267r.

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soldiers issued in English and in French.176 At least some of the laborers were English: in 1515, Mountjoy described “a great number of workmen sent over to rejoice this city another year” for “the making of the citadels” and other buildings, before glossing that “if they were made tomorrow this is not the place that I take pleasure to abide in.” Despite his best efforts, the deputy lamented, “they can make no way with the people, but are compelled to use great rigor” at “great difficulty and charge.” Still, he comforted himself that Henry and Wolsey knew best how to avoid the significant “dishonor” of losing Tournai.177 Then, in 1516, Pawne and Le Sellier received license to “carry over workmen and materials for building a fortress in Tournay”178—a grant that Richard Wingfield worried would allow them to draw carpenters and masons from Calais, to its detriment.179 Finally, in February 1517, Henry mandated a total of 2000 workmen “be reteigned for thaccomplisshement of the said workes… and of them as many to be englisshemen” as possible, “so that the nombre of the said Englisshe artificeres and laborers shalbe a grete socour and strengthe for the surete and defence of the said citie as though that nombre was in thordenary retynue of the same.”180 We also have evidence of more elite Englishmen, like “John Fayrechild,” a kinsman of Thomas Wolsey with experience in clerking, accounting, and the law, who sought posts there.181 As reports of France’s growing influence and Tournai’s Valois proclivities only persisted,182 the Tudor court imagined its own personnel—civilian and military—as bulwarks against sedition and lessons in good rule against the “many straungers… moche wepyn and harnys, many cankerd stomakes… And some starke traytores” that Mountjoy spied in the dominion.183 Perhaps, they too appreciated the territory as a vent for excess

 “Tournay,” 24 January 1517, BL Cotton Calig. D VI, fols. 309r–317v.  Mountjoy to Wolsey, 12 July 1515, BL Cotton Calig. D VI, fols. 305r–306v. 178  “For Wm. Pawne and John Le Fellier,” 7 March 1516, LP 2:1636. 179  Wingfield to Wolsey, 12 March 1516, LP 2:1655. 180  “Tournay,” February 1517, TNA SP 1/15, fols. 16r–19v, at 16v. 181  “Wolsey’s Relatives,” [December 1515], TNA SP 1/12, fol. 48r. 182  Worcester to Wolsey, 27 September 1516, BL Cotton Vitel. B III, fols. 90r–91v; Spinelly to [Henry], 18 April 1518, LP 2:4091. Intelligence that “if any enterprise be intended against Tournay, the people of the country will take part with England” was rare, see Spinelly to Henry, 1 April 1517, LP 2:3088. 183  Mountjoy to Wolsey, 16 February 1515, TNA SP 1/10, fols. 59r–60v, at 59v. 176 177

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population, the un- or underemployed, or those seeking advancement. There, in Tournai, these transplants received news of important domestic and dynastic events, like the birth of Princess Mary in 1516, which kept them tied to their nation of origin while also fostering a wider web of Tudor empire.184 Strikingly, Hall recalled that at the occupation’s end, “then began the capitaines and the souldiours to mourne, knowyng that the toune should be yelded to the French kyng, and many a young gentleman, and many a tall yoman wished that thei had not spent their tyme there.” Worcester discharged Jerningham and “commaunded euery man to be obedient to the kinges pleasure & to prepare to returne into England … Thus was the citee of Turnay deliuered the eight daie of Febru|ary in the .x. yere of the reigne of the kyng, and many a tall yoman that lacked liuyng fel to robbyng, which would not labor after their returne.”185 A backbone of Tudor imperial theory was burgeoning, Atlantic-wide: plantation. In mid-1515, Henry summoned his new Irish deputy Gerald Fitzgerald, ninth Earl of Kildare (since his father’s death in September 1513, while the king was busy in France and Scotland) to court, where a rather routine consultation widened into an inquest on the spread of Gaelic culture and power into Old English areas which had gone unchecked since Poynings. The change owed to Anglo-Irishman William Darcy, who put a list of “causes of the sore decay of the King’s subjects of Ireland” before the privy council at Greenwich that June, indicting the practice of coign, livery, cartage, and other unlawful impositions, the deputy’s independent warmongering, and the close intercourse between Anglo- and Gaelic Irish, all under Kildare and his ilk. The consequence, Darcy charged, was that in the four shires where “the English habit… good English order and rule, and the King’s laws,” rents, and revenues, were once obeyed, all subjects now “be near hand Irish, and wear their habits and use their tongue, so as they are clean gone and decayed.”186 Perhaps because his primary concerns still lay elsewhere, Henry nonetheless confirmed Kildare’s administration and gave him new grants, increased authority, and

 “Queen [Katherine] to the Provost, &c. of Tournay,” 18 February 1516, LP 2:1556.  Hall, Vnion, “Henry the .viii.,” fol. lxviir. 186  “Decay of Ireland,” 24 June 1515, in Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts, ed. Brewer and William Bullen, 6 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, 1867), 1:6–8, and 7, 8. 184 185

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license to call parliament.187 Yet Darcy’s complaints did not surface in isolation; also against the inspiring backdrop of Henry’s assertion of historic right and empire in France, Patrick Finglas (later baron of the exchequer and chief justice of the king’s bench in Ireland) rehearsed the history of Ireland, from its original division into five parts, to its conquest by “henry Fytz Empryce”188 and reform along English lines and to keep those of “the kynges Englyshe” and the “Irysh nacion” separate under Edward III.  Despite these efforts and Henry VIII’s undoubted right and title there, Finglas lamented that “al the land is nowe of Iryshe Rule excepte the lytyll Englyshe pale.”189 The situation could be remedied by a strong show of England’s superior military and colonization, but, he added, since it is dangerous “to depople his Reame of England, if the forsayd lande was gottyn out of Iryshe menis handes, yt may be well enhabited wyth Iryshe enhabitantes as it was at the conquest, for ther be no bettyr laborers ne erth tyllers than the pore comen people of Iryshe men [and they] wylbe broght to good fame yf they be kepe vnder a lawe.”190 An anonymous tract, dated 1515, agreed: by sending an army so that “all Iryshe mennes landes… may be lyghtly conquyred, or constrayned to kepe and observe” the king’s laws, orders, and rents, and then transporting “one man oute of every paryshe of England, Cornwale, and Wales, into this lande, to inhabyte,” Ireland would obey Tudor law and abandon the Gaelic habits.191 After all, the author waxed, the “wylde Iryshe” would be glad to accept the hallmarks of English politics and justice, culture, economy, and society, from justices of the peace to their shiring and gardening techniques, and the domestic commonwealth would, in return, be flooded with timber and other necessities.192 Most tellingly, the piece closed by

187  Granted 7 October 1515, LP 2:996–1001; Quinn, “Henry and Ireland”; Ellis, “Fitzgerald, Gerald, ninth Earl of Kildare (1487–1534),” ODNB (2008). 188  Finglas, “A Brevyate of the Conqueste of Irland and of the decay of the same,” TNA SP 60/2, fols. 17r–26v, at 17r. The document exists in several copies, including one dated to 1515 (Cal Carew, 1:1–6). The SP version dates to the early 1530s, see Brady, Chief Governors, 248–252; Mary Ann Lyons, “Finglas, Patrick (d. 1537), ODNB (2004). 189  Finglas, “Brevyate,” fol. 19r. 190  Finglas, “Brevyate,” fols. 23r-v. 191  “State of Ireland, and Plan for it’s [sic] Reformation,” [1515], StP 2:1–31, at 24, 25. 192  “State of Ireland,” StP, 2:9, 28–30.

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contextualizing Ireland within contemporary Tudor empire-building, as the gateway to a global British Empire: what man canne fynde or shewe a better meane for the King of England to subdue the Kinges of Scottes tyll His Grace, then tordre his land of Ireland as aforesayd? For the swerd and armye of Ireland, a yarde and a flaye for ever, to compell all Scotland to be alwaye undre the obeysaunce of the King of England … the profycye is, that the King of Ingland shalle put this land in suche ordre, that all the warres of the land, wherof growyth all the vyces of the same, shalle cesse for ever; and after that, God shalle yeve suche grace and fortune to the same King, that he shalle, with the armye of Ingland and of Ireland, subdue the realme of Fraunce to his obeysaunce for ever, and shalle rescous the Grekes, and recover the grete cyttye of Constantynoplle, and shalle vanquyshe the Turkes, and wynne the Holy Crosse, and the Holly Land, and shalle dye Emperowre of Rome, and eternall blysse shalbe his ende.193 Galvanized by 1490s adventure and the possibilities laid bare by 1510s experimentation, another observer deployed similar theory and rhetoric to promote activity elsewhere in the Atlantic. As Utopia reached print in Louvain, More’s brother-in-law, lawyer and printer John Rastell, organized an expedition to “this newe landes founde lately / Ben callyd America, bycause only / Americus dyd furst them fynde,”194 departing in mid-1517 for a planned three-year stint with crown support, at least two ships, victuals, soldiers, textiles, tools, and a printer—an idealistic amalgam of Cabot and Hythloday.195 Judging by his supplies and the New World plenty of ore, wood, naval stores, fish, eastern luxuries, and uncivil people that he later described,196 Rastell must have envisioned a combination of trade, occupation, colonization, and discovery: the latter-day King Utopus and his men would conquer, build English-style fortifications and homes, teach via the written word, and find the Northwest Passage to Asia.  “State of Ireland,” StP, 2:28, 30–31.  Rastell, The Interlude of the Four Elements, ed. James Orchard Halliwell (London: 1848), 31–32. 195  E.J. Devereux, “John Rastell’s Utopian Voyage,” Moreana 13, no. 5 (1976): 119–123; “Letters of Recommendation from Henry VIII to Foreign Princes on Behalf of the Expedition of 1517,” and “The Voyage of 1517,” in Williamson, ed., The Voyages of the Cabots and the English Discovery of North America under Henry VII and Henry VIII (London: Argonaut Press, 1929), 85–88. 196  Rastell, Interlude, 30–31. 193 194

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Despite a letter of recommendation from the crown and support from two London merchants, the crew refused the transatlantic crossing and forced anchor at Waterford, a fitting, if ironic, use of this other site of Tudor ambition.197 Rastell’s play, New Interlude and a Mery of the Nature of the IIII Elements, written from Ireland and printed under his mermaid shop sign in 1520, memorialized his legitimacy and purpose: O what a thynge had be than, / Yf that they that be Englyshemen / Myght have ben the furst of all / That there shulde have taken possessyon, / And made furst buyldynge and habytacion, / A memory perpetuall! / And also what an honorable thynge, / Bothe to the realme and to the kynge / To have had his domynyon extendynge / There into so farre a grounde, / Whiche the noble kynge of late memory, / The moste wyse prynce the vij. Herry / Causyd furst for to be founde. And what a great meritoryouse dede / It were to have the people instructed / To lyve more vertuously, / … And also to knowe God theyr Maker, / Whiche as yet lyve all bestly.198 Rastell never made it beyond Ireland nor did he use the word “empire,” but his ideas, imagery, and ties to a scholar who offered significant contemporary commentary on territorial expansion all clarify his venture as among the earliest imperial schemes for the New World, launched at a particularly dynamic moment. The mid-1510s had yielded projects in four locales across the emerging British Atlantic World, based on ancient and medieval archetypes and new Renaissance thought. For now, however, the very landscape that had engendered these new plots and theories also assured their neglect; France took priority. * * * In August 1515, the crown learned that its government at Tournai was deadlocked: the regime insisted that Tournaisiens contribute to their own defense, so that they would have the pleasure of remaining subjects199; the 197   Devereux, “Utopian Voyage,” 120–121; Cecil H.  Clough, “Rastell, John (c.1475–1536), ODNB (2004). See also J. Parr, “John Rastell’s Geographical Knowledge of America,” Philological Quarterly 27 (1948), 229–240; Alfred Cave, “Thomas More and the New World,” Albion 23, no. 2 (Summer 1991), 209–229; A.J. Geritz, “The Relationship of Brothers-in-Law Thomas More and John Rastell,” Moreana 139–140 (1999), 35–48. 198  Rastell, Interlude, 29–30. 199  “Les Consaux sont informés de la décision du roi Henri VIII,” 20 June 1515, Annales, 424–425.

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four chiefs pled poverty,200 complaining that their vibrant “towne of marchaundise” had been “made a citie of warre.”201 Henry bitingly replied that any economic woes stemmed not from his conquest but from years of “evil governaunce,” local and French.202 The remedy, inspired by Charles VII, was a full review of Tournai’s laws and privileges to “preserve whatever was good ‘as well for the conservation of the said sovereignty of the king, as for the weal and utility of the said town & of the common weal of the same’” and “‘correct or reform, revoke and annul all that by good & sufficient informations shall be found to the contrary.’”203 Similarly, demands on Tournaisien coffers were “for the common wealth of all the hoole citie and thinhabitauntes therof.”204 Three years in, the king had again extended crown sovereignty in Tournai, justified by a re-reading of history and humanist discourse. As Thomas Mayer has shown, this was not ordinary English rule over a city that happened to lie overseas, nor did it match precedent.205 It was a new, distinct, experimental, imperial policy. Indeed, this claim of legislative supremacy was one in a series of maneuvers in law, economics, and church that speak to the trial and error at the heart of the venture and its future utility. Writing from Windsor in November 1513, just after the conquest, Henry aired his disappointment that so many Tournaisiens had entered voluntary exile, paying no heed to his promises of good treatment and lasting Tudor rule. He mused that perhaps so many left because Poynings had failed his royal charge “to treat them well and favorably, with all love, favor and benevolence, no less than all the best of our subjects in other parts of [our realm].” To convince them of his true intent, the king announced his “will and intention” that Tournai send deputies to the next

200  Mountjoy, Sampson, Whethill, Jerningham, John Tremayne, John Wysman, and Thomas Hert to Henry, 16 August 1515, BL Cotton Calig. E I, fols. 58r–59v; Worcester, Yonge, and others to Henry, 27 August 1515, BL Cotton Calig D VI, fols. 198r–199v. 201  Worcester and Yonge to Henry, 18 August 1515, BL Cotton Calig. E I, fols. 60r–61v, at 60r. 202  “Tournay,” January 1517, TNA SP 1/14, fols. 244r–153r, at 245r. 203  TNA SP 1/113, fos. 242r–244r, as quoted in Mayer, “On the Road,” 15–16. 204  Henry to Jerningham and Council of Tournai, 26 March 1517, TNA SP 1/15, fols. 37r–38v, at 37r. 205  Mayer, “Tournai and Tyranny,” 260–261.

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parliament to begin after Christmas.206 In December, the four councils discussed who to send and, after some difficulty, settled on provost le Sellier, alderman Nicole de Preys, councilor Michel Aligambe, and proctor-general Eloi de la Rue, who were sent on 11 February 1514 to take part in the session that ran from 23 January to 4 March.207 Multiple sources attest to their presence, and indicate that the delegation successfully drew attention to the complexities of ruling a new, foreign territory.208 The session’s very first statute was “An Acte concerning Ministracion of Justice in the Citie of To’ney,” which clarified the status of and relationship between its inhabitants and the king’s other subjects. The act declared that all contracts lawfully made in Tournai by two new notaries and under a special royal seal were enforceable in England and empowered Tudor authorities in Tournai to enforce contracts drawn up in England. The English Chancery received jurisdiction and oversight over both.209 Moreover, a strongly worded preamble charged that the conquests of Thérouanne and Tournai derived from “the Kyng oure Souveraine Lord gretely desiring to recover the Royalme of Fraunce his very true patrimonye and enheritaunce and to reduce the same to his obeisaunce.” Now that this had been accomplished, at the king’s personal charge, “great amytie famyliaritie and entercours in bying and sellying of merchandises wares and oderwise bytwene the Citizens and inhabitauntes of the seid Cities Townes and percinctes of the same And the Kynges naturall Subjectes inhabituantes in this his Royalme of Englond,” with both enjoying the same “true and indifferent justice.”210 Such prominence on the docket and careful couching speak to the statute’s meaning and purpose as part of a broader vision, legitimized by history, expansive in nature, bound by loyalty and obedience to the crown, for the commercial benefit of England, and with the promise of English justice (but not, critically, the  “Henri VIII se plaint…” 18 November 1513, Annales, 410–4111.  “Le gouverneur de Tournai ordonne la remise entre ses mains des bannières des corporations,” 21 December 1513, Annales, 411–412; Davies, “Tournai MPs at Westminster?” Parliamentary History 20, pt. 2 (2001), 233–235; Cruickshank, Occupation, 49–51. 208  Bindoff, House of Commons, 1:285, 2:521–522; Sampson to Wolsey, 15 December 1514, BL Cotton Galba B V, fols. 365r–366v, at 366r; “Ordonnance de Henri VIII,” 26 February 1514, Annales, 412–413. 209  Mayer, “On the Road,” 17; Mayer, “Tournai and Tyranny,” 262. 210  5 Hen. VIII, c. 1, in Statutes of the Realm, ed. John Raithby, 11 vols. (London: 1817), 3:92–93, at 92. 206 207

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erasure of separateness from natural-born subjects) for the conquered. Roughly concurrent with the parliamentary session, between 26 February and 16 March, Henry issued six new ordinances for the administration of Tournai. They called for the institution of a new tribunal of five “notables” to hear appeals cases that previously went to France,211 created a system for dealing with judgments and decrees that had been made under Louis’s name or in Paris before the siege,212 reaffirmed the city’s right to levy one-sixth of all grain that passed through along the River Scheldt for stockpiling,213 established two royal notaries and a specially engraved royal seal to receive and register contracts,214 authorized subjects of Tournai and the Tournaisis to trade freely in England while confirming other trading privileges,215 and freed the city from the payment of rents and other payments due to those residing in countries hostile to England.216 The emerging empire had dictated the national agenda considerably that spring of 1514, much as an emerging sense of national identity and of what living under Henry’s domed crown meant pervaded imperial policy. The king’s decision to summon Tournaisiens to Westminster was momentous, and it came amid a seismic shift from the last half-century of practice, when English kings had shied away from restoring or creating constituencies. As A.D.K. Hawkyard has shown, between 1509 and 1558, the House of Commons grew by one-quarter, largely thanks to Henry, who enfranchised areas along the periphery of his realm (including Calais in 1536) “as a means of unifying the kingdom, nurturing the commonwealth, and strengthening the Crown’s assertion of England’s imperial

211  “Henri VIII institute à Tournai un tribunal de cinq notables pour connaître des causes qui avant la reduction de cette ville ressortissaient au Parlement de Paris, 26 February 1514, Annales, 413–415. 212  “Ordonnance de Henri VIII concernant les lettres de provision accordées par Louis XII, roi de France, et les arréts rendus par le Parlement de Paris, avant la reduction de la ville de Tournai, 26 February 1514, Annales, 412–413. 213  “Henri VIII autorise la ville de Tournai à lever un droit sur les grains qui passent en cette ville par l’Escaut,” 26 February 1514, Annales, 415–416. 214  “Henri VIII établit à Tournai deux tabellions royaux et un scelleur royal pour recevoir les contrats,” 4 March 1514 [incorrectly dated 1516], Annales, 429–433. 215  “Henri VIII autorise ses sujets de Tournai et Tournaisis à commercer librement en Angleterre et à y acquérir des biens,” 16 March 1514, Annales, 416–418. 216  “Henri VIII libère la ville de Tournai du paiement des rentes et pensions dues à des personnes résidant dans des pays hostiles à l’Angleterre, 19 March 1514, Annales, 418–419.

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status.”217 Tournai did not inaugurate this process—Orford and Berwickupon-Tweed both sent members by 1512—and there is insufficient evidence to prove that Le Sellier and his countrymen were full, regular members rather than advisors.218 Yet neither diminishes the significance of Tournai’s delegation. First, their presence, in whatever capacity, well before the crown invited attendees from other overseas possessions, reminds us that there was no blueprint for the imperial power that Henry claimed in Tournai, nor for its exercise. Much like the visitation proposed in 1517, representation at the highest level of constitutional governance was one possible technique of ensuring loyalty; when it was deemed inappropriate or failed, like so much else in sixteenth-century British empirebuilding, other schemes took its place. There is no evidence that anyone from Tournai appeared at the 1515 Parliament (England’s last until 1523)219 and no overt explanation for why the experiment was abandoned. Second, the delegation’s accomplishments—that is, the legislation and ordinances made during their stay or immediately after—at once strengthened ties between England and Tournai, defined Englishmen and Tournaisiens vis-­à-­vis one another and several key tenets of Tudor identity—the paramount (secular) authority of king-in-parliament, recourse to English law and justice, and the importance of trade—that were in turn reinforced by the new provisions, and cordoned off the crown’s domains, regardless of location, from the rest of the world. Each point marks this moment as an attempt to solve the endemic imperial problems of distance and difference and create a coherent, cohesive Tudor World. By April 1514, the representatives were back home, bearing copies of the ordinances and statute. Tournai now had to enact those designs, which focused on two interwoven areas privileged by metropole and periphery alike: justice and the economy. The city’s courts were busy and consequential because they had to handle wealthy merchants and

217  Hawkyard, “The Enfranchisement of Constituencies, 1509–1558,” Parliamentary History 10, pt. 1 (1991): 1–26, at 7. 218  Cruickshank, “Parliamentary Representation of Tournai,” English Historical Review 83, no. 329 (October 1968): 775–776; Hawkyard, “Enfranchisement of Constituencies,” 2–6; Davies, “Tournai and the English Crown, 1513–1519,” The Historical Journal 41, no. 1 (1998): 1–26; Davies, “Tournai MPs,” 233–235; Mayer, “On the Road,” 17–19. 219  Hawkyard assumed that Tournai sent members in 1515, but without evidence. Hawkyard, “Enfranchisement,” 6; Davies, “Tournai MPs,” 234–235; Davies, “Tournai and Crown,” 7–14.

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manufacturers220; conversely, commerce made Tournai attractive to its occupiers, and law and trade were critical spheres of imperial power. Under French rule, the bailli ran the judicial system, with appeals funneled through the Cour de Parlement at Paris. The Tudor governor replaced the bailli easily enough, and, out of the king’s “very exceptional desire that justice be administered unto his loyal subjects,” the second ordinance issued in 1514 encouraged anyone with an unimplemented decision in hand from Paris to come before the governor for review; if approved, the ruling would proceed as if issued by an English judge.221 Future appeals, however, required a novel innovation with expansionary potential that matched Henry’s kingly vision, also created in 1514 and expounded in July 1515: the “court sovereign”—five, crown-appointed “notables” learned with the law, with clerks and licentiates, resident in Tournai with civil and criminal jurisdiction there and in any “other countries now reduced to our obedience and that will be reduced thereafter.” The new court was necessary, the king proclaimed, because “we desire to recover and return to our obedience our Realm of France, which is our real patrimony and heritage, for a long time occupied by force and violence occupied by our enemies,” and because Paris’s Parlement “is at present in rebellion and disobedience.”222 The document did not specify the type of law employed, but, as Mayer has convincingly pointed out, “its substitution for Henry’s court may have dictated that it be common law  – or perhaps equity.”223 In any event and despite commissions naming Mountjoy and Jerningham presidents of the “supremae curiae,”224 progress stalled, evidently due to the court’s ambivalence. By mid-­May 1516, Mountjoy was trying to dissuade “your grace [who] is mynded and determened to haue your Courte Soveraigne in your Chauncery within your realme of Englond like as in tyme passed hit was at pares,” for “hit shalbe so noyus vnto your subiectes here: bothe for the iorney by see and lande

 Cruickshank, Occupation, 190–192.  “Ordonnance… concernant les lettres de provision,” 26 February 1514, Annales, 412–413, at 412. 222  “Henri institute à Tournai…,” Annales, 413–414, at 414. For the court’s name, see “Les Consaux sont informés de la décision du roi Henri VIII concernant la construction d’un ‘Chateau’, de l’institution de la Cour souveraine et de la conclusion d’une paix avec la France,” 20 July 1515, Annales, 424–425. 223  Mayer, “Tournai and Tyranny,” 262. 224  “Henry VIII,” 1 October 1515, LP 2:979; “Tournay,” [December 1516], LP 2:2737. 220 221

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and also for fawte of langage.”225 The following April, the Consaux related that to ensure “good justice” and show “the very great affection that he has towards his good, true, and loyal subjects of Tournai no less than what he has towards his own native subjects in his kingdom of England,” king and council had decreed that appeals would be heard in the English Chancery and handled by its chancellor, wherever he might be.226 Henry also demanded a report of former French appeals procedures, which were forwarded in July.227 Whether due to the logistical, legal, or ideological challenges, Tournai’s “court sovereign” was never realized. Instead, the governor, his council, and military officials had to coordinate with the seats of metropolitan power.228 The administration did, however, move ahead with the creation of a special royal seal for Tournai. Modeled after England’s Great Seal, as opposed to the small utilitarian one used in Calais, it styled Henry “Rex Francie et Anglie” and bore the king enthroned with arched crown, orb, scepter, fleur-de-lis, and lions on one side, and on horseback, fully armed and wielding a sword on the other.229 It left a powerful image of Tudor monarchical authority on the city’s official documents. Alongside, even in exchange for, its expenditures in personnel and governance, the Tudor state expected profits to pay for and justify the burdens of empire in Tournai, just as native Tournaisiens insisted on regaining their pre-conquest prosperity.230 Without financial success, or at least balanced books, the survival and growth of the project was in jeopardy. Yet the task was huge, especially once Henry blamed his new residents for their desolation, permitted them to leave with all movable property, and saddled them with war debts.231 Tudor officials fed into the narrative, warning that displaced Tournaisien merchants bred sedition, as their

 Mountjoy to Henry VIII, 16 May 1516, BL Cotton Calig. E I, fols. 101r–103r, at 101r.  “Le roi Henri VIII ordonne que les appel des prévots et jurés se feront devant sa Chancellerie, exige cent ouvriers pendant six mois, aux frais de la ville pour la construction du Château,” 3 April 1517, Annales, 438–439, at 438. 227  “Tournay,” 10 July 1517, LP 2:3458; Rymer, Foedera 13:593–595. 228  Cruickshank, Occupation, 200–203. 229  “Sceaux et contre-sceaux de Henri VIII,” Annales, opposite 302; Davies, “Tournai and Crown,” 9. 230  Henry to Jerningham and Council, 26 March 1517, TNA SP 1/15, fols. 37r–38v. 231  “Traité de capitulation,” 23 September 1513, Annales, 400, 402; “Henri se plaint de l’abandon de Tournai,” 18 November 1513, Annales, 410–411. 225 226

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assemblies in Bruges and Ghent “encreaseth dayly more and more And is not a litell to be doubted For their Frenshhartes cannot be contented to dwell in Tournay as long as it is Englisshe.”232 The language touting great commercial amity in Parliament’s justice act and the crown ordinance on trade were early correctives, attempts to “sell” Tournai at home and abroad by offering economic incentive for support and loyalty. The latter, in particular, stressed that Tournaisiens retained all past commercial privileges, especially for draperies, and gained the special right to trade, acquire and hold property, and pay dues in like manner as “our subjects native and resident in our said realm [of England]” because they were “our subjects of good reason and equity” and had been “reduce[d] to our obedience.” Significantly, however, the king never collapsed “Tournai” into “our Realm of England”233: both of their respective peoples were Henry’s subjects, both received equal trading rights by his command, and both were partners and beneficiaries of the shared economic body he had created, yet they remained distinct. Moreover, when the king interpreted Parliament’s statute for Tournai in a 4 March ordinance, he emphasized the principal role played by the governor (as bailli), the English chancellor and his discretion, the chancery, the King’s Bench, and “other royal courts and jurisdictions” in adjudicating contract disputes between Englishmen and Tournaisiens.234 Though the order did provide for two notaries and a keeper of the royal seal to be resident in Tournai, positions that could be (and were) held by locals, the preponderance of power remained in Tudor hands.235 The economic sphere was thus a vital realm of imperial rule, exercised by the king over discrete peoples. When his policies failed, the message was powerful, like when a lack of capital thwarted his governors’ attempts to maintain the English garrison and build a new citadel, surrounding complex of thatched cottages, and other fortifications. Due to Tournai’s poor fiscal performance and security threats, these defensive plans and visible manifestations of Tudor presence, power, and permanence had to be realized at crown expense (if at all), and nearly  Jerningham to Wolsey, 7 February 1516, SP 1/12, fols. 156r-v, at 156v.  “Henri VIII autorise ses sujets de Tournai et Tournaisis à commercer librement en Angleterre et à y acquérir des biens,” 16 March 1514, Annales, 416–418. 234  “Henri VIII établit à Tournai deux tabellions royaux et un scelleur pour recevoir les contracts,” Annales, 429–433, at 431 and 432. 235  Cruickshank, Occupation, 49, fn. 2. 232 233

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bankrupted the venture—a factor in Henry’s decision to relinquish Tournai in 1519.236 The government’s commitment to economic self-sufficiency, permanent occupation, protection against local treachery and volatile European rivals, and displays of royal grandeur in the periphery, on the one hand, and its desire for commercial benefit and sovereign authority in the metropole on the other were at loggerheads in Tournai. For example, when the crown proposed adjusting the garrison’s pay scheme to lessen the financial strain and bring it in line with Tudor forces elsewhere, its men on the ground balked, insisting upon their difference “from other garrisons, the dearness of provisions, the disadvantage of credit, the smallness of their profits”237; their “case is peculiar. They must be always ready to stand a siege.”238 Likewise, when Wolsey and Jerningham discussed turning defense costs over to the city, the court still demanded that “a good nombre of englisshemen ouer and above those that shalbe in the Citadell shalbe retegned and waged … for the said wa[t]che and warde.”239 These fundamental inconsistencies would remain ubiquitous in Tudor empire. Money itself was an equally critical means of projecting and maintaining empire in Tournai—beyond the acts of buying and selling. First, the English appear to have benefited from a currency imbalance. After the siege, Taylor warned that “one thing must be noted to be guarded against in future: English money, which greatly excels foreign coinage in value, was recklessly thrown away, thus occasioning a great loss”240; Wolsey learned in 1514 that “the worst pensse that be in England were goode money in Tournay”241; and, even deeper into the project, the crown appreciated the difference between Flemish and English money as it made

236  See Worcester to Wolsey, 27 August 1515, LP 2:857; Pawne to the Council, 21 December 1515, TNA SP 1/12, fol. 25r; Whettehill to Wolsey, 26 March 1516, LP 2:1708; Mountjoy to Wolsey, 31 May 1516, LP 2:1962; Council of Tournai to Henry, 31 May 1517, TNA SP 1/15, fols. 143r–144v; Jerningham to Wolsey, 31 May 1518, LP 2:4201. For fuller discussion, see Cruickshank, Occupation, 104–127. 237  “Memorial by J. Russell and other gentlemen to [Wolsey] and the Council,” May 1517, LP 2:3323. 238  “Yeomen of the Guard, Vintners of the Castle of Tournay, to Wolsey and the Council,” May 1517, LP 2:3321. 239  Wolsey to Jerningham, 16 January 1518, TNA SP 1/16, fols. 109r–112r, at 109v. 240  Taylor Diary, LP 1:2391[4284]. 241  Fouler to Wolsey, 1514, TNA SP 1/8, fol. 161r.

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payments in Tournai.242 Second, the Tudor court grasped the utility of coining, as a royal prerogative and instrument of rule, and of coinage, as a canvas to express its authority. Early on, Henry established a mint at Tournai, operational by spring 1514.243 It was the work of William Stafford, “warden of the Mint in the Tower and elsewhere within in England,” Mountjoy as “master of the moneys and coins,” Henry Watt, “comptroller and assayer,” and John Sharp, “graver”—all Englishmen instructed by letters patent in March to “take up in England and Tournay sufficient gravers, finers, smiths, and other workmen” and make silver groats of the “standard fineness used in England” and according to “the several prints and forms of several pieces of metal to these our letters annexed.”244 Stafford then received payment from the crown in April, for the costs incurred in “goynge and comynge… and of suche coyners and officers of the saide mynte sent by our saide soueraigne lorde to his citee of Tourney for the orderynge and exersinge of the Kinges mynte there.”245 In this, Henry followed Angevin precedent: as comptroller Martin Pirry explained in 1545, “Kings of England heretofore when they have won any foreign country or town have shortly set up a mint there, that the coins there printed might be a perpetual memory of the winning thereof, as witness the moneys yet remaining that were coined in Gascoin, Normandy, Torney, Calice, &c.”246 Yet the Tudor king also broke new, explicitly imperial ground with the coins themselves: all three surviving varieties of Tournai coinage declare Henry “King of France and England” (transposing his titles to emphasize France) and bear fleur-de-lis, lions, and an arched crown atop his coat of arms, the letter “T,” or profile of Henry VII

242  “Tournay,” February 1517, TNA SP 1/15, fols. 16r–19v, at 17v; “Coinage at Tournay,” [May 1516], LP 2:1972. 243  The coins read 1513, indicating that they may have been struck that year; however the old-style year did not end until 24 March 1514, the coins may have been backdated to commemorate the invasion, and sources point to new accomplishments at an English mint in April 1514, see Cruickshank, Occupation, 138–142. 244  “Mint at Tournay,” 8 March 1514, LP 1:Appendix:27. The King’s Book of Payments notes £14.7s. paid to Henry Baace, goldsmith, for “graving and printing certain irons for the King’s coin,” at Tournai, LP 2: February 1515. 245  “Mint at Tournay,” 7 April 1514, SP 1/230, fols. 128r-v, at 128r. 246  Pirry to [?], [April?] 1545, LP 20:2:Appendix:16.

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(who appeared on English currency to 1526).247 Henry thus carried his dynasty’s iconography overseas, propounding the imperial status of his kingship in prominent, circulated, legal form. The display matched use of the device elsewhere in the 1510s, most notably in The Meeting of Henry VIII and Emperor Maximillian (ca. 1513), a painting depicting the Battle of the Spurs, where it appeared above the Tudor arms (complete with red dragon and white greyhound) and stressed Henry’s equal standing with his ally, and as the namesake of two warships, the Henry Imperial (1513) and Mary Emperyall (1514).248 Several strands of imperial experimentation—the expansion and preservation of sovereign royal authority, articulations of English superiority, searches for profitability—all came together in the ecclesiastical sphere, in a fight over Tournai’s bishopric. A good portion of the city’s wealth derived from its sizable, influential diocese, and as their enterprise sank into debt in 1514, king and court fixed on the see as problem and solution—a means, as Sampson put it, to “make it more profitable than it has ever been.”249 In 1515, he expressed his frustration that while “the spiritual jurisdiction in Tournesey is more charge than profit… the temporal sword takes away temporal power [but] it has no strength in spiritual jurisdiction.”250 It helped that religious invective had undergirded the project from its Holy League origins, lending Henry due cause to turn one of his apostolic armaments (Bartholomew) on Tournai’s Notre Dame Cathedral and canon houses during the siege, to “wake them up to be more inclined to serve God.”251 As Wingfield saw it, “the Restffullnesse and tranquilite of all the h[oly realm of] Cry[stendom] for evyr, to the honour and lawde of almighty god, an[d advancement] of the same, to the Rewine, or Reduction, of many … [infi]delys to the Right weeye of religion, and lyfe” and Henry’s “good Righte, to be Kinge of fraunce” were

247  “Monnaies d’Henri VIII Roi d’Angleterre, frappées pour Tournai,” Annales, opposite 466. 248  Hoak, “Iconography of the Crown Imperial,” in Tudor Political Culture, 54–103, at 79–85; “The Navy,” 7 April 1514, TNA SP 1/7, fol. 154r. 249  Sampson to Wolsey, 24 September 1514, LP 1:3299[5446]. See also Sampson to Wolsey, 6 November 1514, LP 1:3418[5554]; Spinelly to Wolsey, 23 March 1514, LP 2:262. 250  “Sampson to [Wolsey],” 8 June 1515, LP 2:566. 251  Histoire Générale de l’Europe depuis la naissance de Charle-Quint jusqu’au cinq juin MDXXVII composé par Robert Macquereau (Louvain: 1765), 65–67, at 66.

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deeply related.252 Yet Henry’s show of missionary zeal seemingly backfired, and officials worried that like its merchant elite, Tournaisien clergymen fed anti-Tudor sentiment.253 They began to suggest placing “good Englisshe” in key roles, like at the Abbey of St. Martin’s, and bringing them under the archbishopric of Canterbury to ensure obedience.254 Across 1515, the regime thus grew convinced that “it will be no small pleasure for the King to have the whole of Flanders under the spiritual jurisdiction of an Englishman.”255 Unless royal command extended to all corners of Tournai, befitting the enclosed crown, then Tudor kingship abroad, in its empire, would never truly be imperial. Not long before Henry’s invasion, Leo X had appointed Louis Guillard, the son of the president of Paris’s Parlement, to Tournai’s see, BishopElect until his majority at age twenty-seven, some five years ahead.256 But much to English chagrin, the young, stalwart Frenchman refused to swear obedience to the Tudor crown, did not take up the required residency, and sustained Valois meddling in the dominion.257 Guillard’s title, natal ties, and loyal clergy and revenue collectors all assured Sampson that unless Henry made other provisions, no Englishman would ever have a quiet benefice in Tournai.258 Provoked, the King selected an alternative, his premier councilor-cleric Thomas Wolsey,259 and pushed for Leo’s approval of “som englishe chanons” throughout the region.260 Yet opposition only swelled. In May 1515, Sampson advised Wolsey “to use sharply the spiritual sword, and when that is inexpedient desire aid of the temporal,”261 then tweaked his message, admitting in June that he “fear[ed], for his own

252  Wingfield to Wolsey, 10 December 1515, BL Cotton Vitel. B XVIII, fols. 222r–225r, at 223r-v. 253  Spinelly to Wolsey, 18 May 1515, TNA SP 1/10, fol. 187r. 254  Worcester, Mountjoy, and Yonge to [Henry], 19 August 1515, BL Cotton Calig. E I, fols. 62r–63v, at 63r. 255  Sampson to [Wolsey], 14 June 1515, LP 2:581. 256  “Bishopric of Tournay,” 24 August 1513, TNA SP 1/230, fols. 24r–33v. 257  Wolsey to [Sampson], [December 1514], TNA SP 1/9, fols. 178r–179v, at 178r; Wolsey to Worcester, 22 October 1514, TNA SP 1/9, fols. 116r-v. 258  Sampson to Wolsey, 8 September 1515, TNA SP 1/11, fols. 84r–85v, at 84r. 259  Henry to Margaret of Savoy, 13 July 1514, LP 1:3075. 260  Sampson to Wolsey, 20 June 1516, TNA SP 1/13, fol. 224r. 261  “Richard S[ampson] to [Wolsey],” 20 May 1515, LP 2:480.

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part, more the spiritual sword than the temporal, as they are not formidable who only have power over the body.”262 Here was the budding of more than Tournaisien policy: in October 1513, Henry appointed John Kite, the English subdean of his Chapel Royal and a close Wolsey ally, as archbishop of Armagh. Though Leo confirmed him,263 the pick and his reports marked a decided shift in Henrician Irish policy to date and a clear show of royal prerogative and church jurisdiction. By May 1514, Kite had arrived in Drogheda, begrudging his distance from “heven … from the welth off all the ioys off england.” He wrote that though Ireland was replete with corn, cattle, fish, and fowl, without crown help, “the englyshry … shall decay.” Henry, Kite averred, “is as moche bound to reforme this land as to mayntayn the goode ordre & justice of england, more bound to subdew them than jues or sarycens, for relygyon, chrystes faithe, obedyence to the churche with us, for lakke of the temporall swerde is scant.” He closed by imploring Wolsey, to whom he owed the promotion, for “the loff off godd,” to make “redresse off this most plentevsse contre, most profitable to the possessor if beyng ones in ordre.”264 A new, English-­born archbishop had made a formidable case, on the bases of civility, loyalty, religion, raw materials, and money, for Tudor intervention in the spiritual and temporal realms of a crown holding abroad, and to the two most significant figures in the Tournai project no less. The following year, Kite would appear at Greenwich as part of the inquest into Kildare’s deputyship.265 There was, moreover, a British dimension here too, as Leo found himself under pressure from both England and Scotland, who evidently shared caesaropapal pretensions, if only to thwart one another: in June 1515, after the Bishop of Worcester reiterated Henry’s failed recommendation for the see of St. Andrews,266 James V’s governor the Duke of Albany wrote to Rome, protesting the perversion “of crown privilege in prelatical promotion” and the “still  Sampson to [Wolsey], 8 June 1515, LP 2:566.  “Ireland,” 24 October 1513, LP 1:2395. 264  Kite to Wolsey, 14 May 1514, TNA SP 60/1, fols. 4r–5v, at 4r-v. See also Kite to Wolsey, 7 June 1514, TNA SP 60/1, fols. 6r-v. 265  D.G. Newcombe, “Kite, John (d. 1537),” ODNB (2004); Quinn, “Henry and Ireland,” 320–321; Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule (London: Taylor & Francis, 1998), 115–116. 266  Bishop of Worcester [Silvestro de Gigli] to Gavin Douglas, 6 June 1515, Letters James V, 23–24. 262 263

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serious trouble in Scotland between the supporters of royal right and men promoted by the pope.”267 That July, the regency strengthened its appeal and wedded it to the fate of Scottish independence against the Tudor king, pleading to Leo and his Cardinals that There is a rumour that Henry is adding to his titles that of protector and governor of Scotland, on the strength of which the English protectors and orators at Rome impetrate Scottish prelacies for those whom they favour. … The apostolic see ought to give ear, unless the pope wishes to gratify others to the ruin of an ancient kingdom. They are compelled to take measures in time if foreign kings—and foes sometimes—seek to dispose of Scottish prelacies and institute prelatical councillors.268

By contrast to Henry, the Scottish Lords charged, “Albany would rather do his duty than to have France, England, and Scotland”269—a duty that apparently included both petitioning for traditional rights over clerical appointments270 and thwarting plots to put James in English hands,271 as if the two were related. The Scots clearly appreciated the seriousness of Henry’s imperial agenda, if not the particulars: by 1517, the Tournai “battle of the bishops” had escalated into a full-on literary war.272 Tudor officials pressed for Wolsey, reasoning that “as in england calis and the marches, the pope medilth with no gyffte off benifices, so he may [be] contente to absteyne in tornay and torinesey”273 and advised Henry to defend his rights by conquest and royal dignity,274 yet the French

 Albany to Leo X, 21 June 1515, Letters James V, 25–26, at 25.  James V and Estates to Leo X and Cardinals, 3 July 1515, Letters James V, 26. 269  Scottish Lords in Parliament to Henry, 4 July 1516, Letters James V, 31–32, at 32. 270  Albany to Leo X, [February 1516–1517], Letters James V, 41; Petition to Leo X, 18 May 1517, Letters James V, 45; Leo X to Albany, 18 January 1517–1518, Letters James V, 55–56; Bull of Leo X, 19 June 1520, Letters James V, 79–80. 271  Instructions to the Bishops of Dunkeld and Ross, and the Abbot of Cambuskenneth, May 1517, Letters James V, 42–43. Henry too felt threatened, see Henry to the Lords and Commons of Scotland, 1 June 1516, BL Cotton Calig. B VI, fols. 182r–187v. 272  Cruickshank, Occupation, 143–145. 273  Sampson to Wolsey, 25 March 1516, BL Cotton Calig. D VI, fol. 291r. 274  Le Sellier to Poynings, 22 December 1516, LP 2:2695. 267 268

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convinced Leo to issue a bull empowering Guillard to obtain his rights by force and threatening excommunication against those who refused him.275 Henry was livid. Joining classical, medieval, and Renaissance history and theory, he wrote to the Bishop of Worcester in Rome to rebuke this “defeatyng and derogacion of our right and prerogatif roiall within the regalie of our Citie of Torney … our possession and dominion”276 in favor of a “disobeisant and vntrewe vasall.”277 “Truth is that we hauyng the supreme powar as lord and kyng in the regalie of Torney without recognition of any superior owe of right to haue the homage feautie and othe of fidelitie aswell of the said pretended buysshop.”278 Contrary to the laws of God, man, justice, and reason, as well as kingly and papal honor, Leo’s inordinate, strange, and unprecedented bull had discharged Tudor subjects of their allegiances, sowed sedition, stirred violence, and violated royal sovereignty.279 “[H]e attempteth to take from vs the superiorite regale preeminence iurisdicion and autorite that we haue in the region and domynion of Torney,” where “al causes be determynable within the same and no appeale or resorte either to the corte of paris or elsewhere can haue plase… we could not suffer it.”280 Amid floundering enterprise in France, plots in Scotland, Ireland, and America, and a crisis with Rome, Henry had articulated the imperial nature of his kingship, spurred by a realization that one sort of empire (territorial expansion and rule) needed the other (whole and complete supremacy, spiritual and temporal). Whether such language demonstrates that Henry was “on the road to 1534” as Mayer argued, or emphatically not as Davies maintained, or neither as Cruickshank found, is only a sliver of the story 281; the letter set forth a potent and lasting discourse. The Pope hastily submitted, explaining that the bull was not meant to annoy Henry nor exceed usual practice, and claiming ignorance of

 Henry to Worcester, January-February 1517, TNA SP 1/14, fols. 247r–250v.  Henry to Worcester, fols. 247r-v. 277  Henry to Worcester, fol. 248r. 278  Henry to Worcester, fol. 247v. 279  Henry to Worcester, fols. 248r–249v. 280  Henry to Worcester, fol. 249r-v. 281  Cruickshank, Occupation, 179–181; Mayer, “Tournai and Tyranny,” 264–267; Mayer, “On the Road,” 19–24; Davies, “Tournai and Crown,” 17–21. 275 276

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Guillard’s treason and the history of the matter.282 In mid-April 1517, Leo recognized Wolsey’s claim, citing the Bishop-Elect’s default and emphasizing papal right to settle the matter after due consideration.283 Though a victory on paper, Sampson appreciated the reality, bemoaning that “as towching [Wolsey’s] iurisdiction ffor tornay diocese, it is not yet… well establysshid, be cause in this variance no man dare occupie, ffor feare they schuld be vexyd be the other partie.”284 Across 1518, however, the issue became moot, as negotiations to surrender the territory began. That July, Francis granted Wolsey a yearly pension “in recompense for the bishopric of Tournay,” a nod to the significance of the trial over the see.285 * * * Tournai reverted to France in February 1519 as part of a broader AngloFrench peace.286 According to Spinelly, the territory was the agreement’s keystone, and Henry received financial compensation for it, even though debt, an exhausted army, Valois strength, and native discontent had made continued English governance there seem untenable.287 Publicly, the occasion was happy, but privately, parties vented the surprise and unease felt across Europe and in “the English nation, which is not well pleased with the surrender of Tournay.”288 Reactions in Rome and Scotland were most specific and acute, evincing a keen understanding of Tudor ambitions. Both suspected that Henry was not in it for the money or diplomacy; perhaps he had only relinquished Tournai in exchange for another, more

282  Leo X to Henry, 5 February 1517, TNA SP 1/14, fols. 261r–266v; Worcester to Henry, 8 February 1517, BL Cotton Vitel. B III, fols. 130r–134v. 283  “Réintégration du cardinal Wolsey dans la possession des revenus de l’évêché de Tournai,” 17 April 1517, Annales, 439–444. 284  Sampson to Wolsey, 11 September 1517, TNA SP 1/16, fols. 20r-v, at 20r. 285  “Bishopric of Tournay,” 31 July 1518, LP 2:4354. 286  October 1518–February 1519, Annales, 448–464. 287  Spinelly to Henry and to Wolsey, 16 August 1518, LP 2:4384–4385; Cruickshank, Occupation, 227–265. 288  “A Letter of Intelligence,” [July 1518], BL Cotton Calig. D VII, fols. 25r-v; Maximillian to Wolsey, 25 October 1518, LP 2:4531; Giustinian to the Doge of Venice, 10 March 1519, LP 3:117.

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desirable piece of the puzzle: Scotland.289 Indeed, as the transfer was underway, the Scots wrote to the Pope, reminding him how “for upwards of fourteen hundred years the Scottish crown has never wavered in its devotion to the holy see; and now the young king and his people are maltreated by the English, Scottish rebels being harboured in England and incursions made in contravention of truce and the comprehension of Scotland in the Anglo-­French treaty. England seeks to weaken the FrancoScottish friendship and to impede the return of Albany to Scotland.” They begged him to use his influence to intervene.290 The treaty included no such deal, but these rumors, and the Tournai experience more generally, injected new energy, ideas, and cash into plots on both sides of the Atlantic. Two set-pieces visually registered Henry’s self-image in those years: 1520’s Field of Cloth of Gold, where he entertained Francis with a sumptuous décor of “auncient Prynces” like Caesar, Alexander, and Arthur, closed crowns, royal arms, and king’s beasts wrought by English craftsmen, including Rastell,291 and Charles V’s 1522 visit to England, when Henry brought the Emperor to see the Winchester Round Table, adorned with the image of a Henrician-looking Arthur wearing an imperial crown above a giant Tudor rose.292 In the shadow of Tournai, the Court moved to take the bait held out in 1515–1516, whereby Ireland was its springboard, the New World its utopia. First, in July 1518, it tightened Irish communications293; then, in

 [Worcester] to [Wolsey], 10 December 1517, BL Cotton Vit. B III, fols. 231r–232v; Giustinian to the Doge, 10 September 1518, LP 2:4424; “Instructions to John, Lord Fleming, for France,” [April-May 1520], Letters James V, 76–77. The rumor was longstanding, see [Pace] to [Wolsey] 1 April 1516, TNA SP 1/13, fols. 79r–81v. 290  Scottish Estates to Leo X, 4 January 1518–1519, Letters James V, 67–68. 291  Hall, Vnion, “Henry the .viii.,” fols. lxxiir-lxxxiiiir, at lxxiiir; Nicholas Vaux to [Wolsey], 18 April 1520, LP 3:750; “Revels, 1519–1522,” gives further insight into the display, TNA SP 1/29, fols. 187r–207v. See also Glenn Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). Rastell also contributed to the pageantry for Charles’s visit, see Clough, “Rastell.” 292  Hoak, “Crown imperial,” 183; Martin Biddle, ed., King Arthur’s Round Table: An Archaeological Investigation (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2000); Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 293  Pace to Wolsey, 7 July 1518, TNA SP 1/16, fol. 319r. 289

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January 1519, Henry summoned his deputy to appear294; by December, king and council had begun to strengthen ties to Waterford and Wexford, secure English holdings by force, and otherwise “devise howe Ireland may be reduced and restored to good order and obedience”295; finally, on 10 March 1520, amid more complaints of Kildare’s misrule and insistences of metropolitan legislative superiority as enshrined in Poynings’s Law, Henry named home-grown favorite Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey and Flodden veteran, as his new governor, complete with a fresh English-born army, a new “Privy Council, without whose advice he shall do nothing. Three of them to be Englishmen now in England,” and directions to compel landowner residency, call parliament to levy taxes, and investigate coign and livery. To ease the transition, Wolsey would see that all Irish clergy understood that “the King had sent his Deputy thither to reduce the land to order, not intending to make war against any who will do their duty, nor to take anything from any man who is lawfully entitled to it, but to make a fair distribution of lands at reasonable rents, seeing that they now live without order, not wealthy, ne being assured of any succession to their heirs,” preached to that end, and swore to report anything prejudicial to the regime.296 Further instructions followed, couched under the motto that “For now, at the begynnyng, politique practises may doo more goode than exploite of werre, till suche tyme as the strenght of the Irishe enimyes shalbe infebled and diminisshed.” Henry explained that though challenging as all “grete enterprise of weightie impourtaunce” will be, he was committed to “reducing that Reame to the knoulege of God, obeisaunce of Us,” peace, and prosperity.297 Moreover, Surrey was to Anglicize and centralize the Church, reserving all bishoprics to men “of English birth, or of the English nation and language,” assessing their property, and reforming

 “For Gerald Earl of Kildare,” 12 January 1519, LP 3:17.  More to Wolsey, 5 July 1518, LP 3:356; “To George Earl of Shrewsbury,” 18 August 1519, LP 3:430; “Memorandum concerning the Administration of the King’s Affairs,” [December 1519], BL Cotton Tit. B I, fols. 188r–191v, at 191r; Quinn, “Henry and Ireland,” 322–324. 296  “Memoranda for Ireland,” [March 1520], TNA SP 60/1, fols. 69r–72v. 297  Henry to Lieutenant and Council of Ireland, [June 1520], TNA SP 60/1, fols. 36r–39v, at 38v, 36v. 294 295

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their functions. This, like the new pledges required of high-ranking Irish captains, would cut off rebel aid.298 With close supervision by and direct communication with his king and Wolsey, Surrey swung out from the Pale in late May 1520, enjoying some success with local magnates before stumbling under the enormity of his task, the limits of his provisions, and crown policy.299 In July, the deputy voiced his “feare that the said Irishmen wol not bee brought to noo good order, onles it bee by compulsyon, which woll not bee doon without a great puissaunce of men, and great costis of money, and long contynuaunce of tyme” alongside his optimism with such support, he could “obteyne the conquest of this land; the soyle wherof may bee well comparid in goodnes unto your Royalme of England.”300 The King refused. Though he shared Surrey’s end-goals, Henry called for “sober waies, politique drifles, and amiable persuasions, found in lawe and reason,” not costly, short-lived “strenght or violence.” Transitioning into a wider exposition, he proposed terms and tactics highly reminiscent of Tournai: it may be said unto [the Irish], in goode maner, that We, being their Soveraigne Lorde and Prince, though of our absolute power We be above the lawes, yet We woll in noo wise take any thing from thaym, that rightuously apperteigneth to theym; soo, of goode congruence, they be bounde, boothe by lawe, fidelite, and ligeaunce, to restore unto Us our oune. For it so moche toucheth our honour to conserve our rightfull inheritaunce, that We neither may, ne woll, sufrre any Prince, of what soever preheminence he bee, to usurpe or detaigne any parte therof, but, by our puysaunce, to represse suche usurpacion. Once old lands were recovered and new ones gained, he added, they should be inhabited and tilled to achieve order and obedience.301 After quickly reasserting that “this londe woll never be broght to dew obeysaunce, but only with compulsion and conqwest,”302 Surrey expanded upon his king’s last point the following June, articulating an argument for  “Remembrances for Ireland,” [incorrectly calendared January 1524; Quinn, “Henry and Ireland,” 324], LP 4:80; Surrey to Wolsey, 27 August 1520, TNA SP 60/1, fols. 43r-v. 299  Lord Lieutenant and Council of Ireland to Henry, 25 September 1520, BL Cotton Tit. B XI 2, fols. 365r-v; Henry to [?], December 1520, StP 2:59–61. 300  Surrey to Henry, 23 July 1520, StP 2:35–38, at 37. 301  Henry to Surrey, September 1520, StP 2:51–57, at 52–54. 302  Surrey to Wolsey, 16 December 1520, StP 2:61–62, at 62. 298

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colonization. Citing his own experience in Ireland (and later Scotland) and that of Edward I in Wales, he declared that “onles Your Grace send enhabitantes, off your owne naturall subjectes, to enhabite such countrees as shalbe won, all your charges shuld be but wastfully spent”; whereas the Irish would always return to “olde ill roted customes,” settlers “woll contynew trew subjectes.”303 The pair failed to reach an accord, however, and Surrey grew frustrated and disillusioned at his denied appeals for money and men; Henry consented to his request for recall from “our Lande and dominion,” elevating Piers Butler, Earl of Ormond in his stead in 1522.304 The return to an Irish deputy (who served until Kildare replaced him in 1524) was a reversal, only somewhat assuaged by Surrey’s testimony that Butler “hath a true English hert,”305 yet official concerns to maintain or introduce English ecclesiastical power, clerics, residency, style, language, and manners in what archbishop of Dublin John Alen referred to in mid-1529 as “theis exile parties” survived the decade.306 The goal, as his predecessor Hugh Inge put it in terms reminiscent of Tournai discourse, was to prevent “the great discomforte of all the Kinges true subjectes here, and the great danger of thEnglishrye.”307 Although brief, Surrey’s foray had effectively brought new intelligence of Ireland’s state—described by John Stile as “moche waste, and the people mervelously pouer, the Kingis Courtes and recordes ferr oute of order,”308 in need of English administrators309—and grounds for renewed commitment, demonstrated the island’s central place in an evolving Tudor empire, and illustrated the limits of militarism without major material support and plantation. Surrey may not have occasioned “the earliest and most extreme manifesto of a new

303  Surrey to Henry, 30 June 1521, StP 2:73–75, at 74, 75. Scottish comparison followed on 29 July, StP 2:75–77. 304  Henry to Surrey, [October] 1521, BL Cotton Tit. B XI 2, fols. 311r–312v, at 311r. 305  Surrey to Wolsey, 3 November 1520, StP 2:57–58, at 58. 306  Alen to Wolsey, 1 June 1529, StP 2:102–104. See also Kildare to Wolsey, 8 February 1523, TNA SP 60/1, fols. 84r-v; “Ireland,” 4 August 1524, LP 4:558; “Articles to be shown to the King,” 1526, LP 4:2404.3; Hugh Inge and Patrick Bermyngham to Wolsey, 23 February 1528, TNA SP 60/1, fols. 108r–109v; Robert Cowley to Wolsey, [September] 1528, LP 4:4799; “Ireland,” [September] 1528, LP 4:4688. 307  Inge and Bermyngham to the Duke of Norfolk, 15 May 1528, StP 2:129–130, at 129. 308  Stile to Wolsey, 11 March 1522, TNA SP 60/1, fols. 80r–81v, at 80r. 309  Stile to Wolsey, 19 October 1521, TNA SP 60/1, fols. 67r–68v.

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monarchy and of a king who did not need Wolsey or Cromwell to put concepts of unqualified sovereignty into his head,” as Quinn argued,310 nor the first colonial plot, but it was a significant episode. The surge of adventure also reached west. After participating in Henry’s French enterprises—making “a carde of Gascoigne and Guyon” in 1512 and then accompanying the expedition that followed, testaments to the links connecting early imperial activity in all its variety—Sebastian Cabot had entered Spanish service.311 The impetus for his return to England and precisely when it happened are unclear, but both captain and court seized on the opportunity that the late 1510s offered. In 1522 Venetian Gasparo Contarini testified to a recent meeting, where Cabot claimed that “when in England some three years ago, if I mistake not, Cardinal Wolsey offered me high terms if I would sail with an armada of his on a voyage of discovery. The vessels were almost ready, and they had got together 30,000 ducats for their outfit,” however Cabot reneged out of loyalty to Spain. He had then tried to negotiate a partnership with Venice, “of showing her a passage whereby she would obtain great profit; which is the truth, for I have discovered it.”312 In 1553, imperial promoter Richard Eden also cited a Cabot exploit in these years, claiming that “Henry … furnished & sent forth certen shippes vnder the gouernaunce of Sebastian Cabot yet liuing, & one syr Thomas Perte [likely Spert], whose faynt heart was the cause that that viage toke none effect”; with “manly courage… that riche treasurye called Perularia … myght longe since haue bene in the towre of London.”313 Hakluyt reprinted Eden’s note, with likely inaccurate glosses on the date (1516–1517), purpose (honorable travel “to discouer” and “for honest traffique and exchange”), location (“Brasil, Santo Domingo, and S. Iuan de Puerto Rico”), and outcome (they made the crossing, but a poor Spanish greeting forced them home).314 Hakluyt did not, however,  Quinn, “Henry and Ireland,” 325–326.   “Book of Payments,” LP 2:May 1512; David Loades, “Cabot, Sebastian (c. 1481/2–1557),” ODNB (2010). 312  Contarini to the Council of Ten, 31 December 1522, CSPV 3:607. 313  Eden, “To the right hyghe and mighty Prince, the Duke of Northumberlande,” in Sebastian Münster, A Treatyse of the newe India, trans. Eden (1553), sig. aa.iiii.r-v. 314  PN, 3:498–499. E.G.R.  Taylor and Williamson believed that Hakluyt was misled by Oviedo’s date, which should have read 1527 and referenced John Rut, see Taylor, ed., Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), 2:385–386; Voyages of Cabots 105–106. 310 311

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attach the voyage to Rastell’s, nor do Rastell sources mention Cabot or Pert.315 No matter the fates of these earlier plots, by 1521 Cabot was in London to exercise his patent, part of a scheme with the Drapers’ Company fronted by “the king & my lord Cardinall & the Counsell [who] thynketh aswele for his honour as for the generall welth of this his Realm that there be appoynted a certayn noumbre of ships to be prepared for a viage to be made into the newefound Iland.” Enjoying a substantial royal outlay in shipping, the joint enterprise imagined exploration, alternatives to continental routes, goods, and restrictions (including a potential passage East), and a national trade monopoly—all by confirming Tudor rights to the region and taking advantage of Cabot’s expertise.316 The project seemed both familiar and fitting to 1521, yet came to nothing because the Drapers deemed it “sore aventour to joperd v shipps wt men & goodes unto the said lland uppon the singuler trust of one man … whiche Sebastyan, as we here say, was never in that land hym self, all if he makes reporte of many thinges as he hath hard his ffather and other men speke in tymes past.” Even if his claims were true, he would be only one man on one ship, leaving the rest exposed.317 The logic that a venture’s ambition had to match its crew’s proven experience did not stop Henrician subjects from frequenting North Atlantic fisheries,318 but it did leave exploration, conquest, and settlement to others.319 Iberian, French, and Italian travelers, like John Verrazano and Paulo Centurione, reported “wild” inhabitants eager for Europeans, temperate climates, good waterways, wines, woods, spices, and new passages—all confirming the desirability and suitability of North America for Tudor readers who, it seemed, had squandered their early initiative.320 The response was neither awe-inspiring nor immediate, but it did come, most notably with Robert Thorne, Jr.’s tracts for Edward Lee (Henry’s  For further discussion, see Voyages of Cabots, 245–247.  “From the MS Records of the Drapers’ Company of London,” 1 March–9 April 1521, Cabot Voyages, 286–291, at 287. 317  “Drapers’ Company,” Cabot Voyages, 289. 318  Fitzwilliam to Henry and Wolsey, 21 August 1522, LP 3:2458, 2459. 319  Quinn, North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements: The Norse Voyages to 1612 (NY: Harper & Row, 1977), 347–368. 320  “The relation of Iohn Verarzanus,” in Hakluyt, DV, sigs. A[1]r-B4r; “A Projected Spice Trade, c. 1525,” Voyages of Cabots, 102. 315 316

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ambassador to Charles V) and for his King, written in 1527 and reprinted by Hakluyt. Strongly argued and detailed, the Lee text laid out the abundant spices, stones, and other sources of ready profit in the East, then explained, by way of Iberian and English navigational knowledge and emphasis on “the New found Islands that we discouered” (not least thanks to Thorne’s father), England’s unmatched proximity and claims to the famed “Spicerie” via the north.321 The “Declaration” to Henry was shorter, more effusive, and pointed, opening with the statement that “experience prooueth that naturally all princes bee destrous to extend and enlarge their dominions and kingdomes,” unless they “lacketh the noble courage and spirit.” Remarkably, this had proved true for Henry’s progenitors: “God and nature” set them in a fruitful place “compassed with the Sea” and from there, at great cost and peril, they “conquered many rich and fayre dominions, and amplified this your Graces Realme with great victory and glory.” Then, Thorne leaned in, with a shrewd understanding of history, royal proclivities, and the ties binding Tournai to like projects elsewhere in the Atlantic: “And also now of late your Grace hauing like courage and desire, and not without iust cause, to enlarge this your kingdome… your Grace in person passed with a great power into France… and without doubt victoriously you had conquered the sayd Realme of France, as ye began, if your aduersary had not reconciled himselfe, and knowledged your Graces right and title.”322 Following that success, Newfoundland was the next, legitimate frontier for Tudor imperial energies, because it lay “neerest and aptest” to his realm than to any other, stood at risk of falling to rivals, and his subjects have “already taken it in hand.” By these means, and with minimal cost, Thorne promised, “your Grace shall winne perpetuall glory, and your subiectes infinite profite… and thus they shall compasse the whole worlde.”323  “The booke made by the right worshipful M. Robert Thorne,” PN, 1:214–221, at 215.  “A declaration of the Indies and lands discouered,” PN, 1:212–214, at 212–213. 323  “A declaration,” PN, 1:213–214. It appears that Thorne financed some of those competitors, namely a Spanish voyage led by Cabot with fellow Englishmen Roger Barlow and Henry Latimer in 1526–1530, see Voyages Cabots, 262, 267; R.C.D.  Baldwin, “Thorne, Robert, the elder (c.1460–1519), ODNB (2008). Either way, Thorne family activity in the region before 1526 led to Hakluyt to write, “it is probable that some of our marchants had a kinde of trade to the West Indies euen in those ancient times and before also: neither doe I see any reason why the Spaniards should debarre vs from it at this present,” PN, 3:500. 321 322

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Thorne’s was an impeccably well-calibrated appeal to Tudor empire as it stood near the end of the 1520s: steeped in ancient myth, medieval precedent, more recent discovery and competition, and Henry VIII’s lust. Though the quick turn-around raises some doubts,324 according to Hakluyt (who cited Hall, Grafton, Martin Frobisher, and Richard Allen), the “motion tooke present effect”: that May, Henry sent “2 faire ships wel manned & victualled, hauing in them diuers cunning men to seek strange regions.” The first struggled between “Newfoundland” and “Meta Incognita,” but the second continued “towards Cape Briton, and the coastes of Arambec, and oftentimes putting their men on land to search the state of those vnknowen regions”—grounds for possession—and returned home safely.325 Samuel Purchas and Spanish sources provide more detail by way of Master John Rut, who crossed with two ships in 1527—evidently the very same voyage that Hakluyt described. On 3 August, Rut wrote from St. John’s, noting his progress through “wildernesse and mountaines and woodes… and no inhabitation … [but] footing of divers great beasts” to find the harbor full of Norman, Breton, and Portuguese fishermen.326 In the same text that Hakluyt tied to Cabot but that may more convincingly fit with Rut, Oviedo told of “an English corsair” in the West Indies who withdrew in the face of Spanish forces.327 Other Spanish documents described the autumn 1527 arrival of a “vessel belonging to the king of England,” fitted out “to go and discover the land of the Great Khan” or “seek a passage towards the north.” Instead, storms, ice, and indigenous violence forced them to focus on Newfoundland, “in order to give the king of England an account thereof” and “a load of Brazil-wood,” and then head south to explore Santo Domingo.328 Despite these reports of fertile lands, rivals at the fishery, and extensive study of the Americas, as well as a tantalizingly expectant note from Edmund Howard to Wolsey in late 1527 asking to join the upcoming “vyage made into an newfownde land with dyvyres shypes… honerable and profytable to the

 Voyages Cabots, 261–267.  “The voyage of the two ships,” PN, 3:129. 326  “John Rut’s Letter to Henry VIII, 1527, Aug. 3,” Voyages of Cabots, 104–105, at 104. 327  “Ovideo’s Account of John Rut’s Expedition,” Voyages of Cabots, 105–106, at 105. 328  “An English Ship from the North West at the Island of Mona, 1527” and “The English Ship at Santo Domingo, 1527,” Voyages of Cabots, 106–108 and 108–111, at 107, 110. 324 325

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kynges grace and all hys reame… to fynd me my wyffe and my chylderne met or drynke,”329 Tudor New World stalled again. * * * After 1527, the experimental bursts of the previous two decades gave way to the tumultuous, even revolutionary 1530s and 1540s. As they did, the very statesman who had challenged crown priorities in “ungracious dogholes” and the alternative track that he proposed stood at the center of the action. Yet the main target implicated in this new phase of Tudor empire was not new, inert, nor insignificant; rather, as all that surrounded Flodden shows, Scottish involvement in imperialism was practiced, plural, and complex, and it would remain so. Much like their southern neighbors, the Stewart crown and its subjects were acting on their own imperial vision, while concurrently engaging with that of their allies and rivals, as theorists and promoters, collaborators, and critics. Moreover, the trial and error atmosphere of the 1510s and 1520s had proved no less critical for the Scots. Accordingly, much as Cromwell helps to bridge the seeming gap between early and mid-sixteenth-century ideology and practice, so too does Haddington-born scholar John Mair, who set out to pen a new history of England and Scotland. Printed two years before Cromwell’s speech, the fruit of Mair’s labors argued for the recreation of a single, ancient, imperial “Greater Britain” that would curb an over-mighty Scottish nobility and church and subdue a backward Highland people via voluntary, equal, dynastic marital union with England.330 Mair began by taking aim at the Anglo-British canon—the very tracts on which Henry VII and his kin staked their claims—and calling Geoffrey of Monmouth and William Caxton “partly fabulous… partly ridiculous” in their reverence for the Brut, fanciful and pliable prophecies, undead princes of suspiciously grandiose deeds, and images of successive Scottish Kings choosing, seeking, or accepting English superiority.331 “In language

 Howard to Wolsey [December 1527], TNA SP 1/46, fols. 13r–14v, at 13r-v.  Mair, Historia Maioris Britanniae tam Angliae quam Scotiae (Paris, 1521). 331  Mair, A History of Greater Britain, as well England as Scotland, ed. Archibald Constable (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1892), 2–3, 81, 84–85, 127–128, 143–144, 192–194, 226, 287, at 2. 329 330

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that held as many lies as it did words,” these tales sowed only strife.332 Turning to other sources, Mair charged that the name “Britain” came from a Gallic tribe who inhabited the south of the island, not a Trojan hero with archipelagic rule, whereas the “Scottish Britons” descended from the Irish, who in turn came from the Spanish.333 “Let Caxton,” he railed, “read and read again his own Venerable Bede, an Englishman too, and he will find that not only were the Scots at no time subject to the Britons.”334 Mair’s study revealed “in Britain first of all one kingdom, that namely of the Britons… [and] all men born in Britain are Britons, seeing that on any other reasoning Britons could not be distinguished from other races; since it is possible to pass from England to Wales, and from Scotland by way of England to Wales, dryshod, there would otherwise be no distinction of races.”335 For utmost peace, benefit, and godliness, the whole island ought to “be under the rule of one monarch, who should be called king of Britain, provided only that he were possessed of a just and honest title thereto; and to gain this end I see no other means than by way of marriage.”336 Further, this new monarchy should be an imperial one, with authority in the spiritual realm to curb ecclesiastical wealth and immorality; power in the temporal sphere to rein in a barony lacking virtue, reason, and education; and a concerted mission to protect and expand the “civil polity” of England and Lowland Scotland by taming the fearsome “Wild Scots” born in northern forests and mountains, partial to the Irish tongue, and uncivil in dress, manners, and morals.337 Mair did not push further, but it is not a huge leap to suggest that from there; the monarch might channel England’s well-documented (and often-misplaced) lofty spirit, ambition, and greed for empire338 into new worlds: Mair had recently written in commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences that “on either side of the equator; and beneath the poles there are wild men … the first

 Mair, History, 287.  Mair, History, 4, 52. 334  Mair, History, 287. 335  Mair, History, 17–18. 336  Mair, History, 41–42, 190, 217–218, at 217–218. 337  Mair, History, 30, 129, 383–384, 46–49, 60–62, at 49, 48. 338  Mair, History, 291, 157. 332 333

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person to conquer them, justly rules over them … because, by nature, the barbarians and slaves are the same thing.”339 In 1521, in the aftermath of Flodden and Tournai, a self-described “Scot by nation” writing in the vein of Valerius Maximus had offered a cogent argument for Tudor-Stewart British Empire. Mair dedicated the book to James as “him who is illustrious at once for his most admirable natural endowment and for his lofty descent in the line of both kingdoms of Greater Britain,” imploring that the king “read to good purpose this history.”340 The author did not earn unabashed commendation for his efforts; his work contrasts sharply with Hector Boece’s Scotorum historiae (1527), which also refuted claims of English superiority, but did so in a way that constructed a national mythology of fervent Scottish autonomy.341 Yet, as Arthur H. Williamson posited, Mair and those who followed in his wake “defined the framework and provided much of the vocabulary through which British imperialism in the next centuries would be comprehended, promoted, and disputed.”342 More i­mmediately, Mair and then Cromwell tapped into and elevated the Scottish strain of British empirebuilding, which would redefine the project as it moved deeper into the sixteenth century.

339  Mair, In secundum librum Sententiarum [Petri Lombardi] (Paris, 1519), fol. 187a, quoted in Williamson, “Scots, Indians and Empire: The Scottish Politics of Civilization 1519–1609,” Past and Present 150 (February 1996): 46–83, at 58 and Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 38–39. 340  Maier, History, cxxxiii–cxxxv. 341  Boece, Scotorum historiae (Paris: 1527). 342  Williamson, “George Buchanan, Civic Virtue and Commerce: European Imperialism and its Sixteenth-Century Critics,” The Scottish Historical Review 75:1, 199 (April 1996): 20–37, at 21. See also Williamson, “Scotland, Antichrist, and the Invention of Great Britain,” in New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland, ed. John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason, and Alexander Murdoch (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), 34–58; Mason, “Scotching the Brut: Politics, History, and National Myth in Sixteenth-Century Britain,” in Mason, ed., Scotland and England, 1286–1815 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1987), 60–84; Mason, “The Scottish Reformation and the Origins of Anglo-British Imperialism,” in Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, ed. Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 161–186; Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 1998), 36–77.

CHAPTER 4

“More Fully Playnly and Clerely Set Fourth to All the World”: England, Scotland, and “Thempire of Greate Briteigne” in the 1530s and 1540s In October 1542, Henry VIII’s Privy Council sat at Greenwich, a meeting that included crucial figures like Thomas Cranmer (archbishop of Canterbury), Edward Seymour (Earl of Hertford), and diplomat Ralph Sadler. Among their business was the dispatch of a letter to archbishop of York Edward Lee, which explained, Myndyng to have the Kynges Majesties title to the Realme of Scotland more fully playnly and clerely set fourth to all the world … We haue apoynted certaigne Lerned men to travaille in the same. And for bycawse the Archebusshopes of York hath in tymes past had jurisdiction over all the busshopes of Scotlande, We do not dowte but there is very olde auncient and authenticall monumentes of the superioraitie of the same sea over them, if there be good and diligent serche, may be fownde in your olde registers and auncient places of kepynge of such writynges. Wherfore this is to will and requyer yow on the Kynges Majesties behalfe to cawse such diligent serche … with all expedicion.1

Concurrently, a nearly identical appeal for “eny thyng … for the more clerer declaration to the world of His Majesties title to [Scotland]” went to Bishop of Durham Cuthbert Tunstall, “bycawse we know that your

1  Privy Council to Archbishop of York, [October] 1542, TNA SP 1/173, fols. 194r-v, at 194r.

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Lordship in tymes past hath taken som paynes in the same.”2 Indeed, such a determined demand for documentary evidence—including to legitimize empire—was not a new exercise for the dynasty, now in its fifth decade; most recently, in 1529–1532, a similar mission had generated the Gravissimae, atque exactissimae illustrissimarum totius Italiae, et Galliae Academiarum censurae and ultimately the Collectanea satis copiosa, a magisterial dossier of texts on royal and ecclesiastical power (with a section on English overlordship of Scotland)3 “sufficiently abundant” for Parliament to aver in 1533, as the preamble to its Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome, that “by dyvers sundrie olde autentike 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” and “endowed … with honour and possessions.”4 The new decade’s quest also proved fruitful, as Henry established in his appropriately titled Declaration, conteynyng the iust causes and consyderations, of this present warre with the Scottis, wherein alsoo appereth the trewe & right title, that the kinges most royall maiesty hath to the souerayntie of Scotlande, delivered in November 1542, on the eve of his invasion of Scotland.5 Even more, its impact was lasting. Some thirty-five years later, John Dee prepared two seminal tracts of Tudor imperial promotion: the General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Nauigation, which contained the first use of the term “Brytish Impire” in English print,6 and Brytanici imperii limites, which Ken MacMillan argued “must be given pride of place for being the earliest justification for the expansion of the British Empire to be offered in Elizabethan England,” amid “great uncertainty and intense planning for the English land and sea empire in North America and the North  Privy Council to Bishop [of Durham], [October] 1542, StP 4:212–213, at 4:212.  Cranmer translated the Gravissimae as The Determinations of the Moste Famous and Mooste Excellent Universities of Italy and Fraunce (1531); the Collectanea is BL Cotton Cleopatra E VI, fols. 16–135, at 41v-42r. See also Graham Nicholson, “The Nature and Function of Historical Argument in the Henrician Reformation” (unpublished PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 1977); Guy, “Intellectual Origins”; The Divorce Tracts of Henry VIII, ed. Edward Surtz and Virginia Murphy (Angers: Moreana, 1988). 4  24 Hen. VIII, c. 12, The Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols. (London: 1810–1828), 3:427–429, at 3:427. 5  Henry, Declaration (1542). 6  Dee, General and Rare Memorials (1577), at 3, 8, 13, 14, 28, 38, 54, 55, 56, and 57. 2 3

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Atlantic.”7 At this crucial juncture, as he mustered the strongest possible evidence to “stire upp your Majesties most noble hart and to directe your godlie conscience to vndertake this Brytishe discovery and recovery enterprise in your owne royall interest, for the great service of God, for your Highnes immortal fame, and the marvailous wealth publick of your Brytish Impire” and reclaim those lands “vndewlie and disloyallie by some Christian princes alienated and wrested from the government of your Highnes ancestors there Brytish Septer Royall,”8 Dee cited the Declaration. By this “littill booke,” he charged, “it is sufficientlie declared that noe only from the tyme of this Edward Baliol Kinge of Scotes, but from the yeare of Christ 900 untill the 34 yeare of your Majesties father his very victorious and famous raigne, the lawfull possession as well as the proprietie of the supremacy over Scotland hath byn continewed in his and your Majesties noble progenitours hands.”9 Combined with his own rehearsal of Brenius and Belinus, Arthur and Edward I, it proved that the “kingdom of Scotland is ours by absolute right … and that we should take care that we do nothing, either in writing or in deed by which our right and possession of the same may be in any way diminished.”10 Dee’s signal use of the Declaration demonstrates the staying power of the text and the broader discourse and practice that it was a part of, one that coined the phrases “greate Britayne” and “thempire of greate Briteigne” in print in 1548,11 pioneered use of the word “colone” in the English vernacular to describe settlement in foreign lands around 1550,12 and yoked British imperialism to protestant religion. Dee had grown up in this atmosphere, part of a generation that included Thomas Smith, William Cecil, Humphrey Gilbert, Martin Frobisher, and Francis Drake. Born in 1527 to a family that shared its monarch’s Welsh heritage and had ties to court and the Mercer’s Company of London, Dee came of age in a world indelibly marked by Renaissance humanism, the break with Rome, reform in Calais, Wales, and Ireland, war with Scotland and France, and oceanic 7  Dee, The Limits of the British Empire (1576–78), ed. MacMillan with Jennifer Abeles (Westport: Praeger, 2004), 8. 8  Dee, Limits, 29, 25. 9  Dee, Limits, 56–57. 10  Dee, Limits, 44. 11  [Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset,] An Epistle or Exhortacion, to Vnitie & Peace… (1548), sig. A.iiii.v; Nicholas Bodrugan, An Epitome of the title that the Kynges Maiestie of Englande, hath to the souereigntie of Scotlande… (1548), sig. [a.v.v]. 12  [Robert Wedderburn], The Complaynt of Scotland (ca. 1550), fol. 45r.

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adventure.13 Though victory eluded the Tudor side, as its conflict with the Auld Alliance came to an inglorious end in 1551, and projects elsewhere stumbled, the experience was influential and germane in the Elizabethan age. To Dee, it showed “the honour imperiall, lineallie derived and due vnto your Majesties father (of most renowned memorie Kinge Henri the 8)” and thus unto Elizabeth and proved the existence of an historic empire encompassing England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, and America that could and should be lawfully re-created.14 Dee and his cohort appreciated what the Privy Council sought in Autumn 1542. Here, across the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, was a vibrant, vital incubator for Britain and empire. Construed as both a literary and military campaign and situated in a geographical and chronological frame wider than 1540s England and Scotland, the “Rough Wooing” wars were central to the maturation and extension of Tudor empire.15 Far more than the pursuit of a dynastic marriage between heir to the English and Irish thrones Edward Tudor (later Edward VI) and his Scottish counterpart Mary Stewart (later Mary, Queen of Scots), the Wooings occasioned a deluge of offensives, propagated on both sides of the border and elsewhere in the Atlantic that built on the experience accrued since the late fifteenth century—especially at Flodden and Tournai—to further define sovereignty, delineate boundaries of nation 13  R. Julian Robers, “Dee, John (1527–1609),” ODNB (2006); William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Glyn Parry, The Arch Conjurer of England: John Dee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 14  Dee, Limits, 36. 15  I adopt the plural to reflect the variety of the Anglo-Scottish conflict, see Marcus Merriman, The Rough Wooings: Mary Queen of Scots, 1542–1551 (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2000). Scotland has received limited attention from historians of the early British Empire; for the sixteenth century, Armitage (Ideological Origins, ch. 2; “Making the Empire British: Scotland in the Atlantic World, 1542–1707,” Past and Present 155 (May 1997): 34–63; and “The Elizabethan Idea of Empire,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, 14 (2004), 269–277), Mason (“Scotland, Elizabethan England and the Idea of Britain,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, 14 (2004), 279–293), Williamson, and Jane E.A.  Dawson (“William Cecil and the British Dimensions of Early Elizabethan Foreign Policy,” History 74, no. 241 (January 1989), 196–216) are the principal exceptions, while Ned Landsman, T.M. Devine, A. Mackillop, Steve Murdoch, Ester Mijers, and Brian Levack have authored significant work on later periods. Conversely, Scottish developments play a major role in Tudor Studies, though largely for the Elizabethan era, and with 1603 and 1707 casting shadows of inevitability, as D.M. Head noted, “Henry VIII’s Scotitsh Policy,” Scottish Historical Review 61, 1, no. 171 (April 1982): 1–24.

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and identity, and expand across physical space in the Isles, Europe, and New World. Yet much had changed since 1519 or 1527, and these transformations were as important as existing thought and models. The dramatic, even revolutionary, currents of the Reformation and ensuing consolidation were never more than superficially disentangled from events, people, and processes beyond England; they both drew from and impinged upon the meaning and exercise of empire abroad. And throughout, the Scots were not passive, disinterested figures, nor were the Irish or French. Similarly, crown officials worked in competition and collaboration with non-official participants on all sides. The Rough Wooings thus constitute a highly significant, multifaceted, and distinct, but not disconnected, phase in the development of Britishness and British imperialism, one in which the lessons gleaned in the 1510s and 20s merged forcefully with fresh ideas, vocabulary, and funds to generate new attempts at forging Tudor empire in the 1530s and 1540s. Those projects were at once rooted in the archives of York and Durham and alive in Dee. * * * Spearheaded by Cranmer, Lee, Cromwell, Nicholas de Burgo, Edward Foxe, John Stokesley, and Stephen Gardiner, with their king’s active participation, the Gravissimae, Collectanea, and Act of Appeals functioned as primary means by which crown, court, and parliament justified and executed Henry’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon, announced the realm’s imperial status and maxim that rex in regno suo est imperator, severed ties with the Catholic Church, and established the Royal Supremacy and Church of England. Calling on empire explicitly and frequently, the materials sought to affirm supreme caesaropapist kingship and independent national control over all matters and all people, spiritual and temporal, as well as the monarch’s claims over multiple, discrete lands.16 The scholars’ achievements were both timeworn and novel: they newly articulated, legislated, or effected plots and theory that had been swirling at home and road-tested abroad since the accession of Henry VII, as the Act of Appeals illustrates. It opened by invoking “dyvers sundrie olde autentike histories and cronicles” and borrowed concepts of “Impire” and the relationship between “Imperiall Crowne” and Church from Constantine and Justinian—pasts central to early Tudor self-fashioning and humanist  Guy, “Intellectual Origins”; Ullman, “This Realm of England”; Koebner, Empire.

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thought. Next, the statute called the realm a “Body politike compacte of all sortes and degrees of people, devided in termes and by names of Spiritualtie and Temporaltie” bound together and owing natural and humble obedience to God and king alone, the latter endowed by divine donation “with plenarie hoole and intiere power premynence auctoritie prerogatyve and jurisdiccion to rendre and yelde Justice”—a merger of late-medieval metaphor with Roman theory, definitions of regality quite close to those Henry had asserted in 1510s France, and a calculated spin on the “Defender of the Faith” title he received from Rome in 1521. The act proceeded with recourse to “his mooste noble progenitours” Edward I, Edward III, Richard II, Henry IV, and others who preserved “the auctoritie and prerogatyff of the said Imperyall Crowne”—medieval kings with feudal claims, British conquests, and strong views on royal authority. It then emphasized the “greate inquietacion, vexacion, trouble, costes and charges … [and] delaye” suffered by the king and his subjects who await arbitration of appeals from Rome and the right of king-in-­parliament—the questions asked, troubles faced, and lessons learned by Henry VII, Henry VIII, and their peoples in Ireland and Tournai—and attended to the reality of plural crown holdings, from “this Realme of Englond” to “the Kinges Dominions or Marches”—consciously reflecting and accommodating the physical expansiveness of crown holdings, while providing for future growth by withholding their names. Finally, the statute excised papal authority and instituted “the Kinges Jursdiccion and Auctoritie” to determine all cases “finally and diffinityvely”—brand-new provisions, which also elevated common over cannon law.17 The Act of Appeals, then, was not wholly original, nor was it meant to be. The distant and recent past lent resonance and utility. Tournai’s bishopric debacle, for example, had demonstrated that papal power and imperial power were mutually exclusive; it was only logical to borrow from what had been worked out there. Yet the 1533 parliament was innovative in mandating or lending force to extant strands of philosophy, while inaugurating new departures. Moreover, none of this is to suggest that the break with Rome was cohesive, coherent, or detached from the real exigencies and acute drama of the moment, from Henry’s lack of a legitimate male heir to the protestant faith, Anne Boleyn, courtly faction, and European politics. Rather, it is to underscore the multiple contexts and

 24 Hen. VIII, c. 12, Statutes of Realm, 3:427–429.

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catalysts at work and the constant interplay between nation and empire that such upheaval bears out. The same was true of the flurry of reforms that came as the decade progressed, intended (as per 1534’s Act for the Submission of the Clergy) to eradicate not only that which is “muche prejudiciall to the Kinges prerogatyve royall and repugnant to the lawes and statutes of this Realme, but also over moche onerous to hys Highnes and hys subjectes.”18 Most notably, parliament extended royal control and secular law over the clergy,19 halted payments to Rome,20 settled the succession to the throne and its “imperiall Crowne” to protect “the lawfull Kynges and Emperours of this Realme” against usurpation by “the Bishop of Rome” or any other foreign potentate,21 made Henry and his inheritors “the onely supreme [heed] in erthe of the Churche of England callyd Anglicana Ecclesia” to pursue “the encrease of vertue yn Chrystis Religion and for the [conservacy] of the peace unyte and tranquylyte of this Realme,”22 and made it high treason to deny the Royal Supremacy.23 The dissolution of the monasteries followed from 1536,24 greatly enhancing Henry’s revenue stream, and a 1539 act empowered the king to make bishops via letters patent.25 Beyond Westminster, the pace, diffusion, and standardization of reform, via new officials and networks (local, regional, national, and transnational), along protestant lines (if only vaguely or intermittently), in the vernacular (now the language of church and state), and in service of consolidation, centralization, and commercial gain (against individual dissent, popular uprisings, and foreign threats) were important corollaries, appreciable in the Coverdale Bible (1535), Ten Articles (1536), Act of Union with Wales (1536, as “the Domynyon Principalitie and Countrey … justly and rightuouslyis and ever hath ben incorporated annexed united and subjecte to & under the Imperiall Crowne of this Realme”),26 parliamentary  25 Hen. VIII, c. 19, Statutes of Realm, 3:460–461, at 3:460.  25 Hen. VIII, c. 19, Statutes of Realm, 3:460–461. 20  25 Hen. VIII, c. 20 and 21, Statutes of Realm, 3:462–471. 21  25 Hen. VIII, c. 22, Statutes of Realm, 3:471–474, at 3:471–472. 22  26 Hen. VIII, c. 1, Statutes of Realm, 3:492. 23  26 Hen. VIII, c. 13, Statutes of Realm, 3:508–509. 24  27 Hen. VIII, c. 28, Statutes of Realm, 3:575–578; 31 Hen. VIII, c. 13, Statutes of Realm, 3:733–739. 25  31 Hen. VIII, c. 9, Statutes of Realm, 3:728. 26  27 Hen VIII, c. 26, Statutes of Realm, 3:563–569, at 563. Chapuys told Charles V, “the King has just taken away [the Welsh’s] native laws, customs and privileges … I wonder how the King dared to do it during these troubles in Ireland,” 19 December 1534, LP 7:1554. 18 19

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e­ nfranchisement and tightened management of Calais (1536, as “one of the mooste pryncipall treasours belonging to this his Realme”),27 Pilgrimage of Grace (1536), Bishops’ Book (1537), and Six Articles (1539). The 1530s thus altered the English, Welsh, and Calais landscapes, with major implications and concerted moves soon apparent further afield. Henry and his subjects had forged five central tenets and tools of nationand empire-­building, elevating them as the basis of Tudor unity and superiority over others: a providential historical mythology rooted in Antiquity, advanced across the medieval era, and characterized by conquest, expansion, and trade; rule by common law, parliament, and administrative organs like the shire; supreme, sovereign, omnicompetent monarchical power; the protestant Church of England; and English language. The newly sanctioned enclosed Tudor crown was primed to fulfill its perceived rights throughout the Atlantic World. Indeed, in April 1536, Londoner Richard Hore, “a man of goodly stature and of great courage,” departed England with two ships, over one hundred men (thirty of them “gentlemen of the Innes of court, and of the Chancerie, and diuers others of good worship, desirous to see the strange things of the world,” including John Rastell’s son), and “the kings fauour and good countenance,” for “a voyage of discouerie vpon the Northwest parts of America”28—the first major American expedition since the break. Seemingly following Cartier, they sailed near Cape Breton then disembarked on the “Island of Penguin,” a word which significantly sounded enough like Welsh to suggest Tudor primacy in the region, pre-dating Cabot. According to gentleman-merchant Oliver Dawbeny, whom the elder Hakluyt interviewed many years later, after several days in “Newfoundland” the travelers spotted the “natural people of the countrey, that they had so long and so much desired to see.” They promptly “manned out a ship-boat to meet them and to take them,” but “the Sauages fledde,” leaving the voyagers to study the “boote of leather,” “rawe silke,” and a “certaine great warme mitten,” fertile soil, “store of firre and pine trees,” “wilde beastes,” fish, and fowl left behind. Nevertheless, they slowly began to succumb to famine, until one “fellowe killed his mate while he stooped to take vp a roote for his reliefe, and cutting out pieces of his bodie whom he had murthered, broiled the same on the coles and greedily deuoured them.” Horrified, the captain castigated  27 Hen. VIII, c. 63, Statutes of Realm, 3:632–650, at 632.  “The voyage of M. Hore,” PN, 3:129–131, at 129.

27 28

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the man-eater, declaring it better to perish in body than be condemned forever to the “vnquenchable fire of hell,” then begged God for relief. On the very day their starvation became overwhelming and the voyagers agreed to cast lots for their next victim, a well-furnished French ship arrived. Hakluyt waxed, “and such was the policie of the English, that they became masters of the same, and changing ships and vittailing them,” set sail for home. When, several months later, the robbed Frenchmen complained, the king took pity on his men and “of his owne purse made full and royall recompence,” bringing Hore’s adventure to a close.29 Whether or not we can believe its cannibalism report as literal truth,30 the voyage had not gone off particularly well and a decided pause in American exploration followed; however, it did demonstrate sustained, gentlemanly private interest and active crown support for trans-Atlantic venture at a crucial national and imperial moment, show English success against its primary European rival, cement Tudor rights to Newfoundland, reaffirm some of the region’s attractiveness as well as its risks, the presence of fearful, inferior “others,” and the power of this New World to induce Britons to partake in their own barbaric behavior. Unlike America, Ireland rarely receded from view. In the same whirlwind months as Henry’s divorce and remarriage, Cranmer’s elevation, and parliament’s acts of Appeals and Supremacy, king and council sought out a slate of materials on the state of Ireland, all preparatory to a shift in program that accompanied changes in England and Wales. Notably, Cromwell was closely involved: he received an early indictment of Kildare’s rule cautioning “that the Kinges Grace shuld bee wareful, how to suffre him to have all the strength of the land … suche as bee soo farre distant,”31 increased surveillance, and took advice from multiple quarters in bids to centralize the distribution of patronage, promote Anglo-Irish reformers, and Anglicize the Irish council and church.32 Also directed at Cromwell  PN, 3:130–131.  See also E.G.R. Taylor, “Master Hore’s Voyage of 1536,” Geographical Journal 77, no. 5 (May 1931), 469–470; Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages (NY: Oxford University Press, 1971); Philip Levy, “Man-Eating and Menace on Richard Hore’s Expedition to America,” Atlantic Studies 2, no. 2 (December 2005), 129–151. 31  Ossory to Cromwell, 2 January 1532, StP 2:153–155, at 154–155. 32  Quinn, “Henry and Ireland,” 340–341; Bradshaw, “Cromwellian Reform and the Origins of the Kildare Rebellion,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 27 (1977). 69–93, at 74–78; Ellis, “Cromwell and Ireland, 1532–1540,” Historical Journal 23, 29 30

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was one of two anonymous texts from 1533–1534, which emphasized the author’s English heritage and native country’s potential, highlighted Henry’s “ardent deasire … to have a reformacion in your lande of Irlande, whiche was never further from the same,” and credited “incivilitie and brutenes” to the “lak of their Prince and Souveraigne personaly emongis theym,” forgetfulness of the historic rights and practical experience of English rule over Ireland preserved in “the Kingis recordis,” and committing its governance to natives.33 “The thing mooste necessarie,” he continued, “is to encrease thEnglish ordre, habyte, and maner,” at the expense of the Irish via oaths of obedience for “savage” Irishmen, English schooling, reassertion of “the Kinges inheritaunce” in Munster and Ulster, and a crown-appointed, English-born, “sage indifferent” deputy.34 The other similarly stressed the legitimacy of Henry’s administration like all “his noble progenitors,” the unwieldiness of “wild Irish lordes” and their usurpation of crown “prerogatiff,” and the utility of an English-born chief executive with military experience to reverse the “sore deca[y]” by which “ther English tong, ther English habite, and English ordyr is tornyd in to the Irish tong, Irish habite, and Irish ordre.”35 John Alen’s “Instructions,” sent directly to Henry, agreed, asserting “the grete decaie of this lande, which is so farre fallen into myserie, and brought into soche ruyne, that noither the Inglishe order, tonge, ne habite been used, neither the Kingis lawes obeied, above 20 miles in compasse,” deriding the “defaulte of Inglish inhabitauntes,” and recommending prompt redress by a new, experienced, English deputy.36 Policy moved apace: in September 1533, Kildare was summoned to court; in December, the Privy Council discussed the need to send “som trustie persons into Irelonde, to see that domynyon establisshed” and bring “the grete Yrisshe rebelles” to heel; in February 1534, after much delay, Kildare deputized his heir Thomas Fitzgerald, Lord Offaly (Silken no. 3 (1980), 497–519, at 500; Ellis, “The Kildare Rebellion and the Early Henrician Reformation,” Historical Journal 19, no. 4 (December 1976), 807–830, at 811. 33  “To the Right Wurshipfull, and my singuler good Master, Maister Thomas Cromwell, of the Kingis moste honorable Counsaile, to be presentid to the Kingis Moste Excellent Highnes,” [December 1533], StP 2:166–179, at 167, 173, 175. 34  “Report to Crumwell,” StP 2:170, 172, 169. 35  “Here afftyr ensuith Artecleis and Instructions to Our Soweraine Lord the King, for his land of Irland,” [February 1534], StP 2:182–192, at 182, 186, 191. 36  “Instructions, mynistred by the Kingis Counsaile in Irelande to John Alen,” [December 1533], StP 2:162–166, at 162, 163, 165.

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Thomas), and departed for England to face charges of treason; and, by the end of May, Ossory had promised to serve as Henry’s “trewe, faithfull, and liege” subject as any “Inglishe subjecte” would resist and repress “the Bisshop of Roomes usurped jurisdiction” as Ireland’s “most and principall cause of the desolation, devision, ruyn, and decaie,” and reduce “the people to Cristen maners” in conjunction with new English deputy William Skeffington.37 Significantly, Skeffington was appointed with a court-­ penned and -published blueprint. Described by Brendan Bradshaw “as part of the strategy of constitutional and administrative engineering by which Cromwell sought to consolidate the outlying areas of the king’s dominions,”38 the Ordinances extended the crown’s newly legislated imperial sovereignty and national hallmarks to Ireland. It asserted the primacy of a centralized royal government, parliament, and deputy with council (over bastard feudalism and deputy alone), required the chancellor to determine all cases and sit regularly, underscored the king’s sole right to settle land by letters patent, emphasized the island’s division into shires and control by justices of the peace, and prioritized defense.39 The scheme thus harkened back to the 1490s and 1510s, under Poynings and Surrey, and, most immediately, to Skeffington’s own prior service against the “wyld Iryshry,”40 first under the “secret council” organized to rule Ireland in the name of Henry Fitzroy (Earl of Richmond and the king’s illegitimate heir) in 1529 and then as lord deputy in 1530–1532, working to secure Leix and Ulster in tandem with Kildare until the pair fell out and Kildare was restored.41 Yet the plot was also distinctly post-Break, incorporating reformed religion, crown supremacy, recently uncovered precedent and tested theory, vernacular print, and specifically English modes of rulership; it thereby evinces the mutually reinforcing nature of changes at home and abroad, both definitions of empire acting part and parcel of one another. Moreover, a swift backlash bears out the project’s novelty: in June 1534, Silken Thomas revolted, his “bretherne, kynesmen, and 37  “Memoranda for the King’s Council,” 2 December 1533, TNA SP 6/3, fols. 84r-89v; “King Henry VIII and the Earl of Ossory,” 31 May 1534, StP 2:194–197, at 194, 196; Ellis, “Kildare Rebellion,” 809–810. 38  Bradshaw, “Cromwellian Reform,” 85; Ellis, “Kildare Rebellion,” 808; Quinn, “Henry and Ireland”; Quinn, “Government Printing and the Publication of the Irish Statutes in the Sixteenth Century,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 49 (1943/44), 45–129. 39  Ordinances for the Government of Ireland (1534), reprinted in StP 2:207–216, at 215. 40  “Ireland,” [August] 1529, TNA SP 60/1, fols. 141r-145v, at 142r. 41  Quinn, “Henry and Ireland,” 336–342; Ellis, “Cromwell and Ireland,” 499–504.

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a­ dherents … of the Popes secte and bande, and hym wol they serve against the Kinge, and all his partetakers; saying further, that the King is accursid, and asmany as take his parte, and shalbe opynly accursid.”42 The Kildare Rebellion hastened Skeffington’s departure, put a pin in reform, and vented political, cultural, and economic disaffection, as Thomas and his supporters strategically invoked Catholicism and the specter of Tudor power to stimulate pan-Irish and European support and stoke a virulent, enduring strain of anti-British imperialism, even if their actual concerns were personal or more limited. Thomas appealed to Charles V, Paul III, James V, and Francis I—all of whom showed interest in checking Henry’s reach and denouncing his heresy.43 Situating Ireland against a protestant England and with Rome and Spain, rebels flattered Charles with classical imagery as “the most sacred and most invincible Caesar,” implored to save the Irish, whose “predecessors and ancestry did come from your Majesty’s realm of Spain” and have never been subject to rule by “English intruders.”44 The pitch wooed Anglo- and Gaelic Irish, spiritual and lay, but when international help failed to materialize, Tudor forces—the largest sent to Ireland since 139945—crushed the rebels “with 42  Cowley to Cromwell, June 1534, StP 2:197–198. See also “Thomas Fitzgerald,” [October 1535], LP 9:514; “Robert Reyley,” 5 August 1536, Cal Carew 1:84; Bradshaw, “Cromwellian Reform,” 85–92. 43  “Lord William Howard’s Mission,” 1534, TNA SP 49/4, fols. 57r-66v; James to Benedict, Cardinal of Ravenna, [19 February 1534–5], Letters James V, 284; Chapuys to Charles, 4 February 1534, LP 7:152; “The Emperor’s Policy,” 25 February 1534, LP 7:229; Chapuys to Charles, 22 April 1534, LP 7:530; Chapuys to Charles, 7 July 1534, LP 7:957; Chapuys to Charles, 11 August 1534, LP 7:1057; Chapuys to Charles, 29 August 1534, LP 7:1095; Chapuys to Charles, 10 September 1534, CSPS 5:1:87; James to Manus O’Donnell, September 1534, in G.A. Hayes-McCoy, “Unpublished Letters of King James V of Scotland Relating to Ireland,” Analecta Hibernica 12 (January 1943), 179–181, at 179; Chapuys to Charles, 24 October 1534, LP 7:1297; “French News,” 24 and 25 October 1534, LP 7:1302, 1303; Chapuys to Charles, 5 December 1534, LP 7:1507; Alen to Cromwell, 16 February 1535, StP 2:226–231; Deputy and Council of Ireland to Henry, 26 March 1535, StP 2:236–238; Dr. Ortiz to the Emperor, 27 May 1535, CSPS 5:1:164; Skeffington to Henry, 17 June 1535, StP 2:247–249. For earlier Irish appeals to Charles and Spain, see William Wise to Cromwell, 12 July [1533?], BL Cotton Titus B XI 2, fols. 359r-360v; Thomas Batcock to William Prat, 13 July 1533, BL Cotton Vespasian C VII, fols. 42r-v; Ellis, “Kildare Rebellion,” 812–815. 44  “Corny O’Brien, Prince of Ireland, to the Emperor Charles V,” 21 July 1534, in J.A. Froude, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth, vol. II (NY: Scribner and Co., 1872), 279. 45  Ellis, “Kildare Rebellion,” 827.

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unprecedented ruthlessness.”46 As Bradshaw surmised, “the Irish reformation parliament was a logical sequel” to the victory, an “opportunity to enact in the colony the laws that gave the theoretical claims of the monarchy juridical expression.”47 It was an opportunity to extend Tudor empire. Under new deputy Leonard Grey (a veteran of Ireland, France, and Scotland), archbishop of Dublin George Browne (also English, with courtly connections), and new English-born officials, the Irish Reformation Parliament passed a set of acts similar to England’s and the clergy propounded its religious settlement.48 Across 1536–1539, legislation attainted Thomas, divested the pope and named Henry and his heirs supreme heads of the Church of Ireland, reinforced English over Irish ways (with reference to the appropriateness of the Statutes of Kilkenny), and bound subjects to the supremacy by oath, while unrelenting military progresses, visitations, injunctions, and commissions focused on enforcing the new order, securing ecclesiastical wealth, and rooting out dissent.49 The project was laced with notions of English superiority, for its civil government, peacefulness, sovereign prince, and reformed church, as well as the Tudor crown’s duty to spread those tenets, especially by plantation, for the benefit of England and Ireland. Near the start of the effort, the deputy and council charged that having preserved his “rightfull and auncient inheritance,” Henry had a special opportunity—not seen in at least a century— to conquer, reform, and hold the entire dominion (even those “of the irish bloode”) in proper obedience to his “one monarchy” and with little cost; “our simple advises shalbe … principally and above all things, and that immediatlie, to provide for the inhabiting of your saide possessions …  Bradshaw, “Cromwellian Reform,” 91.  Bradshaw, “The Opposition to the Ecclesiastical Legislation in the Irish Reformation Parliament,” Irish Historical Studies 16, no. 63 (March 1969): 285–303, at 288. 48  Brabazon to Cromwell, 17 May 1536, StP 2:315–316; Henry to Browne, [July] 1537, TNA SP 60/4, fols. 184r-185v; Bradshaw, “Ecclesiastical Legislation”; Murray, Enforcing Reformation, 82–124; Brady, Chief Governors, 13–25; Bradshaw, The Dissolution of the Religious Orders in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 49  Henry to Galway, 28 April 1536, TNA SP 60/3, fols. 30r-33v; Deputy and Council of Ireland to Cromwell, 1 June 1536, TNA SP 60/3, fols. 59r-60v; Robert Cowley to Cromwell, [June] 1536, TNA SP 60/3, fols. 63r-68v, [August] 1536, TNA SP 60/3, fols. 142r-152v, and 1537, TNA SP 60/4, fols. 89r-94v; Grey to Cromwell, 10 August 1536, StP, 2:353–356; Deputy and Council of Ireland to Henry, 10 February 1537, TNA SP 60/3, fols. 19r-25v; “Reports to the Irish Commission,” 20 September 1537, LP 12:2:729; Brabazon to Cromwell, 30 December 1537, StP 2:524–528; Browne to Cromwell, 8 January 1538, StP 2:539–541. 46 47

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wherein Your Majestie shall highlie merite of God.”50 By so doing, Henry “can wannt no lande, and that as good and frutefull as we thinck anny prince hath.”51 Several other correspondents agreed. Francis Harbart pled, if Henry would “send Eyngglys men for to enhabyt here; then I would not dowt, out Hes Gras chould hawe here a good countre, and allso on to Hes Gras a proffyt.”52 Walter Cowley suggested forcibly rendering and reinhabiting certain areas “desolate of Irishry” as “the playn way to lynk in oon power togither all thEnglishry in Leynster and Mownster,”53 and William Body asserted, “if Ireland were well inhabited and in good order, the fertility and commodity of the ground is such that within short space … [it] would be to the King’s high profit.” Tapping into the domestic ideal, he added, “the city of Limerick is a wondrous proper city, and a strong, and standeth environed with the river of Shenon, and it may be called Little London for the situation and the plenty.”54 If ruled by “native Englishmen” and quieted by an English force, Martin Pelles promised, “this country … would be as profitable for the wealth of England as any land in the world is to its prince.”55 The language was similar on spiritual matters: after numerous reports bemoaned the difficulty of the religious task, furthering the correlation between unruly Irishness and “the papisticall secte and pharaseycall sorte,”56 a 1539 patent couched monastic dissolutions in terms of rescuing a people “so addicted, partly to their own superstitious ceremonies, partly to the pernicious worship of idols, and to the pestiferous doctrines of the Romish pontiff” from “total destruction.”57 Yet neither mass plantation nor conversion came.

50  Deputy and Council of Ireland to Henry, 26 June 1536, TNA SP 60/3, fols. 93r-96v, at 93r, 93v, 94v. 51  Council of Ireland to Cromwell, 9 August 1536, TNA SP 60/3, fols. 114br-117v, at 116v. 52  Habart to Cromwell, 21 March 1536, StP 2:307–308, at 308. 53  Cowley to Cromwell, 19 June 1536, StP 2:332–333, at 332. Some were more hopeful that the “wilde Irishe” could be reformed, via royal justice and revenue collection akin to other outlying regions like North Wales, see Alen to Henry, 6 October 1536, TNA SP 60/3, fols. 155r-159v. 54  Body to Cromwell, 9 August 1536, Cal Carew 1:86. 55  Pelles to [Cromwell?], 4 December 1536, Cal Carew 1:91. 56  Lord Butler to Henry, 31 March 1538, TNA SP 60/6, fols. 76r-77v, at 76r. 57  “Royal Commission,” 7 April 1539, Calendar of the Patent and Close Rolls of Chancery in Ireland, of the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth, ed. James Morrin, 2 vols. (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1861–2), 1:55.

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Instead, within a two-day span in June 1540, both Cromwell and the abrasive, bellicose, and much-harangued Grey were charged with treason. The latter was replaced by Anthony St. Leger, a humanist-educated Englishman with experience in France and the Pilgrimage of Grace who would serve multiple terms as Irish lord deputy.58 Occupying a sort of middle ground between post-Poynings home rule and Skeffington-Grey slash-and-burn direct rule, St. Leger initiated a strategy of moving piecemeal through territories, accepting submissions from local magnates, then restoring the lands under crown auspices and on condition of upholding English law, parliamentary rule, and royal supremacy. This “surrender and regrant,” then, pragmatically combined Henry’s instructions to survey, instill order, reduce the garrison, and increase royal profits with what St. Leger found on the ground.59 Moreover, the shift in approach did not moderate rhetoric: the Irish council expressed its determination to see “the extirpacion and subdueyng of theas savage” Irishmen who “annoye your poore subjectes … [with] cankerde and naturall malyce”60 and Henry his desire that St. Leger “use good and discreate perswasions, to make them saver, what it is to have their landes by our gift certeynly and quietlye,” “trayneng of thYrishemen to their due obedyence, wherby they shall lerne to knowe Almighty God, and growe into welthe and cyvylytye” over “their former bestlynes.”61 The surrenders adulated Henry as their “moost redoubted Kinge and Emperour” and guardian of God’s law62 or admited their upbriging “in a rude countrey, without order or good cyvilyte, not knowyng Youre moste Excellent Majestie”; “by ygnorans neclectyd our duetie of allegeans,” they had decayed into “disobedient rule by reyson of maryage and norsyng with thoss Yryshe, sumtyme rebelles, nere adjoynynge.”63 In accepting submission and regranting, Henry stressed his clemency, “albeit the longe disobedience, and vile and savage kde of

58  Alan Bryson, “St. Leger, Sir Anthony (1496?–1559), ODNB (2008); Brady, Chief Governors, 25–44. 59  Henry to St. Leger and others, [16 August] 1540, TNA SP 60/9, fols. 92r-99v. 60  Council of Ireland to Henry, 22 September 1540, TNA SP 60/9, fols. 131r-135v, at 131v. 61  Henry to Deputy and Council of Ireland, 23 September 1541, StP 3:330–336, at 332, 331, 333. Observers agreed, see Cusack to Privy Council, [September] 1541, TNA SP 60/10, fols. 148r-151r. 62  O’Brien to Henry, 1542, TNA SP 60/10, fols. 162r-163v, at 163r. 63  McWilliam to Henry, [1541], TNA SP 60/11, fols. 42r-43v, at 43r.

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lief whiche you and your auncestors have lyvid in” merited force.64 Reinforcing the policy and expressing the imperial vision that undergirded it, in 1541 the Irish Parliament restyled Henry and his heirs Kings of Ireland, “with all maner honours, preheminences, prerogatives, dignities, and other things whatsoever they be to the estate and majestie of a King imperiall”65 and “unyted and knytt to your Imperiall Crowne of Englande”66—a move justified by exigency, the discourse of barbarism, and history. The Irish government explained, “we thinke that they that be of the Irissherie wolde more gladder obey Your Highnes by name of King of this your lande, then by the name of Lorde therof; having hadde heretofore a folisshe opinyon amonges them, that the Bisshoppe of Rome shulde be King of the same,”67 confident that given the new title, surrender-­and-regrant, and time, “suche savage vyle poore personnes” would grow civilized and obedient, the realm, “which we take to be no lesthen Englande and Wales,” profitable.68 An academic defense “after the Chronicles” charted Ireland’s kingship from “the beginning of the Irishmen” and their submission to the “King of Britayne” down through Henry II and Richard II.69 Moreover, here was no isolated exercise: at the dawn of a new decade, as St. Leger boasted “that, in my tyme, Your Majestie sholde moste worthelye have a nother Imperiall Crown,”70 Henry set his sights on another. * * * In the twenty years separating Mair’s History and Henry’s Declaration, the relationship between England and Scotland had again been put through the wringer, this time by the Tudor king’s condescending paternalism, persistent meddling and thinly veiled ambitions, break with Rome,  Henry to McWilliam, 1 May 1541, TNA SP 60/10, fols. 36r-38v, at 36r-v.  33 Hen. VIII, c. 1, Statutes at Large, Passed in the Parliaments Held in Ireland, 20 vols. (Dublin: 1765–1801), 1:176–177, at 176. The title was proclaimed at Greenwich on 7 July 1541 (LP 16:974) and Westminster on 23 January 1542 (Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. P.L. Hughes and J.F. Larkin, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 1:307–308). 66  Deputy and Council of Ireland to Henry, 28 June 1541, TNA SP 60/10, fol. 58r. 67  Deputy and Council of Ireland to Henry, 30 December 1540, TNA SP 60/9, fols. 274r-275v, at 274v. 68  Deputy and Council of Ireland to Henry, 24 October 1541, TNA SP 60/10, fols. 158r-161v, at 159r. 69  “The King’s Title to Ireland,” [before 12 July 1541], Cal Carew 1:156. 70  St. Leger to Henry, 26 June 1541, StP 3:304–305, at 305. 64 65

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and Irish policies on the one hand, and the Stewart’s difficulty navigating his lengthy minority, defending his sovereign majority, maintaining his own claims to England, and sustaining foreign alliances on the other. Each flashpoint lent force, experience, and occasion to the Rough Wooings. After skirmishes in the mid-1520s over the border, English influence in Scotland (secular and ecclesiastical),71 and Scottish designs on England (including to see James “pronuncit seeund persone of yat Realm [of England], and to assyng landis, as pertenis to ye Prynce of yat Realm”72 and/or married to Mary Tudor so that “thir tua Realmes may june to gidder with amite and luff”73), the divorce crisis elevated tensions. As Henry’s court fought its case against Rome, with significant implications for royal authority, the Earl of Northumberland spied a loss of Stewart prestige among Scottish elites and expressed his expectation “to crown [Henry] in the town of Eddinburgh within brief tyme.”74 The earl followed up with rumors that James was mobilizing,75 yet glossed that he would be thwarted by the alienation of his subjects, more willing “to entre in pledges unto Your Grace to become your true and lawfull subgiettes.”76 For his own part, James proclaimed that Henry, “against all nature and right seeks to take … a portion of his realm,”77 adding that “the English action, justly weighed, will be found to aim at destroying the Scots.”78 Still, an Anglo-­ Scottish truce held.79 A crucial turn came in 1536—alongside the Welsh Act of Union, first English dissolutions, Hore’s expedition, and opening of the Irish Reformation Parliament—when a planned summit between Henry and 71  Henry to Estates of Scotland, 13 January 1521–2, Letters James V, 86–87; Wolsey to Norfolk, 9 August [1524], BL Cotton Caligula B/II, fols. 21r-26v; Wolsey to Norfolk, 2 September [1524], BL Cotton Caligula B/IV, fols. 400r-404v; Henry to Clement VII, 2 December 1524, Letters James V, 110; James to Wolsey, 4 December [1524], Letters James V, 110–111; Albany to Clement, 8 December 1524, Letters James V, 111; Henry to Clement, 23 February 1524–5, Letters James V, 116; Henry to Clement, 10 April 1526, Letters James V, 132. 72  Margaret to Henry, 31 August [1524], BL Cotton Caligula B/I, fols. 232r-236v, at 232v. 73  Margaret to Henry, 23 and 24 January [1525], StP 4:292–299, at 293. 74  Northumberland to Henry, 27 December [1531], TNA SP 1/68, fols. 99r-101v, at 99v. 75  Northumberland to Henry, 3 September [1532], BL Cotton Caligula B/I, fols. 132r-133v. 76  Northumberland to Henry, 22 October [1532], TNA SP 1/71, fols. 134r-135v, at 134r. 77  James to Christian, 6 February 1531–2, Letters James V, 206. 78  James to Parlement of Paris, 28 February 1532–3, Letters James V, 236. 79  “Indenture,” 11 May 1534, Letters James V, 267–269.

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James disintegrated. James went instead to France, marrying Francis’s daughter to secure the Auld Alliance.80 When his bride died the next year and Europe began to rally against England, James again snubbed Henry to wed Mary of Guise. Earlier, James had played both sides: he received praise as “prince of Ireland, lord of Iceland”81 and countenanced Charles’s reminder that “as friend of the faith with English blood in his veins … James is affected by the open attempt to transfer succession to the illegitimate daughter” and Lutheran “errors” that the cruel schismatic had unleashed, but refused to wed Mary Tudor,82 agreed to “perpetuall peas” with Henry,83 and accepted the Order of the Garter.84 Similarly, James indulged papal pleas “to declare Henry rightfully deprived of his throne,”85 swearing to help halt the protestant “plague”86 and realign England,87 then tried to leverage his Catholicism and that of Scotland and Ireland for greater ecclesiastical privileges.88 By October 1535, however, Henry was pushing harder for “his derest brother and nephieu” to follow his lead, sending a lengthy primer on imperial power and reformed faith that drew heavily on vocabulary and evidence from the Break and extant Stewart proclivities:

80  William Howard and Bishop Barlow to Henry, [13 May 1536], TNA SP 49/4, fols. 123r-124v, at 123r. See also Letters James V, 318–321; Margaret to Henry, 20 October 1536 and Henry to Margaret, 27 December 1536, in The Hamilton Papers: Letters and Papers Illustrating the Political Relations of England and Scotland in the XVIth Century, ed. Joseph Bain, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: General Register House, 1890), 1:38–40; Elizabeth A. Bonner, “The Genesis of Henry VIII’s ‘Rough Wooing’ of the Scots,” Northern History 33, no. 1 (January 1997): 36–53; Andrea Thomas, “James V (1512–1542),” ODNB (2004). 81  Cocheleus to James, 13 August 1534, Letters James V, 273–274, at 273. 82  Credence from Charles to James by Gotskalk Eriksson, 24 April 1534, Letters James V, 264–267, at 265, 266; James to Charles, 31 October 1534, Letters James V, 277–278. 83  English Envoy’s Report to Henry, 9 July 1534, Hamilton Papers, 1:10–11, at 11. 84  James to Odulph, Lord of Vere, 22 February [1534–5], Letters James V; James to Henry, 28 February 1534–5, Hamilton Papers, 11–12. 85  Paul to James, 26 July 1535, Letters James V, 293–294, at 294. 86  James to Clement, 16 September 1534, Letters James V, 275–276, at 276. 87  James to Paul and to Charles, 4 February 1535–6, Letters James V, 311–312. 88  James to Paul, [25 January 1535–6], Letters James V, 308–309; James to Paul, 5 August 1538, Letters James V, 349; James to Paul, 26 September 1538, Letters James V, 351–352; James to Paul, 13 November 1538, Letters James V, 353–354; James to Paul, 2 January and 1 February 1538–9, Letters James V, 362–364; James to Cardinal of Carpi, 3 July [1541], Letters James V, 965.

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it may please your gracious highnes to open your bodely eyes, God opening the sight of your soule clerly to perceyve thoffice of a Christen prince, thauctoritie of a king annoynted, and true administracion of a faithfull ruler, whiche thobscure tradicions of the Bischop of Rome and his adherentes have utterly defaced … All their crafte pollicye and ymaginacion hath been to hold princes in derknes, to kepe from them the light of Goddes worde, and to retayne them in ignorance … [History and scripture offer] evident exemple … to enterprise a like reformable redresse of your spirituall (soo named) clergie, whiche as it shalbe to the glorifieng of Goddes honour, soo must it nedes be thadvauncement of your renome, also to suche augmentacion of inestimable riches and unrestrayned fredom of your royall libertie, as never non of your noble progenitours hitherto could attayne. Howe shuld not your treasure be inestimably augmented, if unto your highnes, as of dieutie ought to be, were restored the title, jus, advousance, patronage, giftes and grauntes of all spitituall promocions, with free interest in their gooddes, landes, rentes, revenues, and possessions, as rightfully belong to your regalitie, wherof so long season they have injustely dispossed you by their subtile submission to the Bisshop of Rome?89

Still the Scot dithered, citing his commitments to God and kirk as well as to the lineage and league he shared with Henry.90 Their conversation shifted as the 1536 meeting fell apart: James wrote more carefully, declaring “‘It sall nocht be in the power of ony wikit person to mak us belief ony thing of yow’ inconsistent with an uncle’s attidue, as true an auncle as James is a true nephew”91; Henry promised only to be “as friendly in action as James promises to be towards him.”92 Meanwhile, Cromwell received reports that laid the basis for invasion on religious grounds: despite “plentie of prestes, sondry sortes of religions, multytudes of monkes, [and] flocking companys of freers,” Scotland had “noo right preaching of Godes wurd, nor scante any knowlege at all of Cristes Gospell, withowt the wiche neyther justice nor good ordre may prospere.”93 France and Ireland added fuel to the fire, evidence that Henry could not have quiet in his holdings abroad without bringing James to heel: in April 89  “Instructions to Barlow and Holcrofte,” 3 October 1535, Hamilton Papers, 1:18–28, at 18, 22–23. 90  James to Henry, 6 and 30 December 1535, Hamilton Papers 1:28–29. 91  James to Henry, 20 May 1536, Letters James V, 318–319. In contrast, the Pope was pleased, Paul to James, 19 January and 15 February 1536–7, Letters James V, 328 and 329. 92  Henry to James, 10 June 1536, Letters James V, 320. 93  [William] Barlow to Cromwell, 10 February [1536], StP 5:17–19, at 19.

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1539, Henry Ray related that the Scots “ar making at this present moche ordenaunce, and artillerie for warr … sayng that in case ther sholde be any breche betwene Fraunce and us, that than they woll take suche parte as Fraunce dothe”94; Alen testified from Dublin, in July 1539, that “the Bishop of Rome is the oonlie auctor of this ther detestable purpoos, and the King of Scottes a speciall cumforter and abetter”95; and, in mid-1540, Brian Layton reported that James was preparing to lead a force into France or Ireland after taking submission from “all the greate men in Ierlande, that thay wolde houlde of Hym, and take Hym for thayre Kynge and Lorde.”96 Despite exhortations, primarily relayed by Sadler, that James remember that “his Realme adjoyneth unto England,” that “blud … amitie and love hath been betwen sondrye of thair predecessours toguether, more than ever was bitwen any other Princes … [down to] King Henry the 7th,”97 “what displeasure happened to his father, making himself an other man’s instrument,” his proximity to the English throne,98 and the superiority of temporal power,99 the Stewart was obstinate.100 Instead, he appeared to be arming101 and assuming the title “Defender of the Faith”102—affronts to the “to the reverence that a good nephiew oweth to his uncle.”103 When James failed to appear during Henry’s nine-day stay at York in September 1541, just as depredations along the border and the

 Report by Henry Ray, April 1539, Hamilton Papers 1:57.  Alen to Cromwell, 10 July 1539, TNA SP 60/8, fols. 44r-48v, at 44r. 96  Layton to Cromwell, [May 1540], StP 5:178–179, at 178. For corroboration, James to O’Neill, 5 June 1540, Letters James V, 400; Paul to James, 24 February 1540–1, Letters James V, 420. It also may have factored into Henry’s new desire to reconsider English plantation in Ireland, see Henry to Deputy and Council of Ireland, 26 March 1541, TNA SP 60/10, fols. 19r-33v. 97  Henry to Sadler, [April 1539?], SP 49/5, fols. 16r-21v, at 21r-v. 98  Sadler’s Instructions, January 1540, in The State Papers and Letters of Sir Ralph Sadler, ed. Arthur Clifford, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: 1809), 1:3–13, at 8. 99  Henry to James, 29 April 1541, Hamilton Papers, 1:68–70. 100  Sadler to Henry, [after 22 February] 1540, Sadler SP, 1:17–45; Sadler to [Cromwell], [February] 1540, Sadler SP 1:46–49; James to Henry, 19 May 1541, TNA SP 49/5, fols. 51r-v. 101  Henry to earls of Westmoreland and Cumberland, 20 May 1541, Hamilton Papers, 1:74–75. 102  Thomas Wriothesley to [?], [July 1541], TNA SP 49/5, fols. 52r-54v. 103  Henry to James, March 1538–9, Hamilton Papers 1:55–56, at 56. 94 95

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prospect of a joint Anglo-Imperial attack on France increased,104 British conflict became imminent. Not coincidentally, the run-up to November 1542 saw heightened Tudor concern for domestic security, national identity, and territorial claims outside of England—matters that intersected with and borrowed from one another and from the brewing Scottish conflict. For example, under royal and parliamentary directive “for the avoidinge of aliene straungers not beiung made denysyns from oute of this youre graces reallme of Englande and other youre majesties domynyons,”105 a 1541 commission sought to parse English from Scots and limit their intermingling, expel Scots from Northumberland as detrimental to “oure true and naturall subiectes,”106 and “sette” “Englishemen borne” in their place.107 Also before the year’s end, Roger Barlow, a merchant-explorer out of Bristol and Seville, former Cromwell ally, crown administrator in Wales, and colleague of Thorne and Rastell (the youngers) who had accompanied Sebastian Cabot on his voyage under Charles V in 1526–1528, presented Henry with his “Brief Summe of Geographie.” A translation of Martin Fernandez de Enciso’s Suma de Geographia (1519) expanded from Barlow’s own experiences, the cosmography was an early eyewitness description of the American continent written in English. The author urged Henry to indulge “one of the thinges most naturally desired of noble hartes … to here reade or comon of straunge contries,” including those “latelie discovered by your majestie” and by “the kynges of portugall and spayne.”108 He pointedly added that Newfoundland might be wanting, for “it stondeth farre aparted from the equinoctiall whereas the influens of the sonne doth norishe and bryng fourth gold, spices, stones and perles. But whereas our englishe marchantes of brystowe dyd enterpryse to discover and discovered that parte of the land, if at that season thei had folowed toward the equinoctiall, no dowt but thei shuld have founde grete riches of gold and perle as other nations hathe done sence.”109 104  Hamilton Papers, 1:76–100; Privy Council, 28 September 1541, LP 16:1211; Bonner, “Genesis.” 105  William Eure and other commissioners to Henry, 7 November 1541, Hamilton Papers, 1:120–123, at 120. 106   “Scotchmen in Northumberland,” 26 September 1541, TNA SP 1/167, fols. 58v-60r, at 59r. 107  Eure and others to Henry, 1:120. 108  Barlow, A Briefe Summe of Geographie, ed. Taylor (London: Hakluyt Society, 1932), 1–2. 109  Barlow, Briefe Summe, 180.

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Elsewhere in the text, Barlow favorably compared the English and Welsh, “goodlie men and valiant and cruel to their enemyes,” to the sometimes-­ sterile Scotland with its “tall men and hardy but unfaythful of promesse” and Gaels beyond the Pale, who make constant war (much like the indigenous American Tupí) and “liveth by stelyng and robbyng as sylvages.”110 Looking to preserve his patronage post-Cromwell and take advantage of the budding imperial moment, Barlow presented the “Brief” together with a map and proposal for a new Northwest Passage search, based on those of the 1520s.111 The following Fall, Henry granted Frenchman Jean Rotz an annuity and denizen status for a treatise on nautical science112 and a Boke of Idrography (or “Rotz Atlas”), in which the author described himself as “sarvant to the kingis mooste excellent majeste,” displayed the royal coat of arms, red dragon, white greyhound, imperial crown, and Tudor rose, and plotted “new fonde londe,”113 in the hopes that Henry and his mariners might enjoy the sweetness of science and, in short time, cause there to be “many or more good and perfect navy pilots and marine astrologers in England as elsewhere in the world.”114 Though they did not immediately spur voyaging, Barlow and Rotz’s gifts demonstrate a real spark of Atlantic interest directed at the crown as the British conflict heated up, and explicitly drew England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, France, and the New World together. The pair was in good company. An anonymous 1542 tract “for the reformation of Ireland” recommended looking to Wales “which is as true to the Crown, as England,” for inspiration and amplified the importance of assuaging native fears and inculcating English laws and habits to turn Irishmen into “true subgietes.”115 In June of that year alone, Alen advised the King to reduce Leinster even if it meant leaving that “cuntrie utterly desolated to fede wylde bestes,”116 soldier-statesman John Wallop sent word from Calais of French unease, readiness for war, and limited  Barlow, Briefe Summe, 45–50, at 46, 50.  For further study, see Heather Dalton, Merchants and Explorers: Roger Barlow, Sebastian Cabot, and Networks of Atlantic Exchange, 1500–1560 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 112  E.G.R. Taylor, “Jean Rotz: His Neglected Treatise on Nautical Science,” Geographical Journal 73, no. 5 (May 1929), 455–459. 113  Rotz, Boke of Idrography (1542), BL Royal 20 E IX, fols. 1v, 31v, 22r. 114  Taylor, “Rotz,” 456, my translation. 115  “Ireland,” 1542, TNA SP 60/10, fols. 164r-165v, at 164v. 116  Alen to Henry, 4 June 1542, TNA SP 60/10, fols. 227r-228v, at 227v. 110 111

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f­ortifications at Boulogne,117 Chapuys confirmed the seriousness of English designs in France,118 and James authorized new ambassadors to dampen “the flames of war.”119 Already by late 1531, an English herald had tellingly compared the marches of Calais to those of Scotland in the same breath as he reminded Margaret of her son’s possible succession in England, commended Henry’s behavior “during the tender years of the king of Scots, [to] forebore to press many claims in Scotland, which, though well justified, he did not esteem worth a war,” and warned James not to prejudice his English right or cause his own subjects to judge him “unworthy to be their head.”120 Now a decade later, Henry greeted the flow of information aggressively, conveying his displeasure directly to James121 and fielding an army “not only to defende his majesties realme against the Scottes, but also to invade the realme of Scotlande and to remayn and tarye [there] … for the most annoyaunce of the sayd Scottes.”122 Though the result was an ignominious defeat at Haddon Rig,123 Henry was buoyed by reports that “the cuntrey is not able to furnyshe theymselfes with grayne, and that the pore people doo leve in suche penury as they never sawe before,”124 its people were prone to flee and had an “evill demenour,”125 and “the wilde and unrulie inhabitauntes” on the border required “refourmacion and sharpe ponyshemente”126—loaded statements on Scottish deficiency and inferiority. The king furthered the discourse, censuring James’s “slipperines and incertaintie,”127 “unkinde and

 Wallop to Henry, 10 June 1542, TNA SP 1/171, fols. 8r-9v.  Chapuys to Mary of Hungary, 29 June 1542, LP 17:439; Chapuys to Charles, 30 June 1542, LP 17:441. 119  Commission of Scots ambassadors to England, June 1542, NRS GD249/2/2/1, fol. 83r. 120  “A memorial of such matters as the King’s pleasures by spoken by Carlisle,” [November] 1531, LP 5:537(3). 121  Henry to James, 23 August 1542, Hamilton Papers, 1:155–156. 122  Privy Council to Chancellor, 24 August 1542, Hamilton Papers 1:156. 123  George, Earl of Huntly, to James Learnmonth, 24 August 1542, NRS SP 13/31; James to Learnmonth, 2 September 1542, NRS SP 13/32. 124  Rutland and his council to Henry, 26 August 1542, Hamilton Papers 1:162–163, at 162. 125  Rutland to Privy Council, 2 September 1542, Hamilton Papers 1:177–178, at 178. 126  Rutland to Privy Council, 5 September 1542, Hamilton Papers 1:178–183, at 182. 127  Instructions by Henry to Norfolk, &c., 13 September 1542, Hamilton Papers 1:197. 117 118

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ungentle maner,” and accusing Scots of usurping English lands.128 Thomas Howard (now Duke of Norfolk and serving in the north) added, “I never saw men so well willyng to no jornay nor so desirous as they be unyversally to be revenged of the Skottes.”129 He may have also appreciated that less than a year after James agreed to help the Pope preserve Catholicism among the Irish chieftains,130 O’Neill submitted to Henry, swearing to adopt English ways and language, till his land, and abandon Brehon in favor of Tudor law.131 Fittingly, growing English animosity toward Scotland was then refracted back through Ireland, in new devices reminding Henry that “perfit civilitie” still eluded him in that “his highneses royalme of Irelande,” urging increased protection of “the sees betuxt Skotlande and Irelande,” and qualifying “the Redshankes” as “moost vile in their lyving of any nation, next Irishmen.”132 Sites of Tudor enterprise in the North Atlantic were similarly drawn into Scottish conflict: in September, Norfolk complained that he could not muster all the ships he wanted because those “as came lately oute of Iseland be not yet all unladen of their fisshe” and disparaged the capture and ransom of “two wise felowes of Southwold that were taken by a Skottisshe shipp as they were commyng from Iseland.”133 His sentiments fit with those of northern commissioners who made a critical link between naval power and Tudor success abroad when they declared in October that “unles we may be lordes on the water, we can not go so far as Edenborough.”134 Conversely, Henry’s replies were reminiscent of contemporary Irish programs, stressing the importance of royal honor, military defense, and good governance to annoy malicious native enemies135 and permitting his men to spare noble Scots who submit “to becom our true man and faithfull subgiet.”136 128  Henry to Commissioners in the North, 13 October 1542, Hamilton Papers, 1:265–267, at 266, 267. 129  Norfolk to Privy Council, 6 September 1542, Hamilton Papers, 1:184–185, at 184. 130  James to Chieftains of Ireland, 13 February 1542, StP 5:202; James to O’Neill, 13 February 1542, Letters James V, 436. 131  Articles and Conditions subscribed by [Con] O’Neill, September [1542], CP 150/5. 132  “Government of Ireland,” [August?] 1542, TNA SP 60/10, fols. 295r-296v, at 295r and 295v. 133  Norfolk to Privy Council, 7 September 1542, Hamilton Papers, 1:186–187. 134  Commissioners in the North to Privy Council, 14 October 1542, Hamilton Papers, 1:268–270, at 270. 135  Henry to Commissioners in North, 2 November 1542, Hamilton Papers, 1:297–300. 136   Henry to Commissioners in North, 16 October 1542, Hamilton Papers, 1:272–274, at 273.

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The Rough Wooings thus emerged in an interwoven British World much informed by 1530s developments. The first shot of the campaign was an emotive polemic on the special bonds of kinship and honor, natural geography and mutuality that tied the kings of England and Scotland together, as well as to the history, theory, and rhetoric that ostensibly demonstrated their rightful hierarchical rank. Exasperated and stung by James’s perceived irreverence, Henry brought the full weight of Tudor dynastic ideology and self-fashioning down on his enemy’s head, melding a narrative of recent events with classical, medieval, and Renaissance thought to “notify vnto the world” the justice of his impending attack. The Declaration’s opening pages deployed concepts of counsel, honor, reputation, nature, law, and diplomacy—all major humanist preoccupations—alongside powerful images of a young rebellious nephew and backward Scots. Following the death of James IV by “due punyshment of god” for Flodden, Henry explained, the latter chose to honor his father’s memorable feats of marital diplomacy and show mercy toward the “tender youthe,” “forgettyng the displeasure that shuld haue worthily prouoked vs to inuade that realme” to instead nourish “our Nephieu to achieue his fathers possession and gouernment,” expecting appreciation in return.137 When James defaulted on their meeting and Scots raided England, Henry blamed “thaduyse of his counsaylle” and “the lewdnes of his subiectes.”138 Yet the Stewart king’s own role, contrary to the laws of God and man, soon grew too apparent to ignore, compelling Henry, “for preseruation of our honoure and right, to vse our puissance and power agaynst hym … not for reuengeaunce of our priuate displeasure … but for recouerye of our right, the preseruation of our subiectes from inuiries, and the obseruation of such leages as haue passed betwne vs.”139 Not only had he insulted the bloodline, especially Henry VII and Margaret Tudor (“a doughter of England”), tainted by “the cold ayre of Scotlande” toward violence, arrogance, and unprince-like demeanor, James’s behavior recalled “Brytayn[‘s]” creation story and ought to be solved according to its lessons. Brutus had conquered “the whole Isle within the Ocean sea,” hitherto inhabited by “people without order or 137  Henry, Declaration, in The Complaynt of Scotlande, ed. James A.H. Murray (London: English Texts Society, 1872), 192–206, at 192. 138  Henry, Declaration, 193. 139  Henry, Declaration, 192–197, at 192, 197.

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ciuilitie.” He appointed his second son “Albanact” to rule what is now Scotland, his third son “Camber” to Wales, and his first son “Locrine” to England, “vnto whom as being the elder sonne, the other two brothers shuld do homage, recognisyng and knowleagyng hym as theyr superior”— a most plain, just, and convenient beginning, Henry reasoned, “for the order of this Island, at that tyme specially when the people were rude.” Though these events were long ago, contemporary authorities “writeth of the nature, maners, and condytions of the Scottis … [as] the very same in tymes paste, that we finde them nowe at this present” and “calleth Scotlande part of Englande.” James was Albanactus’s heir, worthy of punishnment by Lorinus’s for his transgressions.140 Moreover, James should heed more recent examples William I, Edward I, Henry II, Edward III, and Henry V, who, “after moch rebellion and resistence, accordyng to naturall [Scottish] inclination,” subdued, ordered, and took homage and fealty as “noble and superior lords of the kyngdome of Scotlande” with proximal “ryght in France.”141 The Declaration here reproduced John Balliol’s submission, then deftly amplified it and made it relevant to England’s present imperial status by charging that the whole of Scotland, spiritual and temporal, had confirmed the pledge and recognized the authority of the archbishop of York.142 Knitting various discursive strains together, Henry roundly asserted, there was neuer kynge of this realme had more oportunity in the minority of our Nephieu, Ne in any other realme a prince that hath more iuste title, more euident title, more certayn title, to any realme that he can clayme than we haue to Scotland, not diuised by pretense of mariage, not imagined by couenaunt, or contriued by inuention of argument, but lineally descended from the begynnynge of that astate established by our progenitours, and recognised to successiuely of the Kinges of Scotlande … which for the proximitie of bloudde betwene vs, we haue ben slacke to require of them.143

Much like the Act of Appeals, the Declaration used “hystory set forth by diuers” to justify its claims of Tudor empire. Yet nearly a decade on, that empire was now British, rooted in international conquest, and legitimized

 Henry, Declaration, 199.  Henry Declaration, 199–204, at 201, 203, 202. 142  Henry, Declaration, 203, 204. 143  Henry, Declaration, 197–198, at 198. 140 141

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by civilizing mission.144 He concluded, “who can blame our father, knowynge the Scottis nature, neuer to do their duetie but for feare, if he demaunded not that of them, whiche they wold exchue if they might, being his realme not clerely than purged from yll seede of sedition, sparkeled and scattered in the cruell ciuile warres before.” In late 1542, however, law, reason, and god offered Henry the chance.145 As the King of Scots told Pope Paul III, “Henry will pour out his vast new and ill-gotten resources to force James into his impious courses, or to wreak heavy vengeance upon Scotland.”146 On 24 November, Tudor forces won an important victory at Solway Moss,147 seizing “four fawconets with letter of J.R.S., and the arms of Scotland with one imperial crown upon every one of them”148 and leaving the enemy “never sofarr out of courage syns their kyng was killed [at Flodden].”149 On 14 December, a humiliated James V died and his one-­ week-­old-daughter Mary became Queen of Scots. That week, warden-­ general of the Scottish marches John Dudley, Viscount Lisle and later Earl of Warwick, assessed the situation for Henry: a perfite reformacion wyll not be had their, neyther your lawes executed, ne your highnes ministers duly obeyed, untill your majestie have that parte of Skotland asmoche as ys athisside the Frithe on theste side, and asmoche as ys athisside Dunebretayne on the west side, to be under your owne obeysance, wherein I thinke your highnes shuld do an exceptable dede before God, considering howe brewtly and bestly the peop[l]e nowe be governed, and also considering theffucion of Cristen blodde that in all your noble progenytors [suffered] … O what godly acte shuld yt be to your excellent highnes to bring suche a soorte of people to the knowlege of Godes lawes, the countrey soo necessarie to your domyneons, by reason wherof somany soules shuld lyve also in quyetnes!150

 Henry, Declaration, 199.  Henry, Declaration, 205–206. 146  James to Paul, 9 November 1542, Letters James V, 444. 147  Henry to Thomas Wharton, 30 November 1542, Hamilton Papers 1:311–313. 148  “Prisoners taken at Solway Moss,” [November 1542], LP 17:1143. 149  Lisle, Tunstall, and Uvedale to Privy Council, 8 December 1542, Hamilton Papers 1:323–324, at 323. 150  Lisle to Henry, 12 December 1542, Hamilton Papers 1:328–332, at 331. 144 145

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He hastened to add that “the Scotes kyng ys ryght feryd for losyng of hys holl realme”151 and “sum of the beste sort of gentyllmen of theyr Borders hathe wished that your grace had theyre princes for my lorde prince [Edward],”152 now five years old. Dudley had given voice to the war’s eventual namesake, even as he warned against moving before the English could “fele [Scottish] myndes towardes your highnes.”153 Tudor imperial theory seemed to be moving toward reality: according to one chronicler, on 27 December the Scottish lords captured at Solway Moss “weare sworne to the Kinge to sett forth his Majestis tytle that he had to the realme of Scoteland,”154 and also by year’s end, depredations between the English and French at sea had increased, namely among ships carrying Newfoundland fish, escalating into a proxy war.155 The fight, which soon included William Hawkins and others who received royal letters of marque to “thannoyaunce of the kinges mates enemis”156 and persisted through the Wooings,157 showed not only that English mariners continued to frequent Newfoundland and Labrador for their rich waterways and trade, thereby maintaining their right of first discovery (as one Spaniard highlighted),158 but that the Tudor crown and its subjects had come to appreciate their British and European battles as Atlantic-wide affairs with Atlantic-wide repercussions and possibilities. Indeed, across the same period, St. Leger wrote expectedly of a parallel Irish dimension, proposing to fortify the island, mobilize its forces against Scotland or France, and grow its navy.159 The opening of these new theaters reflected,  Lisle and Tunsall to Henry, 17 December 1542, Hamilton Papers, 1:336–338, at 337.  Lisle to Henry, 24 December 1542, Hamilton Papers 1:345–346, at 326. 153  Lisle to Henry, 21 December 1542, Hamilton Papers, 1:343–344, at 343. 154  Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, ed. William Douglas Hamilton, 2 vols. (London: Camden Society, 1875–7), 1:140. 155  “Privy Council,” 3 September 1542, LP 17:738; “Complaints by Frenchmen,” 19 December 1542, TNA SP 1/174, fols. 180r-183v; “Complaints by Frenchmen,” 26 December 1542, LP 17:1236. 156  Council with the Queen to Paget, 30 September 1544, TNA SP 1/193, fols. 11r-12v, at 11r. Hawkins’s commission is “Grants in September [1544],” LP 19:2:340(6). 157  Council to [Thomas] Seymour, [7 August] 1548, TNA SP 10/4/39; Seymour to Peter Carew and others, TNA SP 10/4/40; Seymour to Somerset, 10 and 11 August 1548, TNA SP 10/4/42, 41; John Grenefield to [Seymour], 7 September 1548, TNA SP 10/5/3; James Matthew to Luttrell, 2 February [1548–9?], SRO SP 2/3/197. 158   “Extract from Santa Cruz’s ‘Islario General’” (ca. 1541–1556), Precursors, 183–194, at 190. 159  St. Leger to Henry, 6 April 1543, TNA SP 60/11, fols. 11r-14v, 4 June 1543, TNA SP 60/11, fols. 46r-50v. 151 152

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magnified, and reinforced the vision emerging in 1542–1543, as Henry vowed to waste no time “to unite thiese two realms … if not by conformitie as we most desire, [then] otherwise,”160 to “take into his handes and governement the yong Doughter of Scotland, and also of the hole realme,”161 and to uphold “our title to Scotland.”162 This was no mere marriage alliance. The Wooings were carried out as they had begun: a literary battle fought alongside a military one, with practitioners on both sides. The result was a concentrated mass of promotion and plots akin to that which coalesced around France, Ireland, and the New World at other points in the century. Among the first to assume the Declaration’s mantle was John Elder, self-described “Clerke, a Reddshanke” and protestant convert forced into English exile who prepared “A Proposal for Uniting Scotland with England” ca. 1542–1543. Critically developing an explicitly protestant, civilizing, commercial imperial discourse, Elder used descriptions of his native country, history, and Irish comparisons to beg for Henry’s intervention and for the marriage of Edward and Mary, so that “Beelzebubs flesmongers, the abbotes and all ther adherentes, beinge quyte expulsed and drywyne away, boithe the realmes of England and Scotland may be joynede in one; and so your noble Maiestie for to be superiour and kynge”; “Scotland, a part of your Highnes empyre of England,” he argued, could thus be improved and saved.163 For presentation, Elder paired the piece with a map and guidebook to Scotland, the fruits of his dozen years of travel by land and sea, exemplifying the link between exploration and expansion central across Tudor empire-building, even in Britain, and between the ideological and practical arms of the project.164 According to Elder, the current state of Scotland was “miserable”: rocked by the loss of its king and in the clutches of “pestiferous Cardinall [David Beaton], and his blynd ignoraunt busschops, with certane other wylde, fals, craftie bores, which haue drunkyne the Frence kynges wynes.” By contrast, Henry’s “princely magnanimitie, Salomonicall wysdome and sapience, and heroicall humanitie and beneuolence” had won over the  Henry to Council of Scotland, 4 January 1542–3, Hamilton Papers, 1:354–355, at 354.  Richard Southwell’s Mission, [January] 1542–3, Hamilton Papers, 1:367–373, at 367. 162  Henry to Sadler, 14 April 1543, TNA SP 49/6, fols. 32r-40v, at 40v. 163  Elder, “A Proposal for Uniting Scotland with England,” in The Bannatyne Miscellany, ed. Walter Scott and David Laing, vol. I (Edinburgh: 1827), 1–18, at 1, 8, 11. 164  Elder, “Proposal,” 10. 160 161

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“trew fiathfull hartes” of most commoners north of the River Forth.165 He also had the love of the “wilde, rude, and barbourous” Highland lords, whom Elder defended as more honest and civil than Scotland’s “babilonicall busscheps and the great courtyours” and more athletic and hardy than its “tendir delicatt gentillmen.”166 These Scots appreciated that “without your Highnes, by the prouision of God, [to] hunt and drywe” their enemies “with fyre and swerde,” the whole nation would fall to sin and destruction.167 Moreover, their obedience was appropriate, Elder explained, as was Henry’s British-wide empire. First, “as we reide in auncient Yrische storeis,” pre-Brutus Scotland was inhabited by “gyauntes and wylde people.” Albanactus reduced them to civility, and the region went from being called “Eyryn veagg, that is to say, little Irland,” to “Albon, that is to say, Scoland.”168 More recently, Henry had mercifully brought the Gaelic lords of Ireland from rebellion to order, obedience, and affluence.169 By replicating these deeds among similarly “rude and barbourous people,” he would restore his “noble empyre,” abolish superstition, sow “wealth and ryches,” and fulfill a “godly porpas and desire” to unite the realms forever in love and amity.170 Indeed, Elder concluded, Henry “haith moost iust caus and quarell” to invade, defeat his enemies, and earn comparisons to Hercules, Hector, and Achilles.171 A clear departure from Mair’s pre-Reformation anti-Galfridianism, equal union, and positive representation of Gaeldom, the “Proposal” wed Tudor empire to English reform and rule over the entire British Isles and against France, earning Elder a royal annuity.172 Still, reports showed that Henry faced an uphill battle in convincing “the mynde of Skotland,” which feared “if bothe the realmes were under one, all shuld go to the kinge of England … wherby Skotland nowe being poore alredy, shulde be utterly beggered and undone.”173 His biggest coup seemed to come when Governor James Hamilton, Earl of Arran proclaimed his zeal for

 Elder, “Proposal,” 8,  Elder, “Proposal,” 13–14. 167  Elder, “Proposal,” 9. 168  Elder, “Proposal,” 11. 169  Elder, “Proposal,” 9, 14. 170  Elder,” Proposal,” 14, 8, 7, 16. 171  Elder, “Proposal,” 17. 172  “Grants in March, 1544,” LP 19:1:278(71). 173  Lisle and Tunstall, 5 January 1542–3, Hamilton Papers 1:357–359, at 358. 165 166

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protestantism, Henrician England, and union,174 calling for “the Byble and Testament [to be] settfourthe in Englyshe for the better erudicion of the ignorant people,” declaring that “no man shulde be gladder then he to see bothe realmes under oone governaunce … strong ynoughe to plucke the Great Turke oute of his denne,”175 and extolling the benefit for Mary “to be made a queen of two realms by a just and rightful title, where she had now a scarce title to one.”176 Also in Spring 1543, Sadler offered cautious hope, relaying Scottish pledges to “ever be a trew English man and” optimism that “when the mariage was ones contracte, and both realmes knitte in perfyte frendeship and famyliaryte, there was no doubte but the hole realme in a litle tyme wolde fall into your majestes devocyon, and Fraunce they wolde utterly habandon,”177 despite persistent opposition.178 Even Mary of Guise apparently admitted that it was providential and best for England and Scotland to be one.179 Nominally, Elder got his wish on 1 July 1543 when the Treaty of Greenwich betrothed Mary to Edward. Yet the agreement ignored the Auld Alliance and bucked Tudor notions of superiority, promising that “Scotland shall continue to be called the kingdom of Scotland and retain its ancient laws and liberties.”180 Henry agreed to the settlement so that he could concentrate on Boulogne, while Mary of Guise bought time.181 By year’s end, her faction was in control, Arran had recommitted himself to Catholicism and Scottishness, Scotland’s Parliament had repudiated the treaty, and the country had realigned with France against the Queen’s “great uncle, bent on subduing both her and her kingdom,” as well as all

174  Arran to Lisle, 18 January 1543, LP 18:2:56; Arran to Lisle, 6 February 1543, LP 18:1:110; Lisle to Suffolk, 7 February 1543, Hamilton Papers 1:406–408; Henry to Arran, 9 February 1543, LP 18:1:132; Arran to Henry, 14 February 1543, LP 18:1:158; Henry to Sadler, 4 April 1543, Hamilton Papers 1:498–503; Sadler to Privy Council, 18 April 1543, LP 18:1:418; Salder to Privy Council, 20 May 1543, TNA SP 49/6, fols. 64r-70v. 175  Suffolk, Tunstall, &c., to Privy Council, 13 February 1542–3, Hamilton Papers 1:416–419, at 418, 417. 176  Sadler to Henry, 20 April 1543, Sadler SP 1:152–158, at 155. 177  Sadler to Henry, 20 March 1543, Hamilton Papers 1:474–487, at 480, 477. 178  Sadler to [Lisle?], 27 March 1543, TNA SP 49/6, fols. 29r-v. 179  Council to Suffolk and others, 17 February 1542–43, Hamilton Papers 1:431–432; Sadler to Henry, 23 March 1543, Sadler SP, 1:84–90. 180  “Treaties with Scotland,” 1 July 1543, LP 18:1:804. 181  Paget to Henry, 3 April 1543, TNA SP 1/177, fols. 19r-22v; Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (NY: Mariner Books, 2005), 23–24.

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“kings of England, their common enemies.”182 Moreover, the aggressive stance adopted by Henry and his supporters had seemingly served the opposition, legitimizing claims that “the King of England has determined to make war on us with all his forces, not only to destroy our liberty … but also to overthrow our religion.”183 Scots continued to press an anti-British imperial discourse, emphasizing Mary’s birthright, the threat of protestantism as the “faytht and opunyoun of Ingland,” Henry’s unwavering desire to “maik playn conquest,” and their commitment to “rasist owr said aid innimeis … and to keip owr realme in the aid astayt and liberte.”184 Vowing to “be trewe Scottysshe men,” they declared that they “olde rather be hangyd then so dysgrade theyre howsys” by joining Henry185 and appealed for Continetnal aid on the basis of their Catholicism, patriotism, and ties to France and Rome.186 Conversely, English observers used “the present miserable state of Christendom” to urge vigilant protection of the Church settlement and Supremacy and further reform at home,187 and interpreted any victory abroad as providential punishment for “detestable falsehood.”188 Henry ought to use “sworde and conqueste” to “abate the Scottes your highnes enymyes prowde hartes … for they arre straunge men to medle with, and lytill to trust to.”189 Further, rhetoric of Scottish “wildenes and disobedience,”190 wishes to surrounded Mary with “Englisshe folke,”191 and news that pro-Tudor Scots were harassed as “English lords” or “good Englishman” (because “trewe Scottes … wolbee in harte and dede against

 “Scotland and France,” 15 December 1543, LP 18:2:499.  Arran to Paul III, 8 December 1543, LP 18:2:471. 184  Queen of Scots to Sheriff of Roxburgh, 19 November 1544, Hamilton Papers 2:509–510. 185   Nicholas Throckmorton to William Parr, 23 October 1543, Hamilton Papers 2:116–118, at 116. 186  [Henry Stewart, Lord Methven?], ca. October 1543, NRS SP 2/1/32; Mary of Guise to Paul, 22 November 1543, LP 18:2:416; Arran to Paul and Cardinal of Carpi, 8 December 1543, NRS GD 149/264, fols. 184r-v. 187  Cranmer to Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, 18 June 1544, LP 19:1:732; “A Supplication touching the Church,” December 1544, LP 19:2:797. 188  Anonymous, “The Late Expedition into Scotland,” (1544), in Tudor Tracts, 1532–1588, ed. A.F. Pollard (NY: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1903), 37–51, at 42. 189  Suffolk to Henry, 28 February 1543–4, Hamilton Papers 1:284–286, at 285. 190  Suffolk and Tunstall to Privy Council, 24 July 1543, Hamilton Papers 1:587–588, at 588. 191  “Sir George Douglas,” [May] 1543, TNA SP 49/6, fols. 71r-72v, at 71r. 182 183

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Englande”) shows how the conflict enflamed identity.192 As Sadler explained before Arran’s about-face, Scottish tide was turning against the governor for fear of his Anglophilia: “this nation is of such malicious nature towards English-men, that they cannot abide, nor suffer to hear, that English-men should have any manner of superiority or dominion over them.”193 Observers betrayed mounting frustration with “the unreasonablenes of the people … [who] neyther regarde God nor Governour, ne yet justice, or any good policie”194 and lack even “the tendernes of love to there children as Englisshmen doo”195—striking tropes of otherness. “I never saw people so wylde,”196 Sadler ramped up, decrying “the lewdness … rudenes ignorance and beastlynes of the common people”197 as unmatched198; “neuer man had to do with so rude so inconstante and beestly a Nacyon as this is.”199 By extension, others explained, all Scottishmen must be taken as enemies, destroyed, and wasted, or else “they all woll joyne togethers in thar own reallme agaynst all Ynglishmen.”200 Tying two enemies together, George Douglas purportedly admitted “that ther was never a Scotishman in Scotlande, but he was better Frenche then Englishe.”201 In the mid-1540s, English nation- and British empire-­ building constituted (in the words of Suffolk, a privy councilor experienced in Scotland and France) a single, “most godlye and noble purpose.”202 Within six months of Greenwich, the Wooings were becoming rougher. Through correspondence between the second-half of 1543 and late 1546, we glean more about the Henrician Scottish project and its sharpening outlook. In August, Henry announced his willingness to “prepare a 192  Sadler to Henry, 26 April 1543, Sadler SP 1:160–168, at 166; Sadler to Suffolk, Parr, and Tunstall, 9 June 1543, Sadler SP 1:215–217, at 216; Parr to Suffolk, 6 July 1543, Hamilton Papers 1:554–557, at 556. 193  Sadler to Suffolk, Parr, and Durham, 13 August 1543, Sadler SP 1:259–260, at 259. 194  Sadler to Henry, 1 September 1543, Hamilton Papers 2:2–5, at 4. 195   Suffolk and Tunstall to Privy Council, 22 November 1543, Hamilton Papers 2:176–180, at 177. 196  Sadler to Suffolk and Tunstall, 4 September 1543, Hamilton Papers 2:15–16, at 15. 197  Sadler to Suffolk, 6 September 1543, Hamilton Papers 2:21–22, at 22. 198  Sadler to Suffolk and Tunstall, 11 September 1543, Hamilton Papers 2:33–34, at 34. 199  Sadler to Parr, TNA SP 49/6, fols. 124r-v, at 124r. 200  Opinions of Wharton, Eure, &c., 28 September 1543, TNA SP 1/181, fols. 176r-183r, at 176v. 201  Suffolk and Tunstall to Privy Council, 30 November 1543, Hamilton Papers 2:198–203. 202  Suffolk to Henry, 28 February 1543–4, Hamilton Papers 1:284–286, at 284.

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greater furniture to repress [Scottish] malice” and promised Arran that if Mary were moved or married without his consent, “we will, by force of our title and superiority, make him king of the rest of Scotland beyond the Firth, aiding him with our power by sea and by land.”203 As the alliance fractured, Sadler pointed toward full conquest, reporting native elites who “desireth … that your majeste were Kynge of Scotlande.”204 Moreover, he revealed an abiding interest in bringing the Scots “to subjection, and to have superiorite and domynion over theim” and stressed the difficulty of achieving much without force.205 Suffolk exposed the territorial plan to “bringe all Scotlande to the water of Frythe into the Kinges majesties devocyon … after, they shalle see the holle cuntreye goon from them.”206 Then, in mid-November, Henry expressed his irritation with allies who “have not sticked to take upon them to us to sett the Crown of Scotlande upon our hedd!”207 and when Scotland nullified the Treaty and Arran abandoned England208—despite Henry’s warnings to “feare the hande of God over youe, feare the power of a prince hable to daunt youe, feare ye that take vppon youe to be rulers”209—the court began drafting schemes to “subdue the realme,”210 including with Irish troops.211 Its moves were bolstered by a Subsidy Act, which declared in no unfamiliar terms that “by the searche sight and examinacion of divers and soondrye olde auncient and autentique rolles patentes wrytinges and recordes … [the King] hathe good juste tytle and interest to the Crowne and Realme of Scotlande” and ought to take advantage of this “tyme apt and propyse for [its] recoverye.”212 Coming to the fore in all of this was Hertford, Edward’s maternal uncle, who in May 1544 descended upon Scotland with “armi royall” and a proclamation that praised Henry for agreeing to the marriage, “notwithstanding the just titulle and intrest that his highnis hath unt[o] this  Henry to Sadler, 4 August 1543, Sadler SP 1:246–249, at 248.  Sadler to Henry, 13 October 1543, Hamilton Papers 2:100–105, at 100. 205  Sadler to Privy Council, 30 October 1543, Hamilton Papers 2:131–134, at 132; Sadler to Privy Council, 6 November 1543, Hamilton Papers 2:141–143, at 142. 206  Suffolk to Douglas, 9 November 1543, Hamilton Papers 2:148–150, at 149. 207  Henry to Suffolk, 12 November 1543, Hamilton Papers 2:156–160. 208  Scottish Parliament, 11 December 1543, LP 18:2:481; Parties in Scotland, 13 January 1544, TNA SP 49/7, fols. 1r-v. 209  Declaration by English Herald, December 1543, TNA SP 49/6, fols. 127r-132r, at 128r-v. 210  “Articles to subdue,” [February 1544?], Hamilton Papers 2:287–288. 211  Hertford and Sadler to Privy Council, 13 March 1543/4, CP 231/38. 212  34 & 35 Hen. VIII., c. 27, Statutes of Realm, 3:938–951, at 938. 203 204

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reaulme of Skotland,” and denounced “the most crafti, divillish, and subtull mene of your Cardinalle and his complisis, [who] hath soo sedusid and allterid that most godli porpos.” Hertford had come to demand “your young Queue,” because “bi the comman lawes of the wourduld, his majeste owght as hir next kynsman to be chef govrner and rewlar,” and persecute his enemies “with fiar and sourd.”213 These ideas fit well with a set of articles devised by the king “for the weale and quiet of bothe the Realmes” at about the same time. Occasioned by new alliances with the earls of Lennox and Glencairn, they are particularly revealing of the Tudor design and its basis in prior experience. Listed first was for “the worde of god to be truely taught and preched,” followed by promises to “remayne for ever perfaict frendes to vs, our Realme of Ingland, and all other our dominiones,” sign no treaty without royal consent, “serve vs for like wages as other our subjectes do,” guard Mary until she can be delivered “vnto our handes to be nourisshed at our ordre til the mariage,” help to permanently “wynne and get in to our possessione” key locations, and “helpe vs to be protectour of that realme.” In exchange, Henry would send in an army to “annoye” their common enemies, appoint Lennox as “Governour” to “rule underneth vs,” and select a council to administer justice from Edinburgh.214 The provisions thus clarified that Scotland would be protestant, part of Henry’s growing realm, and under his rule, with policy ordered by England, an Anglicized queen, and a crown-appointed executive and council not unlike Ireland’s. On 26 June, Lennox swore to “knowledge his Majestie to be his supreme Soueraign lord and Gouernor of Scotland.”215 The treaty bore some effect: the following year, Lennox tried to bribe those on the borders “to tak the faith of Ingland”216 and allied with the Islemen.217 Hertford secured other Scottish elites, who pledged to take Henry as “their sovereign lorde as thonly protector and superior of this realme,” pursue “thadvauncement of his highnes title to the said realme of Scotlande, and eyther by force or pollycie to estabhshe thiese two realmes of England and Scotlande in a perfite unytie, and so knyt theym bothe in one under his majestes rule and domynyon,” and serve as his “trewe and  Hertford to Henry, 21 March 1543–4, Hamilton Papers 2:311–312, at 312.  Instructions to Wharton and Bowes, 21 March 1544, TNA SP 49/7, fols. 8r-37v, at 15r-18r, 18v-20v. For the indenture, see 17 May 1544, TNA SP 49/7, fols. 48r-54v. 215  Treaty with Lennox, 26 June 1544, TNA SP 49/7, fols. 86r-88v, at 87r. 216  James Douglas of Drumlanrig to Mary of Guise, 3 January 1544–5, NRS SP 2/2/94. 217  Lords of the Isles to Henry, 5 August 1545, TNA SP 49/8, fols. 108r and 112r-114v. 213 214

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faithfull subjectes … as well agaynst Fraunce.”218 Eying British-wide Tudor imperial authority, Hertford sought to make Scotland “an ensample to the worlde,”219 his king equally eager to make “perpetuall Memorye of ther ontrue and disloyall Behaviour.”220 In May 1545, despite Scottish victory at Ancrum Moor and warnings not to feed rumor that he “ville heif ane plane conqueisse,”221 Henry appointed Hertford to head a new invasion to compel conformity among the Scots,222 whose “nature and practises,” Tunstall and Sadler stressed, “are verye straunge.”223 Inspired by his service in Guînes and Boulogne, the lieutenant general expressed his renewed commitment to the enterprise and, more specifically, to induce the Scots to sever the Auld Alliance, secure “subjection and service to Your Majestie,” permanently garrison Kelso, and bring the Merse and Teviotdale to obedience.224 Arran was convinced that the English were ready “to wipe out the race and name of the Scots, prompted thereto by the ancient hatred of the Scots and their fidelity to the Holy See.”225 Though Hertford was not nearly so successful, his September attacks on Kelso, Jedburgh, and Teviotdale were devastating,226 punishment for “theyr great vntrouthe.”227 Also as the conflict intensified, Tudor officials prioritized commercial alongside military advantage, indicating multiple interlocking objectives. William Eure, for example, recommended heavy border garrisoning, interior raiding, and shipping blockades “so that the Realme of scotlande shalbe glad to yeve ouer and yelde,” while lifting the “Common wealthe of Englande.”228 Hertford urged Henry to let him take, but not destroy, Leith, for “being theyr chief porte towne, Your Majestie shall not onely have a goodly entre into Scotlande, and by that meane take away from them theyr commodytie of fisshing and theyr hole traffique, whiche shalbe 218  Hertford, Lisle, and Sadler to Henry, 15 May 1544, Hamilton Papers 2:371–378, at 376–377. 219  Hertford, Lisle, and Sadler to Henry, 6 May 1544, Hamilton Papers 2:361–366, at 364. 220  Privy Council to Hertford and Lisle, 15 May 1544, CP 231/98, at fol. 98r. 221  George Douglas to Henry, 25 February [1545], TNA SP 49/8, fols. 15r-17v, at 15v. 222  Hertford to Paget, 31 May 1545, TNA SP 49/8, fols. 70r-71v. 223  Tunstall and Sadler to Henry, 18 May 1545, TNA SP 49/8, fols. 63r-64v, at 63r. 224  Hertford, Tunstall, and Sadler to Henry, 25 August 1545, StP 5:497–499, at 497. 225  Arran to Paul, 20 May 1545, LP 20:1:781. 226  Hertford, Tunstall, and Sadler to Henry, 11 August 1545, TNA SP 49/8, fols. 121r-122v, at 121r. 227  Hertford and Sadler to Henry, 19 September 1545, TNA SP 49/8, fols. 189r-190v, at 189r. 228  Eure, “Against Scotland,” 1543, TNA SP 1/182, fols. 176r-177v, at 176v, 176r.

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suche a continuall scourge unto them, as of force the towne of Edenburgh and thole countrey thereaboutes shalbe constreyned to fall unto Your Majesties devocyon” and be unable to receive French succor.229 Moreover, the Council’s emphasis on the “canvas, Olromes, Polldavies, and other lynen clothes” seized in Edinburgh and Leith and instructions for their sale demonstrate a concern for textile industry.230 Indeed, an account of 1544’s expedition painted Leith as “more full of riches than we thought to have found any Scottish town to have been.”231 Other schemes targeted Scottish ships, merchants, and fishermen and protected English ones, a prime Tudor focus throughout the North Atlantic, as part of securing Henry’s “immortal fame.”232 Significantly, insiders and outsiders situated the enterprise with other Tudor claims, part of a broader calculus. In late 1543, Suffolk recommended that Henry spend judiciously in Scotland so as to afford “the warres of Fraunce.” He also reminded him that “having Irelande in suche subjection as your hieghnes hathe” could bolster his Scottish effort,233 as a source of manpower and logistical springboard to “burne and spoyle” recalcitrant Scots or entice amenable ones whom he would then shield from “the wild Irish and Keterel who trouble and molest” their lands.234 The following May, Chapuys wrote that the Queen of Hungary was certain that “the King would easily conquer Scotland”; “she hoped that after the good success … [he] would do no less an exploit in France.”235 Yet councilors feared that the Auld allies planned to invade England and “his highnes’ pieces on thother syde the Sees.”236 More specifically, Hertford and Sadler charged that Francis sought “to styrre both the Scottes and the Yrish men agaynst your majeste.”237 Accordingly, despite a keen St. Leger administration, certain “that thIrishemen being reconciled to Your  Hertford to Henry, 12 April 1544, StP 5:371–373, at 371.  Privy Council to Hertford, 16 May 1544, Hamilton Papers 2:378. 231  “Late Expedition,” Tudor Tracts, 41, 44. 232  Russell to Privy Council, 24 August 1545, LP 20:204. See also St. Leger to Henry, 6 April 1543, TNA SP 60/11, fols. 11r-14v; Sadler to Henry, 24 September 1543, Sadler SP 1:300–305; Adam Otterburn to Mary of Guise, 13 October 1543, NRS SP 2/1/28; Hertford to Henry, 12 April 1544, Hamilton Papers 2:328–329; Privy Council to Shrewsbury, 6 November 1544, Hamilton Papers 2:501–502. 233  Suffolk to Henry, 8 December 1543, Hamilton Papers 2:214–217, at 216, 217. 234  Privy Council to Suffolk, 13 December 1543, Hamilton Papers 2:228–230, at 229. 235  Queen of Hungary to Chapuys, 23 May 1544, LP 19:1:578 (2). 236  “[Privy Council] to --,” [January 1545], TNA SP 1/197, fols. 11r-16v, at 12v. 237  Hertford and Sadler to Henry, 21 March 1543–4, Hamilton Papers 2:312–314, at 314. 229 230

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Majestie … wolde joyne with us againste [the French], and all other straungiers,”238 the crown limited the number of kern dispatched to Scotland in 1544, “myndeng in no wyse to have his sayd Realme of Irland disfurnished of men.”239 Two months later, however, Ormond doubled the crown’s request for Irishmen to join “in this moste Royall voiage for the subduynge of Your Majesties auncient ennemye the Frenche King.”240 Hertford was ambivalent, criticizing their unruliness,241 yet admitting that “the Irishe men have don good service in this journey, and be moche dred of the Scottes.”242 As the navy pulled back from Scotland, the privy council authorized up-and-coming sailor William Winter to attend “the retourne of the Frenche shipps from the Newe Land, and otherwise annoy His Majesties ennemyes.”243 At the same time, much as pro-English Scots pledged aid in France as well as in Scotland, Surveyor of Calais Richard Lee joined Hertford’s attack on Edinburgh and both men, with other veterans of the Scottish invasion, attended Henry across the Channel as he captured Boulogne in September 1544.244 Sebastian Cabot was also busy. The world map credited to him in 1544 advanced European cartographic knowledge and circulated the claim that he and his father had discovered Prima Terra Vista, its rudimentary inhabitants, great beasts, and boundless fish in 1494, even if it failed to engender a Tudor voyage.245 Instead, the crown again looked to Ireland. After St. Leger had readied his defenses,246 the council requested 2000 Irishmen “chosen out of the most wilde and savauge sorte … whose absence shuld rather do good then  Lord Justice and Council of Ireland to Henry, TNA SP 60/11, fols. 141r-142v, at 141v.  Privy Council to Lord Justice and Council in Ireland, 30 March 1544, TNA SP 60/11, fols. 117r-119v, at 117r. 240  Ormond to Henry, TNA SP 60/11, fols. 126r-128v, at 126r. 241  Hertford and others to Henry, Hamilton Papers 2:387–392, at 390. 242  Hertford and others to Henry, Hamilton Papers 2:404–407, at 406. 243  Council with Henry to Council with the Queen, 26 September 1544, TNA SP 1/192, fols. 197r-200v, at 197v. 244  Hertford, Lisle, and Sadler to Henry, 9 May 1544, LP 19:1:483; Privy Council to Hertford, 9 June 1544, CP 231/91; Surrender and Capitulation of Boulogne, 13 September 1544, CP 232/129 and TNA SP 1/192, fols. 71r-74v. 245  “Eighth Legend,” Cabot Voyages, 207; Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, 511. R. Hervé, André Rossel, and Jeanne Sorozabal Kirschen, Mappemonde de Sébastien Cabot (Paris: Éditions les Yeux Ouverts, 1968). 246  St. Leger to Henry, 14 April 1545, TNA SP 60/12, fols. 15r-16v; Deputy and Council of Ireland to Privy Council, 6 May 1545, TNA SP 60/12, fols. 21r-22v. 238 239

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hurt” to serve in Scotland.247 Hertford reported their utility: they would happily burn Scottish lands where the Borderers would not and seemed well suited to fight for the Isles and Highlands.248 Appreciating the extent to which his territory was embroiled in the conflicts, in 1546 Alen dissented from (and incriminated) St. Leger to lament the terrible decay in the Pale, poor revenues, and “new reconciled Iryshmen” still ignoring English law, committing atrocities, and too strong to resist should they rebel. Most worrisome were those Irish given Pale lands, whereby “if they sholde digresse, they may do moche more hurte now.”249 Browne was also concerned, fearing a breach between Old and New English and use of native Irish practices, “to the totall distruccion of this Your Majesties Realme,” amid “more Yrishe ordre, more Yrishe ruell, and more stelth.”250 Though St. Leger disputed these findings, part of a broader feud over the government of Ireland across 1545–1546,251 king and council reasserted their commitment to extending English ways over Irish galloglass, kern, coign, and livery as well as to mining and minting coin.252 The Wooings, then, did not take place in an Anglo-Scottish or even Anglo-Franco-­ Scottish bubble; they drew from, encouraged, and sidelined other projects. When the second Tudor died in 1547, he left the Scottish experiment incomplete, yet well known and much-favored in multiple circles; these ideas and people bridged regnal change.253 In 1546, English humanist John Leland dedicated a new year’s gift to Henry that promised to bring a “full manye thynges to lyght, as concernynge the vsurped autoryte of the Byshopp of Rome and hys complyces to the manyfest and vyolent derogacyon of kyngely dygnyte” and “haue thys your worlde and impery of Englande so sett fourthe.”254 Blending understandings of empire as both supreme kingship and territorial expanse, Leland cast himself as a local  Privy Council to St. Leger, 5 September 1545, TNA SP 60/12, fols. 50r-v, at 50r.  Hertford and others to Henry, 18 September 1545, TNA SP 49/8, fols. 183r-186v. For counterpoint, see St. Leger to Privy Council, 10 October 1545, TNA SP 60/12, fols. 51r-52v. 249  Alen, “Certen Notes on the State of Ireland,” 1546, TNA SP 60/12, fols. 97r-v. 250  Browne to Henry, 28 February 1546, TNA SP 60/12, fols. 82r-83v, at 82r. 251  St. Leger, “An Answere to suche notes,” 1546, TNA SP 60/12, fols. 105r-108v; Alen to Privy Council, 1546, TNA SP 60/12, fols. 109r-113v. 252  Minutes of the Council, [September] 1546, TNA SP 60/12, fols. 114r-117v. 253  Scotland was ambiguously comprehended in the Treaty of Camp (June 1546), which led to momentary peace and kept Boulogne English until 1554, see Merriman, Rough Wooings, 163, 195–205. 254  Leland, The Laboryouse Journey… (1549), sigs. C5r, D5v. 247 248

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expert, geographer, and scholar in the vein of Tacitus or Livy and his patron as Charlemagne. He mapped England and Wales, defended the triumphs of “Arthure, [as] King of great Brittaine” and conquering “Emperor,”255 chronicled how Henry II—“endeuoring by all meanes to enlarge the limittes of his kingdome”—had subdued Ireland,256 and showed through Brutus and Edward I that “the Kinges of England have had, and now owt to have, the upper Domination and Subjection of the Reaulme of Scotland, and Homage and Feaultie of [its] Kinges.”257 Leland thus drew the Tudor empire as it fell to its sole male heir: “I trust so to open this window, that the lyght shal be seane … & the old glory of your renoumed Britaine to reflorish through the worlde.”258 As John Bale elaborated when he brought Leland’s labors to print in 1549, “The empire [of England] is manifest in kinge Brennus, in great Constantyne, in Arthure, and in Edwarde the third. This bringe I in here, that men should not disdaynously scorne, that they are yet ignoraunt of.”259 Nearly thirty more years later, Raphael Holinshed cited Leland alongside Scot Hector Boece to entail “the whole Empire of all Britaine” to Elizabeth.260 * * * The Protectorate established for the minority of King Edward VI in January–March 1547 installed a fierce advocate of the Wooings with extensive on-the-ground experience in Scotland and France at the pinnacle of Tudor government. Hertford, now Duke of Somerset, lent intensity to the imperial project as it entered a new, but not disconnected, phase. Somerset had studied Henry’s “gracyous and godly purpose in the unyting of these two realmes,” then augmented this theoretical outlook with a practical view to Scotland’s attractiveness and viability as a holding. “Surely the countrey is very fayre, and so good a corne countrey … as we have not seen the more plenteous in England,” he wrote amid Jedburgh, envisioning a rich, fortified, and obedient Scotland, unable “to do annoyaunce to

 Leland, A Learned and True Assertion… (1582), 14r-v, 38r-39v.  Leland, Learned and True, 27r. 257  Joannis Lelandi Antiquarii de Rebvs Britannicis Collectanea, ed. Thomas Herne, 6 vols. (London: 1715), 3:2. 258  Leland, Laboryouse Journey, sig. D7v. 259  Leland, Laboryouse Journey, sig. D6v. 260  Holinshed, The First and Second Volumes of Chronicles (1587), 117. 255 256

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Your Majesties subjectes or domynyons.”261 Upon Henry’s death, “the succession of this his Emperiall croune and sceptre” as well as “his royalmes & dominions” had passed to the king’s only son, so that (as Nicholas Udall put it) he “might consummate & finishe suche regall enterpryses.”262 Edward was, like his father, “King of Englande, Fraunce, and Irelande, defendour of the faith, and on yearth next and immediatly vnder God, of the Churches of Englande and Irelande the supreme head,”263 graced with “a crowne imperiall brought from heaven above” to preside over England’s “nation,” and “reign like a prince of high power, by sea and land,”264 as numerous sources demanded.265 His uncle took up the inheritance, too heavy for the nine-year-old to carry alone, with vigor. Elaborating upon and hardening the Henrician enterprise, Somerset’s regime injected new energy, troops, and money, under the auspices of a more evangelical faith embodied by Edward as the godly boy-king Josiah.266 Somerset pursued the cause with sometimes reckless abandon,267 as major economic and social problems, fights over politics and religion, popular riots and rebellions flared at home, until his fall in 1549.268 Though both the Wooings and protectorate failed, they crystalized earlier ideology and policy, making it applicable well beyond 1540s Scotland: less than six months after consolidating his power, Somerset won a landmark victory at Pinkie Cleugh on 10 September 1547; in his travels north, he was attended by Thomas Smith and William Cecil, two of the most important promoters  Hertford and others to Henry, 18 September 1545, TNA SP 49/8, fols. 183r-186v.  Udall, The First Tome or Volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus… (1548), sigs. iiir, vir. 263  Udall, First Tome, sig. iir. 264  “Coronation of King Edward,” in Literary Remains of King Edward the Sixth, ed. John Gough Nichols, 2 vols. (London: 1857), 1: cclxxviii–ccv, at cclxxxvi, ccxci. 265  Henry’s funeral, for example, flaunted the dragon, lion, greyhound, cross of St. George, and Tudor union, “Order of Ceremonies,” [15 February] 1547, TNA SP 10/1/17. 266  Somerset drew on the Josiah comparison as part of an exposition on Edward’s power and his own true Englishness and faithful subjecthood, see Somerset to Reginald Pole, 4 June 1549, TNA SP 10/7/28. 267  Instructions for Norroy [Dethick], [September] 1547, TNA SP 50/1, fols. 111r-114v. 268  M.L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1975); W.K.  Jordan, Edward VI: The Young King; The Protectorship of the Duke of Somerset (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968); Jennifer Loach, Edward VI, ed. G.W. Bernard and Penry Williams (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Alford, Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 261 262

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and administrators of Tudor state and empire in the second-half of the sixteenth century. The Edwardian Wooings were a seminal nursery and a sinew tying early to mid- and late Tudor activities. From the outset, Edward’s government looked abroad: in its first meetings, the privy council brought in “knightes, for their widsomes and experience in service on thother side the sees”; ordered commissions to evaluate Calais, Boulogne, and Newhaven; rewarded one “James Harryson, Skottisheman”; and determined that the coronation service name the king “rightfull and undoubted enheritour … to the Royal Dignitie and Crowne Imperiall off this realme,” anoint him Supreme Head, and bind him to the laws and liberties of all his “realmes and domynions.”269 In Ireland, the council initially retained St. Leger to put down the rebels led by O’More and O’Connor in mid-1547, then replaced him with Boulogne veteran, councilor, and Irish captain-general Edward Bellingham the following April, when it deemed surrender and regrant too soft a policy.270 In office until December 1549, Bellingham’s prime concerns were defending and expanding the Pale, establishing a mint at Dublin, developing two newly won strongholds—Forts “Governor” (Dangan) and “Protector” (Ballyadams)—along its western border, bringing Leix, Offaly, and Cork more firmly under crown rule, and zealously promoting English religion, justice, behavior, and language.271 For the regency, these were intersecting matters of control and Anglicization, whereby Ireland would be made submissive, profitable, and civilized.272 269  7 and 13 February 1547, Acts of the Privy Council of England, ed. J.R. Dasent, 32 vols. (1890–1907), 2:22, 30. 270  Privy Council to St. Leger and Council, 25 March and 2 November 1547, TNA SP 61/1/2, 8. 271  Edward to Mayor of Galway, 12 April 1548, TNA SP 61/1/15; Bellingham to Alen, July 1548, TNA SP 61/1/39, 40; Bellingham to Francis Herbert, August 1548, TNA SP 61/1/75; Bellingham to Cusack, August 1548, TNA SP 61/1/76; Richard Brasier to Somerrset, 14 November 1548, TNA SP 61/1/122; Bellingham to Warwick, 1548, TNA SP 61/1/132(i); Bellingham to Callough O’Carroll, 1548, TNA SP 61/1/138, 139; John Isham to Bellingham, 22 December 1548, TNA SP 61/1/155; D.G. White, “The Reign of Edward VI in Ireland,” Irish Historical Studies 14, no. 55 (1965): 197–211; Bradshaw, “The Edwardian Reformation in Ireland, 1547–1553,” Archivium Hibernicum 34 (1976): 83–99; Brady, Chief Governors, 45–65; Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 166–169; Murray, Enforcing Reformation, 159–203. 272  Browne’s Proposal, 1547, TNA SP 61/1/10; Edmund Butler to Somerset, 25 February 1548, TNA SP 61/1/11; Cork to Bellingham, 27 August 1548, TNA SP 61/1/79; Privy Council to Bellingham, 6 January 1549, TNA SP 61/2/3; Walter Cowley to Bellingham, 25

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Equally, the Irish context was bound to a broader Tudor world: not only was Bellingham’s enterprise about garrisoning and propagating national mores abroad, in late 1548 Alen explained that if foiled in Scotland, the French might send Gerald Fitzgerald with an army to take Ireland and make Henry II its king, adding that upon surrender, O’Connor and O’More should be resettled in Boulogne or Calais so as to limit treachery and grow the Pale.273 Ultimately, Alen became a harsh Bellingham critic, wishing the deputy had more Jupiter and Venus to balance the Mars and Saturn in him, railing against unilateral and Gaelic rule, and using Welsh precedent to warn against granting rights to Irish subjects even if they adopted English ways because of their propensity—like the Scots’— to hanker for liberty.274 Yet his comments reveal the wider lens through which the protectorate viewed Ireland. For his part, Edward was convinced that because they fought for God against the Scots, who fight for the pope with priests, bishops, monks, and friars on its frontlines, his forces would prevail.275 Less than a year into the reign, printed in England and disseminated in Scotland on the eve of Pinkie, Edinburgh merchant and Tudor client James Henrisoun made the first contribution to the Edwardian Wooings, An Exhortacion to the Scottes to conforme themselfes to the honorable, expedient, and godly vnion, betwene the twoo realmes of Englande and Scotlande.276 Invoking notions of a united “Britayne” and “Britayns,” supreme empire, evangelical protestantism, and economic profit, the text expands upon Henrician propaganda to exemplify the regnal transition. Dedicated to January 1549, TNA SP 61/2/12, 14 March 1549, TNA SP 61/2/25, and [25 June] 1549, TNA SP 61/2/47. 273  Alen to Paget and to Somerset, 21 November 1548, TNA SP 61/1/129, 130. 274  Alen to Paget, [21 April 1549], TNA SP 61/2/32. 275  Edward to Somerset, 12 September 1547, Literary Remains 1:50; “Journal,” Literary Remains 2:209–249. 276  Also in 1547, John Mardeley penned “A symple treates complayninge the Ingratytude of our Countramen the scottes” (CP 137/136, fols. 136r-143v), which drew from scripture and history to urge the Scots, with their “deformede manners” (136v), to become “as brotherne to dwell quietely” and join “to reagiones, in to one great bretaigne.” “Dothe not,” he asked, “the Oceane sea inverounde us rounde/both of one language?” (142r, 143r) Warning of divine punishment, he impressed upon the Scots the benefits of escaping French and Roman yokes, embracing the true faith, and being “no more straungers but as naturall/ obedyent subiectes to our king most royall” (fol. 138v). Or, Mardeley was sure, “this noble duke shortely [will] wyne you all” (141r). The Scots should “submyte you gladely” to Edward, “with vs to remaigne as in one hole kingdome callede great breataigne” (143v).

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Somerset as governor, lieutenant-general, and protector of Edward’s (plural) realms, dominions, and subjects, Henrisoun’s departure point was the unnaturalness of war “betwene so nere neighbors, dwellyng with in one land, compassed within one sea, alied in bloude, and knitte in Christes faithe,” like a physical body divided in itself. Divinely called, the regent’s duty was to acquaint the Scots with their sins for love of God, justice, and country, and restore to Edward VI “the whole isle of Britayn … and graunte to the Kynges Maiestie of England his righteous possession of the whole monarchie of Britayn.”277 The Exhortacion rested on earlier images, with a full-page coat of arms under the imperial crown and Tudor rose, held aloft by two angels, surrounded by a castle, portcullis, fleur-de-lis, and pomegranate and recommendation that audiences read Henry’s Declaration, then elaborated.278 Citing Roman, British, English, and Scottish authorities, Herodotus to Geoffrey of Monmouth, he argued that contrary to present discord, Britain’s first state was of one government.279 Brutus divided it, “assignyng ye supreme empire with ye greatest and moste fruitful part” to Locrinus, whose younger brothers, Albanactus and Camber “were obedient, as to a superior kyng.”280 Their peoples were all “Britaynes,” knit together by geography, culture—even empire, as Henrisoun emphatically called on Constantine, who “had al Britayn in possession,” to prove that “beeyng vnder one Emepror, then was Scotlande and Englande but one Empire.” Accordingly, he posited, English kings wear “a close crowne Emperiall, in token that the lande is an empire free in it self, & subiett to no superior but GOD.” Further, Constantine went on to rule “ye whole worlde,” attaching an expansionary dimension to the “Emperor of al Britayn” title.281 Grasping the totality of this inheritance, Henry VIII had won “by plain conquest, Turwayn and Turney,” while the Scots suffered at Flodden, then weeded the “wicked plantes” of untrue religion out of his realm, while the Scots refused to do the same.282 In this, they acted against his right as “superior lord of Scotland”—one based, the author charged, in truth and consent (from Albanactus to Balliol to Greenwich), and that “enduceth no seruitude, but fredome, libertie, concord and quietnesse,  Henrisoun, An exhortacion… (1547), sigs. a.ii.r-a.vii.v, at a.ii.r-v, a.vi.v-a.vii.v.  Henrisoun, Exhortacion, opp. Sig. b.i.r, [e.viii.v]. 279  Henrisoun, Exhortacion, sig. b.iiii.v. 280  Henrisoun, Exhortacion, sigs. c.i.r-v. 281  Henrisoun, Exhortacion, sigs. d.i.v-d.iii.r. 282  Henrisoun, Exhortacion, sigs. [f.viii.v]-g.i.r, [d.vii.v]. 277 278

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and serueth aswell for Scotlande, as Englande, makyng equalitie without supertoritie”283—and instead clung to France, war, and hatred “doubtelesse scatered by ye deuil, through those monsters of men, that professe preposterous religion.”284 Imploring his countrymen, Henrisoun imagined how “those hatefull termes of Scottes & Englishemen, shalbe abolisshed and blotted oute for euer, and that we shal al agre in the onely title and name of Britons … reduced into the fourme of one sole Monarchie … called Britayn.”285 That entity would grow to peace, prosperity, and even “greater dominion, gouernaunce power, and fame” by combining Anglo-­ Scottish resources, a sure path to resisting attack, invading others, tilling the land, protecting foreign trade, ending crime, and enjoying the fruits of their labor; for, “the more large and ample the Empire wer: the more honorable and glorious.”286 It could only help that in addition to Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, the English have always “kepte foote and possession of ground in Fraunce.”287 Henrisoun’s vision was British and imperial, temporal and spiritual, commercial and conquering, protestant and anti-French, English and civil. It was steeped in antiquity, narratives of savagery, agricultural metaphor, body politic and commonwealth theory, medieval precedent and post-1485 national consolidation, religious reformation, and kingship theory. Weaving these threads into cogent discourse, the Exhortation pressed readers to reckon with themselves and accept the marriage and the “pure, syncere & incorrupt religion of Christ” or face Somerset’s “inuincible army.”288 Near its close, Henrisoun’s polemic called on a female personification of Britian to ask, Hath not the almighty prouidence seuered me from the reste of the worlde, with a large sea, to make me one I slande? hath not natures ordinaunce furnisshed me with asmany thinges necessary, as any one ground bringeth furth? hath not mans pollicie at the beginninge subdued me to one gouernoure? And hath not the grace of Christ illumined me ouer all, with one faith … Why then wil you diuide me in two? … were their euer children so

 Henrisoun, Exhortacion, sigs. f.iii.v, f.v.v.  Henrisoun, Exhortacion, sig. h.v.r. 285  Henrisoun, Exhortacion, sig. g.v.v. 286  Henrisoun, Exhortacion, sig. g.iii.r. 287  Henrisoun, Exhortacion, sig. [f.vii.v]. 288  Henrisoun, Exhortacion, sigs. g.iiii.v, [h.vii.v]. 283 284

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vnnaturall … to rend their mothers wombe? yea, were there euer beastes so saluage, or cruel, to deuour the dam?289

The piece at once fed off and deepened Somerset’s resolve, his men’s confidence that were it not for “the great men and the preistes … [the Scots] wold be glad to submytt theim selfes to the kynges matie,”290 and observers’ assurances that “a reasonable nombre of men might nowe subdue & fortefye the hole contrey.”291 An apt reflection of the Edwardian Wooings, Henrisoun’s theory paired well with policy: in November, soldier-­ administrator Andrew Dudley requested “a good preacher & bybles & testaments & other good English bookes of Tyndale & Frithes translacion,”292 and John Cockburn of Ormistoun, a Scottish protestant, suggested how “hering quhit fhishe & salmont” from the coast could fortify the realm and Tudor cause.293 As if in dialogue, in March and July 1548, Henrisoun too made his pitch more practical, offering notes on strategy, garrisoning, and alliances294 and hoping to “steir up the hartes of our nobilles” with “The Godly and Golden Booke for concorde of England and Scotland.” The latter opened with a meditation on the value of unions as a political tool, comparing that of rose and thistle to the white and red roses that began the Tudor dynasty, then sketched out the specifics for “this Ile of Great bryttane.” The new rule would restore Christ’s primitive church; improve law and justice by installing “prudentes” at Aberdeen and Edinburgh; increase noble pensions; provide for second sons; support laborers with new land tenure arrangements; regulate the clergy; create alms houses and hospitals; put idle men to work by giving them “shipps with all there apparell for wynnyng of your ryche fishenges,” training them in crafts, or setting them up in mines; and improve transportation. Dedicated to John Thynne and Cecil, the “Booke” built on the Exhortacion, revealing where the author may have spotted holes and adding further, lasting

 Henrisoun, Exhortacion, sigs. h.i.r-v.  Edward Lord Clynton, Andrew Dudley, and others to Somerset, TNA SP 50/1, fols. 119r-123v, at 121v. 291  Grey to Somerset, 20 December 1547, TNA SP 50/2, fols. 146r-147v, at 147r. 292  Dudley to Somerset, 1 November 1547, TNA SP fols. 78r-80v, at 78r. 293  Ormistoun and Longniddry to Warwick, 9 November 1547, TNA SP 50/2, fols. 92r-93v, at 92r. 294  Henrisoun to Somerset, [March] 1548, TNA SP 50/3, fols. 90r-91v. 289 290

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inducements to British Empire—spiritual, socio-economic, and cultural.295 Even when the venture faltered, Henrisoun remained committed, attempting to calculate whether Scotland was worth the high war costs (among other things) in a series of questions addressed to Somerset in 1549.296 Just before the end of the minority’s first year, English expatriate and Swiss reform movement covert John Hooper added to the propaganda wave a religious piece. Dedicated to Somerset as the king’s governor, his realms’ protector, and armies’ general by land and sea, A Declaration of Christe and his Offyce imagined the conflict as a divine, just, and prosperous effort to restore what God had forged as “one Realme and Ilond deuydyd from all the worold by imparkyng of the sea by naturall discent of parentayge and blud, one in langayge and speche, in form and proporcion of personayge one, one in maner and condicion of lyuyng.” In breaking this “deuynd and Naturall frendshippe” and disobeying their “Naturall and Laufull prince and superiour powre the Kynges maiestie of Englond,” the Scots had fallen to devilish wickedness and dismembered Britain.297 Somerset’s successes constituted proof of his “godlye pretensyd purpose” to “better and perfet the crowne.” Yet, Hooper maintained, “theffect therof must be folowyd that as well the ministerye of the churche be enrychid withe the word of god, as the ciuile Kyngdom withe woroldly honor.”298 The war could not be about secular gain alone; it must propagate what the rest of the book privileged: Christ’s universal “Dominion and Empyre,” at the expense of “the blaspemus pryde of the Bishope of Rome.”299 The author’s diction and imagery were crucial, playing with concepts of foreign conquest and rule, the body politic, environmental determinism, English superiority, and Britishness, under an umbrella of protestant reform. The offering was effective; Hooper joined Somerset’s household.300 Two months later, and likely with help from Henrisoun, Smith, and/or others, the protector added his own contribution, the literary complement 295  Henrisoun to Thynne and Cecil, 9 July 1548, TNA SP 50/4, fols. 67r-68v; Henrisoun, “Godly and Golden Booke,” [July] 1548, TNA SP 50/4, 126–141, at 129, 131, 133–134. 296  Henrisoun to Somerset, “Questions Worthy to be Consulted…,” 1549, TNA SP 50/5, fols. 51r-53v. 297  Hooper, A Declaration… (1547), sigs. Aiiir-v, Aiiiir. 298  Hooper, Declaration, sigs. Aiiv, Aiiiir-v. 299  Hooper, Declaration, sigs. B[i]r, Iiiiiv. 300  D.G. Newcombe, “Hooper, John (1495x1500–1555), ODNB (2016).

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to his militarism: An Epistle or exhortacion, to vnitie & peace. It was not the first time that Somerset had addressed the Scots; recalling earlier uses of text to accompany offensives, a 4 September 1547 Proclamation, published by Grafton in the Protector’s name, was intended for wide dissemination among the Scots. Echoing Henrisoun, it declared that the Wooings had been provoked by Scottish machinations, that the marriage was “expedient, aswell to the glorie of God and his holy woorde, thonor and suretie of bothe” prines and commonwealths, and that the union would prejudice neither, but “unite thame togidder … by the name of Britounis” in liberty, justice, and equality. The proclamation appealed firmly to national identity, hoping that “euery honest and true Englishe and Scottishe man” would embrace the cause.301 Now February 1548, as his forces prepared two invasions, faced French intervention, and stared down Scottish resistance to their harsh “way to mak unuon off thyr twa realmis,”302 Somerset offered a longer elaboration, printed in English and in Latin for European-wide circulation.303 He opened with a rehearsal of titles, a flex that clarified his right to exhort the  Somerset, Proclamation (1547).  Alexander Gordon to Earl of Huntly, 18 January [1547–8], SRO SP 2/2/151. 303  This may be what inspired humanist scholar and later clerk of the privy council William Thomas’s The Pilgrim. A lengthy dialogic defense, it countered charges that Henry “hath by force subdued the realme of Ireland, whereunto he hath nother right nor title,” and quested after the same in Scotland and France (186). Rather, the narrator asserted, “the Kinges of Englande have had domynion over a great parte of Irelande these CCC yeres past and more,” yet it was divided between an English Pale and “the wilde Irishe, as onreasonable beastes lyved without knowledge of God or good maner, in common of their goodes, cattaill, women, children.” With St. Leger’s aid, Henry had done no more than bring “that nation from rude, beastlie, ignorant, crewell and onrewlie infidelles, to thastate of cyvile, reasonable, patient, humble, and well governed Christians. Not ffor for desire of domynyon or for avarice of reveniewe, but for Goddes honor and for a Christian peace, at His Maiesties owne cost and chardge” (263, 264, 265–6). Similarly, the English fight the Scots, who have “a certein order both of religion and customes, though well it be some what barbarouse.” With two more years, Henry would have the same success there as in Ireland, “resolved, either by force or by love” to arrange the marriage and “have made of oon self divided nation and realme, oon self perpetuall united people and peace. Not for the wealth of the Scottyshe domynion,” which is nothing to England’s, “but for the uniforme quiett of their approved anncient contention” (266). Finally, Thomas declared that only most of Picardy would be enough to “satisfie the debtes that the Ffrenche King did owe unto our Kinges Maiestie,” including “for the restitution of the cities of Tournaye and Tirwane”—given the rightful tribute and title that France has owed to England for over 200 years (267). See Ian Christopher Martin, “The Manuscript and Editorial Tradition of William Thomas’s The Pilgrim/Il pellegrino inglese,” (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1999). 301 302

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Scots in the name of Edward’s multiple “Realmes, dominions, and Subiectes”—including (but not limited to) England, Ireland, France, and the Channel Islands—and supreme authority.304 Like the Declaration, the Epistle highlighted the unequal bonds of family (father/son, elder/ younger brother) as well as the geography and language that tied English to Scots under law, reason, nature, and god. Yet it added the vocabulary of “greate Britayn,” metaphor of “louyng Phisicion” and “mistrustfull and ignorant pacient,” and aggressive, even apocalyptic undercurrent, positing, “we are content to call and crye vpon you, to looke on your state, to auoyde the greate calamitie your Countrey is in: To haue vs rather brothers, then enemies, rather Countreymenne, then Conquerours”; failure to listen meant “the finall eradicacion of your nacion.”305 Further, unlike Henry’s rote chronicle of conquests, grants, and submissions, Somerset relied on the same history, but presented it differently and more succinctly, prodding the Scots with the number of times one English king won Scotland (five) and countless Scottish kings captured or slain by England. The Epistle moved on to defend the cause, sanctioned by Scotland’s Parliament and divinely situated on a single island with a common tongue and two young monarchs of the opposite sex. Here, the markers of a burgeoning national consciousness were on display. Somerset explained, “if we twoo beyng made one,” already so alike, then “hauyng the sea for wall, the mutuall loue for garrison, and God for defence, should make so noble and wel agreyng Monarchie, that neither in peace wee maie bee ashamed, nor in warre affraied, of any worldely or forrein power.”306 Moreover, Scots merchants would gain access to England’s renowned common law and ancient customs as well as its great markets, waterways, and commodities, “by lande or sea.”307 Conversely, in an appeal to xenophobia and, specifically, Francophobia, Somerset described how “forein helpe” or, worst of all, a non-English marriage alliance would introduce a “power … [who will] oppresse you, fill your houses, wast your groundes, spende and consume your vitaill, holde you in subieccion, and regarde you as slaues.”308 By contrast, the protector vowed, “We seke not to take from you youre 304  [Somerset], Epistle, sig. A.ii.r. On Somerset’s titles, see “Minute,” 15 February 1547, TNA SP 10/1/14. 305  [Somerset], Epistle, sigs. A.iii.r-v, A.iiii.v. 306  [Somerset], Epistle, sig. C.i.r. 307  [Somerset], Epistle, sigs. B.iii.r, C.iii.r. 308  [Somerset], Epistle, sigs. [B.vi.v], B.iv.r, [B.vi.r]

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lawes nor customes: But … redresse your oppressions,”309 offering “to leaue thaucthoritie, name, title, right, or chalenge of conquerours” and “take the indifferent old name of Britaynes again.”310 Interestingly, however, the author did not appeal as explicitly to empire as Henrisoun, press English superiority as strongly as Henry, or even make much of Protestantism, preferring subtler references to Edward’s “imperial Croune,” “our title [that] remayneth” if the Wooings failed, “kirkmen … [and] those who so often hath falsefied their faithe,” and “this moste Godly Enterprise.”311 Though tempered by coded rhetoric, an underlying, hostile inequality remained: England was the elder brother, its monarch the husband to Scotland’s wife, and, if the latter refused to “make of one Isle one realme … and driue vs to conquere, who is giltie of the blood shed?”312 Somerset railed, “we shal not willyng, but constreined, pursue the battaill chastice the wicked and malicious, by the angrie Angelles of GOD, the Fire and Sworde.”313 Supporting the Epistle while its author’s men struggled to place “the rest of the countrie in to his maiesties handes”314 and French troops moved into Leith and Haddington in May–July 1548315 were two more pieces that reinforced the entangled military, spiritual, and literary components of the enterprise. First, in early May, the council and Cranmer ordered and Grafton printed A prayer for victorie and peace, which exposed a broader English audience to the discourse of Britishness and missionary zeal. From the pulpit, it asked God to “haue an iye to this Isle of Bretaigne: and that which was begonne, by thy greate and infinite mercie … that the Scottishmenne and wee, might for euer liue herafter, in one loue and amitie knit into one nacion, by the most happie and Godly mariage” and ensuing “glory and profite.” The prayer also requested help to “conuert” Scottish hearts or “lay thy sworde of punishment vpon them.”316 In late  [Somerset], Epistle, sig. B.iii.r.  [Somerset], Epistle, sig. B.i.v. 311  [Somerset], Epistle, sigs. B.iiii.r, A6r, [B.viii.r], C.iii.v. 312  [Somerset], Epistle, sigs. [A.viii.r-v]. 313  [Somerset], Epistle, sigs. C.i.v-C.ii.r. 314  Grey to Somerset, 28 April 1548, TNA SP 50/4, fols. 64r-65v, at 65r. 315  “M. de Bréze to the Queen Dowager,” 23 May 1548, in Foreign Correspondence with Marie de Lorraine (Balcarres Papers), ed. Marguerite Wood, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1923–5), 1:200–201; Instructions to Lord Clinton, [May] 1548, TNA SP 10/4/9; Edward and Council to Sherrifs and JPs, [? May] and June 1547, TNA SP 10/4/11, 12. 316  A Prayer… (1548), sigs. A.iii.r-v, A.iiii.r. 309 310

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June, Grafton published Londoner William Patten’s Expedition into Scotland, an eyewitness account of the Wooings unsparing in its vitriol. In a preface to this diary of troop movements, fighting, and garrisoning, the author likened himself to Ovid and his patron (Paget) to Caesar, among other classical references, then extolled Somerset’s virtuous “Victory, or rather Conquest” and “the just title of our King unto Scotland.”317 Ramping up, Patten called the Scots “lawless and headless,” upbraided the “feigned friendship of France” in contrast to “your Princess’s own countryman, a right Briton, both bred and born,” and exploded against “that hideous monster, that venemous aspis and very ANTICHRIST, the Bishop of Rome” with his “wicked blasphemy,” “outrageous usurpation,” and “profane whoredom.”318 Patten did not care to rehearse Anglo-Scottish history, even if he used its findings; his interest was in vindicating Tudor ambition. The result was a straightforward, durable idea: if Scotland would honor the union, Britain would be made protestant, rich, and free. Nevertheless, by August, the French were ensconced in Scotland, Mary was betrothed to the dauphin and on her way across the Channel, and Somerset learned of a proclamation promising wages, pardon, and restitution to every “good Scottyshe manne” who served against the English.319 Englishman John Brende reported from Berwick in late November that the enemy “be full of varyaunce and suspycyon amonges them selfes, and agreing agaynest vs. The gouernore fareth as one that holdeth the wolf by the eares, in doubt to holde and in daunger to let goo.”320 Seeing “the mariage by the iniquitie of some take not effecte,” yet keen to “publish to the world sufficient cause, for the mainteynaunce of your maiesties action against them,” West Country MP Nicholas Bodrugan (alias Adams) produced the final scholarly shot of the Wooings from the English side in late 1548, An Epitome of the title that the Kynges Maiestie of Englande, hath to the souereigntie of Scotlande.321 Sometimes attributed

 Patten, The Expedition into Scotland… (1548), in Tudor Tracts, 53–157, at 56, 59, 63.  Patten, Expedition, 68, 69, 70. 319  Luttrell to Somerset, [ca. 18–23 November 1548], SRO SP 2/3/191; Henry Johns to Somerset, 7 August 1548, Hamilton Papers 2:617–618, at 618. 320  Brende to John Mason, 29 November 1548, TNA SP 50/4, fol. 357r. 321  Bodrugan, Epitome, sigs. a.iiii.v-[a.v.r]. The protectorate still held out some shred of hope that Mary might be carried back from France and the godly Tudor-Stewart marriage carried out, see Instructions given to John Luttrell and Thomas Fisher, March 1549, TNA SP 50/5, fols. 21r-24v. 317 318

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to Smith and certainly informed by courtly discussions,322 the text reread now-familiar evidence and fused elements of earlier propaganda to develop novel theory and terminology—all present from the dedication, which propped up Somerset and his languishing government. Bodrugan proclaimed that under King Ambrose, a Seymour ancestor had slain the “capitall enemy of the Briton nacion: by whiche noble seruice like as this Realme was deliuered from the tyrany of Saxons, and restored to the whole Empire & name of greate Briteigne.”323 The rest of the tract sought to show that “this realme now called Englande [is] the onely supreme seat of thempire of greate Briteigne. In whose bosome cast with vs, as bothe in one moulde, thei haue receiued the same toungue, lawe, and language,”324 rooted in the past, territorially expansive, and headed by a king sovereign in church and state. First, demonstrating his humanist chops, the author staked his discourse on the reason and rhetoric of Plato and Cicero as well as the history of Brutus, who gave the island its name, its people their Trojan heritage, and its English kings their “superiorite.” “Ye obedience of Scotland,” Bodrugan explained, was “from the beginnyng inseperably appendaunt to the croune of this realme, and folowed the possession of ye seignorie as thynges annexed, lyke as the dignities of the Roman Empier folow the state of Rome, according to whiche their homages and oure claymes haue been continued to this day.”325 Developing the mythology further, he charged that Brutus’s heirs had maintained the conquering tradition: Arthur, Malgo, and others not only “subdued all greate Briteigne,” but Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, and France.326 Moreover, Scottish kings had often accepted English overlordship, as Balliol had made homage and fealty then “resigned 322  Also in late 1548, Somerset related a conference with the French ambassador, wherein he chronicled Edward’s “iust title to the soveraignety of [the] Realme of Scotland,” based on “a great number of very antient and authentique writinges” and for over 600 years, “untill the reign of King Henry 7th who also because the Scottish King then refused to doe the like [homage and fealty], prepared to have made warres against him; but in the end, marrying one of his daughters, prevented the warres for certayne yeares” (Somerset to Wotton, [December 1548], TNA SP 50/4, fols. 596r-599v, at 596r, 596v-597r). On the Epitome’s authorship, see Hoak, “Sir William Cecil, Sir Thomas Smith, and the Monarchical Republic of Tudor England,” in The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson, ed. John F. McDiarmid (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 37–54, at 50–51. 323  Bodrugan, Epitome, sigs. a.iii.r-v. 324  Bodrugan, Epitome, sig. [a.v.v]. 325  Bodrugan, Epitome, sigs. a.iiii.v, h.v.r, [a.vi.r-v], [g.v.v-g.vi.r]. 326  Bodrugan, Epitome, sig. [c.viii.v].

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the croune of Scotland with all his right, title, & entrest to the same, into the handes of this kyng Edwarde.”327 Yet Bodrugan clarified that the Tudor claim to Scotland was both feudal and imperial, its mission secular and religious: “synce ye beginnyng the Scottes receiued and obeyed the olde lawes and customes of this realme” of England328; then (albeit owing to “Alexander bishop of Rome”), “the generall iurisdiccion ecclesiastical of Scotland … was subiected to ye dioses and rule of tharchebishoppe of Yorke in England.”329 Accordingly, Edward VI as “king of Englande,” “supreme hed” of its Church, and inheritor of the “Empire of Briteigne” could address the “iniquitie” of Scottish law and reform the counterfeit hypocrisy and wickedness of the Scottish clergy.330 What could be more reasonable, more honorable, or more godly than joining as “the whole membres of all great Briteign” in love and amity?331 With familial language and Somerset’s intimidating posture, Bodrugan asked, “Ah Scottishemen, how long shall I beare your vnnaturall cruelties, howe long will ye remaine rebellious children, when shal there be end of your malice?”332 Fittingly, as Bodrugan addressed anti-union Scots, two of them penned their own, equally sophisticated works. One came from Scottish cleric and “Consull of our Souerane Ladies College of Justice” William Lamb, a retort to Henry’s Declaration and Somerset’s Epistle as records only “sufficientlie ordanit for to perswade your effect to the Lundoun ladyis and to the facill Inglis peopill.”333 Developing a hugely important Renaissance genre, Lamb rendered his “Ane Resonyng of ane Scottis and Inglis merchand betuix Rowand and Lionis” (1549) as a dialogue.334 The form  Bodrugan, Epitome, sig. [f.vi.v].  Bodrugan, Epitome, sig. g.v.r. 329  Bodrugan, Epitome, sigs. f.iii.r, g.v.v, 330  Bodrugan, Epitome, sigs. a.ii.r, [a.viii.r], [g.viii.r], h.ii.v. 331  Bodrugan, Epitome, sigs. h.iiii.v, [h.vi.r]. 332  Bodrugan, Epitome, sig. h.iii.v. 333  Lamb, “Ane Resonynge of Ane Scottis and Inglis Merchande…” (1549), BL Cotton Calig. B.VII., fols. 354r-381v, ed. Roderick J. Lyall (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1985), 2, 5, 145. The text breaks off suddenly, indicating that Lamb never finished and/or that his work was rendered obsolete by the war’s end. This may also explain why Ane Resonyng never reached print. 334  Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in its Social and Political Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Dorothea B. Heitsch and JeanFrancois Vallaee, Printed Voices: The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); K.J. Wilson, Incomplete Fictions: The Formation of English Renaissance Dialogues (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1985). 327 328

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allowed him to air arguments from an English mouthpiece without lending them credence, then crush them with the Scot’s erudite criticism and calm, reasoned rebuttal. Defending his pride in “my natioun,” Lamb’s Scot cited Galfridian-skeptic “Polidor, your awin liturate, autentik historiciane” and “Boece, our trew historiciane” alongside Tacitus, Gildas, and Caesar to reject Henry’s “new-forgit superiorite,” contend that Romans had brought civility and literature, and argue “that Brutus monarchie and his thre sonnis is als vncertane as the origin of all vthir nationis except alanerlie the origin of Isralite peopill be provitioun of God.”335 Against the geographical argument, he scoffed, for then “Asia, Europia, and Aphrica is vnit to your kyng be homage and fealtie, becaus France, and thai sam thre partis of the warald ar continewall in land without separatioun of the sey,” and countered with the example of France and Spain.336 Against feudal submission, he asserted that the Edwardian homage was too general to be evidence of superiority, missing the Scottish king’s name, place, and date, and that Athelstan, though “primus Anglorum regum totius Anglie imperium obtinuit,” had never received Scotland “nor totius Britanie imperium; be quhilk word Britanie wes than and also now is contenit bayth Ingland and Scotland.”337 “Scotland is nocht nor neuir was ane part of Ingland,” he proclaimed, describing “the Inglis impire” rather than a British one.338 Piling embarrassment atop pretended claims, Lamb introduced three horsemen to his story—Thomas More, John Fisher, and Richard Reynolds—Catholic martyrs who served to unmask the allegedly peaceful and just Reformation and critique the “counsell” who “alterat” their king’s “naturale guidnes” and “the new leirnyng of Germanie” that corrupted his court.339 Significantly, Lamb also understood 1513 as the tree that bore Wooings fruit: his Scot exclaimed, “quat sap come fra the rute” when Henry cared more about “the wyning of Torna in Haino” than sparing his people unjust exactions or honoring his sister in Scotland, “for all Inglis kyngis awaitis alwayis a commodious tym and concurrence for to recouer thair pretendit richt to the croun of France.” Henry demonstrated this in 1542, when, forsaking his treaties, he took advantage of Charles V’s  Lamb, Resonynge, 3, 57, 63.  Lamb, Resonynge, 65. 337  Lamb, Resonynge, 67, 69, 75. 338  Lamb, Resonynge, 67, 71. 339  Lamb, Resonynge, 169. 335 336

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war and solicited “ane meting with his nephew, kyng of Scotland, as apperit to brek him fra France and for to mantene the novationis than maid laitlie in Ingland of heresye.”340 For Lamb, then, Tudor claims to France and Scotland and the break with Rome were closely tied. Maligning the drama of the latter, the Scot snapped, “Swa you do transforme your estait ryale als oft as Protheus did change formis”—to the hurt of the “kyng of Scotland … [an] apperand air to Ingland.”341 Vicar of Dundee and suggested author of The Complaynt of Scotland (ca. 1548–1550) Robert Wedderburn took a different approach. He conceded that the English were an imperial power and that Scotland was “degenerit,” but turned the empire label negative and made native-born reform the solution.342 The author charged that “the special cause of our afflictione hes procedit, of thre vehement plagis”: “the cruele inuasions of oure ald enemeis, the vniuersal pestilens ande mortalite, that hes occurit mercyles amang the pepil, ande the contentione of diuerse of the thre estaitis of scotland. throucht the quhilk thre plagis, the vniuersal pepil ar be cum distitute of iustice, policie, ande of al verteus bysynes of body ande saul.”343 The Wooings were a sign of divine vengeance “fra oure vice”— traitors who sided with the English, ambitious and avaricious nobles, unlearned and undisciplined clergy, ignorant and exploited commoners, intolerable misgovernment in law and economics, and widespread incivility—but remedy would not come from the English.344 Wedderburn charged that God elevates rulers and gives them “imperial dominations,” yet also ensures their transience: “Quhar is the grite tour of babilone? … it aperit to be perdurabil ande inuyncibil, bot nou it is desolate … Quhat sal be said of the riche tryumphant toune of troye … [or] the riche monarche of rome, quhilk dantit ande subdeuit al the varld? is nocht nou the superiorite of it partit ande diuidit”?345 Thus far, “the cruel inglis men [have] scurgit vs … Quhar for i treist, that his diuine iustice vil permit sum vthir straynge natione to be mercyles boreaus to them, ande til extinct that false seid.”346 Like modern-day Israelites, the Scots must “deffende the liberte ande to saue the dominione” against English violence, slavery, and  Lamb, Resonynge, 25, 35, 37–39.  Lamb, Resonynge, 41, 39. 342  [Wedderburn], Complaynt, fol. 35r. 343  [Wedderburn], Complaynt, fols. 2r-v. 344  [Wedderburn], Complaynt, fol. 19r. 345  [Wedderburn], Complaynt, fols. 15v, 16v-17r. 346  [Wedderburn], Complaynt, fol. 22r. 340 341

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sin; citing Cicero and turning the Tudor civilizing and conversion mission on its head, the author added, “thai that vil nocht expose there bodeis and gudis, to perrel ande dangeir … bot rather vil thole them selfis, ther public veil, & ther natiue cuntre, to perreis al to gyddir, thai ar mair brutal nor brutal beystis.”347 Mid-way through, the tract made a stylistic turn, its author visited by “lady dame scotia”—a personified, female Scotland reminiscent of Henrisoun’s Britain and another early example of this device in imperial literature. Yet the Complaynt adapted the trope to suit its objective: a separate individual from Britain, Scotia was not an attractive maiden beckoning manly English conquest, but “ane lady of excellent extractione ande of anciant genolygie, makkand ane melancolius cheir, for the grite violens, that sche hed sustenit & indurit”; she was being literally torn apart by her three sons (the estates), who stand by as she is “inuadit ande affligit be my ald mortal enemeis.” Such behavior, the motherland incarnate cried, was “mair disnaturellit, nor is brutal beystis that hes na vndirstanding of raison.”348 After berating his countrymen, the author struck at the remaining pillars of Tudor imperial ideology, astutely translating the Latin colonia to describe the Wooings’ purpose. He argued that though “realmis ar nocht conquest be buikis bot rather be bluid,” the “oratours of Ingland at there protectors instance hes set furtht ane buik quhair be thai intende to preue that scotland vas ane colone of ingland quhen it vas fyrst inhabit.” One particularly troublesome passage claimed that England and Scotland “var coniunit to giddir, and to be vndir the gouuernyng of ane prince and the tua realmis to be callit the ile of bertan.” With this book, the author thundered, the English have not only given “ferme credit to diuerse prophane propheseis of merlyne and til vthir ald corruppit vaticiuaris,” but misconstrued the material: the Polychronicon shows that the last conquest of Britain will be achieved by the Scots.349 Indeed, an even closer look at English history reveals that after a string of murders and depositions, “henry the seuynt be the support and supple of the kyng of France gat the crone of ingland, and sa none of them hed rytht to the crone of ingland ergo thai hef na titil to the crone of scotland.” Not to be outdone, the author warned, “the onfaithful cruel act that kyng henry the aucht vsit contrar yrland and valis quhen he be cam their superiors suld be mirrour  [Wedderburn], Complaynt, fol. 36r.  [Wedderburn], Complaynt, fols. 32v, 34v, 36r. 349  [Wedderburn], Complaynt, fol. 45r-v, 52v. 347 348

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and ane exempil til al scotland,” as should Wales, “for quhou beit that the kyng of ingland nou present be discendet of the blude of valis, yit nochtheless the pepil of valis ar in sic subiectione.” Yet again, the English proved their tyranny and cruelty “abuf al vdir natione.”350 Expressly Scottish, pro-Catholic, and anti-colonial, The Complaynt exhorted all Scots to unite “in ane faithful accord: than doutles god sal releue you of the grit afflictione that ye haue indurit be the incredule seid of ingland, & alse i beleue that he sal mak you ane instrament til extinct that false generatione furtht of rememorance.”351 The Complaynt speaks to the contours of Tudor empire in this period, and to the heightened intensity and lasting effects of the Edwardian Wooings. It also neatly coincides with the conflict’s end, which came in the Treaties of Boulogne (March 1550) and Norham (June 1551).352 On the Scottish side, French force, finance, and fiancé had proved critical; for the English, military defeat and Somerset’s fall were definitive—the latter a culmination of foreign and domestic forces that again illustrates the inextricability of empire and nation. Much as the protectorate elaborated and deepened the Tudor vision abroad, it did the same at home, seeking to consolidate England under the Royal Supremacy with religious, social, and economic reforms; these domestic changes, in turn, both reflected and fostered a more strident British imperial ideology (especially in terms of protestantism and Anglicization) and lent resources to campaigns overseas; then, when those national policies met resistance and jeopardized Somerset’s government, his Scottish project and entire regency toppled. With a style that was “personal, autocratic, increasingly contemptuous of his actual partners in government and with a compulsive urge to reach beyond them, explain himself and win the approval of the wider population” and combined the “reforming zeal” of Cromwell with the “chutzpah” of Wolsey (as Diarmaid MacCulloch put it),353 Somerset was galvanized by a belief in the superiority of his reformed English faith, crown, ways and norms, as well as a need to propagate them across a united British Isles. Moreover, he ruled in the name of a king whose  [Wedderburn], Complaynt, fols. 53v, 60r, 57r.  [Wedderburn], Complaynt, fol.143v. 352  “Acceptation by Mary Queen of Scots,” [18 April 1550], TNA SP 50/5, fols. 56r-v; “Treaty of Peace,” [10 June 1551], TNA SP 50/5, fols. 90r-143v; “Treaty of Norham,” 8–10 May 1551, TNA SP 50/5, fols. 144r-151v. 353  MacCulloch, Boy King, 50–51. 350 351

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humanist, evangelical upbringing has been well documented.354 Part and parcel of Irish and Scottish policies, in England, Wales, and Calais the protectorate oversaw the repeal of Henry’s conservative-leaning Six Articles and prohibited the use of candles and shrines (1547), banned processions, mystery plays, holy day pageants, and religious images and made English the language of communion (1548), and introduced an Act of Uniformity, Cranmer’s first Book of Common Prayer, and clerical marriage (1549). Gone, then, were the physical, material, and personal manifestations of Roman Catholicism and the moderation of Henry VIII, replaced by standardized and widely spread markers of an Anglican protestantism, zealous iconoclasm, and triumphant vernacular.355 Also in 1548–1549, the regime set its sights on enclosure, with two ineffective commissions that were closely linked to the religious reforms by supporters and critics. MP John Hales explained that “If the thyng go forwarde & maye take place,” with local enforcement, the king will have the most “faithfull and assured subjectes” ever; “if ther be any waie or pollicie of man to make the people to receaue embrace & loue goddes worde, it is onely this, when they shall see that it bryngeth forth so goodly fruyte.”356 Between April 1548 and August 1549, popular disaffection toward the government’s spiritual measures mixed powerfully with its unpalatable social and economic policies to spark a series of riots and rebellions that riped through Cornwall, Devon, and East Anglia. It was this combination, stoked by conciliar tensions and failure abroad, that brought down Somerset in October and ensured Anglo-Scottish peace, closing a seminal chapter of British and British imperial development.357 In a denouncement 354  Edward’s library is indicative here, see Literary Remains, cccxxv–cccxlii. Pollard, England under Protector Somerset (NY: Russell & Russell, 1966); MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer:A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Jordan, Edward VI; Loach, Edward VI; MacCulloch, Boy King; Alford, Kingship and Politics; Pollnitz, Princely Education, 139–198. 355  Duffy, Stripping the Altars; MacCulloch, The Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Allan Lane, 1999); Catharine Davies, A Religion of the Word: The Defence of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), among others. 356  Hales to Somerset, 24 July 1548, TNA SP 10/4, fols. 64r-65v, at 64r-v. 357  Contemporaries appreciated the severity of the rebellion, as well as its connection to both domestic and foreign policies, see Somerset to marquess of Dorset and Earl of Huntingdon, 11 June 1549, TNA SP 10/7/31; Council to JPs in Devon, 26 June 1549, TNA SP 10/7/42; Paget to Somerset, 7 July 1549, TNA SP 10/8/4; Edward’s Answer to Devon and Cornwall, [July (?8)] 1549, TNA SP 10/8/6. See also Loach, Edward VI,

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sent on the very day that the protector surrendered himself, the privy council made manifest the preoccupation with nation, identity, and foreign claims central to the 1530s and 40s: “no true herted Englisshe man that lamenteth not in his harte that ever he bare rule in the realme,” not only for the “great daunger” that now faces Edward’s holdings in France, but also for losses “in Scotland, which presently given over to the grete dishonor of the kings mate and the realme.”358 * * * In 1558 and 1563 respectively, Anthony Gilby and Ralph Sadler called on the Rough Wooings in the context of the Scottish Reformation, Marian Catholicism, and the Elizabethan Succession Crisis—three watersheds of the second-half of the sixteenth century. In An Admonition to England and Scotland to Call them to Repentance, Gilby harangued “O Britanie” for failing to follow the godly path promoted by Henry and, especially, Edward, and “wroot” out “Romish” weeds359: That tyme, as ye know, the vineyarde in England by the children of God was not all togither neglected, and then most earnestly were ye (O Brethren of Scotland) required to ioyne handes with vs in the Lords worke, but Satan alas would not suffer it … that Christ should grow so strong by ioynynge that ile togither in perfect religion, whome God hath so many waies coupled and strengthended by his worke in nature: the papistes practised all theyr fyne craftes in England, Scotland, and in France … They moue sturdie stomackes, they dispens with periuries, they worke by theyr craftie confessions, they raise vp warre in the end, whereby ye (deare Brethren of Scotland) were sore plaged.360

The exiled English reformer went on to rehearse each devastating Scottish defeat, from destroyed borders, Solway Moss, and James’s death “for sorow,” to the sacking of Edinburgh and Leith, naval losses, burnings and 58–88; Shagan, Popular Politics, 270–304; Wood, 1549 Rebellions, 1–69; Barrett L. Beer, “Seymour, Edward, Duke of Somerset (c. 1500–1552),” ODNB (2009); Hoak, “Edward VI (1537–1553),” ODNB (2014). 358  Council to the Ambassadors, 11 October 1549, TNA SP 10/9/41, in Troubles Connected with the Prayer Book of 1549, ed. Nicholas Pocock (London: Camden Society, 1884), 113–118, at 115–116. 359  Knox, The Appellation… (1558), fols. 59v-77r, at 60r, 69v, 68r. 360  Appellation, fol. 65r.

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raids, until the Antichrist delivered Mary, Queen of Scots to the French, “mindinge by that meanes to cutt for euer the knot of the frendship, that might haue ensued betwixte England and Scotland by that godlie coniunction.”361 Appended to Knox’s Appellation to the Scottish Nobility, Gilby’s piece sought to resurrect the Tudor cause—complete with confessional, geographical, agricultural, political, and military arguments—to bring about a protestant British vision. Five years later, Sadler appeared before an English Parliament fractured over “the tytle of the Quene of Scotts to thimperial crowne of this realme.” The statesman drew on his extensive experience two decades earlier to express his supreme discomfort with favoring the Stewart claim and elevating “a prynce of a strange nacion,” when no amount of wooing had worked when the roles were reversed.362 The Scots had seen through to the reality of Tudor British imperialism and Sadler now asked parliament to do the same: “if this proude beggerly Scottis did so moch disdayn to yelde to the superioryte of England” that they chose perjury and war, “whie should we, for any respecte, yelde to their Scottishe superiority, or consent to establish a Scotte in succession to the crowne of this realm, contrary to the lawes of the realme, and therby to do so grate an injurye as to disinherite the next heire of our owne nacyon?” Such an act, he submitted in terms that again linked imperial expansion and national identity, could not befit “a naturall and good Englishman” nor “thoffice and duetie of a trew subject.”363 Like Dee, Sadler and Knox demonstrate that the Wooings lived on well past their official end. There was, as modern scholars like Roger Mason have noted, significant carryover from 1542 to 1563: “although the ‘Edwardian Moment’ proved fleeting enough, the Constantinian vision of a Protestant and imperial British kingdom survived it and would be reinvigorated, albeit in somewhat more muted form, in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign.”364 Yet this persistence, and equally important ruptures, did not occur in a vacuum nor were they simply about rejecting the inheritances of the much-maligned Northumberland or Mary I; rather, this mid-Tudor era constitutes a similarly essential juncture for Britain and empire.

 Appellation, fols. 65v, 66v.  “Speech in Parliament,“Sadler SP 2:556–561, at 2:557, 559. 363  “Speech in Parliament,” Sadler SP 2:560, 561. 364  Mason, “Scotland, England, Britain,” 285. 361 362

CHAPTER 5

“Recouer thyne aunciente bewtie”: Mid-­ Tudor Empire over Mid-Tudor Crisis, 1550–1570

In the wake of Mary I’s accession in July 1553, the Cambridge-educated, scholar-courtier son of cloth merchants Richard Eden toiled to recommend himself and his talents to the new regime. A former servant and ally of Edwardian statesmen William Cecil, Thomas Smith, and the boy-king’s second regent John Dudley, Earl of Warwick then Duke of Northumberland, Eden’s connections and the support that his family lent to the duke’s failed coup enveloped him in a shroud of suspicion when Lady Jane Grey met with swift defeat.1 Vulnerable to accusations of heresy and treason, Eden turned to what had earned him commendation under his new monarch’s younger brother: imperial promotion. The product was The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India, a translation of Peter Martyr’s De orbe novo decades, Gonzalo Oviedo’s Natural hystoria de las Indias, and other complementary works, printed in 1555 with a laudatory address to the queen and king consort, later Philip II of Spain.2 Described by Gillian T. Cell as that “which, more than any other single book, stimulated English curiosity about America,” the Decades is a 1  Dudley was made duke in October 1551. To avoid confusion, I refer to him as Northumberland throughout below. 2  Eden, The decades of the newe worlde… (London: 1555). On Eden, see David Gwyn, “Richard Eden: Cosmographer and Alchemist,” Sixteenth Century Journal 15, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 13–34; Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Hadfield, “Eden, Richard (c. 1520–1576),” ODNB (2008); and Hadfield, William Hamlin, Claire Jowitt, Anthony

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fascinating, significant text on multiple levels.3 Yet one of its most striking attributes is its similarity to Eden’s first major literary accomplishment, A Treatyse of the Newe India (1553). Composed under courtly auspices for the still-ascendant Duke of Northumberland and King Edward VI, the Treatyse translated part of German cosmographer and cartographer Sebastian Munster’s Cosmographia (1544), one of the most influential descriptions of the world then in print.4 Two years later, Eden wrote for new monarchs, but his skill set, sources, aim, and broader audience remained unchanged across the landmark regnal divide. Both works were English editions of popular continental texts, and both sought to use European activity overseas alongside ancient example and medieval precedents to simultaneously shame and cajole readers abroad. To these ends, Philip’s consortship played beautifully into Eden’s hands, an opportunity to trot out herculean Habsburg efforts toward colonizing, civilizing, and Christianizing the New World and ostensibly glorify their impressive feats, but also, by extension, press Tudor inadequacies in those very areas. Slyly capitalizing on a rising tide of Hispanophobia, anti-Catholicism, and xenophobia, Eden teetered cautiously between praise of the Anglo-Spanish match, admiration of Philip’s kingdom (with “amplissimis imperijs” and “Antipodes et PLVS VLTRA terminatis”), and exposition of their threat to British sovereignty and empire-building.5 Amid apparent sea change in politics, religion, and international relations—minority traded for female kingship, reformed protestantism for Roman Catholicism, native for foreign influence—Eden’s parallel works on either side of the 1553 chasm highlight a fundamental continuity, a shared concern that ties the reign of Edward VI to that of Mary I and, ultimately, both to those of their father, grandfather, and successor, Elizabeth I, even as they evince a changing context. The translator was so sure of the persistent, pervasive relevance of British Atlantic empire to the Tudor crown and state that he risked his career on it. Reflecting an essential ethos that pulsated throughout the 1550s and 1560s, Eden’s efforts elevate the period as a critical one in the development of nation and empire. Pagden, and Michael Brennan in Connotations 6, nos. 1–3 (1996/7): 1–22, 46–50, 51–64, 65–66, 227–245, 310–315. 3  Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland, 1577–1660 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 35. 4  Eden, A treatyse of the newe India… (London: 1553). 5  Eden, Decades, sig. [a.ii.r].

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In 1553, Eden offered to act as Homer to Northumberland’s Alexander, “that mightie kyng and conquerour of the world,” setting down his heroism for posterity if the duke would lead his subjects with “noble & stoute courage” in enterprises abroad.6 The author described his text as the “duetie I beare to my natyue countrey & countreymen, which haue of late to their great praise (whatsoeuer succede) attempted with newe viages to serche ye seas and newe found landes,” hoping that it would serve as “a little glasse” whereby to learn from the “aduentures of other, how to behaue them selues & direct theyr viage to their most commoditie” and not to be dismayed by failure.7 The duke and his men should, instead, persist in this most “godly, honeste, & lawful purpose,” preferring the “the glorye of God & commoditie of our countrey” over their “soft beddes at home.”8 In this, they would mirror the most revered classical emperors as well as by Henry VII and Henry VIII, making up for Thomas Pert’s “faynt heart,” without which “that riche treasurye called Perularia, (which is now in Spayne…) myght longe since haue bene in the towre of London, to the kinges great honoure and welth of his realme.”9 Never fear, Eden charged, there were plenty more stones, spices, and habitable yet uncivilized land to be had elsewhere nearby, as the ensuing cosmography would show.10 Here was a stirring appeal to the ancient past central to Renaissance Humanism, to the deeds and claims of the early Tudors, mounting competition from Spain, protestant national sentiment, the power of vernacular English, and the manifold advantages of exploration. Where it failed, however, was timing: Edward died the very year the Treatyse reached print. In 1555, the Decades re-extended the invitation, invoking Cicero to comment on the difference between men and brute beasts and on the power of great accomplishments to imbue men with immortal glory, before pivoting to more recent history.11 “Englande,” Eden told his readers, “is in fewe yeares decayed and impouerysshed” while “Spayne is inryched” by the constant influx of precious stones, ore, brazil wood, textiles, spices, and more from the New World12—“iust desertes and good  Eden, Treatyse, sigs. aa.ii.r, aa.ii.v.  Eden, Treatyse, sigs. aa.iii.r–v. 8  Eden, Treatyse, sig. aa.iiii.r. 9  Eden, Treatyse, sigs. aa.iiii.r, aa.iiii.v. 10  Eden, Treatyse, sig. aa.iiii.v–[aa.v.r]. 11  Eden, Decades, sig. a.i.r. 12  Eden, Decades, sigs. b.iii.v–b.iiii.r. 6 7

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fortune” for a people comparable to “those goddes made of men (whom the antiquitie cauled Heroes and for theyr manyfolde benefites to man kynde honoured theym with diuine honoure).”13 There, overseas, Columbus’s inheritors had saved innumerable souls, taken possession of many kingdoms, and spread Spanish seed, while John Cabot’s had largely let their claims lay fallow.14 Eden moved in for the rhetorical kill: Howe much therfore is it to be lamented, and howe greatly dooth it sounde to the reproche of all Christendome, and especially to such as dwell nerest to these landes (as we doo)… [an] inexcusable slothfulnesse and negligence bothe before god and the worlde, that so large dominions of such tractable people and pure gentiles, not beinge hytherto corrupted with any other false religion (and therefore the easyer to bee allured to embrase owres) are nowe knowen vnto vs, and that we haue no respecte neyther for goddes cause nor for owre owne commoditie to attempte summe vyages into these coastes, to doo for owr partes as the Spaniardes haue doone for theirs…15

With Spain as their model and the large fair, fruitful land that lay across the ocean as their providential destination,16 Eden implored, “O Englande whyle tyme is gyuen thee… recouer thyne aunciente bewtie whiche hath so longe byn defaced. Thou haste nowe a kynge and queene that desyre thee to remember thy dewtie, and holde theyr armes abrode to embrase thee yf thou wylt drawe nere vnto them.”17 * * * Taking Eden as its departure point, this chapter argues for the importance of the mid-sixteenth century to the development of a British empire, and, conversely, for the significance of the broader Atlantic imperial context to the development of a British nation in the same era. Building on recent work that problematizes the idea of a “Mid-Tudor Crisis,” it highlights the period from Northumberland’s consolidation of power in 1550 through the outbreak of the first Desmond Rebellion in 1569 as one in which upheaval and uncertainty wrought disruption and change, but  Eden, Decades, sigs. a.i.v–a.ii.r.  Eden, Decades, sigs. b.iiii.v–c.i.r. 15  Eden, Decades, sig. c.i.v. 16  Eden, Decades, sig. c.i.r. 17  Eden, Decades, sig. b.ii.r. 13 14

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barred neither significance nor continuity.18 Only superficially unwieldy and inchoate, these watershed decades saw a set of diverse yet overlapping processes at work, all of which proved integral to the form and function of British imperialism and national sentiment in the remainder of the century: the extension, amplification, and proliferation of imperial theory; a geographical reorientation away from expansion in France and Scotland and toward the west, including a new focus on Ireland and on the Americas as well as on plantation as the best mode of rule and on religious dissidents as a means to settle new territories; the ascent of Habsburgs as the Tudors’ primary rival; the advance of a protestant British vision of nation and empire in direct contrast to Catholic Iberian alternatives; and the rise and increasing standardization of new sorts of joint ventures—like

18  Whitney R.  Jones first applied the word “crisis” to the period bookended by the Henrician and Elizabethan regimes (The Mid-Tudor Crisis, 1539–1563 (London: Macmillan, 1973)), developing comments by Pollard that “sterility was the [era’s] conclusive note” (History of England (London: Longmans, 1919), 172), and Elton that Edward and Mary’s “total achievements would fill barely a page” (England Under the Tudors, 193), and compounding what Mary has suffered by protestant polemics. Overall, treatments of the midTudor era were limited and/or negative through much of the twentieth century; even women’s and gender histories suggested that Elizabeth was England’s first queen regnant. The literature began to shift after Alan Smith’s The Emergence of a Nation State: The Commonwealth of England, 1529–1660 (London: Longman, 1984), Loades, The Mid-Tudor Crisis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), and others began to question the paradigm. Following groundbreaking studies by Hoak and Bush, Loach and Alford spotted continuity from 1547 and 1553, uncovering in Edward a vital reference point for Elizabeth. See Hoak, King’s Council in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Bush, Government Policy; Loach, Edward VI; Alford, Kingship and Politics. Similarly, Mary’s popularity as a significant if much-maligned queen has recently soared, especially for those who see her as a model for Elizabeth, see Alexander Samson, “The Marriage of Philip of Habsburg and Mary Tudor and Anti-Spanish Sentiment in England” (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of London, 1999); Charles Beem, The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Loades, Mary Tudor: A Life (London: National Archives, 2008); Judith Richards, Mary Tudor (London: Routledge, 2008); Anna Whitelock and Alice Hunt, eds., Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman, eds., Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); John Edwards, Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte, eds., The Birth of a Queen: Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Interestingly, however, in striving to link Edward and Elizabeth or Mary and Elizabeth, connections between Edward and Mary and across Edward-Mary-Elizabeth remain largely unmade.

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crown-patented trading companies—that merged public and private resources and personnel. Somerset’s fall and the end of war with Scotland encouraged a group of rising scholar-statesmen practiced in early Tudor administration and empire to apply the discourses developed and experiences gained in Tournai, the break with Rome, and the Rough Wooings to move already-­ extant enterprise in Ireland and the Americas forward. Several years later, Edward’s death and Mary’s coronation did not bring about a clean rupture from what had come before. Rather, the new queen’s gender, familial ties, and faith led to a shift: the court followed a trail blazed by Henry VII and used marriage, precedent, consolidation at home, and experimental enterprise abroad to secure the throne for its female king and propagate her imperial crown. For the emerging Tudor empire, Mary’s Spanish union was particularly salient. It brought a flood of Habsburg personnel, goods, expertise, and texts into England, where they lent new inspiration and impetus—both positive and negative—to adventure and quickened national and xenophobic feelings. Upon Mary’s death, Elizabeth’s accession fused with the loss of Calais, anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic sentiment, and the storm of European sectarian upheaval to raise the queen’s profile as the Atlantic World’s protestant protector, turn Ireland and the Americas into perceived silver bullets to stem British decline and global Iberian hegemony, and draw Tudor subjects, Catholic and protestant, away from home. From 1547 to 1558, five monarchs and two regents ruled England, Wales, Ireland, parts of France and the New World; and yet, as Eden reminds us, these mid-Tudor years shared a common thrust: a desire for empire. * * * After eight years dominated by British and French affairs, war ended with the decade, freeing money, manpower, and energy for neglected projects elsewhere.19 Northumberland’s regime was in many ways an organic second act to Somerset’s: the privy council was shaken up, the administration redefined, restructured, and redirected toward solvency, evangelical reform, and westward pursuits, yet Cecil and others of his circle quickly returned to court, Cranmer’s ascendancy in the Church persisted, and an

 For the forfeiture of Boulogne in March 1550, see TNA SP 68/15, fols. 108r–112v.

19

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increasingly active Edward remained king.20 All that came before the coup profoundly affected the imperial policy that followed, beginning in an unsettled Ireland. Across the first half of 1550, reports reached the council that in reply to Bellingham’s harsh treatment, rebellion in England, Scottish example, and promises of French aid (especially if it might help win Calais),21 “the whole nobility of Ireland… had conspired to rid themselves of the yoke of England… for otherwise, by little and little, they looked for none other but to be driven out of their ancient possessions.”22 Their quarrel, John Mason specified as the plot moved ahead the following April, was religious, in which “they were determined either to stand or to die,” offering devotion and subjection to king of France if he would send help “to defend his own, if it pleased him to accept it” and “trusting to hear shortly the Dauphin proclaimed King of Scotland and Ireland at the least.”23 According to Lord Justice William Brabazon in March 1550, “already the wild Irish, enflamed by their natural hatred of the English race and monarchy, and an expectation of liberty to rob the king’s subjects of their goods and lands if the French and Scots invade, are anticipating such an event.”24 Even loyal Irish had to be treated kindly and cautiously to keep them that way.25 In this context, Northumberland looked back, and reappointed St. Leger to quell the dissent, fortify against invasion, reduce costs, increase revenues, survey the land for ship-worthy timber and alum mines, prepare Leix and Offaly for English settlers, and introduce the new religious 20  Alford, Kingship and Politics, 136–174. On this context, see parliamentary bill on justice, [? December 1550], TNA SP 10/11/17; Hooper to Cecil, 17 April 1551, TNA SP 10/13/13; Edward to sheriffs, 20 July 1551, TNA SP 10/13/31; urrency debasements, August 1551, TNA SP 10/13/33; Charges of war, 29 September 1552, CP 230/6; Northumberland to council, 28 December 1552, TNA SP 10/15/73; Edward to bishops, [9 June 1553], TNA SP 10/18/25. 21  Instructions from Lord Chancellor to Thomas Alen, after 2 February 1550, TNA SP 61/2/50; George Dowdall to John Alen and Council, 22 March 1550, TNA SP 61/2/51; Wotton to Cecil, 2 January 1550/1, CP 150/140. 22  Mason to Privy Council, 29 June 1550, in P.F.  Tytler, England under the Reigns of Edward VI and Mary, 2 vols. (London: 1839), 1:301–307, at 301–302; White, “Edward in Ireland,” 204. 23  Mason to Privy Council, 18 April 1551, in Tytler, England under Edward and Mary, 1:351–363, at 352, 351, 353. 24  Brabazon and Council to Privy Council, 26 March 1550, TNA SP 61/2/52. 25  Remembrances for Ireland, [July] 1550, TNA SP 61/2/55.

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settlement, especially the Book of Common Prayer, in English or Irish depending upon the locale.26 Yet St. Leger found the political, military, economic, and spiritual situations disorderly,27 rustled feathers with his gradual conciliatory approach, and struggled with a fractured Tudor administration and recalcitrant clergy,28 some of whom accused him of obstructing reform and labeled him a greedy papist.29 Still, significant developments were underway for the plantation: around the time of St. Leger’s arrival, twenty-three Anglo-Irish and English officials, soldiers, and gentlemen submitted a petition to assume all possession, spiritual and temporal, of Leix and other lands appertaining, as a syndicate or company, turning wasted land into annual crown rent, clearing disloyal inhabitants, and taking over the Fort Protector garrison.30 Here was, as Quinn identified, “the first project for a corporate private plantation in Ireland,” equally remarkable for combining Old and New English adventurers.31 Though the proposal fizzled, settlement of Leix and Offaly went ahead, with leases granted in late 1550 through the new year.32 The deputy presided over some, following a survey by Walter Cowley—an advocate of rigorously weeding out the disobedient and nurturing the obedient33—but less than a year into his latest tenure, St. Leger was recalled in favor of Boulogne and Wooings veteran James Croft, who arrived with an expeditionary force in January and took office in April–May 1551.34 His charge reflects 26  Instructions by Edward and Privy Council to St. Leger, July 1550, TNA SP 61/2/57, fols. 135r–141v. 27  St. Leger to Lord Treasurer of England, 27 September 1550, TNA SP 61/2/60; St. Leger and Council to Privy Council, 21 October 1550, TNA SP 61/2/62. 28  St. Leger to Cecil, 5 December 1550, TNA SP 61/2/67 and 19 January 1551, TNA SP 61/3/3. 29  St. Leger to Cecil, 19 January 1551, TNA SP 61/3/3 and 23 March 1551, TNA SP 61/3/17; Browne to [Northumberland], 6 August 1551, TNA SP 61/3/45. 30  Petition of Gerald Aylmer, John Travers and others for inhabiting Leix, [1550], TNA SP 61/2/69, fols. 198r–199v. 31  Quinn, “Edward Walshe’s ‘Conjectures’ Concerning the State of Ireland [1552],” Irish Historical Studies 5, no. 20 (September 1947): 303–322, at 309. 32  The Irish Fiants of the Tudor Sovereigns, 4 vols. (Dublin: 1994), Edw. VI, beginning with nos. 599 and 661; Dunlop, “The Plantation of Leix and Offaly, “English Historical Review 6, no. 21 (January 1891): 61–96. 33  Cowley’s survey of Offaly, 10 November 1550, TNA SP 61/2/65, fols. 163r–188v; Cowley to Lord Treasurer William Paulet, 21 February 1551, TNA SP 61/3/12. 34  “Articles for the Expedition into Ireland,” [7 January 1551], TNA SP 61/3/2, fols. 3r–8v; Edward’s instructions to Croft, 25 February 1551, TNA SP 61/3/14, fols. 32r–34v; “At Grenewiche, the xvth of Aprell, 1551,” APC 3:260–261.

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the changing concerns of the regime under Northumberland as well as its connection to the past: explicitly instructed to draw on his experiences,35 Croft was to use his increased garrison to forcibly secure Ireland’s coasts against the Scots as well as Spanish plunderers, impose obedience and civility, propagate English divine service and justice, regulate trade, and extend Pale order by fully leasing O’Conor’s territories in Offaly and O’More’s in Leix.36 A jumble of Henrician surrender and regrant (including oaths of submission to Edward as king of England, France, Ireland, and supreme head under Christ),37 Bellingham-esque coercion and garrisoning, and colonial settlement (in Leinster as well as Newry and Lecale in Ulster and an aborted plan for Baltimore in Munster), some of Croft’s measures stuck, his accomplishments intimately tied to the crown’s express desire to lower costs and its belief that “we wynne not by [Irish] willles but by our power… then shall they obey bycause they cannot chuse.”38 Under his purview, more of Leix and Offaly were parceled out and tenants installed; the dynasty’s first realized colony in Ireland and a banner element of British imperialism took shape. Leased to New English soldiers, Old English gentlemen of the Pale, and one native Irishman, the colony developed earlier plans for Ireland, France, and Scotland and included men who had served in all three theaters and had grants from all three lord deputies (Bellingham, St. Leger, and Croft).39 It required residency, armed service, and cess payments from settlers, aimed to reduce the country to order and obedience, and intended to eventually encompass the whole island,40 with fortified towns akin to Calais and Dublin where Englishmen would reside with their wives.41 Moreover, the policy advocated transferring to even the remotest parts of Ireland those domestic norms—common law, shiring, Edwardian  Edward to St. Leger, 24 February 1551, TNA SP 61/3/13.  “Articles Expedition,” [7 January 1551], TNA SP 61/3/2; Instructions to Croft, 25 February and [?] May 1551, TNA SP 61/3/14, 32. 37  For example, oath of McCarthy More, July 1551, TNA SP 61/3/40; Submission of Hugh McNeill Oge, 1 January 1553, TNA SP 61/4/73. 38  Edward to Croft, 17 August 1551, TNA SP 61/3/48, fols. 136r–144v, at 137r. See also Privy Council to Croft, 11 May 1551, TNA SP 61/3/23 and Council to Privy Council, 20 May 1551, TNA SP 61/3/25; Croft to [Northumberland], May 1551, TNA SP 61/3/27; Croft to Privy Council, 28 July 1551, TNA SP 61/3/38. 39  Council to Privy Council, 10 July 1551, TNA SP 16/3/33; Cal Fiants, Edw. VI. 40  Thomas Wood to Cecil, 24 April 1551, TNA SP 61/3/21. For example, Cal Fiants, Edw. VI, nos. 724–725. 41  Croft to Wood, July 1551, TNA SP 61/3/39. 35 36

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­ rotestantism—deemed superior and uniquely English42 as a means to p achieve the sought-after civility and obedience.43 Attempting to finish what Henry and St. Leger had begun, Croft tried to bolster the settlement with a new printing press in Dublin, new customs and regulations (including, in an interesting nod to identity, staffing mines with English and Irishmen, rather than Germans), minting of coins bearing royal arms, crowns, and roses, currency reform at the hands of Martin Pirry, and new clergymen, so that “the barbarous, rude, and untaught people, who are numerous in Ireland, will be moved to become faithful to God, the king, and his agents.”44 Well into 1552, however, Croft was struggling. Saddled with (by his assessment) insufficient resources, agricultural decline, rising costs, obstinate bishops, and disquiet among all Irish, the deputy reported in March 1552 that slaughter, famine, English resort to coigne and livery, and French and/or Scottish-backed rebellion were not far behind.45 Further, the plantation remained costly and incomplete.46 Yet Croft’s reality did not halt optimism and fresh proposals from other quarters. In May 1552, palesman, former Cromwell servant, and Lord Chancellor Thomas Cusack reported conformity and the promise of royal income in Munster, calm in Leinster, quiet and an easy road to eliminating native customs via shiring in Thomond, productive settlement in Leix and Offaly, and lands fit for English freeholds in Ulster. Experience thus far—of ploughing that 42  Instructions to Wood for Privy Council, 29 September 1551, TNA SP 61/3/54, fols. 159r–161v; Edward to Croft, November 1551, TNA SP 61/3/73, fols. 204–213v; Croft to Cecil, 22 December 1551, TNA SP 61/3/79. 43  Croft to Privy Council, 6 November 1551, TNA SP 61/3/60. 44  Privy Council to Croft, November 1551, TNA SP 61/3/70, see also Croft to Northumberland, 11 November 1551, TNA SP 61/3/63; Privy Council to Croft, 26 November 1551, TNA SP 61/3/75; Privy Council to Robert Record, November 1551, TNA SP 61/3/77; Opinion of Croft, December 1551, TNA SP 61/3/80; Assays of Irishminted Coins, 15 January 1552, TNA SP 61/4/2; Croft and Council to Privy Council, 26 and 27 January 1552, TNA SP 61/4/4, 5; Croft to Cecil, 28 February 1552, TNA SP 61/4/14; Record to Privy Council, February 1552, TNA SP 61/4/14; Edward to Croft and Council, 7 and [10?] June 1552, TNA SP 16/4/50A, 51; Edward to William Williams and Brabazon, 13 June 1552, TNA SP 61/4/52; Report by Thomas Luttrell and Williams, August 1552, TNA SP 61/4/59. 45  Croft to Cecil, 14, 15, 22 March 1552, TNA SP 61/4/27, 28, 31; Privy Council to Croft, 23 February 1552, TNA SP 61/4/11. See also White, “Edward in Ireland,” 206–207; Bradshaw, “Edwardian Reformation,” 92–94; Brady, Chief Governors, 46–64; Murray, Enforcing, 202–203. 46  Privy Council to Croft and Council, 29 May 1552, TNA SP 61/4/48.

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“increaseth dayly thankes be to god wherby the countrey vniuersally is inhabited and so brought to quyet”—demonstrated that so long as the deputy employed gentleness, wisdom, and indifference, presidents were appointed for Munster, Connaught, and Ulster, the whole island was shired, and learned preachers were installed, the outlook was promising. “There can be nothing so good to be vsed with suche savage people as good order to be obserued & kept emonge them, for execucion of the lawe is more feared when it is don in order, then any other punyshment.”47 “Iryshemen,” he concluded, “were never so weake and thenglysh subiectes neuer so stronge.”48 Whereas Cusack foregrounded Irish redeemability, Waterford gentleman and humanist Edward Walshe dedicated a set of “Conjectures” to Northumberland detailing his own plan to “wynne obedience, reformacion, rich profight, streinghth and dischardge of conscience to the kinges maiestie in yrlande.”49 Against ignorant persons who would commit any part of governance to “soche vile persons as are the yryshe lordes,” Walshe averred that “eviry goode subiecte that knoweth the state… shulde desyre not onely the plantinge of ynglishe men there but also the comminge of more thither,” until they are “thicke together and so the lande stronge and well manured without enny chardge but rather with aduauntage to the kinge.” This was the lesson of the “polliticke romaynes” and of the English conquerors, who created the Pale.50 Even if the “comon people of yrlande have evir desired the cominge of Englishe men,” eager to be free from extortion and oppression, rooting out native lords and settling a few English was not enough: without large numbers, close administration, common law, and justice, “evin englishe bloodes wax wylde yrishe” and “the kinge… looseth his right and revenue.”51 Inspired by classical and medieval precedent as well as the more recent crystallization of identity (here juxtaposed to a contagious inferior Irishness) and Leix-Offaly experimentation, Walshe developed all three to justify Tudor empire. Though the “Conjectures” did not immediately yield fruit, they presaged

47  “Book by Thomas Cusack,” 8 May 1552, TNA SP 61/4/43, fols. 132r–145v, at 135r, 135v. 48  Cusack’s Book, 8 May 1522, fol. 144v. 49  “The coniectures of Edwarde Walshe tochinge the state of yrlande,” [1552], TNA SP 61/4/44, fols. 146r–152v, at 149v. 50  Walshe, “Coniectures,” fols. 146r, 146v. 51  Walshe, “Coniectures,” fols. 149r, 146v.

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numerous later theories and plots, especially those that arose around Cecil (a Walshe correspondent) in the 1560s and 1570s. Finally, before year’s end one Thomas Walshe submitted a narrower report, which argued that a presidency and council in Munster then Leinster would enforce justice and religious order, provide military and naval security, create freeholds, generate crown income, regulate fishing, mining, and felling, eradicate beastly customs, and civilize native Irish via free schools. He emphasized the utility of English apparel and of the council of Wales and the Marches as a model for the new administration. Perhaps also of Anglo-Irish extraction, this Walshe found that neither extreme—native Irish home rule or wholly new English plantation—was tenable. Couched in terms of a learned physician evaluating an ill patient before administering his remedy, the treatise resuscitated the medical metaphor and set yet another unfulfilled course for Edwardian Ireland.52 However, the Walshe tracts, Cusack’s book, and the syndicate’s petition demonstrate the contemporary meaning of the stunted Leix-Offaly project, the ways in which theories and policies were evolving in the wake of the Wooings, and why Croft would transform into a colonial standard-­ bearer a quarter-century after his departure amid debt and defeat in December 1552.53 Just as Somerset’s eclipse renewed Irish interest and elaborated past proposals, it did the same for exploits further afield—an equally vital part of Edward’s inheritance shelved during the Wooings. Northumberland had first sought out Sebastian Cabot in the second-half of 1547, facilitating his return to England, monetary rewards from king and council, the resurrection of his family’s 1496 patent, and (according to Hakluyt) the title of “grand Pilot of England.”54 The duke was, as Joyce Lorimer has shown, deeply interested in overseas exploration and had cultivated ties 52  Walshe, “Report on the State of Ireland,” 1552, BL Add MS 48015, fols. 259r–265r, in ‘Reform’ Treatises on Tudor Ireland, ed. David Heffernan (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2016), 7–15. 53  Croft never returned to Ireland, but consulted on its affairs, see Edward to Croft, 6 November 1552, TNA SP 61/4/62; Articles Sent to the Deputy, 29 November 1552, CP 151/60; Resolutions and Considerations of Privy Council, January 1553, TNA SP 61/4/75. Two 1553 “devices” complement these texts, suggesting English-born deputies (on threeyear rotation with Irish-born ones) as well as English-born horsemen, gunners, and councilmen, TNA SP 61/4/82, 83. 54  PN, 1:sig. *3v, 3:10. See also David Loades, “Cabot, Sebastian (c. 1481/2–1557),” ODNB (2010).

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with leading French mariners, including Jean Ribault, while serving as Henry’s Lord High Admiral.55 Moreover, he was likely inspired by recent French and Iberian voyages, especially in the mineral-rich “Brasil and “Peru.”56 Indeed, in a different, later climate, Cabot claimed—possibly spuriously—that Northumberland sought to raise a large expedition with the French (Cabot in the lead) to build a fort at the mouth of the Amazon River and “destroy and kill all the Spaniards and usurp the territory,” though the project never came to fruition.57 The more concrete culmination of this scheming came in 1553, with the creation of “the mysterie and companie of the Marchants aduenturers for the discouerie of Regions, Dominions, Islands and places vnknowen” (namely, a northern passage to “Cathay”)—a joint-stock syndicate of 240 £25 shareholders, from merchants to privy councilors, under Cabot (governor), Hugh Willoughby (captain general), and Richard Chancellor (pilot general).58 An unprecedented organization and the first of many to follow for British global adventure, the Company was imagined as an extension of “his most excellent Maiestie, & his crown Imperiall of his realmes of England and Ireland.” All participants were to swear an oath to that authority and to the company’s vision, which included carefully recording their progress and observing “morning and euening prayer, with other common seruices appointed by the kings Maiestie, and lawes of this Realme.”59 The project was part new, part familiar. It combined royal power and concerns with private capital, interests, and personnel, mounting money and men with comparative ease and speed. It was led by Cabot, 55  Lorimer, ed., English and Irish Settlements on the River Amazon, 1550–1646 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1989), 6. 56  St. Mauris to Philip, 17 June 1546, CSPS 8:279, 29 June 1547, CSPS 9:110–116; Advices from Melun, 20 November 1547, CSPS 9:206–218; Advices from Renard, [?] November 1550, CSPS 10:184–192; M. d’Eecke to Queen Dowager, 19 July 1552, CSPS 10:542–557; “Richard Morysine to Council,” 30 June 1551, CSPF, 392; Wotton and Morysine to Council, 7 July 1551, CSPF, 402. 57  Cabot to Charles, 15 November 1553, in English and Irish Settlement, 127–128, at 128. See also Van de Delft to Charles, 31 January, 12 April, 22 April 1550, CSPS 10:20–21, 63, 67; Jehan Scheyfve to Queen Dowager, 24 June 1550, CSPS 10:115; “Advices from Scheyfve,” [?] January 1550, CSPS 10:217; Scheyfve to Bishop of Arras, 10 April 1551, CSPS 11:31. 58  “Ordinances, instructions, and aduertisements of and for the direction of the intended voyage for Cathay…,” PN, 3:226–230, at 226. See also “Sir Hugh Willoughby’s voyage for the discovery of Cathay,” BL Cotton MS Otho EVIII, no. 6, fols. 11r–14v. 59  “Ordinances, instructions, and aduertisements,” PN, 3:226, 227.

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a Tudor explorer-cartographer just off a stint with the Habsburgs, and Willoughby, a Wooings veteran knighted by Somerset at Leith who helped negotiate the Anglo-Scottish ceasefire.60 It looked backward, to the “examples of our fathers and predecessors” like Henry VII and John Cabot, and forward, ultimately establishing the model for later companies. It looked abroad, toward discovery, shipping, and trade61 as “marchants, who wandering about the world, search… remote regions and kingdomes, and againe to bring from the same, such things as they find there commodious for their owne Countries,” and to the home nation, its modes of governance and sense of self in state and church.62 Here was a sign that the second Edwardian regime recognized and sought to make good on its overseas claims as part and parcel of its efforts in the Isles and European competition. Comprised of three ships, the Company’s first voyage sailed in May 1553 and headed northeast, never approaching the Atlantic. When what remained of the fleet returned in 1554, Chancellor had reached Moscow and made contact with Tsar Ivan IV, but Willoughby, Northumberland, and Edward were all dead.63 Yet men like Eden (whose Treatyse appeared the year that the Company launched), their supporters at court, and a new dynastic alliance kept Cabot, his syndicate, and all that they represented alive as Mary ascended the throne.64 * * * Despite Northumberland’s failure to divert the succession and his ensuing fall, members of the cohort that he and his predecessor had cultivated over the previous decade—well studied and experienced in British Atlantic 60  Loades, “Cabot,” DNB; James McDermott, “Willoughby, Sir Hugh (d. 1554?),” ODNB (2004). 61  On the importance of trade (especially textile) and shipping, including to Edward, see “Reasons for Establishing a Mart in England,” 9 March 1551–1552, in Literary Remains, 2:504–510; Memoranda of council business, [? October] 1552, TNA SP 10/15/40. 62  “Copie of the letters missiue …,” PN, 3:231, 232. 63  “The newe Nauigation and discouerie…,” PN, 1:243–258. 64  Mary chartered Cabot’s group, which developed into the Muscovy Company, in 1555 (PN, 1:267–272). See Thomas Stuart Willan, The Early History of the Russia Company (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956); Willan, The Muscovy Merchants of 1555 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953); Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 1993); Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement.

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pursuits—and their ideas survived the Grey catastrophe to continue their work. They at once responded to the specific realities of the new regime and developed elements that had glimmered under Henry and Edward to cement the post-1550, post-Wooings shape of Tudor imperialism. They endured because when it came to empire, the Marian government did not break cleanly nor decisively from the past. Rather, queen and court propounded and extended an already-extant vision and activity, as marriage to Philip and promotion of ventures in Ireland, the New World, and (most inauspiciously) France redefined that entity for the second-half of the sixteenth century. Mary’s status as England’s first crowned queen regnant meant that, as Alice Hunt surmised, her early reign “articulates an anxious struggle for meaning, truth, and legitimacy,”65 one that was, significantly, satiated partly by appeals to empire. The queen’s faith was certainly on display— bells rang celebrating her accession, holy oils arrived from Rome for her consecration, “the rites of the old religion” marked her coronation66—yet the same was also true of her imperial status, which Mary amply deployed though it descended from an excommunicated heretic and his son. As contemporaries Richard Taverner and Henry Machyn observed, she was the “moste rightful enheritoure of the crowne imperial of England”67 and “proclamyd qwene of England, France, and Yrland, and alle domy(ni)ons, [as the] syster of the late kyng Edward the vj. and doythur unto the nobull kyng Henry the viij.”68 Included among her first orders of business, alongside appointing her council, calling parliament, and making spiritual promotions, was a note to attend to “Irelande, Calyes, Barwike, and the Bulwarkes.”69 Similarly, Mary soon instructed her Council in the Marches of Wales and did so as “our Sovereign Lady… by the Grace of God Quene of Englande, Fraunce and Ireland, Defender of the Faythe, and, in Earth,

 Hunt, Drama of Coronation, 111.  The Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. John Gough Nichols (London: Camden Society, 1848), 37; Ambassadors in England to Emperor, 9 September 1553, CSPS 11:220; Bishop of Arras to Simon Renard, 13 September 1553, CSPS 11:231; Renard to Prince Philip, 3 October 1553, CSPS 11:262. 67  Taverner, An oration gratulatory… (1553), quoted in Hunt, Drama of Coronation, 121. 68  Machyn Diary, 37. 69  “The State,” [July] 1553, TNA SP 11/1/3, fols. 5r–v, at 5r. See also 4 August 1553, TNA SP 11/1/5, fols. 8r–9v. 65 66

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of the Church of England, and also of Irelande, supreme Hedd.”70 In other words, her kingship was imperial in both senses: first, as Alexander Samson has argued, “Mary’s power over the church of England was as complete as that of her predecessors and even after reunification, legislation ensured that her authority was not abrogated by Rome,” belying “the Protestant dichotomy between Romanism and imperialism.”71 Second, that power was territorially expansive, stretching over multiple realms. This is precisely what those early months showed, with ceremonies laden with symbolism. Upon entering London on 3 August 1553, Mary “took possession of her kingdom,” wearing “violet velvet” as “over a thousand men-at-arms, mounted and on foot, followed her train in their accoutrements of war.”72 Less than two weeks later, her first proclamation called on “her majesty being presently by the only goodness of God settled in her just possession of the imperial crown of this realm” to both declare her obedience to Rome and prohibit “evil-disposed persons, which take upon them, without sufficient authority, to preach and interpret the word of God.”73 On 30 September, the day before her coronation, Mary processed to Whitehall, past a Genoese triumphal arch inscribed, “‘Mariae Reginae inclytae constanter piae coronam britanici Imperii et palmam uirtutis accipienti Genuenses publica salute laetantes cultum optatum tribuunt.’”74 The following day, after carefully examining the coronation oath, she evidently swore as Edward had, “to kepe to the people of Englande and others [her] realmes and dominions” their respective laws and liberties, adding only the phrase “the just and licit laws of England,” and promised to make no new provisions except those “to thonour and glory of God, and to the good of the Commen Wealth” and by her people’s consent.75 She thus preserved her inherited authority, while avoiding any risk of swearing to the reformed religion, clarifying the superiority of the English legal corpus, and protecting it from outside intrusion. One observer remarked on her “having in hir hande a cepter of golde, and in hir other hande a ball of golde, which she twirled and tourned.”76 Others 70  Instructions for Council in the Marches of Wales, 23 November 1553, CP 15/127, fol. 127r. 71  Samson, “Marriage,” 54, 53. 72  Ambassadors in England to Emperor, 6 August 1553, CSPS 11:150. 73  18 August 1553, Tudor Royal Proclamations, II, no. 390. 74  College of Arms MS I 7, quoted in Samson, “Marriage,” 56. 75  Ambassadors to Emperor, 19 September 1553, CSPS 11:240; APC 2:30, 31. 76  The Chronicle of Queen Jane, ed. Nichols (London: Camden Society, 1850), 31.

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specified that she was crowned with “iii corownes to wyt / one kinge Edwards crowne the other the imperiall crowne of this realme of Englande the thiryd a very riche crowne the which was made purposefely for hir grace”—reinterpreted by a Castilian account as “una [corona] del rey de Inglaterra y otra de Francia y otra de Yrlanda.”77 Imperial ambassador Simon Renard stressed that after seven hours of ceremony, the queen spent the banquet “on a stone chair… which they say was carried off from Scotland in sign of a victory, and was once used by the Kings of Scotland at their crowning.”78 From the start, Mary deliberately promoted Tudor imperial right and iconography. The Spanish match furthered this imagery and hastened the processes by which nation and empire were defined as anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic entities, the Irish program was reinvigorated, British interest in the New World grew, and the empire in France fell. The previous reign commanded the beginning of the shift. Northumberland clients warned of Spanish sights on Ireland and successes in the Americas, planted Leix and Offaly, and surrendered Boulogne to end the war. Edward’s “Letters Patent for the Limitation of the Crown,” dated 21 June 1553, gave voice to rising national sentiment and xenophobia, explaining that “yf the said lady Mary or ladie Elizabeth should herafter have and enjoy the said imperiall crowne of this realme, and should then happen to marry with any stranger borne out of this realme, that then the same stranger, havinge the governemente and the imperiall crowne in his hands, would rather adhere and practice to have the lawes and customes of his or their owne native countrey or countreyes to be practised or put in ure within this our realme”; it would subvert the commonwealth and God—the additional “their” a nod to Mary’s own otherness and the likelihood her taking a Spaniard as spouse.79 Courtly correspondence revealed the same: fears that Mary would wed “a foreigner, change the government and ancient laws of the kingdom and introduce new customs and administration” were rampant,80 despite explicit claims to the contrary and anxious assertions that the queen and her leading servants were English natives and thus knew the true feelings

77  College of Arms MS 17, fol. 71r and La Real Biblioteca de San Lorenzo del Escorial MS V. ii. 3, fols. 437r, as quoted in Samson, “Marriage,” 63, 64. 78  Renard to Philip, 3 October 1553, CSPS 11:261. 79  Appendix I, Chronicle Queen Jane, 91–100, at 93. 80  Ambassadors in England to Mary, 24 July 1553, CSPS 11:118.

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of their people.81 Like earlier witnesses, Spaniards observed a sweeping, natural hatred of foreigners among “los britanos apartados son de todo el mundo.”82 Yet instead of directing it toward an Auld enemy or Welsh claimant, this animosity fixed on Spain, the rival represented in the queen’s bloodline and faith. Evincing that evolution, in June 1553 Charles V wrote that the union would be hard, “loathed as all foreigners are by Englishmen”83; in September, Renard informed him that “the English did not at all want his Majesty or his Highness, but would prefer the King of the Romans or the Archduke (Ferdinand), partly because they dreaded the rule of Spaniards and partly for religious reasons.”84 Further, this new hatred had a key imperial strand. Already ensconced in the Holy Roman Empire, the Low Countries, Italy, North Africa, and the Americas, Spain was a competitor as well as a potential conqueror.85 One protestant exile warned, “the bayte is pleasaunt / till the hooke hath taken holde,” as it did in Naples, which “came into the hands of the Spaniardes by a pretensed tytell of mariage”; under the “clooke of amitie” a single “unaduised graunt / may gyue your enemies a knyf / to cut your owne throtes / and disherite your children for euer / and bring England unwares to a most shamefull and perpetuall captiuitie.”86 The politics of gender did not help, encouraging images of the queen being conquered in the bedroom.87 Despite arguments in favor of the match as protection against a French king who had “already seized upon Scotland,”88 Tudor senses of national 81  Instructions by Cardinal Pole, [October or November] 1553, TNA SP 69/1, fols. 146r–149v. 82  Samson, “Marriage,” 76. 83  “Emperor’s instructions to MM. de Courrières, de Thoulouse, and Simon Renard,” 23 June 1553, CSPS 11:64. 84  Renard to Arras, 9 September 1553, CSPS 11:228. 85  Whether Charles and/or Philip had their sights set on expansion across the Channel is debated, see Elton, Reform and Reformation, 381; Glyn Redworth, “‘Matters Impertinent to Women’: Male and Female Monarchy under Philip II,” English Historical Review 112, no. 447 (1997): 597–613. 86  [John Ponet?], A Warnyng for Englande conteynyng the horrible practises of the Kyng of Spayne (Emden: 1555), sigs. A2v, A3r, A2r. 87  Richards, “Mary Tudor as ‘Sole Quene’? Gendering Tudor Monarchy,” Historical Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1997), 895–924. 88  “Events of the Kingdom of England… by Monsignor G.F.  Commendone,” in The Accession, Coronation and Marriage of Mary Tudor as Related in Four Manuscripts of the Escorial, trans. C.V. Malfatti (Barcelona: Sociedad Alianza de Artes Graficas y Ricardo Fontá, 1956), 41. Circular letters for England, Wales, and Ireland gave love, honor, and preservation of the realm as rationales, [22 January] 1554, TNA SP 11/2/6, 8, fols. 8r–9v, 12r–13v.

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and imperial self re-formed around fears, reported by Renard, that “England is to be governed by Spaniards and that the Queen is of Spanish blood.”89 The union was a crucial moment for each side to make its case and respond to the other, amply demonstrating the centrality of national law, religion, and identity as well as imperial sovereignty to these discussions. Publicly proclaimed in January 1554, the marriage treaty allowed Philip “to haue and enioye ionteley together with the said moost noble Quene his wief, the stile honour and kingly name of the Realme and Dominiones unto the said moost noble Quene apperteyning” and aid in administration, yet left Mary wholly responsible for disposing of offices, lands, and revenues, mandated that they go to those “naturalle bourne in the same,” and declared English the language of government business. It also required Philip to take Englishmen into his household, not to innovate English laws and customs nor draw England into war with France, to see the realm (“speciallie the fortes and frontieres”) protected by natives, and to seek consent before carrying his wife, progeny, ships, or munition out of England.90 Yet these measures failed to blunt apprehension that, as one man in Kent put it, “the Spanyardes was comynge in to the Realme with harnes & handgonnes and would make vs Inglishe men wourse then connyes and viler… brought to suche bondage by them as yt was neuer afore but should be vtterly conquered.”91 Within a fortnight, Thomas Wyatt raised his standard at Maidstone and, with co-conspirators including former-­deputy Croft and other veterans of the 1540s wars, rebelled against “a Spanish whore” who imperiled both their Englishness and protestantism.92 In pro-reform regions, they appealed to “Inglyshe hart[s]” to resist “the great and manyfold myseries which are like to fall apon us if we shalbe under the rule of the proude Spanyardes or strangers.”93 By Mary’s  Renard to Emperor, 3 December 1553, CSPS 11:412.  “Draft articles of marriage,” [7 December] 1553, TNA SP 11/1/19, fols. 50r–54v, at 50r, 52v; TRP 2:21–26. 91  Words of William Cotman of Ightham, 23 January 1554, TNA SP 11/2/10(1), fols. 18r–v, at 18r. 92  “The Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae of Robert Wingfield of Brantham,” ed. MacCulloch, Camden Fourth Series 29 (1984): 181–301, at 274. See Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); Malcolm R.  Thorp, “Religion and the Wyatt Rebellion,” Church History 47, no. 4 (December 1978): 363–380; William B. Robison, “The National and Local Significance of Wyatt’s Rebellion in Surrey,” Historical Journal 30, no. 4 (December 1987): 769–790; Samson, “Marriage,” 106–125. 93  Chronicle Queen Jane, 38. 89 90

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r­ endering, “certayn ill disposed persones, meaning vnder the pretence of misliking this mariage to rebelle against the catholique religion & divine service restored within this our realme… sprede many false vile and vntrue reportes of our said cosyn & otheres of that nation… stirring our good and loving subiectes by those and sundry other develisshe wayes” against an unfounded rumor that “the spanyerdes entende to conquer this our Realme.” 94 Charles agreed, assuring Philip that Wyatt rose “under the pretext of not desiring a foreign prince, but the real reason was religion.”95 Notably, Marian councilor Thomas Cheyne (an Edwardian holdover) couched the rebellion in terms of incivility, finding it “more then straunge to see the [rebel’s] beastlynes.”96 Bringing these strands together, the uprising manifested political, xenophobic, and confessional concerns— especially, anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic—giving these enduring sentiments a Marian cast and furthering rhetorics of barbarity. While Wyatt’s execution created a martyr for some, Mary worked to disprove his appeal and cast herself as “a good Englishwoman wholly bent on the kingdom’s welfare.”97 If the alliance was to happen, the crown needed to display dynastic greatness, national independence, and imperial power to rival the Habsburgs. Through 1554, the regime harnessed Henrician and Edwardian example and new theory to precisely these ends. In February, Mary declared herself “wedded to the Realme, and lawes of the same”—words that elevated the sanctity of her nation together with the legal system foundational to it and originated a durable image of British kingship98—and ordered the “deportation of seditious aliens” who “plant, and sow the seeds of their malicious doctrine and lewd conversation among the good subjects of her grace’s realm”—a move against protestants made in the very agricultural terms central to Tudor theory abroad.99 In April, parliament averred that Mary held “all Regal Power, Dignity, Honour, Authority, Prerogative, Preheminence and Jursidictions… in as full, large and ample Manner, as… any other her most noble  Circular letters, January 1554, TNA SP 11/2/7, 8, fols. 10r–13v, at 12r, 10r.  Emperor to Philip, 16 February 1554, CSPS 12:100. For religious and political fears, see Deposition, [February] 1554, TNA SP 11/3/18(i), fols. 49r–v; Council to Wotton, 10 April 1554, TNA SP 69/4/185, fols. 7r–12v. 96  Cheyne to Council, 1 February 1554, TNA SP 11/3/2, fols. 8r–10v, at 8r. 97  Ambassadors in England to Emperor, 2 August 1553, CSPS 11:131. 98  “Oration of Queene Marie in the Guild Hall,” in John Foxe, Actes and monuments (1583), 2:1:1418. See also Levin, Heart and Stomach, 41. 99  TRP 2:31–32. 94 95

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Progenitors, Kings of this Realm” and was equally “Sovereign supream Governor… Possessor and Inheritrix to the Imperial Crown of this Realm” and “the Dominions thereof.” After marriage, she would “as a sole Quene, use have and enioye the Crowne and Soverayntie, of and over [her] Realmes Dominions and Subjectes” as before.100 A crucial moment of continuity partly presided over by Henrician administrator, humanist bishop, and now Lord Chancellor Stephen Gardiner, the acts clarified that regardless of religion, gender, or spouse, Mary was imbued with the same power legislated in the 1530s and extended in the 1540s. Further bills passed that year carefully repealed laws contrary to the “See Apostolike during the said Schisme, the whiche is to be understande since the xxti yere of the Raigne of the said late King Henrie theight” and re-established papal authority only insofar as it did not “derogate empaire or diminishe any of the Prerogatives Liberties Franchises Preheminences or Jurisdiccions of yor Crowne Imperiall of this Realme, and other the Dominions to the same belonging.”101 Reinforcing those statements, Philip was not crowned King of England and all dissolved church lands and revenues did not simply revert to Rome.102 As orchestrated by Mary, her court, and her parliaments, neither Spanish marriage nor Catholic restoration were inimical to or subversive of Tudor empire. Evoking comparison to “their noble progenitours” (and empire-­ builders) Ferdinand and Isabella,103 the pair wed in July at Winchester Cathedral—the site of their fathers’ visit to Arthur’s Round Table thirty years earlier—then processed through London to great pomp. Displaying Eden-esque pragmatism, Wooings theorist John Elder made an apparent about-face in confession, but not in cause, evidently abandoning protestantism and lauding the marriage as an expression of and argument for Tudor British empire.104 Now tutor to Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, 100  1 Mar., st. 3, c. 1 and c. 2, Statutes of Realm, 4:1:222–226, at 222, 225. See also J.D. Alsop, “The Act for the Queen’s Regal Power, 1554,” Parliamentary History 13, no. 3 (1994): 261–276; Beem, Lioness Roared. 101  1 & 2 Phil. & Mar. c. 8, Statutes of Realm, 4:1:246–254, at 253. 102  Federico Badoer, Venetian Ambassador with Emperor, to Doge and Senate, 27 October 1555 and 19, 26, 28 April 1556, CSPV 6:257, 460, 464, 465. See also William Wizeman, “The Religious Policy of Mary I,” in Mary Tudor, ed. Doran and Freeman, 153–170; Duffy, Fires of Faith, especially 26–28. 103  Wotton to Philip and Mary, 10 August 1554, TNA SP 69/5, fols. 8r–11v, at 8r. 104  Armitage, “Ideological Origins,” 38; Marcus Merriman, “Elder, John (fl. 1533–1565), ODNB, 2005.

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descendant of both James II and Henry VII, Elder detailed the celebratory pageantry in August and Westminster speeches in November for his pupil’s kin. He described how Philip left his own realms “to strengthen hir most noble grace, and to enriche her empyre of Englande,” where their “armes joined in one, under one crown emperial” to the glee of “faithful and unfained hertes… [who] prayed unto Almightye God longe to lyve, rule, and reygne over their most noble empyre of Englande.”105 He highlighted the new royal style that listed Mary’s holdings first, her dominant positioning to the right of Philip, and her claims to Ireland and Britain, noting the “unnaturall warres betwixt… Englande and Scotlande.”106 He sketched the tableaux that greeted them, like the Galfridian figures who welcomed Philip as “O noble Prince, sole hope of Caesar’s side, By God apointed all the worlde to gyde [imperium totius destinat orbis]… Britayne yeldeth the hir hand, And noble England openeth her bosome” and aged Edward III who lay with a “close crowne on his head, and a sceptour in his ryght hand, and a ball imperial in his lefte,” beneath a family tree showing how both bride and groom descended from him.107 Perhaps Elder relished one stage that he did not rehearse: Henry VIII holding a book labeled “Verbum Dei,” which earned the creator, protestant printer-­ historian Richard Grafton, a scolding from Gardiner as a “traytour… [to] the quenes catholicke proceedinges.”108 Even marred by confused messaging, the displays unequivocally asserted the British and imperial dimensions of Tudor rule. “England,” Elder wrote, had finally been delivered “from so many outragious stormes of errours, cares, and calamities, are thus called home agayne to the sure haven and porte of the most holy catholyke faythe… to the glorye of God, the wealth of Englande, and to the perpetuall peace, love, and quietnes of this moste noble and hole yle of Britayn.” Under Philip and Mary, “the whole body of thys noble empire of England and dominions of the same” could be restored.109 The events of 1554 naturalized Philip and heralded a Catholic, Habsburg-aided Tudor British imperialism in humanist and missionary terms reminiscent of 1540s discourse—with the obvious caveat of their religious slant. As Winchester verses announced, “the Devil… did not wish that the English  Appendix X: John Elder’s Letter, Chronicle Queen Jane, 136–166, at 163, 150, 151.  “Elder’s Letter,” 137, 142, 146, 156, 137. 107  “Elder’s Letter,” 146, 149. 108  Chronicle Queen Jane, 78, 79. 109  “Elder’s Letter,” 164, 165, 160. 105 106

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Queen Mary marry English Philip… but God, the provident hope of the English did wish it. The fierce Gallic lands and inhospitable Scotland would not want it, but Caesar and Italy and Flanders will wish it.”110 Others found signs of foreboding. Elder noted the sheer size of the Spanish retinue, Foxe read one pageant as turning Philip into Orpheus and “all Englishe people resembled to brute & sauage beastes following after Orpheus harpe, and daunsing after king Philips pipe,” and many noticed how images of Mary with royal robes, imperial crown, and roses were replaced by those of her alongside Greek columns or other Habsburg markers.111 From 1554, coinage—that major iconographical canvas—ominously positioned Philip to Mary’s right, both under a single domed crown, and illuminated plea rolls and charters followed suit.112 Writing to Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger, Anne Hooper (wife of John) referred acerbically to that “English coin, on which are the effigies of Ahab and Jezebel”; others worried that the crowns appeared above, but not atop, either head and that the pieces treated Philip “as if he were king of England in dead.”113 In September 1554, Renard reported hearing complaints that foreigners “are making Englishmen feel strangers in their own homes” and fearful that “they are going to be enslaved, for the Queen is a Spanish woman at heart and thinks nothing of Englishmen.”114 Fears turned into plots to ensure that “no straunger shall have the crowne,” even after Philip vowed to “accept the services of natives… and favour them as if I were an Englishman born” and steer any minority according to ancient law and custom and from England.115 Indeed, Philip was exerting some influence on state and foreign policy. He sat with the council (which required “all matters of Estate” be noted in Latin or Spanish and bear his signature), 110  Appendix XII: Verses by Winchester Scholars, Chronicle Queen Jane, 172–174, trans. Samson, “Marriage,” 232. 111  “Elder’s Letter,” 137; Foxe, Actes and monuments, 2:1:1472; Richards, “Gendering Tudor Monarchy,” 903; Joanna Woodall, “An Exemplary Consort: Antonis Mor’s Portrait of Mary Tudor,” Art History 14, no. 2 (June 1991): 192–224. 112  Richards, “Gendering Tudor Monarchy,” 916–917. 113  Hooper to Bullinger, 11 April 1555, Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, ed. Hastings Robinson, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1846), 1:114–115, at 115; A supplicacyon to the quenes maiestie (1555), 23v–24r; The lamentacion of England (1557), 10. 114  Renard to Emperor, 18 September 1554, CSPS 13:60. 115  “Deposition of William Crowe,” 11 May 1556, TNA SP 11/8/70, fols. 117r–v, at 117r (for others, see March-April 1556, TNA SP 11/7/52, 56 and 11/8/35, 52); Philip to Renard, 16 February 1554, CSPS 12:104; “Memoranda,” [before 14 January] 1555, TNA SP 11/5/1, 2, fols. 1r–3v.

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attended parliament, and established a “select council” to keep him abreast of things—all facilitated by Mary, who directed her men to “tell the Kinge the whole state of this Realme,” “obey hys comandment,” and advise him as “a faythfull counceyllour,” and to the ire of critics, who saw English sovereignty, strength, and language erode.116 Though Philip’s departure and Mary’s infertility suggested their ephemerality and futility, the changes fueled anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic feeling, stoked the Black Legend of cruelty and deception, stimulated overseas projects, and determined their course. In Ireland, the Americas, and France, the consort’s designs merged powerfully with his queen’s own aspirations and inheritances, their domestic and international concerns inseparably twinned. The first crucial area in which separate royal interests combined to transcend national bounds was the ecclesiastical sphere, where the couple worked to realign England, Wales, and Ireland with Rome—a particularly significant move for that last holding. By Mary’s own admission, her subjects’ “return to the obedience of Holy Church and the Catholic faith… was largely obtained thanks to the wise guidance of [Philip],”117 who helped broker the reconciliation and secure a landmark bull in June 1555. In it, Paul IV reasserted papal right to donate Ireland, raised it to kingdom status, reinvested it in English hands, and granted Philip and Mary the title of King and Queen of Ireland that an excommunicated Henry VIII had seized in 1541, a heretical Edward VI had persisted in using, and even a Catholic Mary had employed from the start.118 Symbolically meaningful and practically useful, the bull lent external validation to Tudor rule in a 116  APC 5:53; “Things done in council since the beginning of September,” 1555, TNA SP 11/6/18, fols. 27r–v; “Instructions for my lorde Previsel,” [1554?] BL Cotton Vesp. F.III., fol. 23r. See also “Instructions given by the King and Queen,” 30 May 1555, SP 69/6, fols. 108r–110v; “Directions of Q. Mary,” 29 August 1555, BL Cotton Tit. B/II, fols. 160r–161v; Philip to Council, 15 October 1555, TNA SP 11/6/30; Hoak, “Two Revolutions in Tudor Government: The Formation and Organisation of Mary I’s Privy Council,” in Revolution Reassessed, ed. Christopher Coleman and Starkey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 87–115; Loades, “Philip II and the Government of England,” in Law and Government Under the Tudors, ed. Cross, Loades, and Scarisbrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 177–194; Redworth, “Matters Impertinent”; Kamen, Philip of Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Harry Kelsey, Philip of Spain, King of England: The Forgotten Sovereign (London: I.B.  Tauris, 2012); Geoffrey Parker, Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 117  Mary to Emperor, 7 December 1554, CSPS 13:125. 118   “Ireland Declared a Kingdom (1555),” in “Miscellanea Vaticano-Hibernica, 1420–1630,” ed. J. Hagan, Archivium Hibernicum 4 (1915), 215–318, at 217.

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crucial part of its empire, enabling the crown to advance its program in an island that, as the pope suggested, England could not be induced to quit.119 Some early indications for Marian success in Ireland were promising. According to protestant bishop of Ossory John Bale, word of Edward’s death inspired “the blasphemouse blyndenesse and wylfull obstinancie of thys beastly papyst [Thomas Hothe]” and his “wicked” Irish clergy to resume “the whole papisme or heape of supersticions of the bishop of Rome,” as “ye ruffianes of ye wilde nacyon not only rebelled against the English captaines… but also they conspired into the very deathes of so many English men and women as were left therin alyue.”120 Renard reported in late 1553 that “the wild Irish are submitting and saying they wish to obey the Queen.”121 Peter Vannes, an Italian humanist diplomat who remarkably managed to retain Tudor favor from 1526 to 1563, wrote in fuller detail, “the beginning of some accustomed rebellion stirred by the savage people of Ireland… [proved] to be of a greater moment then it was in dede,” thanks to “the good provision that the Quenes matie had made for the quenching of the same, and that ther tumulte were grounded vpon no likelyhode, strength, or power.” He was certain that her “prosperous successe,” “good quiete and tranquillitie” in that kingdom were “vndoubtedly like to continue from good to better.”122 She certainly had ideological help. Looking to explain shows of loyalty or optimism and legitimize intervention, Marian supporters appealed to a story that had (and would again) be used to justify anti-Tudor efforts, re-­ appropriating it to promote Tudor involvement in Ireland. As historian Florian de Ocampo rehearsed it in 1553, years ago “King Brigo of Spain settled inhabitants on a large island, which is now called Ireland”; to this day, the Irish treat Spaniards well and claim Spanish descent.123 Indeed, a version of this myth provoked one Anglo-Irishman to pen a new treatise on the causes and redress of Irish disorder just as the marriage took place, signifying the event’s importance for Ireland and for engendering new imperial activity. “I am imboldened,” he began, “by this most happy mat[ing] which restored devine and hummayn lawes to this prystyne and perfit estate to say vnto the my native contry Ireland reyoyce and be gladd,  “Out of the History of the Council of Trent,” 1554, Cal Carew 1:205.  Bale, The vocacyon of Ioha[n] Bale (1553), 22v, 23r–v, 27r. 121  Renard to Emperor, 3 December 1553, CSPS 11:412. 122  Vannes to Council, 3 November 1553, TNA SP 69/2, fols. 2r–5v, at 2v–3r. 123  de Ocampo, Los Cinco Libros primeros de la Cronica general de España (Medina del Campo, 1553), quoted in Samson, “Marriage,” 82 (my translation). 119 120

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and thinke veryly that nowe thy wrathfull dayes shall haue amende throughe the helping hand of the most worthy philipeprince of Spayne who to his ymortall fame shall [make] of the more renowne then euer did his cuntryman hibernius of whom thou tokest first thy name hibernia.” The new monarchs of England—to whose “empyrall crowne and dignitie” Ireland “doth of right belong” by conquest, statute, free acknowledgment of the people, and “diuers other strong auncyent titles”—could bring the realm out of its miserably uncivil, unjust, and ungodly state and restore its fruitfulness.124 Drawing together an agricultural metaphor of severing “weedes from the clene corne,” references to Cicero and humanist discourse, patriotic sentiment for the “natyve cuntry,” and a history lesson in the first paragraph alone, the anonymous author next recounted how Henry II, “a prince fare befor other in amplyfeng the domyniones of England,” had made his “entry into a goodly cuntry cut and mangled emong asorte of wild and savag people” and settled the land, but over time, the Anglo-Irish “forgote that they were seruantes” and fell into such dissension, greed, and injustice that the land was impoverished and ruined.125 Their savior was Henry VIII, with his new title (king), deputy (St. Leger), and policy (surrender and regrant), yet even those gains were stymied by continued use of “Irish ordre and laweles manner of lyvinng,” bad soldiers, and “slandrous lyes of poore Ireland.”126 The path forward, the writer contended, was to abandon the Statutes of Kilkenny, extend mercy toward rebels, integrate Irish with English, let the former grasp the benefits of civil English rule and the latter exemplify its benefits, and maintain a garrison, subsidy, and multi-tiered administration.127 Here was not only a dissenting opinion from John Alen, whose less interventionist, devolved approach the author refuted, but a departure too from Walshe. Pale thought was diverse and evolving, the “Treatise” a moral, political, and social plea for Tudor-Habsburg reform and rule over abandonment, invasion, or plantation.128 In fact, the crown was already taking action, Marian policy no simple reversion to status quo ante Reformation.

124  “Treatise for the Reformation of Ireland,” [1554–1555?], CP 201/116, fols. 116r–123v, at 116r–v. 125  “Treatise,” fol. 117r. 126  “Treatise,” fols. 117v–118r, at 118r. 127  “Treatise,” fols. 119r–120v. 128  See also Brendan Bradshaw, ‘And so began the Irish Nation’: Nationality, National Consciousness and Nationalism in Pre-Modern Ireland (London: Routledge, 2016), 295–311.

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In October 1553, Mary reappointed George Dowdall to the archbishopric of Armagh (his benefice before his voluntarily continental exile rather than suffer no mass under Edward) and Irish council.129 In him, Mary found a Henrician Catholic—unmarried, amenable to the supremacy, and comfortable with her authority as “Queen of England, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and on earth Supreme Head of the Churches of England and Ireland”—and she restored Dowdall as “primate of all Ireland” soon after.130 Such patronage was a telling flex of imperial muscle, demonstrating royal prerogative and jurisdiction abroad well before the bull and reminiscent of her father’s moves in Tournai and Ireland even before the break. It was also accompanied by another reappointment, secular and spiritual never far apart in Tudor empire: Dowdall landed in November alongside his new and former deputy, St. Leger, whose policies, experience, rumored Catholicism, and mutable fidelity in the Eden-Elder mold must have made up for his service to Northumberland. The queen’s instructions laid out an active administration to restore the religion “now begonne again within this our Realme of England,” diminish costs, install a council in Munster, reduce Leinster, plant Leix and Offaly, and eliminate coign and livery. In ruling “our loving subiectes there,” Mary at once disrupted the growing association among barbarity, disobedience, and Catholicism apparent since the mid-1530s and resuscitated familiar Henrician and Edwardian personnel, policy, and theory.131 Dowdall and St. Leger confirmed Tudor empire in Ireland, exported its program of national consolidation and reform, and furthered Anglicization across the Irish Sea. With crown direction and commissioners, they strove to inculcate Catholic doctrine, liturgy, and ceremony, and extinguish heretical alternatives, especially married or non-English-speaking clergy and Gaelic custom. Moreover, they did so via the same authorities and similar methods as 1530s and 1540s reformers—royal supremacy, 129  “From the Queen to the Lord Deputy,” in Calendar of the Patent and Close Rolls of Chancery in Ireland, of the Reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth, ed. James Morrin, 2 vols. (Dublin: 1861), 1:300–304, at 301–302; Browne to Warwick, 6 August 1551, TNA SP 61/3/45. 130  “From the Lords of the Council in England to their loving friends the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen’s Highness’s realm of Ireland, and the rest of the Council there,” Cal Patents Ireland, 1:304–305, at 304; “Grant to George, Archbishop of Armagh,” Cal Patent Ireland, 1:315. 131  Instructions from Mary to St. Leger and council, [October] 1533, TNA SP 62/1/2, fols. 3r–8v, at 3r.

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legislation (including a great deal imported from Westminster), the printing press, visitations, appointments, oathing, studied distribution of land (some of it secularized church land), and appeals to “the glory of God and advancement of his service and holy worde”—but toward another confessional end.132 Indeed, as James Murray has shown, Dowdall sought not only “to restore the externals of the old religion but to recreate the full historical and avowedly English Irish cultural context in which that religion had traditionally existed and from which it had derived its full meaning” and likely played a “pivotal” role in the 1555 confirmation.133 The return to Catholicism in Ireland, then, was more complicated than medieval reversion, Henrician restoration, or Tridentine counterreformation, and it adhered closely to the broader Tudor context—a point made equally apparent in the second pillar of the regime’s program: plantation. In Marian imperial thought, Catholic revival and colonial settlement were two sides of the same coin, both geared toward propagating a superior, albeit redefined, English way and championed by the same personnel. Hamstringing the English tongue, rule, habit, and power, Dowdall described in a crown-solicited report, the “wylde Irishe” lived without law, obedience, or tillage, “the Pryde and Ravenous behaviour of their fforefathers… soe prynted in their Hartes, that neyther by Preachinge good Counsayle, good example, or yett by any good meane” could change it. Moreover, at present “the ffortes, of Lese and Offaylie” were but costly charges, “in like manner as Bullaigne”—a choice appeal to Henrician-­ Edwardian failure in France. “The most godlye waye of refformacon, and the most proffitable, and Comodious” the archbishop argued, was to subdue or banish the “barbarous people”—a papal right, as chronicles declared—and see “Englishe Subtes to be Planted in their Landes.”134 From the court’s perspective, a second conquest was unfeasible; the 132  Mary and Philip to St. Leger, Cusack, and council, 18 and 23 February 1554, Cal Patent Ireland, 1:327–329, at 327. Interestingly, several appointments and grants were made in explicit appreciation of service rendered, trustworthiness shown, and experience gained under her father and brother, see Mary to St. Leger and Cusack, 16 October 1553, 13 December 1553, and 1 June 1554, Cal Patent Ireland, 1:300, 317, 337. 133  Murray, Enforcing the Reformation, 219. 134  Dowdall, “Opinion Toucheinge Irelande,” July 1558, BL Harl. MS 35, fols. 195r–204v, in “The Archbishop of Armachane’s Opinion touchinge Ireland,” ed. Thomas Gogarty, Journal of the County Louth Archeological Society 2, no. 2 (September 1909): 149–164, at 156, 154, 156, 158, 156. He also penned “Articles submitted to the Privy Council by the Primate of Armagh,” 30 May 1558, TNA SP 62/2/44, fols. 89r–102v.

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­ revious decade’s plantation scheme, however, was, even if limited funds, p poor health, and lingering accusations of malfeasance meant that after April 1556, St. Leger was no longer the deputy to do it.135 Tellingly, Mary replaced him with Thomas Radcliffe (soon third Earl of Sussex), a veteran of Tudor empire-building knighted by her father at Boulogne in 1554, with Somerset at Pinkie in 1547, and dispatched as an envoy to Charles and Philip in 1554.136 The choice offers a unique glimpse into past, present, and future: the first English earl in the post since Surrey, Sussex was a call on experience and to active reform via an influx of money and troops as well as new English officials, institutions, and plantation; his elevation may have owed to Philip’s input and a desire to introduce Spanish-style colonial governance into Ireland—notions that Quinn, Brady, and Redworth have entertained; and it brought in Henry Sidney, a long-time servant and companion to Edward VI and son-in-law to Northumberland who managed an early pardon from Mary, and now Sussex’s brother-in-law, the realm’s new vice-treasurer, and later a major player in Elizabethan Ireland.137 Instructed first to advance “the true Catholic faith and religion now by God’s great goodness and special grace recovered in our realms of England and Ireland,” Philip and Mary (in that order) recycled earlier theory to declare English law and justice the principal means to protect “our possessions, regalities, rights, duties, and obeisance” and control its ports, mines, woods, and commodities that can be “vented out to foreign parts” the key to “great profit” there.138 The crown 135  “Reasons for the Repair of Lord Deputy Sentleger into England,” [April 1556], TNA SP 62/1/10. 136  MacCaffrey, “Radcliffe, Thomas, third Earl of Sussex (1526/7–1583),” ODNB, 2008. 137  Quinn, “Ireland and Sixteenth-Century European Expansion,” Historical Studies 1 (1958): 20–32; Brady, Chief Governors, 68; Redworth, “Matters Impertinent,” 605; “Notes of Remembrance,” [April 1556], TNA SP 62/1, fols. 34r–35Av; “Commission of Philip and Mary granting to Sir Henry Sydney the office of Vice-Treasurer and Receiver General of Ireland,” 27 April 1556, TNA SP 62/1, fols. 36r–49v; “A present remedy for Reformation of the North and the Rest of Ireland,” 1556, TNA SP 62/1, fols. 50r–v; “Orders for Leix,” TNA SP 62/1, fols. 62r–63v; “Orders for the holding of the English that shall be placed in Leix,” 1556, TNA SP 62/1, fols. 64r–65v; “The consignation of Leix,” 1556, TNA SP 62/1, fols. 66r–67v; “Thomas Radeclyff Lord Fitzwauter,” 2 January 1557, TNA SP 62/1, fols. 69r–70v; “Opinions of Lord Fylzwauter on the above articles,” 1557, TNA SP 62/1, fols. 72r–74v; “Instructions to the Earl of Sussex,” 20 March 1558, TNA SP 62/1, fols. 51r–56v. 138  “Instructions to Lord Fitzwalter, Deputy, and the Council,” 28 April 1556, Cal Carew, 1:206.

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expressed its particular hope to see Leix and Offaly (and eventually all Ireland) shired after the English fashion, then divided in three and planted on English terms: the western one-third conditionally reassigned to Irishmen if they submitted to Tudor authority, upheld English law, lived continuously on limited plots, paid rent, labored, came when summoned, kept out of the woods, did not stockpile weapons or intermarry with the Scots, and lived in stone or timber houses; the remaining two-thirds divided between the forts and English subjects, Old as well as New, so long as they also paid rent, upheld much of what was required of mere Irish, and kept at least one man of English birth and no more than one of Irish birth per ploughland. Additional land gained in Leinster, Ulster, and elsewhere would be allocated on an English-to-Irish-born ratio of 2:1, assuming the deputy had faith in their good service and loyalty.139 It was a rather detailed plot, one that asserted the importance of turning uncultivated, empty, and unprofitable land (as Sussex reported upon his arrival) into permanent dwellings on an English model and that connected agricultural to political, social, religious, and economic improvement.140 Under Mary, Anglicization, othering, consolidation, and the promotion of empire were at work at home as well as abroad, with efforts in one reflecting and supporting those in the other, as it had under earlier Tudors. Yet experience had tempered expectations, as the space afforded non-­ English-­born subjects illustrates. Philip and Mary were developing an already-extant imperial dialogue. For the most part, the plan remained just that. Sussex’s first move was actually against “the wylde Skottes” in Antrim, targeted due to fear that they might be a boon to Auld Alliance scheming.141 In Leix and Offaly, the O’Mores and O’Connors rejected the one-third offer and rebelled in December, incurring Sussex’s wrath, who executed or exiled those he could. Though this seemed to quell the immediate threat, costly violence resurged, prompting Dowdall to complain in mid-November 1557, “this pore Realme… was never in my Remembraunce in worse case then it is

139   Orders for Planting Leix and Offaly, [May? 1556], quoted in Dunlop, “Plantation,” 67–68. 140  Sussex to Mary, 2 January 1557, TNA SP 62/1/22(ii). 141  Mason to Earl of Devon, 29 March 1556, TNA SP 11/7/40, fols. 78r–79v, at 79r. See also Wotton to Council, 4 November 1553, TNA SP 69/2/66, fols. 12r–23v; “Journey made by the Earl of Sussex,” 8 August 1556, TCD MS 1087, fols. 121r–139v; Council Summary, [April?] 1556, TNA SP 11/9/35.

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nowe.”142 Still the crown’s project pushed ahead, if only legislatively. As instructed, Sussex called parliament, which opened in June 1557 and promptly adopted a tone inflected by recent events. The body declared that since Leix and Offaly “belong of right to the King and Queen’s most excellent majesties” had, by Sussex, been returned to their possession, it should now be planted by “good men,” not only as “a great strength to those quarters, but also a wonderfull assurance of quiet to all the rest of the English countries, and a great terror to all Irish.” In a sizeable donation of power and departure from the 1556 scheme, Sussex was authorized to “graunt to all and everie their Majesties subjects, English or Irish, borne within this realme, or within the realme of England” land in the territory, “for the more sure planting and strength of the countries with good subjects.”143 Then, after praising Edward for first subduing and possessing the region, Fort Governor was renamed “Mary Burgh” and Fort Protector “Philippeston,” and Leix proclaimed to be hereafter “a countie or shire” called “Queen’s County” and Offaly “King’s countie.”144 Finally, the meeting indicated more to come by cementing royal authority. Threading the needle as it had in England, parliament rescinded only those religious reforms not contrary or prejudicial to “the Queene being supreem governesse, possessour, and inheritrix to the imperiall crowne of this realme,” which persists “in as full, lardge, and ample maner, as it haith done heretofore to any outher her moost noble grogenitors [sic].”145 Though unrest on the ground meant that they did not translate into much and the few settlers were harried, these measures reveal a commitment to colonization, to naming as a symbol of possession, and to explicitly imperial power (over church and state, and over a territorially expansive realm of multiple kingdoms) central to Mary’s mid-Tudor empire. Here was where Sidney and another Sussex kinsman William Fitzwilliam cut their Irish teeth, serving beneath a frequently absent governor. The queen’s imperial monarchy, her and her subjects’ ambitions, and, especially, the dynastic union also encouraged transitions in Tudor 142  Dowdall to Nicholas Heath and Privy Council, 17 November 1557, TNA SP 62/1/61, fols. 172r–173v, at 172r. 143  “Act for the Disposition of Leix and Offalie,” Statutes at Large, 1:240–241. 144  “Act whereby the King and Queen’s Majesties…be entituled to the Countries of Leix, Slewmarge, Irry, Glinmaliry, and Offaily…,” Statutes at Large 1:241–244. For grants that followed, see TCD MS 808, fols. 2r–15r. 145  “Act declarynge that the Regall Power of this Realme is in the Queene’s Majestie…,” Statutes at Large 1:[8–9], at [9].

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approaches to the New World, bolstering interest, exposing new models and motives, and isolating Spain as its chief adversary in constructing an empire. From the moment of Philip’s arrival in England, the wealth and grandeur of his family’s vast Atlantic domain was on display. Son of the “Inuictissimo Carlos Maximo Emperador Cesar Augusto,” as the Merchant Staplers lauded him in 1549, Philip landed with over 100 ships, rare goods, Mediterranean luxuries, and precious metals, generating a mix of fear, envy, and inspiration among onlookers.146 As Renard wrote, English merchants were not sure whether the alliance “intended to enrich foreigners by opening the gates of the country to them and impoverish its unfortunate inhabitants” or “would mean riches and advantages for them rather than poverty, because navigation would be safer and trade freer.”147 This ambivalence, coupled with royal desire to mitigate it, opened space for Edwardian clients to operate. In 1555, Eden and Cabot capitalized on the marriage to continue their work from 1553, once more reminding Tudor subjects of the tantalizing prospect of American adventure and their latent claims there, highlighting English inadequacy by comparison to Spain, and provoking a knotty process of emulating and competing with the Habsburg Empire.148 Eden’s Decades forged existing travel narratives, British and Spanish, together to stroke royal egos and arm English-­ language readers with arguments for overseas adventure, eulogizing exploration for its divine sanction, biblical roots, classical manifestations, and contemporary value. In an artful balancing act, he capitalized on the rhetoric used to smooth over the Anglo-Spanish match as well as the national sentiment that arose in response to at once extol Habsburg imperialism and incite Tudor competition. Spaniards had done a great deal, Eden recounted, yet so too had Englishmen like Willoughby and Chancellor, “men doubtlesse woorthye for theyr noble attemptes to bee made knightes of the Ocean” and immortalized for having “aduentured theyr lyues for the commoditie of theyr countrey.”149 Then there was Cabot, who had sailed from England before he did so from Spain, uncovering stores of fish (vital for a newly Catholic kingdom) and evidence of 146  J.C.  Calvete de Estrella, El felicissimo Viaje d’el muy alto y muy poderoso Pincipe Don Phelippe, quoted in Samson, “Marriage,” 79; “Letter relating Philip’s voyage,” July 1554, CSPS, 13:11; “Elder’s Letter,” 137–138. 147  Renard to Charles, 8 November 1553, CSPS 11:347–348. 148  From Mary’s accession, Cabot tried to play the alliance and his relationship with both sides to his advantage, see Charles to Mary, 9 September 1553, TNA SP 69/1, fols. 66r–v. 149  Eden, Decades, sigs. a.i.r–d.iii.v, at d.ii.v.

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passage East, plus swaths of fertile land still unplanted and unpossessed by Christians.150 Meanwhile, Philip and Mary considered the petition crafted by these very mariners under Edward VI. A practical adjunct to Eden’s tract, Cabot’s Company promised to discover unknown lands to the north, northwest, northeast, or any route not frequented by Christian monarchies, “for the glory of god as for the illustrating of our honour and dignitie Royall, the encrease of the reuenues of our Crowne and generall wealth of this and other our Realmes and Dominions and of our subiects of the same.”151 Both projects were successful: the syndicate (later the Russia or Muscovy Company) received its patent and planned its next voyage, with Cabot governor-for-life and license to fill and govern their ranks, sail under and plant the royal flag in “newly found” lands, and “subdue possesse and occupie all maner cities, townes, Isles, and mainlandes of Infidelitie… as our vassals and subiects,” reserving “dominion title and jurisdiction” to the crown152; Eden received a treasury post.153 Both were also part and parcel of a broader shift: from 1555 and partly due to Philip’s suggestions and Habsburg models, the crown worked to ramp-up shipbuilding and boost trade, including to the North Atlantic. Led by the new Mary Rose and Philip and Mary, filled out by the equally symbolic Lyon, Grayhonde, Barke of Bulloyne, Double Roose, Flower de Lyse and others, the Tudor navy and shipping was significantly strengthened by mid-1558.154 Part of the success of Cabot’s suit and Eden’s Decades, then, was their two-fold  Eden, Decades, 118v–119r, 104r.  Letters Patent, 26 February 1555, TNA SP 11/5/4, fols. 8r–17v, at 9r. 152  Patent, 26 February 1555, TNA SP 11/5/4, fol. 14v. Philip and Mary to Ivan IV, April 1557, TNA SP 69/10, fols. 84r–88v, 90r–93v, called sea voyaging a godly means to increase Catholicism and profit. 153  Hadfield, “Eden.” 154  Declaration, [after 24 December] 1554, TNA SP 11/4/36; Memorials, 1555, TNA SP 11/6/19; Mason to Wotton, 17 December 1555, TNA SP 69/7, fols. 134r–138v; Deposition of William Draper, 11 March 1556, TNA SP 11/7/17; Council Resolution, 8 January 1557, TNA SP 11/10/1; “List of Ships,” [13 July] 1557, TNA SP 11/11/35; “Ships thought meet,” 22 May 1558, TNA SP 11/13/11(i); “Council to certain ports,” [13] July 1557, TNA SP 11/11/38; Mary to Cheyne, 3 June 1558, TNA SP 11/13/23. See also Thomas Glasgow, Jr., “Maturing of Naval Administration, 1556–1564,” Mariner’s Mirror 56 (1970): 3–26; Loades and Knighton, ed., The Navy of Edward VI and Mary I (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011); Benjamin W.D.  Redding, “English Naval Expansion under the French Threat, 1555–1564,” International Journal of Maritime History 28, no. 4 (November 2016): 640–653. 150 151

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appeal—to a court inclined toward maritime enterprise and to a readership apprehensive that the crown had brought the British Isles into Spanish-­ Catholic orbit eager to “draw money out of the kingdom and spend it elsewhere, or change their form of government and promulgate new laws; give office to foreigners and set them to govern the country, or draw the English into war, through the alliance, and set the land in confusion.”155 That both men could land their pitches testifies to the Marian regime’s wide imperial gaze, even if priorities at and closer to home (Catholic reform, Ireland, and soon France) ultimately eclipsed American voyaging. Much like Leland before them, Eden and Cabot helped chart the geographical and ideological course that Elizabethans would take abroad, drawing on history and myth, building the empire with an eye to Europe, all with a changed, matured sense of self. More immediately, however, their contributions were stunted. Allegations of heresy forced Eden to resign in late 1555, Cabot died in 1557, and Tudor foreign policy hinged inauspiciously on the continent. * * * The length and nature of Mary’s reign meant that when Elizabeth ascended the throne and exiles returned to court, individuals and ideas were in place to foster experimentation and growth, at home and abroad. In the new Elizabethan narrative, this was the way out of a half-decade of heretical alien rule, debt, dishonor, and death. From that perspective, one event, in particular, symbolized rock-bottom and became a singular mid-­ Tudor watershed and touchstone: the 1558 loss of Calais. Repeatedly and from the first, Mary had affirmed her commitment to peace with France—in keeping with what her advisors, treaties, and public desired, against what her Habsburg kin (embroiled in war with the Valois since 1551) hoped and what her detractors (including Wyatt’s rebels) expected.156 Equally, she was uncompromising in defense of England, Calais, and Catholicism—all allegedly jeopardized by France and “develishe ymaginaciones” persisting there.157 Susceptible to manipulation and  Renard to Philip, 3 October 1553, CSPS 11:263.  Council to Wotton, 7, 28 December 1553, TNA SP 69/2/95, 115; Wotton to Petre, 26 January 1554, TNA SP 69/3/139; Deposition, [February] 1554, TNA SP 11/3/18(i). 157  Philip and Mary to William Paulet, 22 May 1557, TNA SP 11/10/61/2, fols. 74r–v, at 74r. See also Council to Wotton, 10 April 1554, TNA SP 69/4/185; Mason to Mary, 12 May 1554, TNA SP 69/4/203; Wotton to Council, 12 December 1554, TNA SP 155 156

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perhaps always incompatible, these interests reached a breaking point in June 1557 and England entered the Franco-Imperial fight, much as it had in 1513, lending military, naval, and privateering support to Philip for “annoyance of thennemyes” and uniting Grey, Wyatt, and Mary devotees against their Auld adversaries.158 The outcome was quite unlike the earlier iteration, however. Whereas Henry and Maximilian had seized Thérouanne then Tournai, Mary and Philip’s forces took Saint-Quentin in August then disastrously lost Calais, the queen’s self-espoused “chief Jewell of our Realme,” in January 1558.159 She died before the year was out. In the hands of Elizabethan observers, the two events were linked, the loss of England’s sole surviving foothold in France imbued with a power and significance inordinate to its practical or strategic value. Grafton explained that news of Calais, held by “kings of Englande two hundred. xj. yeres… lost within lesse then. viij. dayes,” hit Mary hard: “so muche touched in honor by the losse of her sayd towne and possessions on that side the sea, as shee counted her life yrksome, vntill the same were eyther recouered agayne, or the losse redubbled with some like victory agaynst the French elsewhere”; when those efforts failed, “and considering also that most of her affayres had but hard successe, [she] conceaued an inwarde sorrowe of minde, by reason wherof about September next shee fell siek of a hote burning Feuer” and succumbed.160 William Camden simply described, 69/5/300; Mason to Mary, 11 April 1555, TNA SP 69/6/344; Wotton to Mary, 20 October, 12 November, 30 November 1556, TNA SP 69/9/550, 556, 559; Council to Philip, [22] November 1556, TNA SP 11/9/50; Notes by Wotton, [before 4] April 1557, TNA SP 69/10/237; Mary to Wotton, 27 April 1557, TNA SP 69/10/593; Instructions to William Howard, 29 May 1557, TNA SP 11/10/64–65; Mary to [?], [9 August] 1557, TNA SP 15/8/34; “Instructions,” 19 September 1557, TNA SP 69/11/665. 158  Howard to Paulet, 22 June 1557, TNA SP 11/11/14, fols. 25r–26v, at 25r. See also List of Ships, 29 May and 6 June 1557, TNA SP 11/10/67, 11/11/2; Muster lists, 2 June 1557, TNA SP 11/11/19; Proclamation licensing privateers, [9 June] and 8 July 1557, TNA SP 11/11/24, 25; Warrants and charges, 1557, BL Stowe MS 571, fols. 78r–132v; Davies, “England and the French War, 1557–9” in The Mid-Tudor Polity, c. 1540–1560, ed. Loach and Robert Tittler (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 159–185; Redworth, “Philip (1527–1598),” ODNB (2011). Mary described the war as against French and Scots, for example, [September] 1557, TNA SP 11/11/655; Council to Thomas Percy, 8 January 1558, TNA SP 15/8/63; Mary to Howard, 19 January 1558, TNA SP 11/12/23. 159  Mary to “the Special Gentlemen in every Shire,” [7 January] 1558, TNA SP 11/12/6, fol. 17r. “Burghley’s Journal,” 1558, CP 229/2. 160  Grafton, Chronicle, 2:558, 563, 566. For attempts to regain Calais, see “Lord Clinton,” [1558], CP 2/17; Mary to Cheyne, [12 January] 1558, TNA SP 11/12/38; Mary to Commissioners, 17 January 1558, TNA SP 11/12/22; Wotton to Mary, 26 September

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“Mary, neglected of her Husband, and with concocted griefe for the losse of Callais, (which had beene Englands rightfully two hundred yeeres) with a Feuer and the Dropsie the seuenteenth day of Nouember 1558. departed.”161 It was, then, with Calais still raw that Elizabeth was crowned “Queene of England, Fraunce, and Ireland, defender of the faith &c.” on 15 January 1559 and feted with roses, imperial crowns, British figures, classical imagery, biblical characters, and evangelical messages.162 Her royal title, pageantry, and descent “by father and mother of mere english bloode, and not of spayne as her late sister,” fueled hope for restitution across the Channel163 and added weight to her remaining claims overseas; Elizabeth’s early reign would be about envisioning and trying to build a new, post-­ France, anti-Spanish, British Atlantic Empire, one that strengthened and magnified a consolidating, protestant nation and looked west, even beyond Newfoundland. Completed that July, Welsh cartographer-antiquarian-MP Humphrey Llwyd’s Cronica Walliae a Rege Cadwalader ad annum 1294, an augmented English version of the Brut y tywysogyon, bears this out. The manuscript reintroduced audiences to the Tudors’ exemplary Welsh ancestors like Madoc, who (in the words David Powel’s 1584 printed edition of Llwyd’s Chronica) “prepared certaine ships with men and munition, and sought aduentures by seas, sailing West, & leauing the coast of Ireland so far north, that he came to a land vnknowen, where he saw manie strange things.” The author charged, “by reason & order of Cosmographie, this land, to the which Madoc came, must needs be some part of Noua Hispania or Florida. Wherevpon it is manifest, that that countrie was long

1558, TNA SP 69/13/824; Wotton to Council, 29 October 1558, TNA SP 69/13/849; Commissioners to Council, 18 November 1558, TNA SP 70/1/6. 161  Camden, Annales (1625), sig. (a)2v. See also David Grummitt, “Three Narratives of the Fall of Calais in 1558: Explaining Defeat in Tudor England,” in Representing War and Violence, 1250–1600 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 178–190. 162  Grafton, Chronicle, 2:567. The Passage of our most drad Soveraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth… (1559); Hunt, Drama Coronation, 146–172; King, Tudor Iconography, 227–233. 163  “Negotiations with France,” 29 January 1559, TNA SP 70/2, fols. 73r–76v, at 76r. See also “Instructions to English Commissioners,” 23 November 1558, TNA SP 70/1, fols. 17r–22v; “Instructions for Cavalcante,” BL Cotton Calig. E/V, fols. 60r–62v. England conceded the loss in the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrensis, April 1559, see TNA SP 70/3, fols. 115r–120v.

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before by Brytaines discouered, afore either Columbus or Americus Vesputius lead anie Spaniardes thither,” and thus entailed to Elizabeth.164 Similarly, in the coronation tableaux he helped create and the chronicle he wrote soon after, Grafton recast myth and history to meet these same ends. His work imagined a direct line of kingship from Brutus, who first ruled over “this Island of Briteyn [which] was but one entier Isle” to Henry VII, who by triumph over tyranny, civil peace and rule of law, and the sign of “a red firie Dragon” took upon him “the Crowne and Diademe of this noble Empyre.”165 His son began “the recouerie of his realme of Fraunce,” taking “possession of the Citie of Tournay” and planted English ways, then turned to Ireland and the “subtile and crafty Scots,” declaring his kingly rights to both, in parliament and in print.166 Following Henry VIII’s “most prosperous successe,” that “king, yea saint, Edwarde the sixt” and his regents sought “reformation in religion… suppressyng and abandoning of all Idolatrie and superstition within his realmes and dominions” and to “winne” Scotland, Grafton wrote, reproducing Somerset’s Epistle to highlight the justness of the cause.167 Their legacy, swollen by Mary’s mistakes, fell to Elizabeth, who would ultimately adopt and cultivate some, but not all, of the bequest. In many ways, Grafton embodied the entire “Somerset Circle” of humanist scholars, printers, protestant reformers, and statesmen that re-emerged (either in the flesh or intellectually) after 1558 to help set the new regime’s agenda, a group that included Cecil, Smith, Eden, Foxe, John Hales, Robert Beale, Thomas Norton, John Aylmer, and John Day.168 Many of them veterans of Scottish or Irish enterprise and attached to Cranmerian religion, the English vernacular, and other avowed markers of English superiority, they drew on their experiences and understandings of the 1530s, 40s, and 50s—ones that often exaggerated Mary’s “bloudy tymes” (Foxe’s phrase) and inflated earlier Tudor deeds—and merged matters of faith, domestic consolidation, and territorial expansion to promulgate a protestant Tudor British nation and

164  Historie of Cambria (1584), 228; R. Brinley Jones, “Llwyd, Humphrey (1527–1568),” ODNB, 2014. 165  Grafton, Chronicle, 1:xi, 2:158, 2:125. 166  Grafton, Chronicle, 2:235–499, at 268, 278, 480. 167  Grafton, Chronicle, 2:499, 1:xv, 2:500, 2:508. 168  Hoak, “A Tudor Deborah? The Coronation of Elizabeth I, Parliament, and the Problem of Female Rule,” in John Foxe and his World, ed. Christopher Highley and King (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 73–88; Hoak, “Iconography Imperial Crown,” 96.

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empire in the 1560s and after—under a queen often disinclined toward radicalism and intervention.169 Indeed, the 1559 church settlement was conservative yet swift. Parliamentary acts of Supremacy and Uniformity revived Henrician laws “for thutter extinguishement and putting awaye of all usurped and forraine Powers and Aucthorities out of this yor Realme and other yor Highnes Dominions and Countreis, as also for the restoring and uniting to the Imperiall Crowne of this Realme thauncient Jurisdiccions Aucthoritees Superiorities and Preheminencies to the same of Right belonging,” reinstated the Edwardian Book of Common Prayer (with some “alteracion or Addition” on contentious confessional matters), and declared the queen “supreme Governour.”170 One significant section extending crown sovereignty to “this Realme or within any other yor Maties Dominions or Countreis that now be or hereafter shalbee” speaks to the imagined scope of the reforms, establishing the expansionist pretensions and protestant complexion of the Elizabethan Tudor imperium, in keeping with “Somerset Circle” aspirations.171 One overseas concern, and outlet, was Ireland, where Sidney reported in the wake of “most dolorous newes” in “Callays” that “concerning the state of the Irishe sort, we haue no hope, but contrarywise feare, that if the Frenche and Scottes come in they will take part wt them openly or destroye her graces pale,” where the people, suffering in desolation and poverty, “be wery and yrke of vs.”172 As Sadler asked parliament in defense of the 1559 subsidy, “If the people there, which now be barbarous, wilde, and savage, lawles, without law or justice; if they may be brought to the knowledge of God and of his woord, and of 169  His full title is Actes and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happenyng in the Church with an vniuersall history of the same, wherein is set forth at large the whole race and course of the Church, from the primitiue age to these latter tymes of ours, with the bloudy times, horrible troubles, and great persecutions agaynst the true martyrs of Christ, sought and wrought as well by heathen emperours, as nowe lately practised by Romish prelates, especially in this realme of England and Scotland. The group’s activity is manifest in art as well as text, as Margaret Aston, King, Hoak, Strong, and Sharpe have shown, with particular reference to the Allegory of the Tudor Succession (ca. 1572, attrib. Lucas de Heere), an apparent defense of Elizabeth’s tranquil, protestant kingship that depicts Henry VIII enthroned at center in front of the Tudor coat of arms, Edward VI kneeling to receive his sword, an oversized richly appareled Elizabeth accompanied by personifications of Plenty and Peace trampling the weapons of war, and, isolated to the left of the patriarch, Mary and Philip with Mars. 170  1 Eliz. c. 1–6, Statutes of Realm, 4:1:350–367, at 350, 356, 352. 171  1 Eliz. c. 1, Statutes of Realm, 4:1:352. 172  Sidney to Council, 8 February 1558, TNA SP 62/1, fols. 15r–16v, at 15r, 15v.

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their dueties to their prince and sovereign, and so to lyve civilie and obedientlie,” then wouldn’t Ireland eventually raise revenue?173 In reply, and mirroring its domestic approach, the new regime borrowed, sustained, and adjusted Marian models, in policy and discourse.174 Retaining Sussex, who had attended the coronation, Elizabeth instructed her deputy to set “the service of Almighty God before their eyes” and ushering the religious settlement through the Irish parliament, advancing common law and English justice, re-surveying the island, raising revenue (especially via customs), and leasing Leix and Offaly, “having been of late conquered and knit now to the crown by authority of Parliament and made shire ground… the people to follow the order of the common laws, and to nourish as many English servants as may be” and dwell there.175 Moreover, the queen quickly distinguished between “natif borne subiectes of this our Realme of Englande” and others176 and revealed her belief that Ireland—particularly Ulster, where people “are far more beastlike and barbarous” than elsewhere—could not be made obedient except by the “extending of force upon some stubborn sort” and planting of loyal captains and soldiers, “but also some number of English people” to inhabit and till the land. Despite the debt and two-front war that her sister left behind, the queen authorized the first of several futile expeditions to the north, aimed at Gaelic lord Shane O’Neill.177 Sussex too drew on the acute xenophobia stoked by Mary’s reign, describing an Ireland corrupted by Brehon law, riddled with factions divided by birth, like “the Geraldines [who] are of Irish blood, not brought or reduced to the English government” and upon whom “depend all the evil-disposed men in the realm,” threatened by “foreign aid,” and best reduced by imposing English order and planting English gentlemen who “would bring over force to defend their own” against the “wild Irish.”178 Here was a decidedly familiar project, explicitly  Speech at Elizabeth’s First Parliament, Sadler SP 3:314–318, at 316.  See Hunt and Whitelock, eds., Tudor Queenship. 175  Instructions to Sussex, 16 July 1559, Cal Carew 1:218. See also “Second Year of Elizabeth,” 1560, Statutes at Large, 1:275–312; Instructions to Sussex, 4 July 1562, Cal Carew 1:235. 176  Instructions to Sussex, 16 July 1559, TNA SP 63/1, fols. 122r–131v, at 123r. 177  “Notes of Ulster, Connaught, Munster, and Leinster,” [1560], Cal Carew 1:229; Instructions to Sussex, 17 July 1559, Cal Carew 1:220. See also Instructions to Sussex, May 1560, Cal Carew 1:223. 178  Sussex’s Opinion, 11 September 1560, Cal Carew 1:227. See also Sussex’s Report, 1562, Cal Carew 1:236. 173 174

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steeped in experience and precedent, even if references to Leix as “Queen’s County” and Offaly as “King’s” became, unsurprisingly, rarer.179 Continuity in Ireland resulted in part from the regime’s preoccupation with the Auld Alliance—a concern whose proximal cause was late Marian foreign policy, but which was also rooted in the survival of earlier, especially Wooings-era, thought among those surrounding the queen. In mid-1559, channeling John Knox’s recent lament that when God had offered means by which England and Scotland “might have been joined together for ever in godly concorde, then was the one proud and cruel, and the other unconstant and fikle of promise,”180 Secretary of State Cecil appealed powerfully to the Edwardian protestant British imperial vision to sway a reluctant Elizabeth to aid the Lords of the Congregation and oust the French and Catholicism from Scotland. He argued, “the best worldly felicitie that Scotland can haue is either to contynew in a perpetuall peace wt the kingdom of Ingland or to be made one Monarchie wt England as they both make but one Isle deuided from the rest of the world,” neither possible if Scotland remained in thrall of greedy, warmongering, and tyrannous French and an idolatrous pope.181 “The crown of England,” he found, “hath a just and unfeigned title, of longer continuance than the friendship betwixt Scotland and France, unto the superiority of Scotland”—a right as manifest as those to Wales, Cornwall, or Lancaster and one that should “stir all English bloods,” cause the Queen of Scots to do homage to England, and induce Elizabeth to defend Scotland, as her predecessors have and as the Holy Roman Emperor does for his imperial vassals.182 Now at last was their chance, Croft wrote to Knox, to establish “this island in perpetuall unite and concorde”; even French offers to 179  For example, Sussex’s Report, 1562, Cal Carew 1:236; Hooker to [Peter Carew] 20 January 1573, Cal Carew 1:291. 180  Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558) in The Works of John Knox, ed. David Laing, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: 1846–1864), 4:373–428, at 394; Mason, “The Scottish Reformation and the Origins of Anglo-British Imperialism,” in Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, ed. Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 161–186. 181  “A memoriall of certain pointes meete for restoring the Realme of Scotland to the Auncient Weale,” BL Lansdowne MS 4, fols. 26r–27v, at 26r. 182  “A short discussion of the weighty matter of Scotland,” August 1559, Sadler SP 1:377–383, at 378, 383; “Void Instructions for Montague and Chamberlain,” 23 January 1560, TNA SP 70/10, fols. 91r–94v; Sadler to Cecil, 31 March 1560, Sadler SP 1:715–716. See also Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1998).

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restore Calais could not deter them from that British end.183 Further, Cecil and others called on providential geography and charged that “this practice of the Frenche is not attempted (onely against the kingdom of Scotland, but also against the croune and kingdoms of Ingland and Ireland,” pronouncing Mary, queen of Scots rightful heir to both and “in paintings, at publik justes in Fraunce, and other places this yere, caused the amies of Inglande, contrary to all right, to be borne quarterly with the armes of Scotland; meaning nothing lesse than any augmentacion to Scotland, but to annexe them bothe perpetually to the croune of Fraunce.”184 Their success in winning Elizabeth’s support for the enterprise and the interventions, treaty, and Scottish Reformation that followed were a coup for Cecil and the empire he imagined; the Isles were all nominally protestant, if still politically divided.185 Fittingly, the next site of intervention was France, where in 1562–1563 the crown combined another attempt to recover a lost imperial possession with support for coreligionists, occupying Newhaven (Le Havre) in the hopes of exchanging it for Calais—regarded as no less Elizabeth’s than “Dover or Canterburie,” helping the Huguenots, and keeping continental forces far from England.186 This time, the effort failed, yet it was still profoundly  Croft to Knox, 27 October 1559, Sadler SP 1:523–524, at 524.  Cecil to Sadler and Croft, 12 November 1559, Sadler SP 1:566–573, at 570. See also Instructions for Lethington, 24 November 1559, Sadler SP 1:604–608; Cecil to Sadler, 24 August 1559, Sadler SP 1:402–404; Throckmorton to Cecil, 30 September 1559, CSPF 1:1408; Henry Killigrew to Council, 14 December 1559, TNA SP 70/9, fols. 76r–79v; [Lethington] to [?], [20 January] 1560, TNA SP 52/2, fols. 14r–v; Thomas Randall to Sadler and Croft, 10 February 1560, Sadler SP 1:704–706; Norfolk and Council to Cecil, 19 March 1559/60, CP 138/25; Queen of Scots’ Claim to the English Crown, 5 April 1560, CP 198/11; Throckmorton to Elizabeth, 4 May 1560, TNA SP 70/14, fols. 31r–32v; Cecil’s Memoranda, TNA SP 52/3, fols. 237r–v (CSPF 3:118); Council to Cecil and Wotton, 24 June 1560, CP 2/48. 185  For English explanations (to the Scots) of why they joined the conflict, see “Articles,” 27 February 1559/60, CP 152/60; Queen’s proclamation, 24 March 1560, CP 152/73. For the complex English-Scottish-Irish relationship that followed, see Jane E.A.  Dawson, “Two Kingdoms or Three? Ireland in Anglo-Scottish Relations in the Middle of the Sixteenth Century,” Scotland and England, 1286–1815, ed. Mason (Edinburgh: Donald, 1987), 113–138. 186  Smith to Elizabeth, 2 March 1563, TNA SP 70/52, fols. 24r–26v, at 24v. See also Cecil to Smith, 29 March 1562, BL Lansdowne MS 102, fols. 29r–30v; Throckmorton to Cecil, [18 May] 1562, TNA SP 70/37, fols. 101r–102v; Throckmorton to Cecil, 29 July 1562, TNA SP 70/39, fols. 190r–191v; Articles between Elizabeth and Prince of Condé, 19 September 1562, TNA SP 70/41, fols. 146r–150v; “Why the Queen puts her Subjects in 183 184

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influential: the venture fully crystalized Spain, rather than France, as protestant Britain’s chief foe and Ireland and the New World, rather than Europe, as the Cecil group’s chief imperial focus. Past empire—medieval and Tudor—had pointed the way toward participation in the Scottish and French wars in the first place, now those conflicts pointed the way toward future empire. Ensconced in Dieppe and Newhaven in July–August 1562, courtly correspondents highlighted the ports’ fruitful western access, rich shipping, influx of Newfoundland fish, and Ribault’s return from his transatlantic voyage,187 where he found a “newe lande called of aunciente La Fluryde,” which was never mentioned before. Its people obey their native king, worship the “sune and mone,” and inhabit a land so replete with cedar trees, fowl, and vines that compared to it, “fraunce is an baren cuntrey.” Welcomed gladly (apparently) with rich gifts, the captain “left in the sayde lande xxx frenchemen” in a fort that he had made—the Charlesfort colony.188 Distressingly, these reports came on the heels of others relaying the daily increase of Spanish riches from the Indies, the decrease English trade, growing Iberian interest in the Newfoundland fishery, and great new Portuguese conquests even further afield.189 The possibility that other Europeans, including “Papists,” were frequenting “the Brazils, Guinea, Newfoundland, Barbary” and more, finding new spots, filling already-rich coffers, and potentially encroaching on areas that Eden and others had shown properly appertained to the Tudor crown, was a powerful Arms,” [20 September] 1562, TNA SP 70/41, fols. 193r–197v and 207r–212v; Smith to Cecil, 6 December 1562, TNA SP 70/46, fols. 72r–75v; MacCaffrey, “The Newhaven Expedition, 1562–1563” The Historical Journal 40, 1 (March 1997): 1–21. The regime remained attached to Calais, as a commercial hub, defensive bulwark, historic dominion, and blight on its honor, see Petition of Company of Merchant Staplers to Elizabeth, 1560, TNA SP 12/15, fols. 95r–v; Elizabeth to Philip, [22] September 1562, TNA SP 70/41, fols. 239r–242v (CSPF 5:682); Elizabeth to French Ambassador, 25 October 1562, TNA SP 70/43, fols. 137r–140v; Throckmorton to Elizabeth, 15 December 1562, TNA SP 70/46, fols. 192r–195v; Smith’s Demands, 19 December 1562, TNA SP 70/47, fols. 13r–14v; Elizabeth to [Warwick], [4 June] 1563, TNA SP 70/58; Paulet to Elizabeth, 29 February 1568, TNA SP 12/46, fols. 84r–85v; Smith to Cecil, 18 January 1572, TNA SP 77/122, fols. 81r–87v; Elizabeth to Charles IX, 7 May 1563, TNA SP 70/56, fols. 55r–56v; Cecil’s Memorial, BL Cotton Calig. C/I, fols. 97r–100v. 187  Killigrew to Cecil, 10 August 1562, TNA SP 70/40, fols. 101r–110v. 188  John Clarke to Killigrew, 21 July 1562, TNA SP 70/39, fols. 112r–113v, at 112v. 189   Thomas Chamberlain to Elizabeth, 27 September 1561, TNA SP 70/30, fols. 111r–114v; “Answer to the Portuguese Ambassador’s Replication,” 15 June 1562, TNA SP 70/38, fols. 110r–117v.

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motivator.190 Newhaven was important for one final reason: the mission gave Humphrey Gilbert his first experience abroad, and may have introduced him to geographer André Thevet and the Charlesfort Huguenot settlement.191 Once home, the soldier took up cartography and navigation, eventually growing convinced, together with Muscovy Company captain-general Anthony Jenkinson (successor to Willoughby and Chancellor), of a northern passage to “Cathaye, Cynaye, and other the Orientall regions” to the benefit of the queen, her economy and navy, and their “natyve countrye.”192 For the early Elizabethan state and empire, then, Scotland and France lent military and naval experience, strengthened conceptions of protestant Britishness and Catholic Spanish otherness, confirmed the permanent loss of Calais and the unlikelihood of Anglo-Scottish union, and outed competing voyaging. Equally crucially, they determined how the regime approached empire, using theories and projects developed in these two places in the 1510s and 1540s and turning to private funds and initiative to make up for the high cost of interventions there in the 1550s and early 1560s. In 1563, “for the better maynetenance and encrease of the Navye of this Realme of Englande,” parliament enacted new shipping provisions, regulating trade of wine, wood, grain, and “hearring and other Sea Fishe,” placing them more firmly (and cheaply) in the hands and vessels of “Subjectes of our Sovereigne Ladye the Quene,” adding Wednesday to Saturday as another “politike”—as opposed to spiritual—“Fishe Daye” with fees or imprisonment for unlicensed noncompliance, increasing production of hemp and flax and the numbers employed at sea, and clamping down on maritime deserters.193 Backed by Cecil, who received a treatise on the topic from Edward Jenynges, and motioned by sailor, Portsmouth MP, and naval administrator William Winter, a veteran of the Wooings and recent Scottish and French wars, the initiative identified fish as the means to rescue a “decayed” navy, “multyply mariners,” nationalize trade, and catch up to seafaring neighbors.194 The act evinces a reorienting Tudor  “Answer of M. Beauvoir,” [4] November 1562, TNA SP 70/44, fols. 35r–36v, at 35r–v.  Quinn, The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1940), 1:1–8. 192  Jenkinson to Elizabeth, 31 May 1565, BL Cotton Galba D.IX., fols. 4r–5v, at fols. 4v–5r, 5v; “Petition from Humphrey Gilbert to the Queen,” [1565], Voyages Gilbert, no. 1. 193  2 Eliz., cap. 5, Statutes Realm, 4:1:422–428, at 422, 424. 194  “Arguments, by Cecill, for increasing the navigation of England,” 1 February 1563, TNA SP 12/27, fols. 280r–285v, at 281r. See also Jenynges, “On the utility to the realm by 190 191

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gaze and presaged more to come—as Edward M. Test surmised, “no other commodity or industry received so much attention and aid from the throne” as Newfoundland fish195—and arose concurrently with a scheme that similarly developed mid-Tudor animosities and Newhaven intelligence, further south. Amid Huguenot losses in France, “famous Pylot, John Ribant” resorted to England, sorely in need of aid for his colony.196 With royal support, finance, and patent, Frenchman Ribault and Englishman Thomas Stucley planned a joint venture to salvage Charlesfort, a protestant outpost within striking distance of the Spanish Empire. An experienced soldier and sailor, Stucley had served both Edward and Mary (albeit not without controversy), took part in the privateering war against France, then, most recently and appropriately for his upcoming imperial pursuits, helped host Shane O’Neill during a 1562 visit from Ireland, with, as Camden recalled, “his Guard, a troupe of Galloglassorum, who had their heads naked, and curled haire hanging on their shoulders, yellow shirts, as if they had beene died with Saffron, or steeped in Vrin, wide sleeues, short Cassockes, and rough hairy Clokes. The English admired them no lesse, than they should doe at this day to see those of China, or America.”197 After a Thames pageant honoring the queen, the pair set sail “to discover certen Lands in the West towardes Terra Florida” with “a Nomber of good Shipps well armed and mann’d” by “sondry of our [Elizabeth’s] Subjects” in June 1563.198 Though Stucley went rogue, rechristening the ships after his family and diverting them to plunder off Spain and France, the project demonstrates and ultimately sustained early Elizabethan interests in the Americas. It set precedent for future crown grants and plots and facilitated the spread of valuable knowledge from French mariners like Ribault, whose 1562 travel narrative of the “straunge countryes,” “riche & inestimable commodities,” “brutishe people & observing days for eating fish only,” BL Lansdowne MS 101, fols. 85r–106v; Loades, “Winter, Sir William (c.1525–1589),” ODNB (2009). 195  Test, “The Tempest and the Newfoundland Cod Fishery,” in Global Trade Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture, ed. Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 201–220, at 209. 196  Camden, Annales, 95. For earlier Stucley exploits, see Northumberland to Cecil, 7 September, October 1552, TNA SP 10/15/3, 38; Clinton to Council, 27 August 1558, TNA SP 11/13/60. 197  Camden, Annales, 90. 198  Elizabeth to Sussex, 30 June 1563, CP 153/147. See also correspondence between Philip and Bishop Quadra, 15 and 19 June 1563, CSPSimancas, 1:230, 233.

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ignoraunt of Jesus Christ” of America (as well as Cabot’s failure to “attaine to any habitation nor take possession there of one only fote of ground” in 1498) was translated as The whole and true discouerye of Terra Florida by Thomas Hacket and printed in London in late May 1563, and René de Laudonnière, founder of France’s follow-up colony, Fort Caroline.199 The following year, John Hawkins conferred with the same court and council behind the Stucley-Ribault fiasco and gained license and shipping for his second voyage, sailing to Africa and the Spanish Atlantic, visiting the new French settlers and Newfoundland, and bringing along his cousin, Francis Drake.200 Piloted from Elizabeth’s Jesus of Lubeck (inherited from Henry VIII), his expedition was lengthy and lucrative. Hawkins gained further navigational expertise, assiduously reported uninhabited fertile land suitable for settlement and replete with grapes for wine, animals for meat, and various agricultural crops as well as desolation and “sauage and fierce” natives in Florida, and made critical use of Newfoundland as a Tudor way-­ point, trade, and fishing station.201 Spanish ambassador Guzman de Silva appreciated the effect of Hawkins’s return in September 1565: “they tell me that this profit has encouraged some of the merchants here to undertake other like voyages and even that Hawkins will return.”202 Laudonnière also expected Elizabeth to be “encouraged to set footing there [in Florida], as before sheé had desired.”203 Further impetus came quickly: almost concurrently, the Spanish massacred most of Fort Caroline’s colonists, including Ribault, apparently confirming the Black Legend and raising the

199  The whole and true discouerye (1563), sigs. A.ii.v, A.iii.r. See also Nicholas Le Challeux, A true and perfect description, of the last voyage or nauigation, attempted by Captaine Iohn Rybaut (1566); A notable historie containing foure voyages made by certayne French captaynes vnto Florida (1587); PN, 3:301–360; Peter Holmes, “Stucley, Thomas (c. 1520–1578),” ODNB (2004); Kupperman, Jamestown Project, 45–51; Andrews, “Beyond the Equinoctial: England and South America in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 10, no. 1 (September 1981): 4–24. 15316; PN, 3:301–360. 200  “The voyage made by M. Iohn Hawkins… to the coast of Guinea, and the Indies of Noua Hispania, begun in An. Dom. 1564.,” PN, 3:501–521; Williamson, Hawkins of Plymouth, 2nd edn. (London: Black, 1969); Andrews, Trade, Plunder, Settlement; Kelsey, Sir John Hawkins, Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Basil Morgan, “Hawkins, Sir John (1532–1595),” ODNB (2007). 201  “Voyage made by Hawkins… 1564,” PN, 3:501–521, at 516. 202  De Silva to Philip, 5 November 1565, CSPSimancas 1:330. 203  Notable historie, 51r.

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specter of global, Catholic Habsburg Empire if the protestant British alternative that Cecil and others imagined did not act.204 It was in this context, conscious of his allies at court, crown debt, and burgeoning New World travel literature, that Gilbert petitioned in 1565 to make “tryall” at his own costs and charges, for “the discoveringe of a passage by the Northe, to go to Cataia, & all other the east partes of the worlde” and, by extension, for “the greate honour, profytt, & strength, bothe of your majestie & also your realme withoute burdeninge of eyther, or Injuringe any Christian prince.”205 While Jenkinson complained that they had heard nothing,206 Gilbert pushed ahead, more fully articulating his plot, justifying it on historical, national, and spritual bases, and contributing enormously to the broader Elizabethan imperial push that followed. Dated to June 1566 by an opening letter to the author’s brother John, Gilbert’s Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia argued that study of adventures, ethnographies, and conquests from “auncient Philosophers: but also by al the best moderne Geographers,” compounded by the experience of medieval travelers, Columbus, and Cabot, all verified the existence of a Northwest Passage, one that properly appertained to Elizabeth (by virtue of efforts begun by her grandfather, Henry VII) and lay closer to her dominions, in reach of her navy, than to that of any other Christian prince.207 And yet, he charged, these sources also showed that the kings of Spain and Portugal eager to move in, “least the Queenes Maiestie, hauing so good opportunitie, and finding the commoditie, which thereby might ensue to the common welth: woulde cutte them of, and enioye the whole traffique to her selfe, and thereby the Spaniardes and Portingals, with their great charges, should but beate the bushe, and other men catche the birds.”208 Spurred by godly geography, right of first discovery, and competition, Gilbert styled an enterprise already well underway, one which he would only advance to fruition.209 Once discovered, the passage would enrich the nation with “the wealth of all the East parts (as they terme them) of the world, which is infinite,” and the “great aboundance of gold, siluer, precious stones, Cloth of golde, silkes, all maner of Spices, Grocery wares, and other kindes of Merchandize” found in “diuers  Le Challeux, True and perfect description.  “Petition from Humphrey Gilbert to the Queen,” [1565], Voyages Gilbert, no. 1. 206  Jenkinson to Cecil, 26 June 1566, Voyages Gilbert, no. 3. 207  Gilbert, A Discourse of a Discoverie (1576), sig. B.iii.v. 208  Gilbert, Discourse, sig. H.iii.v. 209  Gilbert, Discourse, sigs. D.ii.r–D.iii.v. 204 205

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marueilous riche Countries, both Ciuil and others,” bypass Iberian traders and eliminate dependence on European markets, improve mercantile and naval strength without burdening the state, employ and even settle poor, idle, criminal, unskilled, or landless subjects, if “some conuenient place of America” were inhabited to shorten the voyage.210 With each point, he smartly seized upon already-espoused Tudor rhetoric, ideology, and discourse, reflecting the very political, economic, military, and foreign woes stressed by crown, council, and parliament since Mary’s death. New petitions to the queen and correspondence with the Muscovy Company for the voyage and his rights to trade and discovered land followed in December and January.211 Five years later, John Dee echoed and made more explicit several crucial pieces of the Discourse, reinforcing the association between Britain’s island identity, English maritime prowess (real or desired), and empire, and aligning national ends with imperial means. His preface to The Elements of Geometrie read, “In Navigation, none ought to have greater care, to be skillfull, then our English Pylotes… what Priviledge, God had endued this Iland with, by reason of Situation, most commodious for Navigation, to Places most Famous & Riche,” for the commonwealth and all Christendom. For Dee and Gilbert, overseas enterprise mirrored and complemented domestic ideals and needs, much as Vergil and More had charged. Dee also explained what had happened to Gilbert and his pitch: “And though, (of Late) a young Gentleman, a Courragious Captaine, was in a great readynes, with good hope, and great causes of persuasion, to have ventured, for the Discoverye… and was, at the very nere tyme of Attempting, called and employed otherwise (both then, and since,) in great good service to his Countrey, as the Irish Rebels have tasted.”212 Gilbert had turned toward Ireland, as had his monarch, but not before penning the Discourse and by extension, disrupting the thesis that, in a microcosmic case study of British imperialism, his American engagement stemmed directly or only from his Irish experience.213 Though not linear or straightforwardly connected, the two projects were concurrent, closely  Gilbert, Discourse, sigs. H.i.r–H.ii.v, at H.i.r,v.  Gilbert’s Petition to Elizabeth, [December 1566], TNA SP 12/42/23; William Gerrard to Cecil, 24 January 1567, TNA SP 12/45/5, fols. 16r–19v. 212  Euclid, The elements of geometrie… With a very fruitfull praeface made by M. J. Dee, 9 February 1571, in Voyages Gilbert, no. 8. 213  Quinn, Elizabethans and Irish; Canny, Elizabethan Conquest; Andrews, Canny, Hair, eds., Westward Enterprise. 210 211

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related, and mutually reinforcing, part and parcel of one another and of the wider, century-long context in which they took place. Back in 1562, amid Newhaven, Elizabeth received a primer on Gaelic commissioned from Christopher Nugent, baron of Delvin, which promised that by learning Irish, “your subiects shall receaue justice, ciuilitie planted, their loue towards your maiestie encreased, leauing to posteritie an example of virtue to follow your glorious acts and deedes,”214 and her officials made careful note of statutes passed in Ireland since Henry IV, which amply displayed the queen’s rights to fortify, punish traitors, govern via common law, collect land and revenues, and rule the island (as Mary propounded) with “regal power… as absolutely as ever it was in any of her progenitors, Kings of Ireland.”215 Together, they helped lay the intellectual, cultural, and political groundwork for a reinvigorated Irish project, begun in 1563–1564 with a new survey and grants to English and Irish soldiers in Leix and Offaly along Edwardian and Marian lines. Planters were to pay annual rent, reside permanently, help defend and administer the area, repudiate Brehon law, seek permission to employ Irish fighters, and see that the chief members of his household use English language, dress, and manners, while limiting interactions with those of Irish birth— the Anglo- and Gaelic Irish permitted to remain, yet subject to control and Anglicization.216 Yet again, rebels of “vile and base condycion” thwarted the planters and Sussex’s efforts elsewhere.217 He sued for recall, and Elizabeth elevated Nicholas Arnold and then Sidney, just off service in Wales and Newhaven, to “entrid into that realme as a large feeld or world overrun with brambles and replennished with ravening beasts” and “clense the contrees of Lesse and Offally and specially our Englishe pale from such rebells and disordrid people as oppresse the same” and thoroughly reform the kingdom.218 Sidney landed in January 1566 under instructions that, as Ciaran Brady has shown, though “replete with the rhetoric of change,” were “nothing more than a recapitulation of the principal reforms deemed by Sussex to be immediately requisite for Ireland”: carry out uniform 214  Elizabeth’s Irish Primer, Guinness Library, Farmleigh House, Dublin, as quoted in Hiram Morgan, “‘Never Any Realm Worse Governed’: Queen Elizabeth and Ireland,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 14 (2004): 295–308, at 296. 215  “Acts of Parliament in Ireland” and “Acts not Extant in the Printed Book,” 1 June 1562, Cal Carew 1:233–234. 216  Dunlop, “Plantation,” 71–73. 217  Patent to Fitzwilliam, 1 August 1564, CP 215/13. 218  Elizabeth to Sidney, 28 March 1566, TCD MS 745, fols. 30r–32r, at 31v, r.

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r­ eligious and legal reform, reorder the army and executive, introduce provincial presidents and councils, improve finances, plant Leix-Offaly, forcibly bring O’Neill (soon described as a “wilde Irishe man”) to heel, settle the north, and subject Munster to English law.219 He was also to call an Irish parliament—the second of Elizabeth’s reign—which met in 1569–1571. As per Poynigns Law, the body considered only what had been approved “under our great Seale of this our realme of England” and agreed to various subsidies, trade provisions, a proposal for shiring, land re-grants, and an attainder of O’Neill (now dead), but the debate was arduous, the session dragged on, and parliament ultimately refused to abolish coign and livery.220 Chosen for his experience and directed with recycled imagery and policy, Sidney was, in Cecil’s simile, “a physition… well acqueynted with the diseases of your countrey” but lacked the “medecynes” to treat them.221 He faced worsening conditions in Munster and Ulster and complained of poverty, raids, and degeneration among the English in the Pale, yet reported obedience, increased tillage, and thorough quiet in Leix as well as want of civility and religion in “this rude and barbarous countrey” by means of a free school in Galway, which would in turn advance the “Subiection of the province of Conaught.”222 This complex situation, then, added impetus and immediacy to the schemes swirling around the deputy and around Cecil, especially after O’Neill’s murder in June 1567 and in the run-up to risings by Edmund Butler and James fitz Maurice Fitzgerald in 1569. After all, post-Calais, it had become even more important for the Tudor crown to find a way to defeat the rebels and 219  Brady, Chief Governors, 116–119, at 117; “Articles of Interrogation,” 19 April 1566, TNA SP 63/17/23, fols. 63r–64v, at 64r; Elizabeth to Sidney, 21 February 1566, TCD MS fols. 9r–10v. 220  Elizabeth to Sidney, 16 January 1567, TCD MS 745, fols. 21r–25v; Instructions to Sidney, 1 May 1568, TNA SP 63/24/29; Note of Acts Passed, 28 June 1570, TNA SP 63/30/61(i); Statutes at Large, 1:312–390; V.  Treadwell, “The Irish Parliament of 1569–71,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature 65 (1966/67): 55–89. 221  Cecil to Sidney, 24 February 1566, TNA SP 63/16/31, fols. 75r–76v, at 75r. 222  Sidney to Council, 30 May 1566, TNA SP 63/17/69, fols. 207r–208v, at 207r,v; Sidney to Robert Dudley, 1 March 1566, TNA SP 63/16/35; Sidney to Elizabeth, 20 April 1567, Letters and Memorials of State…, ed. Arthur Collins, 2 vols. (London: 1746), 1:18–31. Others also reported Sidney’s good success and conformity, see George Wyse to Cecil, 20 June 1567, TNA SP 63/21/26; Loftus to Cecil, 25 January 1568, TNA SP 63/23/18. For Leix-Offaly progress, see Elizabeth to Deputy and Chancellor, 5 March 1569, TCD MS 745, fols. 141r–v; Notes on Maryborough, 20 March 1569, TNA SP 63/27/55.

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hold onto Ireland; as Sidney wrote to Cecil in 1566, aptly reflecting the contemporary link between the two projects and contorting it to suit his ends, “the los of Ireland [would be] no small los for Ingland & It was neuer so lykely to be lost as nou yt ys”; if the small territory and town of “Calles… wear aduantagus to vs,” he asked probingly, “consyder what advantage the pocessor of the large prouynce of Vlster” would offer.223 Writing back, Cecil similarly tied the two, discussing the continued failure to wrest Calais from France, by force or by law, alongside “the shame that the crown of England hath long sustained by the disobedience of that land of Ireland.”224 “If she provide not… in tyme,” the governor threatened that June, Elizabeth would lose Ireland as “her highnes sister” had lost Calais.225 Indeed, the same powers were involved, strengthening the comparison: O’Neill appealed to the French for help against the English226; James fitz Maurice Fitzgerald appealed to Spain and Rome, couching his rising in “Martyrston” as a Catholic crusade against Elizabeth’s illegitimate, damnable, “newly invented kinde of Relygion.”227 Proposals and their incumbent ideologies came from both Old and New English quarters. Among the former was Palesman Rowland White, who in January 1567 updated and forwarded three treatises on Ireland that he had written in the 1550s (two Edwardian, addressed to Northumberland and Cecil; one Marian) to Cecil, whose interest was piqued. Presumably buoyed, circa 1569 White penned a “Discours Touching Ireland,” dedicated to Cecil, which integrated material from the earlier works and also reached the chief councilor. As Canny argued upon bringing text and author to light, the “Discours” offers crucial, comprehensive, and representative insight into Anglo-Irish opinion in the aftermath of O’Neill’s death and Sidney’s early governmental program.228  Sidney to Cecil, 3 March 1566, TNA SP 63/16/41, fols. 107r–108v, at 107v.  Cecil to Sidney, 3 April 1566, TNA SP 63/17/6, fols. 10r–11v, at 10r. 225  Sidney to Cecil, 9 June 1566, TNA SP 63/18/197, fols. 18r–19v, at 18v. He made a similar threat on 24 June 1566, TNA SP 63/18/241, fols. 56r–57v. 226  O’Neill to Charles IX and Cardinal of Lorraine, 25 April 1566, TNA SP 63/71/34, 35; O’Neill to Cardinals of Lorrain and Guise, 1 February 1567, TNA SP 63/20/22. 227  James Fitzmaurice to Cork, 12 July 1569, TNA SP 63/29/8, fols. 12r–v, at 12r. Lord Chancellor Weston blamed the rebellion on the universal “lovinge of the harlott of Rome” in Ireland, see Weston to Cecil, 7 August 1570, TNA SP 63/30/78, fols. 168r–169v, at 168v. See also Anthony M. McCormack, “Fitzgerald, James fitz Maurice (d. 1579),” ODNB (2008). 228  The “Discours” survives in Cecil’s copy, [23 March] 1571, TNA SP 63/31/32, fols. 73r–117v. See also “Propositions by an Irishman,” 1 February 1568, TNA SP 63/23/29; Canny, “Rowland White’s ‘Discourse Touching Ireland’ c. 1569,” Irish Historical Studies 20 223 224

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Styling himself a mediator between “the right and worthie governance of thimperiall crowne of Englande” and “Ireland being a poore subjecte of the same borne,” and taking advantage of a “tyme of tranquyllitie… wherein her highnes is neyther troubled with forreyn warres, nor interior comocions,” White’s thesis was that despite undeniable desolation, disobedience, and brutish savagery among the Gaelic—the admitted majority of inhabitants—all Irish inclined toward “quiet civilitie” and eager for “generall reformacion.”229 Their capacity for change, moreover, was manifest in the “profe of other contries in almoost as saulvage sort.”230 There was no reason for wholesale conquest by sword or complete resettlement by Englishmen, which were costly and dangerous; instead, elite Anglo-­ Irish could be partners and facilitators. Pairing religious with other notions of improvement, he suggested that in addition to oaths of fidelity and land held at royal pleasure (i.e., surrender and regrant), spiritual appointments, new schools, and parliamentary rule, English colonists should “come hither and take wast landes to inhabyte and tyll… Then within a whyle by means of their inhabytacion cyvilitie will onelie beare the stroke, supplantinge all wilde and idle lyvinge,” “outrootinge” wickedness, and sowing “sedes” of English language, law, faith, and usages over “weedes of incyvilitie,” while gaining profit themselves.231 In Ireland, newcomers would find “as frutefull a country as lightlie any other countrey” wood and fertile soil, richly situated with various commodities, and “inestymable treasures within the grounde.”232 By defending the Anglo- and Gaelic Irish, accommodating plantation with other plots, appealing to market concerns and other colonized territories, and employing well-worn agriculturalist theory and rhetorics of incivility, White reflected and responded to the particular climate of nationalistic xenophobia, protestantism, and American adventure of the 1550s and 1560s, while drawing on arguments and polemic appreciable from Poynings through Utopia and the Wooings. It was a mix emblematic of the mid-Tudor years, offered as Elizabeth continued many of her predecessor’s efforts, including surrender and regrant,233 yet also, as the author knew well, heard new options. (1977): 439–463; Canny, “Rowland White’s ‘The Dysorders of the Irisshery’, 1571,” Studia Hibernica 19 (1979): 147–160. 229  White, “Discours,” fols. 75r, v. 230  White, “Discours,” fol. 76v. 231  White, “Discours,” fol. 90r. 232  White, “Discours,” fol. 75v. 233  Elizabeth to Sidney, 28 February 1568, TCD MS 745, fols. 69r–70r.

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At the same time, Cecil heard New English voices. In September– October 1566, Gilbert led a force into Ulster as part of Sidney’s enterprise against O’Neill—the soldier’s first Irish experience. When his passage search remained stalled upon his return, Gilbert departed again for Ireland in mid-1567 and—with loose royal support, the occasion of O’Neill’s death, and aid from Sidney and others—fixed on the island as the site of his next plot, a plantation scheme in Ulster.234 In Ireland, Gilbert found much of what had attracted him elsewhere overseas and applied much of the same logic: Ireland was another Atlantic locale not far to the west of Elizabeth’s realm, entailed to her by history, endowed with fruitful soil, good havens, precious metals, profitable victuals like fish, and other commodities needed to sustain life at home and abroad. It could improve the navy and bolster English markets at the expense of Spain, yet was beset by “uncyvyll” “wylde Irish and savadge people.”235 As he later elaborated, Ireland needed Tudor kingship, common law justice, garrisoning, and settlement, to preserve “the Irish empire from the conquest of the spaniardes Frenche men and other nacions the which is nowe more to be dowbted then heretofore it hath bene and more perillous for England then when Callis was Englishe”; if Ireland was seized, England would be bordered by “unsure and daungerous neighbours whereof let Scotladn be a president for us.”236 Broadly, Elizabeth agreed: she was most eager to extirpate O’Neill, see his followers swear to her “crowne imperiall,” and, as Cecil put it, achieve “the recovery of yr crown of Irland in dede, [what] only is now had in title.”237 But she reasoned in July 1567 that the way to keep the north was “either by keeping of garisons there to our countynuall charge, or ellse by planting the sea coastes of the same with Englishe subiectes,” thus establishing “those contres with Englishe birth and government,” who could resist Irish practices, and directed Sidney to gauge interest, consider divisions and shiring, and treat with “our servaunt Humfrey Gilbert.” Her general thinking, she wrote, was “that such as 234  “Soldiers for Ireland,” 26 April 1567, CP 155/48; Cecil to Sidney, 20 July 1567, TNA SP 63/21/64. 235  Gilbert, “The Discourse of Ireland,” 1572, Voyages Gilbert, no. 14. He also wrote “A discourse for the reformacion particularly of Munster,” 1 February 1574, BL Add MS 48015, no. 25, fols. 397r–407r. 236  Gilbert, “Discourse,” 126. 237  Turlough Luineach O’Neill’s Submission, 18 June 1567, TNA SP 63/21/22, fols. 53r–54v, at 53r; Cecil to Sidney, 11 June 1567, TNA SP 63/21/13, fols. 34r–35v, at 34r; Elizabeth to Sidney, 11 June 1567, TCD MS 745 fols. 83r–88v.

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c­ annot presently be brought to a perfit obedyence as to the obeying our ordinary wrytrs… that som degrees be vsed to trayne the people from the vnordinat tyrany of the Irishe captens. And to cause them feele and tast of the swe[et]nes of civile ordre and justice.”238 Borrowing from the Sussex-­ Sidney plan and from others advocating colonization as the means to “rote out” rebels,239 Francis Knollys advised that Gilbert be made president, planting there with his friends and in turn provoking “good husbond men, plowe wryghts, kart wryghts, and Smyths… artizans, and sae fysshers” to follow suit.240 The Ulster plot, however, fell apart—Sidney and Cecil appreciated the challenge, cost, and charge involved in what Elizabeth described as “deducing of some colonells of people out of this our realme to inhabit the same and fortifie.”241 By early 1569, Gilbert was attached to another New English plantation scheme, this time for Munster, alongside Warham St. Leger, Peter Carew, and Richard Grenville. The private syndicate sought permanent rights to the lands, havens, and fishing, and would, in exchange, pay an annual rent, build a convenient town, defend, fortify, and work the country at their own cost, adhere to English law, bring the Irish to obedience, and increase crown revenues. By these means, the petitioners vowed, “those countreys nowe possessed by disobedient people assistinge every rebellyon shalbe inhabited by naturall English men,” loyal to the crown, who will rid the area of “Spaniardes frenchemen and other straungeres,” who profit from Irish fish and offer succor to her enemies, and enrich the crown, her realm, and English shipping.242 Significantly, as the contingent negotiated with the council on terms, court and deputy also considered a proposal from “Thomas Gerrard 238  Elizabeth to Sidney, 6 July 1567, TNA SP 63/21/49, fols. 109r–114v, at 110r, v, 114r. Soon after, the court entertained a rather detailed “Device for the Plantation of Ireland with Englishmen,” January 1568, TNA SP 63/23/26, which suggested a mix of unmarried husbandmen, married couples, artificers, plough-wrights, smiths, carpenters, fishermen, and mariners, sponsored by their parishes, be sent to live in close proximity in Ireland, eventually reducing the island and yielding crown revenue. 239  Thomas Masterson to Knollys, 10 August 1566, TNA SP 63/18/78, fols. 178r–179v, at 178r. 240  “Knollys’ Opinions on Ireland,” 7 July 1567, TNA SP 63/21/56, fols. 129r–v, at 129r. 241  Elizabeth to Sidney, 6 June 1569, TCD MS 745, fols. 145r–148v, at 145v; Sidney to Cecil, 20 November 1568, TNA SP 63/26/18, fols. 71r–75v; Cecil to Sidney, 6 January 1569, TNA SP 63/27/2; Quinn, Voyages Gilbert, 14. 242  “Offers of English subjects,” 12 February 1569, TNA SP 63/27, fols. 52r–54v, at 53r. See also “Offers for the lands in Munster,” November 1568, TNA SP 63/26/52, 53; Discourse on abolition of coign and livery, 1568, TNA SP 63/26/68; Warham St. Leger to

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and other gentilmen of Lancashere for the inhabiting of some parte of Ulster” with Catholics. Perhaps inspired by the Huguenots (or Marian exile), it was among the earliest British schemes to settle religious dissidents in the empire, asking for toleration in exchange for serving Elizabeth in Ireland. Yet the queen found their articles “inconvenient and unreasonable,” and the project fizzled in 1570.243 As for Munster, the two sides reached an accord and the plantation was set to move forward in June 1569, when Ormond and Desmond forces intervened.244 Sidney related that all of Ireland except the Pale had rebelled, confidently awaiting Spanish support; “there is none here fre from the poyson of papystre.” And yet, the deputy maintained, “all thys comotyon may turn to the queenys gayn if she wyll go thorough” and dispatch adequate forces to keep the land for England.245 In this, he reflected another New English camp that was increasingly butting heads with advocates of Irish reform, surrender and regrant, and moderate colonizers. To varying degrees they believed, as the ardent protestant captain Thomas Wilford put it in February 1567, that some Irish are so “geaven to the spoile and so farre from Civillite that longer then the sworde is on their neckes thei will not be true subiectes.”246 Gilbert seems to have concurred; instead of planting, he led an army through Munster in autumn 1569, brutally exercising martial law, executing men, women, and children, accepting submissions to the queen’s “absolute power,” and growing convinced that “no conquered nacion will ever yelde willinglie their obedience for loue but rather for fere.”247 He left Ireland soon after, and though he did consider it again in 1572 and 1574, Gilbert channeled all that he gained via Ulster and Munster back toward his American pursuits, having dubbed Ireland a Elizabeth, 14 February 1569, TNA SP 63/27/23; Elizabeth to Sidney, 30 June 1570, TCD MS 745, fols. 182r–183v. 243  Elizabeth to Sidney, 6 June 1569, TCD MS 745, fols. 145r–148v, at 146r; “Second book and offer to Sir Thomas Gerrard and company for the planting of the Glens and part of Clandeboye,” 15 March 1570, TNA SP 63/30/32, fols. 62r–63v; Quinn, “The First Pilgrims,” William and Mary Quarterly 23, no. 3 (July 1966): 359–390, at 360–361. 244  Petitions to council and “Items allowable,” [12 April] [1569], TNA SP 63/28/2, 3; Petitions and answers to council, [June] [1569], TNA SP 63/28/61; Elizabeth to Sidney, 9 July 1569, TCD MS 745, fols. 157r–158v. 245  Sidney to Cecil, 30 June 1569, TNA SP 63/28/58, fols. 131r–132v, at 132r. 246  Wilford to Cecil, 16 February 1567, TNA SP 63/20/32, fols. 70r–71v, at 70r. 247  Gilbert to Sidney, 6 December 1569, TNA SP 63/29/83, fols. 177r–180v, at 178r. Thomas Churchyard described the Munster campaign in A Generall Rehearsall of Warres (1579).

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place “wher neither reputation, nor proffytt, is to be wone.”248 Nevertheless, contemporaries spotted complementarity and similarity in the two exploits, lauding him as “valiant in martiall affayres… both in this Realme, and in foreigne Nations” and a commitment to “the publique profit” of his commonwealth and its dominions, so that they might not “become naked and altogether vnfurnished.”249 Much as inability to mount a project in one part of the historic Tudor empire precipitated experimentation in another part for Gilbert, it did the same for humanist scholar and Edwardian veteran Smith, further demonstrating the interconnectivity of mid-Tudor imperialism. Smith had spent much of the first half of the 1560s in France, and was back in March 1567 demanding restoration of Calais.250 When that again failed, Smith found an alternative in Ireland, petitioning with a group of associates early the next decade to “obtaine Arde and other landes therto adjoyninge at their owne charges and perils, and to make the same civill and peopled with naturall Englishe men borne.”251 In his 1549 Discourse of the Commonweal, written in the form of a dialogue with the “doctor” providing the solution to the realm’s social and economic ills, Smith demonstrated his reverence for classical antiquity, his understanding of the relationship between the national and international spheres, and his evolving ideas for both—all of which informed his future Irish plotting. He conceptualized of England as a godly commonweal born out of Saxon, Norman, British, and Roman conquest and its future as an independent civil nation, which currently hung in the balance, reliant upon educated men who would encourage domestic consolidation and then, by natural extension, empire-building.252 For Smith, a strong, learned, and superior commonwealth, rooted as it should be in the study of ancient history, cosmography, foreign travel, and experience and under the command of a philosopher-prince, legitimately  Gilbert to Cecil, 12 July 1569, TNA SP 63/29/9, fols. 13r–14v, at 13r.  “George Gascoigne Esquire to the Reader,” in Gilbert, Discourse, sigs. ¶.iij.v, ¶. iiij.v, ¶.ij.v. 250  Commission and Instructions, 22 March 1567, TNA SP 70/89, fols. 65r–66v, 70r–73v; Negotiations for Calais, 10 May 1567, TNA SP 70/90, fols. 41r–44v. Cecil informed Sidney of the mission, 23 April 1567, TNA SP 63/20/67. 251   “The Petition of Thomas Smythe and his Associates, [c. 1570],” in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord de L’Isle and Dudley preserved at Penhurst Palace, ed. C.L. Kingsford (London: Stationery Office, 1934), 2:12–15, at 12. 252  Smith, A Discourse of the Common Weal of This Realm of England (1581), ed. Elizabeth Lamond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1893), fol. 10r. 248

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and necessarily bred empire: his Doctor explained, “the wiser sorte haue the souerayngtie ouer the rude and vnlearned… amonge all nations in the worlde, they that be pollitique and civill doe maister the rest, thought theire [forces] be inferior to the other. The empires of the Grekes and Romaines doe that declare; emongst whome, like as learninge and wisdome is most estemed, so throughe it theire empires was spread abroade widest, and longest did continewe.”253 Moreover, the geographic, demographic, and economic situation of England tended even further in an imperial direction, for all islands require goods from overseas, isolation leads to impoverishment, trade imbalance breeds ruin, and large populations need a release valve.254 Smith developed his thinking further in another humanist treatise, De republica Anglorum (begun in 1562, completed in April 1565, and circulated in manuscript before publication in 1583). Also steeped in classical history and philosophy, the tract praised the uniqueness and superiority of English law, constitution, and governance structures, especially its sovereign parliament and monarchy, implying their fitness for export elsewhere.255 Conceived of amid the domestic crisis that toppled Edward’s first regency at the end of the 1540s and furthered in the contexts of England, Scotland, and France in the decades that followed, Smith’s theory resurged amid Irish crisis under Elizabeth in the second-half of the 1560s. In November 1565, Smith wrote to Cecil, “[Ireland] will not be well governed, but with good force, prompte execucion Integrity and wisdom. And in my mynd needeth nothinge more then to have more colonies. To augment our tongue, our lawes, and our religion in that Isle, which thre be the true bandes of the commonwelth, whereby the Romaynes conquered and kept longe tyme a greate parte of the worlde.”256 His petition for the Ards followed in its wake, picked up as the start of a new burst of activity in 1571. * * * Whether viewed from Cecil and Smith in the metropole, or Sidney, Gilbert, and White on the ground, at the end of the decade Munster was in rebellion, the British Isles were in transition, and orbits were colliding.  Smith, Discourse, fols. 10r–v.  Smith, Discourse, especially fols. 10r–v, 27r–28r, 36r–37v, 46v, 78v. 255  Smith, De republica Anglorum (1583). 256  Smith to Cecil, 7 November 1565, TNA SP 70/81, fols. 6r–7v, at 6v. 253 254

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By 1571, all five men were in or en route to England, on intersecting paths: Gilbert had been knighted and returned to marry, serve in parliament, and ascend the courtly hierarchy with patronage from Cecil and Smith; Sidney had been recalled, and began the process of rebuilding his reputation and generating, with inspiration from Edmund Tremayne, a new reform scheme for what would be his second term in Ireland (1575–1578); Cecil had invited White to come visit England to discuss the relationship between their homelands, which White accepted; Smith had received his patent to plant the Ards Peninsula and after a late-year embassy to France began recruiting colonists, ultimately picking up where Gilbert had left off, stimulated by Sidney’s programs and Cecil’s outlook, and by White, who conferred with Smith’s brother and whose son became Smith’s ward upon White’s death in 1572 London.257 These movements signaled change afoot and, more specifically, a bevy of colonial plots and then rifts among and between New and Old Englishmen. The Irish project was not fading from Tudor view, even once the first Desmond Rebellion was quelled, but nor was the broader Atlantic World, where equally seismic incidents in the New World, Britain, and Europe kept American schemes awake. Across 1567–1570, Cecil and Sidney had become clearinghouses for a spate of imperial projects centered on a tumultuous Ireland, but part of a temporally broader field of view. It is altogether fitting, then, that as Smith and Gilbert looked, respectively, from Calais and the Northwest Passage to Ireland, Hacket implored the Irish deputy not to lose sight of the New World, dedicating his translation of Thevet’s The Newe found worlde, or Antarctike (1557) to Sidney in 1568. A nationalistic, historical, and missionary plea and practical tool for Tudor empire, Hacket’s text opened with evocative praise of those arts and sciences that bridle “the Barbarous and wicked,” especially navigation and cosmography, and the empires created by industrious men willing to leave the safety of their native lands in search of a “Newe found Worlde, or the West part” that even the lauded ancients had judged “vnhabitable.”258 Though the translator significantly pointed out that “England hath of late yeares gotte the fame and renowme,  White to Burghley, 23 March 1571, TNA SP 63/31, fols. 67r–68v. MacCaffrey, “Cecil, William, first Baron Burghley (1520/1–1598),” ODNB (2004); Ian W. Archer, “Smith, Sir Thomas (1513–1577),” ODNB (2008); Rory Rapple, “Gilbert, Sir Humphrey (1537–1583),” ODNB (2012); MacCaffrey, “Sidney, Sir Henry (1529–1586),” ODNB (2008). 258  Thevet, The new found worlde, or Antarctike… (1568), sig. *.ii.v. 257

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that it hath had in times past, by Nauigation lately atempted by many and sundrie of our countreymen” and framed the alternative as “naked, barbarous and brutish” servility, he chastised most English as “giuen to idelnesse or sensualitie” and willing to leave the world bereft of great conquerors; they failed in their duty “to go forwarde and encrease in those and such like enterprises, to Gods glory and the benefite of this common Wealth.”259 Like Eden, Hacket hoped that a narrative of overwhelmingly non-English (and largely Catholic Iberian) exploits detailing the boundless opportunity awaiting them in “the Indies, America, or Fraunce Antartike”—from the legendary Prester John to hospitable climates, fruitful lands, beautiful woods and waterways, trade in textiles, spices, dyes, and jewels, huge fish and animals, and cannibals as well as “maruelous strange wild and brutish people, without Fayth, without Lawe, without Religion, and without any ciuilitie: but liuing like brute beasts,” naked “but may peradventure… lerne to liue aftr a more ciuill and humayne manner”—would both embarrass and impel his countrymen “to abandon themselues and their swetest liues to the fauoure of the boystrous seas, to the hap of the vnconstante windes, to the chayre of fortune, and finally to a thousande imminent euils, onely to encrease the fame and good renowme of their countrey.”260 In this, they would pick up where the discoverer of the “Baccalles,” left off “an Englishman named Sebastian Babat, who informed Kyng Henry the seuenth, that by that waye he would sayle into the countrie of Catia, towards the Northe, and that by this meanes he woulde fynde spices and other thyngs as well as the Kyng of Portingal dyd in the east Indies: Neuerthelesse his mynd was to go to Perou, & America, for to people that cuntrie with Englishmen, but his purpose toke no effect.”261 Maybe Hacket also expected that in the mass of environmental and ethnographic information, Sidney might find resonances to Ireland or evidence of the efficacy of colonization across the Atlantic world. The translation came at a crucial time, one that ensured that the Hacket-Thevet literary achievement echoed loudly into the next decade. Also in 1568, the French avenged the Fort Caroline colonists by attacking St. Augustine (ostensibly with the help of native tribes disaffected toward Spain’s rule), Hawkins’s third voyage suffered at the hands of the Spanish at San Juan d’Ulúa, and the slide into war in the Netherlands further imperiled the  Thevet, New found worlde, sigs. *.ii.r, *.iii.r.  Thevet, New found worlde, fols. 34r, 36r, sig. *.ii.r. 261  Thevet, New found worlde, fol. 122r. 259 260

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balance of power and trade in Europe.262 All three events escalated the Anglo-Spanish rivalry, forced the crown to recalibrate its posture toward continental and confessional affairs, and encouraged merchants to seek out new markets and goods. So too did word of Spanish discovery, plantation, and Jesuit missionary activity in the mid-Atlantic in 1570, which promised Philip “great hope” of “[native] conversion and of service to Our Lord and His Majesty and of an entrance into the mountains and to China.”263 Closer to home, Mary, Queen of Scots’ forced abdication in 1567 and flight south in 1568, the Northern Rising of Elizabeth’s Catholic earls in 1569, her excommunication by Pope Pius V in Regnans in excelsis (which renounced her titles, her subject’s obedience to her, and pre-­ emptively pardoned her regicide) in 1570, the Ridolfi assassination plot in 1571, and the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1571 all served to exacerbate fears of an international, Habsburg-led Catholic conspiracy and provoked a rapid response. The Tudor court worked to nullify Mary’s claims, and further entrench associations of reformed religion with superiority and loyalty, Catholicism with degeneration and treason. As Anne McLaren has argued, the papal bull in particular “buttressed an opposed associational triad of militant Protestantism, English national identity, and loyalty to a (virginal) Elizabeth,” which was then promoted via new texts, images, speeches, laws, and penalties.264 This context set the course of Elizabeth’s middle years on the throne, with the heightened imperial energy and frenzied activity that marked them: Atlantic-wide Tudor British Empire seemed more providential and more indispensable. Mid-Tudor empire—a critical twenty-year span of theory, rhetoric, discourse, 262  Philip P.  Boucher, “Revisioning the ‘French Atlantic’: or, How to Think about the French Presence in the Atlantic, 1550–1625,” in The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624, ed. Peter Mancall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 274–306, at 290–291; Morgan, “Hawkins”; Kelsey, Hawkins, 71–93; Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); G.D.  Ramsay, The Queen’s Merchants and the Revolt of the Netherlands (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). For useful comment on some of these concerns, see Guerau De Spes to Philip, 12 March 1569, CSPSimancas 2:88. 263  Luis de Quirós and Juan Baptista de Segura to Juan de Hinistrosa, 12 September 1570, in Clifford M. Lewis and Albert J. Loomie, The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, 1570–1572 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 89–92, at 90. 264  MacLaren, “Gender, Religion, and Early Modern Nationalism,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 739–767, at 758. See also Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 450–451.

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scheming, and largely unfulfilled theory and predicated on westerly interest in an expanded Atlantic World, Spanish rivalry, protestantism, and mixed (public and private, colonial, trade, and military) enterprise—gave way to an experimental turn in Ireland and North America as the sixteenth century neared its final quarter.

CHAPTER 6

“The very path trodden by our ancestors”: The Elizabethan Moment, 1570–1588

From Paris in early March 1586, French mathematician and Hakluyt collaborator Martin Basanier dedicated the first printed edition of René de Laudoinnière’s L’histoire notable de la Floride to English courtier and American patent-holder Walter Ralegh.1 The volume detailed several French voyages of exploration and Huguenot settlement in the New World, emphasizing in its very title “the great riches and fruitefulnes of the countrey with the maners of [its] people” thus far unknown to most Europeans. Its preface touted the allure and legitimacy of traveling “to serch out the commodities to liue happely, plentifully, and at ease,” find vent for “the multitude of people too frutefull… to dwell in their natiue soyles,” and, on the Roman model, introduce “their lawes, customes, & religion in those prouinces which they had conquered by force of armes.”2 “For this cause,” Laudonnière submitted, “princes haue sent foorth out of their dominions certaine men of good actiuitie, to plante themselues in strang countries, there to make their profite to bring the countrie to ciuilitie, and, if it might be, to reduce the inhabitantes to the true knowledg of our God.”3 1  Basanier received the manuscript by way of Thevet. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, 170; Jonathan Hart, Representing the New World: The English and French Uses of the Example of Spain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 123. 2  Laudonnière, A notable historie… (1587), sig. Ar. 3  Laudonnière, Notable Historie, Av.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. S. Hower, Tudor Empire, Britain and the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62892-5_6

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Basanier’s opening epistle made the plea more specific, applying the tract to Ralegh and to the broader milieu that this premier royal favorite epitomized. That spring, as Queen Elizabeth I neared her fourth decade on the throne, she and her subjects were energetically engaged in three overlapping projects crisscrossing the Atlantic—Ireland, Newfoundland, and Virginia—and Ralegh had experience in them all. Indeed, at that very moment, one group of planters led by Ralph Lane aspired, under Ralegh’s auspices, to establish the first enduring British American colony, at Roanoke. The surge of new, enterprising plots raised the Tudor state’s profile as an imperial player and Ralegh’s as one of its most formidable public faces Europe-wide. “I am assured,” Basanier began, “that further familiarity [with navigation] will give you not only pleasure and contentment, but will make you still more ardent and desirous to continue the fine and noble exploits which have already won you an incomparable triumph in honor and glory.” Such was the reward for a man who spared no expense in venturing west, discovering “certain islands and land between Florida and Cape Breton,” and colonizing them, “in honour of your most virtuous and serene queen… an exploit certainly most laudable and not less profitable to a commonwealth.” To Basanier, Ralegh had “followed the very path trodden by our ancestors when they have desired to profit their realms, immortalize their names and, in the end, attain to the glory of God… with increase of honor and profit to your nation.”4 The following year, Hakluyt translated Laudonnière’s Historie into English, followed Basanier in dedicating the tract to Ralegh, and brought it to print in London in what would become a core piece in his seminal campaign for Tudor plantation in the New World.5 Offered from the perspective of a well-connected outsider, the Frenchman’s words reveal a great deal about the British Isles, Europe, and the Atlantic World at a crucial juncture. At once vague and particular, medieval and Renaissance in its appeals to history and memory, science and honor, nation, colony, and crown, Basanier’s flattery injected power and strength into Ralegh’s overseas exploits on behalf of his patron Elizabeth. By affording his client rights of first discovery and settlement as well as recognizing the Virgin Queen as the territory’s namesake, the 4  “19 February/1 March 1586, Dedication by Martin Basanier to Sir Walter Raleigh,” in Laudonnière, L’histoire notable de la Floride (Paris), printed in Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), [hereafter RV] 1:472–473. 5  Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, 170–172.

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author gave three proofs of Tudor possession in the New World. By highlighting the costs as well as the successes of the enterprise thus far and promising further profit for the adventurer and his commonwealth, he subtly yoked private and public fortune. By emphasizing the godliness of the pursuit, he indirectly tied it to Laudonnière’s dissident exploits as chronicled in the body of the text and lent Tudor imperialism a protestant confessional bent. And by calling on “the very path trodden by our ancestors,” Basanier implicitly invoked Ralegh’s predecessor, inspiration, and half-sibling Humphrey Gilbert as well as Elizabeth’s own predecessors, inspirations, and half-siblings. Traveling in their footsteps, without crippling knowledge of the ultimate fate of the “Lost Colony,” the courtier, his monarch, and his polemicist reveal the contemporary significance of Roanoke and of related, concurrent activities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. They privilege a new, distinct narrative of the 1570s and 1580s and role of these two busy decades in the history of the British Empire. This chapter recasts the middle of Elizabeth’s reign and the flurry of activity—at once sudden and expected, innovative and practiced—by monumental figures like Sidney, Gilbert, and Ralegh. Here was a critical moment of intensive, even furious experimentation abroad, launched in tandem with a concerted literary push at home.6 Roughly coinciding with the dawn of the new decade and lasting until the Spanish Armada set sail in 1588, their interest coalesced to the west, in Ulster, Munster, Newfoundland and the Northwest Passage, and Roanoke. Yet with official court support and essential mid-Tudor experience behind them, these activities were also deeply informed by their European settings and earlier ventures.7 They sought to re-establish British rule in an expanded Atlantic frame, following in an ancestral wake. Indeed, without this heritage, mid-­ Elizabethan efforts seem spasmodic, perhaps doomed. Considered 6  Andrews identified 1570–1587 as a “seed-time, a phase of ambitious projects, most of which came to nothing. In practical terms it was a false start, which gained its aura of brilliance from effective publicity,” and applied the term “proto-imperial,” see “Beyond the Line Equinoctial: England and South America in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies 10, no. 1 (1980), 4–24, at 4. Similarly, Canny highlighted Sidney’s concomitant deputyship, arguing that with the first systematic, comprehensive, consistent policy of garrisoning and New English colonization, it constituted a “new departure” and revolutionary program, see Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, 45. Mancall emphasized the intellectual products of this period in Hakluyt’s Promise. 7  By contextualizing Sidney, I seek a middle-ground, lost in an Ireland-only approach, between Brady, who found a “lack of originality” under Sidney (Chief Governors, 118), and Canny.

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together, Sidney’s Ireland, Gilbert’s North Atlantic, and Ralegh’s Virginia—significant exceptions to a historiography that otherwise privileges the Jacobeans as originators of Britain and its empire, yet still overwhelmingly labeled as failures or losses—become more than the abortive prerequisites that set the stage for permanent colonization in the seventeenth century.8 Projects in the 1570s and 1580s borrowed from the Henrician and Edwardian past, developed features new to the post-­ Somerset era (like collaborative public-private adventure, new Irish plantation, colonization by religious dissidents, and anti-Iberian sentiment), and at times radicalized ideologies or changed course in response to new circumstances. This chapter, then, connects Tournai, the Rough Wooings, and the mid-Tudor era to the boom that followed via a meandering yet discernable new narrative. These projects become successful expressions of earlier theory and practice (as contemporaries saw them), midway points in a far lengthier British imperial story, and aspects of an Atlantic-wide contest that was hurling England toward outright war with Spain. The struggle had a major effect on the development of an early modern British nation and empire. At home, it trumpeted a providential, xenophobic protestant identity; abroad, it merged with challenges in North America to sound the death knell of the Roanoke colony and Northwest Passage search. Ever since its launch, the Spanish Armada has garnered lofty interest, whether the failure is blamed on poor planning and bad luck or credited to a benevolent wind. However, the attack’s paradoxical effects—clarifying England’s place in Europe, demonstrating the importance of its amity with Scotland and security in Ireland, and bolstering the case for future enterprise in theory, while halting adventures already underway—have received less attention. Further, scholars have not considered the ways in which the 1588 augmented a pre-existing discourse that stretched back to 1485. In this light, the Armada becomes, like 8  Roanoke is the chief exception in a scholarly literature that largely omits British activity in the New World before the Stuart era. The colony’s prominence stems from its mysteriousness and ease with which it fits the conventional narrative: its location in the modern-day U.S., late date, colonial complexion, and ostensibly dismal failure leading, in linear fashion, to Jamestown’s success do not disrupt entrenched assumptions about British imperialism. Tellingly, Kupperman and James Horn each wrote a pair of books, one on Roanoke, one on Jamestown, see Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (NY: Rowman and Littlefield, 2nd edn., 2007) and The Jamestown Project (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007); Horn, A Kingdom Strange (NY: Basic Books, 2010) and A Land as God Made it: Jamestown and the Birth of America (NY: Basic Books, 2005).

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Roanoke, a moment among many in which multiple spheres proved wedded, domestic events both stymying and advancing expansion, and one phase gave way to another, final turn in the history of Tudor empire. * * * From June 1569 to February 1573, former rivals James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald (cousin of Gerald Fitzjames Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond) and Edmund and Piers Butler (brothers of Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond) joined forces to upend Tudor designs across the Irish Sea. Raising the banner of “holy war” for “the common good and wealth of… our dear country” and drawing strength from previous confessional conflicts, the rebels issued a challenge to “Elizabeth, the praetended Queene of England,” whom “neither the warning of other Catholick princes and good Christians, nor the sentence of pope Pius the fifth… nor the long sufferance of God, could cause her to forsake her schisme heresie and wicked attemptes,” threatening to “deprive her actually of the uniust possession of these kingdoms” and spread their rebellion among coreligionists in Wales, “the most pte of England desirous to enioye the Catholicke faithe,” and “or deere bretherin the nobilitie of Scotland.”9 Violent action and rhetoric laced with appeals to religion, nation, and empire grew firmer on both sides. Conveying reports of unparalleled destruction as well as targeted rapes and murders of English planters, whose bodies were then “stripped out of their English garments… set up as marks for [Geraldine] kernes to throw their darts at,”10 Tudor forces led 9  “Declaration of James FitzMorrice FitzGerald… in anno 1569,” in The Journal of the Kilkenny and South-east of Ireland Archaeological Society, vol. II, new ser. (Dublin: University Press, 1858–1859), 364–368, at 364, 365, 366, reiterated in “The Proclamation of the Right Honorable Lord James Geraldine,” 1569, Cal Carew 1:268. For one favorable response, see Anthony de Gueras to “the rebels of Ireland,” 1573, TNA SP 63/40/80, fols. 204r–205v. Edmund Butler later denied foreign collusion, to Earl of Ormond, 24 August 1569, TNA SP 63/29/47, fols. 80r–83v. See also Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, chapter 7; David Edwards, “The Butler Revolt of 1569,” Irish Historical Studies 28, no. 111 (May 1993): 228–255; Anthony McCormack, The Earldom of Desmond, 1463–1583: The Decline and Crisis of a Feudal Lordship (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005). 10  Brady, ed., A Viceroy’s Vindication? Sir Henry Sidney’s Memoir of Service in Ireland, 1556–1578 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), 62. See also Malby to Cecil, 21 June 1569, TNA SP 63/28/45; John Cantwell to Sidney, 21 June 1569, TNA SP 63/28/46; Roger Hooker to Robert Weston, 10 August 1569, TNA SP 63/29/45; Sidney and Council to PC, 26 October 1569, TNA SP 63/29/70.

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by Sidney, Gilbert (newly knighted “for his valiant doinges” by the Lord Deputy),11 Peter Carew (newly elevated English baron of Idrone, at the expense of Irish claims), and John Perrot (newly created president of Munster)12 responded brutally to the “vnnaturall… naked rascales,” reasserting their commitment to the “politicke, godlie, & easie reformation of this barbarous countrie” and slaughtering entire Irish communities.13 Meanwhile, in Connacht, another new provincial president and Cecil ally, Edward Fitton, faced down rebellion by Conor O’Brien, Earl of Thomond. Harried, Fitton explained that daily, Ireland grew more obstinate, more expensive, and no more reformed in religion or civility.14 His assistant Ralph Rokeby concluded, the people are “not wyllynge to embrace justice nor… cyvylyte and englyshe government… yt ys not the ma[c]e nor the name of a lord president & councell” that will bring them to obedience, but “fyer & sworde.”15 The following year, another Cecil agent William Herle plainly associated Irish Catholicism with devotion to Rome, violence toward the queen, opposition to the English name and fortune, and commitment to shaking off the Tudor yoke.16 Similarly, crown correspondent William Piers advocated planting “rude and vncivill” Ulster with English soldiers and settlers to sow civility and appointing “some learned and zealous man… who maye in both the languages enstruct thise rude people in the true and lyvelie worde of god” to the bishopric of Down.17 Archbishop of Dublin Adam Loftus complained of ignorant papists in the Irish Church,18 Bishop of Killaloe Morgan O’Brien lamented that his people “for the most p[ar]te covet to be fead wth Pharoes ffleshe potts then to

 Thomas Lancaster to Cecil, 4 January 1570, TNA SP 63/30/3, fols. 6r–7v, at 6r.  According to Sidney, Perrot took up the new post to maintain “quiett, although no man could do more in so short a tyme as Mr Gilbert hath,” see “Extracts of letters,” 26 January 1570, TNA SP 63/30/38, fols. 74r–75v, at 74v. 13  Weston and Council to Elizabeth, 23 March 1571, TNA SP 63/31/33, fols. 121r–124v, at 121v, 122r, 123v. On Carew, see John A. Wagner, The Devon Gentleman: A Life of Sir Peter Carew (Hull: Hull University Press, 2000); on the offensive, see Wayne E. Lee, Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 25–36; Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 295–299. 14  Fitton to PC, 29 October 1571, TNA SP 63/34/27, fols. 74r–75v. 15  Rokeby to Cecil, 15 April 1570, TNA SP 63/30/44, fols. 86r–87v, at 86r, 86v. 16  “Note of the confederates in Ireland by William Herlle,” April 1571, TNA SP 63/32/16, fols. 67r–68v. 17  Piers to Elizabeth, 6 July 1571, TNA SP 63/33/70, fols. 1r–2v, at 1r and 2r. 18  Loftus to Cecil, 26 September 1571, TNA SP 63/34/13, fols. 36r–37v. 11 12

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taste the heavenlye Manna,”19 and the state oversaw the publication of Irish statutes from Henry VI’s reign through to Elizabeth’s to remind subjects of their supposedly 400-year-long happy governance under England, reasoning that ignorance of the law bred rebelliousness.20 William Fitzwilliam, who replaced his brother-in-law as lord deputy in late 1571, responded by pleading with the queen and with Cecil (now Baron Burghley) for well-provisioned soldiers—especially those trained in foreign warfare,21 good preachers,22 “Englisshe harted” Irish bishops,23 and God-fearing, mere English officials24 to cure the “desease wch grevously eatith [Ireland] inwardly”25 and instruct the “barborous Irisherye.”26 Perrot at once assured Fitzwilliam that even razed sites need only be re-­ edified by the many desirous to inhabit the commodious land,27 stressed the European-wide threat of “paganist papistes,”28 and emphasized the necessity of eagle-eyed presidents “reddye wt her mates sworde of justice”; here was “a wylde & subtell nacion,” more challenging, he suggested, than either Wales or the north.29 Witnessing “suche arrogant contemptuous demeanor in everie rascall almost of the Irissherie, the names of England and englisshe waxing generally and toto apparantly hatefull,”30 and “wthowte force continually to followe and suppresse them,” the lord deputy asserted, “[the rebels] will neuer leave, ffor so muche doth it stick in their stomackes, to be drawen from their olde Irisshe and sensuall barbarisms, to the knowledge of any civilitie, or the obedience of lawe.”31 For their part, the Irish received assurances of the “holy Catholic King  O’Brien to Burghley, 1573, TNA SP 63/39/18, fols. 45r–46v, at 45r.  “Reasons for printing the statutes,” 1571, TNA SP 63/33/22, fols. 48r–49v. 21  Fitzwilliam and Council to Elizabeth, 7 April 1571, TNA SP 63/32/2, fols. 9r–14v; to Brughley, 7 April 1571, TNA SP 63/32/3, fols. 24r–25v; to Burghley, 24 March 1572, TNA SP 63/35/41, fols. 137r–138v. 22  Fitzwilliam to Burghley, 8 May 1571, TNA SP 63/32/29, fol. 90r. 23  Fitzwilliam, Loftus, and Hugh Brady, bishop of Meath, to Elizabeth, 1 October 1572, TNA SP 63/38/1, fols. 1r–2v, at 1r. 24  Fitzwilliam to Burghley, 4 January 1572, TNA SP 63/35/4, fols. 24r–27v. 25  Fitzwilliam to PC, 15 April 1572, TNA SP 63/36/3, fols. 7r–8v, at 7r. 26  Fitzwilliam and Council to Elizabeth, 7 December 1572, TNA SP 63/38/49, fols. 102r–103v, at 102r. 27  Perrot to Fitzwilliam, 14 May 1571, TNA SP 63/32/41(ii), fols. 118r–119v. 28  Perrot to Burghley, 2 November 1572, TNA SP 63/38, fols. 66r–68v, at 67r. 29  Perrot to Fitzwilliam, 11 May 1572, TNA SP 63/36/46(iii), fols. 158r–159v, at 158r. 30  Fitzwilliam to Burghley, 21 October 1572, TNA SP 63/38/20, fols. 44r–45v, at 44r. 31  Fitzwilliam to PC, 24 July 1572, TNA SP 63/37/13, fols. 28r–30v, at 29r. 19

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Philip[’s]” singular love and exhortations against “the Lutheran harlot queen of England and the chief men of England, scoundrels and devils, who long troubled you and plundered the lives of your parents.” “You are beggars in your own home,” Roland Turner told Brian mac Phelim O’Neill, lord of Clandeboye in 1573, “the English, unjust and impious men and recoiling from the holy catholic faith,… rob you continuously.”32 For many Elizabethans, then, the rebellion confirmed Irish incivility, the treasonous conspiracy of Spain and Rome, and the need for English-­ only rule and plantation by force; for Geraldine, Butler, and O’Brien malefactors, it showed their enemies’ commitment to a centralizing, martial, protestant colonial mission and further bound Catholicism with Irishness. As such, the first Desmond Rebellion propagated a particular view of the Tudor nation and empire rooted in the 1550s and 1560s, yet raised the specter of its alternative and sanctioned a specific, uncompromising reply to protect what Fitzwilliam described as so “dear a juell” to England.33 Making a connection to 1558 explicit, he warned, if Spain should send men to possess Ireland, “I feare Englond may looke after it as Cal[ai]s.”34 The year Fitzmaurice and the Butlers rebelled, Burghley had sent Edmund Tremayne, accused Wyatt-conspirator-turned-MP and Drake’s cousin, to assess Ireland’s condition. Soon after, he became clerk of the privy council and a wellspring of ideas for Sidney’s crucial second deputyship. While the latest tract from Burghley correspondent Rowland White, likely composed just before the Anglo-Irishman’s death in 1572, had both scorned Gaelic customs and emphasized the cooperation of the Old English and capacity of all Irish for civility and protestantism,35 Tremayne found instead a general “vnwillingnes to reformation.”36 Writing in broad strokes and disputing even Fitzmaurice’s claims of pervasive Catholicism, he reported that, quite simply, “religion hath no place” here. Instead, its people “regarde nor faith nor othe, they murder, rauyshe, spoyle, burne, comytte whoredome, breake wedloke, change wifes wthout grudge of conscience,” obey no law or army. Perhaps most troublingly, 32  Turner to O’Neill, 1573, TNA SP 63/40/81, fols. 206r–207v, at 206r (CSPI rev., 3:567), quotation from CSPI’s translation. 33  Fitzwilliam to Dudley, 16 March 1572, TNA SP 63/35/33, fols. 120r–121v, at 120v. 34  Fitzwilliam to Burghley, 15 April 1572, TNA SP 63/36/4, fols. 10r–11v, at 10r. 35  White, “The dysorders of the Irissherye,” ca. 1571, TNA SP 63/1/72, fols. 165r–177r; Canny, “White’s Dysorders,” 147–154. 36  Tremayne, “Causes why Irel is not reformed,” June 1571, TNA SP 63/32/65, fols. 183r–184v, at 183v.

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“the disagreement of or own nation settled in that country” rendered those who “haue any setlinge there… the vnfitter for al reformacions.” Until civility and law, rather than profit and power, took precedence, “no man need to merveyl why that Realme growth daylie from bad to werse. And al is lost that is spent ther.”37 To that end, Tremayne homed in on the cess, asserting that the successful, regular collection of a set tax or rent was crucial to defend the queen’s laws and free the island from the “idle kearne, the galloglass and scotes” who “be the deuourers of that comonwelth,” and “the tyrranny of the irishrye and other usurpers.”38 Enforced nationally by a large royal army and commissioners, such “composition” would replace traditional tenancy, coign, and livery and thus bring local magnates to heel, promote assimilation, and reduce the realm to obedience.39 He also emphasized the importance of sending “good men, new and new, out of England to rule,” in church and state.40 Yet disturbingly, Tremayne contended, make what bisshoppes you like, preach what you like, Bring what lawyers you list… plant as many presidents as you can, and all is to no purpose to reforme the wickednesse of those stubborne, rude, and most barbarouse people… for there muste come with it a third minister that must give effecte to the two other… [:] her maties Armie.41

By contrast, Smith and Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, homed in on colonization and conquest. With Rowland’s son John in his employ and in possession of the father’s views, Smith intended “to wyne the Ards, and Duffer to affynitie.”42 Petitioning for the land “at their owne charges and perils, and to make the same civill and peopled with naturall Englishe men

 Tremayne, “Causes,” 183r, 184r.  Tremayne, “Touchinge the state of Ireland,” endorsed June 1571, TNA SP 63/32/64, fols. 181r–182v, at 181v, 182r. 39  Tremayne, “Notes and Propositions for the Reformation of Ireland,” endorsed 1571, TNA SP 63/32/66, fols. 185r–192v; Tremayne, “Whether the Quenes Matie be to be counselled to governe Ireland after the Irishe manner,” 1571, BL Add MS 48015, fols. 274r–279v and BL Cotton MS Titus B XII, fols. 357r–360v; “Advice in Tremayne’s hand,” 26 February 1572, TNA SP 63/35/21, fols. 65r–66v; Brady, Chief Governors, 140–143. 40  Tremayne, “Notes,” 191v. 41  Tremayne, “Notes,” 190r; Canny, “Revising the Revisionist,” Irish Historical Studies 30, no. 118 (November 1996), 242–254, at 248. 42  Nicholas White to Burghley, 10 May 1573, TNA SP 63/40/31, fols. 77r–78v, at 77r. 37 38

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borne,”43 he and his associates received their grant in November 1571 and promoted the joint-stock plot in a printed broadsheet, map, and pamphlet.44 They argued that a combination of divine providence, the right of “Kings of England [who] haue had footing and continuall gouernement these foure hundred yeeres and more,” a native “barbarous Nation at no time fully subdued”45 nor settled,46 insufficient forces47 and inhabitants,48 and the “daily decay of the English manners” among Old English into “the Irish mans beastly libertie”49 had prepared the “desolate”50 land to be a solution of England’s overpopulation.51 The loss of Calais also seems to have been pivotal for the experienced councilor and French ambassador: Smith censured “the Prince, who at the firste inhabyting thereof mynding more the kyngdome of Fraunce and thinking all to little for that purposed Conquest, neglected Ireland”52 as well as his successors “addicted” to France53 at the expense of the “Englishe race ouerrunne and daily spoiled” across the Irish Sea.54 As such, upon examining law, history, and “the estate of Countreis abrode,” the pamphlet settled on “Ireland [which] is the Queenes inheritaunce”; “to inhabite & reforme so barbarous a nation as that is, and to bring them to the knowledge and lawe, were bothe a godly and commendable deede, and sufficient worke for our age.”55 The plot depicted a fertile, naturally fortified place teeming with waterways,

43  “The Petition of Thomas Smythe and his Associates, [c. 1570],” in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord de L’Isle and Dudley preserved at Penhurst Palace, ed. C.L. Kingsford (London: Stationery Office, 1934), vol. 2, 12–15, at 12. 44  See also Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577) and the Beginnings of English Colonial Theory,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 89, no. 4 (December 1945), 542–560; Quinn, “Renaissance Influences in English Colonization,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (1976), 73–99; Hiram Morgan, “The Colonial Ventures of Sir Thomas Smith in Ulster, 1571–1575,” The Historical Journal 28, no. 2 (June 1985), 261–278. 45  A Letter sent by I.B. Gentleman… [1572], sig. A.iii.r. 46  Letter, E.i.r. 47  Letter, A.iii.v. 48  Letter, A.iv.v. 49  Letter, B.i.r. 50  Letter, E.i.v. 51  Letter, C.iv.v. 52  Letter, A.iii.v. 53  Letter, A.iv.v. 54  Letter, B.i.r. 55  Letter, C.iv.v.

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fish and fowl, timber, stone, and wool56 apt for new English annexation, garrisoning, plantation, and rule,57 “lacking only inhabitants, manurance, and pollicie.”58 A humanist bent was also on display. The Letter cited Alexander the Great and the Macedonians,59 and Smith counseled the erection of a city, Elizabeth, on the model of London, and a central “fort as byrsa was to dido, And Mons auentnus to Romulus… that being strong & provided to live & defend may master the cuntrey about.”60 He recalled that “England was ones as vncivill as Ireland now is… [until] colonies of the Roymaynes brought… ther lawes & orderes,”61 and submitted that unless “the Queenes maie go so to worke & either of hir owne charge, or els thus wthout hir charge do send thither colonias, to people the contrey wth civil men, brought vp in the lawes of England she shall never reduce th[at] countrey.”62 Elizabeth apparently agreed, issuing instructions that in demising or letting crown land, preference go to “Englishemen borne in Englande… and nexte vnto them suche as be of the Englisheborne in Irelande, and lyvinge civillie after the maner of Englande” and “bynde euery farmer” to use “the Englishe tongue and also the Englishe apparell,” manner, and “tillyage.”63 Effectively sanctioning the private enterprise, she granted independent power to the colonel to forcefully expel rebels, inhabit and defend the colony, strictly govern soldiers and civilians, settle causes (barring land grants) and punish criminals (barring traitors and coiners).64 Calling on early Henrician theory and playing with Greek spelling to turn More’s “No Place” into a “Good Place,”65 Smith asked the reader, “haue I not set forth to you another Eutopia?”66

 Letter, B.i.v, D.i.v.  Letter, C.i.v. 58  Letter, B.i.v. 59  Letter, C.iii.v. 60  Smith to his son [Smith], 10 April 1572, TNA SP 70/146, fol. 63v. 61  Smith to Fitzwilliam, 8 November 1572, TNA SP 63/38/30, fols. 69r–70v, at 70r. 62  Smith to Fitzwilliam, 8 November 1572, 69r. 63   “Instructions for the commissioners in Ireland,” 30 December 1572, TNA SP 63/38/59, fols. 125r–126v, at 125v. 64  Fiants, Elizabeth, no. 2149, cited in Morgan, “Colonial Venture,” 266–267. 65  Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 176. 66  Letter, E.i.r. 56 57

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Smith and his son recruited some 800 men, yet disputes and delays whittled them down to 100 by the August 1572 departure.67 Despite claims that it “neyther sought to expell nor to destroy the Yrish race” but to keep them quiet, English law, and civility,68 unsurprisingly the venture and broader “Enterprise of Ulster” faced resistance from the Anglo-Irish, Brian mac Phelim O’Neill and his Gaelic clan, their sometimes-allies, sometimes-rivals the O’Neills of Tyrone, and the Antrim Scots69—apparently, none of these “wyld vnserten heddyd people,” as Fitzwilliam called them,70 agreed with English logic that settling “englishmen to fortifie it and to bring thither the englishe customes and lawes” was either “most necessary” or “very iuste.”71 The nervous deputy reported to the privy council in May 1572 that the English landing “tyckelith the mutable and waveryng heddes and senses of the yrishrie in generall, and feadeth the humoures besides of such other the wickedd as would fayne practize the meanes to have styrres and trobles to arryse.”72 Disputing rumors that he “mislyked” the plan to “plant Englisshe men in these wast cuntryes,”73 Fitzwilliam promised Elizabeth that he would fully “imbrace the entreprice, as the onelye meanes I knowe… to brydle this rebelliouse people, whome nothing but feare and force can teache,”74 but openly lamented the venture’s small size and feared its destabilizing effect on a people “long nuseled in beastlie libertie and sensuall immunitie.”75 Indeed, he charged in October, as a result of the Ulster project “McPhelim hath nowe discouered his Irishe nature full,” aligning with Turlough Luineach and

67  Fitzwilliam to Elizabeth, 25 September 1572, TNA SP 63/37/59, fols. 123r–126v, at 123v–124r. 68  Smith to Fitzwilliam, 8 November 1572, 69v. 69  Brian mac Phelim O’Neill to Sidney and Council, 19 March 1571, TNA SP 63/23/2(iv), fols. 20r–21v, at 20v; William Piers to [Fitzwilliam], 3 January 1572, TNA SP 63/35/2, fols. 19r–v. 70  Post-script in Fitzwilliam’s hand in Piers to [Fitzwilliam], 3 January 1572, TNA SP 63/35/2, fols. 19r–v, at 19v. 71  “Enterprise to inhabit and fortify the country of Clandeboye to the use of the crown of England,” 1571, TNA SP 63/34/52, fols. 144r–145v, at 144r, 144v. 72  Fitzwilliam and Council to PC, 6 May 1572, TNA SP 63/36/16, fols. 34r–35v, at 34v. 73  Fitzwilliam to Burghley, 26 October 1572, TNA SP 63/38/24, fols. 58r–59v, at 58r. 74  Fitzwilliam to Elizabeth, 25 September 1572, TNA SP 63/37/59, fols. 123r–126v, at 123v. 75  Fitzwilliam to Burghley, 25 September 1572, TNA SP 63/37/60, fols. 142r–145v, at 142r.

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the Scots.76 Nicholas Malby, whose name had been linked to the Marian Queen’s plantation and who was now prospecting in Ulster alongside Smith after serving under Sidney,77 wrote to Burghley from Dublin that “her ma[jesty] can not assure her selfe of any stedfast obedience of anye… of the yryshery”; any reduction in troop numbers will be “joyfull tydinges” to those who “will make havocke of all.”78 The council too realized the depths of resistance, explaining that the Queen would gladly plant more civil Englishmen and reward those who served her in the rebellion, yet gave Fitzwilliam discretion to do whatever was best “in such places… where no man dare adventure.”79 Fatefully, Thomas junior died at Irish hands in October 1573.80 Smith mustered another venture in 1574 to preserve the patent,81 but by the middle of the following year, more failure had convinced him to try to surrender the claim to Essex, who had been granted the Glynns and North Clandeboye and launched his project in Antrim 1573–1575, or to the Queen.82 Essex’s scheme was larger than Smith’s and carried a larger burden, constructed on an appeal to crown honor, to country’s dignity, and to Ulster, habitation, and building as the keys to reforming Ireland.83 In July 1573, Perrot reminded Elizabeth that “yf the kinges of England have any one thinge heavier vppon their soules, then other: yt ys that they haue not made a throughe conqueste of [Ireland],” and speculated that if Essex

 Fitzwilliam to Burghley, 4 October 1572, TNA SP 63/38/4, fols. 11r–13v, at 11r.  Bernadette Cunningham, “Malby, Sir Nicholas (c. 1530–1584),” ODNB (2008). 78  Malby to Burghley, 8 August 1572, TNA SP 63/37/33, fols. 70r–v, at 70r. 79  PC to Fitzwilliam, 21 January 1573, TNA SP 63/39/14, fols. 36r–v, at 36r. 80  Christopher Maginn, “Smith, Thomas (1547–1573),” ODNB (2008). 81  “Mr. Brett’s Notes,” 1573, TNA SP 63/40/21, fols. 62r–63v, at 62v. 82  “Sir Thomas Smith’s title to all the Ards,” May 1575, TNA SP 63/51/47, fols. 132r–133v. Smith willed his Irish lands to nephew William, who arrived with 40 men to colonize the Ards in June 1579. He was blocked by crown administrators, however, likely because the patent was defunct as of March. See Quinn, “Smith and Beginnings,” 550, 559–560. For Essex’s venture, see “The offers of Walter Devereux,” 1573, TNA SP 63/40/62, fols. 162r–163v; “The intention of Walter Devereux,” 1573, TNA SP 63/40/65, fols. 167r–168v; “Note of letters patent for Walter Devereux,” endorsed July 1573, TNA SP 63/41/97, fols. 215r–252v; “Articles between Essex and the Gentleman Adventurers,” [22 January] 1574, TNA SP 63/44/23, fols. 63r–64v; Essex to Walsingham, 10 March 1575, TNA SP 63/50/5, fols. 8r–9v. Morgan, “Colonial Venture,” 263; Quinn, “Smith and Beginnings,” 545. 83  Essex to Burghley, 2 November 1573, TNA SP 63/42/68, fols. 146r–147v; Thomas Wilford to Burghley, 1 December 1573, TNA SP 63/43/1, fols. 1r–2v. 76 77

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should “shrinke not… [she] may haue Vlster reformed.”84 Yet against the “barbarous doings of the Yrishe” and “Englishe papistes” (as Smith put it),85 impugning by Spanish sympathizers,86 and scant supplies, plague, and desertion,87 Essex struggled and died in 1576. Smith followed in 1577, but not before lending participants and observers essential lessons that would both help and hinder Tudor empire, such as the crafting of rhetorical justifications, the look and feasibility of private enterprise, the importance of well-supported New English personnel and plantation, and the potential for O’Neill-led resistance.88 Developing ideas from More, Walshe, and White, the episode presaged Tyrone’s Rebellion in the 1590s and the Virginia Company in the 1600s.89 In mid-May 1574, Munster settler Henry Ackworth lamented how the area was “revolting to her monstruouse Irishe fasshion,” of Brehon law, native custom, and Roman Catholicism, to the dishonor of God and Queen. In part, he blamed “the cankred stomakes off protected or pardoned traitores, wch vpon euerie light occasion breake owt festeringe & rotting all partes of ye commonwealthe”90 and cited Aristotle and Cicero to advise severity as “the perfitest forme to gouerne barbarouse people.”91 “Send vnto us a Bellingham or a Sydney… a Perrott or a Gilbert,” he begged, “wch can & will bridle thes vnrulie irishe coltes, wth a sharpe englishe bitt.”92 Advocating an aggressive approach in colonialist terms laced with classical references, Ackworth got his wish. The next month, 2000 soldiers were levied in Wales for Irish service, lending the effort a British flavor and befitting a near-contemporary comment that “Vntill yt was Kinge Henry the 8. tyme, Wales was in like estate that Ireland is presently.”93  Perrot to Elizabeth, 13 July 1573, TNA SP 63/41/76(ii), fols. 197r–198v, at 197r, 198r.  Smith to Burghley, 13 October 1574, TNA SP 63/42/50, fols. 108r–109v, at 108r. 86  Anthony de Gueras to “the rebels of Ireland,” 1573, TNA SP 63/40/80, fols. 204r–205v. 87  Barnabe Googe to Burghley, 7 April 1574, TNA SP 63/45/60, fols. 154r–155v. 88  Thomas Jenyson to Burghley, 5 February 1574, TNA SP 63/44, fols. 71r–72v; Loftus to Burghley, 23 April 1574, TNA SP 63/45/81, fols. 217r–218v. 89  Morgan, “Colonial Venture,” 272, 277; Canny, “The Permissive Frontier: The Problem of Social Control in English Settlements in Ireland and Virginia, 1550–1650,” in Westward Enterprise, ed. Andrews, Canny, and Hair, 19; Dewar, Smith, 166. 90  Ackworth to Burghley, 20 May 1574, TNA SP 63/46/26, fols. 53r–54v, at 53r. 91  Ackworth to Burghley, 20 May 1574, 53v. 92  Ackworth to Burghley, 20 May 1574, 54r. 93  PC to Fitzwilliam, 20 June 1574, TNA SP 63/46/69, fols. 157r–v; “The causes of innovation in Ireland,” TNA SP 12/45, 94–95 (fols. 47v–48r), at 94 (47v). 84

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That November, Essex lured mac Phelim O’Neill to Belfast and slaughtered his followers; the leader, his wife, and brother were executed for treason.94 In February, a Burghley report summarized, “the best is, to seke ye Reformation of Ireland as well by force, as by ordre of Justice,” enforced by those “of England” and maintained by Irish “brought vpp in english sort so as they may have knolledge of cyvillyte,”95 as Perrot promoted sword and justice, whereby Munster’s natives “exchanged their warlyke furniture into ploughes… their Irisshe habites into Englisshe.”96 In July, confident that he was God’s instrument “to further his glorye, the Queenes honor, and the wealthe of our countreye,”97 Essex sent John Norris and Francis Drake to Rathlin Island, where they massacred some 600 of Antrim chieftain Sorley Boy MacDonnell’s followers.98 Elizabeth was pleased, calling the earl’s last turn in Ireland a “happy success.”99 In September, Sidney returned as deputy, to “hit where others had missed.”100 The Irish “stirs” had disrupted settlement, provided a stage for mid-­ Elizabethan officials and theorists, and legitimized an intensified Anglicizing approach perpetuated by Sidney in his second term against those “disposed to shake of ye englishe yoke” with help from Spain.101 The climate befitted new militarism and new resolve to English dominance as well as a turn away from alternatives like White, but the program was not wholly novel. Seemingly borrowing from Tremayne, his one-time secretary, the deputy moved to enact nation-wide reform that would enforce spiritual obedience with new clergy and commissions, introduce uniform 94  Henry A.  Jefferies, “Brian mac Phelim O’Neill, lord of Clandeboye (d. 1574),” ODNB (2004). 95  “Degrees for the government of Ireland,” endorsed February 1575, TNA SP 63/49/78, fols. 220r and 221r. 96  Perrot to Elizabeth, n.d. 1575, TNA SP 63/50/80, fols. 190r–191v, at 190r. 97  Essex to Burghley, 8 May 1575, TNA SP 63/51/9, fols. 19r–20v, at 19r. 98  Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 303–305; Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 120–121; Thomas Herron, Spenser’s Irish Work: Poetry, Plantation, and Colonial Reformation (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 19–20. 99  Elizabeth to Essex, 12 August 1575, Cal Carew 2:23. 100  Brady, ed., Viceroy’s Vindication, 81. On Essex’s withdrawal, Fitzwilliam’s recall, and Sidney’s reappointment, see Elizabeth to Essex, 22 May 1575, TNA SP 63/51/39, fols. 106r–107v and 6 August 1575, Cal Carew 2:21; Instructions for Sidney, 2 August 1575, Cal Carew 2:20. 101  “William Herlle’s collection of John Corbin’s speech,” endorsed 29 May 1574, TNA SP 63/46/32, fols. 64r–65v, at 64v. On Spain’s role, see [—] to Burghley, 24 June 1574, CP 7/45.

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payments, and extend New English oversight, justice, and colonization, targeting Anglo-Irish and Gaelic subjects. Recalled in March 1578 amid charges of abusive spending and power, Sidney left Ireland having achieved little of what he sought, while preparing the ground for another Desmond Rebellion, which began in July 1579 and gave Ralegh and others an early chance to perform against the Irish as well as the Spanish and Italian mercenaries who accompanied Fitzmaurice. Yet the parameters of Sidney’s project survived for later application, and not simply via shared personnel. Across the 1570s and early 1580s, a diverse set of printed polemical texts publicized his feats102—Edmund Campion’s 1571 History of Ireland,103 the attainder of “monstrous monarchal Tyrant of all Ulster” Shane O’Neill in 1572,104 Holinshed’s Chronicles in 1577105 and Derricke’s Image of Ireland in 1581,106 culminating in his own “Book,” a vindication of service sent to Walsingham in 1583.107 Sidney’s scheme was secular and ecclesiastical.108 He contended in 1576 that in this “sore, and sick Realm,” the church was in a particularly “foule deformed” and “cruellye crusshed” state. Its temples were collapsing, its ministry run by “irish roges, hauing verye little Lattin, lesse learning and cyuilite… [who] lyue vppon the gayne of Masses, Dirges, shryuinges and soche lyke tromperyes godlye abolished by yor. Matie.” The two spheres were connected—where little or no reformation existed in religion, there was little or none in manners—and both under Elizabeth’s imperial crown, as “the onelye souereigne salue geuer.”109 As such, he petitioned to execute both, including via a roving “Apostelshipp” of “three or fower grave, learned, and venerable parsonagies of the Clergye” sent from England to

 Morgan, “Elizabeth and Ireland,” 300.  Campion, History of Ireland, in Two Histories of Ireland, ed. James Ware (Dublin, 1633). 104  Brady, ed., Viceroy’s Vindication, 45. For the attainder, see Statutes at Large, 1:322–338, also Brady, “The Attainder of Shane O’Neill, Sir Henry Sidney, and the Problems of Tudor State-Building,” in British Interventions, ed. Brady and Ohlmeyer, 28–48; Brady, “The Killing of Shane O’Neill: Some New Evidence,” Irish Sword 15 (1982–1983), 116–123. 105  Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, 4 vols. (1577). 106  Derricke, The Image of Ireland (1581), 6734. 107  Brady, ed., Viceroy’s Vindication. 108  Brady and Murray, “Sir Henry Sidney and the Reformation in Ireland,” in Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700, edited by Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 14–39. 109  Sidney to Elizabeth, 28 April 1576, TNA SP 63/55/38, fols. 129r–130v, at 129r. See also Sidney to PC, 27 April 1576, Letters Memorials, 1:102–110, at 109. 102 103

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replace the local episcopacy and supported by English bishops.110 After facing some initial caution from the council, Sidney moved ahead, driven by his interpretation of royal prerogative and an abiding commitment to furthering Elizabethan religious reforms.111 He promoted strong new English protestants like George Acworth and William Gerrard at the expense of those favored by the gradualist Loftus and Weston, created a new court of faculties to subsume and control multiple ordinary bishop functions, and assembled a new High Commission of his supporters to levy fines, punish violations, and fight recusancy.112 Recall came just one year to the month after he established the court, yet Sidney’s tenure had effectively squelched the potential for moderation and confirmed the tenor of late 1570s and 1580s experimentation. By Sidney’s instructions, paramount crown concerns were reducing debt, defraying costs, and increasing revenue113—that is, transforming Ireland from drain to profit, as decades of promotion (and Sidney) had claimed it could be. The deputy’s solution, culled from Tremayne and Fitton and instigated upon arrival, was composition, that regular system of fixed, annual, monetary rents and taxes on the English model, aimed to grow government income, cripple local magnates, float a permanent army, and reform society.114 As he reported during a 1576 tour of Munster, the plan was beneficial, practical, and desired: “all the principall Gentlemen… originall Inglishe… [and] originall Irishe … crave, that they may have the Forces of their meane Lordes suppressed, and that they may be equallye cessed to beare an Inglishe Force, and to have Englishe Lawes planted amongst theim, and Englishe Sheriffs to execute those Lawes, and to surrender their Landes to her Majestie.”115 Besides being “detestable,” the administration charged, “coign and livery… is dangerous to the State.”116 Suppressing it, then, was a central plank of Sidney’s wider vision,117 derived  Sidney to Elizabeth, 28 April 1576, 129v.  Murray, Enforcing the Reformation, 296. 112  Murray, Enforcing the Reformation, 298–310. 113  Instructions for Sidney, 2 August 1575, Cal Carew 2:20. 114  Brady, Chief Governors, 113–158, especially 139–146; Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 304–308; Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland, 185–187; Brady, Viceroy’s Vindication, 35–36. 115  Sidney to PC, [27] February 1576, Letters Memorials, 1:87–97, at 93–94. 116  “Discourse of Cogne and Livery,” 13 March 1579, Cal Carew 2:123. 117  Sidney to PC, 27 April 1576, Letters Memorials, at 1:109–110; “Lord Chancellor Gerrard,” Cal Carew 2:73. 110 111

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in part from his and Gerrard’s experiences in Wales as well as crown directive.118 It also included the expansion of common law and shiring, the reconstitution of Essex’s Ulster venture,119 recovery of New English tenancy in King’s and Queen’s counties,120 and installation of New English officials, who could better control locals.121 To him, the Irish “seamed in all Apparaunce generallye to lothe their vile and barbarous” ways.122 Rumors to contrary, however, apparently circulated at home: the council reported in July 1576 that “the sending thither of lawyers is a matter most requisite, but such opinion is conceived of the barbarism there, and so small are the gains and entertainment,” that “they do ever make some means to her Majesty whereby they may be stayed.”123 Some advances were more successful, like the appointment of Ulster enterprise veteran Malby as governor of Connaught, explicitly because of his “honest and discreet” reputation.124 Sidney commended the choice of “so apt an instrument to frame the rude barbarous people of this province.”125 Yet Munster, Connaught, and even the Pale bristled.126 The latter complained that composition was oppressive,127 bringing “more decay, than ever coyne and livery did.”128 These lords declared it “contrary to the laws and ancient usage of that realm”129 (namely, extra-parliamentary)130 and carried their grievance to court.131 Significantly, Sidney’s defense appealed

118  Gerrard to [PC?], 8 February 1577, Cal Carew 2:46; Sidney to PC, [27] February 1576, Letters Memorials, 1:89–97; Brady, “Comparable Histories? Tudor Reform in Wales and Ireland,” in Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725, ed. Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (London: Longman, 1995), 64–86, especially 75–81. 119  Sidney to PC, 15 December 1575, Cal Carew 2:33. 120  Sidney to PC, 15 December 1575, 2:33; Instructions for Sidney, 2 August 1575, 2:20. 121  Sidney to PC, [27] February 1576, Letters Memorials, 1:95. 122  Sidney to PC, [27] February 1576, 1:92. 123  PC to Sidney, 13 July 1576, Cal Carew 2:39. 124  PC to Sidney, 23 July 1576, Cal Carew 2:40. 125  Sidney to PC, 20 September 1576, TNA SP 63/56. fols. 66r–67v, at 66v. 126  Council of Ireland to Elizabeth, 12 September 1577, in Letters Memorials 1:214–218. 127  Petition of the Inhabitants of the English Pale to Sidney and the Council, [November] 1576, Cal Carew 2:42; Gerrard to [PC?], 8 February 1577, Cal Carew 2:46. 128  Viscount Baltinglas and Others to PC, 11 January 1577, Cal Carew 2:44. 129  “The Cesse,” 14 May 1577, Cal Carew 2:55. 130  “Proceedings in the Cesse,” [1577], Cal Carew 2:47. 131  Viscount Baltinglas and others to PC, 11 January 1577, 2:44; PC to Desmond, 13 May 1577, Cal Carew 2:54.

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to precedent dating back to Henry IV,132 but while Elizabeth censured protest as “tend[ing] manifestly to the overthrow of our prerogative, by which in our own time, as in the time of our progenitors,” the cess had been imposed,133 she ultimately heard their plea, agreed to a compromise, and accepted submissions.134 Ulndercutting his authority, the council directed Sidney to “consider well of the time and discontentation in the people of the Pale, ‘and to bear such a moderate hand upon them, as, with preservation of her Majesty’s prerogative, may confirm them in duty without alienation of the rates [sic for races?] by extraordinary burthens in these p[eri]lous practices from that accustomed service which they have naturally borne to the crowne of England.’”135 The fight over composition offered a chance to reassert Tudor empire in Ireland. For Sidney and his supporters, moreover, it entrenched notions of degeneracy and the necessity of New English rule—pointedly against the “Book of Howth,” which drew on the Polychronicon and other sources to demonstrate England’s right to Scotland and Ireland (in fulfillment of Merlin’s prophecy), but defended Anglo-Irish loyalty and highlighted the risks of displacing Old for New English.136 The Irish council explained in September 1577, “the People within the Pale are over moche blemished with the Spottes of the Irishry; and that the sondrie good Lawes from Age to Age, devised to wype out those Staynes, have rather bene hid and not knowen, then duelye executed.”137 These ideas outlasted Sidney’s deputyship, as did his appeals to earlier sixteenth-century models. In May 1578, Elizabeth instructed Lord Justice of Ireland William Drury to consider how Leix and Offaly could be effectively inhabited, re-edify English religion and justice as twinned enterprises, prohibit English-Irish intermarriage and fostering, enforce the primacy of English law, halt Irish tributes, 132  Sidney to Elizabeth, 20 May 1577, TNA SP 63/58/29, fols. 90r–93v, at 90v. The government also took stock of cesses taken by St. Leger, Bellingham, and Croft on behalf of Henry VIII, “Extracts from the Council Books relating to Cesse,” June 1577, Cal Carew 2:61. 133  “The Cesse,” 14 May 1577, 2:55. 134  Elizabeth to Sidney, 17 July 1577, Cal Carew 2:66; “Submission of the Gentlemen of the Pale to the Lord Deputy and Council,” 1578, Cal Carew 2:81. 135  PC to Sidney and Council, 9 June 1577, Cal Carew 2:59. 136  “Book of Howth,” Cal Carew 6, 1–260; Valerie McGowan-Doyle, The Book of Howth: The Elizabethan Re-Conquest of Ireland and the Old English (Cork: Cork University Press, 2011). 137  Council of Ireland to Elizabeth, 12 September 1577, in Letters Memorials 1:214–218, at 216–217.

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and “peruse the instructions taken in the time of King Henry VIII,” executing those “meet for this present age.”138 Perhaps Sidney’s cautionary reminder in 1577 resonated. As he conveyed intelligence that Fitzmaurice was ready “to enuade this yor Realme” with men, munitions, and money from France and Rome, and assurance that his fellow Irish would support him “for not onelye in matter of religion they be Romish, but for gouernement they wish chaunge, and to be under a prince of their owne superstition,” Sidney warned of the boldest papist plot of Elizabeth’s reign and recommended immediate armament139: “I remember… howe in yor. sisters tyme Calleys the Jewell and honor of England was lost for lacke of force in reddines. Though the keping of this be somewhat bourdenous, yet wold the greife for the losse of it, be more insupportable, the recouerye farre more chardgeus and if it were not recouered the dishonnor irreparable.”140 Indeed, Fitzmaurice did have an opening in Sidney’s largely abortive second term, invading with European aid just ten months after the deputy’s departure and uniting disaffected Anglo-Irish and Gaels. As Burghley’s son Thomas explained as it grew in 1580, the rebellion could only be deterred if the crown addressed its causes, namely, the nobility’s dread of losing “ther auncyent greteness,” “fere of conquest, of late deeply graffed in the harts of ye wylde Iryshe,” “over stryct” rule, “excessive charges,” English-only reform and garrisoning, and insufficient defense to thwart Catholic foreigners.141 Though Ireland did not go the way of Calais, the episode proved pivotal to imperial discourse and practice, sustaining some of Sidney’s experiment. The propaganda program began with Campion and O’Neill’s attainder and persisted in Holinshed and Derricke. Seemingly (and speedily) writing in part to defend Sidney as deputy,142 preserving “a nation derived from our auncestours, ingraffed and incorporate into one body with us” from  “Sir William Drury, Lord Justice,” 29 May 1578, Cal Carew 2:90.  Sidney to Elizabeth, 20 May 1577, TNA SP 63/58/29, 92v. For further reports of fitz Maurice’s continental dealings, especially with France, Spain, and Rome, see Amyas Paulet to Elizabeth, 6 August 1577, CP 9/71; Drury to Burghley, 6 March 1578/9, CP 9/102; “The Queen’s Marriage,” 13 April 1579, CP 148/39; “Consultations at Greenwich,” 2 October 1579, CP 148/47. 140  Sidney to Elizabeth, 20 May 1577, TNA SP 63/58/29, 93r. 141  [Thomas Cecil] to Elizabeth, 28 January 1579/80, CP 148/19. 142  Colm Lennon, “Campion and Reform in Tudor Ireland,” in The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits, ed. Thomas M.  McCoog (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1996), 67–84; Graves, “Edmund Campion (1540–1581),” ODNB (2008); Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 138 139

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“barbarity,143 the Jesuit Campion too defended “the Titles of the Crowne of England to every part of Ireland, and to the whole in diverse ways.”144 Via Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales, and Leland as well as his own observations, he depicted an island ripe for civility and profit, if only it was shired and farmed.145 The “meere Irish” emerge rather positively in his telling,146 capable of reform and holiness147 if given to sinful, “bestiall” ways,148 while “the very English of birth” quickly degenerate “into the worst ranke of Irish Rogues.”149 Rooted in a careful reading of histories and origin stories, Campion argued that Scotland appertained to Brutus150 and Ireland to “the Brittaines by elder right… [and] invincible title,” through Belinus, Arthur, and Henry II,151 “the Irish… subject to the Crowne of Brittaine, before they set foote in Ireland.”152 The attainder did similar work the following year. Already a potent political and ideological tool since its 1569 creation, it now reached wider audiences, “disclos[ing Elizabeth’s]… auncient and sundry strong authentique tytles conveyed farre beyond the sayd lynage of the Oneiles, and all other of the Irishrie, to the dignitie, state, title, and possession… of Ireland”153 and casting Sidney as savior.154 From “the noble King Belan, King of Great Britaine” to Henry VIII,155 the lengthy preamble sought by “auncient Chronicles” and details of the Ulster chieftain’s treason to manifestly prove to the world156 that Ireland fell under “themperiall crowne of England.”157 Adding breadth and depth, Holinshed traced the “whole Empire of all Britaine” from Brutus,158 investing spiritual and temporal sovereignty over England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and more to generations of English  Campion, History, 136.  Campion, History, 69–72. 145  Campion, History, 1, 10. 146  Campion, History, 14–20. 147  Campion, History, 13. 148  Campion, History, 17. 149  Campion, History, 14. 150  Campion, History, 35. 151  Campion, History, 28–29. 152  Campion, History, 71. 153  Statutes at Large, 1:328. 154  Statutes at Large, 1:324–328. 155  Statutes at Large, 1:329. 156  Statutes at Large, 1:333. 157  Statutes at Large, 1:322. 158  Holinshed, Chronicles (1577), 1:40. 143 144

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kings159 and personifying “Albion as the mother, and the rest of the Ilands as hir daughters.”160 The chronicler credited the Ireland volume to the joint efforts of Campion, Richard Stanihurst, and himself and dedicated it to Sidney, “beseech[ing] the Lorde to guyde your harte in his holy wayes, and to furnish you with politike prudence and skilfull knowledge, to gouerne” in furtherance of God’s glory, the surety of Elizabeth’s dominions, the statesman’s own honor, and the quietness of true, loyal Irish subjects161; in his pages, Sidney would find manifest, replicable historical examples of “vice punished, vertue rewarded,… and vpright gouernours to their eternall fame extolled.”162 The text charted how, after many “kings of the Britons… got dominion there” (evidence culled from Llywd, among others)163 and papal donation to Henry II,164 the English lawfully planted the well-environed Ireland, some “so addicted to all the poyntes of Husbandry, as that they are nicknamed by their neighbors, for their continuall drudgery, Collonnes of the latin worde Coloni.”165 There, they sought to draw “the wyld Irishe”166 “from barbarous sauagenesse,”167 but ultimately fell to a rudeness, ignorance, and rebellion168 left for the Tudors to rectify.169 Derricke then illustrated “Our valiaunt Sidney[‘s]”170 ostensible heroism and requisite force to subdue an irredeemable, contagious Irishness, venturing life in “aduancyng her Maiesties honor, shewyng thereby, bothe a constant faithe, a perfecte fidelitie, to her royall Croune… [against] these monsters,”171 a “graceless cursed race.”172 His verses extolled how God had “made the seate of Brittishe kynges,”173 for “Arthure… [who] raigned as Kyng, in Britaine and in Fraunce… whose

 Holinshed, Chronicles (1577), 1:1–47.  Holinshed, The first and second volumes of Chronicles… (1587), 1:2. 161  Holinshed, Chronicles (1577), 3:572–573, at 573. 162  Holinshed, Chronicles (1577), 3:1/574. 163  Holinshed, Chronicles (1577), 3:4. 164  Holinshed, Chronicles (1577), 3:21, 3:34. 165  Holinshed, Chronicles (1577), 3:2/575. 166  Holinshed, Chronicles (1577), 3:27/600. 167  Holinshed, Chronicles (1577), 3:2/575. 168  Holinshed, Chronicles (1577), 3:3/576. 169  Holinshed, Chronicles (1577), 3:76. 170  Derricke, Image, [F.iv.v]. 171  Derricke, Image, b.i.r. 172  Derricke, Image, E.i.r. 173  Derricke, Image, A.i.v. 159 160

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bloodie blade, obtained Caesars Croune,”174 Henry II whose “possessions, so largely thei extended: As neuer Prince before nor since,”175 Edward III “whose conquryng sworde, possest a double Croune,”176 and Henry VIII, king of “the famous Irishe soile… Fit for the Marchauntes of the worlde, to saile from forraine Realmes” and abounding with beasts, plentiful ground, and woods,177 situating Elizabeth in this British imperial lineage, transforming Sidney into a latter-day Strongbow, and setting forth enduring legal, providential, and cultural-economic inducements for empire.178 Rounding out the spate was Sidney’s own contribution, part of an emergent humanist “memoirs of service” genre within English court circles and meant to justify his deputyship, uphold his reputation, and even win reappointment.179 It emphasized the need to splinter inherently unstable Irish lordships, collect rent as fealty to Elizabeth’s “crown imperial,”180 and plant garrisons and “colonies of English and other loyal subjects”181 to end the cycle of brutishness, rebellion, and foreign invasion.182 The literary campaign appears to have been somewhat successful, perhaps because it aptly reflected the fuller atmosphere in imperial thought. In 1582, Richard Robinson’s translation of Leland’s Learned and True Assertion came to print, dedicated to Sidney, his successor Arthur Grey, Barton Grey of Wilton, and merchant adventurer/MP Thomas Smythe, to spread the feats of “that most incomperable King Arthure of great Brittaine for his princely prowess, valiant vertues, and triumphat victories,”183 who represented for “Brittons”184 what Alexander did for the Greeks and Caesar for the Romans185 and was particularly beloved by his “auncestor” Henry VIII.186 Robinson expressed special hope that the book might “assist your right honourable Lord Deputie with his  Derricke, Image, A.ii.r.  Derricke, Image, A.iii.r. 176  Derricke, Image, A.iii.v. 177  Derricke, Image, [B.iv.r]. 178  Morgan, “Elizabeth and Ireland,” 300. 179  Brady, ed., Viceroy’s Vindication, 1–12. 180  Brady, ed., Viceroy’s Vindication, 45. 181  Brady, ed., Viceroy’s Vindication, 57. 182  Brady, ed., Viceroy’s Vindication, 31–34, 52, 54–55, 57–61, 74, 89–90, 92–95. 183  Leland, A Learned and True Assertion… (1582), sig. A 4r. 184  Leland, Assertion, [B 2r]. 185  Leland, Assertion, A 4r. 186  Leland, Assertion, [A 4v]. 174 175

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­ mnipotent power, that as an inuincible Iosua you may continually bring o in the people to the due knowledge of God and obedience of our Prince.”187 Most prevalent in this context was a comfort with force, especially necessary after rebellion began anew in 1579.188 “We are on the side of truth,” rang Fitzmaurice’s rally cry; “we are Catholic Christians… justice is with us… tak[ing] arms, first for the sake of God, and next to defend their country.”189 Lord Justice William Pelham urged Elizabeth “to judge of Desmond as a traitor” in service of the Pope “even above you and your Imperial crown.,”190 as the threat ballooned beyond Munster, ultimately into the Pale with James Eustace, Viscount Baltinglass’s Leinster revolt “for gredines of paie or arrogante zeale to poapishe governemente”191 in July 1580.192 Telling of Tudor concerns, terms of submission for those of “vnduetifulnes & lewde disobedience”193 required swearing to Elizabeth as “naturall Prince and Souereigne Lady,” perpetually obedient to her, her laws, and her officers, alongside rents, taxes, and expelling Scots,194 who along with English Jesuits, other “popishe Instrumentes,”195 and foreign powers, emboldened the traitors.196 The risings vindicated the narrative credited to Sidney’s son, Philip: “little is lenity to prevaile, in myndes so possest, withe a naturall inconstancy ever to goe to a new fortune, withe a revengefull hate to all englishe as to their only conquerours, and that

 Leland, Assertion, [B v].  Fitzmaurice to Austin Kittagh MacDonnell, 18 July 1579, in Kilkenny and South-east Ireland Archaeological Society, 362–363, at 363. 189  Fitzmaurice to MacDonnell, 18 July 1579, Kilkenny and South-east Archeological Society, 363–364. 190  Pelham to Elizabeth, 28 December 1579, Cal Carew 2:230. 191  Council of Ireland to Elizabeth, 22/23 December 1580, TNA SP 63/79/26, fols. 55r–56v, at 55r. 192  Brady, “Faction and the Origins of the Desmond Rebellion of 1579,” Irish Historical Studies 22 (1981), 289–312; Maginn, “The Baltinglass Rebellion, 1580: English Dissent or Gaelic Uprising?” The Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (2004), 205–232. 193  Copy of submission of MacWilliam Eighter to Malby, 1580/1, TNA SP 63/81/39, fols. 87r–v, at 87r. 194  Copy of articles between Malby and MacWilliam Eighter, 7 March 1580, TNA SP 63/81/15, fols. 34r–35v, at 34r. 195  Grey to PC, July 1581, TNA SP 63/84/12, fols. 23r–26v, at 24r. 196  Grey to Burghley, 14 March 1580/1, TNA SP 63/81/27, fols. 59r–60v, at 59r; “Discourse” concerning the Queen’s Marriage, 25 April 1581, CP 148/80. 187 188

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whiche is most of all with so ignorant obstinacy in papistry, that they doe in their sowles deteste the presente governement.”197 Epitomizing the response were Barnaby Rich, self-professed “souldier, better practised in my pike then in my penne,”198 and Grey,199 who arrived in August 1580, likely with his secretary Edmund Spenser in tow.200 A veteran of Essex’s Ulster convinced that the Irish were “more vnciuill, more vncleanly, more barbarous, and more brutish in their customes and demeanures, then in any other part of the world that is knowne,”201 in 1578 Rich tapped his extensive military experience (France under Mary, the Netherlands and Ireland under Elizabeth) and knowledge of history to offer an Allarme to England. If there were some rule, he charged, akin to what Plutarch described, “that none dare call himselfe to be natural of the yle, vnlesse he hath… shewed him self forward in his countreis defence… we shuld haue to few natural Englishmen.”202 Spying a symptom of this dilapidated condition, Rich seized on “those endlesse warres, that are holden in Ireland,” a place vital to England’s success.203 In a significant parallel, he complained that the Irish “loth[e] any thing that commeth from the English,” preferring to “goe more beastly and sauage like then the people of America.”204 The solution was a combination of labor, “sharpe ordinaunces,” secular and religious education—all maintained by soldiering power.205 “The knowledge of warre therefore and the exercise of armes are especially to be sought… by the whiche so greate dominions and noble Empires, haue beene purchased, kingdomes inlarged, princes preserued, iustice mainteined, good lawes protected, and the Common wealth defended.”206 Putting discourse into practice, in November 1580, Grey and his army massacred a Desmond force—some Irish, but primarily “Spaniards & Italians… sent by the Pope… that nether from God nor man could clayme 197  “A Discourse on Irish Affairs,” in The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 3:46–50, at 50. 198  Rich, A Short Svrvey of Ireland ([1609]), sig. A3v. 199  Instructions for Grey, [15] July 1580, Cal Carew 2:422. 200  Hadfield, “Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599),” ODNB (2008). 201  Rich, Short Svrvey, 2. 202  Rich, Allarme to England… (1578), B.iiii.r. 203  Rich, Allarme, D.ii.v. 204  Rich, Allarme, E.v. 205  Rich, Allarme, D.ij.v–E.iiij.r, at D.iiij.r. 206  Rich, Allarme, G.v.

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any princely powre or empire”—at Smerwick, believing only “a harde and forcible hand” would bring Ireland to heel.207 Elizabeth rejoiced in her deputy as God’s instrument,208 while participant Ralegh thought of his half-brother’s ferocity, telling Walsingham in early 1581, “I never hard nor rede of any man more fered then [Gilbert] is amonge the Irishe nacion. And I do assuredly know that… all the unbridled traytors of thes partes, would cum in hyre, and yeld them selves to the Queen’s mercy, were it but known that he were cum amonge them.”209 Persuaded by “triall… that onely sworde will salue the sore” of Catholicism210 in this “broken state,”211 Grey executed nearly 1500 Irish elites and “innumerable” others before his July 1582 recall212—no chance to carry out the “thorough reformation”213 he thought necessary to turn Ireland into “no small iewell too owre natiue lande.”214 Despite fears that Smerwick would “be revenged with fire and sworde” by “tenne thousand spanishe soldiours… to rune over all that Realme,”215 the war ended following Desmond’s death the following year. Another rebellion appealing to Catholic Irish nationhood and continental aid had strengthened mid-Elizabethan empire. By echoing 1569—a moment that, for Holinshed, revealed “the nature and disposition of this wicked, effrenated, barbarous, and vnfaithfull nation” who “resist hir imperiall estate, crowne, and dignitie”—the Irish had confirmed the chronicle’s maxim: “withdraw the sword, and… they will surelie skip out; and as the dog to his vomit, and the sow to the durt & puddle they will 207  Grey to Elizabeth, 12 November 1580, TNA SP 63/78/29, fols. 62r–65v, at 63r–v; Vincent Carey, “Atrocity and History: Grey, Spencer, and the Slaughter at Smerwick,” in Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland, eds. David Edwards, Padraig Lenihan, and Clodagh Tait (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 79–94. 208  “Minute from the Queenes Mate to the L. Gray,” 12 December 1580, in John Pope Hennessy, Sir Walter Ralegh in Ireland (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, & Co., 1883), 212–214, at 212. 209  Ralegh to Walsingham, 25 February 1581, TNA SP 63/80/82, fols. 229r–230v, at 229v. 210  Grey to Elizabeth, 26 April 1581, TNA SP 63/82/54, fols. 139r–141v, at 140v. 211  Grey to PC, 10 June 1581, TNA SP 63/83/45, fols. 111r–114v, at 113r. 212  Edwards, “Beyond Reform: Martial Law and the Tudor Reconquest of Ireland,” History Ireland 5, no. 2 (1997): 16–21, at 20. 213  Grey to Elizabeth, 26 April 1581, TNA SP 63/82/54, fols. 139r–141v, at 140r. 214  Grey to Walsingham, 10 May 1582, TNA SP 63/92/26, fols. 82r–83v, at 82r. 215  “Advertisements from Waterford,” 16/20 March 1580/1, TNA SP 63/81/36(ii), fols. 81r–82v, at 81r, 81v.

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returne to their old and former insolencie.”216 Master of the Rolls Nicholas White, a Palesman who had fallen afoul of Sidney, feared the shift, with its narrowed definitions of identity, suspicion of the Anglo-Irish, and militarism. In a 1581 letter to Burghley, White called on his “experience [of] whate thinges the stomake of that body can and can not digest,” deploying the popular metaphor to diagnose the “wilde Irishe” as the cause of the country’s ills, discredit profit-seeking, treasure-depleting, and war-like English-born malcontents, and acclaim “her [Old] Englishe nobilitie, that haue bene, and may be made the suertie of this state.”217 He was, however, ultimately on the losing side of the argument. White died in the Tower in 1592, his position filled by a New English appointee.218 Whether physically, intellectually, or both, Smerwick brought together, for “Her Hightnes and the Inglyshe nacion,”219 Sidney, Grey, Gilbert, and a next generation, Frobisher, Ralegh, and Spenser, men who illustrate the scope of the era’s intensified activity. As Irish rebellion raged, trials were underway elsewhere, evincing important overlap; indeed, when Burghley received intelligence that the King of Portugal was preparing a navy in the run-up to Fitzmaurice’s invasion, the carrier was unsure whether the enterprise was for “Irelande or into Africke againste the moores, or to prevente the passage wch Frobysher hath founde owte.”220 * * * Sidney’s career was part of an interconnected, Atlantic-wide Tudor growth-spurt. Further west, after exercising energies in Ireland221 and the Dutch Revolt222—both construed as protestant, anti-Habsburg enterprises tied to imperial impulses—Gilbert’s interests in Newfoundland

 Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), 3:133.  White to Burghley, 23 December 1581, TNA SP 63/87/55, fols. 151r–152v, at 151r. See also Canny, “Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity,” Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983): 1–19, at 13–14. 218  Jon G. Crawford, “Sir Nicholas White (c. 1532–1592),” ODNB (2008). 219  Ralegh to Walsingham, 23 February 1580, Life of Ralegh, 2:9–10, at 9. 220  Edwd. Mansell to Burghley, 15 March 1577/8, CP 160/120. 221  His theories recently elaborated in “A Discourse,” 1 February 1574, BL Add MS 48015, no. 25, fols. 397r–407r. 222  “Instructions for Sir Humphrey Gilbert in the Low Countries; sent by Capt. Pickman. 1575,” BL Cotton MS Galba C/V, no. 57, fols. 149v–151v; Rapple, “Gilbert,” ODNB. 216 217

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reignited, occasioned by some combination of his new prominence223 and a range of contemporaneous events, including the publication of his now decade-old Discourse in 1576,224 Frobisher’s three voyages between 1576 and 1578, Anthony Parkhurst’s in 1574–1578, Dee’s General and Rare Memorials, “Of Famous and Rich Discoveries,” and Limits of the British Empire across 1576–1578, and a plot by Grenville and “Certen gentlemen of the West Contreie”225 for discovery, trade, Christianization, and occupation “southewarde beyonde the oequinoctiall”226 in 1574. Coalescing around Gilbert, new American discourse and activity sprang from the same context and personnel as Sidney’s reform program. With experience voyaging/privateering off the coast of Africa and campaigning in Ireland, Frobisher went to Greenland and Baffin Island in search of northwest passage and the riches it ostensibly promised, reasserting Tudor British Atlantic claims. For many observers, his first two expeditions were promising, even successful, exploring new regions, taking possession for the queen that “those barbarous, people, trained vp in Paganisme, and infidelitie, might be reduced,” naming the environs, carrying back proof of a route east, ore, and Inuit captives,227 and garnering 223  A result of his martial exploits and show of favor toward royal prerogative in parliament in May 1571, which led to a crown grant (office of general surveyor, June 1571) and a place with Burghley, Leicester, and Smith in a royally patented alchemical venture (December 1571), see “Abstract of a Grant,” [25 June] 1571, TNA SP 15/20/47, fols. 112r–113v; “Brief of the Privileges,” 4 December 1572, BL Lansdowne MS 14, no. 15, fols. 40r–41v; Quinn, Voyages Gilbert, 19–20. 224  Printed “by Henry Middleton for Richarde Ihones,” facilitated by George Gascoigne, see Gilbert, Discourse, title-page, sigs. ¶¶.j.v–¶¶.ij.v. Frobisher associate Michael Lok and Dee both commented on the importance of the Discourse, see BL Cotton MS Otho E. VIII, fol. 44v; General and Rare Memorials… (1577), 2. 225  “Gentlemen of the West parts to the Lord High Admiral,” 22 March 1574, TNA SP 12/95, no. 64, fols. 137r–v, at 137r. An explanatory enclosure follows, TNA SP 12/95, no. 64(i), fols. 138r–142v. 226  “A discourse addressed to Lord Burghley,” [undated], BL Lansdowne MS 100, no. 18, fols. 142r–147v, at 142r. See also “Petition of Divers Gentlemen of the West Parts of England to the Queen,” 22 March 1547, TNA SP 12/95/63, fols. 136r–v; “Mr. Greenfield’s discourse of a Streight,” [undated], BL Lansdowne MS 100, no. 4, fols. 52r–54v. The appeal was successful, see “Commission by the Queen to Richard Greynevile,” [calendared 1590], TNA SP 12/235, no. 1, fols. 1r–v, but the license was subsequently revoked, see “The Declarations that were made by Captain John Oxenham,” 20 February 1579,” in New Light on Drake, ed. Zelia Nuttall (London: Hakluyt Society, 1914), 5–12. 227  “The first Voyage of M.  Martine Frobisher… by Christopher Hall…,” PN 3:29–32; “The second voyage of Master Martin Frobisher… by Master Dionise Settle,” PN 3:32–39, at 34.

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courtly support.228 Celebrating the second “luckie voyage” in 1577, Abraham Fleming went so far as to describe the “worthie Captein” as “A right Heroicall heart of Britanne blood, / Vlysses match in skill and Martiall might: For Princes fame, and countries special good, Through brackish seas (where Neptune reignes by right) / Hath safely saild, in perils great despight.”229 A third, in 1578, reported a strong, warlike “Tartar, or rather a kind of Samoed,” but “of the same colour and complexion that all the Americans are,” clad in “the skinnes of beastes” or “naked,”230 eating “raw flesh and fish,” ignorant though willing to interact, trade, and share knowledge of gold nearby,231 and—strikingly—with “faces marked or painted ouer with small blewe spots”232 like ancient Britons. “They began,” he took care to point out, “to grow more ciuill, familiar, pleasant, and docible amongst vs in very short time.”233 Fittingly, then, one narrative rehearsed “that principle of Philosophie… [that] inferior bodies be gouerned, ruled, and carried after the maner and course of the superiors” and imagined Frobisher’s sailors moving in a single current, “from the bay of Mexico, passing by and washing the Southwest parts of Ireland,”234 a marked waypoint on the crossing235 from nation (“England”) to empire (“West Frisland, now named west England”),236 civil to “sauage and brutish.”237 The trip was Frobisher’s last, and ambitiously combined navigation, trade, mining, occupation, missionary work, and colonization by one hundred men—a “first brunt & aduenture” for “profit and common wealth of their countrey,” strictly governed and victualed, with a prefabricated building and preacher. If not for weather and ice, it would have been the first British settlement in the New World; the small stone and timber structure that Lieutenant-General Edward Fenton built in August, complete with garden, was still their first house there, minister Robert Wolfall’s 228  James McDermott, Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 158. 229  “A Rythme Decasyllabicall,” in Dionyse Settle, A true reporte of the laste voyage… (1577), sig. [A.i.v]. 230  “The Third voyage of Captain Frobisher…,” PN 3:74–96, at 93. 231  “Third voyage,” 94. 232  “Third voyage,” 95. 233  “Third voyage,” 94. 234  “Third voyage,” 81. 235  “Third voyage,” 76. 236  “Third voyage,” 77. 237  “Third voyage,” 74.

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service “ye first signe, seale, & confirmacion of Christes name death & passion euer knowen in all these quarters.”238 Back home, though “by discoverye of a newe worlde, he was become another Columbus, so also nowe by conquest of a new world he would become another Cortes,”239 Frobisher’s enterprise flagged, as promoter-treasurer Michael Lok was suspended, testing found the ore worthless, and hope of returns on investment evaporated.240 Yet the project’s contours survived, grafted as they were onto earlier exploits and part of a wider thrust. Across the 1560s and into the next decade, European maritime exploits had swelled in and around Newfoundland, irrespective of any supposed Tudor monopoly there.241 It seemed the area had receded from English metropolitan consciousness, that is until a conglomeration of Frobisher with Parkhurst and Dee provided crucial support. A Bristol merchant-­ shipowner who had also been involved with Hawkins in Africa, Parkhurst launched several voyages to St. John’s in the mid-1570s, reporting on the harbor, exploring beyond it, and advocating full-scale control and colonization in the most detailed eyewitness accounts of Newfoundland by an Englishman to date.242 In letters to an unknown correspondent (possibly Edward Dyer) in 1577 and Hakluyt the elder in 1578, Parkhurst declared that “yf this cuntry wer inhabyted,” England would gain fish, salt, shipping stores, meat and hides, ore, and a temperate climate capable of sustaining English life—enough to victual the nation, “increaseth the navy, good maryners, good fysshermen, and… maketh them honest, ritche and good husbonds”243—while “amplifying of the Christian faith” and redeeming natives “from out of the captiuitie of that spirituall Pharao, the

238  “Third voyage,” 74–84, at 74; “Instructions to be observed by Martin Frobisher,” March 1578, TNA SP 15/25, no. 81, fols. 146r–151v; Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discouerie (1578), 51. See also “Instructions for an expedition to Cathay by the North Seas,” 1 June 1578, BL Cotton MS Otho E VIII, no. 33, fols. 108r–113v; McDermott, Frobisher, 204–244; William W.  Fitzhugh and Jacqueline S.  Olin, eds., Archeology of the Frobisher Voyages (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1993). 239  “The doings of Captaine Furbisher,” May 1579, BL Lansdowne MS 100, no. 1, fols. 2r–16v, at 7r. 240  McDermott, Frobisher, 245–256. 241  Quinn, North America, 356–368. 242  Quinn, Explorers and Colonies, 210; Cell, English Enterprise, 22, 39–41; Margaret Conrad and James Hiller, Atlantic Canada (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 29. 243  “Anthony Parkhurst’s account,” [1577], BL Lansdowne MS 100, no. 10, fols. 95r–97v, at 95r, v.

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deuill”244 at the expense of rival Europeans who impinge on “those parts discouered of late by our nation.”245 Moreover, the author himself constituted living proof of Dee’s seminal theories in these years: free movement at sea for trade and right by inheritance, discovery, and actual possession.246 “My chiefe purpose,” he wrote in his Limits, was “to stire upp your Majesties most noble hart and to directe your godlie conscience to vndertake this Brytishe discovery and recovery enterprise in your owne royall interest, for the great service of God, for your Highnes immortal fame, and the marvailous wealth publick of your Brytish Impire.”247 Little of his evidence, derived from history, law, geography, and philosophy, was new, reflective of the mental world of the Somerset circle he had come of age in and the Sidney circle he was now part of. Yet Dee compiled it comprehensively and systematically, teaming Brutus, Arthur, Madoc, and Edward I with Cabot, Thorne, Major, Mary I, and Frobisher, Mercator and Ortelius with common, civil, and canon law and the law of nations to circumscribe Iberian claims and legitimize the Tudors’ explicitly “Britishe Title”248 to the Isles, France, America, and well beyond.249 Promising a vibrant, lawful import-export market, gateway east, naval and military dominance, Dee, Parkhurst, Frobisher, and Gilbert agreed that if North America—a place they naturalized with a now-conventional litany of attributes that mirrored and suited the home nation—were settled, England could secure its dominion, promulgate its civility and creed, and aid its poor. Queen and realm would be

244  “A letter written to M. Richard Hakluyt… by M. Anthonie Parkhurst,” 13 November 1578, PN 3:132–134, at 132. 245  Parkhurst to Hakluyt, 134. 246  Dee, General and Rare Memorials (1577, written 1576), with stunning frontispiece depicting Tudor roses, royal arms, and Elizabeth—enthroned, wearing an imperial crown, and surrounded by sailors, ships, soldiers, military camps, Europa astride her bull, and Lady Britannica—“at the HELM of this Imperiall Monarchy: or, rather, at the Helm of the IMPERIALL SHIP, of the most parte of Christendome,” 53; Dee, “Of Famous and Rich Discoveries,” [1577], BL Cotton MS Vitellius C VII, fols. 26r–269v; Dee, Brytanici Imperii Limites [1577–1578], BL Add MS 59681. See also MacMillan, “Discourse on History, Geography, and Law,” 1–25. 247  Dee, Limits, in John Dee: The Limits of the British Empire, ed. Ken Macmillan (Westport: Praeger, 2004), 56. 248  Dee, Limits, 65. 249  Dee, Limits, 43–49, at 48, 43.

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made strong and rich, Gilbert posited, “doubtfull frendes, or rather apparaunte enemyes… only made weake and poore.”250 Distilling legal theory and precedent, Gilbert proposed, under crown license but not charge, “to sett forth under… colour of discoverie, certayne shippes of warres to the N.L. [New Land],” seizing the best and burning the worst French, Spanish, and Portuguese ships, while taking advantage of “the N.F. [Newland Fish] [which] is a principall and rich and everie where vendible merchaundise.”251 Thus “disapointed” of forces, funds, and victuals, European shipping would be spoiled, their empires unsettled, their people beset by famine.252 Contrarily, he continued, if overtly or covertly sanctioned in the north, a company could easily be conveyed to the West Indies to dispossess the Spaniards and enjoy its many benefits.253 Witnessing a fundamental aspect of post-1550 Tudor empire-­ building, the captain understood his project as finely calibrated to “annoy the king of Spayne,” who “is wholie addicted to the Pope and is the chiefe mayntainer of the Romish religion,”254 and tied it to an even broader context: if “brought to passe… then of force this Realme being an Iland shall be discharged from all forraine perills, if all the MONARCHIES of the world should joyne against us, so long as IRELAND shal be in salf keping, the league of SCOTLAND maintayned, and further amitie concluded with the prince of ORANGE and the King of DENMARK,” then “your majestie shall ingraffe and glewe to your crowne, in effect all the Northerne and Southerne viages of the world, so that none shalbe then well hable to crosse the seas, but subject to your highnes devocion.”255 The promotional onslaught worked. Gilbert received his patent on 11 June 1578. In this, Burghley may have been decisive—the plot fit his vision.256 Closely based on what her grandfather granted Cabot in 1496, Elizabeth licensed Gilbert to “discouer, finde, search out, and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countreys and territories not

250  Gilbert, “A discourse how hir majestie may annoy the King of Spayne,” 6 November 1577, Voyages Gilbert, no. 22. 251  Gilbert, “Annoy.” 252  Gilbert, “Annoy.” 253  Gilbert, “Annoy.” 254  [Gilbert], “A discourse how hir Majestie may meete with and annoy the king of Spayne,” [6 November 1577], Voyages Gilbert, no. 23. 255  Gilbert, “Annoy.” 256  “Relation of the Ambassador, Don Guerau de Spés,” 1571, CSPSimancas, 2:301.

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actually possessed of any Christian prince or people.”257 There, he should “inhabite… build and fortifie,” with “so many of our subiects as shall willingly accompany him,” and—in gesture to the queen’s imperial authority—maintain the faith, sovereignty, law, custom, and profits of England.258 Notably, Elizabeth avowed her intent “for vniting in more perfect league and amitie of such countreys, landes and territories so to bee possessed and inhabited as aforesayde, with our Realmles of England and Ireland,” and declared them under crown allegiance, the adventurers to “enioy all the priuileges of free denizens and persons natiue to England.”259 Expansionary, Atlantic-wide, and marked by Elizabethan Englishness and earlier Tudor exploits, the project was a fitting follow-up to Frobisher, whom Thomas Churchyard celebrated alongside Gilbert that very year as part of the same, recent, great “flocke,” “Toyl[ing]” to “planteth floures… [in] strange and forrayne soyle… for Countreys cause.”260 Alarmists exposed fear of Tudor empire-building from without and entanglement within. The Spanish expected Gilbert to head toward the Indies, possibly to establish a footing along the coastline, unless anything in Ireland or Scotland should stay him.261 The French were certain that “[Elizabeth] desires and is advised to explore parts of the world where she might expand and grow great by means of navigation,” sending him to rich southern regions, comparable to England and France, unclaimed by Iberians, and “inhabited only by… wild people… [of] good disposition, naked and completely unarmed.”262 There, Castelnau de Mauvissière wrote, “empires and monarchies may be built.”263 The captain was indeed busy in August–September 1578, reportedly well furnished with men and supplies,264 yet weather, quarrels (perhaps on the relative merits of colonization over plundering), and suspicions of

257  “Letters Patents graunted by her Maiestie to Sir Humphrey Gilbert…,” PN 3:135–137, at 3:135. 258  Gilbert Patent, 3:135. 259  Gilbert Patent, 3:136. 260  Churchyard, A Discovrse of The Queenes Maiesties entertainement… (1578), sigs. L.ii.v, I.iiij.r, I.iiij.v, K.r. 261  Bernardino de Mendoza to Philip II, 3 June 1578, CSPSimancas, 2:503. 262  Castelnau de Mauvissière to Henry III, 7 July 1578, Voyages Gilbert, no. 30. 263  Castelnau de Mauvissière to Henry III, 7 July 1578. 264  Gilbert to Walsingham, 23 September 1578, Voyages Gilbert, no. 36. See also John Gilbert to Walsingham, 20 December 1578, TNA SP 12/127/24, fols. 42r–43v.

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piracy thwarted the expedition,265 and Gilbert was redirected to Munster.266 While Tremayne grieved that “so forwerde a mynde, hath so backwerde succeasse,”267 Mendoza seemed relieved that “Gilbert, who was robbing on the coast, has been ordered to go in pursuit of the Irishman, who, although he has so few ships, is causing them some anxiety.”268 Despite the interlude, which lasted to autumn 1579, sailor-promoter Edward Hayes later testified to Gilbert’s commitment “to reuiue this enterprise,… to plant & fortifie in the North parts of America” by granting “assignments out of his commission to sundry persons of meane ability,” and protect his patent, due to expire after six years without “actuall possession.”269 Notably, Dee was among the assignees, before the scheme ran afoul of the council.270 Gilbert also enlisted protestant Portuguese pilot “Simon Ferdinando mr Secretary Walsinghams man”271 to scout the American coastline.272 The small, brief reconnaissance returned information on geography, inhabitants, flora, and fauna273 by mid-1580, which was shared with Dee, Walsingham, and likely others soon after,274 and illustrates how this Elizabethan project, much like Henry VII’s, combined Iberian expertise with home-grown theory and manpower, in turn passing the approach (and, ultimately, the pilot himself) onto Ralegh, who had captained a royal 265  Gilbert to Earl of Sussex, 23 September 1578, BL Cotton Otho E VIII, 14, fols. 67r–v; Henry Killigrew to William Davison, 10 October 1578, TNA SP 15/25/116, folls. 200r–201v; Gilbert to Walsinngham, 12 November 1578, TNA SP 12/126/44, fols. 137r–v; Gilbert to Walsingham, 18 November 1578, TNA SP 12/126/46, 46(i), fols. 147r–153v; “At Westminster, the 26 of Aprill, 1579,” PC 2/12, 460–465, at 461; “28 May 1579, Whitehall,” PC 2/12, 491–494, at 492–493; “Demands of the King of Spain’s subjects against Sir Humphrey Gilbert,” [?] September 1579, TNA SP 94/1/57, fols. 91r–92v. 266  Quinn, Voyages Gilbert, 35–49. 267  Tremayne to Burghley, 17 October 1578, CP 161/85. 268  Mendoza to Philip, 20 June 1579, CSPSimancas 2:580. 269  “A report of the voyage and successe thereof … written by M. Edward Haies…,” PN 3:143–161, at 3:146. 270  “John Dee and Sir Humphrey Gilbert,” 28 August 1580, and “Agreement between Sir Humphrey Gilbert and John Dee,” 10 September 1580, Voyages Gilbert, nos. 134, 135; “[Meeting] 22 October 1581, Richmond,” PC 2/13, 547–548, at 547. 271  “Reports of the country Sir Humphrey Gylberte goes to discover,” [1583?], TNA CO 1/1/2, fols. 3r–10v, at 9v. 272  “Sir Humphrey Gilbert Enters into a Bond for the Good Behaviour,” 7 April 1580, Voyages Gilbert, no. 72. 273  “Certain questions to be demanded of Davy Ingram,” [?] 1583, TNA SP 12/175/95, fols. 163r–164v (marginalia). 274  Quinn, Voyages Gilbert, 51.

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ship with Fernandes as his master in the stalled 1578 expedition.275 Yet though Fernandes’s involvement exemplifies how voyaging could still cross national lines, a bond entered into between Gilbert and the company for “good behaviour towards her Majestes subjects, and the subjects of other Princes with whom her Majestye is in league and amitye, and doe not robbe nor spoile eanye” demonstrates a certain trepidation when it came to foreignness.276 Further support came with a burst of print, bold attacks, and fresh schemes that resembled what had coalesced forty years earlier and influenced projects through century’s end. Early participant John Florio’s 1580 Hakluyt-sponsored translation of Cartier made the connection to the other side of the Atlantic explicit: “for the benefite and behoofe of those that shall attempt any newe discoverie in the Northweast partes of America,” he offered “the Description of a Countrey no lesse fruitful and pleasant in al respects than is England, Fraunce, or Germany, the people, though simple and rude in manners, and destitute of the knowledge of God or any good lawes, yet of nature gentle and tractable, and most apt to receiue the Christian Religion, and to subiect themselues to some good gouernement: the commodities of the Countrey not inferiour to the Marchandize of… many other frequented trades: the voyage verye shorte, being but three weekes sayling from… the Weast Country.”277 Moreover, he pressed, “a Colonie… to possesse the Country” was crucial, for “the Spanyards neuer prospered or prevailed, but where they planted” and, thanks to Cabot, “there is no nation that hath so good righte, or is more fit for this purpose, than [the English] are.”278 Drake’s circumnavigation, which ended at Plymouth in September 1580 weighed down with Spanish treasure, added pluck.279 Convinced enough of the legality of the seizures by those at court—including Dee, whom she and Burghley conferred with “to understand somewhat 275  “The names of all the shippes officers and gent[lemen]…,” 19 November 1578, TNA SP 12/126/49, fols. 155r–156v. 276  “Bond for Good Behaviour.” 277  Florio, A shorte and briefe narration… (1580), sigs. B.i.r, A.ii.r, B.i.r. 278  Florio, Shorte and briefe, B.i.v, B.ii.r. 279  He had also claimed “Nova Albion,” see “The course which Sir Francis Drake held…,” PN 3:440–442; Andrews, Drake’s Voyages: A Re-Assessment of their Place in Elizabethan Maritime Expansion (NY: Scribner, 1967); Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Peter Whitfield, Sir Francis Drake (NY: New York University Press, 2004).

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e­ ffectually of the title to foreine countryes”280—Elizabeth accepted him. Charles Merbury explained soon after: “it is no small comforte vnto an English Gentleman, finding him selfe in a farre countrey, where he may boldly shew his face, and his forehead vnto any forren Nation… knowing that this most Royall Prince (her Maiesties highnesse) is no whitte subiecte, nor inferiour vnto any… As maister Dee hath very learnedly of late (in certaine tables by him collected out of sundry auncient, and approuued writers) shewed vnto her Maiestie, that shee may iustly call her selfe Lady, and Emperes of all the Northe Ilandes.”281 Mendoza appreciated the effect too; in January 1581, he reported that, made greedy and bold by the haul, Drake, Gilbert, Frobisher, and Henry Knollys had an aggressive, four-­ pronged design on Spanish Atlantic, a “fit of activity” that Philip must stop.282 Yet it was their rival who was reaching his zenith: in April, the Habsburg monarch was crowned King of Portugal and united the Iberian Empire.283 Crying poverty from his Irish service284 and admonished by the council to limit his activities to discovery, conquest, and colonization as authorized, Gilbert took a new tack, with a group much inclined toward “partes beyond the seas.” 285 Across the 1560s, a moderate church settlement had somewhat tolerated those “Hereticks in your Realm, Contentious and malicious Papists” ballyhooed in parliament.286 However, European religious strife upset that equilibrium after 1571–1572 and a March 1581 act made it treasonable to withdraw obedience from Elizabeth or her Church and heightened recusancy penalties.287 A major blow to dissenters, the measure served Gilbert. “Mutterinnge among ye papystes” began by April 1582288 and that June, Catholic gentlemen Peckham and Gerrard entered into agreement with him “for the more spedye executing of her Majesties 280  Dee, “The Compendious Rehearsall,” in The Autobiographical Tracts of Dr. John Dee, ed. James Crossley (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1851), 18. 281  Merbury, A briefe discourse of royall monarchie (1581), 4. 282  Mendoza to Philip, 9 January 1581, CSPSimancas, 3:61. 283  Parker, Imprudent King, 271. 284  Gilbert to Walsingham, 11 July 1581, Voyages Gilbert, no. 74, and 25 October 1581, in Gosling, Life of Gilbert, 161–165. 285  “[Meeting] 22 October 1581, Richmond,” PC 2/13, 547–548, at 547. 286  Simonds d’Ewes, “Journal of the House of Commons: January 1563,” The Journals of All the Parliaments During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (1682), 82. 287  23 Eliz. I, cap. 1, Statutes of Realm, 4:1:657–658. 288  P.H. to Walsingham, “Secret advertisements,” 19 April 1582, TNA SP 12/153/14, fols. 22r–23v, at 23r.

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graunte and the Inlargemente of her… Domyions and government” by peopling and manuring those “Remote heathen Countnryes” “between the Cape of Florida and Cape Bryton”289—a significant evolution of the 1569–1570 Ulster plan and of “Mr. Carleton[’s]” (likely puritan MP George Carleton, treasurer on Essex’s enterprise)290 1572 proposal for otherwise loyal “Englishe gent. of religion & value,” whether Catholic, atheist, or puritan, to settle Ireland.291 In an amalgamation of feudal language with that of Gilbert’s grant and promotion, the voyagers were to have due authority to govern the territory according to English law, the status of native Englishmen, and license to travel, in exchange for oversight by crown and council, promises not to visit any other foreign Christian realm, maintenance of a cadre of soldiers and shipping, as well as homage and fealty, rent, and two-fifths of mineral wealth. The venture was still envisioned as a means to grow the queen’s holdings, unite her new American lands with England and Ireland, secure crown allegiance, improve trade, and support the poor.292 As such, the colony, for which Gilbert made grants through February 1583,293 was imagined as a part of a Tudor empire, with one fundamental difference: faith. According to Mendoza, Walsingham had been pivotal; he had “indirectly approached two Catholic gentlemen, whose estate had been ruined, and intimated to 289  “Agreement between Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir George Peckham and Sir Thomas Gerrard,” 6 June 1582, Voyages of Gilbert, no. 83. See also nos. 84–87, 89, 91, 98, 103. 290  Carleton, “Discourse on the present state of the realm of England,” ca. 1572–1573, TNA SP 15/21/121, fols. 266r–269v; Collinson, “George Carleton (1529–1590),” ODNB (2015); Quinn, “First Pilgrims,” 361; David Heffernan, Debating Tudor Policy in SixteenthCentury Ireland: ‘Reform’ Treatises and Political Discourse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 133. 291  Carleton, “Discourse,” 268v, 268r. 292  “Agreement,” 6 June 1582, Voyages Gilbert, no. 83; “Agreement between Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir George Peckham,” 6 June 1582, Voyages Gilbert, no. 84; “Agreement between Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir George Peckham, and Sir Thomas Gerrard,” 9 June 1582, Voyages Gilbert, no. 86; “Agreement between Sir Thomas Gerrard, Sir George Peckham, Sir Edmund Brudenell, Sir William Catesby, William Shelley, Philip Basset, Sir William Stanley, Richard Bingham, and Martin Frobisher,” June 1582, Voyages Gilbert, no. 87; “Grant of Authority by Sir Humphrey Gilbert regarding his rights in America, to Sir John Gilbert, Sir George Peckham and William Aucher,” 8 July 1582, Voyages Gilbert, no. 89; “Articles of petition by Gerrard and Peckham to Walsingham,” August [?] 1582, TNA SP 12/146/40, fols. 91r–92v. 293  “Agreement between Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir George Peckham and [his son] George Peckham,” 28 February 1583, Voyages Gilbert, no. 103. Philip Sidney received a similar grant on 7 July 1582, Voyages Gilbert, no. 88.

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them that, if they would help Humphrey Gilbert their lives and liberties might be saved.” “By this means,” Mendoza added, “what little sound blood be left in this diseased body would be drained.”294 By strict interpretation, Gilbert’s patent, which declared the Church of England’s transatlantic reach, should have prohibited a Catholic colony, but Elizabeth’s spiritual sovereignty offered room to maneuver and the plan fit a now-long-standing Tudor belief that consolidation at home (in this case, a wholly protestant nation) paired well with expansion abroad. As one correspondent told Walsingham, “I haue harde it saide among ye papystes, yt they hope it wyll prove ye best journeye for england yt was maide these fortie yeres.”295 Nevertheless, despite early support, the council finally blocked the Catholic element by requiring payment of recusancy fines prior to departure. Mendoza must have been comforted; he admitted that he had only been somewhat successful in convincing subscribers that “the real object of the Queen and Council in extending this favour to them” was “to weaken and destroy they by any means, since they have now discovered that persecution, imprisonment, and the shedding of martyrs’ blood only increase the number of Catholics… that the country in question belonged to [Philip] and was defended by fortresses,… [and that] they will be acting against the interests of His Holiness.”296 Yet though the dissident plan crumbled, the concept, of course, survived. Gilbert had two irons left in the fire: a Southampton-based joint-stock company of merchant adventurers launched in November 1582 to float his enterprise and relieve “poore travelers and decaied persons”297 via trade in “barberous Landes”298 and publicity drummed up across 1582–1583, which managed promises of support in Bristol and in London.299 Among them was soldier-sailor-merchant Christopher Carleill, attached to the Muscovy Company and who had served protestant coreligionists in the Netherlands and France. Written in April 1582, his Breef and sommarie discourse made a compelling case for North America as a comparatively superior site for fish, textiles, furs, food stuffs, naval stores, and more out  Mendoza to Philip, 11 July 1582, CSPSimancas 3:275.  “Secret advertisements” 19 April 1582, TNA SP 12/153/14, fols. 22r–23v, at 23r. 296  Mendoza to Philip, 11 July 1582, CSPSimancas 3:275. 297  “Articles bipartite indented, between Sir Humphrey Gylberte and the Merchant Adventurers,” 2 November 1582, TNA SP 12/155/86, 152–159, at 158. 298  “Additions to the preceding Articles,” 12 December [?] 1582, TNA SP 12/156/13, fols. 23r–25v, at 23v. 299  Quinn, Voyages Gilbert, 76–79. 294 295

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of western ports in England and Ireland and for plantation by those of “poore estate.”300 “By gentle and familiar entreatyng,” Carleill reasoned, “it is to be assuredly hoped, that [the natives] will daiely by little & little, forsake their barbous, and sauage liuyng, and grow to suche order and ciuilitie with vs, as there maie be wel expected from thence no lesse quantitie, and diuersity of Marchandize, then is now had out of Dutchlande, Italie, Fraunce, or Spaigne,” yet “beyng somewhat further remote, are the liker to take, or giue lesse occasion of disquiet.” Envisioning the colony as part of a wider body, he asked rhetorically: “when it is considered, that thei are our owne kindred, and esteemed our owne Countrey Nation whiche haue the gouernement: meanyng by those who shalbe there planted, who can looke for any other then the dealyng of most louing, and moste assured freendes.”301 Muscovy Companymen agreed, and supported Carleill’s ask for £4000 in shares for a preliminary year-long voyage with 100 colonists, but not until he secured a royal patent.302 Hakluyt’s approach was lengthier and more pointed, a collection ranging from Henry VII’s patent to Cabot and Thorne’s writings under Henry VIII, to pieces by Verrazzano, Ramusio, Ribault, and Hakluyt the elder, which asserted, in its very title, that “the discouerie of America, and the Ilands adiacent… [was] made first of all by our Englishmen.” Dedicated to Philip Sidney, the seminal Divers Voyages (1582) marveled that in the ninety years since first discovery, England had failed to “set fast footing” there; hopefully, honor of country and right would impel readers to “share and part stakes” with the Iberians by “the deducting of some Colonies of our superfluous people into those temperate and fertile partes of America, which being within sixe weekes sayling of England are yet vnpossessed by any Christians: and seeme to offer themselves vnto vs, stretching neerer vnto her Maiesties Dominions, then to any other part of Europe.” In this, they might the follow natural and classical example, reduce “those gentile people [of that land] to christianitie,” profit from its richness, and improve navigation.303 That autumn, Walsingham solicited an examination of Barking-born sailor David Ingram, who claimed to have traveled by land from the Gulf of Mexico to near Cape Breton after being left behind by

 Carleill, A breef and sommarie discourse… (1583), sigs., A.i.v–B.i.v, at B.i.r, v.  Carleill, Breef and sommarie, A.iii.r. 302  “Points set down by the Committees,” [1583], TNA CO 1/1/1, fols. 1r–2v, at 1r. 303  Hakluyt, Divers voyages (1582), sig. ¶r–v. 300

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John Hawkins in 1568.304 Though dubious, the later-published and influential report305 was of obvious value: here was a living Englishman bearing witness to the climate, resources, and peoples of North America, speaking to its suitability for his state, society, and economy, and noting that its friendly if largely “naked,… brutish & beastly” natives could be converted to English ways.306 Most strikingly, he related “a kinde of Foule in that Countrey… the Countrey men call them Penguins (which seemeth to be a Welsh name.) And they haue also in vse diuers other Welsh words.”307 For careful readers, Ingram had just substantiated the Tudor dynasty’s claim to an ancient Atlantic realm through their Welsh ancestors.308 Adding similar aid to the cause, Calvinist Hungarian poet, Hakluyt contact, and prospective colonist Stephen Parmenius celebrated Gilbert as “BRITANNIA’S pride, / [who] Goes to a new world” to “stretch the bounds of empire,” in “ELIZA’S name, / The mighty empress of the boundless deep,” and in Cabot’s wake.309 With subscriptions from the Southampton company, Walsingham, the adventurer’s family, and a smattering of others, Gilbert launched in June 1583 with five ships, 260 men “of euery faculty,” items “to delight the Sauage people,”310 and a royal token (“an ancor guyded by a Lady”),311 doggedly resolved of the profitability of his venture for the crown and validity of his navigational and cosmographical information.312 He set course for “those Northerly countreys of America,” first found by “Cabot [who] was authorised by regall authority, and set forth by the expense of 304  “Certain questions to be demanded of Davy Ingram,” [1582–1583?], TNA SP 12/175/95, fols. 163r–164v; “Reports of the country,” 3r–10v. 305  “The Relation of Dauid Ingram,” Principall Navigations, 557–562; Peckham, “A true Report of late discoueries,” PN 3:165–181, at 3:169, 173, 175; “A discourse written by one Miles Philips Englishman,” PN, 3:469–487, at 3:475. See also Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, 190–194. 306  “Relation of Ingram,” 558. 307  “Relation of Ingram,” 560. 308  Fittingly, David Powell soon printed Llwyd’s translation of The historie of Cambria (1584). 309  “A Poem of Stephen Parmenius,” 31 March 1583, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 9 (1904), 56–75, at 58, 68, 67, 73. See also Quinn and Neil M. Cheshire, eds., The New Found Land of Stephen Parmenius: The Life and Writings of a Hungarian Poet Drowned on a Voyage from Newfoundland, 1583 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). 310  Hayes Report, 3:148, 149. 311  Ralegh to Gilbert, 16 March 1583, Voyages Gilbert, no. 106. 312  Gilbert to Walsigham, 7 February 1583, SP 12/158/59, fols. 162r–163v, at 162r.

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our late famous king Henry the seuenth” and reserved by God for the “English nation” to plant and reduce to “ciuility.”313 Hayes described their “successe”314: in August, before a crowd of “English and strangers,” Gilbert took possession of “S. Iohn, and 200 leagues euery way, inuested the Queenes Maiestie with the title and dignitie thereof, had deliuered vnto him (after the custome of England) a rod & a turffe of the same soile,” declared it subject to the government and Church of England, erected “the Armes of England,” and began renting land for those present to dress and dry their fish.315 Yet the promising start deteriorated. After some prospecting that Hayes later called on to defend the place as ideal for English colonization, Gilbert lost one vessel to crew unrest and another to wreckage. They set for home, into a storm.316 From a spared ship, Hayes watched his “Generall… with a booke in his hand, cr[y] out… We are as neere to heauen by sea as by land,” before drowning. In the days prior, Gilbert had mused on the “inestimable good [done] by his voyage” and those sure to follow, confident that, upon return, “I will aske a pennnie of no man. I will bring good tidings vnto her Maiesty, who wil be so gracious, to lend me 10000 pounds.”317 Though such assuredness was misplaced, the Newfoundland project outlived Gilbert, much as it predated him. His last words were Cicero’s—and the very same offered by More as he related Hythloday’s decision to stay in the New World.318 As Armitage has argued, Gilbert was studied enough to quote Cicero without mediation, but according to Quinn, it was Utopia that the captain gripped as he died,319 and it would not have been the captain’s first reference to the book. Introducing the 1566 Discourse of a Discoverie, he told his brother John, “you might iustly haue charged mee with an vnsetled head if I had at any time taken in hand, to discouer Vtopia, or any countrey fained by imagination: But Cataia is none such,” its goodness “prooued, by no smal number of the most expert” authorities.320 Either way, memorialized by Hayes, Hakluyt, and Peckham,  Hayes Report, 3:145.  A constant theme from the title onwards, see Hayes Report, 3:143, 144, 145, 146, 157, 158, 160. 315  Hayes Report, 3:151. 316  Hayes Report, 3:152–161. 317  Hayes Report, 3:159. 318  More, Utopia, sig. B.iiii.r. 319  Armitage, “Literature and Empire,” 107–108; Quinn, Voyages Gilbert, 89, fn. 1. 320  Gilbert, Discourse, sig. ¶¶¶.iii.r,v. 313 314

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Gilbert’s tragedy transformed into triumph, “the first of our nation that caried people to erect an habitation and gouernment in… [North] America”321 and thus “amplie enlarge her Maiesties Territories and Dominions (or I might rather say) restore her to her Highnesses auncient right.”322 Peckham even went so far as to equate Elizabeth with Constantine for their shared concern to build empires among “Barbarous and Heathen nations”323 and cite Cortes’s record of a comment by Montezuma that the Aztecs’ “forefathers came from a farre countrie” as validation that Ingram had it right: America had been colonized by that “noble Britton” Madoc, then confirmed as a Tudor holding by Cabot and his English-born sons.324 As prefatory material to his tract exhorted, here was the means by which Elizabethans, “pent at home, like sluggardes… our cofers yet to fill,”325 would compete, “an other England” set abroad.326 Italian Giordano Bruno agreed, writing in 1584 of “Elizabeth… who by title and royal dignity is inferior to no other monarch in the world,” that “If her earthly territory were a true reflection of the width and grandeur of her spirit this great Amphitrite would bring far horizons within her girdle and enlarge the circumference of her dominion to include not only Britain and Ireland but some new world, as vast as the universal frame.”327 Plotting with Philip Sidney and others,328 Peckham rushed to adopt the mantle of “chiefe aduenturer, and furtherer of Sir Humfrey Gilberts voyage to Newfound Land,”329 assuming the project and contesting his predecessor’s futility. As lawful as it was honorable, as “gratefull to the Sauages, as gainefull to the Christians,” the enterprise not only met Athenian philosopher Aristides’s threshold for righteous overseas adventure, but was already well underway—“manie notable Gentlemen, bothe of our owne  Hayes Report, 3:145.  Peckham, A Trve Reporte of the late discoueries… (1583), sig. [D.iiii.r]. 323  Peckham, True Reporte, D.ii.v. 324  Peckham, True Reporte, [D.iiii.v], E.i.r. 325  “Sir William Pelham Knight, in commendation of the discourse following,” in Peckham, True Reporte, [*.iiii.r]. 326  “Master Anthony Parkhurst in commendation of this Treatise,” in Peckham, True Reporte, [§.iii.r]. 327  Bruno, Cena de la cener, in Frances A. Yates, “Queen Elizabeth as Astraea,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 10 (1947), 27–82, at 80. 328  “Indenture of articles between Sir Philip Sydney, of Penshurst, and Sir Geo. Peckham,” July 1583, TNA SP 12/161/44, fols. 117r–118v; “Minute of a Letter,” [November?] 1583, TNA SP 12/165/35, fols. 102r–v. 329  Peckham, “True Report,” 3:165. 321 322

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nation and straungers” can attest to the goodness of the land, he wrote, “stretch[ing] out it selfe towardes England onelie.”330 Playing, paradoxically, on both rising enmity toward and abiding appreciation (derived, perhaps, from his own Catholicism) of Spain,331 Peckham recast the Columbus myth, positing that the sailor “hauing in purpose to acquaint (as he did) that renowmed Prince, the Queenes Maiesties Grandfather, King Henry the seuenth, with his intended voiage for the Western Discoueries was… derided and mocked generally euen here in Englande.”332 From that missed opportunity, the Spanish crown had enlarged its dominions and enriched its subjects. Now that the English had finally awoken “out of that drowsie dreame, wherein we all haue so long slumbered,”333 they had to go plant civility—for nation (securing jobs, trade, and “the greatest Iewell of this Realme, and the cheefest strength and force of the same… [its] Shippes, Maisters and Mariners”334) and empire (fulfilling Elizabeth’s titles, “as much, or more then any other Christian Prince can pretende to the Indies”335). “May it not much encourage vs to hope for good successe,” Peckham pushed, that Strongbow, “beeing but a subiecte in this Realme… by himselfe and his Alleis and assistaunts, at their owne proper charges passed ouer into Ireland, there made conquest” and “likewise Hernando Cortese… with his sayd number of Spaniardes, tooke prisoner that mightie Emperour Metezuma … and in short time after obteyned not onelie the quiet possession of [Mexico] Cittie, But also of his whole Empire”?336 Despite commendation from Walsingham, Drake, John Hawkins, Frobisher, and Parkhurst and some interest from the Merchant Adventurers of Exeter,337 the enterprise fizzled, and Peckham was arrested for nonconformity.338 Carleill attempted to revive it in 1583–1584,339 as did Hayes  Peckham, True Reporte, B.iii.v, [B.iiii.r].  Peckham was the first author in England to show familiarity with Francisco de Vitoria’s work, see Macmillan, “Benign and Benevolent Conquest,” 45–60. 332  Peckham, True Reporte, [B.iiii.r]. 333  Peckham, True Reporte, [B.iiii.v]. 334  Peckham, True Reporte, E.i.v. 335  Peckham, True Reporte, E.i.r. 336  Peckham, True Reporte, G.i.r, G.i.v–G.ii.r. 337  “Merchant Adventurers of Exeter and Sir George Peckham,” January 1584, Voyages Gilbert, no. 133. 338  James McDermott, “Peckham, Sir George (d. 1608),” ODNB (2008). 339  Hakluyt to Walsingham, 1 April 1584, TNA SP 12/170/1, fols. 2r–3v; Quinn, Voyages Gilbert, 94–95; D.J.B. Trim, “Carleill, Christopher (1551?–1593),” ODNB (2008). 330 331

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through 1586, yet neither effort materialized.340 Nevertheless, the promotional onslaught elevated Newfoundland with plans for the future and did find adherents, its vision of maritime commercial colonialism lasting. Moreover, perhaps buoyed by the revisionist narrative of 1583, John Davis led three Passage searches, one each season, from 1585 to 1587. Coordinating with Dee, Walsingham, and Humphrey’s brother Adrian, Davis’s patent authorized discovery, occupation, and exclusive trade for five years, pressing the queen’s royal prerogative to give any of the company’s heirs or assignees born abroad “all the priuileges of free Denizens as persons natiue borne within this our Realme of England.”341 Both borrowed and novel like so much of the era’s literary production, the grant speaks to the power of crown authority to justify imperial policy and of national subjecthood in a tempestuous international climate. Though passage, settlement, and monopoly remained elusive, North America remained in Tudor sights. * * * Much of what had been rustled up in the late 1570s to early 1580s westerly push had been Iberian and, by extension, looked past St. John’s, exalting a land of “Heathenish and Sauage generation,” over whom God had appointed Elizabeth “supreme Princesse.”342 If Gilbert-successor Ralegh was England’s conquistador,343 these texts—like translations of Francisco López de Gómara’s Pleasant Historie of the Conquest of the Weast India (1578) and Bartolomé de las Casas’s Spanish Colonie (1583)—introduced 340  Hayes to Burghley, 10 May [1583/5?], BL Lansdowne MS 37/73, fols. 166r–167v; “Mr. Herritt and Mr. Hayes’s discourses,” [10 January–23 February 1586?], BL Lansdowne MS 100/9, fols. 83r–94r; Quinn, “Hayes, Edward (b. c. 1550, d. in or after 1613),” ODNB (2008); Quinn, “Edward Hayes, Liverpool Colonial Pioneer,” Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 111 (1959), 25–45. 341  “Letters patents of the Queenes Maiestie, granted to Master Adrian Gylbert and others…,” PN 3:96–98, at 97, with voyage narratives 3:98–120. See also “A consideration of such things as shall be necessary for the advancement of the discovery of the Northwest Passage,” [January? 1584], TNA SP 15/28/1, no. 53, fols. 118r–119v; “Privileges Desired by Adrian Gilbert,” [September 1583?], Voyages Gilbert, no. 141; “A Graunte from her majestie to Adryan Gilbert…,” January 1584, TNA SP 15/28/1, no. 55, fols. 122r–v. 342  Gómara, The pleasant historie (1578), sig. a.ii.v. 343  Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors; Benjamin Schmidt, “Reading Ralegh’s America: Texts, Books, and Readers in Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Atlantic World and Virginia, ed. Mancall, 462.

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the originals, alternatively styled as “a Mirrour and an excellent president for all such as shall take in hande to gouerne newe Discoueries”344 or warning against “cruelties and tyrannies.”345 Pushing a Marian inheritance, mid-Elizabethans courted Anglo-Spanish rivalry and sought adventure south. Before the 1580s, Tudor activity below the St. Lawrence was limited, yet the area was not untouched by the experimental atmosphere. In March 1574, Grenville and his West Country colleagues had petitioned the queen, for secular and spiritual renown, increase of royal dominions, and profits, to “alowe an enterprise by vs conceyued, and (with the helpe of god) vnder the protection of youre moste pryncely name and goodnes… for discovery of sundry Ritche and vnknowen landes, fatally (and as it seemeth by god’s prouidence) reserved for England.”346 They expanded in an appeal to Edward Clinton—privy councilor and lord high admiral who had also served Henry VIII and Edward VI—that their program was to discover new navigation and traffic, advancing the material and spiritual honor of crown and country without injury to any other country or state funding.347 Grenville believed that though longer than a Northwest Passage, his southwesterly route was warmer, better known (partly due to Sebastian Cabot), and boasted “most precious merchaundize,” besides a habitable environment.348 Led by mariners from “the apteste of all partes of Englonde for navigation southewarde,”349 a “faythe, wch those naked barbarous people are most apte to receiue, and speciallie when yt shall not carrie wth hit the vnnaturall and incredible absurdyties of Papistrie,” and otherwise needy settlers, the English would find their rightful foothold. Echoing Eden, Grenville extolled Tudor colonization in the New World as a counterbalance to Iberians who currently “encrese their riches vppon or losse,”350 yet lack full possession there. Here, the author toyed with the  Gomára, Pleasant Historie, a.ii.r.  Las Casas, The Spanish colonie (1583), sigs. ¶2r. 346  “Petition of Divers Gentlemen of the West Parts of England to the Queen,” 22 March 1574, TNA SP 12/95/63, fols. 136r–v, at 136r. 347  Gentlemen of the West Country to Lincoln, 22 March 1574, TNA SP 12/95/64, fols. 137r–v, at 137r. 348  “Mr. Greenfield’s discourse of a Straight,” [no date], BL Lansdowne MS 100, no. 4, fols. 52r–54v, at 53r. 349  “Specification indetail of the advantages to be gained by their proposed voyage of discovery South of the equinoctial line,” 22 March 1574, TNA SP 12/95, no. 64(i), fols. 138r–142v, at 138r. 350  “Specification,” 138v. 344 345

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century’s two meanings of empire, asserting that “the frenche mene inhabytinge in Florida and Bresyle: who albeyt they acknowledge the popes authoritie in suche thynges as they graunte to perteyne to him, yet in this vniversall and naturall right of trafyque and temperall domynion they have not holden them bound by his power.”351 According to John Oxenham and a draft patent, Elizabeth authorized settlement352 by Grenville and his associates—including “Edmonde Tremayne” and “William Hawkyns”—hoping for rich territories “to Joyne to the Christian faithe and also to our dominion & amytye,”353 yet the scheme was apparently thwarted by Irish and Spanish concerns.354 When Gilbert’s did advance, Grenville latched on, while Drake’s circumnavigation and Hawkins’s predation pushed south. With publicity and experience, much had changed by 1582–1583. Convinced of masterless mines and markets, Hakluyt declared it time that England move toward “those lands, whiche of equitie and right appertaine vnto vs.”355 The Virginia project followed on from Grenville and Gilbert, as well as Ralegh’s own growing prominence and penchants.356 Like earlier sites, it fit Divers Voyages’s framing: a seaside seat near “some notable riuer,” temperate, teeming with wood, fish, meat, and vegetation for trade and sustenance of those who “plant there… in ciuill sorte” in a colony about the size of “Callice.”357 Reducing dependence on rival nations for goods, “wee might bee much inriched, our Nauie might be increased, & a place of safetie might there be found, if change of religion or ciuill warres shoulde happen in this realme.”358 This last comment must have seemed eerily prescient in 1583–1584, as the Throckmorton plot—“an international Catholic conspiracy with a vengeance,” as Guy described it—broke, Elizabeth’s council expelled Mendoza, and William of Orange was

 “Specification,” 139v.  “Declarations that were made by Captain John Oxenham…,” 1579, New Light on Drake, 5–13, at 9. 353  “Commission by the Queen to Richard Greynevile,” [1590], TNA SP 12/235/1, fols. 1r–v, at 1r. 354  Andrews, “Beyond the Equinoctial: England and South America in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies 10, no. 1 (1980), 4–24. 355  Hakluyt, DV, sig. ¶r. 356  Ralegh to Grey, 1 May 1581, TNA SP 63/83/16(i), fols. 49r–50v, at 50r–v. 357  “Notes framed by a Gentleman,” DV, Kr–K3v, at K3v, Kr–v, K3v. 358  “Notes,” DV, K2v. 351 352

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assassinated. The extraordinary Bond of Association followed,359 amid fears that Philip would come to conceive of himself as “the grand Conqueror of the Churche of Rome ouer all Regions aduerse to Rome, amongest wch England hath most reputation”360 and Perrot moved to secure an unstable Ireland.361 Hakluyt’s Virginia could be an extra-national panacea to save a protestant British Isles and Tudor imperial crown. On 25 March 1584, Ralegh was patented to discover, inhabit, and trade in “remote, heathen, and barbarous lands” not possessed by Christians and govern under English law, reserving homage and one-fifth of gold and silver to the crown.362 Further, “for vniting [them] in more perfect league and amitie… with our Realmes of England and Ireland” and to encourage adventurers, Elizabeth declared the territory to be of her allegiance, its subjects privileged “as if they were borne and personally resident within our said Realme of England.”363 Steeped in early (Cabot) and later (Gilbert) precedent, with notions of royal right, reach, and identity solidified since the 1530s, the donation shows an active crown partnering with private initiative—as MacMillan surmised, “a clear historical and legal relationship between the imperial center and the colonial periphery.”364 Ralegh’s patent not only legalized the project, but determined its complexion. Philip Sidney mused in July, “we are haulf perswaded to enter into the Journey of Sir Humphry Gilbert very eagerli; whereunto your Mr. Hackluit hath served for a very good Trumpet,”365 and Elizabeth authorized Drake’s Habsburg West Indies raid in December, supported by the Hawkins family, Carleill, and Frobisher.366 Ralegh busied with a 359  Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 441. See also Anne N. MacLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Patrick Collinson, Elizabethans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 360  “Questions, &c. touching the Low Countries on the Death of the Prince of Orange,” 10 October 1584, CP 163/50. 361  “Orders to be observed,” [18 December] 1584, Cal Carew 2:563; Long to Walsingham, 20 January 1585, TNA SP 63/114/39, fols. 86r–87v, at 86r–v. 362  Ralegh letters patent, PN 3:243–245, at 243, 245. 363  Ralegh Patent, 3:244. 364  MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession, 120. 365  Sidney to Edward Stafford, 12 July 1584, Letters Memorials, 1:298. 366  “Royal assent to the preparation of a fleet,” 23 December 1584, TNA SP 46/17, fols. 183r–v; Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage, ed. Mary Frear Keeler (London: Hakluyt Society 1981); [Walter Bigges,] A summarie and true discourse of Sir Frances Drakes West Indian voyage (1589).

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two-­pronged campaign: literary promotion spearheaded by Hakluyt and practical reconnaissance by captains Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, with Fernandes. The combination likely helped defend the patent before the Commons in December, and certainly drummed up support.367 Hakluyt’s mid-1584 “Discourse of Western Planting” was a seminal distillation of arguments and evidence for Tudor empire, purposefully novel in its comprehensiveness and yet not in its sources, thereby capturing a great deal of what the 1580s were about. Channeling myriad reasons to “move the harte of her Matie to put her helpinge hande to this godly action” and inspire his countrymen to “joyne in,” Hakluyt cited precedents from Roman “Colonies” in “Britaine” to the “Englishe planted at Bulloine and Calice” and security of Scotland and Ireland, Madoc to recent experience in Newfoundland and the “bluddy governemente of the Spaniarde” to show its necessity.368 Not only, then, were “the west Indies… discovered and inhabited 322. yeres before Columbus,” by “some of or nation,” but it was incumbent upon Elizabeth to take up her British mantle—first as “Defender of the Faithe,” by which she is charged to maintain and enlarge “our true and syncere Relligion”; second, as a means to economic and military growth, which would bridle Habsburg “superstition” and their “indaungeringe and troublinge of our state.”369 In a tract dated to the following year, Hakluyt the elder made the case more succinctly, with his “Inducements” to civilize, traffic, and conquer across the Atlantic, to the just glory of God and “naction,” expansion of the queen’s dominions, and frustration of “Auncyent Enemyes or doubtfull ffrendes.”370 Rounding out the paper campaign and straddling theory and practice, Edenic expectation and on-the-ground reality, was an anonymous text emphasizing the importance of the plot’s military dimension, “for that they ar to deal with naked men… [and] preuent the Inuasion of the 367  “Parliamentary proceedings on the bill to confirm Ralegh’s patent” and “Bill to confirm Ralegh’s patent,” December 1584, RV, nos. 6–7. 368  Hakluyt, “Discourse,” Original Writings 2:211–326, at 2:217, 282, 247, 265, 247. My treatment is brief, owing to extensive work by others, including Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, 128–155; Quinn and Alison M.  Quinn, eds., Richard Hakluyt’s Discourse of Western Planting, 1584 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1993). 369  Hakluyt, “Discourse,” 2:290–291, 215, 216, 263, 267. 370  Hakluyt the elder, “Inducements to the Liking of the Voyage intended towards Virginia in 40. and 42. degrees,” (1585), and, also attributed to him, “Inducements to the lykinge of a voyadge intended to that pte of America weh lyethe between 34. and 36. degrees,” Original Writings 2:327–338 and 339–343, at 2:342.

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Spanyardes.” It recommended 800 armed, organized troops to guard the soon-to-be-constructed central fort and bulwarks, go “discoueryng,” and complement a civilian contingent including, among others, a physician, alchemist, and husbandmen. They should be presided over by a general with absolute command and authority to pardon, as well as officials committed to strict enforcement of the rule of law, discipline, and crown profit under strict penalty.371 Perhaps drafted by a professional soldier with European experience, the piece’s militarism paralleled a similar turn in Ireland and harkened back to Tournai and the Wooings. The Amadas-Barlowe expedition “to discouer that land which lieth betwéene Norembega and Florida” supplemented the literary with the tangible. It returned in September 1584 with “two sauage men,” Mateo and Wanchese, markers of the country’s current state and translators for the future, as well as “sundrie other things” that demonstrated the “great commodities that would arise to the realme of England,” if the English “were planted to liue there.”372 Barlowe’s report, “by which you may iudge how profitable this land is likely to succeede” for Ralegh, queen, and commonwealth as well as how the crew “[took] possession of the same… according to the ceremonies vsed in such enterprises,” was glowing, boasting abundant resources and ethnographic detail on indigenous society.373 Barlowe described the people of the place, now called “by her Maiestie, Virginia” as eager to trade, “gentle” (if frequently at war), hierarchical, and beholden to an “idol of whom they aske counsel, as the Romans were woont of the Oracle of Apollo,” thus seemingly amenable to civil ways.374 The account likely stoked the support that followed across early 1585—notably Elizabeth’s.375 Ralegh organized his colony, which set out in April,376 much vexing Spain (which also fretted Drake), according to Hakluyt.377 Alternatively, Charles Thynne reported that “the Spanish Ambassador’s confessor… marvelled that whereas the King of

 “For Master Rauleys Viage,” [1584–1585], RV, no. 8.  Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), 3:1369. 373  “The first voyage made to the coasts of America,” PN 3:246–251, at 246. 374  “First voyage,” 3:247, 249, 250. 375  “Warrant for Ralegh,” January 1585, TNA SP 12/185/59, fols. 141r–v; Elizabeth to Warwick, 2 February 1585, RV, no. 13; Elizabeth to Perrot, 8 February 1585, RV, no. 14. 376  Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), 3:1401. 377  Hakluyt to Walsingham, 7 April 1585, TNA SP 15/29/9, fols. 11r–12v. See also Lane to Philip Sidney, 12 August 1585, TNA CO 1/1/5, fols. 15r–16v. 371 372

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Spain was shortly to take possession of England, Sir Walter Ralegh… doth nevertheless undertake voyages to seek to hinder the Spaniards.”378 Newly knighted with a seal declaring him “Militis Domini & Gubernatoris Virginiae”379 and equipped with gunpowder and the flagship Tiger by his colony’s namesake,380 Ralegh and his project blended military occupation, settlement, and privateering, if not particularly well. He seems to have procured men and supplies from Devon, Cornwall, Bristol, and Ireland—all western locations with vast Atlantic experience—and launched seven ships from Plymouth with 600 men, just over 100 of whom remained in the colony after the rest returned home via the West Indies in August.381 Ralegh’s cousin Grenville was in command, followed by Cavendish and his former tutor Thomas Harriot, as well as Manteo and Wanchese, Amadas, artist and Frobisher voyage veteran John White, and Fernandes—a handy non-English scapegoat quickly accused of “vnskilfulnesse.”382 For the governorship, Elizabeth released Ralph Lane from service “in her desolate kingedom of Irlande,”383 and his descriptions of the territory, after their arrival in June, show that the familiar title and charge were not the only connections between Virginia and earlier Tudor exploits. Lane gauged indigenous strength by the number of “fighting men” they could field and, displeased with their initial situation on the Outer Bank, held a “course of insconsing euery two dayes march” in search of a place “worth the possession”384—a tactic that stemmed from Ireland and harbored both symbolic and practical significance.385 Moreover, Lane carped that he found himself “as hauying, emungst sauuages, ye chardege of wylde menn of myne owne nacione,” highlighting native barbarity while also

 Thynne to Walsingham, [1585?], CSPF Elizabeth, 20:261–262, at 261.  Reproduced in RV, 145. 380  Elizabeth to Warwick, 2 February 1585, RV, no. 13. 381  “Warrant for Ralegh,” 1585, TNA SP 12/185/59, fols. 141r–142v; “Sir Richard Grenville leaves Plymouth,” [9 April 1585], RV, no. 2; “An account of the particularities of the imployments of the English men left in Virginia,” PN 3:255–264, at 3:263. For Kupperman, the privateering angle helped with funding, but doomed the enterprise, Roanoke, 16–20. 382  “The voiage made by Sir Richard Greenuile…” PN 3:251–255, at 253. 383  Lane to Burghley, 4 April 1584, SP 63/109/6, fols. 11r–v, at 11r. See also Elizabeth’s warrant, 8 February 1585, TNA SP 63/114/71, fols. 161r–v. 384  Lane’s Account, PN (1598–1600), 3:256, 257. 385  Points made in Kupperman, Roanoke, 78; Macmillan, Sovereignty and Possession, 146–147. 378 379

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suggesting that his countrymen had degenerated amid their surroundings.386 Nevertheless, Lane was certain of the benefit to church and country that the queen’s “newe kingedom of Virginia” ensured, especially if she should “finde her selfe burthened” by Philip.387 Despite his frustrations, then, Lane comforted himself with “an assuerance of her Mates gretenes hereby to growe by ye Addycione of suche a kingedom as thys,” a buttress against Spanish tyranny.388 With a relatively successful stop in Puerto Rico where the crew had built a new pinnace, constructed a fort, and revictualled before moving onto privateering and trading in the area, the early days of the 1585 venture did indeed seem to threaten Spain. Its reports described the “great boldnesse” of the English interlopers and warned that “strangers do bere more Rule ther today then the kinge him selfe.”389 Worried that the fleet had come to colonize the Caribbean, preying on areas that “[Philip] could not settle on account of his many commitments elsewhere,” one witness suspected Grenville’s desire for “Spaniards and English in the Indies to be as one,” as the general brought “men skilled in all trades,” “two tall Indians, whom they treated well, and who spoke English,” “the Bible translated into Castilian… in order that the inhabitants there might understand how they had been deceived by their preachers,” and “back-sliding” “Lutheran Portuguese.”390 Tudor empire was growing, a Habsburg counterpoise. Roanoke reflected and reinforced what was now nearly a century of thought: a nominally pleasant island, replete with necessities for trade, defensible yet in striking distance of European enemies—precisely what theorists, More to Smith, assessed as their ideal, in veneration of all that situated Britons for their imperial apogee391; it aspired to and suited the national archetype. Responding to English production and consumption patterns, disruption of routes, and concern for navigation, Lane described a “naturally… curteous” if “sauage” native population eager for clothes and land suited for English plantation that would yield everything that Spain, France, Italy, the West or East Indies offered, in gums, grapes, drugs, flax, silk, grass, corn, wheat, sugar, oil, flax, rosin, pitch, and tar.392  Lane to Philip Sidney, 12 August 1585, TNA CO 1/1/5, fols. 15r–16v, at 15r.  Lane to Sidney, 12 August 1585, fols. 15v, r. 388  Lane to Walsingham, 12 August 1585, TNA CO 1/1/3, fols. 11r–12v, at 12r. 389  Diego Osorio to Philip, 13/23 June 1585, TNA SP 94/2/46, fols. 98r–v, at 98v. 390  “Relation of Hernando de Altamirano,” [June 1585], RV, no. 121. 391  Lane to Walsingham, 12 August 1585, fols. 11r–12r. 392  “An extract of Master Ralph Lanes letter…,” PN 3:254–255. 386 387

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Chronicling more possibilities of the place and conveying its space in measurements of “English acre” and “London bushels,” Harriot agreed.393 As Mancall has argued, “unlike previous travel writers, who wove together stories of individual explorers with observations about what regions looked like or could produce,” Harriot systematically surveyed the land and its people, emphasizing ethnography in a way that demonstrated an elaborated identity, the influence of experience, and Roanoke’s role in fueling sentiment against Iberian, Irish, and American others.394 He and White were much influenced by past empire, which served as reference, source of terms and tropes, and justification. Harriot noted how Virginians “fish after the maner as Irish men cast darts,” rendering them as “a poore people” who “shall finde our maner of knowledges and crafts to exceede theirs in perfection… Whereby may bee hoped, if meanes of good gouernment be vsed, that they may in short time bee brought to ciuilitie, and the imbracing of true Religion.”395 White, with the help of engraver Theodor de Bry, paired his drawings of Amerindians with similarly positioned and comparably clad Picts “to showe how that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie haue bin in times past as sauuage as those of Virginia.”396 Here was a visual continuum of successful Anglicization, past and future, bolstered by Harriot’s narrative of spiritual and secular improvement. Pitching “the Aduenturers, Fauorers, and Welwillers of the enterprise for the inhabiting and planting in Virginia,” Harriot was certain that, especially with more colonists and cattle from England but with far less hard plowing and digging than is required there, the place would bear all manner of fruit.397 Lane’s colonists had worked to that end, hastily constructing houses—timber frames with prefabricated panels later reinforced by low-quality bricks—arranged outside the fort, contrary to what the plans drafted at home advised, yet approximating another style of English village and patterned on English cottages.398 Native rulers “came to visite the Colonie,” some supposedly yielding themselves “seruant, and homager, to the great Weroanza of England, and after her to Sir Walter Raleigh… acknowledg[ing] her Maiestie their onely Soueraigne,” others  “A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia,” PN 3:266–280, at 3:271.  Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, 197. 395  Harriot, “Brief and True Report,” 3:274, 276. 396  Harriot, A briefe and true report of the New found land of Virginia (Frankfurt: 1590), sigs. [E2], E. 397  Harriot, “Brief and True Report,” 3:266, 280, 266. 398  Kupperman, Roanoke, 20–21. 393 394

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to Christianity, though Lane reported that they grew blasphemous as Anglo-indigenous relations soured. 399 The governor wrote “from the new Fort in Virginia” in September, “I dare assure… being inhabited with English, no realme in Christendome were comparable to it.”400 Grenville boasted, “I haue possessed and peopled the [country] to her Maties vse,” with industry never before seen there.401 Precedent thus mixed with invention, revision, and promise, as Lane, Grenville, Harriot, and White emphasized what they had done alongside what greatness would follow, epitomizing the intensely experimental spirit of the era. Notwithstanding dissatisfaction with Roanoke, dwindling supplies, and a steep learning curve, the adventurers came to “know the countrey by our experience” (Harriot repeated the last word six times in his report),402 the colonists had “sufficient[ly] experimented” (another favorite word, used six times by Lane and Harriot combined) to prove the region’s worth,403 and their self-described “successe” (as Grenville put it)404 proved pivotal to later colonies.405 Despite professed returns, Grenville departed early for more provisions and privateering, Lane became disillusioned with the location, meager resources, and indigenous strength,406 Elizabeth told Ralegh to divert a relief voyage by Bernard Drake from Virginia to Newfoundland to warn of impending strife and seize Iberian ships,407 and an unexpected visit from Bernard’s brother Francis on his way home from a West Indies raid408 ushered the governor and most of “our English Colony out of this paradise.”409 The four events presaged Anglo-Spanish war and manifested the entangled Atlantic in which it occurred. Indeed, leaving just three men  Lane’s Account, PN 3:255, 261, 260.  Lane to Hakluyt, PN 3:254–255. 401  Grenville to Walsingham, 29 October 1585, TNA CO 1/1/7, fols. 19r–20v, at 19r. 402  Harriot, “Briefe and True,” 3:267, see also 3:266, 268, 276. 403  Harriot, “Briefe and True,” 3:280, see also 3:371, 272, 274, 279; Lane’s Account, 264. 404  Grenville to Walsingham, 29 October 1585, fol. 19r. 405  Kupperman, Roanoke, 159–167; Kupperman, Jamestown Project, 4–9. 406  Lane’s account, 3:255–264. 407  “Commission to Bernard Drake,” 20 June 1585, TNA SP 12/179/21, fols. 47r–v; “The Queen to the Inhabitants of Newfoundland,” 20 June 1585, TNA SP 12/179/22, fols. 49r–v. 408  [Bigges,] Summarie and True; “The discourse and description of the voyage of Sir Francis Drake and Mr. Captain Frobisher set forward the 14th day of September, 1585,” in Julian S.  Corbett, ed., Papers Relating to the Navy during The Spanish War, 1585–1587 (London: Navy Records Society, 1898), 1–26; Kelsey, Drake, 240–279. 409  “The third voyage made by a ship in the yeere 1586…,” PN 3:265. 399 400

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behind,410 Lane justified his decision by explaining that “our hope for supply with Sir Richard Greenuill, so vndoubtedly promised vs before Easter, not yet come, neither then likely to come this yeere, considering the doings in England for Flanders, and also for America”411 and one account of Drake’s venture couched the stop at “the inhabitation of our English countrey men in VIRGINIA” as part of a broader narrative of “great victories a fewe English men haue made vpon great numbers of the Spaniardes” at home and abroad.412 Still, the message was somewhat mixed, as Hakluyt wrote that the colonists fled “for the hand of God come vpon them for the cruelty and outrages committed by some of them against the natiue inhabitants of that countrey.”413 Eventually, resupply did arrive, but finding no sign of Lane’s men, left fifteen more to “reteine” England’s “long held” right.414 Neither contingent was seen again, yet their ostensible presence maintained the legal claim. Meanwhile, news of Drake’s anchor (with Lane and colonists in tow) in July 1586 “inflamed the whole countrie with a desyre to adventure vnto the seas,” according to John Hooker.415 Self-styling as “Homer and Eurpidies for the Grecians: Titus Liuius for the Romaines: and Quintus Curtius for the life of Alexander the Great,” Thomas Greepe conveyed Drake’s successes in “Countreyes straunge beyond the sea.”416 No force could daunt their “English harts,” he wrote, as the adventurers found great commodities, ripped down the idols of “wyld and nakte” peoples, “tooke possession… and spred their Ensignes triumphantly… / To winne their countrie honour and fame.”417 The Spanish were left to “tremble,”418 Mary, Queen of Scots to fear that “news of these exploits… lifts up the hearts of [Philip’s] enemies all over Christendom.”419 The demise of Lane’s colony, then, was like its birth, part and parcel of a knotty Atlantic context, yet that did not sound the death knell of the project. As Philip plotted against “barbarous foreigners who spread  Kupperman, Roanoke, 91.  Lane’s Account, 3:264. 412  [Bigges,] Summarie and True, 47, sig. [Av]. 413  “Third voyage,” 3:265. 414  “Third voyage,” 3:265. 415  “John Hooker on the Results of Drake’s Voyage,” 1586, RV, no. 50. 416  Greepe, The True and Perfecte Newes (1587), sigs. A.iii.r, A.iiii.v. 417  Greepe, True and Perfecte, B.i.r, B.2.v, B.3.v, B.4.v. 418  “Spanish Advertisements,” 15 May 1586, Spanish War, 77–79, at 78. 419  Mary, Queen of Scots to Mendoza, 27 July 1586, CSPSimancas 3:459. 410 411

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themselves over the earth in search of rich and fertile lands where they can settle,”420 Elizabeth became more deeply embroiled in the Dutch Revolt, and the Babington Plot led Mary Stewart to her execution, imperial promoters were busy. In Paris, Hakluyt secured Laudonnière’s L’histoire notable from Thevet and saw to its publication there, complete with Basanier’s dedication and Hakluyt’s own evocative verse, telling how even amid great conquests of other nations, “we, noble Ralegh, assign first place to thee.”421 He also supported Basanier’s French edition of Antonio Espejo’s history of Mexico in these same months.422 The following year, 1587, Hakluyt translated Laudonnière into English and brought it to press in London and spearheaded a new edition of Peter Martyr’s Decades in Paris. In the former, he explained the “affinitie, resemblance, or conformitie” between Virginia and Florida, and hoped that the text would thus advance Tudor colonization, learning from French mistakes, and show the region’s value, urging Ralegh to remember Strongbow, who “opened the way for king Henrie the second to the speedie subiection of all that warlike nation to this crowne of Englande,” for “one hundred men will doe more nowe among the naked and vnarmed people in Virginea, then one thousande were able then to doe in Irelande,” while employing idle veterans of the Dutch Wars and securing all that “our realme standeth most in need of.”423 In the Decades, Hakluyt praised Martyr’s description of the land and its people, a literary feat not unlike those of Cicero, Sallust, Caesar, or Tacitus, and enjoined “our own island race” to emulate the Iberians and also the “homely and familiar example of their own native quality,” from Cabot, who discovered from the North Pole to Cuba for Henry VII, to efforts under “Henry VIIII our invincible King.” Only providence had reserved “new lands, ample realms, unknown peoples” for “the sceptre of our most serene Elizabeth, Empress—as even the Spaniard himself admits—of the Ocean.” Sexualizing the conquest, Hakluyt imagined Virginia as “the fairest of nymphs… whom our most generous sovereign has given you to be your bride… no one has yet probed the depths of her hidden resources and wealth,” but through perseverance she will “shortly bring forth new 420  Junta de Contaduría Mayor to Philip, 24 August/3 September 1586, in James McDermott, England and the Spanish Armada: A Necessary Quarrel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 142. 421  “Verse by Richard Hakluyt, 1586,” Original Writings 2:53. 422  Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, 170. 423  Notable Historie dedication, unnumbered.

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and most abundant offspring.”424 Pressing the point to Ralegh, Hakluyt yearned to know the state of the enterprise and noted that even the Spanish could not deny that “our Cabot and the English did first discover” North America.425 Fittingly, a second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles came within the year, weaving together narratives of the British Isles, France, and the New World and recalling how each came under Tudor sway, with another dedication to Ralegh. Co-editor Hooker likened the work to Homer’s for Alexander “when he was to inlarge his empire,” praised “the first Engllish colonie” in the New World, and charged that “no realme, no nation, no state nor commonwealth throughout all Europa, can yeeld more nor so manie profitable lawes, directions, rules, examples & discourses, either in matters of religion, or of ciuill gouernment, or of martiall affairs, than doo the histories of this little Isle of Britaine or England.”426 None of the material was new, only the editions and audiences. Coinciding with Ortelius’s new map, which powerfully inscribed the name “Virginia” on America,427 Hakluyt’s Decades functioned much as Eden’s had under Mary. When Drake’s mid-1587 Cadiz raid temporarily thwarted Philip, it opened space for Ralegh, who sent a new settlement to Virginia under White. A colonial enthusiast and painter whose qualifications were his 1577 voyage with Frobisher and participation in Virginia two years earlier, White lacked Lane’s experience and Grenville’s pedigree (grandson of a Calais knight marshal in the 1520s and son of the Mary Rose’s captain during the Wooings).428 Patented in January to “Thencreasse of Christian Faith & Religyon, Thenlargement of the Quenes Maiesties Domynyons… [and] The Comon Vtilyty of the whole Realme” and meant to augment and amplify, rather than replace, the work of their predecessors,429 the overwhelmingly non-gentleman-soldier colonists from across the British Isles (White left 110 behind, their names suggesting English, Welsh, and 424   “Epistle dedicatory to Sir Walter Ralegh by Richard Hakluyt, 1587,” Original Writings 2:56. 425  Hakluyt to Ralegh, 1586, Original Writings 2:55. 426  Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), 2:sigs. [A.ij.v], [A.iii.v], [A.ij.v]. 427  Ortelius to Jacob Cole, 9/19 January 1587, RV, no. 73. 428  Warren M. Billings, “Lane, Sir Ralph (d. 1603),” ODNB (2008); Loades, “Grenville, Sir Richard (1542–1591),” ODNB (2008); Karim M. Tiro, “White, John (fl. 1577–1593),” ODNB (2004). 429  “Grant of Arms for the City of Raleigh in Virginia, and for its Governor and Assistants” [7 January 1587], RV, no. 74.

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possibly Anglo-Irish and/or Scottish origin, plus two children born there and two “Sauages,” Manteo and Towaye, who “were in England and returned home into Virginia”430; there were also two “Irish men” in the original company431) included fourteen family units and targeted the promising Chesapeake Bay for “seate and forte.”432 Prepared to stay, they organized as a corporation, “one Bodye pollitique” led by a governor and twelve assistants433—amounting to what Kupperman has called “the prototype of all later successful plantations. None succeeded without following this model; and yet this colony failed because the legacy of Roanoke’s past was too powerful to be overcome.”434 The apparent changes from 1585 reflect a robust experimental, exigent atmosphere, but were neither absolute nor unambiguous. The colony’s aims and ideological framework were consonant with earlier thought, while two related privateering voyages and the prospect that White’s territory would turn into a base for such activity435 show that like the rest of Tudor adventure, the City is not easily classified into a discrete imperial typology. Moreover, Ralegh may have simply been bowing to the reality that soldiers were preoccupied while others were idle, America an imperial antidote to both problems, as previous promoters had suggested. By adapting earlier models, the City brought the first half of the sixteenth century into late Elizabeth empire-­ building. And as before, Virginia was not alone. Significantly, and again like its predecessors, White’s venture coalesced alongside a fresh Irish colonization venture. Across February, June, and July 1586, Elizabeth authorized the “Repeopling and Inhabitinge” of Munster on condition that all planters and heads of family were of English birth, never consorted with mere Irish, maintained a well-armed garrison, and referred all disputes to crown officials.436 Ralegh received the single 430  “The names of all the men, women and children, which safely arriued in Virginia, and remained to inhabite there. 1587,” PN 3:287; Kupperman, Roanoke, 107. Quinn hypothesized their national identities, RV, no. 78. 431  “The fourth voyage made to Virginia… in the yere 1587,” PN 3:280–286, at 281. 432  “Fourth voyage,” 3:282. 433  “Grant of Arms,” RV, no. 74. 434  Kupperman, Roanoke, 106. 435  “Warrant for the Issue of Letters of Reprisal to Sir George Carey,” 29 January 1587, RV, no. 75; “Sir George Carey’s Venture to the West Indies and Virginia,” 1587, RV, no. 79; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 270–271. 436  “An abstracte of the artycles for Repeopling and Inhabytinge of the Provynce of Mounster in Irelande,” 21 June 1586, PRO SP 63/124, fols. 184r–185v, at 184r. See also “Articles concerning her Majesty’s offers for the disposing of her lands in Munster,”

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largest parcel, seized from the Earl of Desmond, whose “traitorous practices” had left the area “vtterly wasted,”437 and Grenville seems to have become involved in February 1588.438 The scheme, though stunted, carried out in absentia, and interrupted by unruly undertakers (Norris asked the council to remind them to “live in compas of law, & to measure theyr actions by ye rule thereof, accordingly as in England they haue bene accustomed”439), rebellion, and war, epitomized a militarism and anti-­ Irish sentiment—two chief Sidney attributes—now enshrined in policy. The late 1580s Munster plantation reflected a great deal of what Andrew Trollope theorized: that all Irishmen were uncivilized, untrustworthy Catholics with little regard for God and even less for Elizabeth; the Anglo-­ Irish were in many ways worst,440 and less apt to religious reform than the “wylde iryshe.”441 Perhaps this same climate is what led Ulster marshal Nichola Bagenal to beg Elizabeth for leave to return to England, more willing to die there than live in Ireland, “tyrannized ouer wth all the indirecte dealings that maie be, though the same be masked and shadowed ouer wth the shewe of iustice and yor Maties best seruice.”442 The new plot came close to asking, as observer John Merbury would in 1589, “theise carren crowes devour the seede, theise weedes choake the corne whie should they not be killed & weeded out in tyme”?443 Moreover, it did so at a time when, for some, it was more important than ever for the English to regain Calais.444 Roanoke was part of a broader push, related imperial projects constructed in a common space and time that ultimately dictated their fates.

[February] 1586, Cal Carew 2:605; Commission from Elizabeth to PC, July 1586, PRO SP 63/125, fols. 69r–70v. 437  “Elizabeth’s Commission for the Plantation of Munster,” 27 June 1586, TCD MS 672, fols. 1r–10v, at 1r; Hatton, Burghley, Walsingham, and Paulet to Fitzwilliam, 2 September 1588, TNA SP 63/136/21, fols. 57r. See also Mark Nicholls and Penry Williams, “Ralegh, Sir Walter (1554–1618),” ODNB (2008). 438  Warham St. Leger to Walsingham, 26 February 1588, CSPI 1586–1588, 133:85. 439  Norris to PC, 22 January 1588, TNA SP 63/140/37, fols. 129r–130v, at 130r. 440  Trollope to Walsingham, 12 September 1585, TNA SP 63/85/39, fols. 96v–102r, at 98v. 441  Trollope to Burghley, 26 October 1587, TNA SP 63/131/64, fols. 200v–204r, at 204r. 442  Bagenal to Elizabeth, 24 July 1587, CP 16/12. 443  Merbury on the revolt in Connacht, 27 September 1589, TNA SP 63/146/57, fols. 177r–180r, at 177v. 444  Thomas Rodwell to [Walsingham?], 25 April 1586, TNA SP 84/7, fols. 109r–v.

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White’s colony was plagued early, in part by its structure, rough crossing, and haughtiness. Together, these limited the governor, produced vying hierarchies, and bred animus, pitting him against Fernandes, who was accused of jeopardizing the venture, and perhaps contributing to the desertion of two Irishmen in Puerto Rico. Only by virtue of Captain Edward Stafford did they arrive at Roanoke on 22 July, “hoping there to finde those fifteene Englishmen, which Sir Richard Grinuile had left there,” to no avail.445 With Manteo behaving “toward vs as a most faithfull Englishman” and “our guide to the place where those Sauages dwelt,” White remained at Roanoke, despite lack of provisions, attempting to repair what he found of Lane’s settlement and Anglo-indigenous ties.446 There, on 18 August, White’s daughter gave birth. According to Ralegh’s original patent, the girl—“Virginia [Dare]”—was English; though she never crossed the Atlantic, her very arrival, christening, and naming exercised central tenets of Tudor empire in the New World for the first time.447 Though it produced the hugely symbolic “first Christian borne in Virginia,”448 the colony struggled with leadership, the lure of privateering, and poor native relations. Entreated by his planters, notably styled as “her Maiesties subiects of England, we your friends and countrey-men,” White sailed for resupply in the royally named Lion, landing in Ireland (more strikingly, Smerwick),449 that crucial weigh-station between nation and empire, and never returned. The winter season and Armada crisis had begun, a “generall staie” of shipping issued and White, Davis, Carleill, Frobisher, Drake, Ralegh, and Grenville all pressed into the fight.450 Emergency redirected energies inward, “for resisting and destroying the Spaniards and others, their allies, adherents, abettors or assistants, attempting or compassing any design against our kingdoms, dominions and subjects,”451 and abandoned another group of colonists.

 “Fourth voyage,” 3:281–283, at 282.  “Fourth voyage,” 3:284, 284–285. 447  “Fourth voyage,” 3:285. 448  “Fourth voyage,” 3:283–285, at 285. 449  “Fourth voyage,” 3:285–286, at 285. 450  “Defence of the Realm,” 9 October 1587, APC, 1587–1588, 254. 451  “Commission to Howard,” 21 December 1587, in State Papers Relating to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, Anno 1558, ed. John Knox Laughton, 2 vols. (London: Navy Records Society, 1895), 2:19–23, at 2:20. 445 446

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That each wave of this experimental flood stalled across 1587–1588 speaks to the relationship between Tudor nation and empire in the last fifteen years of the dynasty, about what pushed projects forward or held them back. When the Armada set sail, a force that Philip had considered splitting to attack both England and its American colony,452 it blunted the effect of Harriot’s Report, printed in 1588, and White’s return, as the crown quashed follow-up expeditions and one that did launch failed to cross453—a testament to the importance of courtly support in an age of private investment. By mid-1588, in response to “the wonderfull preparation and inuinicible fleetes made by the king of Spaine ioyned with the power of the Pope for the inuading of England,” Elizabethan Virginia, Newfoundland, and Ireland languished.454 Though the result of Habsburg impetuousness, bad weather, and worse luck, the Armada’s failure was read by Tudor polemics as divine sanction for their protestant, British, maritime empire—as Elizabeth’s commemorative medal read, “God breathed and they were scattered.”455 After 1589, subjects were emboldened to bring a full century of empire-building and state-formation to a close in the Queen’s last decade. * * * “Look and bow down Thine ear, O Lord. / From Thy bright sphere behold and see / Thy handmaid and Thy handiwork.”456 With these lines and the fifteen that followed, Elizabeth celebrated the defeat of the Armada. She sanctified the event and imbued it with biblical proportions and providence, recalling the plight of the Israelites and offering herself as divine instrument and sacrifice for drowning the enemy in a latter-day Red  Kupperman, Roanoke, 132.  Ralegh to Gilbert, 27 February 1588, RV, no. 82; PC to Grenville, 31 March 1588, APC 1588, 7–8; PC to Grenville, 9 April 1588, APC 1588, 27; PC to Drake, 9 April 1588, APC 1588, 27; “The first voyage intended for the supply of the Colonie planted in Virginia…,” Principall Navigations, 771–773; “An assignement from Sir Walter Raleigh, to diuers Gnelemen, and Merchants of London…” 7 March 1589, Principall Navigations, 815–817; “William Sanderson and the Virginia Ventures,” RV, no. 88. 454  “Voyage for supply,” 772. 455  Garrett Mattingly, The Armada (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 390. 456  “Song on the Armada Victory,” December 1558, in Elizabeth I: Collected Works, edited by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 410–411. 452 453

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Sea. The song also played with symbols of kingship, highlighting royal power, amplifying her role in the affair, and privileging what it portended, as she submitted “Myself and scepter.” In that opening stanza, “thy bright sphere” also recalled a missing piece of iconography, the orb that usually accompanied the scepter and featured so prominently in William Rogers’s 1589 engraving, Eliza Triumphans. There, the scepter is replaced by an olive branch.457 Domed crown on her head and receiving two more, Elizabeth stands before a vast land and sea—a view that complements her three crowns; she is in possession of an empire.458 With God imagined above it, the bright sphere in Elizabeth’s second line similarly recalls both earth and cosmic significance of the Armada. This was something of divine as well as regal and worldly meaning. It was also fundamentally British, as Henry Lyte celebrated Elizabeth as “the Angell of Englande, The bright Britonia of Britayne… The chast Diana… [who] keepeth… [Britain] from Romish wolves and Foxes,” delivered by God with her “faithfull Subiects (his people of Britayne) from the handes of your and our cruell enemies” and descended from Trojan Brutus.459 Neither the song nor Roger’s engraving nor Lyte’s book were the most stunning manifestations of the moment, yet they do offer some suggestions for viewing it. That distinction belongs to the Armada Portrait, which commemorates in grand form. It is as though, in the words of Roy Strong, “some new, … spectacular format had to be invented to match the magnitude of the event.”460 The magnificently attired queen takes on a pale glow, with markers of majesty, divinely sanctified virginity, and sea power that protect her impregnable body politic against Spain.461 She is surrounded by furniture, including a  William Rogers, Eliza Triumphans, British Museum 1901, 0417.35.  Frances A. Yates, “Queen Elizabeth as Astraea,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 10 (1947), 27–82, at 56; Susan Frye, “The Myth of Elizabeth at Tilbury,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 23, no. 1 (Spring 1992), 95–114, at 108. 459  Lyte, The light of Britayne (1588), sigs. A.3.r, [A.4.r]. 460  Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 131. 461  Andrew Belsey and Catherine Belsey, “Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I,” in Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture, c. 1540–1660, ed. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktion Books, 1995), 11–35; Louis Adrian Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia A.  Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 303–340; Frye, “Myth of Elizabeth”; Susan Doran, “Virginity and Power: The Portraits of Elizabeth I,” in The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. Doran and Thomas Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 171–199, at 188. 457 458

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chair bearing a mermaid—aquatic, female, at once sexualized and desexed, enticing and dangerous, in profile as if on a ship’s bow.462 Above her are contrasting seascapes, framed by pillars.463 As Strong surmised, “the theme is that of imperial triumph,”464 and reveals the painting’s first bright sphere: a globe dominating the foreground, draped by the queen’s hand, resting across North America and the West Indies to tacitly claim possession. It has an obvious shadow, perched on a sloped table to allow Elizabeth’s hand to function as stabilizer: only she halts it from rolling onto the floor,465 preventing alien invasion at home and conquest abroad.466 Above is an imperial crown, oversized to match the globe, another bright, albeit half-sphere that echoes Elizabeth’s forehead, skirt, headpiece, ruff, and pearls. Spheres are everywhere,467 like the completeness of the queen’s power—she is emperor in her realm as her father’s parliament declared. The arched crown is topped with its own orb that overlaps with the positive naval scene, creating a triptych of maritime victory and supreme empire that is, quite literally, over the entire world, even if the current expanse of royal power—the literal reach of the queen’s hand—is more limited. Read vertically, the Armada victory leads directly to global empire under Elizabeth. Here, the “Queen, crown and island become one, woman and kingdom… interchangeable,”468 supreme, sovereign, imperial.469 The 1588 portrait testifies to policy and plans at work in this chapter. It depicts Elizabeth with an Atlantic reach. The event came amid significant activity in British nation- and empire-building and only temporarily and superficially interrupted those processes. Though it thwarted the rescue of Roanoke, trade from Newfoundland, search for the Northwest Passage, and Irish plots, the victory bolstered the English navy, engendered protestant national sentiment, injured Spain’s ego and shipping, and encouraged  Doran, “Virginity, Divinity, and Power,” 188.  Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 145. 464  Strong, Gloriana, 132. 465  Roland Mushat Frye, “Ways of Seeing in Shakespearean Drama and Elizabethan Painting,” Shakespeare Quarterly 31, no. 3 (Autumn 1980), 323–342, at 331. 466  Montrose, “Subject of Elizabeth,” 147. 467  Belsey and Belsey, “Icons of Divinity,” 17–18. 468  Strong, Gloriana, 136. 469  Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 146. 462 463

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a bevy of new theory and practice. For all that it halted, slowed, and altered, it stimulated. With new inducement to follow the “Navigations of our British Kings, as of Arthur,” Madoc, Henry VII, and Henry VIII, and the enterprises of Drake, Frobisher, Davis, Gilbert, and Ralegh as Hakluyt rattled off,470 in the 1590s and 1600s, Elizabethans relaunched old projects and sent fresh ones. Among the results would be expanded plantation in Munster and Ulster, the first English pilgrims in North America, and the “discovery” of Guiana.

 “Richard Hakluyt to the fauourable Reader,” Principall Navigations, sig. *4r.

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CHAPTER 7

“Travelers or tinkers, conquerers or crounes”: Tudor Empire in the Last Decade, 1588–1603

In late 1595, half-way through what would prove to be his queen and her dynasty’s final full decade on the throne and not long after his inglorious return from South America that September, Walter Ralegh wrote to his investor, Robert Cecil. Unlike for Virginia, Ralegh had undertaken this most recent voyage himself, and it came at a challenging time for courtier and country, as the former suffered disgrace for his marriage to Bess Throckmorton in 1591, the latter multi-front war, socio-economic hardship, and religious dissent. Somewhat vindicated by his fleet’s capture of the Portuguese Madre de Dios in 1592 and election to parliament in 1593, where he urged a strike against Spain and animus toward the Dutch,1 helped secure a crown subsidy,2 stressed the danger posed by nonconformists like the Brownists,3 and penned a tract on the succession,4 Ralegh moved not only to please the queen, but because he knew

1  Simonds d’Ewes, “Journal of the House of Commons: March 1593,” in The Journals of All the Parliaments During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Shannon, 1682), 479–513; “Anonymous journal,” Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, ed. T.E.  Hartley (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), 3:61–175, which d’Ewes claims as a source. 2  35 Eliz. I, caps. 12, 13, Statutes at Large, 2:683; “Anonymous journal,” 106. 3  “Anonymous journal,” 162. 4  Ralegh, On the Succession, February 1592/3, CP 139/139–140, accompanied by CP 83/35; see also Pierre Lefranc, “Un inédit de Ralegh sur la succession,” Etudes Anglaises 13 (1960): 38–46.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. S. Hower, Tudor Empire, Britain and the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62892-5_7

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the great strengtht of the King of Spaine… In France he hath the Parliament townes att his commaundement. In Brittaine he hath all the best havens. In Scottlande he hath so corrupted the nobilitie that they had promised him forces there… ‘In Ireland I speake upon in knowledge the people are so addicted to papistrie that they are readie to ioyne with anie forreine forces… In this owne countrie there is all possible preparacion made and hee is coming with 60 gallies besides other shipping.’5

“‘The tyme nowe is more dangerous than it was in anno ’88,’” he urged,6 and it was an Atlantic-wide threat: “The Dutchman by his policy hath gott the trade of all the world into his hand; he is now entred into the trade of Scarborough fishinge and the fishing at the New Found Lande which is the stay of all the West Contry. They are the people that maynteine the Kinge of Spayne in his greatnes.”7 Yet still impoverished and banned from court, Ralegh looked to the legendary El Dorado, a hidden empire of vast mineral wealth nestled amid the Orinoco and Amazon rivers, to better his situation and continued to hang his hopes there, even after others tried to shift his sights toward the East8 and the 1595 trip returned little—“it is true that as my errors were great,” he explained; “I did therefore euen in the winter of my life, vndertake these trauels … [to] recouer but the moderation of excesse, and the least tast of the greatest plentie formerly possessed” and privilege “her Maiesties future Honor, and riches.”9 Busily preparing a narrative of his expedition, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana (1596),10 “to testify, to persuade, to provoke action” in the service of imperialism as Stephen Greenblatt put it,11 Ralegh reached out to Cecil with impassioned desperation and adroit rhetoric.

 “Anonymous journal,” 94.  “Anonymous journal,” 110. 7  “Anonymous journal,” 143. 8  Lady Ralegh to Cecil, [February 1593/4], Calendar of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House [hereafter CCP], ed. R.A. Roberts (London: Stationery Office, 1892), 4:485. 9  Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and bewtiful Empire of Guiana (1596), sigs. A 2v–A 3r, A 3v. 10  Ultimately three editions, STC 20636, 20634, 30635. The surviving draft is Lambeth Palace MS 250, see Sir Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana, ed. Lorimer (London: Ashgate, 2006), xxi. 11  Greenblatt, “Introduction,” New World Encounters, ed. Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), xiv. 5 6

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For the writer, the Orinoco-Amazon region was the answer to personal, domestic, and overseas woes. His plea illustrates the significance of these years to the development of Tudor nation and empire, a final evolution in an over-century-long story of theory and practice. To Ralegh, it was a make or mar threshold. Across November–December, he shunted together rumor of a Spanish fleet en route to Ireland in support of the Earl of Tyrone’s rebellion and England’s unpreparedness with a desire to hear “what becumes of Guiana… whether it pass for a history or a fable.” He feared that Robert Dudley, Leicester’s illegitimate son, and others were keen to head him off, a risky prospect, for though he “rather sought to wine [indigenous] kings to Her Majesties service then to sack them, I know what others will do.” Ralegh advocated a reconnaissance of the Spanish coast and cautioned, “expedition in a litle is better then mich to late.”12 Two days later, he implored Cecil to see that, by his own and corroborating Spanish reports recently obtained by George Popham, “it is no dreame which I have reported of Guiana” and convince Elizabeth to deem him “worthy to direct thos actions that I have att myne owne charge labored in & to govern that countrey which I have discovered and hope to conquer for the Queen without her cost.” Ralegh warned that “if it be thought of less importance than it deserveth Her Majestye will shortly bewayle her negligence therin, & the enemy by the addition of so much wealth weare us out of all.” After all, “if the Spaniards had bynn so blockishe & slouthfull wee had not feared now their power… Wee must not looke to mayntyne warre uppon the revenus of Ingland.”13 Ralegh redoubled the point with a brief to the privy council that increased the foreign menace’s specter by expressing concern over Devon and Cornwall, “for there is noe parte of Inglande soe dangerouslie seated, soe thynly mande, so littell defensed, and so easilie invaded.”14 He too followed up with Lord Admiral Charles Howard, advising that a Spanish fleet was soon to be dispatched on the heels of Francis Drake and John Hawkins’s latest West Indies raid, offering to thwart a Habsburg invasion of Ireland, and praying for “a resolution for our enterprize of Guiana,… the greatest assurance of good that ever was offred to any Christien prince &… surest way to devert all attempts from home.”15  Ralegh to Cecil, 10/20 November 1595, CP 36/4.  Ralegh to Cecil, 12/22 November 1595, CP 36/9. 14  Ralegh to PC, 25 November 1595, CP 36/26. 15  Ralegh to Howard, 30 November/10 December 1595, CP 36/42. 12 13

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But Ralegh saved the ultimate stroke for Cecil. He exhorted, “if it be now foreslowed, farewell Guiana forever. Then must I determyne to begg or run away: honor, & golde & all good forever hopeles.” It was now, at this moment, that the statesman, his monarch, and their realm would have to make a choice. “I beseich yow lett vs know whether we shalbe travelers or tinkers, conquerers or crounes.”16 It was the question of the era and, in microcosm, of the century. * * * This chapter argues for the importance of a broadly construed, oft-­ overlooked “last decade” in the Tudor World—from the Armada through the death of the queen—to the history of Britain and empire. It finds that protracted war and instability, real and perceived, wrought by an aging monarch, conciliar discord, social and economic decline, political and confessional tumult empowered subjects, spread navigational knowledge, and produced an urgency to consolidate from within and expand from without—merging national and imperial means and ends. With Habsburg invasion momentarily repelled, an idealized rendering of 1588 reacted with a charged soldering and naval core as well as new material on exploration to animate Elizabethan audiences, engendering new adventuring. Though tempered by conflict and debt, promoters and travelers sought to build upon the so-called successes of the 1580s to fight their spiritual and temporal foes. The ensuing fifteen years resembled those half-a-century earlier, when another war—against Scotland—had stimulated similar watershed; both also provoked a transformative, anti-imperial discourse forged by the would-be conquered. As before, efforts focused on a series of intertwined plots in carefully chosen locations, determined by past history and present hostility.17 Together, they show that the “nineties” were 16  Ralegh to Cecil, 26 November/6 December 1595, CP 36/44. “Crounes” may be defined as imbeciles or novices. 17  Until recently, the 1590s might more accurately have been described as the lost—rather than last—decade, for the dearth of attention it received, for example, E.P. Cheyney, History of England from the Defeat of the Armada to the Death of Elizabeth, 2 vols. (London: Longman-Green, 1914–26); R.B. Wernham, After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe, 1588–1595 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Wallace MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588–1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). The paradigm shifted when Guy invited scholars to reconsider this distinct fin de siècle atmosphere in his edited The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade

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a great deal more than “nasty,”18 and brought a full 125 years of activity at home and abroad to a close. It is no coincidence that four big last decade projects—Guiana,19 Ireland, Newfoundland, and Virginia—gave rise to the Wiapoco and Amazon, Munster and Ulster, Cuper’s (Cupids) Cove and Nova Scotia, and Jamestown colonies across 1604–1629. What may at first appear to be a yawning post-Roanoke interlude, then, was in fact a seminal moment that transcended the dynastic divide. * * * Between 1588 and 1590, domestic dynamics and foreign exigencies stimulated a “second reign” of Elizabeth as imperial monarch.20 The Armada had prioritized defense, manifesting the correlation among European politics and empire in personnel, resources, and discourse. Yet even as it hampered Roanoke and Newfoundland, the thwarted assault exercised martial and maritime muscle, spoke to the importance of a consolidated realm and surety among England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, stoked protestant national sentiment, injured Spanish egos and shipping, and fueled (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), then Elizabeth: The Later Years (New York: Penguin, 2016); Anne N.  MacLaren agreed, suggesting that the first reign (1558–1588) sought to legitimize the queen, while the second (1558–1603) endeavored to renegotiate the church settlement and secure the crown against Scottish succession, in Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth 1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 18  Collinson, “Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s and the Invention of Puritanism,” in Reign of Elizabeth, ed. Guy 150–170, at 170. 19  My study of Guiana is indebted to Lorimer, who masterfully traced the region’s importance, see “Ralegh’s First Reconnaissance of Guiana? An English Survey of the Orinoco in 1587,” Terrae Incognitae 9 (1977): 7–21; “The Location of Ralegh’s Guiana Gold Mine,” Terrae Incognitae 14 (1982): 77–95; English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1500–1646, ed. Lorimer (London: Hakluyt Society, 1989); Lorimer, Untruth and Consequences: Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana and the ‘Salting’ of the Gold Mine (London: Hakluyt Society, 2007). Others have privileged Ralegh’s Discoverie, see Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and his Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); New World Encounters, ed. Greenblatt; The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, ed. Neil Whitehead (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 20  Guy, “Introduction: The Second Reign of Elizabeth I?” in Reign of Elizabeth, ed. Guy, 1–19.

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i­ntervention in multiple theaters abroad in the longer term. In other words, though the Armada did not herald the “downfall of Spain and the rise of England as a great maritime power” as per nineteenth-century historiography/hagiography21 and Philip’s loss exposed error and poor luck far more than any confessionally inclined gale, commentators transformed the event into a symbol of and inducement to empire, a godly exercise for the commonwealth’s profit, faith, and domed crown. That process most famously began at Tilbury, where Elizabeth presented herself—according to the most-cited, if apocryphal, version— “resolved… to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people mine honor and blood,” endowed with “the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but… the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too,” and certain of “a famous victory.”22 The rejoicing and myth-making continued in commemorative prayers, songs, and portraits, where themes of biblical righteousness (“worthy the Christian Deborah and Theodosia”), triumph over devilish foreigners (“the raging enemy who goeth about to beat down his word and devour his people” now reaping “just plague for their wickedness and idolatry”), and imperial imagery (“The only Empresse that on earth hath liu’d”) met wider audiences.23 The success too became a British one: Elizabeth hastened to secure her alliance with her “brother and cousin” James VI24 and expressed her gratitude for his “constant defence of your country, together [with] myne, from all Spaniardz or strangers.”25 “You may assure yourselfe,” she added, that “all this tirannical prowd and brainsick attempt will be the beginning, thogh not the end, of the ruine of that king”; “if, by leaving  Laughton, ed., State Papers Armada, 1:ix.  “Queen Elizabeth’s Armada Speech to the Troops at Tilbury, August 9, 1588,” Collected Works, 325–326, at 326. See also Frye, “Myth of Elizabeth”; Janet M. Green, “‘I My Self’: Queen Elizabeth I’s Oration at Tilbury Camp,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 28, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 421–445; Steven May, “Queen Elizabeth to her Subjects: The Tilbury and Golden Speeches,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 30, no. 1 (2004): 23–40. 23  “On the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, September 1588,” Collected Works, 424–425, at 424; Thomas Fenner to Walsingham, 4 August 1588, in State Papers Armada, 37–41, at 40–41; James Aske, Elizabetha Trivmphans (1588), 24. See also “On the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588,” Collected Works, 423; Theodor Beza, Ad serenissimam Elizabetham Angliae Reginam (1588); “Copy of a Letter from London,” 7 December 1588, CSPSimancas 4:484. 24  Elizabeth to James, received 15 May 1588, in Letters of Queen Elizabeth and King James VI of Scotland, ed. John Bruce (London: Nichols and Son, 1849), 47–49, at 49. 25  Elizabeth to James, ca. 1 July 1588, Letters of Elizabeth and James, 49–51, at 50. 21 22

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them unhelped, you may increase the Englisch hartz unto you, you shal not do the worst dede for your behalfe.”26 In the months that followed, two of England’s most important writers were hard at work. William Camden, who later posited the “inuincible” Armada as the culmination of two decades of religious, global, imperial struggle and proof of Spain’s mortality27 and couched Elizabeth’s reign as “the dayes, / when Britanns ground, / With blessings all, / was compast round,”28 produced the third edition of his Britannia (1590). First encouraged by Ortelius and dedicated to Burghley in 1586, the text endeavored to “restore antiquity to Britain, and Britain to its antiquity,”29 recovering the land and people of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland from first inhabitance. Deploying models and material from classical Greece and Rome, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Leland, Llwyd, and many others, Britannia was fundamental to the understanding and spread of a notion of “Britain” in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. The timing of its new, enlarged version seems uncoincidental.30 Equally part and parcel of the moment was Hakluyt’s most ambitious and comprehensive work yet, The Principall Navigations (1589). Its appeal was pointed: evoking Eden’s praise mingled with admonition, Hakluyt’s dedication to Walsingham recalled how he “heard in speech, and read in books other nations miraculously extolled for their discoueries and notable enterprises by sea, but the English of all others for their sluggish security, and continuall neglect of the like attempts… either ignominiously reported, or exceedingly condemned.” Here was his reply to “the obloquie of our nation,” charting “the industrious labors, and painefull travels of our countrey men” from Arthur and Madoc to Hore and Davis, to prove that as in all former ages, they haue bene men full of activity, stirrers abroad, and searchers of the remote parts of the world, so in this most famous and peerlesse gouernement of her most excellent Majesty, her subiects through the speciall assistance, and blessing of God, in searching the most opposite corners and quarters of the world, and… in compassing the vaste globe of the earth more then once, have excelled all the nations and people of the earth.

 Elizabeth to James, August 1588, Letters of Elizabeth and James, 52–54, at 53.  Camden, Annales (1625), Book 3, 252–253. 28  Camden, Annales, unnumbered page 3. 29  Camden, Britannia (1590), sig. A 2r. My translation. 30  Wyman H. Herendeen, “Camden, William (1551–1623),” ODNB (2008). 26 27

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In this, Hakluyt ventured, Elizabeth was Solomon to Henry’s David: “perform[ing]” what her father had built, with “the same Heroicall spirit, and most honorable disposition, as an inheritance.” The collection would demonstrate the extent of Tudor empire, promote “the aduancing of nauigation, the very walles of this our Island,” and fix his status as England’s Homer/Pliny/Ptolemy with “vnfained seruice to my prince and country.”31 Five months later, Hakluyt continued the post-Armada onslaught by convincing Frankfurt’s Johann Wechel to print de Bry’s engraved edition of Harriot’s Brief and True Report.32 It was, as Peter Mancall argued, an “astonishing” event by which Roanoke’s inhabitants became “international celebrities” and “representative of all Americans.”33 Wechel demonstrated—textually, pictorially, Europe-wide—the progress of mid-Elizabethan Atlantic adventure and its British roots, a boon to new projects overseas. As promotion turned to practice, Virginia remained in the dialogue, however the fate of its leading players held that enterprise back, as Newfoundland, Guiana, and Ireland went forward. One blow came when Drake faltered in his counterattack against Spain. Concocted to harass Philip’s ships, gain footing in the Azores, then enthrone Portuguese claimant Dom Antonio and sunder the Iberian union, to the “honour… [of] our whole Nation,”34 the scheme garnered significant support, including from Walsingham, Burghley, and the queen, yet ended in fiasco, as its leaders disobeyed orders, plunged their men into sickness, and limped home without achieving its aims; Drake did not sail west again until late summer 1595, on the voyage that would claim his life35—a major blow.36 In 1591, Grenville was mortally wounded aboard the Revenge in a botched attempt to raid the Habsburg treasure fleet.37 The loss of this Ireland and Virginia veteran38 was soon compounded: by mid-decade, Cavendish was also 31  Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, sigs. *2r–*3r, at *2r–v, *3r; Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, 184–185. 32  Harriot, Brief and True. 33  Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, 195, 196. 34  Anthony Wingfield, A True coppie of a Discourse… (1589), sig. A 2r. 35  Guy, Elizabeth, 129–133; Kelsey, Drake, 341–364; Wernham, After Armada. 36  Notes [by Burghley], June 1595, TNA SP 12/252/110, fols. 202r–203v; Hans Dyryckson to Pietre van Lore, 18/28 November 1595, CP 36/38. 37  Loades, “Grenville.” 38  For Grenville’s Irish grant, see Elizabeth to Lord Deputy, 7 March 1590/1, CP 146/103.

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dead, Lane had settled permanently in Dublin for “god, his religion and the safetye of my countrye”39 and White in Munster, while Harriot suffered accusations of atheism.40 Yet even in death and defeat, Ralegh found instruments for his cause: in a short work on the fight of the Revenge, he extolled England’s greatness by contrast to the “vaine glorious vaunts” of the Spaniards, who “couer their greedy and ambicious pretences, with that vayle of pietie” and pretend “as if the Kinges of Castile were the naturall heires of all the worlde” as they tyrannize indigenous peoples, linking Grenville’s demise to the Armada, drawing attention back to America, and appealing to Las Casas.41 Ralegh also managed to benefit from Harriot’s continued study in navigation, mathematics, and cartography, which aided the Guiana venture.42 These years demonstrate that despite recent narratives—important correctives to a high-politics historiography—emphasizing unofficial sources and stimuli as the backbone of Elizabethan empire-building,43 collaboration and symbiosis were crucial. Without courtly support, projects did not depart; public and private forces combined to dictate the complexion of imperialism, as they had since Henry VII. This helps explain why Camden, Hakluyt, and Ralegh were all so keen to endear their exploits, even the most ignominious, to the top and why those feats and flops were felt so acutely across multiple levels of state and society. It is borne out in the “ambiguity” and “conceptual fluidity” that Richard Helgerson found in Hakluyt’s pages, slipping “back and forth from monarchs to nations in a way that suggests they are interchangeable” and construing exploration, military action, commerce, and colonization together.44 Moreover, each loss was more momentous because it was not in isolation. Alongside their queen and her adventurers, Elizabeth’s council was aging, and a series of deaths significantly altered the body’s cast and tenor. Between 1588 and 1591, Leicester, Walter Mildmay, and Warwick—loud voices for a foreign policy dictated by reformed faith—were gone, as was  Lane to Burghley, 2 January 1589/90, CP 166/98.  Susan M. Maxwell, “Cavendish, Thomas (bap. 1560, d. 1592),” ODNB (2009); Billings, “Lane”; Tiro, “White”; J.J.  Roche, “Harriot, Thomas (c. 1560–1621),” ODNB (2006); Robyn Arianrhod, Thomas Harriot: A Life in Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 41  [Ralegh], A Report of the Truth of the Fight about the Isles of the Açores… (1591), sigs. A 3r, [C 4v], Dr. 42  Arianrhod, Harriot, chapter 11. 43  For example, Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement. 44  Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 165. 39 40

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Christopher Hatton. Walsingham’s April 1590 demise was particularly decisive: Philip was relieved, now spared this interventionist supporter of global protestantism, Anglo-Scottish union, and Tudor voyaging who was lauded by David Hume of Godscroft (then developing his radical theory of a new, civic, reformed Britain),45 had once commended Hakluyt for giving “much light for the discouery of the Westerne partes yet vnknowen… to the publike benefite of this Realme,”46 and had written “A plotte for the anoyeng of the K[ing] of Spayne.”47 In the margin of a report conveying “much sorrow” in London over the secretary’s death, the King of Spain wrote, “There yes! But it is good news here,”48 perhaps not appreciating how others could sustain his vision. Still, posts lay vacant, patronage shifted, Burghley tussled with archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift, and the council split into two factions, led by Cecil and Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex.49 Each pushed its own course until Essex’s execution in 1601, the wax and wane of projects mimicking government fluctuations. Ralegh’s fall fits and elucidates this context, as does his response. “Cast into the depth of all misery,” as he described to Cecil in significantly classical terms, “I that was wont to behold her ridinge like alexander, huntinge like diana, walkinge like venus,”50 the courtier turned to New World empire for salvation. His first step back into royal graces came when the fleet he sent to the Azores, helmed by Frobisher (a man whose northwest voyages “present some curious incidental parallelisms with occurrences in the long subsequent voyages to Guiana of Ralegh, and in the metallurgic transactions which grew out of them,” as Victorian Edward Edwards surmised), returned in 159251; loaded with gems, gold, and silks, the Madre

45  Williamson, “Patterns of British Identity: ‘Britain’ and its Rivals in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in New British History, ed. Burgess, 138–173; Williamson, “Education, Culture, and the Scottish Civic Tradition,” in Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714, ed. Macinnes and Williamson (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 33–54; The British Union: A Critical Edition and Translation of David Hume of Godscroft’s De unione insulae Britannicae, ed. Paul J. McGinnis and Williamson (New York: Routledge, 2016). 46  Walsingham to Hakluyt, 11 March 1582, PN, 3:181. 47  “A plotte…,” [?] March 1585, TNA SP 12/176/2, fols. 153r–154v. 48  “Advices from London,” 18 April 1590, CSPSimancas 4:589. 49  Guy, Tudor England, 435–458. 50  Ralegh to Cecil, [July 1592], CP 21/58. 51  Ralegh to Cecil, 10 March 1592, in The Life of Sir Walter Ralegh, ed. Edward Edwards (London: Macmillan, 1868), 2:44–46, at 45.

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de Dios was perhaps the richest prize of the century.52 Though denied a full share of the profit and favor, Ralegh was freed from the Tower before year’s end,53 by a crown seeking fuller coffers, military advantage, and overseas victory over an ex-brother-in-law whose imperial heart lay across southwesterly waters. Described by Fuller as “a kind of obverse to the Virginia enterprise, undertaken at the heyday of his power and favor in the 1580s,” Guiana was Raleigh’s negotiation of a new personal and political climate.54 In Camden’s reckoning, “some Englishmen priuately, and the Queene her selfe publikely, vndertooke greater aduentures against the Spaniard”; Ralegh, “his owne Genius, that was alwaies enclined to search out hidden Regions, and the secrets of Nature, vndertooke a Nauigation to Guiana, that beares Gold, which iourney he hop’d would proue aduantgious to his Countrey, both by getting store of wealth, and by molesting the Spaniard.”55 The next three years became a seedtime of pitching and planning, Ralegh, like other individuals before him, never the sole architect and executor. * * * Travel northwest was complicated since rumblings of an Armada forced a stay of shipping in 1587 and outright war precluded international cooperation at the fishery from 1588, yet, in Burghley, Newfoundland retained its champion at court and, in Hakluyt, it gained encyclopedic proof of its advantageous situation and British genealogy. Against a backdrop of heated conflict, four consecutive bad harvests, population pressures, and rising poverty, the region seemed a panacea.56 Moreover, when Bernard Drake’s warning-turn-raid effectively dismantled the Portuguese presence and the Spanish functionally surrendered the area for the duration of its conflict with England, leaving France their chief competitor in the space,

52  John W.  Shirley, “Sir Walter Ralegh’s Guiana Finances,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 13, no. 1 (November 1949), 55–69, at 57. 53  Nicholls and Williams, “Ralegh.” 54  Fuller, Voyages, 57. See also Andrews, Trade, Plunder, Settlement, 288; Lorimer, “Ralegh’s First Reconnaissance.” 55  Camden, The Historie of the Life and Reigne of that Famous Princesse Elizabeth (1634), 129. 56  Jim Sharpe, “Social Strain and Social Dislocation, 1585–1603,” in Reign of Elizabeth, ed. Guy, 192–211; Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement, 304–305.

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Elizabethans were emboldened.57 Though somewhat moderated—as the remainder of this chapter suggests—by the primacy of Ireland and points south, the North Atlantic re-emerged as a site of commercial and colonial interest as well as European competition. They increased their presence, waged a protracted fight for primacy, especially against the Basques and Bretons, that—with their enticing hauls of fish, oil, and hides58—only increased excitement, faced a litany of grievances for their exploits, and debated what their next moves might be to further capitalize on prizes that were rarely restored and make up for lost ground in a territory now nearing its centenary on Tudor minds. Even those who set their sights elsewhere got in the game: a June 1592 letter to the council testified that a ship owned by a Bayonne merchant laden with over 100,000 dry fish, 4000 green fish, and 14 hogsheads of train oil from “newe founde lande” was commandeered “by an Englishe shippe appointed warrlike belonginge to Syr Walter Rawleye.”59 Three instances from 1591 bear out this narrative. In April, a Basque vessel of Canadian furs apparently intended for Henry IV’s sister was captured and taken to Dorset. Such a high-profile recipient merited restitution and piqued Burghley’s notice, fodder for a statesman who, as Quinn put it, held “a shrewd preference for the more northerly objectives of the small colonizing groups—furs, masts, resin, tar, hemp as well as fish and fish oil—and his interest deepened as the Spanish war increased the demand for ships’ stores,”60 with an expansionary British vision since the 1540s; by June, a company of Devon ships were at Newfoundland.61 In September, Bristol mayor Thomas James sent a letter—later printed with a note underscoring the value of walruses by Hakluyt—informing Burghley that a Breton ship had been brought to his city with over forty tons of train oil made from fish near Newfoundland with veal-like meat, great tusks, and leathery skins; “if it will make sope,” James ventured, “the king 57  John Welles to Walsingham, 27 April/7 May 1589, TNA SP 78/19, fols. 129r–130v; Cell, English Enterprise, chapter 2. 58  For example, “A St. Jean de Luz ship seized,” 1591, in List and Analysis of State Papers, Foreign Series: Elizabeth I (London: Stationery Office, 1980), 2:485; “Martin de Ralde’s ship,” 1591, List and Analysis, 3:597; “Martissans de Hourgues’ Petition to the French King,” [July 1593–December 1594], Lists and Analysis, 5:531. 59  Bernard de la Laude to PC, 6 June 1592, TNA SP 12/242, fols. 87r–v, at 87r. 60  Quinn, “First Pilgrims,” 369. 61  “Mayors of Barnstaple and Bideford to the Lord Treasurer, Lord High Admiral, and Lord Chamberlain,” 25 June 1591, CP 19/95.

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of Spaine may burne some of his Oliue trees.”62 The seized ship’s master then penned a fuller report, also in Principal Navigations, detailing his “discouerie of the Isle Ramea” (Magdalen Islands), highlighting its “Morses or Sea oxen,” grounds, and harbors.63 In October, Burghley’s agent in St. Jean de Luz, Edmond Palmer, relayed that another Basque ship had been captured, replete with more fish, train oil, and furs.64 For a statesman and broader audience who long valued island geography, North American resources, and imperial possession, the region filled historic and contemporary needs. Indeed, in February 1594, officials at Dartmouth declared that “in these harde tymes of trade, [Newfoundland] is the onely voyadge that maketh both owner and mariner to florishe.”65 Activity soon swirled around the Magdalens, a means to spread English civility, improve the nation’s navy, acquire food stuffs,66 support the West Country,67 consolidate the nation by expelling nonconformists, and promote the Cecil faction. Mid-way through the previous decade, Elizabeth had selected Whitgift as primate, succeeding Edmund Grindal.68 Occurring within weeks of Gilbert’s drowning, the two events opened the way for change in foreign and domestic theaters, which quickly became intertwined. Whitgift was an ardent Calvinist, active campaigner, and strict disciplinarian, committed to combatting dissent, Catholic and “radical” protestant—puritan, presbyterian, and anabaptist. Freed by the deaths of opponents Leicester and Walsingham and elevated to the council, across 1590–1591 he moved against three nonconformist foes, Thomas Cartwright, John Udall, and Robert Cawdrey. The case of the last, accused of depraving the Book of Common Prayer, proved to be a referendum on the queen’s power, affirming a high view of her sovereignty.69 Powerfully echoing the Act of Appeals,  “A Letter Sent to the Right Honorable Sir William Cecill…,” PN, 3:191.  “A Relation of the First Voyage and Discouerie of the Isle of Ramea,” PN, 3:189–190. 64  Palmer to Burghley, 19 October 1591, TNA SP 94/4, fols. 64r–66v. 65  “Officers of the Customs at Dartmouth to Mr. John Dawse and Other Surveyors,” 18 February 1593/4, CP 169/38. 66  William Stallenge to Cecil, 15 August 1596, CP 43/93; John Jefferey to Cecil, 30 October 1598, CP 65/27. 67  John Martyn to PC, 26 June 1603, CP 100/136. 68  Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); William Joseph Sheils, “Whitgift, John (1530/31?–1604),” ODNB (2008). 69  Guy, “The Elizabethan Establishment and the Ecclesiastical Polity,” in Reign of Elizabeth, ed. Guy, 126–149. 62 63

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the judges found that “by the ancient Laws of this Realm, this Kingdome of England is an absolute Empire and Monarchy, consisting of one Head, which is the King, and of a Body politick, compact and compounded of many and almost infinite severall, and yet well-agreeing members.”70 The decision upheld the special status of the Tudor crown, church, and state, and how to protect it. As Whitgift preached, “part of obedience to princes is ‘honour’… Where this love and fear is, commonwealths prosper and flourish and increase.”71 Elizabeth proclaimed in 1592, “be of one mind, for you know that unity is the stronger, disunity the weaker and quick to fall into ruin.”72 Cawdrey served as a warning; soon the rest of the realm felt Whitgift’s hand. In 1593, after the archbishop gave the opening sermon, parliament authorized acts to avoid “such great inconveniences and perils as might happen and grow by the wicked and dangerous practices of seditious sectaries” and “popish recusants… hiding their most detestable and devilish purposes under a false pretext of religion.” All subjects were required to attend services, conform to law, and obey the queen under pain of forfeiture, fines, and/or banishment from “this realm of England and all other the Queen’s Majesty’s dominions.”73 Herein lay intellectual origins for the northwest project. The government had statutorily wedded national safety to spiritual obedience and proposed resettlement as an alternative to conformity. It was here, sitting in the session, that Ralegh mused, “If 2000 or 3000 Brownestes meete at sea, at whose charge shall they be transported, or whether will you send them? ‘I am sorry for it, I am afrayd there be 10,000 or 12,000 of them in England: when they be gone who shall may[n]taine their wife and children’”?74 In early 1593, with Burghley’s encouragement, London shipowner with Newfoundland ties Peter Hill and a Bristol syndicate that included Mayor James launched two ships with a company that included a French Huguenot pilot from Basque country (Stevan de Bocall), ten mariners, three coopers, and two butchers to the Magdalen Islands, “on the backe  John Davies, England’s Independency upon the Papal Power… (1674).  The Works of John Whitgift, ed. John Ayre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1853), 591. 72  Elizabeth to the heads of Oxford University, 28 September 1592, Collected Works, 327–328, at 328. 73  “35 Eliz. Cap. I” and “Cap. II.,” in Select Statutes and Other Constitutional Documents Illustrative of the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I, ed. G.W. Prothero (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), 89–93, at 89, 92, 90. 74  “Anonymous journal,” 162–163. 70 71

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side of Newfoundland… called by the Britons of Saint Malo the Isle of Ramea, but by the Sauages and naturals of the Continent next adoyning Menquit.” Richard Fisher’s relation described an abundance of marine mammals, better cod than Newfoundland, other “beastes and foules,” impressive trees, promise of rosin, pitch, and tar, and Christian competitors. He also detailed an inauspicious meeting with the indigenous population that feels conditioned by the 1580s experimental boom, specifically appraising their culture in a way that at once realized a potential threat, highlighted incivility, and lent both familiarity and legitimacy by comparison to southerly locales: one Sauage with blacke long hayre… called vnto vs… one of our mens musket vnawares shot off: whereupon hee fell downe, and rising vp suddenly againe hee cryed thrise with a loude voyce Chiogh, Chiogh, Chiogh. Thereupon nine or tenne of his fellowes running right vp ouer the bushes with great agilitie and swiftenesse came towardes vs with white staues in their handes like halfe pikes, and their dogges of colour blacke… but wee retired vnto our boate without any hurt… One of the Sauages, which seemed to be their Captaine, ware a long mantle of beastes skinnes hanging on one of his shoulders. The rest were all naked except their priuities… Wee sawe also, while we were on shore, the manner of their hanging vp of their fish and flesh with withes to dry in the ayre: they also lay them vpon raftes and hurdles and make a smoake vnder them, or a softe fire, and so drie them as the Sauages vse to doe in Virginia.75

Again seized upon by Hakluyt, the report and an appended brief note furthered late Tudor imperial ideology. The latter pressed how Captain George Drake and his two successors, Silvester Wyet in 1594 and Charles Leigh in 1597, “are the first… of our owne Nation, that have conducted English shippes so farre within this gulfe of S. Laurence,” witnessing “the manifold gaine which the French, Britaynes, Baskes, and Biskaines do yerely returne from the sayd partes; while wee this long time haue stood still and haue bene idle lookers on.”76 Even Ralegh jumped on the northwestern bandwagon, telling Cecil in 1594 that if the Spanish should attack “our  “The Voyage of the Ship Called the Marigold…” PN, 3:191–193, at 191–192.  “A Briefe Note Concerning the Voyage of M. George Drake…” PN, 3:193. The Wyet narrative followed, supplying further navigational information and eyewitness testimony for the western coast of Newfoundland and Anticosti, “The voyage of the Grace of Bristol…” PN, 3:194–195. See also Cell, English Enterprise, 49–50; Quinn, “First Pilgrims,” 370. 75 76

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newland fleet… it would be the greatest blow that ever was geven to Ingland.”77 The message was not lost, even if it took time to realize. In March 1594, the crown authorized thirty-six ships to fish at Newfoundland and Iceland78 and, in 1595–1596, Palmer recommended Bocall as the means by which Elizabethans would find copper deposits in Newfoundland and a bay to capture Basque whalers—an undocumented voyage that either never launched or became the means by which English privateer William Craston gained his extensive knowledge of the gulf.79 At last, again with Burghley’s support, in 1597 a voluntary company—judged by Quinn as “not unlike the syndicate which backed the Pilgrims in the sixteen-­ twenties”—brought together a group of Londoners including Hill, goldsmith Ralph Hill, and trader, Armada veteran, Roanoke supporter, and “prince of privateering promoters” John Watts; with Dutch merchant Abraham van Harwick and Captain Stephen van Harwick; Craston; Pastor Francis Johnson’s Brownist congregation; and commander Charles Leigh (described by Johnson’s brother George as “a brother in the faith”) to colonize the Magdalens.80 It shows how myriad considerations specific to the mid-1590s could coalesce into a single plot, to simultaneously elbow out the Basques and Bretons, get a jump on the cod season, and resettle non-conformists who sought, according to their petition, to “performe the dutie of Subiectes,” rather than enter useless foreign exile, by expanding her realm to “the West”; there, “wee may not onlie worshippe god as wee are in conscience perswaded by his Word, but also doe vnto her Matie and our Country great good service, and in tyme also greatlie annoy that bloodie and persecuting Spaniard.”81 Adopting a generous reading of 1593’s legislation, in March the council authorized the “voyage of fishinge and dyscovery into the Bay of Canyda and to plant them selves in an island called Ramea or thereabouts, whence they hope and intend to bringe divers very necessarie comodyties of speciall use for this realme” on condition that the passengers’ names were logged, they remained outside  Ralegh to Cecil, 20 July [1594], CP 27/46.  “Ships Released to goe on fishinge,” 2 March 1594, TNA SP 12/248/1, fols. 1r–v. 79  “Spanish Advertisements,” 6 March 1595, TNA SP 94/5, fols, 9r–10v; Palmer to [Cecil], 1 May 1596, TNA SP 12/257, fols. 102r–v; Quinn, “First Pilgrims,” 371. 80  Quinn, “First Pilgrims,” 371–372, at 371; Andrews, Trade, Plunder, Settlement, 252; Johnson, A Discourse of Some Troubles… (Amsterdam, 1603). 81  “Petition of the subjects falsely called Brownists,” [November–December 1593 or February–March 1597], TNA SP 12/246/56, fols. 111r–v, at 111r. 77 78

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of England so long as they refused conformity, and they swore obedience to Elizabeth.82 With a scheme reminiscent of Gilbert, the region was again the linchpin of Tudor nation- and empire-building, with a last-decade twist. The voyage launched in April carrying four Brownists colonists— the first English separatists bound for the New World, three decades before the Mayflower. It was not, however, particularly successful. Before departure, Francis Johnson fought with another dissenter about the virtues of separatism and circulated a “confession of faith” among the mariners in what was not the last of his conversion efforts.83 After crossing, the ships separated in a fog: van Harwick’s struck rocks, was plundered by Basques, and dithered over next moves, with the captain threatening the Brownists with abandonment “to be devoured by the wilde” or surrender to the Catholic French if they did not help prize-seek84; Leigh’s made it to the Magdalens and confirmed their goodliness, but soon stumbled upon well-ensconced Basques, Bretons, and Mi’kmaq drying their cod, contributed to the proxy war by disarming a suspected Spanish vessel (almost provoking a mutiny when he refused to take the ship), then suffered a massive rout by the non-­ English fishermen.85 Improbably, the two ships reunited and headed home, where the Brownists fled. In a striking nod to past and future, they compared their plight as “the banished English Church at Amsterdam in Q.  Elizabeths daie” and “light vpon a hil” to that of Marian exiles in Frankfurt.86 Thereafter, plans for what George Johnson described as a “strange land”87 stalled, despite Leigh’s voyage narrative (published by Hakluyt), his “brieffe platforme” to beat the French to the Magdalens, garrison a port, plant colonists, and secure the trade for themselves—so “her maiesties revenues and dominions may in shorte tyme be greatly enlarged to her endless honor”88—and fears that Newfoundland fish was victualling Spain.89 Burghley died in August 1598 and, two years later, another  25 March 1597, TNA PC 2/22, 169–170, at 169.  Johnson, Discourse, 109. 84  Johnson, Discourse, 110. 85  “Voyage of M. Charles Leigh…,” PN, 3:195–201. 86  Johnson, Discourse, 21, 156. 87  Johnson, Discourse, 111. 88  Leigh, A Brieffe Platforme ffor a Voyadge, 4 October 1597, in J.D. Rogers, A Historical Geography of the British Colonies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 5:4:249–250, at 250. 89  William Monson to [Cecil], 4 October 1602, CP 95/136. 82 83

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­ roposal for “an Englishe collonee in the northe weste of America” seemp ingly floundered.90 Yet it was only an end for captain and region in the narrowest sense. In 1602, Leigh set out with the encouragement of another Cecil (Robert) and another son of Katherine Champernowe (Raleigh) to add a different territory to the Tudor empire, Guiana; some eight years after that, the British founded a colony at Cupids Cove, located along the very bay Leigh had visited. * * * In spring 1593, at the same session that was a boon for Ralegh and blight for dissenters, another MP too spoke for the queen’s subsidy. Having sat in every one of her parliaments,91 William More assumed the voice of carefully constructed history, “and shewed that her Majestie had nowe more cause to have the subsidie then had Henry 8, Edward 6, or Queene Marie”: Henry’s wars were sometimes “impulsive not defensive” and he had other income streams, like the dissolutions; Edward had the chantries, church plate, and a relief; Mary had a relief and loan; but “[Elizabeth] hath been at continuall defence of her owne realme and her neighbours’ kingdomes, England, Ireland, Fraunce and the Lowe Countries” without “such helpes.”92 It was an arresting argument for exceptionality and legitimacy at the expense of (rather than building on) the queen’s predecessors. The entire debate—even the whole parliament—hinged, as Cecil argued, on “the preservacion of her Majestie’s royall person and the good of this relme,” now “in exceedinge great imminent danger” from the King of Spain and “Antechrist of Roome.”93 Elizabeth put an even finer point on the matter, declaring, this kingdom hath many noble and victorious princes. I will not compare with any of them in wisdom, fortitude, and other virtues; but… in love, case, sincerity, and justice I will… It may be thought simplicity in me that all this time of my reign have not sought to advance my territories and enlarged my dominions… but it hath not ben fear to obtain or doubt how to keep the things so obtained that hath withholden me from these attempts; only my  “Considerations,” [1600?], TNA CO 1/1/9, fols. 22r–24v.  P.W. Hasler, The House of Commons, 1558–1603 (London: History of Parliament Trust, 1981), 3:86. 92  “Anonymous journal,” 93. 93  “Anonymous journal,” 71. 90 91

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mind was never to invade my neighbors, nor to usurp upon any, only contented to reign over my own and to rule as a just prince.94

Of course, the consequence depended wholly upon what constituted “her own.” Under cover of history and security, the 1593 parliament assumed a more aggressive posture and allowed a push further south than ever before. A decade on, it was time to realize what Hakluyt had found in 1584: “the lymites of the Kinge of Spaines domynions in the west Indies be nothinge so large as is generally ymagined.” The Iberians “governed rather by gevinge oute of greate rumors of power and by secrecie then by any great force,” as copious evidence showed, and beyond its grasp there is “onely the Caribes, Indians, and salvages. In wch places is greate plentie of golde, perle, and precious stones.”95 Ralegh was ready, the reorientation arguably a long time coming. Not incidentally, Hakluyt’s first surviving piece, “driven by the fear of national exclusion and shame” and “the sheer need to expand” (in Helgerson’s words) at the outset of the Iberian union in 1580, advocated “that the Straight of Magellanus be taken and fortified, inhabited and kept” and “the Isle of S. Vincent in Brasill, and the soyle ajoyning be taken and kept”—respectively “the gate of entry into the treasure of both the East and West Indies” and means to “make subjecte to England all the gold mines of Peru and all the coste and tract of that firme of America upon the Sea of Sur.”96 Deprived of treasure, trade, mariners, and force, “thus the prowd [Spain] shall not be abel to annoy us in Ireland… or thereafter be the popes instrument to annoy us anywhere.”97 Much like in the north, war encouraged competition, privateering, and proxy fights elsewhere in the Atlantic. English ports flooded with cochineal, hides, indigo, silver, gold, sugar, and reports from Brazil, the Caribbean, and Mexico, eliciting both excitement for gains, if also worries about their effects on other trades, navigation, and defense.98 A ­permanent 94  “Queen Elizabeth’s Speech at the Closing of Parliament, April 10, 1593,” Collected Works, 328–330, at 329. 95  Hakluyt, “Discourse,” 2:250, 251, 255. 96  Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 164; “A Discourse of the Commodity of the Taking of the Straight of Magellanus,” 1579–80, Original Writings, 1:139–146, at 140, 142. 97  “Ye Commodity of Taking ye straightes of Magellanus,” 1580, Original Writings, 1:163–164, at 164. 98  “Advices from London,” 23 December 1589, CSPSimancas 4:573; “A Discourse of the Indies,” 23 December 1591, TNA CO 1/32/1, fols. 1r–2v; Pedro de Valdes to Philip, 19

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presence might satiate the crown’s pleas for money, the state’s for Spanish hurt, the plunderer’s for loot, the merchant’s for markets, the sailor’s for experience, and the courtier’s for preferment—no party mutually exclusive. Moved by Principall Navigations, Ralegh promised to “willingly spend my life therein, and… performe more then euer was done in Mexico by Cortez, or in Peru by Pacaro,” making Elizabeth “Lorde of more Gold, and of a more beautifull Empire, and of more Cities and people, then eyther the king of Spayne, or the great Turke.”99 Indeed, in Hakluyt and his circle, the courtier found a veritable handbook to South America. From writers like Francisco López de Gómara and Pedro Cieza de León to explorers like Francisco de Orellana, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, and Antonio de Berrío, to English sailors like William Parker, Ralegh gleaned a fertile place of precious commodities.100 Adding extra inspiration, Hacket’s edition of Thevet’s New found worlde (1568) had described native inhabitants near “the Ryuer of Platte” as “almost like Gyants” and Brazil’s as “poor brutish men” who sometimes “coloure al their bodies” with a pigmant “bewtene an Azure and a blacke,” stoking British parallels that might seem providential.101 Fittingly for the era, the best evidence reached Ralegh by way of European rivals. His initial interest may have come from the “French [who] haue made diuers voiages, and returned much gold and other rarities” from the Amazon and Brazil, including “a captaine of a French ship that came from thence… the same yeere that my ships came first from Virginia,”102 positioning Guiana as an alternative should the latter fail. Most fortuitously, in 1586, after supporting a furtive (and abortive) trip to the West Indies,103 his privateers took a ship carrying Sarmiento and ferried him to England, where he “conversed” with Elizabeth, Burghley, Howard, and Ralegh.104 The following year, in collusion with the March 1593, CSPSimancas 4:612; Rob. Zinzan to Burghley, 3 July 1593, TNA SP 12/245/48(i), fols. 77r–v. 99  Ralegh, Discoverie, 9. 100  English and Irish, ed. Lorimer, 11–16; Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement, 287–289; Ralegh, Discoverie, 3, 93–96. 101  Thevet, New found worlde, fols. 86r, 87r, 48v, 49r. 102  Ralegh, Discoverie, 21–22. 103  Lorimer, “First Reconnaissance,” 14–16. 104  “Concise narrative,” in Narratives of the Voyages of Pedro Sarmiento de Gambóa, ed. Clements R. Markham (London: Hakluyt Society, 1895), 342–343, at 342. “A Voyage to the Azores,” PN, 2:2:120–121, at 120.

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Portuguese pretender, French supporters, and an Italian captain, Ralegh may have backed a reconnaissance of Trinidad and the Orinoco, to scout “the richest land” where, “once settled,” Philip “would not be strong enough to conquer them,” and leave behind English boys to “pick up the language” and forge indigenous ties.105 Though, as Lorimer has shown, the voyage’s failure to bring back much intelligence, Armada, last Roanoke searches, Ireland, court politics, and finances delayed the project,106 by the mid-1590s, Ralegh could write that “many yeares since, I had knowledge by relation, of that mighty, rich and beawtifull Empire of Guiana, and of that great and Golden City, which the Spaniards call El Dorado”; “it farre exceedeth any of the world, at least so much of the world as is knowen to the Spanish nation.”107 Poetic invective came in Thomas Watson’s posthumously published Amintae Gaudia (1592), dedicated to Henry Sidney’s daughter, Mary. Laden with humanist homages and evocative imagery, the Latin verses described a “lofty hall” “lapped by the fair Thames water, rising with the alternating current, then flowing back in accordance with the ocean tide” in which “resides our august, bright-faced Diana, wealthy in riches, wealthy in her people, a pious friend of peace, yet mighty in battle,” as Spanish soldiers sailed “beyond all lawful limit, trying to work ruin on heaven’s choice daughter” and her “sacred shore touching the chill North, inhabited by the Briton, cut off from the world, but not lesser than the Italian wit nor unequal in strength.” It then pointed to those on whose example the realm would build its post-Armada glory, extolling Cabot, Frobisher, Drake, Willoughby, Chancellor, and more for braving “westly climes” to gain experience, converts, and commerce. “If you shift your eye to the cloudy south, where the inhabitants stand upside down from us,” Watson counseled excitingly, “see new peoples, unknown to our forefathers.”108 In 1594, following Gilbert’s Newfoundland example and his own for Virginia, Ralegh sent Jacob Whiddon to “get knowledge of the passages” and survey around Trinidad, where the captain faced Spanish resistance, yet likely seized at least four natives.109 If they were the same that Ralegh 105  “Deposition that Juan Retud made,” 1587, in Lorimer, ed., Ralegh’s Discoverie, 248–250, at 249. 106  Lorimer, “First Reconnaissance,” 21. 107  Ralegh, Discoverie, sig. A 3v, 10. 108  Watson, Amintae Gaudia (1592), ed. Dana Sutton, “The Fifth Epistle.” 109  Ralegh, Discoverie, sig. A 3v.

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brought back in 1595 and referenced in 1596, including “my Indian interpreter,”110 then Whiddon’s captives constitute “the largest group of Americans thus far to visit England at one time” and the first from South America since 1531, as Alden Vaughan suggested.111 Meanwhile, the courtier continued to gather intelligence from Parker112 and risked being pre-empted by Dudley, who, after being deterred by the crown from circumnavigation, traveled to the West Indies in late 1594. “Meaning to stay there some time” hunting “the entrance into the empire of Guiana,” Dudley was acting on intelligence from George Popham who, in the course of privateering, had taken a batch of letters detailing Spanish searches for El Dorado. The pair rendezvoused in Trinidad in March; had he not lost his pinnaces, Dudley lamented, they would have “discouered further the secrets of those places.” Instead, they waited a week for “Ralegh (who, as we surmized, had some purpose for this discouery),” before returning home and forwarding the letters to the council.113 Ralegh only learned of the material after he had returned from his first voyage.114 Yet the frenzied pace of new evidence, cooperation, and competition establish the context in which Ralegh set sail, Whiddon captaining his flagship with notes and tables from Harriot, backed by Cecil, Howard, John Hawkins, and William Sanderson—investor in some of the pivotal imperial ventures of the era—among others, and sanctioned, but not funded, by the crown.115 For this last, he sustained hope,116 imploring, “it seemeth to me that this Empire is reserued for her Maiestie and the English nation.”117 With the promise of so much profit and honor, if she “will vndertake it, I wilbe contented to lose her highnes fauour and good opinion foreuer, and

 Ralegh, Discoverie, 7.  Vaughan, “Ralegh’s Indian Interpreters,” 360. 112  Ralegh, Discoverie, sig. A 3v. 113  “A Voyage of the Honourable Gentleman M. Robert Duddeley,” PN 3:574–578, at 575, 576–577. 114  Ralegh to Cecil, 12/22 November 1595, CP 36/9; Ralegh, Discoverie, 102–112, at [103]; Lorimer, ed., Ralegh’s Discoverie, xliv–xlvii. 115  E.G.R. Taylor, “Hariot’s Instructions for Ralegh’s Voyage to Guiana, 1595,” Journal of the Institute of Navigation 5, no. 4 (October 1952), 345–350; Shirley, “Guiana Finances”; Ruth A. McIntyre, “William Sanderson: Elizabethan Financier of Discovery,” William and Mary Quarterly 13, no. 2 (April 1956), 184–201; Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement, 290–291. 116  Lorimer, ed., Ralegh’s Discoverie, xxxvii–xxxix. 117  Ralegh, Discoverie, 17. 110 111

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my life withall, if the same be not found rather to exceed, then to equall” everything Ralegh promised.118 Much of what we know of his 1595 expedition comes from the Discoverie, dedicated to Howard and Cecil (who also served as editor to improve readability and help balance attractiveness with believability,119 particularly crucial post-Frobisher) yet expressly aimed at garnering royal favor. The text is a seminal piece of Elizabethan colonial promotion, a genre Fuller argues was “surprisingly difficult,” much more than a simple record of what happened, “as much apologetic as descriptive,” a defense of the project “before, during, and after the fact” and a “way of talking about oneself”; after all, this was how “the decades 1576–1624 could be recorded not as years of waste and catastrophe but as years whose heroes were the stuff of greatness.”120 Ralegh sailed with four ships and 300 men in February, landing in Trinidad, where he cultivated native allies, destroyed the settlement at San Josef (per the less restrained manuscript, he “converted the new city into ashes, and wrate this saying of Christ on a great stone in the market place, [Let all that which my [Heavenly] Father has not planted be uprooted]”), and executed captives, except Berrío and the governor’s second-in-­ command.121 Roanoke served as both lesson and excuse: Ralegh “bred… an opinion that I was bound onely for the reliefe of those english, which I had planted in Virginia” to learn “more and more of Guiana.”122 In mid-May, with diminished resources, Ralegh “hastened away towards our purposed discouerie,” using his interpreter to make those he met along the way vnderstand that I was the seruant of a Queene, who was the great Casique of the north, and a virgin, and had more Casiqui vnder her then there were trees in their Iland: that she was an enemy to the Castellani in respect of their tyrannie and oppression… and hauing freed all the coast of the northren world from their seruitude had sent me to free them also… I shewed them her maiesties picture which they so admired and honored, as it had beene easie to haue brought them Idolatrous thereof… so as in that  Ralegh, Discoverie, sig. ¶ 4v.  Lorimer, ed., Ralegh’s Discoverie, xxiv–xl. 120  Fuller, Voyages in Print, 11, 14, 15. This too fits with Greenblatt’s emphasis on the core instability and contradictions of the text, see New World Encounters, xiv–xv. 121  Ralegh, Discoverie, [1]–7; Lambeth MS 250, in Lorimer, ed., Ralegh’s Discoverie, 30. 122  Ralegh, Discoverie, 5. 118 119

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part of the world her maiesty is very famous and admirable, whom they now call… Elizabeth, the great princesse or greatest commaunder.123

Alongside royal flattery, obedient natives, and Tudor greatness in place of Black Legend horrors, the courtier-explorer pressed the genuine promise of El Dorado as corrective to Peru’s abundant treasure, with which “the Spanish king vexeth all the Princes of Europe, and is become, in a fewe yeares form a poore king of Castile, the greatest monarch of this part of the world”; with Guiana, Philip would grow “vnresistable,”124 a fate that warranted encounter with the region’s stranger sort, from “Amazones… [who] do accompanie with men but once in a yeere” and keep only their daughters to “Canibals” and “Ewaipanoma… [with] eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts, &… a long train of hair [that] groweth backward between their shoulders.”125 Indeed, anti-­ Spanish and more broadly national sentiment are running themes, manifesting the era. Berrío is a fine example, rendered as Ralegh’s foil, embodying the war in miniature. Spared for his expertise much as preceding ventures had retained Portuguese aid, Berrío emerges “as a wily opponent, ready enough to tell the story of his enterprise, but keeping geographical details to himself and exaggerating the dangers awaiting the English in the hopes of discouraging them”126—his contributions weighed against “good counsell” and indigenous informants, as the author translated a key political theory of the day into the colonial sphere.127 Berrío was to be used carefully, as Ralegh lay covetous claim over “mine owne discouerie” and begged readers to keep it secret.128 Whoever controlled “Indian Golde” controlled “all the nations of Europe.”129 Ralegh’s word choice was equally salient, entangled pursuits for crown, nation, and empire forefront in his mind. Positioning himself as serving at “the Queenes pleasure” and for “my Country,” local kings became her “vassals,” who “seeme to desire nothing more than her Maiesties protection, and the returne of the English nation.”130 “Nation” too is u ­ biquitous,  Ralegh, Discoverie, 7.  Ralegh, Discoverie, 12, 13. 125  Ralegh, Discoverie, 23, 24, 33, 70. 126  Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement, 291–292. 127  Ralegh, Discoverie, 75, 79. 128  Ralegh, Discoverie, 21. 129  Ralegh, Discoverie, sigs. ¶ 3v–¶ 4r. 130  Ralegh, Discoverie, 62, sigs. ¶ 3v, A 4r. 123 124

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used to designate European and native polities, demonstrating the term’s growing currency and a heightened appreciation of difference, even among “others.”131 So is “empire,” used to signal the greatest prizes.132 Already a loaded word in Tudor literature, it imbued Guiana with superiority for its riches (rendering it worthy of conquest), evoked other empires (making that conquest more glorious), and, like “nation,” shows how Ralegh constructed the world via vocabulary popular at home. Also recurrent is “honor,” another sixteenth-century watchword, employed to emphasize how an exploit could simultaneously enhance adventurer, patron, and kingdom.133 Ralegh’s Guiana was thus refracted through the prism of national survival and its twin, imperial expansion, all under Tudor monarchical auspices; it was the fulfillment of something begun when “the west Indies were first offered her Maiesties Grandfather by Columbus a straunger,” now pursued by her dutiful subject.134 Much as he relied on contemporary language, Ralegh drew on existing tropes and rhetoric. Comparing his project to a domestic standard, he depicted river entrances at least “as bigge as the Thames at Wolwich,” islands “twise as big as the Isle of Wight,” “fieldes… as full of deare as any forrest or parke in England,” a “beast… as bigge as an English beefe,” and sea passages to the distance “betweene Douer and Callys”—a particularly striking simile relating one imperial journey to another.135 Moreover, Ralegh’s Guiana complemented the home situation: its Edenic land suited English garrisoning and plantation and would cure poverty and unemployment in exchange for civil English ways, which its many warmongering, adulterous, naked, cannibalistic, or otherwise monstrous inhabitants seemed in need of, and the obedience that they clamored for.136 The author even turned his homeland’s female kingship into advantage, noting “the Canuri, which are gouerned by a woman… who came farre off to see our nation, and asked mee diuers questions of her Maiesty.”137 Personifying and gendering the place like earlier Tudor theorists, he concluded,

 Ralegh, Discoverie, sigs. A 4r, ¶ 3v, 3, 7, 22, 43, 58–59, 69.  Ralegh, Discoverie, sig. A 3v, 12, 73, 101. 133  Ralegh, Discoverie, sigs. A 2r, ¶v. 134  Ralegh, Discoverie, 99. 135  Ralegh, Discoverie, 38, [82], 94, 38. 136  Ralegh, Discoverie, 2–3, 42, 67, 85, 92 (land), 99 (cures), 43, 51, 52, 70, 78, 79 (incivility), 99 (obedience). 137  Ralegh, Discoverie, 91. 131 132

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“Guiana is a Countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead.”138 Under a virgin queen, the comment was risky yet potent.139 Despite his bombast in prose, however, Ralegh was cautious, turning back and leaving only two Englishmen behind. Determined to return the following year, he docked at Plymouth in September.140 A pivotal mid-decade juncture followed, when Ralegh lobbied in 1595–1596 against criticism and doubt.141 Amid revising his narrative, rumors that Philip had sent colonizing forces to El Dorado, and news of John Hawkins’s and Drake’s demises,142 he worked on an accompanying “Charte”143 and an unknown scholar (possibly Harriot, more likely Lawrence Keymis, who had accompanied Ralegh) penned “Of the voyage for Guiana.” Pitched as lawful, honorable, and necessary, seizing Guiana for “the Crowne imperiall of the Realme of England,” the piece declared, would spread “the liberall arts of Civility” and protestantism, obstruct “the intollerable tirrany of the Spaniards” and “Pope, the great Inchantor or cousner, & troubler of the world,” and see “the Queens. dominions… exceedingly enlarge[d], & this Realme inestimably enriched.”144 Although they had already invited Elizabeth to assume “the Seigniorie of Guiana,” natives would be further allured by tales of her greatness—“releeving sundry distressed nations” in the Indies and Ireland—as well as maps manifesting her “great magnifficence and puissance, her countreys populous, rich, warlike & well provided of shippes as any state in the northern world.”145 Imperial and domestic again intertwined in cogent argument, Guiana now next to receive English ways—if Ralegh got support. The Discoverie (1596) was an immediate commercial sensation, but, as Lorimer posited, “only a limited success as a piece of colonial

 Ralegh, Discoverie, 96.  Montrose, “Work of Gender,” 6. 140  Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement, 292–294. 141  Ralegh, Discoverie, sigs. A 3r, ¶ 2r–¶ 3r. 142  John Gilbert to Ralegh, 17 January 1596, TNA SP 12/256/19, fols. 26r–v; Stallenge to Cecil, 25 April 1596, TNA SP 12/257/48, fols. 76r–v, at 76r. 143  Ralegh, Discoverie, 21; Ralegh to Cecil, 12/22 November 1595, CP 36/9. The map may be BL Add. MS 17940A, amplified in de Bry, Americae, Pars VIII (Frankfurt, 1599), see Lorimer, ed., Ralegh’s Discoverie, 283. If so, Harriot worked on another, Harriot to Cecil, 11/21 July 1596, CP 42/36. 144  “Of the Voyage for Guiana,” (ca. 1595–1596), in Lorimer, ed., Ralegh’s Discoverie, 253–263, at 253, 261, 253, 259, 253. 145  “Of the Voyage,” 258, 259. 138 139

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propaganda.”146 Among the few enthusiasts was Hayes, who told Cecil that, “being now an olde professed Sea man and zealous towards the voyage of Guyana… I am veary willyng to follow Sr Walter Raulegh wth the best meaens I can procure.”147 It was his first pitch since the early 1590s, when he had tried to woo Burghley to a colonial scheme beyond Newfoundland, between 40 and 44° N (New England), to be sustained by English fishermen, agriculture, and trade and to compete with the French.148 Also encouraged and encouraging was poet-playwright and Harriot friend George Chapman, who celebrated the chance to win “riches with honour, conquest without blood, / Enough to seat the monarchy of earth. / Like to Jove’s eagle, on Eliza’s hand,” to the rest of the world’s envy. Pulling together strands of theory applied to Scotland, Ireland, and the Americas since the Wooings, De Guiana spoke of prophecy and divine election, profit and posterity, a “most admired sovereign” and impending maritime golden age. The author personified the land of conqueror and conquered, equating the former with its queen, subordinating the latter, and adopting British terms. Guiana was imagined with “mines of gold” as feet, “Kissing her hand, bowing her mighty breast, / And every sign of submission making, / To be her sister, and the daughter both / Of our most sacred maid.”149 “So let thy sovereign Empire be increased, / And with Iberian Neptune part the stake,” he implored, “a world of savages fall tame before them.”150 From there “new Britannia humbly kneels to heaven, / The world to her, and both at her blest feet, / In whom the circles of all Empires meet.”151 Hayes’s and Chapman’s overtures reveal continuity and overlap; Ralegh may have broken new ground, but his project was a part of a century-long imperial puzzle, as contemporaries perceived. Around the same time, an Italian cipher added to the clamor, mingling old with new in grandiose terms. “The king of Spain has neither ships nor means nor sufficient preparations to undertake any enterprise against England,” it advised, “but spreads reports of such… to keep the Queen in suspicion and divert her.” So long as she diffused Ireland and succored Calais, Elizabeth’s forces  Lorimer, ed., Ralegh’s Discoverie, lxxxiv; Lorimer, ed., English and Irish, 16.  Hayes to Cecil, 15 May 1596, CP 40/83. 148  Quinn, “Liverpool Colonial Pioneer,” 37–39. 149  Chapman, De Guiana, carmen Epicum (1596), in The Works of George Chapman: Poems and Minor Translations (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), 50. 150  Chapman, De Guiana, 51, 52. 151  Chapman, De Guiana, 52. 146 147

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could be deployed to the Caribbean and against Philip’s fleet, “the maiming of which would be the cutting off of Samson’s hair.”152 Chapman’s verses appeared as a preface to Keymis’s A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana (1596), a report on the two-ship enterprise mounted by Ralegh in January 1596 to protect his “discover[y]” and “asure the people that they dispaire not, nor yeild to any composition with other nations.”153 The Relation, in turn, intended to “remooue all fig-­ leaues from our vnbeleefe,” recommend Ralegh for his toil for “our weale publique,” and prove the project viable and vital to “the ancient fame, and reputation of our English nation.”154 Indeed, the dedication made a stunning appeal to early Tudor history, myth, and religion: If we should suppose our selues now to liue in the dayes of King Henrie the seuenth of famous memorie, and the strange report of a West Indies, or new world abounding with great treasure should entice vs to beleeue it: perhaps it might be imputed for some blame to the grauitie of wise men, lightly to be carried with the perswasion and hope of a new found Vtopia, by such a one as Columbus was being an alien and manie ways subiect to suspition. But since the penance of that incredulity lyeth euen now heauie on our shoulders… and that we haue the personall triall of so honorable and sufficient a Reporter, our owne Countriman: let it bee farre from vs to coudemne our selues in that, which so worthilie we reprooue in our predecessors; and to let our idle knowledge content it selfe with naked contemplation like a barren womb in a Moansterie.155

The queen’s grandfather had missed out; his successors had to learn the lesson and act. Keymis arrived in March and although he did not return rich, he earned Harriot’s commendation for doing “the speciall thing which he was inioined to do, as the dyscovery of the coast betwixt the river of Amasones and orinoco”—information Harriot urged Cecil to embargo.156 The Relation recounted the lot and situated Keymis as Ralegh’s successor, building on his foundation as he claimed possession by naming (Cape Orange as “Cape  J. Guicciardini to Essex, 24 April/4 May 1596, CP 40/57(i).  Ralegh to Cecil, 13/23 November 1595, CP 36/9. Harriot also complimented the voyage and the geographical knowledge it accured, Harriot to Cecil, 11/21 July 1596, CP42/36. 154  Keymis, A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana (1596), sigs. [A3v], A2v, [A4r]. 155  Keymis, Relation, [A4v]–A. 156  Harriot to Cecil, 11/21 July 1596, CP 42/36. 152 153

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Cecyll”; the Orincoco as “Raleana”), relied on “my Indian Interpreter,” and gathered more, well-calibrated detail concerning stores of brazilwood, spices, and victuals and “whole shyeres of fruitfull rich groundes lying now waste for want of people, [which] doe prostitute themselues vnto vs like a faire and beautifull woman.”157 Riddled throughout were signs and symptoms of European war and incumbent identity politics. Keymis described how indigenous tribes, “earnestlie expect[ing] our returne,” greeted his men as saviors sent from “our Princesse,” famed for her ability “to vanguish the Spaniards, and singular goodnesse in vndertaking to succour and defend the afflicted Indians” and agreed to help root out the Spanish in favor of “her Maiesties gracious gouernment and princelie vertues.”158 The equation worked both ways, the author explained: here was a place with solid Tudor claim, where Spain had failed, and that could improve the Elizabethan polity.159 Like Peckham and others before him, Keymis thus deployed what Armitage identified as “the techniques of the ars rhetorica to achieve the great end of Roman moral philosophy—the good of the commonwealth through the promotion of action which was at once honestum and utile,”160 improving the nation by colonization abroad. Yet all was not well: soon after Keymis docked in June 1596, word spread “that the Spaniardes ar allredi possessid in gueano… and allso topeaware the keng that was heer Magisti’s subget is ded.”161 Around the same time, Cecil reached out to Hakluyt for his “opinion touching the state of the Country of Guiana, and whether it were fit to be planted by the English”162 and to Harriot for fear that Ralegh was looking for El Dorado in the wrong place. The scholars obliged with translations of José de Acosta’s 1590 Natural and Moral History of the Indies that were ambivalent about location but affirmed the region’s riches (Hakluyt)163 and offered confusing reassurance that Ralegh was right (Harriot).164 Sustained by Keymis, Ralegh mounted a new mission to convince detractors and to win back wavering supporters.  Keymis, Relation, B 2r, Er, B 2r, F 3 r, F 2v.  Keymis, Relation, B 2v, B 3r, D 3r. 159  Keymis, Relation, [E 4r], E 3r. 160  Armitage, “Literature and Empire,” 106. 161  Lady Ralegh to Cecil, [July 1596], CP 43/29. 162  Hakluyt, “Epistle Dedicatorie,” PN, 2:sig. * 4r. 163  Hakluyt, “Notes Concerning Sir Walter Raleighes Discovery,” ca. 1596, TNA SP 12/235/43, fols. 87r–88v. 164  Harriot to Cecil, 11/21 July 1596, CP 42/36. 157 158

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According to “gentleman of the companie” Thomas Masham’s report, Leonard Berry sailed with one pinnace in late 1596 and returned in mid-1597, a small reconnaissance aimed at learning Guiana’s access points and keeping it in Tudor sights. After refreshing themselves with fish and extolling the Cape Verde salt trade as “very beneficiall to England” (a potent reminder of the home situation, Newfoundland cod, and the Atlantic-wide context of these adventures), the crew made its crossing. It reached “Cape Cecill,” fortifying the claim and perhaps buoying its namesake, verified the plenty of victuals, textiles, naval stores, spices, and gold-­ handled bows (if not the mines from which they were sourced), and trade with natives who expressed their “desire… to haue the English come and kill the Spaniards, and to dwell” among them.165 Masham echoed Ralegh, praising a doe “like vnto deere in England,” peoples who are polygamous and naked yet “very louing and kinde to Englishmen,” and, pointedly, great “commodities, which in good time may be found out to the benefit of our countrey, and profit of the aduenturers, who as yet hauing ventured much, haue gained litle.”166 Prior to departure, however, Berry made another, more arresting, discovery: a “Barke called the Iohn of London” captained by John Ley on the Courantyne River.167 According to a seventeenth-century pedigree, Ley “sailed twice with Martyn ffurboiser to the North partes of America, Then served in the Lowe Countries,” joined Frobisher in the Azores in 1592, “went into Ireland with Sir William Russell, went divers times to the sea uppon Reprisals,” and “sailed to the west Indies Thrice”168—a storied career mapping late Elizabethan exploits. His 1597 Guiana voyage was inspired by the Discoverie and Relation, illustrating their circulation outside court and positive reception among private adventurers.169 Ley’s run-in with Berry led to a brief consortship, but whereas Ralegh did not travel back to Guiana until 1617 when his reputation again needed 165  Masham, “The Third Voyage Set Forth by Sir Walter Ralegh,” PN, 3:692–698, at 693, 694. 166  Masham, “Third voyage,” 3:695, 697. 167  Masham, “Third voyage,” 3:695–696. 168   “Ley his Pedigree,” in Lorimer, ed., Ralegh’s Discoverie, Appendix VI, no. 2, 308–331, at 311. 169  The Dutch were also on Ralegh’s heels, willing to arrange a joint venture against the Spanish in 1597 and using his report to explore in 1598. Adrian Cabeliau to Ralegh, 20 March 1597, TNA SP 94/5, fols. 177r–v; Lorimer, ed., Ralegh’s Discoverie, lvi, xc, xciv, 307–308.

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r­ escuing, Ley returned in 1598 and 1601, surveying the region, entering the Lower Amazon, and leaving behind a factor—alive when Leigh scouted the Wiapoco in 1602, but dead by the time he arrived with the first English colony two years later.170 Ley mimicked, then advanced his predecessors’ deeds: he traveled by way of Cape Verde; described plenty of fish, wood, and rumors of gold; compared local flora to England’s; travelled with the aid of “my Indian”; distinguished native “nations” from one another and “our Countrie”; and at once underscored the wildness of the place—from star-worshippers to those who “colour their faces and bodies,” hunt like otters, drink blood, eschew men, have two heads and four legs, or lack heads entirely—and implied its pliability to English ways.171 Though they may have shared intelligence, there is no record of Ralegh and Ley’s relationship; by the time the latter became involved in Guiana, the former and his circle were much distracted.172 In 1596, the council united over the capture of Cadiz, an ephemeral victory swiftly turned into propaganda even by Elizabeth, who launched the expedition with prayer for “the advancement of Thy glory, the triumph of their fame, and surety to the realm.”173 For his contribution, Ralegh was allowed to return to court the following year and sent on the Azores (“Islands”) voyage that summer, for which he appears to have mounted a ship called Guiana.174 Despite the barbed naval branding, the effort was a disaster, failing to yield, as Elizabeth had hoped, “least loss to such a nation as despise their lives for their country’s good” and encourage “the faithful.”175 Soon after, first-in-command Essex’s star began to wane. Groping for a path forward, 170  Lorimer, ed., Ralegh’s Discoverie, xc–xciv; Lorimer, “The Reluctant Go-Between: John Ley’s Survey of Aboriginal Settlement on the Guayana Coastline,” in The European Outthrust and Encounter: The First Phase, c.1400–c.1700 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994), 191–223; Lorimer, ed., English and Irish, 19–26. Rumors did emerge that Ralegh and/or John Gilbert would return to colonize, see James Hyll to Lord Brockhurst, 25 September 1598, CP 64/55; John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton, 20 October 1598, TNA SP 12/268/87, fols. 141r–142v; Richard Bayley to William Stanley, 19 November 1598, TNA SP 12/268/111, fols. 181r–182v. 171  “Pedigree,” 317–318, 320, 316, 331, 322, 323, 317. 172  Lorimer, ed., Ralegh’s Discoverie, xciii–xciv. 173  “On the Sailing of the Cadiz Expedition, May 1596,” Collected Works, 425–426, at 426; Hammer, “Myth-Making: Politics, Propaganda and the Capture of Cadiz,” Historical Journal 40, no. 3 (September 1997), 621–642. 174  Essex, Ralegh, Carew, Francis Vere, and Ferdinando Gorges to PC, [29?] July 1597, TNA SP 12/264/60, fols. 86r–87v; Mountjoy to Cecil, 25 October 1597, CP 56/47. 175  “On the Sailing of the Azores Expedition, July 1597,” Collected Works, 426–427, at 427.

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the earl tellingly followed Ralegh’s—toward empire—yet closer to home, in a place with a longer, more fraught history.176 * * * Tellingly, in the early throes of his fall, Ralegh’s letters to Cecil bewailed not the lack of support for Virginia or Guiana, but the state of his Irish plantation and of that country more generally. He complained that under Fitzwilliam, Munster was impoverished, those “in a strang country newly sett downe to builde and plant” made to suffer numerous indignities. “I care not ether for life or lands,” he protested, “but it will be no small weakninge to the Queen… and no small cumfort to the ill-affected Irishe, to have the Inglish inhabitants driven out of the country.”177 By 1593, things were even more dire: recalling “the troien southsayer [who] cast his Spear agaynst the wodden horse, but not beleved,” he wrote, We are so busyed & dandled in thes french warrs, wch ar endless, as we forgett the defens next the hart, her maiesty hath good cause to remember that a million hath byn spent in Irland not many yeares since, a better kingdome might haue byn purchased att a less prize… shee shall fynde it no small dishonor to be vexed with so beggerly a nation… The kinge of Spayne seeketh not Irlande for Irlande but having raysed up troops of beggers in our backs shalbe able to inforce vs to cast our eyes over our shoulders while thos before vs strike vs on the braynes.178

Ireland was becoming a critical—arguably the critical—venue in last decade calculus; as it did, the island resumed its privileged place in Tudor discourse and activity, closely interwoven with the era’s other projects and its predecessors, as Ralegh’s arguments and career attest.179 Others too witnessed a mounting tension since 1589. Gerard Comerford reported a “wicked enterprise” afoot to “annoy the Queenes mates good  Hammer, “Devereux, Robert, Second Earl of Essex (1565–1601),” ODNB (2008).  Ralegh to Cecil, [July 1592], Life of Ralegh, 2:48–50, at 49, 50. On the plantation’s progress, see his “Answer,” 12 May 1589, TNA SP 63/144/27, fols. 60r–61v, and “Trade in Pipe Staves from Ireland,” [1593?] CP 24/68; Lords of Council to Burghley, 6 January 1592/3, CP 168/85; Ralegh to Burghley, 15 June 1593, CP 22/100; Ralegh to Cecil, 27 August 1593, CP 23/41; Ralegh’s Lands in Munster, 13 June 1596, APC 25:453–454. 178  Ralegh to Cecil, 10 May [1593], CP 22/93. 179  In 1601, Ralegh warned Elizabeth of Spanish threats to Scotland, demonstrating British awareness, CP 83/35. 176 177

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subiectes,” contending that “these people will never bee obedient subiectes vntill thei be cut off. For dailie theie are making of galliglasse axes and other weapons, and yet haue theie greate store of shot and powder and municon of the Spanyardes.”180 Desmond descendant Florence MacCarthy was being held in the Tower on suspicion that he would unite “all the Ireishery of Munster,” becoming stronger than the earl and breeding trouble with Spanish aid, as he rehearsed his great grandfather’s surrender to Henry VII.181 Brian O’Rourke, who had rebelled in 1580 Connaught, was executed in 1591 for trying to “depose her maty from her regall power” (including by putting her name on an image which was then tied to a horse’s tail and drawn through the mire before it was mangled by his gallowglass) and colluding with the pope, Spanish, and Scots.182 In 1592, former deputy Perrot was found guilty of high treason, despite declaring his protestanism since Edward and faith in Elizabeth as “legittimage Queene of these her imperiall kingdomes of England, Fraunce, and Ireland.”183 Then current deputy Russell recommended putting the idle in Ireland to work to reduce treachery184 and lamented how rebellion had rooted out English planters,185 while the Spanish were regularly reputed to be planning their invasion of the island.186 Across the mid-1590s, word swirled of emboldened Catholics, illicit efforts to translate the bible into Irish, and Philip’s plots, including his successful scheme to take Calais,187 “knowinge th’importaunce of that place.”188 The last came with seminal remembrances of how the city was

 Comerford to Lord Deputy, 29 March 1589, CP 166/117.  MacCarthy to Burghley, 12 December 1589, CP 167/10. 182  Treason of Brian O’Rourke, [1591], CP 168/61. 183  Testament of Perrot, 3 May 1592, CP 21/27. 184  Russell to Burghley, 6 February 1595/6, CP 171/80. 185  Russell to Elizabeth, 16 May 1596, CP 40/90. 186  Thomas Ferrers to Burghley, 23 March 1595/6, CP 31/40; Thomas Leighton to Cecil, 9 April 1596, CP 39/103. 187  [?] to [?], 11/21 October 1590, TNA SP 15/31, fols. 226r–v; Robert Bowes to Burghley, 28 November 1590, CSPScot 1589–1593, 10:501; Bowes to Burghley, 17 February 1595/6, CP 30/73; John Gylles to Thomas Mydleton, 30 November/10 December 1595, CP 36/69; Robert Sidney to Essex, 12 December 1595, CP 20/93; Thomas Bodley to Burghley, 21 March 1595/6, CP 31/35; Francis Vere to Essex, 9 April 1596, CP 39/109; Carew to Cecil, 16 April 1596, CP 40/10; Edward Norris to Essex, 7 December 1596, CP 46/108. 188  George Gilpin to Essex, 31 March 1596, CP 39/73. 180 181

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lost under Mary,189 and not restored under Elizabeth, due to “the colde and hollow dealing… of the kinge of Spaine”190; Bishop of Durham Tobias Matthew bewailed how Calais’s fall “doe marvelously embolden the heartes & sharpen the humors of the bad affected,”191 even as Captain Matthew Bredgate hoped it might yet be regained for the queen.192 Others relayed Spain’s plans to strike at the Channel Islands or Britain next, albeit amid comforting reminders that England and Scotland shared a religion, island, and alliance—even if Ireland was in close proximity, currently occupied by loyal men yet only so long as they had honest, skillful captains to command them, and James showed favor toward Tyrone.193 Worrying news spread that the Welsh borders were “in Relligion generallie ill affected, as may appear by their Use of Popish Pilgrimage, their Harbour of massing Priests, their reteining of superstitius Ceremonies, and the Encrease of willfull Recusants; and therefore [prompted] reason for feare.”194 Significantly, then, at this important moment for Ireland, many recollected other sites of imperial activity as stimulus and warning. In December 1596, Essex learned that with designs on Ulster, Anglesey, and the Scottish Highlands, the Spaniards “haue agred wt the earle of tirone that yf the interpryce faule out luceley he shalbe K of england.”195 That very month, intelligence tied the escalating conflict to the New World, as the Cecils received news that a Tyrone supporter was diverting fish from  Robert Sidney to Essex, 13 October 1595, CP 20/48.  Henry Killigrew to “My Singular Good Lord,” 8 March 1594/5, CP 25/70. 191  Matthew to Burghley, 3 May 1596, CP 40/53. Others also saw Spain’s success as an opportunity to retake Calais, certain that many English subjects and others, including the King of France, would support the venture, see Daniell to Cecil, 11 March 1596/7, CP 39/3; Edward Wilton to Essex, 8/18 March 1596/7, CP 39/29; Vere to Essex, 26 March 1597; George Gilpin to Essex, 22 April 1597; Vere to Essex, 5 June 1597. 192  Bredgate to Cecil, 20 March 1595/6, CP 31/31. 193  Notes [by Burghley], June 1595, TNA SP 12/252/110, fols. 202r–203v; “P. FitzJames [Segrave] to Robert Sidney, 31 October/9 November 1593, CP 20/75; George Herbert, Prisoner in the Tower, 1595, CP 37/2; [?] to [?] 15 December 1595, CP 172/110; Robert Elliott to Cecil and PC, 13 January 1599/1600, CP 67/95, 97; “Information which it is important for the Queen to know,” February 1594, TNA SP 12/247/109, fols. 182r–183v; “Borthwick’s Discourse,” 1590, CP 167-126; James to Elizabeth, 19 September 1593, CP 133/105; [Cecil] to Nicholson, [January 1602], CP 180/10, and 12 January 1601/2, CP 84/62 2; Examination of Roche, 30 March 1599, CP 69/35; Dautrey to Cecil, 21 July 1594, CP 27/47. 194  Earl of Pembroke to Elizabeth, 12 February 1592/3, CP 203/136. 195  “News Out of Italy,” CP 174/62, enclosure in Mathias Holmes to Essex, 20 December 1596, CP 174/57. 189 190

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Newfoundland into Spain196 and subsequent correspondence spoke to war-torn Irish ready to buy Newfoundland fish at Plymouth197—a potent reminder that the conflict’s frame was an Atlantic one.198 It was an altogether appropriate simile, then, when George Tuchet, Lord Audley, remarked that late Elizabethan Ireland “resemble[d] rather a boystrus sea than a ferme or quyette lande, ever to make her matie seasicke wt there stormye and tempestious raginges.”199 The Nine Years War or Tyrone’s Rebellion shook Tudor rule in Ireland. The conflict began in 1594200; the following June, second Earl of Tyrone Hugh O’Neill was proclaimed a traitor; over the next months, he developed Desmond precedent to incite his countrymen, fellow Gaels and Anglo-Irish alike, against “a straunge and forraine prince” in defense of a “poore, oppressed, and afflicted… native soyle” and “Christ’s Catholic religion”; by April 1600, he fought expressly against “regina Angliae… pro Romana et libertate patriae”—a sophisticated, counter-imperial, nationalistic ideology of “faith and fatherland” and “besmirching of ‘[Elizabeth’s] honour.’”201 The rebels inverted prevailing discourse: for Tyrone, it was Catholicism that needed “plantinge,” protestant “heresie” that needed extirpating, English governance that “norished… obscuritie and ignorance, mayntained… barbarity and incivility,” the queen who must be deprived of “hir obedience,” “kingdomes, dominions and possessions” for “the  Robert Eastfield to Burghley or Cecil, 20 December 1596, CP 47/36.  Stallenge to Cecil, 13 September 1597, CP 55/33. 198  See also Stallenge to Cecil, 22 March 1598/9, CP 60/57; Cecil to Lord Admiral, 8 October 1600, CP 250/28. 199  Audley to Cecil, 15 October [1600], CP 250/19. 200  Henry Bagenal to Burghley, 26 March 1593/4, TNA SP 63/173/97, fols. 281r–282v; John Byrd to Cecil, 17 July 1594, CP 27/42; “Articles exhibited by Sr Henry Bagnall,” 17 August 1594, TCD MS 578, fols. 32r–v. 201  Tyrone to James Fitzpiers, 11 March 1597/8, TNA SP 63/202/3/168(ii), fols. 359r–v, at 359r; “The Translation of a Letter in Irish,” 6 July 1596, Cal Carew 3:244; J. Hagan, “Some Papers Relating to the Nine Years’ War,” Archivium Hibernicum 2 (1913), 274–320, no. 15; Morgan, “Hugh O’Neill and the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland,” The Historical Journal 36, no. 1 (March 1993), 21–37, at 23–24. See also Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1993); Morgan, “Faith and Fatherland or Queen and Country: An Unpublished Exchange between O’Neill and the State at the Height of the Nine Years War,” Dúiche Néill: Journal of the O’Neill Country Historical Society 9 (1994), 9–65; Morgan, “‘Never Any Realm Worse Governed’: Queen Elizabeth and Ireland,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14 (2004), 295–308. 196 197

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commodity and profett of our country” to be reaped,202 and a “Republike” ruled by free Irishmen endowed with the rights of Englishmen that should be forged.203 Spread via private word, public preaching, and proclamations, as Hiram Morgan has traced, the rebels’ message also—strikingly— appealed to another crucial site of imperial rhetoric and retort: Dermot McCreagh, bishop of Cork and Cloyne, “contrasted Ireland with Scotland which had a king of its own even though it was part of the same island as England”; now it was the latter’s turn to “throw off the yoke of slavery” and win liberty of conscience and kingdom.204 If Ireland’s muse was, in part, Scotland, Spain was its France, the necessary continental ally. In 1595, Tyrone and Hugh Roe O’Donnell wrote to Philip, “our only hope of re-establishing the Catholic religion rests on your assistance. Now or never our Church must be succoured,”205 adding concurrently that “by acceding to our request, [Philip] will re-establish our religion and acquire a kingdom.”206 At the risk of alienating Anglo-Irish who prized their Englishness, the confederates too drew on the pseudo-historical tradition, exploited in 1528 and 1554, that tied the Gaels to the Spanish by blood, positing the Irish race as descendant from Iberians.207 In a letter ostensibly found in the street by two bricklayers, the “pretended” Earl of Desmond “humblie salute[d Philip’s] ymperiall matie, giving yor highnes to vnderstande of the greate misery & violent order wherewth we are of longe tyme oppressed by the English nation. Their gouernment,” he continued, which slayed his kin, usurped his title, and planted his land with Englishmen, is worse than Pharaoh or Nero, not content only with our “perpetuall distruction and to blott out the whole remnant of our posteritie and our Catholike religion.”208 Elsewhere, he prostrated himself before “the most mighty monarke of the world, the great king of Spayne.”209 Tyrone’s son Henry presented their case to the Spanish Council, criticizing Irish 202  “Copie of a trayterous Writing,” 15 November 1599, TCD MS 578, fols. 31r–v, at 31r, 31v. 203  “Articles Intended to be Stood upon by Tyrone,” [November] 1599, TNA SP 63/206/55, fols. 152r–153v, at 153r. 204  Morgan, “O’Neill,” 26. 205  Tyrone and O’Donnell to Philip, 27 September 1595, Cal Carew 3:167. 206  Tyrone, O’Donnell, and Montfort to Don John de L’Aguila, 27 September 1595, Cal Carew 3:169. 207  Morgan, “O’Neill,” 34. 208  J.D. [Earl of Desmond] to [Philip], 2 August 1599, CP 72/6. See also James fitz Thomas [Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond] to Philip, 14 March 1599/1600, CP 68/98. 209  Fitz Thomas [Fitzgerald] to Philip, 14 March 1599/1600, CP 68/96.

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s­ eminary students as unfit (unlearned in the Irish language, of the English race, obedient to the Queen rather than the Catholic Church, and willing to arm against Philip) and Irish merchants as selfish schismatics who cleave to the English over the Spanish to preserve their privileges.210 The appeals worked. Perhaps appreciating Ireland as an opportunity to annoy or even poach Elizabeth’s Atlantic holdings as Ralegh and company did his, Philip encouraged Tyrone and promised assistance,211 yet the hoped-for invasion did not land until September 1601 at Kinsale—three years after Philip’s death and the accession of his son, Philip III. Though exasperated at Irish who declared themselves Spaniards and at Scots from the north and west who supported the rebels, Cecil announced after the landing that “no man of honor or religion will now hence forth accompt this invasion other then an action against god, against a lawful and an annoincted prince.”212 Meanwhile, Tyrone turned to Peter Lombard to spearhead overtures to Rome.213 The Waterford-born, Louvain-educated Anglo-Irish philosopher, priest, and theologian turned the very past deployed by Tudor theorists on its head. Whereas English narrators had used Laudabiliter among a litany of other proofs to show their duty and right to civilize Ireland, Lombard used it as a linchpin in his De regno Hiberniae to remind Clement VIII that the island was an ancient papal fief, converted by St. Patrick into one of Europe’s first, flowering Christian countries, steeped in missionary activity and sainthood, steadfast in Catholicism, and only conditionally granted to Henry II for reform; yet English subjugation had actually accelerated its fall, reducing the Irish to barbarism, alienating them from Rome, trying to turn then protestant, and chaining them as the Egyptians and Babylonians had the Israelites. Tyrone was their pious savior and warring liberator, taking up the mantle of James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald. Though not the only Irish entreaty to the Pope or native celebration of the island, it was, in Morgan’s words, “a piece of full-blown nationalism which celebrated the faith of the Irish as well as their fatherland,”214 and won the confederates a plenary indulgence (working “for ye state of ye church chatholique, or for thincrease of faith or for the conversion of ye kingdomes of England, Ireland or Scotlande, &  “The accusations,” [ca. 1600?], CP 58/29.  Philip to Tyrone, 22 January 1596, Cal Carew 3:203. 212  [Cecil] to George Nicholson, [3 October 1601], CP 88/87 2. 213  See also Tyrone and Desmond to Lord Barry, 13 February 1600, Cal Carew 3:345; to Lord Roche, 21 February 1600, 21 February 1600, Cal Carew 3:348. 214  Morgan, “O’Neill,” 31. 210 211

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of all heritiques”),215 Tyrone legitimacy as “captain general of the Catholic army in Ireland,”216 and Lombard the archbishopric of Armagh. Yet the anti-Spanish Clement refused to excommunicate those loyal to Elizabeth, donate ecclesiastical authority, or send material aid.217 The impact of “faith and fatherland” as a unifying rebel theory, then, may have been blunted during the war, a consequence of Ireland’s ethnic divisions, Tyrone’s limited popularity, the nature of Tudor Irish governance, and more,218 but it was unequivocally significant—the backbone of a very real threat to Elizabethan rule and one that elicited a response. The crown’s retort revolved around “honour” (a concept—framed by Morgan as “the standing of her monarchy in the world”—also called upon by Tyrone’s side, evincing its role “in an emerging ‘British’ political nation” as Kane has shown) and a defense of its pro-imperial ideology.219 The reply was, then, not wholly novel, yet reinforced established discourse and the centrality of Ireland—an external realm—to the queen’s reputation at home and abroad. The year the war began, George Carew described Tyrone as harboring “a thirstie desire to be called Oneale, a name more in price to him then to be entituled Caesar,” “plott[ing] with Spayne to pull the Crowne from the Quenes heade,” and striving “not much vnlyke the Race of Ottoman… [to] tyrannyze wth absolute power”; “Yf the Queenes honor maye be saved… wthout blemysh lyke vnto an vnspotted virgin her selfe,” all means must be used to draw him back to obedience or prosecute him to “vtter exterpacion… that the lande maye be devyded amongest Englysh collones” and thus assured forever.220 The Irish Council impugned the “barbarous ungratfull rebell” and elevated Elizabeth’s pursuit of “the course wch in the rules of honor her highness thinketh meete.”221 Also  Indulgences, [1596?], CP 48/30. See also “Bull of Indulgence,” 18 April 1600, Cal Carew 3:Appendix 5. 216  Morgan, “O’Neill,” 32. 217  Lombard, De regno Hiberniae, sanctorum insula, commentarius, ed. Patrick F. Moran (Dublin, 1868); Matthew J. Byrne, The Irish War of Defence 1598–1600: Extracts from the ‘De Hibernia Insula Commentarius’ of Peter Lombard, Archbishop of Armagh (Cork: Cork University Press, 1930). See also Morgan, “O’Neill,” 29–32. 218  Morgan, “O’Neill,” 37. 219  Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion, 165–167, 177, 193–194, 206, at 177; Kane, The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541–1641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 92–121, at 94. 220  Carew, “Treatise on Ireland,” April 1594, TNA SP 63/174/13(i), fols. 28r–33v, at 30r, 28r, 29v, 30r. 221  Council of Ireland to PC, 3 August 1599, CP 72/13. 215

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active in the conflict, Lane reported the “dayly expectacione” that Tyrone may “run wilde” with the “nymblenes of his Rascalles,”222 but too the “honnorable and moste happie successe” of the English forces,223 even as news filtered to London of miserable conditions on the ground.224 A 1597 address to the queen further emphasized how, considering the benefits of Elizabethan rule, “wee yor moste loyall and loving subiectes” can but feel a “vigilant jelosie, of the interrupcion or disturbence of our present state and condycion, wherin wee feele the spirituall benefitt of Godes true religion planted and possessed amongst vs and the restitucion of the imperiall crowne of this realme to ye auncient jurisdicciones and preheminences.”225 Ecclesiastical quarters were rallied under the banner of fighting a rebellion “pretended for extirpation of religion,” the laity with appeals “to recouer a kingdome so neere loosing,”226 and prospective participants like Richard Wigmore on the basis of experience, namely, for “hauing acquaynted my self wth those sease under sr H:Gilbert sr W. Winter, and mr. George Winter, I dare confidently affirme that fewe masters in England doe know yt coaste of Ierland wch lyeth from Waterford to Galloway better then my self. Besyde sum tyme spent there by me under… ye L. Graye.”227 John Bird called on Irish service across twenty-five years and five governments there to counsel Cecil that the only way to improve “that idolatrous & rebellious nation” was to restrain intercourse between England and Ireland, enforce the penal statutes, and not neglect the Henrician “act restoring to the Crowne the ancient jurisdiction over the estate ecclesiasticall and the abolishinge of forreyne power” or the Elizabethan act of uniformity228—a crucial diagnosis and reference to the Tudor past. Politician Arthur Hall also looked back, recommending debasement to compensate for the cost of last decade policy, with recourse to similar moves under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I and mention of the minerals now available, thanks

 Lane to Burghley, 2 February 1595, TNA SP 63/178/31, fols. 63r–65v, at 64r.  “Coppie of a proiecte of an aduice at ware… by Sir Raffe Lane,” 19 July 1597, CP 53/48. 224  Henry Harrington to William Waad, 9 August1597, CP 54/13. 225  [Address to the Queen], 1597, CP 58/43. 226  “A Contribution for Ireland,” [1598], CP 24/66. 227  Wigmore to Essex, [1598], CP 178/110. See also Dawtrey to Cecil, 19 July 1598, CP 62/67 and Moylle to Essex, 14 January 1589/99, CP 176/51. 228  Bird to Cecil, 11 January 1598/9, CP 58/103. See also Bird to Cecil, 29 March 1601, CP 250/135 and CP 87/144, enclosure in Bird to Cecil, 27 August 1601, CP 87/146. 222 223

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to New World mining.229 Less direct, but remarkable given their foe, crown reports continued to refer to “Qwynborro”230 and “Philliptown.”231 Powerfully, the crown too took part in the discourse, writing in mid-1599, “may not o[u]r kingdoms, o[u]r hono[u]r, and the lyves of o[u]r subiectes both at home and abroade be still dallyed wthall. God hath giuen vs these vppon other condicions, and whilest he vouchsafeth to continue vs over them, we will not be accusable for anything wthin o[u]r power to perfourme.”232 Losses, where “vndertakers had most shamefullie quitted and forsaken their castles and houses of strengthe,” were couched as “to her mates dishonor and thencreasinge of the traytores pride”233 and notions of being “discendid of [the] English race” and thus reputable were seemingly sharpened beyond Ireland,234 perhaps in contrast to “her highness vnnaturall and wicked subiectes there.”235 Scholar-administrator Geoffrey Fenton, in Ireland since entering Grey’s service alongside Spenser in 1580, feared that “vnsavory events” would continue to “multiply to worse… tyll Tyrone be turned owt of Tyrone, wch I see will not be don wth her mates honor for the present, nor wth the saffety of the kingdome… wthowt his entier extirpacion and banishment,” decrying his foe’s “barbarus hand.”236 Lord Justice George Carey detailed how Tyrone’s monstrous libel is spread by “Popish priests and Jesuits (whereof this country doth swarm), and [they] do mightily infest and seduce this bad nation, being apt to embrace anything that may have any colour (how false soever it be) to maintain their rebellious actions.”237 Yet the most telling if, paradoxically, most enigmatic rendering of Tyrone’s vision came from Cecil, who labeled the earl’s twenty-two article scheme for a Catholic kingdom of Ireland “Ewtopia.”238 Whether the statesman called on More’s title to imply impossibility (as in 229  “Touching the embasing of the coyne,” CP 183/85, enclosed in Hall to Cecil, 28 November 1600, CP 181/37. 230  [Plot of Queenborough Castle], [late sixteenth century?], CPM II 20. 231  John Reynolds to Cecil, [1596–1601?], CP 205/90. 232  Elizabeth to Essex and PC in Ireland, 10 August 1599, CP 133/182. 233  Ormond to PC, 21 October 1598, TNA SP 63/202/3/117, fols. 223r–224v, at 223v. 234  William Lile to Essex, 17 February 1596/7, CP 38/40. 235  Daniell to Cecil, 16 January 1597/8, CP 48/100. 236  Fenton to Cecil, 11 June 1598, TNA SP 63/202/2/62, fols. 192r–194v, at 193r; Hadfield, “Fenton, Sir Geoffrey (c. 1539–1608),” ODNB (2004). 237  Loftus, Carey, Ormond, and Council to PC, 17 November 1599, CSPI 1599–1600, 206:25; Carey to Cecil, 4 December 1599, CSPI 1599–1600, 206:71. 238  “Articles Intended,” fol. 153v.

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modern usage) or Atlantic colonization (as in the book) is opaque; regardless, the gloss poignantly recalled the lengthy, far-ranging history of Tudor empire. Crown officials looked to defeat the proud, insolent Tyrone and his confederates “by fire, sword, or any other extremitie, whereby they may be an example for all other traitors to the worldes ende.”239 Strikingly, his nation deep in war, his queen unsure whether the Spanish were after “our realm of Irland or England,”240 and his contemporaries asserting that the “protection of Englande and the safe reducinge of Irelande” had to come before any other foreign action,241 Robert Sidney pulled on the language of honor to promote a fresh assault on France. “Nothing at this time bee more profitable for the state of England, nor more honorable for him that should performe it,” he wrote in mid-1597, “than to reduce Callis to the obedience of the crown of England. For such is the general affection of all our countrimen to see that town once more English as surely the memory of it would neuer bee delaied.”242 An anonymous argument for colonization in Ulster yoked the two projects and with other empires, if notably distinct: like the Romans in the Roman Empire and the Spanish in Spanish America, “in Callis the English race were still called Englishe, yet the poore descent of the English in Irlande may in no wise be allowed that grace or priuiledge.”243 To counter fears—most acute after the disastrous Battle of the Yellow Ford in August 1598—that “yonder cursed cuntry of Ireland”244 was slipping from grasp, Elizabeth named Essex lord lieutenant that December.245 According to Camden, he won the appointment by counseling her to send one “of great honour, and as great wealth, beloued of Souldiers, and one that had beene a Generall heretofore.”246 Equipped with the largest army mounted abroad during the reign,247 markedly comprised of English and Welshmen,248 his instructions were laced with the familiar vocabulary and  Ormond to Elizabeth, 18 June 1598, TNA SP 63/202/2/75, fol. 227r.  [Elizabeth] to [Essex], 28 October 1597, CP 56/60. 241  [?], “A briefe Discovery of My Simple conceite,” [early 1597?], CP 139/110. 242  Robert Sidney to Essex, 6 June 1597, CP 51/92. 243  “That Planting of collonies,” 1598, TNA SP 63/202/4, fols. 232r–237v, at 235v, 236r. 244  Essex to Elizabeth, 26 August 1598, CP 63/75. 245  Hammer, “Devereux.” 246  Camden, Historie, 237. 247  Court of Star Chamber, [14 June 1600], CP 80/29; Ellis, Ireland, 346. 248  For example, John Harington to Essex, 27 December 1598, CP 178/50; Richard Gwyn to Essex, 30 December 1598, CP 178/58; “John Mountfennell, baron” to Cecil, [February ? 1600–01], CP 98/37. 239 240

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martial logic: “We find it necessary, both in regard of our honour and the safety of Ireland, to end the rebellion there by a powerful force. We shall ‘spare no earthly thing of ours’ in defence of that kingdom and people,” plagued by “massings and idolatry” and rebels who must be bound “to use English habit and language.”249 Glad to learn that Essex was engaged in such “a Great and Honorable expedition,” Edward Norris hoped that the earl “shall returne wth the glory of the tytle to be the reducer of Ireland.”250 Richard Hadsor similarly complimented Essex for seeking to complete the conquest of “Vlster (the welspring of the cyvill warres of that Realme) wch was well begon by yor most honorable father… and to suppresse all the rebells of that countrie, vpon wch honorable expedicion the recouery & defence of my smale patrimony & all others of English race there do wholy depend,” thereby combining a recourse to honor with a meaningful look back to the previous generation.251 Another prospective participant commended himself to Elizabeth “that hir bounty might be suteable the daughter of king henry,” though wondered why, “exception is taken to these words.”252 Despite promise of quick success and a mighty, focused attack, all “for the recovery of that Kingdom,”253 Essex felt scuttled and undersupplied. Perhaps such a result was predictable: prior to departure, the earl opined, with telling references, that even all the difficulties of war “were better indured then to haue a Hanno at Carthage, or a Cato at Rome, barking at him that is every day venturing his life for his country abroad.”254 Nevertheless, his correspondent urged him on, adding biblical to classical invective, “you should take all your folowers wth you into Egipt to dy happely wth you rather than vnhappely leaue them to liue in the dearth of Canaan behind you… Hanno is subdeud alife, hanniball from ye senat throwes his trifflinge enemy to the staires foote: Cato his poyson ends him selfe, you victorious shall se these all new acted.”255

 Elizabeth’s Instructions to Essex, 25 March 1599, Cal Carew 3:296.  Norris to Essex, 18 December 1598, CP 66/84. 251  Hadsor to Essex, 11 January 1598/9, CP 176/45. 252  Dunsany to Cecil, 20 March 1598/9, CP 60/53. 253  Essex to Reginald Nicholas, ca. March 1599, CP 75/50. See also Whitgift to Cecil, 2 April 1599, CP 69/43. 254  Essex to Willoughby, 4 January 1598/9, CP 58/86. 255  Willoughby to Essex, 21 January 1598/9, CP 59/10. 249 250

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Essex landed in mid-April 1599.256 Avoiding the north, he moved into Leinster and Munster then unadvisedly agreed to a parlay and truce with Tyrone and rushed home, against royal directive, becoming what Ellis called “among the more spectacular examples of English commanders whose reputations were ruined in Ireland.”257 Adding insult, Spanish intelligence boasted that “O’Neil had almost gained the Earl of Essex, the Queen’s commander, to leave her side and join [Philip], surrendering the country to you on the promise of great favours in your Majesty’s name,” but the Englishman could not overcome his Hispanophobia.258 Another source confessed that “Essex is a wilde lord” and endeavors “to be kinge of Ireland himselfe.”259 Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, declared, upon acquainting “her maty wth the vnfortunat newes of the accursed kingdom of Irland it semithe, that she expected no good succes could acompany him there that wold folow no good direction heere.”260 The earl was imprisoned and ultimately executed (following a brief release) in 1601.261 His replacement Charles Blount, eighth Baron Mountjoy, arrived in early 1600, instructed to attend to “the government of Ireland, wherein we have received dishonour and consumed infinite masses of treasure,” “preserve the true exercise of religion amongst our loving subjects” (but not “intermeddle by any severity or violence in matter[s] of religion until we have better established our power there”), oversee “plantation of garrisons in the heart of the countries of the capital rebels,” survey shipping, and avoid his predecessors mistakes.262 It was Mountjoy who greeted Spanish and confederate forces at Kinsale, presided over their defeat in December 1601,263 and mapped out a plan in the months that followed for reducing Ireland to civility and justice by extinguishing the relics of  Hammer, “Devereux.”  Ellis, Ireland, 347. See also “Essex in Ireland,” 3 August 1599, CP 72/16, 17; Udall to Elizabeth, ca. October 1599, CP 186/159; Harington’s “Irish Journal” (10 May–3 July 1599), in Nugae Antiquae, ed. Thomas Park (London: 1804), 1:268–293 and A Short View of the State of Ireland (ca. 1605), ed. W. Dunn Macray (Oxford and London: James Parker and Co., 1879); John Dymmock, 1599, in A Treatice of Ireland (ca. 1600), ed. Richard Butler (Dublin: Irish Archeological Society, 1842), 30–51; Thomas Stafford, Pacata Hibernia (1633, written 1599–1602). 258  “Report of the Council of State to Philip III,” 1 July 1600, CSPSimancas 4:685. 259  Examination of Vaughan, 16 May 1599, CP 70/29. 260  Hunsdon to Cecil, 16 August 1599, CP 72/85. 261  Hammer, “Essex.” 262  “Instructions for Lord Mountjoy,” [January] 1600, Cal Carew 3:343. 263  “Capture of Kinsale,” 2 January 1601/2, CP 91/25. 256 257

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war, recovering the hearts of the people, and setting forth new plantations264; on 30 March 1603, he accepted Tyrone’s formal submission265— nearly one week after Elizabeth’s death, unbeknownst to the Irishman—and “paved the way for the Ulster plantation and the transformation of Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to an English colony.”266 After all, as lord chief justice John Popham had ascertained, “the purpose of the Iryshe ys not onely against the relygyion professed by her mat’s authoryte wherunto they haue not bene by any vyolent menes… constrayned, but rather to shake off her mat’s government wch ys to be looked vnto in tyme.” Now, “new supplies might be off gentylmen off the best sort… to be accompend wth their frendes, neyghbors, and tenants,” whose plantation will “prevent all the inconvenyences that… myght in the end growe by these warres.”267 Last-decade Tudor Irish ideology found multiple means and forms of expression. Elizabeth was incensed that “sedicious priests, Jesuits, and seminaries now resorting to all parts of that or kingdom… being suborned by the Pope and the king of Spaine to raise or subiects to rebellion and to shake of[f] the yoke of obedience wch thei owe vnto vs haue so effectuallie prevailed in their vngodlie and malicious purposes” to “vnder the pretexte and cullor of religion” make the Irish “beleue that we intend not onelie to conquer but also vtterlie to extirpe and roote owte all that nacion.” She anxiously swore, upon “the worde and honour of a Prince and in the presence of almighty god,” that “all our subiects that woulde contynue loyall servitors vnto vs should be reputed and taken for our good and lovinge subiects wth equall love and favour as our subiects of England” and urged them away from “devillishe hippocrits,” back to “their naturall soveraigne.”268 Munster lord president Carew positioned “this realm of Ireland” as “the second kingdom over the which her Majesty weareth a crown, and therefore as the second jewel to be preserved, and, as near as may be, to be made a help unto England” and charged that the rebels  Suggestions [by Mountjoy], [1602], CP 139/136.  For praise of his service to the late queen, see 17 June 1603, CP 218/15. 266  Hadfield, “War Poetry and Counsel in Early Modern Ireland,” in Elizabeth I and Ireland, ed. Kane and Valerie McGowen-Doyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 239–260, at 260. See also Morgan, ed., The Battle of Kinsale (Bray: Wordwell, 2004); Canny, “The Treaty of Mellifont and the Re-organisation of Ulster, 1603,” Irish Sword 9, no. 37 (1970): 249–262. 267  Popham to Cecil, 22 August 1602, CP 184/91. 268  Elizabeth to [—], [1599], TNA SP 63/206/136, fols. 321r–322v, at 321r, v. 264 265

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were moved by ambition, not religion, for “the English race and the Irish have different ends. The English to recover again the supreme government in bearing her Majesty’s sword by one of themselves,” the Irish “to regain the Crown of Ireland to themselves.”269 Mountjoy elaborated, here was not merely “the war of Ireland, but the war of England in Ireland, to the infinite danger and cumber to them both”—a war of nation and empire.270 The maneuvers of Elizabeth and her officials on the ground were, in turn, further theorized in three new reform tracts that brought the Tudor Ireland project to its chronological close with strong humanism, belief in English greatness, socio-economic arguments, militarism, and resonance with earlier texts. William Herbert’s Croftus sive de Hibernia liber (completed early 1591), Richard Beacon’s Solon his Follie (published 1594), and Spenser’s A Veue of the Present State of Ireland (completed June–July 1596) mixed extant British Atlantic imperial thought—especially from the Wooings—with new elements to fit the 1590s landscape.271  Carew, “A Discourse of Ireland,” 1601, Cal Carew 4:191.  Mountjoy to Carew, 29 July 1602, Cal Carew 4:274. 271  Sir William Herbert, Croftus sive de Hibernia Liber, ed. Arthur Keaveney and John A. Madden (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1992); Beacon [Becon], Solon his follie… (Oxford, 1594); A Veue of the Present State of Ireland in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Edmund Spenser, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (1882–84), 9:13–256. Spenser has received the most attention, see Brady, “Spenser’s Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s,” Past and Present 111, no. 1 (May 1986): 17–49; Patricia Coughlan, ed., Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork: Cork University Press 1989); Bruce Avery, “Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland,” English Literary History 57, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 263–279; Jean Brink, “Constructing A View of the Present State of Ireland,” Spenser Studies 11 (1990): 203–228; Bradshaw, Hadfield, and Maley, eds., Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Tracey Hill, “Humanism and Homicide: Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland,” Irish Studies Review 1, no. 4 (Autumn 1993): 2–4; Hadfield and Maley, eds., Edmund Spenser, A View on the State of Ireland (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997); Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1997); Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 40–55; Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Maley, Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 63–91; Joan Fitzpatrick, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Contours of Britain: Reshaping the Atlantic Archipelago (Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2004); J.B. Lethbridge, ed., Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006). 269 270

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Certainly, these three were not alone. Also at work in these years were authors like Church of England and (from 1591) Church of Ireland clergyman Meredith Hanmer. His Chronicle of Ireland—later published alongside Jesuit Edmund Campion’s History of Ireland (1571) and Spenser and featuring a Tudor rose surmounted by an imperial crown at its conclusion—pressed the Britishness of the Irish, the Arthurian origins of an unruly Ireland’s tribute to the Kings of Britain, and Madoc’s New World discovery “afore either Columbus or Americus Vespatius.”272 Soldier Thomas Lee contended that despite “remote and savage places,” Ireland could be brought “to dutiful obedience, and to yield [Elizabeth] that profit which neither your majesty now hath, nor any of your progenitors ever had,” but it required “either to accept of their own offers of submission and contribution” and the placement of garrisons to hold their obedience “or else to make royal war upon them, and so utterly to overthrow and root them up… and plant others in their room or places.”273 He later added, “the present state of Ireland is lyke a snake wthout teeth: more odious to beholde than dangerous to handle”; its “recouerie” was possible.274 John Dymmock, part of Essex’s retinue, celebrated the rich land, assailed its poor manurance and rule by native custom. He diagnosed “the cheeffe thinge wantinge in that cuntrye” to be “cyvillitye, and dutyfull obedience of the people to their soveraigne,” derived partly from a desire to oust foreign rule, partly from an inclination toward “wildenes,” and generally from a lack of good English law—all despite the foundation laid “in the tyme of Kinge Philip and Q. Mary,” when Sussex planted Leix and shired Offaly.275 An unsigned 1602 text spoke to the “reasons to induce the vndertaking and peopling of the province of vlster,” praising the profit, pleasure, propagation of English families and religion, protection from foreign enemies, and public benefit to be gained by its commodious land.276 Yet Herbert, Beacon, and Spenser are particularly significant and worthy of close study. They worked, thought, and wrote as part of a shared 272  Two Histories of Ireland (Dublin: 1633), 110. See also Hadfield, “Briton and Scythian: Tudor Representations of Irish Origins,” Irish Historical Studies 28, no. 112 (November 1993): 390–408. 273  Lee, “A brief Declaration of the Government of Ireland,” 1594, in An Historical and Critical Review of the Civil Wars in Ireland, ed. John Curry (Dublin, 1810), 1:587–609, at 589, 587, 606. 274  Lee to Cecil, 15 December 1599. 275  Dymmock, Treatice of Ireland, 6, 14. 276  “Reasons to induce,” [1602], CP 139/141.

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milieu—close contemporaries born ca. Mary’s accession, protestant, and well-educated, who travelled to Ireland in the 1580s—but adopted different narrative methods and voices. Together, they form a dialogue as well as a spectrum, from the most moderate and restrained (Herbert) to the most dramatic and radical (Spenser). Set against the late Elizabethan world, looking back for inspiration and forward to new policies, they sought a single, if capaciously defined object: in Spenser’s words, “reducing that salvage nation to better government and civillity” under the Tudor crown.277 Of the three, Spenser came to Ireland earliest. As Grey’s secretary from 1580, he may have been present at some of his employer’s military exploits and perhaps even Smerwick with Ralegh.278 The only non-Englishman of the group, Herbert descended from Wales and had ties to Churchyard and Dee279; he was also the author of a tract which advocated strictness against “rude and barbarous” “Irish habites” on the basis that sight is the foremost sense and, as such, “seeing vs in a strange attire from them and they from vs haue thereby a Contynuall testymonie in their eie that they are a different people from vs and we from them strangers and alientes: which breedeth & Confirmeth in them a strangenes and alienacion of mynde from vs, our lawes & government,” while, conversely, unity of civil apparel could unite minds, combine nations, breed reform, and foster order.280 In 1586, the duo coalesced around Munster, where the third, Beacon, newly appointed queen’s attorney for the province and a commissioner for its reallocation, plantation, and adjudication, joined them as undertakers in the wake of the Desmond rebellion.281 Herbert wrote first, perhaps  Spenser, Veue, 13.  Maley, A Spenser Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1994), 15. 279  Maginn, “Herbert, Sir William (c. 1553–1593),” ODNB (2008). 280  “A note of such reasons as moved Sir W. Herbert…” calendared with 25 May 1589, TNA SP 63/144/57(ii), fols. 186r–187v, at 186r. 281  For Beacon’s role in the plantation, see Sean Kelsey, “Becon, Richard (fl. 1567–1611),” ODNB (2004); Solon His Follie, ed. Clare Carroll and Vincent Carey (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1996), xiii-xliii; “Book of the proceedings in Munster,” 3 September 1588, CSPI 1588–1592, 136:21(1–82); Vice-President of Munster (“Jessua Smythes”) and Beacon to Hatton and Walsingham, 2 December 1587, TNA SP63/132/25, fols. 64r–65v. All three appear in “An abstract or brief particular of all the names of the undertakers,” 31 December 1592, TNA SP 63/167/44(iii), fols. 182r–202v; Spenser and Herbert appear in “An abstract of the proceedings of the undertakers in Munster,” December 1592, TNA SP 63/167/45, fols. 203r–204v and Spenser wrote an answer to the “Articles of Instructions,” [May] 1589, TNA SP63/144/70, fols. 230ar–230bv; for Herbert’s earlier 277 278

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explaining his temperance, Spenser and Beacon amid Tyrone’s Rebellion; yet the meaning and import of each is amplified when studied together.282 One crucial commonality is a shared Renaissance reverence for the ancient past, seized from Tacitus, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and others, to legitimize conquest and colonization.283 Likening England to Athens, Spain to its colonial rival Megara, Ireland to Salamina, Beacon showed how the Athenians struggled in “repossessing and reforming” its colony not because of the nature of the native people nor the challenges of the action, but poor counsel and governors; only the wise, furious military leadership of Solon stemmed the tide and, in turn, inspired Brutus to fight tyranny, corruption, and decline with sword to save the Roman commonwealth—together, they demonstrate the value of force, colonization, and reform, political and cultural.284 Herbert continued, explaining how “conquered and devastated regions ought” to be “cultivated afresh by settlers / from England” and protected by fortifications and garrisons to maintain justice.285 He and Spenser pointed specifically to Henry II, whose conquest was significant for subduing the Gaels, but whose failures to uphold Rome’s imperial lessons set Ireland down its present, problematic path.286 If, Herbert posited, Elizabeth’s predecessors had filled the island “with citizens and farmers and / enriched [it with]… peace and industry, they would / for this long time past have added to our state / quite as many benefits, distinctions, comforts / and troops as Sicily of old bestowed on the / Romans.”287 Instead, “barbarous laws and habits,” faulty “religious usages,” “wicked and rude customs,” and “tyranny” were allowed to reign.288 It fell to the current queen to achieve classical greatness where others had not. Moreover, all three tracts furthered the association with antiquity via style. As his modern editors have noted, Beacon’s is “an extended allegory based on Plutarch’s story of Solon” to prove the power comments on colonization, see Herbert to Walsingham, 14 February 1588, CSPI 1586–1588, 133:47; “Tracts, apparently by Sir William Herbert,” [June] 1588, TNA SP 63/135/58, fols. 130r–144v. 282  Armitage also treats the three together, see Ideological Origins, 52. 283  Herbert deployed Plato; Herbert and Spenser cited Tacitus and Aristotle; Beacon used Cicero. For Herbert, see index entries in Croftus, ed., Keaveney and Madden; for Spenser, see Veue, 68, 71, 111; for Beacon, see 15, 84, 99. 284  Beacon, Solon, 1. 285  Herbert, Croftus, 45. 286  Herbert, Croftus, 29, 31; Spenser, Veue, 29–30. 287  Herbert, Croftus, 27. 288  Herbert, Croftus, 45, 67.

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of “publicke good” and the role of empire-building within it289; Herbert’s eulogizes Wooings veteran and Edwardian deputy James Croft, styling himself as Suetonius to his subject’s Roman imperial general290; Spenser’s personified and Latinized the realms so that “Eudoxus” and “Irenius” could debate the future of the colonized vis-à-vis the colonizer.291 British imperial past and present were also central, as the authors pressed Elizabeth’s territorial reach and sovereign authority. Most evocative, Herbert’s concluding verses extolled “THE right hand of our Virgin Queen / is assuredly meet for royal affairs. / She, with stately sceptre, guides the British/realms. / Kingdoms and kings she rules—Nymph with a / lofty diadem. / Lighting the orb with her rays, her virtue and/her strength, / She binds Alps to Orkneys with her wisdom. / Her name o’ertops all lands and conquers the / seas.”292 Indeed, a great deal of Herbert’s text looked back, borrowing from Henrician and Edwardian currents to inspire the future; there was, purposefully, much that was not new here. From title on, he memorialized Croft’s administration, which included colonial efforts at Leix and Offaly as well as broader schemes to plant, spread “knowledge of / the true God and the true good,” and educate Ireland,293 and appreciated the relevance of previous service, specifically noting Croft’s “outstanding courage” in “Haddington Scotland. ‘By his care, patience and courage he tamed / the French who were running riot in their youthful ardour.’”294 Adopting the much-vaunted body politic metaphor, now Ireland was the patient ravaged by civil and military ills, the former deputy and his dutiful political theorist its physician.295 Elizabethans could learn from his commitment to colonization and ruthless might in its pursuit. Beacon harbored a similar gaze. His dedication hoped the “most mighty and renowned Queene, and Empresse” might be encouraged to “goe forwarde Brutus, for thy glory in reforming, is farre greater then the glory of Romulus in building and instituting of the citie of Rome,” for “what further honour,” he asked, “now remaineth… for that you have chaunged the life of man which before your time was rude, cruell, and  Solon His Follie, ed. Carroll and Carey, xxxi; Beacon, Solon, 2, 33, 37.  Herbert, Croftus, 85. 291  Spenser, Veue, 13. 292  Herbert, Croftus, 117, 119. 293  Herbert, Croftus, 97. 294  Herbert, Croftus, 17. 295  Herbert, Croftus, xvii–xviii. 289 290

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wilde, in Ireland, and brought it for the most part to be obedient, gentle, and civill… this is the favour which your Majesty hath found in the sight of God to augment, strengthen, and honour your imperiall crowne of England, by the thorough reformation of this your Realme of Ireland.”296 Herbert prayed “that this holy and heroic work… may / be added to the outstanding praises and lasting glory which form a diadem superior to that of / kings adorning her most illustrious and serene/highness”—the perfect adjunct to her “most admirable and / virtuous government of England, the protection / and defence of Scotland, the repression and curbing of the madness and the frenzy of / France, the protection of the life and liberty / of the Netherlands, the containment and / repulsion of the arrogance, the ambition and / the cruelty of the Spaniards, the / advancement and defence of Christian truth,” which demonstrated the reach of her rule.297 It was a helpful, even explanatory broader context, as Spenser’s Irenius rehearsed how “the Irish doe derive themselves from Gathelus the Spaniard” and “Scotland and Ireland are one and the same.”298 By ridding Ireland of native customs—manners that Spenser deemed “Scythian or Scottish” and Beacon called “the very nurse, and teate, that gave sucke and nutriment to all disobedience, rebellions, enormities, vices, and iniquities”—the 1590s harbored great potential, for all three men.299 The same was true for other contemporaries, who reminded Cecil that “as she is the principal diadem of Christendom, [Elizabeth] should enact that as the Pope and King of Spain wish all Christians to be called Catholics, all her subjects should be termed defenders of the faith.”300 It was a call to arms for a uniquely imperial dynasty. Yet Spenser went further, with an ethnographic framework that tied culture and environment. “[A]ll barberous nacons are commonly great observers of cerimonies and superstitious rights,” Exodus detected, explaining Irish Catholicism301; those who live “by kepinge of cattell… are both very barbarous and uncivill, and greatly given to warre,” stated Irenius, explaining their rebellions302; and so many of those who have  Beacon, Solon, sigs. ¶3r, ¶4r–v.  Herbert, Croftus, 117. 298  Spenser, Veue, 65, 66. 299  Spenser, Veue, 81; Beacon, Solon, 77. 300  Giles van Harwick [alias William Resould] to Peter Artson [alias Cecil], 19/29 November 1598, CSPD 268:110. 301  Spenser, Veue, 22. 302  Spenser, Veue, 238. 296 297

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planted since Henry II, “through lycentious conversinge with the Irish, or marrying, or fostering with them, or lacke of meete nurture, or other such unhappy occasions, have degendred from ther auncyent dignityes, and are nowe growen as Irish as Ohanlans breach, (as the proverb ther is,).”303 The implications were severe, and contrary to Herbert and Beacon’s confidence in the reforming capacity of Englishness: certain Irish “will never bee made dutyfull and obedient, nor brought to labor or civill conversation … soe as there is no hope of theire amendement or recoverye, and therefore nedefull to be cutt of.”304 Only the sword followed by careful, crown-commanded English colonial governance would have the desired effect.305 These theorists all agreed on one, final key point, however, aimed at bolstering resolve and mirroring imperial pitches throughout the Atlantic World. In spite of everything, Ireland remained, for Spenser, “yett a most bewtifull and sweete Country as any is under heaven,” temperate and teaming with waterways, fish, and timber so commodious “as that if some princes in the world had them, they would soone hope to be lordes of all the seas, and er longe of all the worlde.”306 For Herbert, “GIVEN also Ireland’s convenient harbours, its / copious corn supply, its abundance of / commodities necessary for the maintenance of / troops and finally its location in the west, we / should note how much support and assistance / this kingdom would have brought us in / carrying out our vast enterprises in the Atlantic / and West Indies.”307 The time was ripe again, Ireland part and parcel of late Tudor nation and empire, rooted in the past with equally significant possibilities for a wide future. * * * No matter the overwhelming reality of Irish turmoil, then, American projects did not simply vanish. New promotion, court patronage and policy, and the Atlantic-wide scope of the war against Spain engendered a last gasp of Tudor activity in the Americas across 1602–1603—its final year.

 Spenser, Veue, 106–107.  Spenser, Veue, 161, compare to Herbert, Croftus, 71; Beacon, Solon, 6–7. 305  Spenser, Veue, 148–254. 306  Spenser, Veue, 38. 307  Herbert, Croftus, 29. 303 304

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In August 1597, Governor of Paraíba Feliciano Cieça de Carvalho wrote to Philip, altering him to the rival European incursions, internal rebels, and strife between the crown’s officials and the Pope’s friars that threatened to topple his dominion; without redress, “this countrey cannot be kept,” he warned.308 Amid multi-front war, the Habsburg king seemed on his heels in northern Brazil and Hakluyt was well aware, printing the intercepted letter as part of a larger promotional push that reasserted the possibilities of Tudor empire at century’s end. First, ca. 1595–1598 and attributed to Hakluyt himself, was “The true Limites of the Countries and Prouinces at this present actually possessed by ye Spaniard and Portugales in the West Indies,” which emphasized law to posit that despite having “discovered much farther” and unauthorized donations by an over-­zealous Pope Alexander VI, Iberian right only properly appertained to the relatively few areas inhabited by its subjects.309 Moreover, and more pointedly, “besides all those huge coasts and mighty inlands lying southward of ye tropique of Cancer,” free from Spanish government, and the “west of America” (with any potential northwest passageway) discovered, possessed, and named Nova Albion by Drake, all those large and spatious countries on ye easte parte of America from 32 to 72 degrees of northerly latitude… are both by right of first discovery performed by Sebastian Cabota at ye cost of King Henry ye 7 th, and also of later actual possession taken on ye behalfe and under ye sovereign authoritie of hir Matie by ye severall deputies of Sr Walter Ralegh, and by the two English colonies thither deducted (whereof the later is yet their remaining) as likewise of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Martin Frobisher, Mr. John Davies and others, most justly and inseparably belonging to the crown of England. Which countries being greater than all Europe, and in goodness of soile nothing inferior thereunto, are by no meanes by us to be given over unto them who have already a great deal more than they can well weild.310

The second edition of Principal Navigations (1598–1600) also confirmed and promoted Tudor empire, on the grandest scale yet: “not in wax, yet in record of writing,” Hakluyt avowed in a dedication to Cecil, “haue I presented to the noble courages of this English Monachie, the like images of  “A speciall letter,” PN, 3:716–718, at 717.   “True Limites,” 1598, Original Writings, 2:420–425, at 420; Quinn, Hakluyt Handbook, 309. 310  “True Limites,” 2:422, 423. 308 309

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their famous predecessors, with hope of like effect in their posteritie.” He protested that such activity was not inimical to universal peace with Christian neighbors, “for there are most conuenient emploiments for all the superfluitie of euery profession in this realme. For, not to meddle with the state of Ireland, nor that of Guiana, there is vnder our noses the great & ample countrey of Virginia,” its inland “found of so late to bee so sweete and holesome a climate, so rich and abundant in silver mines, so apt and capable of all commodities, which Italy, Spaine, and France can affoord.” Indeed, all the best cosmographers—Peter Martyr, López de Gómara, Ramusio—agreed “that all that mightie tract of land from 67. degrees Northward to the latitude almost of Florida was discouered out of England” by Henry VII’s command, and “the South part… planted with diuers English Colonies” by Elizabeth’s consent before any other Christian. With the possibility that even one remained and the contents of his volumes, Hakluyt hoped—also in Dee-like terms—that “it shal please the Almighty to stirre up her Maiesties heart to continue with her fauorable countenance… with transporting of one or two thousand of her people” and the many other eager adventurers, whereby she shall, “in short space, worke many great and vnlooked for effects, increase her dominions, enrich her cofers, and reduce many Pagans to the faith of Christ.”311 Adding to the noise was Roanoke syndicate member and Cecil client John Gerard, whose 1597 The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes affirmed the Virginia project on scientific, commercial, and legal lines, drawing liberally from the experience of “our English men,” like White and Hariot, who “dwelled (intending there to erect a ceratine Colonie)” among “the Sauages,” and ancient sources.312 He presented a plentiful place, with a natural bounty of necessary (dietary and medicinal) plants and desirable ones that might support England, perhaps as empire-­ building had once sustained the classical world, and was still occupied by its people “if neither vntimely death by murdering, or pestilence, corrupt aire, bloodie flixes, or some other mortall sicknes hath not destroied them,”313 their fate perhaps no more than cautionary tale against underpopulated, undersupplied colonization. Inconstancy and inconsistency were characteristic of sixteenth-century imperialism, neither a death knell 311  “Epistle dedicatorie,” PN (1598–1600), 2: sigs. * 2v–* 3r. On the new edition, see Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, 221–235. 312  Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597), 752. 313  Gerard, Herball, 752.

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nor evidence of complete disregard. Light was again falling on overseas adventure in the wake of the Armada. As the Irish war languished under Essex and fervor against Philip, whose “large & vast dominions spread far and neere, by reason of his power ouer other Princes, and his Merits from the Church of Rome” grew, the court responded with a palpable effort, perceived by Camden, to look abroad to benefit home.314 The most oft-­ cited consequence was the chartering of the East India Company in late 1600, but its creation was symptomatic, not solitary. That summer, an estimate of charges for “victuales to be provyded at London and Plymouth for the victuallinge of 80. men to serue in the Guiana for 4. monethes” was drawn up; at £250, the figure was neither insignificant nor outrageous and the very process of calculation was suggestive.315 Also afoot were efforts to bring Francis Sparrey and Richard Hawkins—respectively “a seruant of captaine Gifford, (who was desirous to tarry, and coulde describe a cuntrey with his pen),” left behind by Ralegh in Guiana to learn its “secrets,” but captured by Berrío’s men, and most recently offering his services to the Habsburgs to avoid the galleys and a sailor (the only son of John Hawkins) seized at San Mateo during an anti-Spanish “enterprise”—back from imprisonment in Spain; both imperial actors returned home by 1603.316 As Cecil negotiated,317 he gained added impetus from Anglo-Irishman Valentine Blake, who described how the Spaniards “use our englishmen suche as they take, specially about the Indies and Brasile… yoakinge them in prisons, and condemminge them to Gallyes, and some… tortured and racked even to death” and “seize vppon all englishe wares, as confiscated to the kinge,” while the English treat the Spanish mildly and allow their goods, transported by Scots, Dutch, and French, though “England may well enough live wthout their wines, fruite, and oyle.” Thus, he appealed, mimicking Eden’s mid-century call to  Camden, Historie, 272.  “Estimate of the charges of victuals,” 14 June 1600, TNA SP 12/275/6, fols. 8r–v, at 8r. 316  Ralegh, Discoverie, 80; “Francis Sparrey’s Memorial,” in Ralegh’s Discoverie, ed. Lorimer, 268–271, at 270; “Commission to Richard Hawkins,” October 1593, TNA SP 12/245/126, fols. 205r–206v. See also “Intelligences from Spain Relating to Guiana,” in Ralegh’s Discoverie, ed. Lorimer, 265–278; Loades, “Hawkins, Sir Richard (c. 1560–1622),” ODNB (2009); Lisa Voigt, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 291–294. 317  Van Harwick to [Cecil], 10/20 November 1597, TNA SP 94/5/286, fols. 287r–288v. Negotiations continued to 1603, see Lorimer, ed., Ralegh’s Discoverie, 267, n. 5. 314 315

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action, “England is ympoverished, and these strangers inriched and trayned in navigation.”318 The following year, the imperial continued to pervade the national, in the last Tudor parliament, convened in autumn 1601. Perhaps the ugliest of the reign, debate clustered around mushrooming licenses and monopolies, granted by crown patent (the statecraft tool extended at home and abroad by the dynasty) for domestic exports and foreign imports, including train oil, salt, and other Atlantic commodities.319 “To what purpose is it,” MP Francis Moore demanded, “to do any thing by Act of Parliament, when the Queen will undo the same by Her Prerogative… There is no Act of Hers that hath been, or is more Derogatory to Her own Majesty, or more Odious to the Subject, or more Dangerous to the Common-Wealth, than the Granting of these Monopolies.”320 To avoid the melee, a proclamation annulled the censured grants, allowed aggrieved subjects to bring suits in common law courts, and rescinded conciliar support of patentees.321 Two days later, however, Elizabeth addressed the body with a scarcely veiled defense: “GOD had made Me his Instrument to maintain his Truth and Glory, and to Defend this Kingdom… from Peril, Dishonour, Tyranny, and Oppression. There will never Queen sit in my Seat, with more Zeal to my Country, Care for my Subjects, and that sooner with willingness will venture her Life for your Good and Safety, than My Self.”322 The acrimonious assembly had elicited imperial ideology. In mid-­ December, her final speech before parliament, Elizabeth justified the Spanish war as godly, honorable, and against a foe “seeking to take away one of two crowns,” noted her listeners’ “dutiful supplies for defense of the public—which, as the philosophers affirm of rivers coming from the ocean, return to the ocean again,” and reaffirmed her contentment “to be a taper of true virgin wax, to waste myself and spend my life that I may give light and comfort to those that live under me.”323  Blake to Cecil, 1600, TNA SP 12/283/57, fols. 154r–155v, at 154r.  Guy, Tudor England, 399–401; Hayward Townshend, Historical Collections: or, An exact Account of the Proceedings of the Four last Parliaments of Q. Elizabeth Of Famous Memory (London: 1680), 239. 320  Townshend, Historical Collections, 233. 321  Guy, Tudor England, 402; “Reforming Patent Abuses,” Tudor Royal Proclamations, III, no. 812. 322  Townshend, Historical Collections, 266. 323  “Queen Elizabeth’s Final Speech Before Parliament, December 19, 1601,” Collected Works, 346–351, at 350, 347. 318 319

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Representing Cornwall and ambivalently defending his tin monopoly, Ralegh was likely in the audience throughout 1601324 and from 1602 to 1603 the great promoter of American adventure had further inducement to move. Again in England, Sparrey could complete his original mission: sharing intelligence “so that the Queen might know… the quality and riches of those provinces and send another fleet for its discovery.”325 His claims of “savage” peoples, their native kings who allied with Ralegh, and immense gold combined with Ley’s, the charged domestic context, and polemical literature since 1597, even if they were, perhaps, somewhat diluted by Sparrey’s ostensible conversion to Catholicism and willingness to serve Spain.326 Two westerly voyages launched in these final years—one north, the other south. On 26 March 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold—a Suffolk gentleman and privateer with links to Hakluyt and Hayes, the last just off from a stint in Ireland and soon to produce a project for a permanent, paid, English militia there, moves that tied him to three late century Tudor imperial projects327—and co-captain Bartholomew Gilbert departed Falmouth with thirty others for, in the titular words of John Brereton’s account (which aped Gerrard and Hariot’s), “the North part of Virginia; being a most pleasant, fruitfull and commodious soile,” endeavoring toward exploration and the establishment of a trading post, but apparently without Ralegh’s sanction.328 Following precedent, privileging experimentation, and repeatedly deploying home as yardstick, model, and beneficiary, Brereton remarked on Gosnold’s naming practices in the “discouered” land and on its fertility, where their “triall” showed that “sowing or setting (after the ground is clensed) is no greater labour, than if you should set or sow in one of our best prepared gardens in England.”329 He described a wholesome, temperate climate, “faire trees,” harbors, flax, fur, fish “in as 324  Townshend, Historical Collections, 235; History of Parliament: Commons, 1558–1603, ed. Hasler, 275. 325  Council of the Indies to Philip III, 31 October 1602, in Ralegh’s Discoverie, ed. Lorimer, 273–274, at 274. 326  “Sparrey’s Memorial,” 270. Voigt suggests that Sparrey even met John Smith, see Writing Captivity, 312–313. 327  Hayes to Cecil, 7 January 1602/3, CP 91/36; Quinn, with Alison M. Quinn and Susan Hillier, eds., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, 5 vols. (New York: Arno, 1979), 3:345. 328  Brereton, A Briefe and True Relation of the Discouerie of the North Part of Virginia (1602); David R. Ransome, “Gosnold, Bartholomew (d. 1607),” ODNB (2004). 329  Brereton, Briefe and True, 4, 6, 7.

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great plentie, as in Newfound-land,” tobacco, mineral wealth, “stones fit for building,” and “people… of tall stature, broad and grim visage, of a blacke swart complexion, their eie-browes painted white,” some who “excell all the people of America,” willing to trade, and quick to learn English, yet naked saving those attired after Europeans (following contact with traders and fishermen) or wearing animal skins.330 Another account, by participant Gabriel Archer, implicitly and explicitly placed the “Sauages” amid British conquests, describing their painted bodies and “Seale-skinnes tyed fast [around their waists] like to Irish Dimmie Trousers.”331 Ultimately settling on “Elizabeths Island” (Massachusetts), the voyagers “determined to fortifie our selues” and built a house there, before the captain, short on supplies, resolved to “returne for England, leauing… with as many true sorrowfull eies, as were before desirous to see it.”332 They docked at Exmouth in July and Brereton’s relation was circulating before year’s end. In an appended treatise, arranged with the elder Hakluyt’s “Inducements,” Hayes pressed the intent to “plant Christian people and religion, vpon the Northwest countries of America” and find passage east as “the rightfull inheritance of her Maiesties, being first discouered by our nation in the time of King Henrie the seuenth,” how closely the rich territory “resembl[ed] France,” and his certainty that it would be “profitable for the State of England specially, aswell in regard of the vse of such commodities, as for the imploiment also of our people and ships; the want whereof, doth decay our townes and ports… and causeth the realme to swarme full with poore and idle people”; “no nation of Christendom is so fit for this action.”333 Brereton dedicated his text to Ralegh, appeasing the courtier (who also confiscated part of the venture’s haul) and promoting his hoary plot.334 In fact, Ralegh was already at attention. The same month Gosnold sailed, “SAmuel [sic] Mace of Weimouth, a very sufficient Mariner, an honest sober man, who had beene at Virginia twice before,” experience in Guiana, and ties to Hariot, “was imploied thither by Sir Walter Ralegh, to finde those people which were left there in the yeere 1587.”335 Despite  Brereton, Briefe and True, 4, 5, 6, 4, 10.  Archer, “The Relation of Captine Gosnols Voyage,” in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrims (1625), 4:1647–1651, at 1647. 332  Brereton, Briefe and True, 12, 8, 12. 333  Brereton, Briefe and True, 15, 16, 17, 19. 334  Elizabeth Baigent, “Brereton, John (b. 1571/2?, d. in or after 1619?), ODNB (2004). 335  Brereton, Briefe and True, 14. 330 331

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making landfall along the Outer Banks, Mace faced rough weather and returned home in August with only flora specimens, no sign of his patron’s “Colonie.”336 Nevertheless, Ralegh was galvanized, telling Cecil, “I shall yet live to see [Virginia] an Inglishe nation… [and] yow shall see what a pretty, honorabell, and sauf trade wee will make.”337 Within the year, Ralegh licensed Martin Pring, another contact of Hakluyt’s and the Bristol merchant community, who launched with two ships in April 1603 “for the farther Discoverie of the North part of Virginia” and to trade with its inhabitants.338 Finding “goodly grasse and sundry sorts of Trees,” including some bigger than England’s, as well as “excellent fishing for Cods, which are better than those of New-found-land,” the expedition snaked south to where Gosnold had landed, naming sites along the way, before erecting a “small baricado to keepe diligent watch and ward in,” protected by two mastiffs from Bristol “of whom the Indians were more afraid, then of twentie of our men,” on the Massachusetts Bay coast.339 Remaining for seven weeks, Pring “used [the people of the Countrey] kindly, and gave them divers sorts of our meanest Merchandize,” made ethnographic notes that emphasized native appearance, dress (including “a Beares skinne [worn] like an Irish Mantle ouer one shoulder”), goods, weaponry, jealous guarding of their women, treachery, transportation, and land use, and sowed crops, “giuing certaine testimonie of the goodnesse of the Climate and of the Soyle” and bringing back evidence of his findings when he docked in October 1603.340 “From our Port of Virginia, the Soundings of England” that greeted them were altered, even if the crew had already heard the news while stayed by harsh winds prior to departure: Elizabeth I was dead.341 It was the last voyage to the region launched under the auspices of the queen for whom it was named and the final one under

336  Brereton, Briefe and True, 14; Quinn, “Thomas Hariot and the Virginia Voyages of 1602,” William and Mary Quarterly 27, no. 2 (April 1970): 268–281. 337  Ralegh to Cecil, 21 August 1602, Life of Ralegh, 2:251–253, at 252. 338  “A Voyage Set Out from the Citie of Bristoll,” Hakluytus posthumus, 4:1654–1656, at 1654. 339  “Voyage Set Out,” 4:1654, 1655. 340  “Voyage Set Out,” 4:1655. 341  “Voyage Set Out,” 4:1656.

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Ralegh’s patent.342 Pring followed the trajectory of his patron to Guiana; Gosnold and Archer went on to play pivotal roles in Jamestown.343 Meanwhile, in September 1601, Howard and Cecil—joint recipients of Ralegh’s Discoverie—tapped Charles Leigh for “reprisal of pirates and Spaniards” in the Mediterranean; the veteran of the failed Brownist colonization scheme was back in action344 and the following year, the pair sponsored his reconnaissance of the Wiapoco.345 “Finding a fit place for habitation [and] determined to procure the planting of a Colonie there,”346 Leigh returned to England then mounted his expedition across 1604–1606, with financial capital from his brother Oliph and political capital from Cecil and Howard, who won over crown and council.347 As Andrews and Lorimer have shown, the captain was at once “first of the Jacobean colonists” and “a direct continuation of the imperialist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Spanish designs first mooted by Ralegh at the close of Elizabeth I’s reign,” his short-lived attempt, thwarted by his men’s privateering impulses, insufficient supplies, illness, idleness, suspicion of local tribes, and the peace with Spain inaugurated by James VI and I shortly after his accession, a fitting capstone for over a century of projects as well as a foundation for another.348 * * * Unlike later exploits here in Guiana, in Newfoundland, and in Virginia, which show continuity with the past but bear more marks of Stuart invention, the Leigh experiment’s origins, timing, and tenor help anchor it in the Tudor century—an apt conclusion to that imperial story. Setting course for what sailor John Nicholl duly called, in an account dedicated to East India Company governor Thomas Smyth, the place “first… made  Quinn, ed., New American World, 3:359.  Basil Morgan, “Pring, Martin (bap. 1580, d. 1626),” ODNB (2008); Quinn, “Hariot and Virginia,” 280; Quinn, “Archer, Gabriel,” Dictionary of Virginia Biography, ed. John T. Kneebone (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1998), 1:191–192. 344  Lorimer, “Leigh, Charles (bap. 1572, d. 1605),” ODNB (2008). 345  Lorimer, ed., Ralegh’s Discoverie, xciv. 346  John Nicholl, An Houre Glasse of Indian Newes (1607), sig. Bv. 347  Andrews, Trade, Plunder, Settlement, 296. 348  Andrews, Trade, Plunder, Settlement, 296; Lorimer, “The Failure of the English Guiana Ventures 1595–1667 and James I’s Foreign Policy,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 21, no. 1 (1993): 1–30, at 16. 342 343

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knowne to our English Nation… about the yeare of our Lord 1594,” Leigh sailed on 28 March “to discouer and inhabit some part of the Countrie of Guiana,” forty-seven strong including Pring (who seems to have mutinied against his leader) and a gold-refiner (in lofty anticipation).349 At the mouth of the Wiapoco, he renamed what he found “mount Howard”350 and “tooke possession… in sight of the Indians,”351 who supposedly offered “their free consent” to his settlement, “desired him withall to send into England, for men to teach them to pray,” and gave pledges to secure such “Salvages promise.”352 Though he reported that “the English man which was left here by Captain Le[y], is dead,”353 Leigh met two natives “which had beene before in England, and could speake some English”354 (albeit not enough to stop him from requesting “Sir Walter Rawleighes Indian or my Lord Admirals” as a more suitable interpreter)355 and smoothed negotiations such the colonists gained a place to stay in the natives own homes and gardens in exchange for military support.356 For Alden Vaughan, “thanks to Ralegh’s culture brokers, the first English outpost in Guiana was about to be established.”357 The captain wrote optimistically to his brother of the group’s commitment “to make full triall both of people and Countrey,” lauding its riches, spices and textiles to dyes and minerals, and stressing his want of “sober and discreete men, and such as are well perswaded of the Church gouernment in England”358 as well as to the Council, to send “well dissposed preachers” for “thes symple harted people” and urge the king to grant free passage to prospective planters.359 Gone was the separatist element of his more northerly exploit; Leigh now sought to recreate and benefit the nation abroad. Yet this too was a familiar appeal, couched in familiar rhetoric (despite European amity), made as 349  Nicholl, Houre Glasse, sig. Bv; “Captaine Charles Leigh his Voyage to Guiana and Plantation There,” Hakluytus posthumus 4:1250–1252, at 1250; “The Relation of Master Iohn Wilson,” Hakluytus posthumus, 4:1260–1265, at 1260. 350  Leigh to PC, 2 July 1604, TNA SP 14/8/87, fols. 174r–v, at 174r. 351  “Captaine Charles Leighs Letter to Sir Olane Leigh his Brother,” Hakluytus posthumus 4:1252–1255, at 1253. 352  Leigh’s voyage, 4:1251. 353  Leigh to Leigh, 4:1255. 354  Leigh’s voyage, 4:1250. 355  Leigh to Leigh, 4:1255. 356  Leigh’s voyage, 4:1251. 357  Vaughan, “Ralegh’s Indian Interpreters,” 366. 358  Leigh to Leigh, 4:1253, 1255. 359  Leigh to PC, 2 July 1604, 174r.

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he sent a contingent, including the four indigenous “pledges,” to England in summer 1604 and remained behind with forty colonists, eager “for the prosecuting of this voyage, in such sort as we be not preuented by the Spaniard nor any other Nation.”360 Still, the venture sputtered. Despite a resupply in early 1605, Leigh and his planters were sick and struggling. The captain resolved to return home, but died in March before launching, one of his men clandestinely burying the body to avoid derailing the colony361—perhaps thinking back to how Gilbert’s death had risked the Newfoundland enterprise. After a failed second reinforcement, though one which produced “the most detailed and valuable account of Carib-European contacts before full-scale attempts at settlement on the islands of the Lesser Antilles in the 1620s”—Nicholl’s Houre Glasse of Indian Newes,362 the remaining colonists were ingloriously ferried out by continental European traders across 1605–1606.363 They had “escaped as they could,” in the words of John Smith who, significantly, saw fit to memorialize Leigh’s effort in 1630 as one “wherein I should have beene a partie” alongside Ralegh and Sparrow’s and tying them all to “the present Plantation there.”364 As Leigh’s Guiana venture floundered, the project’s founder languished in the Tower of London, imprisoned for treason from July 1603 to March 1616, when he was freed for one last expedition for El Dorado.365 The disgraced courtier found himself in much the same position he had occupied over a decade earlier. Keymis, who also fell under suspicion, must have represented the outlook of some when he lamented to Cecil in 1603, “[I] am cleane defeated of all hope of prosecuting any purpose of plantation in the Indies,”366 even if others, like Gawen Harvy, told the privy council that Ralegh “neuer dyd me curtesye in all his lyfe, vnlesse I should loue hym for staruynge me in his Guiana journey and sendinge me hoame a foote wth out monye in my purse when we landed in the  Leigh to Leigh, 4:1254.  Wilson’s Relation, 4:1261. See also “Part of a Treatise Written by Master William Tvrner,” Hakluytus posthumus 4:1265–1267. 362  Morgan, “Nicholl.” 363  Wilson’s Relation, 4:1262. 364  Smith, “A briefe discourse of divers voyages made unto the goodly Countrey of Guiana,” in The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations (1630), 48. 365  Nicholls and Williams, Sir Walter Ralegh: In Life and Legend (London: Continuum, 2011), 223–284. 366  Keymis to Cecil, 15 August 1603, CP 101/116. 360 361

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westcountry.”367 Nevertheless, Ralegh looked to what had rescued him in the Elizabethan past to save him in the Jacobean present: empire. He, Keymis (who joined him in the 1617 voyage to Guiana), and other survivors of the 1603 regnal divide carried the vision forged in the sixteenth century into the seventeenth. Indeed, six crucial Tudor Atlantic geographies—France, Scotland, Ireland, Newfoundland, Virginia, and Guiana— remained a part of the early Stuart world, whether nominally attached to the crown or as active sites of adventure. As Jacobean panegyrics and polemics manipulated the monarch’s inheritance to cajole the king into one policy or another, the immediate legacy of a Tudor empire took shape.

 Harvy to PC, 6 December 1603, CP 102/58.

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CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: “Such an honourable seruice”

Sometime in 1609, early in the union of the Scottish and English crowns under James VI and I, a London bookseller whose career otherwise centered on religious texts of the Church of England persuasion by figures like Joseph Hall and Samuel Hieron changed tack. He saw to the printing of Robert Johnson’s Nova Britannia. Offering most excellent fruites by Planting in Virginia. Exciting all such as be well affected to further the same, dedicated to Thomas Smythe “of his Maiesties Councell for Virginia, and the Treasurer for the Colonie, and Gouersnor of the Companies of the Moscovia and East India Merchants.”1 Two years after the founding of Jamestown and the same year its backers received a new charter, here was a seminal make or mar moment for the Virginia Company, for New World adventure, and for the British Empire writ large.2 Macham and Johnson  Johnson, Nova Britannia (1609), sig. A 3r.  Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); W.F.  Craven, The Virginia Company of London, 1606–1624 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1957); Fredric W.  Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); David Hackett Fischer and James C.  Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000); Horn, A Land as God Made it: Jamestown and the Birth of America (NY: Basic Books, 2005); Kupperman, Jamestown Project; T.K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); L.H.  Roper, The English Empire in America, 1602–1658: Beyond Jamestown (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009). 1 2

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seized upon it. Very crucially and quite purposefully, however, their promotion did so in a way that was resolutely un-novel. Across the seventeenth century, and much as other scholars have found in the domestic context, the Tudor dynasty functioned as “a whip with which to beat the Stuart monarchs, a yardstick by which to measure their perceived deficiencies, a touchstone for dissent,”3 as well as an archetype to be imitated, a precedent upon which to rest their legitimacy, a prototype to be improved. Out of a decidedly non-linear history, Johnson crafted a compelling narrative from “our former auncient miseries, wherein wee had continued brutish, poore, naked Brittans to this day, if Iulius Caesar with his Romaine Legions (or some other) had not laid the ground to make us tame and ciuill,”4 to when “Columbus… chose Henry the seauenth of England, as in those dayes the most worthy, and best furnished for Navigations, of all the Kings in Christendome; offering to inuest his Maiestie with the most pretious and richest vaines of the whole earth, never knowne before”5 and “the first discovery and actuall possession taken” of “this earthly Paradice” by his subjects not long after,6 to the “raigne of Queene Elizabeth, [which] brought forth the highest degree of wealth, happines, and honor, that euer England had before her time” as “our Royall Fleetes and Marchants ships, (the Jewels of our land) our excellent Navigators, and admirable voyages, as into all parts and round about the Globe with good successe, to the high fame and glorie of our Nation… most directed to the new found world, to the mayne land and infinite Ilands of the West Indies, intending to discouer with what conveniency to plant and settle English Colonies,”7 thus “manifesting and shewing, that the coastes and parts of Virginia haue bene long since discouered, peopled, & possessed by many English, both men, women and children… And that the same footing and possession, is there yet kept and possessed, by the same English, or by their seede and of-spring, without any interruption or inuasion… to this day”8—all under a title, Britannia, reminiscent of the discourse of Britishness popularized in the 1540s.

3  Walsham, “‘A Very Deborah?’ The Myth of Elizabeth as a Providential Monarch,” in The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. Doran and Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 159. 4  Johnson, Nova Britannia, sig. C 2r. 5  Johnson, Nova Britannia, sig. B 3r. 6  Johnson, Nova Britannia, sig. B 2r. 7  Johnson, Nova Britannia, sig. Bv. 8  Johnson, Nova Britannia, sig. [A 4v].

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But yet, the author opined, “it is now aboue twenty yeares agoe since these things were done.”9 “Where is our force and auncient vigour,” he asked, “doeth our late reputation sleepe in the dust? No, no, let not the world decieue it selfe, wee still remaine the same, and upon iust occasion given, we shall quickly show it too… Our plant, we trust, is firmely rooted, our armes and limmes are strong, our branches faire, and much desire to spread themselues abroad,”10 and Virginia offered the Stuarts all that it had the Tudors: opportunity to spread knowledge of God’s truth and civility to “savage and blind” people living “in beastly brutish manner,” labor a land naturally rich in minerals and merchandise, shadow the ancient past (biblical and classical) and counter present rivals (political and religious), “a most royall addition to the crowne of England, and a very nursery and fountaine of much wealth and strength vnto this kingdome.”11 His arguments established, all that remained was a closing. It required evocative power, rhetorical strength, lasting resonance, and so, Johnson charged, “I leaue it to your consideration, with a memorable note of Thomas Lord Howard Earle of Surrie, when king Henry the eight, with his Nobles at Douer, tooke shipping for Turwin [(Thérouanne)] & Turney [(Tournai)], and bidding the said Earle farewell, whom he made Gouernour in his absence,” to meet the Scottish invasion mounted by James’s great-­ grandfather James IV at Flodden, “the Nobleman wept, and tooke his leaue with teares, an admirable good Nature in valiant minde, greeuing to bee left behinde his Prince and Peeres in such an honourable seruice.”12 On the heels of references, implicit and explicit, to Roman colonization of Britain, Columbus and Cabot under Henry VII, the Reformation and Rough Wooings under Henry VIII and Edward VI, Hispanophobia and anti-Catholicism fixed under Mary I, Ralegh and White under Elizabeth I, as well as to England and Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Newfoundland, Virginia, and Guiana, the author’s final appeal to 1510s France is simply striking. One, representative piece of a wider imperial literature,13 Nova Britannia demonstrates the centrality of Tudor nation- and empire-­ building, across multiple geographies and the whole of the long sixteenth  Johnson, Nova Britannia, sig. B 2v.  Johnson, Nova Britannia, sig. B 2r. 11  Johnson, Nova Britannia, sigs. Br, Cv, B 3r. 12  Johnson, Nova Britannia, sig. [E 3r]. 13  For further discussion, see Hower, “Under One (Inherited) Imperial Crown: The Tudor Origins of Britain and its Empire, 1603–1625,” Britain and the World 8, no. 2 (2015): 160–180. 9

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century, to Jamestown. This conclusion starts to parse and evaluate that inheritance, commenting on the legacy of its theory and practice to 1603, when the Stuarts began co-opting the complex, multifaceted, and contingent, yet discernable, germane, and useful, foundation that the Tudors left behind, poised to survive the regnal divide. * * * The trajectory of Tudor developments in nation and empire is, arguably like all history, a complicated mix of continuity and change. Upon seizing the throne in 1485, Henry VII founded a new regime, a new dynasty, and a new, post-Wars of the Roses polity. Paradoxically, much of what made his kingship new and thus insecure, unstable, or threatened—from a Welsh birth to French exile, executive inexperience, ancillary lineal claim, and pretenders—ultimately sustained and empowered him. Amid these challenges, Henry groped for security and legitimacy; he found it by seeking recourse in precedent, myth, ceremony, and imagery, avant-garde intellectual and cultural currents, marriage diplomacy, consolidation, and centralization. Acutely aware of the validating power of history, ideology, and symbolism, he pushed a reliance on and reverence for a British imperial past—ancient and medieval—and backed fresh western enterprise in Ireland and further afield, across the Atlantic. Melding a profound curiosity for the world beyond England and its archipelago with an overriding concern for their defense, the first Tudor court fashioned and propagated icons and ideas that survived the century: the double rose, domed crown, and red dragon; Arthurian and more broadly British legend; the English vernacular and printing press; the reform of Ireland by English law, custom, and governors; and Atlantic exploration to benefit the commonwealth as well as native “others” elsewhere. Henry VII originated a Tudor dynasty and imperial vision, fostering desire for expansion abroad redoubled via strength at home that his progeny advanced. Quickening and change came first under his son, who was far freer from the constraints of security that hemmed his father in and far more heavily influenced (and emboldened) by the mental world of Renaissance humanism that his father’s court nurtured. Drawing on classical models, medieval conquests and rivalries, and the near example of his immediate predecessor, Henry VIII injected new funds, energy, and personality into the growth of his realm, part and parcel of the original conception of a territorially vast kingdom dictated by sovereign, supreme royal command

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over church and state that he harbored. First appreciable in the 1510s, at the moment when Tournai and Flodden combined with concomitant, related, officially sponsored activity in Ireland and Newfoundland, the second Tudor king crafted a concrete experiment in empire-formation that clarified the meaning, function, and limits of such rule over foreign peoples abroad. Here was a crucial trial that isolated a future route for British growth. The divorce crisis, break with Rome, and protestant reformation fundamentally altered the terrain. Endowed with the sort of supreme, sole authority over all subjects, clerical and lay, that he had flirted with in France and a new church, when Henry VIII returned to overseas exploits, deeply informed by these dramatic transformations and by what previously stymied the realm, his nation had been subjected to new consolidation measures and his kingship had been redefined as expressly imperial. Armed with new power, vocabulary, perceptions of European-wide distinctiveness and superiority, and applied knowledge accrued in the previous decades, the crown and its supporters looked to annex Scotland. Over the 1540s, Henrician and Edwardian writers theorized an empire of Great Britain. Though only ever brought to fruition in the minds of participants and in their texts, the concept crystalized ideas apparent since 1485; this empire too was engineered against an inferior French alternative and meant to improve less civil natives, restore a grandiose historic past, and both replicate and augment a national ideal current in England. Now, however, it was also protestant, explicitly imperial and British, and propagated via a sophisticated polemical literature. The Rough Wooings forged a new discourse promoting these ideas and elevated a circle of scholar-soldier-­ statemen, both of which persisted across the remainder of the century, while also provoking an intensely anti-imperial, counter discourse among its foes. The monarchical and confessional tumult of the second Edwardian regency, Marian regime, and early Elizabethan era triggered a mid-century watershed. At this pivotal juncture, the Auld Alliance partners of Scotland and France receded, and the focus of expansion shifted back toward Ireland, into an expanded New World, and against Spain—a physical reorientation both epitomized and conditioned by the unrequited loss of Calais. In this oddly cohesive three-decade stretch, Tudor energies coalesced around an anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic xenophobic national sentiment, as the specter of global Habsburg hegemony grew. As crown and court deployed Wooings-era ideology to cement a tenuous male minority

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and two female kingships, empire emerged as a silver bullet to reverse ostensible crisis and apparent decay and realize a golden, godly future. As the corpus of imperial literature swelled to include more non-English travel narratives and models, several specific methods of expansion took center stage: the New English colonization of Ireland, collaboration between public and private interests as well as figures and funds, company-­ led adventure, and settlement by religious dissidents. Though not entirely novel to the mid-Tudor period, such plots received greater attention than ever before, a result of state debt, continental European discord, variable foreign alliances, and Irish upheaval. Each mechanism and its cause remained through century’s end. Whereas boiling tensions and outright war prohibited the intense scheming of the 1540s, 1550s, and 1560s from becoming reality, transient moments of calm in Ireland and news of increasing non-English incursions into the Americas provided an outlet. An experimental boom followed, manifesting thirty years of theory. Focused on Ireland, the Northwest Passage and Newfoundland, and Roanoke and undertaken by a tight network of courtly adventurers, the mid-Elizabethan empire put planning into practice—less about created new theory than putting current ideas to work. The chief difference between the late 1570s and 1580s empire and its predecessors was intensity, particularly in terms of militarism and clearly drawn lines of national identity that separated English from Irish and Iberian. These were also kitchen-sink ventures, which combined piracy, trade, garrisoning, mining, colonization, and conversion. As such, with decades of experience behind them, what Elizabethan subjects accomplished—especially in Virginia and Newfoundland—constituted the successful elaboration and pursuit of past plans. These efforts halted abruptly with the opening of outright hostilities against Philip II, the Anglo-Spanish and Anglo-Irish conflicts of Elizabeth’s last decade induced the final evolution of Tudor empire. Marked by amplified resolve, a self-proclaimed and providential protestant invective, glorified reckonings of the British world and the queen, and a (frequently misplaced) sense of indestructability, 1590s developments—most notably voyages aimed at a permanent presence in South America, settlement of protestant dissenters in North America, and the total destruction of intransigent Gaelic and Anglo-Irish subjects—sprang from multi-front war alongside domestic political and religious friction. Again, change existed alongside and in concert with continuity, as Elizabethans resuscitated a latent theme—honor—in retort to the most sustained anti-British

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imperial ideology since the Wooings: the Irish language of faith and fatherland. This critical phase of both plotting and activity provided the mental and geographical space for a Stuart empire based squarely on Tudor thoughts and deeds. * * * In some ways, James’s 1603 accession was reminiscent of Henry’s in 1485, both non-English founders of new monarchies who faced existential threats of war, sought to consolidate their domestic holds, and supported activity abroad. The symmetry was not lost on seventeenth-century commentators, but neither was it simple or straightforward. The early Stuart revision of the Columbus myth illustrates this. Much as Johnson had the first Tudor king refuse the proposal, due to the sailor’s “poore apparell and simple lookes, and for the noueltie of his proposition,” whereby “most men accounted a vayne foole, and vtterly reiected”14 him, so too did colonial prospectors like William Alexander and Robert Gordon—all for rhetorical value.15 Their transmutations bore a grim warning. In Robert Harcourt’s pointed, exemplary rendering, the preface implored readers to treat his discourse in favor of the Guiana project seriously, such that it could “move you to wipe away from your eyes, the cloudie incredulous blindnesse that possessed our forefathers in the dayes of Henry the seuenth, when they reiected the offer made by Bartholomew Columbus, in the behalf of his brother Christopher Columbus, and thereby lost the fruition of those inestimable riches in the West Indies, which now we see possessed by the Spanish Nation”; here was the means by which he did “inuite and summon my Country-men in generall, to rouze vp their valour, to quicken and spurre on their endeuours, to be coadi[…]utors with vs in this action, both of honour and profit.”16 Like the divides that preceded it, the Tudor-­ Stuart chasm signaled continuity as well as change. Henry, his son, and his grandchildren functioned as highly visible, expedience references, tools to judge, applaud, criticize, and manipulate James, his son, and grandsons,

 Johnson, Nova Britannia, sig. B 3r.  Alexander, An Encouragement to Colonies (1624), 6–7; Gordon, Encouragements. For such as shall have intention to bee Vnder-takers in the new plantation of Cape Briton, now New Galloway in America (Edinburgh: 1625), sigs. Cv–C 2r. 16  Harcourt, Relation, sig. [B 4r]. 14 15

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under a cloak of remembrance.17 Nor was James beyond doing this work himself. Three years after it was initially laid to rest next to Henry VII in Westminster Abbey, James reinterred Elizabeth’s body beneath a large tomb bearing her effigy, closed imperial crown, orb, and scepter and situated along the north aisle, with her sister Mary and, from 1612, directly across from her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots.18 A Latin epigraph commemorated the work: “James, king of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, heir to her virtues and kingdoms, to her so well-deserving, dutifully erected this,” glorifying Elizabeth yet privileging James’s greater title.19 It was a monumental political balancing act, as Peter Sherlock has shown, and not unlike the symbolic self-fashioning Henry VII engaged in, yet it required both embracing and rejecting the previous dynasty. Faced with a predecessor who had authorized his mother’s execution, the king and his councilors at once “had to assert the Stuart claim to the kingdom of England” and “demonstrate continuity with the Tudor monarchs”; James “hoped to rewrite the past in his own image.”20 By recalling the past, the Stuarts and their subjects recalled Tudor notions of nation and empire, praised and censured, real and illusory. The endurance of key personnel, texts, and thought merged with shifts brought by or circa the new dynasty, as its members, sycophants, and adversaries refashioned history to suit their ends. Consequently, they perpetuated certain aims, images, and regions of interest and spurned others. Accordingly, and unsurprisingly, mid- and late Elizabethan developments surface most in Jacobean and subsequent conversations. However, the popularity of Henry VII and the Columbus myth and a single, signal reference to Tournai and Flodden suggest that just the 1580s and 1590s were squarely  D.R.  Woolf, “Two Elizabeths? James I and the Late Queen’s Famous Memory,” Canadian Journal of History 20, no. 2 (1985): 167–191; Julia M.  Walker, ed., Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Doran and Freeman, eds., Myth of Elizabeth. 18  Walker, “Reading the Tombs of Elizabeth I,” English Literary Renaissance 26, no. 3 (1996): 510–530; Walker, The Elizabethan Icon, 1603–2003 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Peter Sherlock, “The Monuments of Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart: King James and the Manipulation of Memory,” Journal of British Studies 46, no. 2 (2007): 263–289. 19  Sherlock, “Monuments,” 278. 20  Sherlock, “Monuments,” 263, 266. 17

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rooted in earlier experiences, so too did the seventeenth-century observers look back, to a vibrant, sixteenth-century Atlantic world. Their acknowledgment of this history, at moments so often cited, even revered, as the genesis of Britain and the British Empire, demands that we do too.

Index1

A Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome (1533), 1, 150 Americas, 8, 13, 16, 25, 29–31, 66, 71, 84, 90, 109, 120, 135, 144, 152, 156, 157, 209, 213, 214, 225, 226, 232, 252, 255, 266, 293, 299, 302, 307, 310, 324, 325, 341, 350, 351, 359, 362, 383, 384, 400 André, Bernard, 46, 50, 51, 51n65, 53, 91, 102 Armada (Spanish), 30, 271, 272, 327–330, 336–339, 341, 343, 348, 353, 386 Arthur, 22, 23, 26, 41, 46, 47, 50, 52, 56, 64, 67, 69, 80, 85, 91, 137, 151, 200, 229, 289, 299, 339 Arthur Tudor, 35, 47, 67, 93 Auld Alliance, 27, 98, 152, 166, 179, 184, 238, 248, 399

B Barlow, Roger, 143n323, 169, 170 Basanier, Martin, 269–271, 269n1, 323 Beacon, Richard, 377, 378, 380–383 Beaufort, Margaret, 26, 34, 38, 49, 50, 52 Bellingham, Edward, 190, 191, 215, 217, 282 Blount, Charles, 8th Baron Mountjoy, 375 Blount, William, 4th Baron Mountjoy, 85, 109 Bodrugan, Nicholas, 76, 199–201 Boleyn, Anne, 2, 154 Bosworth Field, Battle of, 25, 36 Boulogne, 11, 171, 179, 184, 186, 187n253, 190, 191, 216, 237 Bristol, 22, 35, 45, 56, 65, 66, 70, 77–79, 169, 298, 306, 318, 344, 346, 390 Brownists, 333, 348, 349, 391

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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406 

INDEX

Brutus, 22, 23, 41, 52, 64, 76, 91, 100, 173, 188, 192, 200, 202, 245, 289, 299, 380, 381 C Cabot, John, 26, 35, 67, 77–80, 82, 83, 212, 222, 222n64, 240–242, 240n148, 253, 254, 299, 300, 303, 307, 308, 310, 315, 323, 324, 353, 397 Cabot, Sebastian, 68n166, 80n227, 83, 84, 141, 142, 143n323, 144, 156, 169, 186, 220, 221, 313 Cadwallader, 3, 22, 26, 41, 42, 52, 64 Caesar, 45, 47, 50, 64, 91, 102, 105, 111, 112, 137, 160, 199, 202, 230, 231, 291, 323 Calais, 13, 29, 38, 43, 60, 63, 65, 66, 67n164, 90n7, 91, 95–97, 96n35, 108, 109, 113, 117, 124, 127, 151, 156, 170, 171, 186, 190, 191, 206, 214, 215, 217, 242–244, 249, 250n186, 251, 258, 263, 265, 278, 288, 324, 326, 359, 365, 366, 366n191, 399 Campion, Edmund, 55, 284, 288–290, 378 Carleill, Christopher, 306, 307, 311, 315, 327 Cecil, Robert, 21, 31, 194, 333, 350 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley, 151, 189, 209, 214, 220, 245, 248–251, 254, 257, 258, 260, 264, 265, 274, 275, 334–336, 342, 345, 347, 350, 354, 355, 359–361, 364, 369, 371, 372, 382, 384–386, 390, 391, 393 Chapuys, Eustace, 2, 171, 185 Charles V, 92, 137, 143, 160, 169, 202, 226

Church of England, 2, 31, 153, 156, 224, 306, 309, 378, 395 Columbus, Christopher, 35, 70, 78, 212, 254, 298, 311, 316, 357, 396, 397, 401, 402 Connaught, 60, 219, 286, 365 Cranmer, Thomas, 149, 153, 157, 198, 206, 214 Croft, James, 216–218, 220, 220n53, 227, 248, 381 Cromwell, Thomas, 89, 141, 145, 147, 153, 157, 163, 167, 169, 205, 218 D Davis, John, 312, 327, 331, 339 Dee, John, 14, 29, 82, 150–153, 208, 255, 296, 296n224, 298, 299, 299n246, 302–304, 312, 379, 385 Derricke, John, 284, 288, 290 Desmond Rebellion, first, 28, 212, 265, 276 Devereux, Robert, 2nd Earl of Essex, 342 Drake, Francis, 29, 151, 253, 276, 283, 303, 304, 311, 314, 315, 317, 335, 340 Dudley, John, 1st Duke of Northumberland, 175, 176, 209, 209n1 E Eden, Richard, 141, 209–212, 214, 222, 240–242, 245, 250, 266, 313, 324, 339, 386 Edward I, 52, 90, 91, 140, 151, 154, 174, 188, 299 Edward III, 38, 52, 61, 61n129, 90, 95, 97, 119, 154, 174, 230, 291

 INDEX 

Edward VI, 20, 23, 27–29, 51n65, 57, 76, 152, 188, 192, 201, 210, 232, 237, 241, 246n169, 313, 371, 397 Elder, John, 177–179, 229–231 Elizabeth I, 2, 3, 20, 28, 51n65, 210, 270, 390, 391, 397 Elizabeth of York, 38, 42, 44 Erasmus, Desiderius, 86, 110, 110n132, 112 F Ferdinand of Aragon, 33 Fitzgerald, Gerald, 9th Earl of Kildare, 118, 191 Fitzwilliam, William, 239, 275, 276, 280, 281, 364 Flodden Field, Battle of, 27, 89, 90, 98, 100, 102, 147, 152, 173, 175, 192, 397, 399, 402 France, 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 13, 18, 21, 25–27, 29, 33, 34, 36–43, 52, 53, 60, 63, 64, 67, 68n165, 68n168, 70, 71, 73, 74, 86, 89–94, 90n7, 96, 98, 100, 100n72, 102–107, 109, 112, 114, 117–119, 121, 124, 130, 134–136, 143, 151, 152, 154, 161, 163, 166–171, 174, 176–181, 185, 186, 188, 193, 196n303, 197, 199, 199n321, 200, 202–204, 207, 213–215, 217, 223, 225, 227, 232, 236, 242, 243, 248–253, 258, 263–265, 278, 288, 288n139, 293, 299, 301, 306, 319, 324, 334, 343, 368, 373, 382, 394, 397, 399, 402 Francis I, 27, 92, 104, 160

407

Frobisher, Martin, 16, 29, 144, 151, 295–299, 296n224, 301, 304, 311, 315, 318, 324, 327, 331, 342, 353, 362, 384 G Geoffrey of Monmouth (Galfridian), 41, 51, 51n68, 52, 55, 65, 67, 72, 145, 192, 289, 339 Gilbert, Humphrey, 29, 151, 251, 254, 255, 260–265, 271, 272, 274, 282, 294–296, 299–306, 308–310, 314, 315, 331, 345, 353, 371, 384, 393 Gilbert, John, 358n142, 363n170 Gosnold, Bartholomew, 388–391 Grenville, Richard, 261, 296, 313, 314, 318, 319, 321, 324, 326, 327, 340, 341 Grey, Arthur, 14th Baron Grey de Wilton, 291, 293–295, 372, 379 Grey, Leonard, 161, 163 Guiana, 4, 17, 18, 21, 31, 106, 331, 335–337, 337n19, 340–343, 350, 352, 354, 356–359, 362–364, 386, 389, 391–394, 397, 401 H Hacket, Thomas, 253, 265, 266, 352 Hakluyt, Richard, 14, 29, 66, 66n159, 141, 143, 143n323, 144, 157, 220, 269, 270, 298, 303, 307–309, 314–317, 322–324, 331, 339–344, 347, 349, 351, 352, 361, 384, 385, 388, 390 Hakluyt, Richard, the elder, 156, 389 Hariot, Thomas, 385, 388, 389 Hawkins, John, 253, 266, 298, 308, 311, 314, 315, 335, 354, 358, 386

408 

INDEX

Hayes, Edward, 302, 309, 311, 359, 388, 389 Henrisoun (Harrison), James, 24, 191–196, 198, 204 Henry II, 12, 52, 55, 61n129, 72, 164, 174, 188, 191, 234, 289–291, 369, 380, 383 Henry V, 52, 90, 91, 174 Henry VII, 3, 12n16, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 46–48, 52, 54, 57, 60, 63, 65–68, 72, 76, 84, 86, 90, 91, 93, 109, 130, 145, 154, 173, 211, 214, 222, 230, 245, 254, 302, 307, 323, 331, 341, 365, 385, 397, 398, 402 Henry VIII, 3, 11, 20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 37, 51, 51n65, 51n70, 60, 82, 85, 86, 89–91, 93, 94, 98, 101, 119, 144, 149, 152, 154, 192, 206, 211, 230, 232, 234, 245, 246n169, 253, 288, 289, 291, 307, 313, 323, 331, 371, 397–399 Herbert, William, 377–383, 379n281 Holinshed, Raphael, 58, 188, 284, 288, 289, 294, 324 Hore, Richard, 156, 157, 165, 339 Howard, Thomas, Earl of Surrey and 3rd Duke of Norfolk, 92, 138, 172 Humanism, 15, 36, 51, 110, 112, 151, 377, 398 I Imperial crown, 3, 45, 68, 70, 86, 99, 102, 137, 170, 175, 192, 214, 224, 231, 244, 284, 299n246, 330, 378, 402 Ireland, 2, 36, 89, 151, 213, 270, 334, 397 Isabella of Castile, 33

J James III, 59, 99 James IV, 24, 27, 33, 43, 59, 71, 72n183, 75, 89, 93, 94, 98, 99, 101, 102, 173, 397 James V, 27, 97, 103, 133, 160, 175 James VI & I, 30, 31, 76, 391, 395 Johnson, George, 349 Johnson, Robert, 395–397, 401 K Katherine of Aragon, 35, 68n168, 93, 153 Keymis, Lawrence, 358, 360, 361, 393, 394 Knox, John, 208, 248 L Lamb, William, 201–203, 201n333 Lane, Ralph, 270, 318–322, 324, 327, 341, 371 Leigh, Charles, 347–350, 363, 391–393 Leinster, 170, 217, 218, 220, 235, 238, 292, 375 Leix (Laois), 29, 159, 190, 215–218, 225, 235, 238, 239, 247, 248, 256, 257, 287, 378, 381 Leland, John, 47, 50, 52n72, 187, 188, 242, 289, 291, 339 Leo X, Pope, 102, 132 Ley, John, 362, 363 Llwyd, Humphrey, 24, 244, 339 Louis XII, King of France, 27, 33, 92, 93, 97 M Madoc, 22, 23, 244, 299, 310, 316, 331, 339, 378 Mair (Major), John, 24, 145–147, 164, 178

 INDEX 

Margaret Tudor, 99, 173 Mary I, 20, 28, 29, 208–210, 299, 371, 397 Mary, Queen of Scots, 27, 152, 175, 177, 179, 199, 199n321, 208, 213n18, 222–225, 222n64, 227–232, 235, 237, 238, 241–244, 246n169, 249, 252, 256, 267, 293, 322–324, 350, 353, 366, 402 Mary Tudor, 165, 166 More, Thomas, 110, 111, 120, 202, 255, 279, 282, 309, 319 Munster, 18, 60, 158, 217–220, 235, 257, 260n235, 261, 262, 264, 271, 274, 282, 283, 285, 286, 292, 302, 325, 325n436, 326, 331, 337, 341, 364, 365, 375, 376, 379, 379n281 Muscovy Company, 29, 82, 222n64, 241, 251, 255, 306 N The Netherlands, 6, 71, 266, 293, 306, 382 Newfoundland, 4, 17, 18, 26–29, 31, 81, 82, 84, 143, 144, 156, 157, 169, 176, 244, 250, 252, 253, 270, 271, 295, 298, 309, 312, 316, 321, 328, 330, 337, 340, 343–349, 353, 359, 362, 367, 391, 393, 394, 397, 399, 400 Nine Years War, 30, 367 Northwest Passage, 30, 81, 83, 120, 170, 254, 265, 271, 272, 296, 312n341, 313, 330, 400 O Offaly, 29, 190, 215–218, 225, 235, 238, 239, 247, 248, 256, 287, 378, 381

409

O’Neill, Hugh, Earl of Tyrone, 24, 172, 367 O’Neill, Shane, 247, 252, 257, 258, 260, 284, 288 P Parkhurst, Anthony, 296, 298, 299, 311 Parliament, 3, 12, 28, 34, 43, 44, 48, 49, 57, 58, 60–63, 65, 66, 70, 72, 87, 87n1, 90, 94–96, 99, 108, 119, 123, 125, 128, 138, 150, 153–157, 159, 161, 179, 197, 208, 223, 228, 229, 232, 239, 245–247, 251, 255, 257, 264, 265, 296n223, 304, 330, 333, 334, 346, 350, 351, 387 Peckham, George, 304, 309–311, 361 Philip II, 30, 209, 400 Pope, 2, 55, 58, 93, 94, 134, 135, 137, 160, 161, 167n91, 172, 191, 233, 248, 273, 292, 293, 300, 314, 328, 351, 358, 365, 369, 376, 382, 384 Portugal, 6, 65, 68, 68n168, 81, 82, 254, 295, 304 Poynings, Edward, 26, 60–64, 109, 113, 114, 118, 122, 159, 259 R Radcliffe, Thomas, 3rd Earl of Sussex, 237 Ralegh, Walter, 29–31, 106, 269–272, 284, 294, 295, 302, 312, 314, 315, 317, 318, 321, 323–325, 327, 331, 333–336, 341–343, 346, 347, 350–364, 362n169, 369, 379, 384, 386, 388–394, 397 Rastell, John, 120, 121, 137, 137n291, 142, 156, 169

410 

INDEX

Reformation, 2, 8, 13, 15, 153, 161, 170, 193, 202, 234, 245, 274, 283, 284, 294, 382, 397, 399 Rich, Barnaby, 293 Richard III, 22, 36, 37, 37n2, 39, 56, 65, 73 Roanoke, 17, 29, 30, 270–273, 272n8, 319–321, 325–327, 330, 337, 340, 348, 353, 355, 385, 400 Roman Catholic Church, 2 Rough Wooings, 23, 27, 76, 152, 153, 165, 173, 207, 214, 272, 397, 399 Royal Supremacy, 27, 153, 155, 163, 205, 235 Russell, William, 362, 365 S Sadler, Ralph, 149, 168, 179, 181, 182, 184, 185, 207, 208, 246 St. Leger, Anthony, 163, 164, 176, 185–187, 190, 196n303, 215–218, 234, 235, 237 Scotland, 3, 33, 89, 149–208, 213, 272, 336, 397 Seymour, Edward, 1st Duke of Somerset, 23, 149, 200 Sidney, Henry, 29, 237, 239, 246, 256–258, 260–262, 264–266, 271, 271n6, 271n7, 274, 274n12, 276, 281, 283–292, 295, 296, 299, 353 Sidney, Philip, 292, 307, 310, 315, 326 Simnel, Lambert, 57, 57n102, 58, 73 Skeffington, William, 159, 160, 163 Smerwick, 294, 295, 327, 379 Smith, Thomas, 50, 151, 189, 195, 200, 209, 245, 263–265, 277–282, 319 Spain, 6, 30, 34, 35, 54, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 77, 84, 93, 94n25, 141,

160, 202, 209, 211, 212, 226, 233, 240, 250, 252, 254, 258, 260, 266, 272, 276, 283, 311, 317–319, 329, 330, 333, 338–340, 342, 349–351, 359, 361, 366–368, 366n191, 380, 382, 383, 386, 388, 391, 399 Spenser, Edmund, 293, 295, 372, 377–383, 377n271, 379n281 T Thorne, Robert, 82, 142–144, 143n323, 169, 299, 307 Tournai, 21, 26, 27, 89, 90, 90–91n7, 97, 101, 102, 104n103, 105–115, 112n146, 117, 118, 121–134, 125n219, 136, 137, 139, 140, 143, 147, 152, 154, 214, 235, 243, 272, 317, 397, 399, 402 Tremayne, Edmund, 265, 276, 277, 283, 285, 302 U Ulster, 18, 158, 159, 217–219, 238, 247, 257, 260–262, 271, 274, 280, 281, 284, 286, 289, 293, 305, 326, 331, 337, 366, 373, 376 Utopia (1516), 110 V Vergil, Polydore, 41, 50, 52, 52n72, 53, 57n102, 58, 62, 75, 77, 92, 109n127, 255 Virginia, 4, 15, 18, 21, 31, 270, 272, 314, 315, 316n370, 318–321, 323–325, 325n431, 327, 328, 333, 337, 340, 343, 353, 364, 385, 390, 391, 394, 395, 397, 400

 INDEX 

W Wales, 3, 10, 12, 16, 22, 23, 27, 35–39, 41, 42, 42n22, 51–53, 55, 64–66, 72, 73, 86, 119, 140, 146, 151, 152, 155, 157, 164, 169, 170, 174, 188, 193, 205, 206, 214, 220, 223, 226n88, 232, 248, 256, 273, 275, 282, 286, 289, 337, 339, 379, 397 Walshe, Edward, 65, 219, 219n49 Walshe, Thomas, 219, 220, 234, 282 Walsingham, Francis, 284, 294, 302, 305–308, 311, 312, 339, 340, 342, 345 Warbeck, Perkin, 71–74, 79, 105

411

Wedderburn, Robert, 24, 203 White, John, 318, 320, 321, 324, 325, 327, 328, 341, 385, 397 White, Nicholas, 295 White, Rowland, 258, 259, 264, 265, 276, 282, 283 Whitgift, John, 342, 345, 346 Wolsey, Thomas, 102n87, 104n103, 107, 114, 117, 129, 132–134, 136, 138, 139, 141, 144, 205 Worcestre, William, 56, 64, 64n148, 65 Wyatt, Thomas, 227, 228, 242, 243, 276