THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

it a firm sense of England as a nation state. With the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England in 1603
that sense of national consciousness was extended to embrace the entire island of Britain. When Calais, the last relic
of English domination of France and the symbol of Edward III’s victory at Crecy and Henry V’s at Agincourt, fell in
January 1558 its loss finally exposed the hollowness of the Plantagenet claim to the French Crown. It also, willy-nilly,
enforced the idea of the insular sovereignty of the Tudors and of their Stuart successors.
King Henry VIII’s ‘imperial’ sovereignty, his declaration of independence from papal overlordship, had been
asserted in 1533 in the preamble to the Act of Parliament which announced the advent of the English Reformation. By
this ‘Act in Restraint of Appeals’, Parliament cut off future legal reference to the superior authority of Rome and
proclaimed that England was ruled by ‘one supreme head and king’ who governed without interference from ‘any
foreign princes or potentates’. Given the assertion that the islands of Britain and Ireland represented a law unto
themselves, and given the claims of the Tudor monarchs to an imperial sovereignty, the process of extending the
political influence of the kings of England was pursued with a particular reforming vigour by the ministers and
servants of the Crown. Hand in hand with this process went the imposition of the English language as it was spoken
and written at court. In 1536, for example, the reform of Welsh legal procedure culminated in what was effectively an
act of union between England and Wales. In 1543 the union was reinforced when Wales was organized into twelve
counties on the English model, English common law was introduced, and seats
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in the Westminster Parliament allocated. By these Acts of Parliament the status of Wales changed from that of an
occupied province to that of an integral part of a single (English) realm. The privileges accorded to English customs
and to the English language in Wales were even more emphatically enforced in the linguistically and culturally
divided Ireland. Gaelic Ireland, stretching beyond the Pale of Dublin and its seaboard, was gradually coerced into
submission to English concepts of good manners and good government. An Act of 1537 ordered all the inhabitants of
the island to speak the language of its rulers and to adopt English styles of dress. For much of the rest of the century
English ‘civilization’ was to be imposed by armies rather than by laws and by attempts to extirpate Gaelic society
rather than to transform it.
The would-be ‘imperial’ dynastic relations of the Tudor monarchs with the still independent Kingdom of Scotland
proved as fraught as their attempts to subdue Ireland. King Henry VII’s bid for a lasting peace with his northern
neighbour, cemented by the marriage of his daughter to James IV, floundered when Scotland reaffirmed its useful
‘auld alliance’ with France, and suffered a crushing defeat at the battle of Flodden in 1513. When in 1542 Henry VIII
attempted to forge a Protestant alliance by marrying his son Edward to the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, his ambition
was effectively countered by the opposition of a Francophile party in Scotland. This same Mary, as a direct descendant
of the first of the Tudors and as the prime Catholic claimant to the English throne, proved to be a thorn in the side of
the ministers of the last Tudor, the childless upholder of a new Protestant order, Elizabeth I. It was, however, Mary
Stuart’s Protestant son and Elizabeth’s godson, James VI, who was ultimately to unite the Crowns of England and
Scotland as Elizabeth’s approved successor in 1603.
For James VI and I and his often imaginative panegyrists, the emergence of what the King was proud to style
‘Great Britain’ seemed to be the fulfilment of an Arthurian dream of an independent and unified island. ‘Great
Britain’ was also viewed as a restoration of the lost order originally given to the nation by its mythical founders, the
followers of the Trojan refugee prince, Brutus. As King James entered his English capital in state in March 1604 he
was greeted by specially erected triumphal arches, whose iconography reminded him of his supposed Trojan ancestry
and fancifully welcomed him to a new Troy (‘Troynovant’). The entertainments and pageants written for the same
occasion by the playwrights Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson reinforced these elaborate fancies with a series of
scholarly parallels and intellectual conceits. One of the speeches in Dekker’s Magnificent Entertainment spoke of
James and his realm as
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so rich an Empyre, whose fayre brest,
Contaynes foure Kingdomes by your entrance blest
By Brute divided, but by you alone,
All are againe united and made One,
Whose fruitfull glories shine so far and even,
They touch not onely earth, but they kisse heaven.
The myth of a restored, integral, and independent Britain, first fostered by the usurping and expansionist Tudor
dynasty, continued to sustain the optimistic but increasingly unsteadily based pageantry of the early Stuarts. ‘Great