Tudor Empire The Making of Early Modern Britain and The British Atlantic World 1485 1603 Jessica S Hower All Chapter

Tudor Empire: The Making of Early
Modern Britain and the British Atlantic

World, 1485-1603 Jessica S. Hower
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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 cen-
tury 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 (martin.farr@newcastle.ac.uk) 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 (ezuelow@une.edu) 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

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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 prod-
uct. From 2006 to 2020, I received invaluable aid in the form of fellow-
ships 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 orga-
nizations 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 stok-
ing, sustaining, and honing my interests in the British World through col-
lege 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 histo-
rian 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
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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 provid-
ing 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 immeasur-
ably 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, how-
ever, 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
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
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 cham-
pioning of this book and your efforts to make it as strong as it could pos-
sibly 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
xi
xii Contents
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 them-
selves 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 mani-

festly 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 1

Switzerland AG 2020
J. S. Hower, Tudor Empire, Britain and the World,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62892-5_1
2 J. S. HOWER
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).
1 INTRODUCTION: “THIS REALME OF ENGLOND IS AN IMPIRE” 3
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 flank-
ing 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 back-
ground, 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 sover-
eign entity beholden to no foreign potentate, temporal or spiritual. It also
reflected the territorially expansion vision—if not reality—of Tudor king-
ship. 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 rein-
forcing. A critical tool of Tudor statecraft, the statute responded to exi-
gencies 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 narra-
tive of the era that focuses simultaneously on another facet of the British
4 J. S. HOWER
past that has exercised a powerful grip on writers and audiences: imperial-
ism. 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 concur-
rent, intertwined, and mutually reinforcing. I explore these knotted histo-
ries of British nation- and empire-building by examining the ventures
undertaken by the Tudor crown and its subjects in six settings crisscross-
ing 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 unim-
portant 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 mod-
ern 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 endeav-
ors, 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 chal-
lenges the insularity and traditional periodization of the third, ultimately
demonstrating the new, significant narrative that comes from merging
the three.
In recent decades, scholars from across disciplines have completely
transformed understandings of imperialism. Literature on the British
Empire in particular has disrupted the once-unambiguous distinctions
between metropole and colony, center and periphery, perceptions of the
colonizer-colonized as simple or unidirectional from ostensibly superior,
civilized colonizer to inferior, savage colonized, and assumptions of

unquestioned British hegemony. The “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 practi-
tioners 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 impor-
tant 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 centu-
ries. 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 under-
standings 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).
6 J. S. HOWER
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 con-
temporary, rival empires Spain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands; in
a seminal critique, it has even encouraged some to embrace an even big-
ger, 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 enter-
prise 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).
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 com-
plete, British colonial possessions and populations increased, and perma-
nent 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 six-
teenth 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 Many-
Headed 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).
8 J. S. HOWER
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 “expand-
ing zone of cultural conflict and creation” in the Atlantic world and even-
tually 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
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 domes-
tic history and union of the New British History with Atlantic History”
for a century (the sixteenth) that has eluded three of these four catego-
ries.10 This is particularly crucial for Tudor Studies, which is locked in a
stubborn attachment to the domestic narrative. Larger-than-life personali-
ties coupled with all-consuming debates over church, court, and parlia-
mentary 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 man-
tle has taken root, toward the new British history and against English
exceptionalism. Mapping the networks that bound England to its neigh-
bors, this work has elevated the importance of political culture, high-
lighted the use of images and icons to express power, and situated the
Tudor court as part of a Renaissance European milieu of mentalities, cir-
cles, 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,
10 J. S. HOWER
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
identity and nationhood, like Colin Kidd, have demonstrated, without

slipping into anachronism, that such sentiments did exist in the early mod-
ern period, best understood as a plural blend of national identity and sen-
sibility, 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.
12 J. S. HOWER
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 concep-
tion, 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 fourteenth-
and 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
Nevertheless, the relative stability of British borders after 1450, the inter-
nal struggles faced by the English and Scottish kings in the fifteenth cen-
tury, 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 appreciat-
ing 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 encour-
aged, 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.1500-
c.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).
14 J. S. HOWER
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 sover-
eignty and jurisdiction of that single authority, a caesaropapal head
uninhibited by external powers or internal rivals (befitting the Latin dic-
tum, 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, expan-
sionary in its aspirations.23 To return to Pagden’s perfect phrasing, “all of
these meanings of imperium survive, and sometimes combine, through-
out 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 mon-
archies, 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 chron-
icles, anthologies, and other forms of literature, to coinage, flags, and
21
Pagden, Lords of All, 6, 11.
22
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.
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 impe-
rial 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 under-
stood in those terms (a duty to exercise virtue in active pursuit of the good
of the commonwealth) rather than simple commerce, profit, and posses-
sion 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 geo-
graphical 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 ear-
nest until the mid-sixteenth century or later, evincing the general reluc-
tance 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.
16 J. S. HOWER
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 fundamen-
tally 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 contempo-
rary 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
30
Armitage, Ideological Origins, 8, 7.
31
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.
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 mili-
tary 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, complex-
ity, 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 weak-
nesses and they are, much as in the case of the intellectual histories, chron-
ological, 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.
18 J. S. HOWER
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 straight-
forward in its west-looking, outward thrust of nearly wholesale transfer-
ence, 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, indi-
viduals, and exercises, and thus transforms Elizabethan Ireland from gen-
esis 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 narra-
tive, 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.
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, multifac-
eted, and holistic history stretching from the late fifteenth century for-
ward; 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 domes-
tic 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 tan-
dem with paintings, coinage, and other material artifacts. My study hinges
on a close, serious reading of imperial plots, especially those that ostensi-
bly 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 devel-
opments; 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 insular-
ity, 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 impe-
rialism 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 multi-
ple, 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 activ-
ity 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
20 J. S. HOWER
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 assess-
ments, even if those same projects they have been devalued by later schol-
ars. 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, undertak-
ings 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 tran-
scend entrenched divisions and rethink how the sixteenth century is peri-
odized in a novel way, another important contribution to Tudor Studies.
Overwhelmingly, the field is written according to reign, religion, or gen-
der: 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 occa-
sional 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 excep-
tions 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).
together national and international, pivoting from location to location,

this book challenges such traditional, easy narratives and finds new, inter-
esting 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 colo-
nist. Even specific enterprises under their command were subject to out-
side 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 cir-
cumstances 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 legiti-
macy 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, parliamen-
tarians, diplomats, lawyers, scholars, clergymen, merchants, sailors, pilots,
and adventurers that stretched well beyond London or England. They
shared multiple connections—political, social, financial, personal, intellec-
tual—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
22 J. S. HOWER
Country merchants out of Bristol and their London counterparts, com-

peted for a piece of the action. Moreover, at no point was national senti-
ment or imperial trial dictated solely by or from the metropole. This book
examines the balance of power within this network, the ideas that circu-
lated 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 mythol-
ogy, 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 por-
traying 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
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 coinciden-
tally, 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 accu-
rately reflects the physical space that the Tudor crown claimed. By appeal-
ing 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 circum-
spect 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 prede-
cessor’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
24 J. S. HOWER
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 dia-
logue. 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 cen-
tury, 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
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 con-
tinental 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
26 J. S. HOWER
unearth the British and imperial dimensions of his reign. I argue that
armed with his half-Welsh parentage, the scholarly and spiritual inclina-
tions of his mother Margaret Beaufort, and his experience in France, the
first Tudor embarked on a successful program of defense and consolida-
tion 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 mercan-
tile interests and, together, they originated a Tudor imperial vision. In his
quest for stability, solvency, and support, the king exhibited a truly offen-
sive, active expansionary posture on both sides of the Atlantic. The plots
that he conceived of and backed set powerful precedents and accrued valu-
able 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
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 overwhelm-
ingly 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 activ-
ity 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 bor-
der 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 sub-
ject of Chap. 4. When the public and, indeed, many scholars and students
think of Henry VIII and ardent courtship, the king’s six wives immedi-
ately 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
28 J. S. HOWER
Newfoundland into the picture shows, the fight brought English and
Scottish observers into conversation about the nature of Britain and impe-
rium, originating the concept of an empire of Great Britain and crystalliz-
ing the image of a Tudor empire that was explicitly British, Protestant,
sovereign, expansionary, and pursued by word and sword. It was an ideo-
logical 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 bear-
ing 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 dura-
bility 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, par-
liament, literati, and merchant interests, the crown and its subjects ush-
ered in a new phase of British nation- and empire-building marked by a
mix of continuity and change in direction, objectives, and sponsorship:
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 toe-
hold, 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 pur-
suit 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 ser-
vants 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 mon-
umental 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 geographi-
cal 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
30 J. S. HOWER
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, demonstrat-
ing 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 con-
sidered 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 criti-
cal 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
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 dissi-
dents 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 inheri-
tance, 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 con-
tinuity and borrowing. Rather, I show how Stuart theorists and adventur-
ers 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, par-
liamentary act that asserted empire, the internal affairs of England cannot
be understood without looking further, to the rest of the Isles, to conti-
nental Europe, and to the Americas. This wider view changes our under-
standing 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, tribula-
tions, 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) perspec-
tive at a pivotal moment, Pedro de Ayala’s remarks are telling, his empha-
ses 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 king-
doms 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 33

Switzerland AG 2020
J. S. Hower, Tudor Empire, Britain and the World,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62892-5_2
34 J. S. HOWER
“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, bel-
licose, and too courageous—significant issues for a naturally poor, indo-
lent, 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 “undis-
puted, 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, with-
out equal.” While Henry looked for peace with Scotland and Europe,
even if it meant strengthening the Stewart House, his people were resent-
ful 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 exces-
sive 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,
2 “THE DIRECTION WHICH THEY LOOK, AND THE DISTANCE THEY SAILED”… 35
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 ambas-
sador 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 estab-
lished 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 contin-
ued their overseas probing. Through the eyes of the most powerful mon-
archy 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.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sunfire!
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Sunfire!
Author: Edmond Hamilton
Illustrator: Virgil Finlay
Release date: November 20, 2023 [eBook #72181]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company,

1962
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUNFIRE! ***

SUNFIRE!
By EDMOND HAMILTON
Illustrated by FINLAY
He was walking in the pine grove, with

the resinous smell of the trees in his
nostrils. Once he had met a smell
vaguely like it, far away from Earth.
Forget about that, a voice said in his
mind, but he would never forget.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Amazing Stories September 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Everything in the old house seemed just the same as it had been
before he went to space.
It was incredible, thought Hugh Kellard, standing in the front hall and
looking around the silent, sunlit rooms, how little it had changed. The
life was gone out of it now, all the people and voices and the comings
and goings when his grandfather still lived and he had visited here.
But that had been long ago, and he was amazed that so much
remained still untouched.
"Like travelling into the past," thought Kellard, "to come back to this
part of Earth."
He was tired, in body and mind and nerve, and he stood for a while,
just staring. The agent who cared for the old place had let him in and
gone away, and there was not a sound in the house. He walked into
the living-room where his grandfather's desk still stood beneath a
window, and looked out. The window faced northward, along the
California coastal cliffs that run north along Morro Bay to Big Sur. The
Pacific foamed and surged against the huge broken stones beneath
the cliffs, and the hills, somber now with a tinge of autumn,
shouldered massively up toward the east from the cliff road. It all
looked as lonely as ever, no other houses in sight but this gray,
weatherbeaten house that had faced the sea-wind and the sea-fog for
over a hundred years.
Kellard walked back along the hall. On its walls still hung the ornately
framed family photographs which his grandfather had stubbornly kept
in place. His great-grandfather, and his great-aunt something, and all
the rest of them, on back into the shadows. They were all there, they
had not been touched, nothing in the house had been touched, just
as his grandfather's will had enjoined. Keep the old house, he had
said. Some of the family will be back some day.
The old man had been right, he thought. One of the family had come
back at last, one who had roamed farther than almost anybody on
Earth.
"But that's all done with," he told himself. "Here I am, and here I stay.
I'm through with space."
He started through the rooms, opening windows, letting in light and

air. The furniture was faded and old-fashioned, but the place was not
dusty, the agent had seen that it was kept in shape. Kellard picked
one of the big upstairs bedrooms for himself, and brought in the
blankets and cartons and luggage from the car. He went into the
utility room and turned on the power-unit, remembering as he did so
how his grandfather had disliked and distrusted the unit, how he had
refused to have one until the electric wires were all gone and there
was no other way to get power. He checked the stove and freezer,
shoved his cartons of food into the latter, and then looked around and
wondered what to do next.
Standing in the silent house, he wondered suddenly if he had been
foolish to quit everything and come back to Earth and this old place?
No, he thought heavily. Mercury ended it for me. I made my decision
and that is that. Forget it.
He strode abruptly out of the house and started walking. And after a
little while the dark weight in his mind, the somber knowledge, faded
and receded in the new-found, old-remembered interest of the things
about him.
His way took him across the road, past the shabby barns and up
sloping pastures where once his grandfather had kept the fine horses
he bred. Then he was in among the pines, climbing more steeply, with
the resinous smell of the trees strong in his nostrils. That smell he
had never forgotten, and once he had met a smell vaguely like it, far
away from Earth—
Forget all that, Kellard.
The trees took him in and he walked through a dapple of sun and
shadows. A deer slipped away through the pines ahead of him, and
quail burst up from almost under his feet. He remembered a grove of
bigger pines farther up the slope, and an old man and a boy walking
up to them. How long ago was that? He had been fifteen—and he
was thirty-two now. Seventeen years. Still, he thought he could find
the place.
He found it. The big pines were still there, for people did not use
wood much any more. The rough dark giants stood at dignified
intervals from each other, and he sat down with his back against the
massive trunk of the biggest.
Funny, he thought. When I was a boy sitting here dreaming about the
future and what I was going to do, I never once imagined that some
things would stay much the same. The whole world would somehow
be miraculously transformed—but it wasn't. This tree was here when
men first reached the Moon, and Mars, and Venus and the rest, but it
didn't know about that, it didn't change because of it.
Kellard sat for a long time, still wrapped in a gray weariness, his
emotions in a numb trance. He sat listening to the distant, uneasy
murmur of the sea, until the sunset light shafting through the trees
dazzled his eyes, and then he got up and went back down to the
house. He heated food, ate it, and then went out to the porch in front
of the house and sat watching the sun sink toward the vast golden
sheet of the Pacific. He thought of the little dot close to the sun that
he could not see, the little world and the strange, terrible place upon it
where Morse and Binetti had died.
The telephone rang.
Kellard did not stir, and it rang and rang again.
Go ahead and ring your head off, he thought. You're not getting me
back. I told you. I've had it.
The ringing stopped. The sun sank and darkness came with the hosts
of wheeling stars, and there was no sound but the vast voices rolling
in from sea, as Kellard sat staring and drinking.
He finally got up, as the fog started coming in. He moved with gravity,
feeling much better. He went in and turned on the lights, and then
looked at the faces that stared from the long row of framed
photographs.
He raised the bottle to them in a gesture of salutation.
"You see, Kellards, that your prodigal son—or great-grandson—has
come home again from space."
He gravely drank, and continued to stand looking along the faded
faces.
"You were lucky—you know that? Back in your time, there were
hopes, and dreams, and man's road would go on forever, from
triumph to triumph everlasting. But that road was a blind alley, all the
time, even if I'm the only one who knows it."
The faces looked back at him, unchanging, but he read reproach in
their steady gaze, their lined features.
"I'm sorry," said Kellard. "You had your own troubles, I know. I
apologize, Kellards. I am very tired and a little drunk, and I am going
to bed."
The next morning he was making coffee when there came a banging
of the old-fashioned knocker on the front door. A certain tightness
came into Kellard's face. He had expected them to send some one.
He had not expected the man who stood at the door. He was not in
Survey uniform, although he was the highest brass there was. He
was a big, slow-moving man with a heavy face and blue eyes that
seemed mild if you didn't know him.
"Well," said Kellard. And after a moment, "Come on in."
Halfrich came in. He sat down and looked interestedly around at the
old room and furniture.
"Nice," he murmured. Then he looked at Kellard and said, "All right,
let's have it. Why did you quit?"
Kellard shrugged. "It was all in my letter of resignation. I'm getting a
bit old and tired for Survey, I—"
"Bull," said Halfrich. "It was something about that crack-up on
Sunside, wasn't it?"
Kellard said slowly, "Yes. The deaths of Binetti and Morse, and the
after-effects of that shock, made me feel I didn't have it any more."
Halfrich looked at him. "You've had crack-ups before. You've seen
men die. You've had almost as many years in Survey as I have, and
you've taken as many jolts. You're lying, Kellard."
Kellard got up, and walked a few steps and swung around again.
"So I'm lying. I want out, and what difference does it make why?"
"It makes a difference," Halfrich said grimly. "I remember from away
back at Academy, even though you were two years after me. You
were the space-craziest cadet there was. You spouted the glories of
the conquest of space until we were all sick of it. You haven't
changed in all the years in Survey—until now. I want to know what
can change a man like that."
Kellard said nothing. He went to the window and looked out at the
long rollers coming endlessly in and crashing against the rocks.
"What did you see on Sunside, Kellard?"
He turned around sharply at that.
"What do you mean? What would there be to see there, but hot rocks
and volcanoes and a cross-section of hell generally? It's all in my
report."
Halfrich sat like a judge, and spoke like one pronouncing sentence.
"You saw something, you met something there. You covered by
tearing out the film of the automatic sweep-camera. Whatever it had
recorded, you didn't want us to see, did you?"
Kellard came toward him and spoke angrily and rapidly. "Do you
realize that we flamed out and crashed there? A crash like that can
do damage. It killed Binetti and mortally injured Morse, and smashed
the sweep-camera."
Halfrich nodded. "That's what we thought, at first. But the radar-
sweep had an automatic recorder too. It was something new. Binetti
knew about it, as communications officer, but I guess he hadn't told
you, or you'd have smashed it too. Its record shows something."
A cold feeling came over Kellard. He had thought that he had covered
everything, but he had calculated from insufficient data.
He kept his nerve. A radar record was not like a photograph, they
couldn't prove much from that, they certainly couldn't guess the truth
from it. They must not guess the truth.
He laughed mirthlessly. "A radar record made on Sunside isn't worth
the paper it's on. The storms of radiation there make radar practically
unreliable."
Halfrich was watching him keenly. "But not entirely. And over and
above the static and the fake bogies, the record shows quite clearly
that you went outside the ship after the crash, that you walked about
a thousand yards, and that you were approached by some things that
register vaguely but unmistakably."
He paused and then he asked, "Who—or what—did you meet there,
Kellard?"
Kellard was cold inside, but all the same he made a disgusted sound
that he hoped was convincing.
"Who would I meet on Sunside? Beautiful lightly-clad maidens? After
all, you know, it's only four hundred degrees Centigrade there, and
practically no atmosphere, and nothing much else but solar radiation
and hot rock and volcanoes. I tell you, the radar record is worthless."
Halfrich was studying him with that mild estimating look that Kellard
knew well, and didn't like at all. It was the look that came into
Halfrich's face when friendship didn't matter and the good of the
Survey did.
"You're still lying," he said. "You met or saw something there. And it
did something to you—something that made you resign. Something
that's taken all the life and eagerness out of you."
"Oh, hell, be reasonable!" said Kellard angrily. "You know no kind of
life can exist on Sunside. My mission was the second time even
Survey has landed there. Pavlik's mission, the first, didn't see
anything. Neither did I. Quit dreaming it up. Go back to Mojave and
your job, and leave me be."
Halfrich rose. "All right," he said. "I'll go back to the base. And you're
going with me."
"Oh, no," said Kellard. "I'm through, quit, resigned."
"Your resignation has not been accepted," Halfrich told him. "You're
still liable to Survey discipline. You'll obey orders just as you always
did, or you'll go up before a court-martial."
"So that's it," said Kellard.
Halfrich nodded. "That is it. I don't like to do this. You're an old friend.
But—"
"But the Survey comes first," Kellard said, between his teeth.
"The Survey," said Halfrich, "comes first. It has to. It's why we've got
stations on Venus and Mars and Ganymede, not to say the Moon. It's
why we'll someday be able to hit for deep space and the starworlds.
And when one of my best officers suddenly goes off the deep end
and won't say why, I'll damn well wring it out of him. Whatever you
found on Mercury doesn't belong to you, it belongs to us, and we'll
have it."
Kellard looked at him and started to say something and didn't, and
then turned his back on Halfrich and looked out the window at the
sea. In a low voice he said,
"Let it be, John. I'm telling you now, you'll be sorry if you don't."
There was no answer to that at all, and the silence was his answer.
He turned back around.
"All right, you have a rope around my neck. I'll go back to base with
you. I'll tell you not one thing more than here."
"In which case," Halfrich said, "we'll go on out to Sunside, and you'll
go right along with us."
A rage born of desperation came to Kellard. He had tried to spare
people this—Halfrich, the Survey, the whole human race. But they
would not let it be so. Damn them, he thought, if they must do this,
they have it coming to them.
"All right," he said flatly. "I'll get my jacket. I take it that you have a flier
waiting."
The fast flier, less than an hour later, whizzed down over the gaunt
mountains and across the desert, and the glitter and splendor of
Mojave Base sprang up to meet them. The tall ships shone like silver,
and something about them, something about the feel of the place,
made you think that this bit of desert did not belong to Earth at all but
was part of space, a way-station, the first way-station of all, to the
stars.
That, thought Kellard, was what he had thought when he had first
come here, years ago. And it had not been just a youngster's passing
enthusiasm, it had deepened and strengthened through all the years
of work and danger—until Sunside. And oh God, he thought, why did
I have to go there, at that place, at that moment. I could have lived
my whole life and done my work, all of us could have, without ever
dreaming the truth.
He knew now that he had no choice. He must go back to Sunside
with them. For even if he told them the truth, they would not believe,
they would insist on going to see for themselves. He would keep
silent, and that was all he could do now.
Four days later a Y-90 experimental cruiser, outfitted for space
research and with full anti-heater equipment, took off from Mojave.
Kellard had kept silent. And still silent he sat in his recoil-harness and
took the jolts, and heard Halfrich grunting beside him, and viciously
hoped that that he was not liking it.
Halfrich had brought along a consulting biophysicist, a keen-faced
man of middle age named Morgenson, who did not look as though he
was enjoying the mission either. But the three-man crew of the little Y-
90 were young men in their twenties. They spoke to Halfrich and to
Kellard as though they were heroes out of legend, for in the Survey
twelve to fifteen years of space-missions was an age.
It was only after they had gone a long way and a long time through
the sunwashed spaces that one of the three, Shay, the navigator,
ventured to put a question to Kellard.
"You were with the first mission to Ganymede, sir, weren't you?"
Kellard nodded. "Yes, I was."
"Wouldn't that have been something!" said Shay. "I mean, to be the
first."
"It was something," said Kellard.
"Maybe someday I——" Shay began, and broke off and then went on,
"I mean, if the star-drive is perfected as soon as some people say it
will be, I could maybe be one of the first ones out there? Sir?"
"You could be," said Kellard. "Someone's going to be first. The stars
are waiting. All we have to do is go out there and keep going, and the
stars will be ours, just like the planets here are, all ours, forever and
amen."
Shay looked at him puzzledly, and shuffled, and then went away.
Halfrich had been listening, and watching. He said, "Did you have to
slap the kid's face?"
Kellard shrugged. "What did I say? I was merely repeating what
everyone feels, these days. The glory of the conquest of space."
"I'd give a lot," Halfrich said, "to know what's riding you. We'll soon
reach Sunside and we'll find out, but I wish you'd tell me now."
"All right," said Kellard. "I'll tell you. I've been disinherited. That's
what's wrong with me."
He would say nothing more, nor did Halfrich ask him another
question, until the Y-90 was far in past the orbit of Venus and going
into its pattern of approach.
"I assume," said Halfrich, "that you bear none of us any personal ill-
will. If there is anything dangerous awaiting us, now would be the
time to tell us."
Kellard considered. "You're going to land, I suppose, at the same spot
where we crashed."
"Of course."
"Then land," said Kellard. "As far as I know, there is not a thing there
to harm you."
In the scanner, he watched Mercury swing slowly toward them, a tiny
crescent of white that was hard to see against the Sun. For here the
Sun was a monster thing, fringed with writhing flames, paling the
stars, drenching this whole area with radiation that already would
have killed them but for the ship's anti-heaters.
Kellard remembered that when he had come this way before, Binetti
had quoted something, a line from William Blake's poems, he had
said. "The desire of the moth for the star." And that was what we
were, he thought. Three little moths, going right into the furnace, and I
was the only one to get out of it, but now I'm going back.
The Y-90 went into its landing pattern. It skimmed over the dark side
of Mercury, the black cliffs and peaks and chasms that never saw the
Sun, and then light seemed to burst ragingly up from all the horizon
ahead of them, and they were over Sunside.
In old days this little world had been called "the moon of the Sun,"
and it looked like it, the same stark, lifeless rock plains and ridges
and cracks, the fang-like look of pinnacles in a place where no
atmosphere eroded anything. But the Moon was cold and still,
whereas Sunside seemed to throb with sullen hidden fires. Volcanoes
spewed ash and lava, and the infernal storm of radiation from
overhead made everything quiver in a shimmering haze. The
indicator board told them that the temperature of the outside hull was
climbing to four hundred as the Y-90 went down.
And the wide valley that haunted his dreams opened up ahead.
Across it the squat volcanic cones still dribbled ash and dust and it
was all just as it had been when he had last looked back from the
relief cruiser that had come from Venus Station to take him off. And
there gleamed bright on its floor the crumpled wreck in which Binetti
and then Morse had died.
Kellard's gaze flew to the place north of the wreck, the tumbled, odd-
shaped rocks. He felt his palms sweating. Maybe there would be
nothing. After all, could it all happen again?
They set down, and after the crashing rocket uproar, the steady throb
of the anti-heaters was an anti-climactic sound.
"You've got the armor ready?" Halfrich asked of Morgenson.
The biophysicist nodded nervously. "Three suits, with their anti-heater
equipment tested on and off all the way out."
"One suit stays here, for emergencies," Halfrich said. "Kellard and I
will go out, when there's something to go out for. First, we'll make
observations."
The recording telescope-cameras and the radar, Halfrich ordered

focused on the place of the odd-shaped rocks. And then, sitting there
on Sunside, they watched. They waited.
Nothing.
Kellard's hopes began to rise. He was right, he told himself, it couldn't
happen again.
"How long," he asked, "are we going to sit waiting for nothing
because a radar made a screwy record? If those anti-heaters quit for
five minutes, we're fried."
Halfrich looked at him bleakly. "I'll tell you how long. Till you tell the
truth, and we see the truth for ourselves. That's how long."
Kellard shrugged. "If that's the way you want it. I would tell you to go
to hell except that we're already there."
They watched and waited some more.
Morgenson said, on a rising note of excitement, "There's something
——"
Halfrich got to the 'scope fast. Kellard, looking through the scanner,
saw the geyser of flame that was beginning to pour up from the rocks.
It grew slowly, but steadily, in height.
"What is it?" Halfrich asked him.
"Can't you see for yourself?" said Kellard. "There's a blowhole out
there and it throws off burning gases from the interior. It did it twice
while I was waiting in the wreck."
Halfrich said, "It's in the same location where radar recorded you
before, with those other blips. There's something about this—We'll go
have a look."
"If you must," said Kellard. "You'll find it's just what I've said."
They got into the heat-armor. It was a clumsy outfit, for it had to have
room for an efficient anti-heater, and the long tube of the heat-
discharge was a nuisance. Kellard had spent days in one of these
suits, waiting for the relief ship after the crack-up, and he did not like
the feel of it at all.
Halfrich tested the radio and then said, "All right, Shay, lock us out
and stand by. Morgenson, you keep watching."
They stepped upon Sunside.
There beat down upon them such a storm of radiation, such cataracts
of heat and light, that instinctively they bowed their heads as before a
deluge. It took an effort of will to step forward through that tempest,
but Halfrich made it. They walked, slowly and heavily, and at first they
saw only the blackened rocks beneath their feet, and the little puddles
and rivulets of molten lead, and their own massive armored feet
plodding.
Then, as they went forward, they straightened against the impact.
Through the face-plate of his armor, dimmed by the many-layered
filters, Kellard saw the column of flame ahead. It was a hundred feet
high now, and growing higher, and though there was no air-borne
sound on this almost airless world, the sound of it came through the
rocks and the soles of their feet, a throbbing and roaring that quivered
through all their bodies.
They reached the tumbled rocks, and stopped. And now the fire-
fountain was so lofty that they had to lean back their heads to look at
its topmost crest. Some unthinkable diastole and systole of the fiery
planet was at work, and this periodic geyser of flame was its result.
The rocks shook and roared, and the fires raged higher, and Kellard
thought again, what devil is in the blood of our race that drives us to
places like this where we should not be?

Tudor Empire The Making of Early Modern Britain and The British Atlantic World 1485 1603 Jessica S Hower All Chapter

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Tudor Empire: The Making of Early

Modern Britain and the British Atlantic

More information about this series at

Britain and the World

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

Cover illustration: Michael Foley / Alamy Stock Photo

Irene and Louis.

immensely grateful to Amy Leonard and Aparna Vaidik; Chandra Manning,

Lipscomb, Darcy Kern, Rachel B. Herrmann, and James Goodman, you

1 Introduction: “This Realme of Englond is an Impire” 1

2 “The direction which they look, and the distance they

3 “Ungracious Dogholes”: Experiments in Empire, Ca.

4 “More Fully Playnly and Clerely Set Fourth to All the

5 “Recouer thyne aunciente bewtie”: Mid-­Tudor Empire

6 “The very path trodden by our ancestors”:

7 “Travelers or tinkers, conquerers or crounes”: Tudor

8 Conclusion: “Such an honourable seruice”395

Introduction: “This Realme of Englond is

where by dyvers sundrie olde authentike histories and cronicles it is mani-

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Those words inaugurated the revolutionary process of reform by which

civilized colonizer to inferior, savage colonized, and assumptions of

Whereas the new imperial history has dramatically reoriented scholarly

rarer, their presence impermanent, diffuse, and harder to measure—a

ephemeral, efforts in the Americas is underexplored.7 As such, despite its

centralization, consolidation, and difference in the British Isles rather than

Scotland, and Wales (in descending order of popularity and contention)

i­dentity and nationhood, like Colin Kidd, have demonstrated, without

otherwise English studies.16 Similarly, only a handful, most notably

anthropological assumptions, [that] persisted from the sixteenth into the

architecture, to actual policies tried and failed.25 Examining these instances

unchallenged, formulation of what constitutes British empire. For

small group of historians and literary scholars, including David Beers

dominant modes of current historiography, it moves Tudor Studies beyond

teleology, this book takes contemporary language as its lead. It highlights

together national and international, pivoting from location to location,

Country merchants out of Bristol and their London counterparts, com-

manipulation of the British past, contributing to increased use of the

soldiers across the century spent considerable time in multiple locations

a cause of consolidation at home and enlargement abroad. It involved a

permanent colonization in the seventeenth century. We can see them as

“The direction which they look,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 33

Though he considered sending Cabot’s “mapa mundi” to Spain, Ayala

Author: Edmond Hamilton

Illustrator: Virgil Finlay

Release date: November 20, 2023 [eBook #72181]

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company,

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUNFIRE! ***

He was walking in the pine grove, with

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

He started through the rooms, opening windows, letting in light and

The recording telescope-cameras and the radar, Halfrich ordered

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1 Introduction: “This Realme of Englond is an Impire” 1

2 “The direction which they look, and the distance they

3 “Ungracious Dogholes”: Experiments in Empire, Ca.

4 “More Fully Playnly and Clerely Set Fourth to All the

5 “Recouer thyne aunciente bewtie”: Mid-Tudor Empire

6 “The very path trodden by our ancestors”:

7 “Travelers or tinkers, conquerers or crounes”: Tudor

8 Conclusion: “Such an honourable seruice”395

identity and nationhood, like Colin Kidd, have demonstrated, without

* START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUNFIRE! *