Henry VIII fancied himself a cultured king and accomplished thinker with a talent for theology. The king sought the company of learned men and married three women – Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, and Katherine Parr – who stimulated his intellect, collected books, and patronized writers and preachers. Like jewel houses, the libraries at Westminster, Greenwich, and Hampton Court held the king's precious books, codices, and manuscripts. Only with difficulty could Henry move his great body, racked by obesity and leg ulcers, to be among them. Four volumes of Britain's literary worthies, from the Romans to the Tudors, guided Henry through some of the authors on his shelves, books rescued from the monastic communities that the king's religious policies had decimated. Alongside great poets and writers stood centuries of British, Saxon, and Norman kings, from whom Henry traced his lineal descent. Their lives and achievements, recounted in the three great tomes of ‘De Nobilitate Britannica’, ornamented the young Tudor dynasty. The realm that Henry would leave his son Edward lay before him in a great ‘Civil History’ called ‘De Antiquitate Britannica’. In this Tudor Domesday Book, the king studied the English and Welsh shires, minutely described. Henry found the crowning glory cast in silver, a magnificent relief of Britannia carefully designed to echo the fabled silver tablets of Charlemagne and stroke the king's imperial vanity.

Or so went the fantasy penned by John Leland in his ‘Newe Yeares Gyfte’ for the king in 1546. He promised Henry the books and ‘quadrate table of silver’ that would give literary and visual substance to the Tudor ‘worlde and impery of England’. Beginning in the mid–1530s, Leland spent a decade travelling in order to establish the physical, cultural, and historical reality of the Tudor imperium. He made good on the king's commission to search out monastic libraries and bring their ‘monumentes of auncyent wryters’ to the welcome light of day, helping to uncover the records of the ancient Christianity of the Britons before it succumbed to the corrupting influences of the papacy.