Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- For Bex
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and conventions
- Plate 1: Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus (1533)
- Introduction: Empire and this ‘Englyshe or Bryttyshe nacyon’
- Part One Empire
- Part Two Nation
- 3 Richard Morison: Rebellion and the rhetoric of nationhood
- 4 Enter England: John Bale's King Johan
- 5 Commonwealth in crisis: Nicholas Udall's Respublica
- Conclusion: William Lightfoot and the legacy of England's empire apart
- Bibliography
- Index
- Volume 1: The Theology of John Donne Jeffrey Johnson
4 - Enter England: John Bale's King Johan
from Part Two - Nation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- For Bex
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and conventions
- Plate 1: Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus (1533)
- Introduction: Empire and this ‘Englyshe or Bryttyshe nacyon’
- Part One Empire
- Part Two Nation
- 3 Richard Morison: Rebellion and the rhetoric of nationhood
- 4 Enter England: John Bale's King Johan
- 5 Commonwealth in crisis: Nicholas Udall's Respublica
- Conclusion: William Lightfoot and the legacy of England's empire apart
- Bibliography
- Index
- Volume 1: The Theology of John Donne Jeffrey Johnson
Summary
THE ‘particuler formes of gouerment […] are not determyned by God or nature’, the Jesuit Robert Parsons wrote in 1594. Instead, ‘euery nation and countrey’ should ‘chuse that forme of gouerment, which they shal like best, and think most fit for the natures and conditions of their people’. If we agree with Benedict Anderson that nations are born out of a desire for greater political freedoms, then Parsons words inevitably force us to question Anderson's claim that national sentiment did not emerge in Western Europe until the eighteenth-century age of ‘Enlightenment and Revolution’. Parsons's separation of king from commonwealth had found echo throughout the Tudor period, in writings by royalists and reactionaries alike. Thomas Starkey and Thomas Elyot both wrote specula principum in the 1530s that sought to rein in royal power. We have seen how Richard Morison exploited their language of commonwealth, not to argue with Parsons for elective models of government, but to support the king's claims to supremacy in church and state. In Morison's pamphlets, Mother England claims to speak for the majority of English people when she speaks in support of the king.
Morison writes for his audience. Aware that the northern rebels were refusing to regard the Royal Supremacy as divinely ordained, he tailors his support for imperial government accordingly. Morison's England speaks for the nation; although upholding the king's claims to absolute power, she claims merely to be echoing the will of the majority, to speak for a national community wholeheartedly in support of the king.
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- Information
- Empire and Nation in Early English Renaissance Literature , pp. 136 - 169Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008