Concern over the present state of British history in North American colleges and universities, and more specifically British history of the “Tudor and Stuart” or “Early Modern” era, becomes steadily more intense. Conference panels are devoted to it, on-line conversations frequently indulge in it, and its hard to find an extended conversation amongst colleagues which doesn’t eventually take it up. Much of this may be prompted by the near disappearance of entry-level employment in the field, but this is of course the symptom of far deeper realities. When asked to contribute to a recent colloquium on the state of Early Modern British history in general, I chose to present a North American perspective on the subject. I hoped to affirm that there is such a perspective, and to distinguish it from what I saw as a British perspective. Though the world of ideas may indeed be universal, the worlds of teaching, studying, and academic employment are not. They are peculiar to specific national traditions, educational systems, and cultures.

Henry VII’s image as an innately peace-loving, war-loathing monarch was cultivated by his own court poets, repeated by early Tudor chroniclers, and affirmed for posterity by Sir Francis Bacon in his classic history of Henry’s reign. James Gairdner, one of the first of the modern historians of Henry VII, thus regarded Henry VII’s pacificism as a confirmed fact. More recently Joycelyne Russell, in her study of Renaissance peacemaking, posed Henry VII as “a man of peace” in stark contrast to his war-mongering son. Ian Arthurson, however, in an article about Henry’s planned invasion of Scotland in 1497, exposed Henry’s more bellicose side by showing a king intent on prosecuting a war against Scotland to its violent end, even out of proportion to the initial provocation, because at the time that seemed the best means to attain his particular political end. This essay will consider Henry’s inclinations to war and peace with respect to the mediation undertaken in 1490 by Leonello Chieregato, the humanist and bishop of Concordia, and by Antonio Flores, canon of Seville and papal prothonotary, who were charged by Pope Innocent VIII to mediate a peace or a long truce between England and France.

Gloriana, Britomart, Astraea, Belphoebe, the Sun in Splendor, England’s Moses, the new Deborah, the Phoenix—Elizabeth I possessed a generous wardrobe of public personas. Monarchy, chastity, divinity, and other intangibles played in the early modern mind as images, personifications, embodiments—the invisible rendered visible. As Clifford Geertz has observed, the Elizabethan imagination was “allegorical, Protestant, didactic, and pictorial; it lived on moral abstractions cast into emblems.” These emblems were culturally ubiquitous, appearing in books and broadsides, painted and carved portraits, architecture, tapestry, jewelry and clothing, armor and weapons, monumental funerary sculpture, wall and ceiling decoration. University students neglected Aristotle in favor of fashionable continental emblem books, and the taste for embellishing houses with emblems extended from the monarchy and aristocracy to the landed gentry and the rising middle class. Peter Daly stresses the psychological impact of emblems on the early modern mind when he observes that emblems were “as immediately and graphically present in this period as illustrated advertising is today.”

There is an important collection of videotaped interviews with British historians that is now available in London. The Publications Department of the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) has produced twenty-eight videotaped interviews with prominent historians in Britain. More tapes are to be released with others scheduled for production in the future. The historians who have already been interviewed are senior British historians who have made their scholarly contributions since World War II. All the interviews are conducted by younger colleagues who have specialized in the same or related fields of history. Interviewers explore the influences that have shaped the work of the senior historians and encourage the latter to reflect upon their background, training, publications, and careers. Because the historians are selected by an IHR committee, the members of which are mostly economic historians, senior social and economic historians have been more fully represented in the IHR videotapes than other historians. Of the twenty-eight interviews, fifteen of the historians have written mostly about the modern period (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), eight are historians of the early modern period (from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries), three are medievalists, one is a classicist, and one is a historian of science. Concluding this article is an alphabetical list of all the historians interviewed in this series.