With a focus on Edmund Spenser, this chapter explores representations of ruined monasteries within (New) English protestant writing of c.1590-1642. Monastic ruins are visible mnemonics of British-Irish reformation, and Protestants express surprisingly broad motivations for their remembrance, from sorrow for, to celebration of, monastic dissolution – a breadth of opinion reflecting the breadth of beliefs and practices within the Elizabethan/early Stuart church. Recognition of this confessional latitude is leading to reappraisal of Spenser’s own ‘puritan’ credentials, and to realisation that Spenser was as anti-Presbyterian as he was anti-Catholic. The chapter is the first to translate Spenser’s Presbyterian anxieties to a Scottish context, arguing that Spenser’s famously fractious relationship with James VI was prompted as much by Spenser’s anxieties over James’s seeming support for Scottish Presbyterians as by Spenser’s attack on James’s Catholic mother. The chapter shows how, in Faerie Queene VI, Spenser evokes memories of monastic ruins to warn his generation against the prospect of further, Presbyterian-led ruination in England and Ireland under a future Scottish king. This perspective on monastic ruins – as memories of past, and monitories against future, reformation – serves as a salutary reminder that ‘reformation’ was a protracted and by no means universally popular process for Spenser’s generation.

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.

ANNE BOLEYN'S entry into London took place on Saturday 31 May 1533, the day before her coronation at Westminster Abbey on Whit sunday 1 June. Parliament had passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals less than two months earlier on Monday 7 April. The Appeals Act declared England an empire, autonomous of the Holy Roman Empire, but also independent of the See of Rome. By preventing Rome's interference in what Archbishop Cranmer termed Henry's ‘great cause of matrimony’, the act allowed Cranmer to annul Henry's marriage with Catherine of Aragon, and to make lawful his clandestine marriage to Anne.

Cranmer pronounced sentence on the validity of Anne and Henry's marriage on 28 May, and the entry occurred in the happy aftermath of this verdict three days later. The passage of the Appeals Act had paved the way for Anne's coronation, and the entry proved the first opportunity to give public expression to ‘empire’ as it had been defined in this act – an empire compact of church and state, and ‘gov[er]ned by oon Sup[re]me heede and King’. Where the Habsburg Empire was expansionist, the empire of the Appeals Act looked inwards. This chapter approaches the 1533 entry as propaganda for Henry's imperial claims to power. It explores how these claims informed the stagecraft of Anne Boleyn's entry, which cast Anne as Astraea, and identified England under Henry VIII with the Golden Age of Virgil's fourth eclogue.

THE DEATH of Henry VIII, in the early hours of 28 January 1547, brought the downfall also of legislation prohibiting Bible-reading to all but his most privileged subjects. When the first parliament under Edward VI met in November 1547, it was to reverse the late king's concessions to traditional religion by repealing all ‘Act[es] of p[ar]lament’ passed in Henry's reign ‘concerninge doctryne and matters of Religion’. Alongside the conservative Six Articles Act, the 1547 Repeals Act singled out for particular mention the Act for Advancement of true Religion. Its proscriptions against the ‘reading preaching teaching or expownding of Scripture’, the Repeals Act asserted, ‘shall fromhensfurthe be repealed and utterlie voyde and of none effecte’.

According to the Act for Advancement of true Religion, disputes over the meaning of scripture were to blame for the great ‘diversitie of opinions’ which had of late sprung up in England. Insofar as it condemns exegeses that contradict ‘the veraye sincere and godly emeaning’ of scripture, the act appears to uphold the idea, first espoused by Tyndale, that the meaning of scripture was self-evident, its prose accessible to all. This apparent faith in the straightforwardness of scripture is nevertheless undermined by the fact that, within the act, Henry had deemed it prudent firstly to ban the reading of the English Bible before proceeding with his plan to establish a ‘pure and sincere teaching, agreable with Godd[es] woorde’.

THE ENTRY into London of Charles V and Henry VIII took place on the evening of Friday 6 June 1522. According to Edward Hall's account, Charles and Henry rode side-by-side in identical ‘Coates of Clothe of Golde, embraudered with Siluer’, and they were serenaded on their way towards Southwark by Sir ThomasMore, who ‘made to theiman eloquent Oracion, in the praise of the twoo princes, and of the peace and loue betwene theim’. The procession met with the first pageant at the gate to London Bridge, which was flanked with the two giants Hercules and Samson. Between them they held aloft an iron chain, upon which was listed the lands and dominions over which Charles ruled as Emperor-elect. The list is included in the anonymous Descrypcion of the pageantes, a second, slightly variant account preserved on six manuscript folios contemporary with the entry, and now bound into Corpus Christi College Cambridge, MS 298. The second pageant had been erected on London Bridge itself. It depicted the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece. According to Hall, the armed figure of Jason stood behind the Golden Fleece and was flanked by the ‘fiery Dragon’ (sig.QQq6v) that legend has Phrixus deploy to guard the fleece, and by a ‘fayre mayde representyng the lady Medea’ (sig. RRr1r), the sorceress who helped Jason defeat the dragon and seize the fleece. A child explained to the Emperor that his coming to London had brought as much joy to its residents as had been brought to the citizens of Colchis by Jason's conquest of the Fleece.

ENGLAND'S Break with Rome enriched the crown's coffers with revenue from the sale of church lands, but these lands were purchased at a cost to Henry VIII, for with the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536 came open rebellion at home and the threat of invasion from abroad. Henry paid a high price in October 1536 for his claims, in the Appeals Act, to be ‘Sup[re]me heede’ of an English empire compact of church and state. As head of the English church, Henry had in May 1536 adopted a policy of dissolving religious houses with an annual income of less than two hundred pounds. A government office – the court of augmentations – was set up to receive the treasures and charters of those monasteries earmarked for closure, and commissioners were dispatched to the shires, with orders to suppress religious houses, and to assess their market value for sale by the crown. It was news of these activities that prompted the people of Lincolnshire to rebel in early October, according to the account of the Imperial ambassador in England, Eustace Chapuys. ‘Five days ago in Lincolnshire’, Chapuys writes in his letter to Charles V of 7 October 1536, ‘a great multitude of people rose against the King's commissioners, who levied the taxes lately imposed by parliament and put down the abbeys’.

In depositions taken after the event, many of the rebels admitted their outrage upon learning that royal commissioners had been ransacking local monasteries, an outrage apparently fuelled by rumours that these same commissioners also intended to steal from parish churches in the nearby area.

This book explores England's self-image in the earlier Tudor period as a sovereign realm, independent of Rome and the rest of Britain, ‘an Empire off hitselff’, as Cuthbert Tunstall called England in 1517, poised between the Holy Roman Empire under the Habsburgs, the Roman church under Leo X and his successor popes, and the British Empire that gathered steam under the ageing Elizabeth. It looks at the figures – both historical and rhetorical – that were used to write England's evolving self-image as a sovereign realm, or empire, in seven principal texts – two pageant sequences, two plays, two pamphlets, and Leland's Laboryouse Journey, the subject of this Introduction – all printed or performed between 1520 and 1553.

Chapter One explores England's relations with the Habsburg Empire under Charles V before the onset of the Break with Rome in the early 1530s. Its subject is the literature surrounding the visit of Charles V to England in 1522, in which England was in relation to the Habsburg Empire imagined as an ‘Empire off hitselff’. Chapters Two to Five focus on royalist literature written in the two decades after England's Break with Rome, arguing that England was imagined in this literature as a sovereign political community, a ‘nation’ free to rein in royal power, but happy to consent to the imperial powers granted to Henry VIII and his successors, within the Royal Supremacy acts of 1532–34.