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Chapter 5 - On the Knees of the Body Politic: Scottish Succession and English Liberties, 1567–1608

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2023

Lorna Hutson
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Chapter 5 challenges accounts of the ‘Union’ debate of 1603–1608 as a story of English constitutionalist resistance to James’s absolutist Union. Edmund Plowden’s Treatise (1567) used the ‘King’s Two Bodies’ to locate sovereignty in the ‘body politic’ of the English common law. He transformed the old Galfridian notion of English overlordship into an allegory of Scotland’s jurisdictional sub-nationality, Scotland’s body politic kneeling before England’s. The problem created by James’s accession was how, after Plowden, to deny Scots the rights of English naturalisation. How to justify excluding Scots from free trade with England and from the common law liberties of Englishmen? Sir Henry Savile and Sir Henry Spelman drew ingeniously on myths of King Edgar’s (943–975) thalassocratic rule over the British islands to argue simultaneously that Scots were aliens and (lest that suggest that a Scottish accession had brought England geopolitical advantages to be recompensed) that this alien nation’s coastlines had nevertheless always been under English sea-sovereignty. England’s trade expanded while Scots, though subject to English foreign policy, were excluded as aliens from participation.

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Chapter
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England's Insular Imagining
The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland
, pp. 154 - 187
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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