Throughout the medieval and much of the early modern period, a dynasty was conceived as a community embracing not only living family members but also ancestors and descendants. Immortalised and visualised in family pedigrees, these past, present and future generations were held together by the principle of heredity. This was magnified in royal dynasties, where monarchs were conceptualised as heirs to their ancestors through an inheritance of blood, but also through qualities and deeds. Royal genealogies sought to convey the idea of a ‘real’ kinship, by which the virtues of nobility were transmitted between generations; the members of a noble lineage were related through blood ties to the forebears they were urged to emulate and to whom they were compared.

Since the late fifteenth century, blood had been identified as the substance which transmitted physical and moral traits across generations. Nobility and virtue were traits passed on ‘naturally’ through the blood running within the enclosed genealogy of a noble family. The numerous debates on the transmission of blood, nobility and virtue are summarised in Hieronimus Osorius's De Nobilitate Civile, et De Nobilitate Christiana (1542) translated into English by William Blandie as The Five Books of the Famous […] Hieronimus Osorius (1576). In this book, which Elizabeth I and Lord Burghley both owned, Blandie wrote that ‘virtue is not obtained so much by study and industry, as gotten by nature and by the good blood of Noble Parentage’; true nobility was simply ‘the glorious spark of virtue ingraffed in some Noble and renowned family’. Ancient families deserved greater civic honour as they had perpetuated for longer the virtue ‘ingraffed’ in their stock. Osorius and Blandie sought to adjust the moral and political ideals of classical antiquity, rooted in the acquisition of virtue by active imitation, to the genealogical mind-set and ideals of sixteenth-century European dynasties.

This emphasis on blood was, however, not absolute, since, as Osorius and Blandie also observed, human institutions, including bloodlines, were ‘frail, mutable, and much subject to alteration’; not even nobility was bound to continue forever.

In 1544 Henry VIII passed the Third Succession Act, which stated that his son Edward should succeed him, followed by his daughters Mary and Elizabeth, who should only marry with the consent of advisors appointed by the king. The Act also sought to limit the succession by reverting all subsequent decisions, alterations, and revisions of Henry's heirs to the authority of the king's letter patents or to his Will and Testament. In this Will and Testament, which was drawn up in 1546, Henry added further indications concerning alternative successors, should his direct line fail. While he made no mention of the Stewarts, who were descendants of his elder sister, Margaret, he designated Frances and Eleanor Brandon, daughters of the Earl of Suffolk, and their heirs, as being descendants from his younger sister, Mary. The Will and Testament concluded by stating that, if the Suffolk line bore no legitimate offspring, the ‘next rightful heirs’ should succeed to the throne; the document failed to specify who these heirs might be. The authenticity of the will was questioned for decades, since it was stamped and not signed by the king, who was then on his deathbed, and so considered by some to be ‘past sense and memory’.

After the early deaths of Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey, and Mary, Elizabeth became Queen of England in accordance the Third Succession Act. Nevertheless, there were shadows cast on her claims. Henry's Second Succession Act of 1536 had decreed her illegitimate after his divorce from Anne Boleyn. Coupled with the doubtful nature of Henry VIII's testament, the interpretation of these documents sparked harsh debates on who should be deemed the lawful heir to the throne after the death, and even instead of, Elizabeth.

Shakespeare lived in an age when royal genealogy mattered. It became increasingly clear during his adolescent years that Queen Elizabeth would never marry and would have no direct heir. A new sovereign would have to be found on a lateral branch of the royal family tree. Breaks in the royal chain could lead to violence and social upheaval, as those in Shakespeare's time knew well. When he sat down to write his first plays, the Wars of the Roses had ended a little over one hundred years before, a bloody catastrophe which remained embedded in the national memory. One witness to this lingering concern is the playwright's activity during the last decade of Elizabeth's rule, when eight of his dramas dealt with the conflict and its causes; from the deposition of Richard II by his Lancastrian cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, to the overthrow of the Yorkist Richard III by Henry Tudor. Elizabeth was the last of the Tudors, and the joined red and white roses in their coat of arms was meant to remind their subjects of the relative peace which the dynasty had brought to England and Wales.

In the Wars of the Roses, genealogy was claimed as an important issue in the struggles of Yorkist and Lancastrian pretenders to the throne. Henry VI was the great-grandson of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the fourth son of Edward III. This royal ancestry was said to be insufficient by partisans of the Yorkist cause, who observed that Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, besides being the grandson of Edward III's fifth son, Edmund of York, through his paternal line, was also the great-great-grandson of Edward's third son, Lionel of Clarence, through his maternal line. This gave him a claim to the English crown, one which would then be asserted in civil war in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, leading to the deaths of both Richard and Henry, and the accession to the throne of Richard's sons, Edward IV and Richard III.

Elizabeth I was confronted with her genealogy from the very moment she entered London for her pre-coronation progress. Surrounded by a huge crowd, the Queen proceeded through the City following a route signposted by pageants on which symbolic scenes were being staged. After the official welcome of a Latin oration, she was presented with a three-storey pageant called The uniting of the two Houses of Lancaster and York. The whole structure was ‘garnished with Red Roses and White’ and celebrated the unity and peace brought about by Henry VII at the end of the Wars of the Roses. It reproduced Elizabeth's royal pedigree as a visual rendition of the accompanying verse:

The pageant was structured as a three-dimensional genealogical tree rooted in the lower stage; there sat effigies of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, with their red and white roses. From their clasping hands sprang ‘two branches, gathered into one’, leading to a higher stage showing Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Above this second stage was a third, ‘wherein likewise was planted a seat Royal, in the which was set one representing the Queen's most excellent Majesty Elizabeth’. The shape of the genealogical diagram, running bottom to top, mirrored that of the Tree of Jesse, that is, the visual representation of the genealogy of Christ from King David's father, as found in the Gospel of Matthew, and predicted in the Book of Isaiah. The structure of the pageant was most likely similar to the frontispiece of the 1550 edition of Edward Hall's The union of the two noble and illustre families of Lancaster [and] Yorke (Fig. 25), a book published by Richard Grafton, who was also involved in the preparations for Elizabeth's ceremony.

To Elizabeth I the notions of bloodline and heredity were and would remain daunting.

This last chapter provides a bridge between the political uses of royal genealogies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through a short study of a unique genre – genealogical maps – which enjoyed unparalleled success in England. Both royal genealogy and maps used word and image to define and celebrate political sovereignty; both were kinds of texts which, thanks to their aesthetic appeal, provided a pleasant and useful way of communicating information. The polymath John Dee famously wrote that maps could ‘beautify…Halls, Parlours, Chambers, Galleries, Studies, or Libraries’ of monarchs, noblemen, gentry, and scholars. Dee was also a great expert on genealogies, and, in order to boost his own social status and reputation, he commissioned a vellum roll over six feet in length decorated with heraldry and a self-portrait, representing his descent from King Arthur and his kinship with the Tudors, other European monarchs, and even the rulers of the Indies. In his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the antiquary Robert Burton highlighted the benefits of looking at maps for the melancholic person: ‘what pleasure’, he wrote, ‘can there now be, then to view those elaborate Maps of Ortelius, Mercator, Hondius, &c?’ Interestingly, Burton ranked heraldry (and, implicitly, its germane art, genealogy) at the same level as maps: ‘What so full of content, as to read, walk, and see Maps, Pictures, Statues, Jewels, marbles…so exquisite and pleasing to be beheld’ – a statement valid, as he added a few lines later, also for ‘Devices, Escutchions, coats of arms’. Heraldry and genealogy had a double-sided nature as didactic texts and decorative objects.

Genealogies shared with maps symbolic and social meanings: symbolically, they exalted the (seemingly) natural connection between the nation and the monarch and the strength of the political state; socially, they visualised national consciousness, ethnocentrism, and secular power. Connoisseurs of antiquity and geography stored samples of these two genres close to one another in their libraries. For instance, to cast a glance outside England, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini stored in his print collection maps together with portraits and genealogies of rulers.

The resolution of the succession in favour of James did not lessen the need for royal genealogies; the lineal legitimacy of his rule needed to be shown to the English subjects of their new Scottish king. The importance of pedigrees remained great throughout the Jacobean reign, especially to the mid-1610s. In his first speech to Parliament, James VI and I set the tone for genealogical political discourse, proclaiming that his succession was legitimate ‘by lineal hereditary right, all Acts of Parliament and other exercises in law notwithstanding’. He also asserted that he held ‘the right and title of both [kingdoms] in my Person’, being ‘alike lineally descended of both the Crowns’ of England and Scotland. James presented his legitimate ancestry and its continuation through metaphors exalting his thriving ‘body natural’ as the means to assure the permanence of the ‘body politic’ of the monarchical institution. Approved a year after his accession, the Act of Recognition stated that, according to the laws of God and man, the imperial crown of England had ‘descended’ on him ‘by inherent birthright and lawful and undoubted succession’. The ‘undoubted succession’ and ‘lineal descent’ were celebrated not only in poems and prints outlining his pedigree from the Tudors, Edward III, or William the Conqueror. They were also visualised through intricate genealogical rolls or tables tracing James's ancestry to the ancient British-Welsh, Germanic, and Scottish-Irish kings, and ultimately to Noah and Adam.

This desire to depict an all-embracing genealogy of James VI and I, capable of outlining his multilineal descent, is voiced most clearly in the preface, authored by the antiquarians George Owen Harry and Robert Holland, to an unpublished Welsh translation of the king's political essay Basilikon Doron (1598). This translation was accompanied by a complex pedigree – probably that published in Owen Harry's name in 1604. Although their aim was mainly to celebrate James's mythical and historical British-Welsh ancestry, Owen Harry and Holland acknowledged that all the king's ancestral lines bore equal value within the definition of his legitimacy.

In the end, Elizabeth's crown was passed without manifest constitutional crisis to her Protestant relative, King James VI of Scotland, after a series of co-conspiring events: Cecil's commitment to the Stuart succession after the Essex rebellion of 1601, Philip III of Spain's refusal to pursue the Infanta's claim, an increased Protestant support for the Stuart claim as a result of Persons's pamphlet, and, by then, the absence of any other plausible alternative. The uncertainty remained, however, on the fundamental nature of James's royal title: had he been elected by the Council, appointed by Elizabeth, or chosen by blood ties? In any case, the title would only be strengthened by a sound genealogical claim which would, at the very least, fashion the Scottish king as an English one.

From the moment of his accession, the pedigree of James VI and I and the legitimacy it conferred upon him were systematically imposed onto the public sphere, for the first time in English history, through the medium of print. The king's commitment to forbid any misconceptions and criticism of his right to the throne appears in a cryptic letter to the Earl of Salisbury dated c.1610. It mentions that an unnamed ‘villain’ had slandered the king by questioning his genealogical legitimacy; in the missive, James ‘recommend[ed] the knave to the gallows for the points of [i.e., arguments concerning] my pedigree’. One of the new king's earliest – and certainly his most drastic – gestures was the manipulation of the implicit genealogical structure of one of the most significant monuments of royalty: the tombs of the English kings in Westminster Abbey. In 1606, Elizabeth I's bier was removed from the chapel of Henry VII and laid to rest on top of the coffin of her Catholic sister Mary – a carefully planned irony of history. The king thus physically and visually weakened her ancestral connection with the Tudor ancestor who had united the two roses.

Genealogical texts in print celebrating James's accession appeared at a moment in which public opinion was still seeking to overcome the trauma of Elizabeth I's death, enveloped in the tense atmosphere caused by the political uncertainty which had characterised recent years.

After the blow caused by the sudden death of Prince Henry in 1612, James's genealogical tree still had one more bud in store: the second-born, Prince Charles. Royal legitimation was no longer a major concern when Charles was proclaimed king by ‘lineal right’ in 1625. Themes such as the sterility of death and the uncertainty of the royal line which had populated public lamentations for Elizabeth I were absent in funeral elegies for King James. During the period of mourning and the funeral procession, James was celebrated according to tradition with a wax effigy upon a catafalque, images of which appeared in print. The frontispieces of two elegies had the title framed within a funeral monument featuring skeletons, Father Time with hourglasses and scythe – the customary memento mori. The poet Arthur Johnstoun wrote that the king they used to call ‘pater patriae’ was now only a shadow. John King recreated in verse James's empty tomb; after arguing the impossibility of a ‘reversion’ of James's body from dust to life, he praised his effigy as a lasting material form of commemoration. William Hodson described his feelings upon seeing the king's effigy in Denmark House:

In Upon the Death of K. James, James Shirley walked from room to room in Denmark House, hoping to see the royal effigy and find confirmation that the monarch was dead. Whilst the effigy represented James's death, the poet knew nevertheless that ‘the King I sought, might be alive’ in his successor; as the law says, ‘the King never dies’. Shirley concluded: ‘I found the King [at Whitehall] /…and boldly did revive, / King James not dead, he was in Charles alive.’

The fundamental role played by Wales, its land and history in the narrative of Poly-Olbion is a question which has long fascinated its readers. Drayton’s decision to adopt the poetic voice of a Welsh bard is especially intriguing, since bards were traditionally seen as complex figures, uniting the characteristics of skilled poets, national historians, heralds, and prophets; like similar poets of oral cultures and communities, they were in charge of preserving the memory of their people and princes through the knowledge of genealogies, which allowed them to tie the remote past to the present and the future.

The conceptualization of Welsh bards as historians in Poly-Olbion has been variously explained, with special attention to the First Part of the poem, which contains most of the historical narrative that has most appealed to its readers. Philip Schwyzer suggests that Drayton found in the figure of the bard a way to join the ‘custodianship of history and national lore’ and the ‘extraordinary public authority and respect’ he saw embodied in the ideal figure of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ‘poet historical’ and ‘poet laureate’. According to J. E. Curran, Jr, the function of bardic poetry as an oral means to preserve the national past raised a fundamental question in Drayton's mind: its actual value as an historical source. While early modern antiquarians like William Camden rooted their narrative of the past into monumental history and material remains, the ‘tradition’ of Welsh oral poetry praised by Drayton, though ultimately grounded in history, could not provide equally certain evidence. G. G. Hiller suggests that Drayton chose bards as an archetype of poets-historians-prophets and saw ‘an analogy between his own task of immortalizing his country's noble ancestors […] and the bards’ recording of their countrymen's deeds and genealogies’, a task on which Hiller elaborates no further.

Maintaining a similar focus on the First Part of the poem, this chapter builds on this criticism and suggests that a study of the Welsh bards’ social role as genealogists – an aspect which deeply interested Drayton – can shed new light on representations of history and nationhood in Poly-Olbion. As the chapter argues, Drayton constructed a narrative of the national past based on the same genealogical principle of medieval historiography which informed Welsh bardic poetry – a principle whereby ‘dynastic time’, or the genealogical succession of kings, acted as the backbone of history.