‘This England’, as everyone knows, is Shakespeare: ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’. The rolling and rising cadences across a dozen lines build up to that blunt, but emotionally charged, ‘this England’, which Shakespeare elsewhere called ‘this dear, dear land’. And again: ‘This England never did, nor never shall | Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror | But when it first did help to wound itself … | Come the three corners of the world in arms | And we shall shake them. Naught shall make us rue | If England to itself do rest...

One of the things to be done in haste and repented at leisure is to propose a neat formula by way of a title for an article without thinking through what the formula might mean, and how the subject could be tackled. ‘The politics of religion and the religion of politics’ sounds fine until you begin to consider how the topics of religion and politics are to be prised apart. To make any sense, my title depends on religion and politics being two distinct substances; and it is not at all clear that that is what they were in Elizabethan...

My title needs to be explained, and perhaps defended. By ‘the Elizabethan exclusion crisis’ I refer to the sustained concern of much of the ‘political nation’ in the reign of Elizabeth I to forestall the accession to the English crown of Mary Queen of Scots; and, indeed, to prevent any other remedy for the dangerous vacuum of an uncertain succession which would threaten the Protestant religious and political settlement and all that it stood for. These contingencies included a royal marriage to a foreign Catholic prince, and in particular to the French duke of Anjou, the last to tango with...

It was a great honour, and a provocation to many a nostalgic wander down memory lane, to have been invited to deliver the original version of this chapter as a paper at the Tudor and Stuart seminar to honour the memory of Joan Henderson. When I first arrived at the Institute of Historical Research in October 1952, Joan was already there. I did not presume to guess for how long she had been there, but as the years went by it was as if she had been part of the furniture of the place for ever. She was one of...

In July and August 1578, Elizabeth I and her court went on progress deep into East Anglia, the only extensive royal tour of that region. From 16 to 22 August the great travelling show reached the second city of the kingdom, Norwich, referred to by the Spanish Ambassador as ‘the North’.¹ There are a number of episodes in the course of the 1578 progress which have made it into many accounts of Elizabethan history and culture, some of them literary. There was the encounter at Audley End with the University of Cambridge, when Gabriel Harvey, in Thomas Nashe’s hostile account...

One of the things that I remember about Mandell Creighton, biographer of Elizabeth, great historian and notable bishop, bearing a marked physical resemblance to the current Archbishop of Canterbury, is that when controversy raged over Darwin’sOrigin of Species, he wrote to his fiancée suggesting that Darwin’s theory was very dubious and that he would be happy for her to sort it all out for him. ‘I have not time for it, and would rather read some Italian history.’¹ That story attracted my attention, since by instinct and thwarted ambition I am a thoroughly Darwinian biologist and I only accidentally...

When members of the Elizabethan parliaments demanded of their queen that she marry or otherwise determine the succession to the crown, they sometimes spoke with feeling of England, the nation which they claimed to represent and for which they offered to speak. ‘For I tell you, Mr Speaker, that I speake for all England, yea, and for the noble English nation, who in times past (with noe small honour) have daunted and made the proudest nations agast.’¹ According to political science, such rhetorical flights are not to be mistaken for expressions of ‘nationalism’, which, like steam-power, was a substance not...

We all know what William Haller wrote about John Foxe and national consciousness inThe Elect Nation, 36 years ago; and we can also rehearse the arguments deployed against his thesis by Katherine Firth, V. Norskov Olsen, and others.¹ We know that Foxe was not a vulgar nationalist but a man of universal vision and ecumenical conviction, who believed himself to be living near the end of time. Reopening Haller after a few years, there is less about the elect nation than one remembered, and one suspects that ‘the elect nation’ of the title may have been a mistake, since,...

John Foxe (and notwithstanding some glancing references to John Bale and Miles Coverdale, Foxe will serve on this occasion as shorthand for ‘sixteenth-century historiography’) had a great deal to say on the subject of ‘truth’. In a sense he wrote about nothing else. But he was accused by his religious opponents of telling lies on an unprecedented scale. And if he did not deliberately propagate fictions, in the sense of inventing his stories, he wove his material into forms that were as fictive as they were factual. Like his friend and mentor, Bale, he was a myth-maker, even, it has...

The Royal Historical Society will not be startled to learn that one of the best-informed essays on William Camden was written by its quondam president, Sir Maurice Powicke:

A great book might be written about Camden, his life and his works, his wide circle of friends and correspondents and his humanity. It would be a very difficult book to write, for its author would have to be steeped in the social history of the time and to be familiar with the personal life, the friendships and all the correlated activities of scholars all over the western world in Camden’s day....

As an apprentice Elizabethan historian I was given discouraging advice by someone whose identity I have long since forgotten: ‘It’s all in Camden, and what’s not in Camden won’t hurt.’ William Camden, a Londoner born in 1551, was educated at Christ’s Hospital and St Paul’s schools and subsequently at Oxford. He died at Chislehurst in 1623 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, having been a man of distinct, if related, parts: schoolmaster (at Westminster), herald (Clarenceux ‘king’ of Arms), antiquary, and historian. These last two roles were considered at the time to be formally distinct. History dealt with the notable...

John Stow might have anticipated Peter Laslett by 350 years, calling hisSurvey of London The World We Have Lost. While Stow never employed the expression ‘Merry England’, his preoccupation with ‘that declining time of charity’¹ makes his book the most extended treatment of the Merry England refrain in all English literature: a mythical story about a world enjoying plenty, but attentive to want, a socially harmonious world consolidated and sweetened by charity, a festive world, in which generosity spilled over freely from the full cup of seasonal pastimes, an open world, and, above all, a religious world. Stow’s Survey...