English designs on union with Scotland
ENGLAND’S INSULAR IMAGINING The Elizabethan erasure of Scotland
LORNA HUTSON 320pp. Cambridge University Press. £30 (US $39.99).
IN HIS HISTORY of Henry VII, Francis Bacon recalls a discussion of the proposed marriage of the king’s daughter Margaret to James IV of Scotland. Invited to speak freely, some counsellors cautioned that were God to take the king’s two sons, a Scottish succession would follow. Henry’s reply, that “Scotland would bee but an Accession to England, and not England to Scotland, for that the Greater would draw the lesse”, silenced those concerns. In the event, God took only one of Henry’s sons, but the king’s speech, as Bacon knew, and as Lorna Hutson demonstrates in this brilliant study, proved prophetic. The greater drew the lesser.
“Then with Scotland first begin”, Westmoreland advises the king in Shakespeare’s Henry V, but few critics of the period began thus. In England’s Insular Imagining Hutson shows how English rulers and writers sought to downplay Scotland’s political significance precisely because of its strategic importance for the Tudor state’s imperial ambitions. Vital to this strategy was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s medieval History of the Kings of Britain, with its mythologizing of Arthur, which was used “to uphold the claim that Scotland, as a kingdom, had anciently been feudally subject to the king of England”. Hutson maps out the ways in which this Galfridian history was harnessed by poets and politicians in pursuit of “an insular Anglo-British empire”.
Hutson is right to pinpoint the preoccupation with Arthurian legend as “urgently geopolitical”. The first half of the sixteenth century witnessed the deaths of three princes named Arthur, a Tudor and two Stuarts, their titles – Prince of Wales, Duke of Rothesay, Duke of Albany – resonant of their archipelagic origins. The “legends” of these Arthurs may have owed more to Malory than to Monmouth, but the mere fact that Elizabeth I had an Uncle Arthur, and James VI an uncle and a great-uncle of that name, renders the “Arthurian moment” all the more compelling. In the case of Henry VII’s son, fears of a Scottish succession were allayed when Arthur’s younger brother Henry married his widow, Katherine of Aragon, an insurance policy against a Franco-Scottish alliance. France and Spain figured prominently in England’s desire to make sure its coast was clear, its border locked.
England’s Insular Imagining opens with the legal justifications and military accounts of the Anglo-Scottish wars of the 1540s in two formidable chapters that exemplify its scholarship. These chapters do two things. They debunk the myth of English indifference to Scotland and indicate the lengths to which the Tudor state was prepared to go to establish an insularity that presupposed the obliteration
