National Identity in Early Modern Britain
Philip Schwyzer. Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xi + 194 pp. $75.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-521-84303-4.
Reviewed by Krishan Kumar
Published on H-Albion (November, 2005)
The upsurge of interest in national identities tional consciousness before British national con‐ in early modern Britain has been evident in a sciousness. A further consequence, natural spate of books in recent years. For most of us that though by no means inevitable, is to regard Eng‐ renewed interest was signaled by the appearance lish (as well as Welsh, Scottish, and Irish) national of Richard Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood: The identity as the more frmly established identity, Elizabethan Writing of England (1992). Helgerson with Britishness forming a light and easily dis‐ is a literary historian, and indeed a remarkably carded cloak. large number of these studies have been by liter‐ The argument of this lively and refreshing ary historians. (Schwyzer conveniently lists a se‐ book is that most of these scholars have got it lection of them.) Schwyzer joins that company wrong, at least for the sixteenth and early seven‐ with a book that is consistently engaging, enter‐ teenth centuries. If--and it is a big if--Englishness taining, and challenging. had achieved some sort of defnition by the six‐ Most recent studies have endeavored to show teenth century, it was challenged in Tudor times that the literature of Tudor and early Stuart Eng‐ by a wide-ranging and sustained efort, by writers land projected a new or at least more sharply de‐ as much as or even more than statesmen, to sub‐ fned image of Englishness and English national ordinate Englishness (along with Welshness, Scot‐ identity. Here, whatever the novelty or ingenuity tishness, and Irishness) to a prior and more inclu‐ of their particular approaches, they have largely sive British identity. endorsed--explicity or implicitly--the well-known The reason for this becomes obvious as soon view of Liah Greenfeld, in her Nationalism: Five as it pointed out. With the Henrician Reformation, Roads to Modernity (1992), that it was sixteenth- England had to come to terms with what would century England that invented the modern form otherwise have been considered centuries of hu‐ of nationalism. One consequence of this view is to miliating tutelage to Rome. The response was--al‐ see "England" coming before "Britain," English na‐ most brutally--to attempt to annul in the national H-Net Reviews imagination the one-thousand-year period of "An‐ Many of these British projects came to naught glo-Saxon" history. It was the Saxons, converted or had to be deferred; nevertheless there is no by Augustine, who had put England in thralldom denying the seriousness with which they were to Rome. The Britons of old, on the other hand, pursued. For the better part of a century Eng‐ had converted to Christianity before the coming land--or at least the English--had to be suppressed; of Augustine. British Christianity was therefore Britain and the British returned triumphantly older--and purer--than Roman Christianity. It was into their own, to the great satisfaction especially an inheritance, kept alive in the Welsh mountains, of Welsh poets and scholars. The collocation "An‐ that was restored with the accession of the Welsh glo-Saxon Protestant" has become so common that Tudors, seen as fulflling Merlin's prophecy that a it is something of a shock to be reminded that at descendant of the last British king, Cadwallader, one time "English" and "Protestant" belonged to would restore the fortunes of the British. That, in separate ideological camps. (It was the English turn, meant restoring the "British empire"--to use Catholic recusants, Schwyzer shows, who were, the term apparently frst coined by the Welsh not surprisingly, the most enthusiastic propo‐ scholar Humphrey Llwyd in his Breviary of nents, if not the inventors, of "Anglo-Saxonism.") Britain (1573). By this was meant not the familiar There was no room here for the Teutonomania overseas empire of later times, but the united that later became all the rage; the English, proper‐ kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ire‐ ly so-called, were more likely to be portrayed as land--the empire, it was claimed, ruled by Arthur the cowardly and uncouth Pistol of Shakespeare's and other British kings. Henry V, set against the courageous and patriotic Henry VII, while exploiting his Welsh ances‐ Fluellen or the sensibly skeptical MacMorris try to please his Welsh subjects, did little else-- ("What ish my nation?"). apart from naming his eldest son and heir Diferent aspects of this story, as Schwyzer is Arthur--to realize these imperial ambitions. For well aware, have been carefully examined by a Henry VIII and his successors the matter was evi‐ number of scholars, such as Arthur Williamson, dently more serious. The Reformation faced them Roger Mason, Colin Kidd and David Armitage.[1] with a more urgent task of historical interpreta‐ What Schwyzer adds is not simply some telling tion. Court writers threw themselves enthusiasti‐ details, but, more importantly, the placing of the cally into antiquarian research to show the im‐ whole discussion within the context of the debate peccably British origins of the Protestant reforma‐ about Englishness and English nationalism. No tion. The Act of Union with Wales (1536) pro‐ one has done it as well or as forcefully as he. His claimed that Wales and England had always been particular strength is, of course, his knowledge of united under "the Imperial Crown of this Realm." the literature of the period. There are impressive Under Protector Somerset, in the episode known and thought-provoking treatments of the more fa‐ as the "Rough Wooing," a determined efort was miliar texts, such as Spenser's Faerie Queene, and made to bring Scotland into the empire--not as Shakespeare's Henry V, King Lear, and Cymbeline, England's feudal dependent, but as a constituent with a particular focus on the British dimension. element of "the empire of Great Britain." The woo‐ Most valuably there are discussions of the less fa‐ ing of Ireland, as always, was somewhat rougher, miliar literature--Welsh poetry and historiogra‐ but the same intent was there. The British policy, phy, Robert Aske's defense of the Catholic Pilgrim‐ and British advocacy, reached something of a cli‐ age of Grace as an assertion of the medieval Eng‐ max with the accession of James I, the most lish legacy, the Protestant John Bale's retort in the wholeheartedly "British" king of the period. vein of British antiquarianism, Sir John Prise's Historiae Brytannicae Defensio (1573) as a state‐
2 H-Net Reviews ment of the specifcally British Renaissance, con‐ cerned with the importance of retrieval and mem‐ ory in a nation's life. Indeed the interest of this book goes beyond its contribution to debates about Englishness and Britishness. Schwyzer is sensitive throughout to questions about the gener‐ al phenomenon of nationalism. He is illuminating, through his discussions of particular texts, on the role of history, memory, the cult of the dead, and nostalgia, in the constructs of nationhood and na‐ tionalism. You may or may not be convinced by the ar‐ gument about Britishness in this period; Schwyz‐ er indeed leaves the whole question hanging by suggesting that British thought and policies ran into the sands in the later Jacobean period (and that both Lear and Cymbeline express Shake‐ speare's disillusionment with the British project, and with nationalism in general). I think he un‐ derestimates the continuity of the pursuit of Britishness, which, of course, receives its fulfll‐ ment in the Union with Scotland in 1707. But no one with an interest in English and British identi‐ ties, and in nationalism in general, can fail to fnd this book enormously stimulating. Beautifully written and cleverly conceived, it is one of the most important studies of the culture of early modern Britain. Note [1]. See, for example, Myron C. Noonkester, "Review of Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the At‐ lantic World, 1600-1800," H-Albion, April, 2000
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Citation: Krishan Kumar. Review of Schwyzer, Philip. Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. November, 2005.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10966
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