Empire state building:

Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds. 1996. The British Problem, c1534-1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago. London: Macmillan. 334pp. ISBN 0-333-59246-8. £14.99

Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, eds. 1998. British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533-1707. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 354pp. ISBN 0-521-43383-5. £40.

1. For just over a decade at the beginning of his reign King James VI and I managed to pull off a sizeable coup. This was in no small part due to the fact that what he was trying to achieve and the manner in which his people subsequently interpreted it were actually quite different. In spite of his accent and the presence of his nearest and dearest advisors, James Stuart managed to sell the idea of Great Britain to the English without, it might be added, sacrificing Scotland to Anglocentric imperialism. It was left to his son, and the man who replaced his son to accomplish that.

2. In a recent magazine debate two commentators made highly pertinent observations regarding the subject of Britain and Britishness. George Kerevan wrote that the British union state was created as a counterweight to continental Europe in its various pre-EU forms, while Andrew Marr argued that 'British' is a political term, not an ethnic one, adding that '"British" surmounts and tames England' (Prospect 1998, 18-21). The British union state was indeed a political expedient, but its 1707 creation belies the imaginative force of that state brought into existence under James VI and I. And the idea that Britain is a political term rather than an ethnic one might hold water now but it certainly didn't four hundred years ago, especially in the absence of a British political discourse in the early modern period (Burgess 1988, 579-90). That said, Britishness certainly had a cultural impact. It was an idea stimulated by James Stuart's accession to the English throne and taken up by playwrights and antiquarians, not all of whom, to follow the established line of literary criticism, pursued an oppositional agenda (Helgerson 1992).

3. Historians have yet to get to grips with what James Stuart did and what his Tudor forebears couldn't do. And I use 'couldn't' deliberately, which goes some way to explaining why I find the dating of much of the work falling under the heading of the British Problem problematic. The British Problem as it stands today is also its own Achilles Heel. If historians only look at it from a position of English centrality it won't be British and if we envisage one particular component of the islands as epitomising the problem then we run the risk of turning a discursive field into a regional quagmire.

4. Studies of the Problem traditionally begin with Henry VIII's implementation of legislation designed to supplant Papal authority over the majority of ecclesiastical matters with his own. It is an important and often cited moment in the history of the Protestant Reformation. But what does it say about the creation of a British polity or a British culture? It says a considerable amount about English nationalism. But English nationalism writ large is what perceptions about Britain mean today. The better date to look for the creation of an emphatically British agenda is not in the sixteenth century, but the seventeenth, in 1603 to be a bit more precise, if only because it was a period of intense pro-British marketing. Lord Mayor's pageants, court masques, stage plays and commemorative coins, a wide-ranging variety of cultural forms, all celebrated Great Britain in terms which challenge Professor Morrill's assertions that 'the one group who most resolutely and consistently refused to regard themselves as Britons were the English in England' and that if the English use Britishness at all it was as a synonym for English (Morrill 1996, 10). In a similar vein Glenn Burgess has claimed that 'there are [ . . . ] at best separate Scottish and English discourses of Britain, and part of the problem is that they meet astonishingly infrequently' (Burgess 1998, 587). In political terms this may be so, but culturally, this really isn't surprising. English audiences were not ready to appreciate the ancient history of the Scottish crown or its Parliament. As an example, the dignity of the soldiers in Shakespeare's Macbeth is as far as a dramatist was prepared to go in that respect. English politicians who might well have recognised the political maturity of the Scots were less likely to voice that sentiment in the context of the Union debate of the first Jacobean parliament when such concessions could have undermined English parliamentary sovereignty. In political terms there was no pan-British discourse because Union produced at least two armed camps and few people in power on either side of the border were prepared to concede anything. This cultural realpolitik shouldn't appear astonishing at all. What is significant is that not all English discourse of Britain necessarily followed the line that Scotland should become part of a greater England.

5. We know of an ideological Britishness that was not solely part of a process of English aggrandisement through the repertoire of the London stages. Shakespeare's King Lear (1606), his Cymbeline, King of Britain (1610-1611), the anonymous Nobody and Somebody (1603-1606), the lost Madon, King of Britain (1605-1615), Rowley's A Shoe-maker, A Gentleman (1607-1609) and his The Birth of Merlin (1607-1615) all have ancient British history as their subject material (Marshall 1995). Furthermore, they make individual assertions as to the desirability and inherent greatness of the unified realm. We often forget that Lear's disaster comes about because he not only fails to read his daughters' affections but because he divides his British kingdoms. Yet the theatrical marketing of Britishness as an ideological trope began to break down at the same time as James's popularity took increasing knocks in the middle of his reign. Somewhat unsurprisingly the venality of his court and the scandal of the Overbury murder, combined with his unwillingness to further the Protestant cause overseas loomed large in bringing about this decline in popular standing. Explicit considerations of Britain were replaced by contemplations on martialism amid the growing clamour for war with Spain (Marshall 1998).

6. The two volumes under consideration here emerged from an undergraduate course at Cambridge led by Professor Morrill and Dr Bradshaw from 1987-1997. Their work pioneered what has become one of the most important discursive fields in early modern history this century. No longer is it acceptable to study England under the Tudors without more than a passing reference to the neighbours. Ironically, most visible of the matters which emerge from both these volumes is the strong sense that England was not that interested in getting to know those Irish, Scots and Welsh neighbours any better. Where England was interested in being archepelagic was whenever the neighbours made a row or threatened to do so. But a consideration of the British Problem which looks at the manner in which the English dealt with things is not only an anglocentric bias but also it singularly fails to appreciate where Britishness really drew its support.

7. England never really saw Britain and Ireland as a unit but the Scots infrequently did. When Argyll had Charles II proclaimed king it was not as King of Scotland but King of Great Britain. As Derek Hirst notes in his essay in the first of these two collections, the response from the English parliament was less than favourable: 'The Rumpers, who during the last ten years might have been expected to have recognised the Covenanters' deep commitment to a shared British ecclesiastical – and hence political – destiny, were appalled' (Hirst 1996, 196). Furthermore, Cromwell turned down the title of Emperor of Great Britain in favour of the more conservative Lord Protector, making it difficult to see the British Problem as one of English state building (Armitage 1992). But the Scots in Scotland weren't the biggest fans of Britain. As I will indicate below, those Scots and English who left their home countries took that accolade.

8. But what of Europe? Is the British Problem not just short change for a wider European predilection for dynastic shenanigans, wars of religion and good old fashioned internecine bickering? Of course, the argument for a European view, a European Problem as it were, is made more awkward when we consider the pressures and influences external to Europe which shaped the fortunes (often quite literally) of the European powers. To what extent was Spain's ability to interfere in Ireland consequent on its finances reaped from the New World? How much of Dutch history within a European framework is dependent on its East Indian trading power? Or that of Portugal? Just where are we supposed to draw the line? Nicholas Canny would here claim the importance of the Atlantic perspective and this too makes the study of such a small area as Britain problematic. Problematic but not impossible. As Professor Morrill notes, these are further frameworks for conceptualisation, not alternate ones (Morrill 1996, 17). Nevertheless much of what Jonathan Scott says on the matter of a European context for British affairs strikes true (Scott 1996) and if there wasn't a very real sense in which there was a contemporary conception of Great Britain then indeed study of a British Problem would be a matter of historiographical convenience. But there was.

9. While James wrangled with Parliament over his title and Parliament wrangled with James over the small matters of English fiscal, legislative and bureaucratic inviolability, popular attention moved towards a consideration of the grandiosity of the British isles. Coincidentally, it did so precisely at the time when one significant British consciousness was about to emerge. Elizabeth's successor oversaw the large-scale plantation of Ulster, giving rise to nearly four hundred years of one of the most staunchly British identities and one which has at practically all times been threatened not as much by Eire as by perfidious Albion.

10. Throughout the seventeenth century, planters in Ulster of both Scots and English backgrounds differentiated themselves from the natives by calling themselves British. Though there were indeed printed references to the 'British' in Ireland referring solely the Scots, the fact that some writers chose to speak of the two peoples under one national banner should not be overlooked. In the survey of Ulster lands undertaken by Captain Nicholas Pynnar in 1618 / 19, Pynnar used the inclusive term 'British' as his most frequent description. An English servitor in 1622 complained that his land in Tyrone was so bad that 'noe britishe tenents wilbe drawn to inhubytt uppon it upon any tearmes or condicions be the[y] never so reasonable'. Furthermore, towards the end of 1620 a group of undertakers under the leadership of an Englishman, Sir John Fish and a Scot, Sir James Craig, submitted a petition in which they refer to '36,000 British planted whereof 8,000 [are] able to beare Armes' (Marshall 1995, 172-5). By the mid-century this distinction continued to be used, Sir John Temple differentiating between Irish and British in Ireland in his The Irish Rebellion (1646), where the term 'British' is used to mean English and Scottish settlers. As Jim Smyth notes, the term 'British' was again used in the crisis years 1688-91 to embrace both English and the Scots in Ireland' (Smyth 1996, 253). Here were the seeds of the sole ethnic British identity, the most common expressions of national identity in Northern Ireland today remaining the bifurcation between Irish and British. Short of royal weddings, the streets of England, Scotland and Wales never see the levels of British paraphernalia as appear in the loyalist communities of Ulster during the summer months of the year.

11. The differences in these two volumes are subtle but important nevertheless. The style of the first is akin to that of stalls in a bazaar, many ideas in a very loose ideological framework, while the newer tome is more of a department store, related ideas more firmly under the same roof. In The British Problem, Professor Morrill's reading of the Tudor attempts at a British viewpoint does raise some problems. If, as indeed he notes, Henry VIII made no attempt to proclaim himself King of Scotland after the death of James V, showing himself to be largely uninterested in the unification of Britain, where are the Britons in the sixteenth century? (Morrill 1996, 21) How many people, other than such British propagandists as John Dee and Humphrey Lluyd would have signed up to the notion of there being Britain? If the number of Britons who thought of themselves as such were limited in the seventeenth century, as Morrill rightly indicates, they were practically unheard of in the sixteenth.

12. At times these different stalls can be quite confusing as the traders call out their wares. In one corner Dr Bradshaw (1996, 43) tells us that 'Ireland constitutes the historic British problem', at another Dr Wormald (1996, 148-171) views the Problem as the relationship between England and Scotland during the reign of James VI and I. Hiram Morgan meanwhile observes that 'with high levels of continental involvement in Scotland and Ireland, it is obvious that British policy so-called was in many respects the exercise of foreign policy in England's own backyard' (1996, 67). In their essays Morrill, Goldie and Smyth all illustrate the manner in which English policy in response to the component parts of the islands was very much off the cuff. Immediate political reaction, however knee-jerk, does not rule out the existence of an ideology subsuming a notion of Britishness but it is important to differentiate here between what were indeed matters of internal foreign policy (and not just English foreign policy at that) and what were genuine attempts to rule three kingdoms as one. To do that we need to re-emphasise the difference between a British Problem under the Tudors and one under the early Stuarts, because Britain meant very different things to Elizabeth and James. Elizabeth's Britain was a greater England. James's was not always so. True, there were those (like Parliament) who liked to think that England would have the upper hand in any of James's notions of empire but there were also those who wrote about a non-partisan form of Britishness, inclusive, rather than exclusive, conciliatory rather than confrontational. Aside from the playwrights, Michael Drayton stands tall in this respect. Though his two-part chorographical magnum opus, Poly-Olbion (London, 1612, 1622) didn't include Scotland, we know from letters written by friends after his death that he had begun work on completing the British mainland.

13. Most interestingly in this volume, the essays by Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts reveal the Welsh response to English expansionism as being comparatively smooth. Wales bought into Tudor English pretensions to Britishness. Tudor Scotland did not. Tudor Ireland never would (and but for the North still doesn't). The 'New Britain' deal touted by Henry VII to the Welsh had the effect as Dr Bradshaw writes, of facilitating 'a perception of incorporation, in view of the benefits it bestowed, not as the annexation of the nation as a 'very member and joint of the English realm', but as its liberation by the long hoped-for British deliverer' (Bradshaw 1998, 51-2). As Dr Roberts notes, the Welsh were squeezed into the Jacobean equation by their reconciliation to the idea that James was the true heir of that first Tudor.

14. Jenny Wormald's essay could never be accused of anglocentrism, being another superb example of how Scotland's monarchy was a better run machine than its English counterpart. But when she writes that James 'manifestly failed to achieve any sort of 'British' kingship' he certainly didn't fail when it came to inculcating a notion of Britishness. Both she and Derek Hirst make the mistake of citing Shakespeare's Elizabethan Richard II for its pithy summary of Englishness vis-à-vis the seventeenth century. Wormald writes of the play that 'it takes little imagination to appreciate which imagery, British or English, would appeal to King James's English subjects' (Wormald 1998, 152). However, as far as we know neither James Stuart nor anyone else living in England (or Scotland for that matter) during the period of his reign ever saw Richard II performed. The single recorded Jacobean performance of the play in James's reign occurred on board the Dragon off Sierra Leone en route to the East Indies on 30 September, 1607 (Kawachi 1986). A slightly exclusive gathering. Shakespeare's view of 'this England' was momentarily sidelined in favour of the run of plays noted above which were more interested in British history. King James's English subjects were paying to see a new national past.

15. Wormald's 'flattering poets, scholars and politicians [who] settled down in the early years of the reign to extol the 'British' idea, without being very clear what it was' were not always flattering and they didn't always write for court performances either. If they didn't know exactly what Britain was they did what any playwright did when in doubt: he picked up his copy of Holinshed's Chronicles. Equally, her assertion that a British identity 'did not exist, because the king did not want it to exist' tends to ascribe too much power over cultural forms to the king (Wormald 1998, 153, 170). James was certainly a focal point of some of the British material in the early seventeenth century, but then so was Prince Henry until his death in 1612. Indeed, the often belligerent, martial tone of much of the material in the British plays would certainly have appealed more to the young prince's sensibilities than to his father's.

16. British consciousness and identity is very much the offspring of its elder parent. Its contributors' profiles are announced, its editors note, to counter accusations of anglo-centrism. Indeed, the differing national backgrounds and academic fields of study make for an extremely wide-ranging set of essays. Too wide-ranging perhaps. We must at some stage return to the basic question about this 'British Problem' itself. Do the contributors of the newer volume find a solution to this enigma or are they, as the Irish were famously accused of doing, continually changing the question when someone figured out the answer to the old one?

17. The latter answer appears to have the weight of evidence behind it, because what emerges from the Bradshaw and Roberts collection is the sense that we're emphatically not looking at a British Problem at all. We're looking at an Irish one. Dr Bradshaw views the triumph of the Counter Reformation over the Reformation in Ireland as of critical importance in the sixteenth century process by which Ireland established itself as the greatest thorn in the English Parliament's side. His magisterial essay, the longest in the book, sets out why Wales went along with incorporation into the English world view and Ireland did not. He asserts the significance of the manner in which the two Catholic peoples of Ireland came together in ideological terms, noting the difference between religion as practice and religion as ideology. However, what is extremely revealing as regards Ireland's place within the British Isles (pace Dr Bradshaw) is the dark side of this particular moon, the part of Irish history which does relate firmly within a British historical sphere. Willy Maley's revelation of the context of Bacon's 1609 Certain Considerations Touching the Plantation in Ireland is extremely potent in redirecting our gaze away from the more familiar territory where England failed to change the face of Ireland to where it (perhaps Pyrrhically) succeeded. Maley's essay indicates not only that Ireland cannot be considered in isolation from Britain but that there is a definitive British stake in Ireland. He notes that this is not something Irish republicans have been keen to acknowledge, especially as Bacon's Certain considerations illustrates the manner in which the Ulster plantation is perceived as being part and parcel of the reconstruction of Great Britain in the aftermath of the Union of the Crowns (See also Maley 1995). The plantation was a highly visible representation of multinational co-operation, even if realpolitik demanded that the settlement should be one governed by English law and ministered to, officially at least, by the English national church.

18. If we wish to find proto-Britishness in the seventeenth century we should look solely to the Ulster plantation. That settlement was a palpably British project, the direct offspring of the Union of the Crowns and to this day a troubled child in the family of these islands. Ulster was British centuries before England was and remains the last bastion of British national identity in the United Kingdom. Yet Ireland still has the ability to stand out like a sore thumb in the equation. In his essay in The British Problem Pocock asks whether it was 'perhaps not a body politic incorporate at all?' (Pocock 1996, 177) while in the same book Jim Smyth writes that 'Ireland, perhaps, had never been anything other than a colony, yet the constitutional fiction that it was an autonomous kingdom packed considerable rhetorical force' (Smyth 1996, 261). It is perhaps ironic that the Irish patron saint is that celebrated Romano-British colonist, Patrick.

19. In his essay on Britishness and the later Stuarts in British consciousness and identity, Colin Kidd writes that Britain at the end of the seventeenth century 'remained an uninspiringly underimagined community. Contemporary construction of British nationhood lacked a compelling ethnic or historical vision. Instead of a hegemonic British identity, there remained the existing national traditions and a few areas which permitted a degree of common identification.' He writes of the 1707 union being 'celebrated in terms of a very weak milk-and-water Britishness' (Kidd 1998, 335-6). Indeed it was. Mid- to late-seventeenth century Britain was Orwellian Britain, do-what-you're-told Britain, one religion under God, or else, Britain, the Britain of Cromwell's persuasive military methodology and, after him, of the Duke of York's variation on the same theme. It's not a matter of where you look here, so much as when you do so. For most of the early modern period Englishness asserts itself almost unchallenged over any British rival as it did at the close of the seventeenth century, but from the late Elizabethan period through that of her successor 'Britishness' did emerge as something more than an antiquarian interest. Writing on Britain encompassed some of the greatest works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Fletcher and Middleton, to name but a few. Their work created a short-lived British culture, and if in the case of Spenser in particular it was one with an English spin on Britishness then we shouldn't rush to deride its value in the formulation of the British national identity that was to appear beyond the seventeenth century.

20. Unlike Tony Blair's facile 'Cool Britannia' and the equally anglocentric 'Britpop', early seventeenth century Britannia had a degree of popular conceptual legitimacy. In fact it was the stage versions of Britain which draw our attention to what was a far greater interest in this cultural entity than political historians have ever appreciated. In his essay in the newer of the two volumes Jim Smyth writes of how 'many astute commentators discern the impending 'break-up of Britain' (Smyth 1998, 319). In this context it is interesting that these two collections, far from attempting merely to bury Britain, treat the three kingdoms to a wake. But is the British Problem, to follow Dr Bradshaw's definition, really the problem Britain has had with Ireland? Is the failure of the Reformation to take hold in the sixteenth century echoing down the halls in Stormont castle? I remain to be convinced that there is a single problem, one particular beast in the woods. If there was we would have found it by now. The British History, like Great Britain itself, is greatest in its diversity. Especially when we look at its constituent parts. There we can find the greatest success of James VI and I's reign, and perhaps, just perhaps mind you, the locus of this particular phase of identity construction.

21. That does not mean we should be disappointed that there wasn't genuine British policy-making during the majority of the early modern period. It comes as no surprise that the English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should have viewed the Scots, Welsh and Irish as second class citizens. 'The English think of themselves as a self-made nation, thus relieving the Almighty of a dreadful responsibility' as the doggerel goes. That the Britishness of the Ulster plantation was of a comparatively mild hue in its early stages should neither discourage us from viewing it as significant nor dishearten us that we have not found something more revealing. Calling for the 'Brits' to get out of Ireland today is therefore similar to the admittedly less well voiced movements for the Normans to get out of England and the Europeans to get out of America. The recognition of an insoluble and emphatically British identity as a separate and distinct part of the island of Ireland is the last great Irish taboo. Failing to accept this will lead us only to yet another Yugoslavia.

22. The debate about the British Problem will undoubtedly run on for many years yet, but what the two books here have achieved is to bring together historians from many backgrounds and viewpoints and in so doing ushered in a fresh round of contextualization. Perhaps there is more to be done. One thing is certain though, and that's the healthiness of the multiple perspectives used. If I might make a request it's that we stick to using the term 'British Isles' without wringing our hands with guilt or embarrassment. I can't find one early modern inhabitant of these islands who thought it appropriate to talk of an 'archipelago'. Besides, the Archipelagic Problem just doesn't sound right.

List of Works Cited

Armitage, David. 1992. 'The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire.' Historical Journal 35:531-555.

Bradshaw, Brendan. 1996. 'The Tudor Reformation and Revolution in Wales and Ireland: The Origins of the British Problem.' In The British Problem c. 1534-1707, edited by Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill. London: Macmillan.

Bradshaw, Brendan and John Morrill. Eds. 1996. The British Problem, c1534-1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago. London: Macmillan

Bradshaw, Brendan and Peter Roberts. Eds. 1998. British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533-1707 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Burgess, Glenn. 1998. 'Scottish or British? Politics and Political Thought in Scotland, c1500-1707.' Historical Journal XLI: 579-590.

Canny, Nicholas. 1998. 'The Origins of Empire: An Introduction.' In The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, edited by Nicholas Canny. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Volume I of Wm Roger Louis, Ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire] 1-33.

Dunlop, Robert. 1924-5. 'Sixteenth century schemes for the plantation of Ulster.' Scottish Historical Review 22:51-60, 115-126, 199-212.

Helgerson, Richard. 1992. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

Hirst, Derek, 1996. 'The English Republic and the Meaning of Britain.' In The British Problem c. 1534-1707, edited by Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill. London: Macmillan.

Kawachi, Yoshiko. 1986. Calendar of English Renaissance Drama 1558-1642 . New York: Garland Press.

Maley, Willy. 1995. '"Another Britain"?: Bacon's Certain Considerations Touching the Plantation in Ireland (1609).' Prose Studies 18: 1-18.

Marshall, Tristan. 1995.'The idea of the British empire in the Jacobean public theatre, 1603 – c. 1614.' Cambridge Ph.D.

Marshall, Tristan. 1998. '"That's the misery of peace": Representations of martialism in the Jacobean public theatre 1608-1614.' The Seventeenth Century XIII:1:1-21.

Morgan, Hiram. 1985. 'The Colonial Venture of Sir Thomas Smith in Ulster, 1571-1575.' Historical Journal 28: 261-278.

Morgan, Hiram. 1996. 'British Policies Before the British State.' In The British Problem c. 1534-1707, edited by Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill. London: Macmillan.

Morrill, John 1996. 'The British Problem, c. 1534-1707.' In The British Problem c. 1534-1707, edited by Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill. London: Macmillan.

Prospect (August / September. 1998) 33:18-21.

Scott, Jonathan. 1996. 'England's Troubles 1603-1702.' In The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, edited by R. Malcolm Smuts. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 20-38.

Smyth, Jim. 1996. '"No remedy more proper": Anglo-Irish unionism before 1707.' In The British Problem c. 1534-1707, edited by Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill. London: Macmillan.

Wormald, Jenny. 1996. 'James VI, James I and the Identity of Britain.' In The British Problem c. 1534-1707, edited by Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill. London: Macmillan: 148-171.