National Identity as a Relational Process

When we think of the Tudor period, for many of us, images of the glittering court come to mind Henry VII standing square or Elizabeth I, draped in her pearls But there's another side to this history In this episode of The History Extra podcast, Nandini Das traces the lives of ordinary early modern people to reveal a world of constant movement and migration Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Landini explains that beyond the monarchs and courtiers, Tudor and Stuart England was actually being shaped by the ordinary people who crossed its borders. You open the book with the letters of Klace van Verken, an ordinary Flemish hatmaker. and of Hassan Aga, treasurer to an Ottoman governor. Why are these letters significant? How does this set the tone for your book? What is it about? Thank you, Charlotte You know, we think we know about Tudor England, Henry's wives and Codpce. Elizabeth's Jewels, Shakespeare's skeptered Isle And there was a moment of doubt when I started my book instead with not all that glamour and sensationalism, but with a hatmaker complaining about Lard. This is Cllius, who's a Flemish hatmaker writing home to his wife from Norwich in fifteen sixty seven and urging her to come quickly to England Except that he says she must remember to bring two wooden butter dishes Because here, he says, they cook with lard with pigs fat. And it's such a small detail. It's a matter of taste and habit and homesickness. Anyone who has packed about you know, tenin of pringles when they're going on their year away or something like that will immediately understand the pull of it It's funny and intimate and domestic. tells us something profound I think lass is a fitting opener for me precisely because he's not important. He isn't a diplomat, he isn't a courtier or a king. And then of course, the book pivots, as you said, to Hasanaga, this man who was once, we arere told, Samson Rowley of Bristol, a merchant's son who reappears in the archives as the treasurer to an Ottoman governor in Alchers. An Englishm in a turban All of a sudden, the Tudor world isn't a sceptered isle anymore. It's a web stretching right away from Norwich to North Africa that's what really attracted me. There are so many of them. Venetian glassmakers Dutch seam stresses, English samurais African servants, Jewish merchants, even the words and objects that we think of as being quite conventionally English tulips in the garden, sugar in your tea, tobacco in pipes All of those came to England through global networks So that's probably why I wanted to start with those letters Those letters shatter that island myths. in a way, Tudor England isn't and never was an insular prelude to empire. It wasn't even an island nation, if you think of it. It had always shed space with Wales and with Scotland And it was already a node in a really global trans cultural web And that's what the book argues that the nation didn't precede mobility In fact, it took shape through that mobility of people, both in and out of the country. So this is a history of migration, belonging and identity So let's start with a setting which might feel a little bit more familiar to our listeners, the Tudor court If we were to step back in time into the court of Henry VII evidence would we see of multiculturalism? That is exactly where so many of us start our familiarity with this part of history because the tudors in school teaching of history is such a central foundational point. And the things that immediately come to mind are really familiar images, Henry VII, squaring himself up like a boxer in a cod piece Elizabeth standing like a goddess over a map of the nation in all her pearls and jewels and finery, perhaps. And those all give us a sense of Tudor England as something almost monumental, self contained te But those images are really propaganda And propaganda requires labor And that labver came significantly from artists Some English, of course, we know A huge percentage of the work that went into that labor came from immigrants, artists and artisans It meant importing skill and this was really important for Henry VII. We have to remember that the Tudors were still a very young dynasty And both Henry VIII and his father, Henry VII, the founder of the dynasty, were punching above their weight. They were competing against the vast imperial machinery of people like Charles V in Europe. of those first Tudor kings realized and knew this really well that what mattered was perception, except that they didn't call it perception. they called it magnificence And that magnificence was created through people like Flemish painters and Italian financers, that kind of people, you know we know are Hans Holbein, but Holbein is just one among many. Just to probe a little bit further, what view of Englishness and the English monarchy did the Tudor Court try to project during Henrygate's reign The feel that the tutors would like to project primarily It came down to two things power and stability that they were powerful and they were here to stay. And these were crucial for them And as I said, you know there were multiple artisans who were working on gold and jewelry and clothing for Henry VI in the spiit, but the key thing that I focus on are the painters. images that last and Lavvenia Terlink who forms the focus of My opening kind of chapter in story that I tell in the book. is very much one of them. She appears in the records of the Tudor monarchy around fifteen forty six almost incidentally it's a really brief note of appointment Mistress Lvena Terling Pinttrix. We don't know for certain which paintings she produced. Her paintings are scattered throughout the parliamentary records and the court rolls and courtly documents of the period Invisibility almost is precisely why I was so fascinated by her because she stands as a symbol of all those figures presence you can just about discern through the corner of your eye almost as you look at those portraits of Henry or Elizabeth or Mary Tudor in this period. Of course, I've mentioned Holbein already He is absolutely a really illustrative figure in this respect about the power that the artist's brush could wield We know that not only through his portraits of Henry, but of course through his role in things like producing portraits of the women that Henry may or may not want to marry, for instance. Absolutely. And I think there's some irony in the idea that actually you've got immigrants being the people who are painting and projecting this image of consolidated Englishness and a strong tudor monarchy How did contemporaries view these people who were immigrants, working in amongst them alongside them in their daily lives? In the book you mentioned the categories of stranger and alien. I just wonder if you could explain about that a little bit. Absolutely. Firstly, we should make it quite clear that stranger and alien at this point were not vague insults or science fiction references in any way. They were technical categories. So an alien or stranger was someone from a land beyond the control of the English king who had arrived in England and therefore would pay higher duties, higher taxes would have certain restrictions on their freedom Often there was a distinction made between a stranger who was from another country. and a foreigner who might be English, but from just another tax paying region So in those senses, you could argue that Shakespeare, a man who had been born and brought up and had a house in Stratford, was a foreigner in London because he wasn't born and brought up and paid his taxes in London. itself. A denisen would be another category, for instance. A denizen is someone kindind of comparable to a permanent resident today someone who had purchased limited rights, but you could also by paying significantly more get yourself an act of parliament which naturalized you as a citizen. And then by effect, by all rights, you would be comparable to anyone who had been born and brought up in England. So as you can see, there are a whole load of gradations there in a way And you see that circulating throughout this period in popular discourse, in entertainment, in all sorts of ways. So for instance, in fifteen seventeen, a London preacher famously preached a sermon that incited one of the biggest riots against immigrants in London evil Mday rites And he talked about aliens and strangers who steal the bread from the mouths of our children. On the other hand, in Shakespeare's comedy of Eerrors, You have a man who faces execution precisely because he's a stranger except that he's ultimately revealed not only to be a brother but the twin of one of the citizens of the city that he had survived in And that doubleness runs throughout this period. This is what I find so very fascinating. In early modern England, a stranger could be a tax liability, someone who is siphoning off state resources. the scapegoat for a riot. but it could just as easily be The neighbor next door The man or woman you married and loved The teacher who taught you your letters or your sums The friend who brought you ail when you were unwell and knew your children's names and stood in as a witness at their baptism So the stranger could be a scapegoat. They could be a neighbor, stranger could be a kin. The stranger, in fact, could be you stepping off a ship in Venice or in Algiers or in Goa in India The category never settled, and that's what's fascinating about it. It keeps continuously shifting throughout this period and as it shifts, it rewrites what it means to be a nation So we've essentially got this population living in England, many of which are strangers and aliens, as you've explained. someome of them involved in creating this image of Englishness and projecting a view of a stable Tudor monarchy How did that notion of state sanctioned Englishness change when the Reformation came along And suddenly we've got the division of religion coming into play. The Reformation absolutely It changes the grammar of Englishness pre Reformation, belonging was largely you could say loyalty to the monarch and to a given dynasty, it was your birthright Belonging was measured by where you were born, perhaps could hold private views and still serve the crown. We have seen that happening for a significantly long period even within Henry VI's reign, but the breakw Rome absolutely unsettles that framework because suddenly Allegiance is not simply to a king, but to a religious sentiment to a religious faith and that faith becomes entangled. with nationality questions of loyalty too be English increasingly means to be Protestant, then it means to be Catholic, then it means to be Protestant again. So there's a lot of oscillation going on and that makes the boundary between an insider and an outsider increasingly more fraught. What happens if you're an English Catholic under Protestant rule? Are you as English as your Protestant neighborss Some of the Protestant neighbors would argue that you weren't English at all and your citizenship should be stripped from you. So for instance, one of the figures I follow in the book is a man called Thomas Stehvens, who I'm absolutely fascinated by and have been fascinated by for a long, long time Stehvens is a young Catholic And he escapes from England and ends up in Goa in Western India. And there, far from England, he is the first Englishman to write Biblical epic fifty years before John Milton's paradise Lost. But he writes it in Konkani and Marati, the languages of Western India So in his identity, those things, those transnds of what Englishness mean, become significantly Dpending on your perspective, either messier or richer some ways, and that's entirely the doing of that post Reformation aftermath. So essentially the Reformation brings in another avenue for negotiating what counts as Englishness. Absolutely. And this is something that I argue throughout the book, actually over that one hundred fifty years span that this book covers What I traced is essentially a shift of allegiance conceived primarily as a personal bond between either the soil the land and a subject or a monarch and a subject to much more complicated ideas of civic status, participation and rights And religion is one of those things that complicate that issue Moving away from the realm of theological divisions between Catholicism and Protestantism, How did ordinary people negotiate the boundaries of what it meant to be English I know we touch on this a little bit with your discussion of strangers and aliens, but Imigrants expect assimilation into Elizabethan England Yes, I think once you move away from kings and bishops, belonging looks much less doctrinal and much more practical. as anyone who reads the book will realize I've spent far too long pouring over letters written in exchanged among displaced families, both English and non English and they cover things that we can identify with. they worry about work They miss familiar food. They think about newew fashions that they need to absorb They worry about rumors of the debs and Marriages and pregnancies of loved ones who are far from them. They join guilds and baptize their children Assimilation isn't automatic. But it's hugely possible. It was worked through labor through marriage and language and parish life. So for instance, one of the people I follow is a merchant called Jacques the Hem who lands up in Norwich And Norwich, of course, throughout this period takes in huge waves of migrants from Protestant migrants, from the low countries, so Dutch and Flemish communities. And they're not the only ones. There are multiple cities across England who essentially put together the list of preferred immigrants to supply skills and jobs for which their own populations cannot supply the need So if you walk into Staint Michael at Plea in Norwich today, you'd be standing in the parish where Jacques Hem lived And he was very much a very noticeable member of the community. During the fifteen nineties when there was a harvest crisis, he sources grain for Norwich from Amsterdam During the fear of the Spanish Armada when all the cities are having a muster of ableblemot bodied men, to protect the city's resources He puts his name in that muster. along with his other immigrant Dutch contemporaries. He buys the freedom of the city for himself and for his family. He enters the names of his children in the city's registers So that's the classic story of the good immigrant in some ways. He is industrial and useful and loyal But there is another side of the story Of course, Rodrigo Lopez, who is Portuguese born, a Jewish Christian convert Has a meteoric rise. He is Elizabeth in England's celebrity doctor He sees everyone who is worth knowing, including the quQeen. And then the tide turns. One day he's writing a grumpy letter to his son's headmaster complaining about his son's handwriting. The next day he's been arrested. for treason. has this very high profile case tried against him and is executed bllink the Lopez family's fortunes have been overturned Usefulness offers him a protection until it doesn't. People like them aren't marginal curiosities. even the English language revolves in the spirit. We talk about Shakespeare creating new words But so much of that language is also the work of one of Shakespeare's contemporaries a man called John or Giovanni Floro, he's a second generation Italian immigrant And he really knows firsthand how it felt to be on the receiving end of that accommodation or assimilation, whatever you might want to call it There's a wonderful moment where he says in one of his books that I know they have a knife to my throat They believe that an Italian Englishman is a devil incarnate. But at the same time, he insists that he might be Italian in tongue, but he's also English at heart Italus O Anglo speictori, he says. And it's a huge thing for him. and I find that absolutely fascinating. Floro puts this across so wonderfully. that within him, there's face both for his Italian heritage and his English Allegiance. Be a member of two nations, two cultures doesn't divide him It makes him richer, and that's also a story that I want to tell. That really complicates the idea of Englishness, which people typically have for this period, I think Moving on chronologically, After Elizabeth I F's death, James I reign brought with it questions of allegiance for English and Scottish people National identities clash as Scotland was unified with England under one monarch. When James the first comes to the English throne in sixteen oh three as a Scot, that alone kind of completely unsettles that grammar of belonging and we can actually trace that through the legal records of this period. Suddenly, the question isn't only who is English about birthright. Does W you're born Who you're born to matter and how much becomes a really key thing in James's reign. What made you English Is it the fact that your parents were English? What about your grandparents then? Or is it the fact that you were born in England? And this happens with a lot of James's Scottish subjects, for instance who come over with him and then have children in England. But then again, on the flip side, what happens when an Englishman has a child abroad Where did that child's allegiance lie Did it matter if the child's mother wasn't English, for instance. So these were Debates around the right of soil and the right of blood twow ways in which you could measure or map belonging And you could see that English identity itself was stretching far beyond the island. So for instance, I talk about William Adams, who's the real life inspiration behind the blunt English hero of James Clavell's shogun. Adams is an English sailor. sails in a Dutch ship arrives in Japan and was living in Japan advising the emperor married to a Japanese woman, deeply embedded in a foreign political system And yet When he writes and here again, we come to a letter When he first finds out that the English believe he's dead and he finds a means of sending a letter back to the East India Company Back home in London, that letter home begins with him saying, I am a Kentish man And that's so hugely resonant that this man who now has a new name, a new language, a new family thousandousands of miles away still measures himself through his roots in Kent. It's an incredible example and I'd like to just ask you a little bit more about that How people's sense of allegiance and belonging and Englishness changed as people were able to travel and trade with other countries during the seventeenth century, like William Adams? Well, people like William Adams and his children, in fact, the children he had in Japan complicate that issue of birthright They complicate that issue of a national identity. And he, of course is just one among hundreds who are traveling abroad with the various trading companies in these days And that's something that perhaps don't really quite often acknowledge the scale of the sheer kind of presence of trade within international geopolitics in this spiod. And the way it facilitated connection and exchange and therefore complicated identity And one of the spaces where that identity is really complicated is on the high seas It is all very well to talk about your right off soil, but what happens? when there is no soil. under your feet. just the creaking groaning planks of a ship And it's a ship that is manned and they would be manned because it was a predominantly male profession in this period By a hugely multilingual multicultural community, shipboard life was immensely risky So you wouldn't have a single ship manned or crewed by an English predominantly English group It would be multicultural. So that complicates that idea of where does Englishness slip away? Does the fact that William Adams wears a kimona and eats Japanese food and seems to enjoy Japanese music mean he's not English anymore This is something that the East India Comany captain who arrives in Japan. In sixteen eleven worries about How far can he trust this man who looks English doesn't quite seem English. him In a similar vein to travel and trading How did people adapt notions of nationhood as the English colonies became more established and the imperial venture solidified throughout the seventeenth century. You're quite right to bring that up, I think, because particularly as the seventeenth century progressors is another dimension that becomes increasingly urgent and also increasingly fraught because Englishness Ironically becomes something that is enforced far more stringently in those contested territories. first in Ireland and then across the Atlantic. Ireland of course is England's rehearsal space. in terms of that colonial identity. And it's particularly interesting how The shoes off language and religion and belonging kind of come together in those colonies in Ireland in those negotiations. So for instance, Elizabeth Carey is by all rights, if you look at her early life typical Aristocratic English girl Yes, she is significantly kind of bookish. And we know that from contemporary records But she's married off at fifteen. she's an heiress who marries more aristocratic but cash strapped Cter And she soon has children and is shipped off to Ireland following her husband who becomes the Lord deputy of Ireland. So he is very much partart of and in fact, the leader of the colonizing forces in Ireland All her actions in Ireland come from a very good place, but got terribly haywire in various ways. She talks about the necessity of English control and order while at the same time herself rebelling against that English control and order, because it is in Ireland, we suspect where she becomes increasingly familiar with Catholicism And then she returns back to England and very publicly sensationally converts to Catholicism. She's disowned by her own family, by her mother. She's disowned and divorced by her husband Her children are taken away from her all through this She sticks to her faith. so she's hugely important for understanding the implicit presence of the English in Ireland, she's so heavily caught up. that colonization also ironically in the flexibility and the freedom that she herself appropriates for herself as a Catholic in Protestant England. Yeah, I think Elizabeth Carey is a brilliant example of contemporaries negotiating the ideas of colonization of what it means to go and live in Ireland. She's also a typically complicated case because she has deep sympathy for the Irish also has this absolute sense of her English superiority that she knows better. So she is an absolutely wonderful example. of that doubleness. This is not a binary of being either pro or anti colonial It's a really messy, complicated mixture of the two By the time we moved to Virginia in North America, of course question becomes even more brutal What is English blood worth Ultimately So for instance, I trace the story of one particular woman, Elizabeth Key who's the daughter of an Englishman, a slave owner and an enslaved African mother And she brings her case to the Virginia High Court. claiming her freedom because courourt by law has to recognize Eernal Englishness In other words, A that the father is the more important parent where a child's identity is concerned and be that an English man or an English woman cannot be a slave. And Elizabeth Ky uses those two, the conjoint power of those two arguments to claim that she is a free woman And so is her children They have to be free becausecause her father was English. The colony agrees And she's given her freedom, but then soon after the colony changes the law And enslavement becomes hereditary through the maternal line So if you have an enslaved mother You are doomed to enslavement. This is a moment I find profoundly important because this is the moment where belonging becomes racialized For some people, it's going to be easier to belong than to others. And that Ease of belonging depends on which race you belong to on your appearance, on your background. But also what these stories reveal is that colonization and empire didn't just expand English identity. It transforms it, it shapes it It continues to be changed from year to year not only within England, but beyond it in North America, in India, in Japan, in various far flung places wherever the English had set foot. Yeah, I think complexity is a common theme that we keep coming back to in these stories. Taking together the stories that we've spoken about so far, Elizabeth Keee, Elizabeth Carey, Thomas Stevens, William Adams Is there a common factor defines the nature of identity, of migration, of belonging in this history. That's such a lovely question And I think that's in a way the argument that holds the book together. What I try really to put across and what emerges from this history is that National identity is not a settled inheritance that is disturbed by mobility. It is actually something that is clarified by that mobility everyvery time a stranger appears or an Englishman becomes a stranger abroad The state has to articulate Wh he is or she is counts who doesn't And those articulations accumulate. Belonging is never final. Throughout this history of one hundred and fifty years that I trace It is granted and contested and revoked and renegotiated. That instability is the story. The stranger, the exiled, the denizen, the naturalized citizen, the child born on the wrong side of a boundary All of these figures, I think demonstrate just a simple key fact, which is that appears natural or what we appear to take for granted, national identity is in fact contingent. It's granted and withdrawn in response to mobility And yet the story is not just one of exclusion, either, when the gardener John Tradescand and his son For instance, traveled to Russia and North Africa and Virginia and planted the lilac and the horse chestnut tree In English soil Those plans were foreign arrivals like so many of their human counterparts today we call them architipally English. The garden And the nation naturalizes what was once alien It reforms itself in response to that movement. That's a really powerful idea that instability is the story that we're telling here. Another continuity that actually stood out to me when I read the book Oftten in these stories we're telling There is the notion or the spectre even, of a stranger. That's something that consistently comes up. What does that tell us figure keeps reoccurring in this history. Can we take anything positive from that, do you think? Absolutely. think If there's one thing that this book tries to communicate is that it tells us that the stranger is not just someone who arrives at a nation's door It's also the person who leaves it. So in these stories, the stranger is Lavinia Turlink at courourt or Jacques the Hem in Norwich, yes But it's also William Adams, writing from Japan, Thomas Stevens writing in GoA, English settlers in Ireland, merchants in Venice, sailors in Algiers, the pirates on the high seas. The English are as often the strangers abroad as they're the hosts at home and that Reciprocity is quite crucial I think, because it destabilizes any simple story, any binary structure that we might want to set up of inside versus outside. And what that reveals is that national identity is relational. In other words, it becomes visible not when everyone fits and there's only a single story prerecisely when someone doesn't fit Or when you yourself no longer fit, the migrant, the exile, the expatriate falls that question travels with you? Is it Englishness? and if it is is that Englishness soil Language, loyalty Memory, what is it And there is something positive, I think, in that understanding, in that recurrent pattern that we trace. It shows that belonging has never been a close inheritance It has never been something that is absolutely owned by some and withheld from others It has always been worked out in movement through encounter, through adaptation, sometimes conflict the stranger whether they are incoming or Outgoing is not an anomaly in the story of the nation. they are part of the mechanism through which the nation tells its story. Bringing this story up to today, then Does this history speak to our modern political climate, do you think? That's always such a tempting question, isn't it? But I'm cautious about drawing neat parallels purely because the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries quite explicitly aren't the twenty first. There are different pressures The political structures, the scale of movement, the language of rights are very different. What history can offer, I think, is perspective One of the striking things about this period is how familiar the certain rhythms feel economic strain, religious conflict, political uncertainty These are the things that repeatedly sharpen anxieties about who belongs. The language hardens and then boundaries are debated, and yet those same societies remain deeply dependent on movement and exchange. That tension isn't new What the book suggests, I would say is not a lesson because history can't really, despite all we hope teach us a lesson what it can offer our patterns Political communities repeatedly recalibrate terms of belonging when faced with mobility and change. I think sometimes we tend to forget The nation has always been argued over, It has been administered contontested but it has also been reshaped and enriched by encounter. And that is ultimately what this early modern period reminds us of. That reminder is definitely an important one in our modern day Now finally, something which we have touched on a little bit, but I was hoping we could just pull out a little bit more is How do the stories in your book complicate the well worn tudor histories centered on monarchs and courtiers What do you hope the impact of this history will be? You know, those well worn Tudor and Stuart histories are where my fascination with this period started And I'm still fascinated by them cause who wouldn't be? These are huge towering figures. Those stories matter They can also make the nation look as if it were shaped only from the center outward. What this book shows is that England was also being made in workshops and parishes and on the streets of London and Southampton and Portsmouth in courtrooms by migrants and gardeners and school teachers and writers and all of those people. The title comes from Shakespeare from John of Gorne's spepeech in Richard II, where England is called This Little World And that speech quite often tends to be taken out of context. It's seen as this wonderful celebration of a golden England in the past But here's the thing Even in John of Godone's speech It is Not only in the past, but it's a broken ideal that you can only just about reach for. It's a lament of a very fragile vision of an England that was crumbling rapidly political pressure and greed and all of those things That's what I want to convey.. If the book has an impact, I hope it's this that readers stop seeing national identity as something cleared from above all from the center. and start recognizing it as something that is forged ly tr encounter. It's really about tension between imagining England as an island and discovering that it was already global That was Nandini Das speaking to Charlotte Vosper Andandini is prorofessor of early modern literature and culture at the University of Oxford Her book, This Little World, A New History of Tudor and Stuart England, is full of even more stories about the early modern people who negotiated identity, belonging and migration