Elizabeth Key and the Fight for Freedom

Want to walk the halls of Anne Bleyn's childhood home? or explore the castles that made up Henry VI's English stronghold With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tutor past alongside the world's leading historians and archeologists You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week coovering everything from the ancient world World War II Just visit history hit. com For slash, suubbscribe Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipbskom and welcome to Not justust the Tutors from History Hit a podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, fromom Holbein to the Huguenotos, from Shakespeare to Samuraise relelieved by regular doses of murdaths, espionage and witchcraard. In other words, just the tutors But most definitely also the tudors. In june fifteen eighty six, William Harbourne, England's ambassador to the Ottoman Court, sat down to write a difficult letter A group of Englishmen had been taken prisoner by the Ottomans and all Harbourne's attempts to free them had been in vain He had repeatedly petitioned the Ottoman governor of Algiers, Uluch Alipasha to no avail This time, he changed his target His letter was written to Urich Alipasha's treasurer A eunuch called Asang Aga Harborn reminded Asan Aga of the biblical story of Joseph, the boy abandoned by his brothers in Egypt, later their Saviour, Hoban was urging the treasury to treat the imprisoned Englishman as his brothers in the same way And he included these lines Not Withstanding your body be subject to Turkish thrdrom, yet your virtuous mind be free from those vices There was an interesting meditation on liberty in the circumstances The reason for Harbourne's strange rhetoric is that he knew Asan Aga's secret. The eunuch had been born Samson Rolly, the son of a Bristolian merchant He'd been taken into captivity by the Ottomans while on booard the merchant ship swallow He had risen up the ranks of Ottoman bureaucracy until he became the right hand man of the Ottoman Governor He was English. But he also was not Ideas of England and Britain of Englishness and Britishness have never been uncontested. There has perhaps been no moment in history when their definitions were more up for grabs than in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries This was an age of immigration and emigration of global entanglements and intersections an age in which national identities were being continually remade through encnter. O guest today, Professor Nandini Das has written a lyrical, brilliant and bracing book about this age of flux that causes us to reassess our understandings of Tudor and Stuart England With a touch of rhetorical genius, it is called this Little World It's an absolute treat to talk with her again today. I'm Professor San Lipskom and this is not just the Tutors from History Had Professor Dus and Nandini, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you, Susie. It's such a pleasure. It's such a treat, as I said, to talk to you about this, especially as it's brand new And the ideas in it are so important and I think are going to be really key to redefining how we see this epoch because this is an age of extraordinary change of extraordinary numbers of people emigrating and immigrating wayays of' using the verb I mean, one of the numbers I was struck by is thirty thousand Protestants you say on your first few pages escapeed from Catholic Europe to England between fifteen sixty seven, fifteen, seventy three. Within six years, I mean, it's vast. So I guess couldn't really feel more topical, but I wonder if discussions about immigration have always felt topical So in some ways, the numbers particularly is exactly what struck me when I first started looking at it. That she Concentration Oh Unfamiliar faces, unfamiliar sounds Unfamiliar voices on familiar streets, in familiar spaces, and the kind of tensions that brought up And what's striking, I think is also not simply the scale, but the rhythm So for by that, I mean, you know you have these moments of welcome, letters that I talk about in the book, urging families to join Lved ones in England full of reassurance and you have real sense of a shared humanity and pity and sympathy from the English hosts, one moment. And then they sit out alongside outbreaks of violence like the evil Maydayay riots of fifteen seventeen that I also write about And what you realize when you look at those is that immigration is never just about the movement and discussions of immigration I'm ever just about the movement It's about how that movement unsettles what people think they know. about themselves and about their worlds. And that's what I really wanted to get into. Yes,' an interesting contradiction or it feels like a contradiction or at least a tension here when you write was precisely this deep involvement with the world through trade, conquest, diplomacy and migration that shaped the imagining of the nation singular oional Pidentially set apart Talk me through this, how does this contradiction work? and how does this history create ideas of Englishness and later Britishness It is a contradiction or at least it sounds like one, but it's also I think the engine of the story of an emergent national identity and nationhood On the one hand, you had England as a nation that was beginning to imagine itself as being set apart this precious stone set in the Silver seea the title of the book But this little world, of course comes from John of Gorne's famous speech in Richard II other hand It's also a nation that already at this point is deeply entangled through trade, through diplomacy, migration, conquest The more contact it has with that world, however The more urgently it tries to define itself against that world the thing that I was trying to decode to some extent that quite often think about Englishness as a kind of self sufficient entity as something that's formed in isolation island nation. But even if you think about that phrase this island nation, England was never by itself an island, it had always shared its space with other nations within the island. Englishness is formed not in isolation but in response in conversation, always. encounters a broad weather with Ottoman officials like Asanaga and his superiors, the story that you opened with or with Flemish artisans or Native American visitors, all of that feeds back into how the English think about themselves And you can see that quite beautifully in someone like John Tadesccent, who I write about in the book, a Gardener The royal Garden in fact bringing back plants and curiosities from across the world which are then cultivated, adapted and eventually absorbed into what we think of as this typical English space, the English country garden in a way. somethinghing imported becomes naturalised and then in time becomes a marker of Englishness itself. Literal transplantation, I suppose. Yeah, absolutely. Paradox is real, I think, but it's also really creative. I found that absolutely fascinating push and pull between separation and absorption between distinction and anxiety on the one hand, an absolute appetite and curiosity for the world on the other. This question therefore feels like maybe it's a little reductive, but I think it's important to address the terms Time, migrants from other countries and not just that, but certainly for immigrants were desescribed as aliens or strangers Does that reflect attitudes to immigration accurately Yes, but only partially, I think. Aliens and strangers are esssentially are legal terms quite often and they're used either individually or together So you have various kinds of permutations and combinations like stranger, aliens, alien, strangers, everything that you might think of But a stranger is quite literally someone who doesn't fit into existing categories Someone whose presence raises questions. Are they inside or outside? friend or enemy But what's important is that All of these labels are really unstable in practice. and you can see that when you look at court records or archival records of this period. the same person might be taxed as an alien You have other civic court records where they are treated as a neighbor, a colleague. even family You know, there's intermarriages between stranger families and English families quite often And then you have Even more interestingly, I think, a term like denison, which I spend a lot of time king to some extent which is, I think absolutely wonderfully ironic. originally, if you said that someone was a denizen somewhere. It meant a native, someone who belonged by birthright By the sixteenth century therm is turned inside out applied almost exclusively to foreigners who had been granted limited rights. So it's kind of like a permanent leave to remain. So the very words that seemed to admit you into the nation also quietly recorded that you didn't quite belong So it's very messy in the spirit. and that messiness itself It's both frustrating, of course, but also you can see That's the space within which those conversations and discussions could take place, about identity, about belonging, about who you are who being English meant in this period You follows the stories of many people, some names that will be familiar to people and some that will be new One named somewhere between those things is Lavivinia Tielink, an artist at the Tudor Court, one of many artists to come from Europe And following her story gives us something or the sense of the multilingual multicultural nature of that ct, particularly around cultural and artistic creation What do we know of Livinia Tiink and her work? If you want a short answer, Very little When I started writing that chapter, I wanted to write part of the story through the images that come to our mind. If anyone talks about the tudors, all about Henry theII images that come to our mind are from Tor portraits They're like the kind of dysfunctional family portraits lurking in the background always, you know, Henry VI and his power pose and Elizabeth I first with all her glitter, all that kind of stuff But I don't want to write about Holbein becausecause you know, we know about Hans Halbein, we know about his influence on that early Tudor monarchy propaganda It is propaganda to some extent the Tudors were fairly M on in the political space For me, Lavena was a really interesting figure because she is one of those figures who's both absolutely central almost completely invisible, both because she's foreign and also because she's a woman And she's covered by literally in legal terms, she's a fam covette. So she's covered by the independent identity of her husband Who's the male who's getting paid for her work But she does get paid. I mean, she gets paid more than Hans Holbein does in his left hand. So she is absolutely central to this period. and I found that irresistible. know Here is a woman helping to create the very image of Tudor England The portraits that seals the visual language of monarchy And she absolutely disappears behind that work. We cannot Certainly identify any single one of her work till this day We know from court records that she illustrated various court orders, records, which she may have had a role in designing royal seals She serves all four of the Tudor monarchs after Henry the eighth So she had a substantial role And I liked that idea of really trying to trace this person who's not just an artist, she's a migrant a woman a mother And these things matter those identities too matter in the story of England There's an interesting development in Elizabeth's reign, perhaps from Mary's reign onwards growing sense of Tension, a connection between Political identity and religious identity. And one of the ways in which that's manifested is the suggestion, although it's not passed recisents. So those Catholics who refuse to attend church be made to pay double rates of tax like those imposed on strangers and aliens, you say. I mean, it conveys very powerfully something of the status of the Catholic remnant, those who are recutantents, those who are exiles I mean, do you think there's a parallel here there's something about the formation of the identity of Englishness that we can see encoded in that suggestion. That's a really interesting question. I think Yes, to some extent, it does and it gets to something quite fundamental. about how belonging is being redefined in this period argument for treating the recisants like strangers rests on fairly fundamental, but quite striking idea. esssentially, the argument was that they had in effect, estranged themselves England had become Protestant in the wake of Elizabeth's excommunication by the Pope and the hardening of Protestant identity you have this emergence sense that loyalty is no longer simply about where you're born or who your parents are. It becomes confessional and to refuse the established church of England is in the eyes of some contemporaries to place yourself outside that community So you become as some of them put it, a kind of spiritual stranger to your own country And that's a really interesting point, I think It's not just a policy proposal, this thing about seeing strangers are geographical strangers and spiritual strangers similarly. at this point, it's a sign of how fragile and neegotiable identity itself is becoming in this period. The boundary between insider and outsider is no longer fixed by geographical position or accent or how you look or the fashion in which you Dress It's defined by allegiance, by conformity. by perception In other words, you know, strangers Strangeness is no longer something that comes from elsewhere Your next door neighbor might equally be a stranger even if they were born in England That's really interesting because you also look at people like Asan Agar Another example is Thomas Stevens, and we'll see some others as we go along. hereere U comprehending the experience of exile as something There looks like reinvention where they are choosing an identity internally. Can you tell me about him and how that reflects back onto this bigger question? I'm so glad you asked because Thomas Stehvens is just such a fascinating character obsessed with him for a long time now. And he really is one of the most quietly radical figures in the book. So he's an English Catholic. He grows up in England Born in Wilshire She goes to Winchester School And then he leaves England not as an adventurer, but because he's essentially leaving to save both his life and soul as a Catholic and ends up first in Lisbon, Portuguese, Lisbon, and then in Goa in Western India And that's where he does something remarkable. So He learns local languages, Marathi and Konkoni writes grammars for at first catechisms and then ends up supposing this magnificent epic retelling of the Bible in the local poetic form and language. So this becomes the first telling of the Bible by an Englishman But in Marathi, fifty years before John Milton It's incredible. He is absolutely fascinating and again What it makes you think is then defines him as English prerecisely like the Hassan Aga example There's a moment where Thomas Stehvens, despite being a Jesuit priest in Goa, actually acts on behalf of some English merchants who had been caught by the Portuguese and imprisoned And that brings up this whole mess of identity to the foreground Again, what does it mean to be English It's not obviously simply Protestantism, despite all those arguments about spiritual strangeness becausecause here is this English Catholic Jesuit priest Padre Tomaso Esteval as the Portuguese scold him ing in defence of his Protestant English. countrymen So what is it that holds them together At the same time back in England, We you detail the experiences of Another extraordinary man, Giordano Bruno who might best be known to people for the awful fate he suffers in the end. But let's talk about this moment where he's encountering London. It seemed to me So much to sort of codify that He's experiencing London as a city hostile to foreigners. att the same time, he has moments of feeling really accepted. Tell us about him and how his story helps us understand the reaction to strangers. You know, I have a soft spot for Bruno. He is your typical, irritable academic. In so many ways, he does not take criticism well bristles at everything. He's so very confident about his own views But he's also just such a good example or such a good eyewitness really of that particular London that we are talking about And I write a chapter which opens with his His nightmare trip from hell in London going to a dinner party When he takes the wrong route, he gets stuck in mud His dinner party host stops eating dinner without him so he doesn't get food People are insulting towards him So there's that side of England that is deeply spikeish suspicious or foreigness of anyone who seems or sounds different to them and equally on other side You have foreigners or strangers who have heard those stories, right? Like we do. when we go anywhere foreign and you know you read these travel accounts and they frame your perception. So he has come this assumption that the English are hostile to strangers as and this becomes a recurrent theme throughout the book, I think ers are rarely binary So there is rarely a simple one to one story to be told So on the one hand, Bruno faces all of this hostility and gives as good as he gets. in terms of his satire of English life in this period On the other hand He's also so at home within this thriving intellectual environment Wites multicultural, multilingual absolutely sparking with new ideas, new Imagination, newew excitement about the universe. in general And Bruno isn't the only one he's part of this really widespread intntellectual networks a network of academics and scientists and philosophers who think of themselves as citizens of everywhere. boring a term from Eerasmus the great humanist philosopher. And they believe that intellectual work should not be defined by geographical or political limits It should be for all Of course that all is kind of framework and defined, the all does not include women, for instance people of certain other races or religion But there is a sense of this expansion and that's what I was trying to communicate through my attention to Bruno that you have that tension between those two elements at the same time It's striking that we see that expansion happening on a sort of etymological level with the expansion of the English language at the time or the sense that it needs to expand. What does changes happening in the Elizabeth and Jaccoobbean period to English as a language tell us about culture of assimilation Oh so much. I mean On the one hand, you have writers like Edmund Spencer. writing to his friend, Gabriel Harvey and grumbling about, you know why can't England have a kingdom of its own language? So there's a great deal of anxiety, you know There's always a sense in this period among English writers and you see that cropping up repeatedly about being slightly slow on the uptake as far as it comes to this upsurge of creativity around the Renaissance, they are terribly belated and they feel that and they're made to feel that from Virgil onwards, people talk about England this little island entirely divided from the rest of the world So there's a little bit of a chip on the shoulder. How that in a way. But then There's a flip side to it. so on the other hand, you have people like George Gascoine, another writer. who writes about, you know how the truest English is Really monoelebric So he says, if you're using multiple syllables and long words, chances are these are Italianate borrowings, they're foreign So they're not Tuly English in that way So if Gascon had his way, we'd be talking in very short words and not using words like monocyllabic So you have that tension But you know what? in the middle of that You just have to pick up any book in the period to get a sense of all those words coming up in from everywhere You have those little moments like Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth to wash her hands of blood. This is a Scottish figure, right? and Shakespeare's imagination. and saying the blood on my hands would this multitudinous seas incarnadine couldouldn't get any more end that in terms of the richness of the language Well actually, there's this wonderful example very similar, which is why you've made me think of it. where Shakespeare I think must be mocking you know the whole inkhorn movement to introduce Latinate words because he gives clown in love's Labour's Lost Let me see if I can get this right. You know what I'm going to say, don't you? The word honorifificabilla to dinner tartbus which is means the state of being able to achieve honors. and it's exactly a sort of to show how ridiculous these neolingisms, sorry, Gascon, new words are, you know, actually we've got too many stupid things being made up But it absolutely shows also the ability of English to do precisely that. Exactly. And you have that kind of tension, that push and pull, but then you also have people like John Florio who's a translated he's a second generation immigrant. in know Italian, but he says very famously that he might be Italian in tongue, but he's English at heart. And he's bringing in all these Latin words and terms to the English language. he's talking about How you going to enrich the language itself. He's also editing loads of English writers in the period, including Sir Phip Sidney. So you have a whole wonderful mixture of it. Yes, it's such a fascinating time. Okay Well, let's think also about the other things that the people who are coming in talked about the influx of immigrants and these at some level, these are quite humble people. We've got carpenters, we've got weavers as well as merchants, you know Is it possible cover the stories of these refugees Yes, and this was one of my favorite things You know, I was talking to My students and my friends about writing the opening. And as any writer will know, the opening is what you agonize about. How do you start telling this story And whenever people talk about Tudor history, we talk about kings and queens and here I was Thinking about a Flemish hatmaker complaining about lard And that story is a letter. esssentially. So this is a man called Clius van Vervien who writes a letter to his wife In fifteen sixties, Telling her, England is very welcoming towards strangers comeome over You don't have to stay under this loooming fear of Spanish inquisition You can come to England But remember to bring two butter dishes because the English here Pigs fat, he says You know, whoever has heard of such a thing and I loved that These are not grand narratives, they are domestic, practical. human and sometimes when we're talking about Whether we're talking about monarchy and politics or we are talking about immigration and identity, I think we've sometimes tend to forget that there are real people Mothers, fathers brothers, grandmothers who are caught out attention, indndividuals. But this cluster of letters were wonderful in revealing that texture. of migration The small adjustments, the negotiations, the mixture of hope and uncertainty peopleople went through as they moved in and out of the country in this period In the Is recent period, there is a famous Immigrant Rodrigo Lopez, Portuguese physician to Elizabeth I. We've talked about him on the podcast before But I wondered Whether you might reflect for me on his downfall and the public reaction to it because Does it tellell us something about how Elizabethans now are reckoning the strangers in their midst. We're decades on from the Mayday riots. How has it changed over time, do you think Lopez is in many ways the kind of ideal case for what we might now call the idea of the good immigrant. by the fifteenth. he's done everything right. He's a highly skilled professional. He's a physician, and in fact, he is a doctor to some of the greatest men and women in the land, including the quQueen And he's settled, he's prosperous. he's outwardly conforming. Even his name shifts from Rodergico to Roger in the court records of this period So In many ways, he's precisely the kind of figure who seems to embody successful assimilation And of course, that's when the tide turns. His story, I think reveals is how conditional acceptance always was. So yes, you're absolutely right that there is a to some extent because of political circumstances about anxiety about Spanish and Catholic influence just on the doorstep for the Elizabethan state triggers some of the anxiety around him But it also reveals anxieties that were always Al already simmering underneath, I think, the same markers that made him valuable. So for instance, the fact that he had foreign connections, foreign origins. He was multilingual All of these in a moment of pololitical crisis could be reinterpreted as signs of duplicity rather than usefulness rather than signs of flexibility. Volatility, I think, is crucial It shows that the category of the good immigrant isn't stable never was stable. depends not just on behavior or contribution O circumstance, on mood, on things that the individual can't really control And that's what happens with lopers, Lopers starts acting as a mediator political dealings with Spain and Portugal And then the Earl of Essex who desperately wants to step into The role of the most important political advisor to Elizabeth I him up in this kind of unfolding of a plan of poisoning the quQeen Essse says that ers have planned as a double agent of Spain and Portugal poison Elizabeth I. and Lopez is tried for treason and then hanged drawn and quartted So Logis's downfall for me is not simply a story of individual tragedy in that sense I think it exposes this deeper uncertainty at the heart of the system that acceptance is never unconditional and it's never permanent if you're an outsider in the spiriod, it's somethingomething that that line between insider and outsider can be redrawn at any moment It seems to me one of the moments at which it was being redrawn. was when An outsider became king When James VI of Scotland became James I first of England Can we talk about how that shifted ideas of Englishness because There's this sense, isn't thereough that perhaps the sort of ancient rites of the English, the nature of what it means to be English is now under threat Let's talk about that. Absolutely really messes things out. this point A Scottish king becoming king of England It's inevitable that it's going to raise urgent questions at this point. You know, what is England What is Britain? Are these identities even compatible So one of the things that we see is that this idea, this term Britain itself which for over a century had been used by the English to incorporate other parts of the island like the Welsh and parts of Ireland that it had control over and occasionally also Scotland that it was desperately trying to control All of a sudden. becomes seen as a foreign in possition. Englishness. So you have all these anxieties in parliament this new king is imposing this foreign term that will erase English identity But there's something even bigger, I think, there, which is about how belonging itself is defined So for a long time, people may have said that you were English if you were born on English soil Therefore, you owned allegiance to the English king. What happens when You have someone who's born on English soil but their parents had owned allegiance to the same king, but when he was king of Scotland rather than off England So you have these huge really convoluted legal cases being fought. And I talk about a particular case called Calvin's case which is hugely influential and it has been actually hugely influential right till the present day in terms of determining those legal definitions around birthright whether it is a rightite that is given to you by soil by the place that you're born in or by blood And to what extent does it stay your right? I mean I start to think of the discussion There's been in recent years about ISIS brides who leave and whether they retain their Englishness, their Britishness, because We have this extraordinary case that will be so well known to people who read James Clall in the nineteen seventies or who watched the series more recently of William Adams, who was who became a the level of samurai in Japan Tell us about his story, how did he end up in Japan? you know, for our purposes for today How do we see him shaping his narrative and his identity? Oh this is such a wonderful, amazing story. It almost seems made for fiction in a way. And you just have to imagine this moment where a letter arrives in England. written by someone who's believed to be dead. And he says, I am a Kentish man But this is a sailor. He's a Kentish pilot who at first is employed on English ships during the Armada, when there's a great need for mariners And then what happens after push towards national defense dies down a bit when Elizabeth dies and James I comes to the throne. You have the sudden body of saailors who are suddenly without jobs. So you have sailors, English sailors taking up positions in ships of other nations and Adams is one of them He signs up for a Dutch shipping voyage ultimately ends up shipwrecked in Japan where he is one of the very few people who survive he's taken The Portuguese who were already in Japan are really not pleased to see this Dutch ship Englishmen suddenly wash up on their shore desperately try to convince the shogun that these are pirates, you know, you should kill them Adams manages to convince Tokugawa, Ayasu, the shogun that there was old blood between the Portuguese and themselves, so he shouldn't trust the Portuguese version of events and ultimately He becomes a Hatamoto, a samurai. He marries again. He has a concubine and children in Japan There's this wonderful moment when The first English ship lands in Edo modern day Tokyo, the capital And they're really not pleased to see this Englishman they had depended on who wears Japanese clothes, prefers Japanese food in Japanese and has a Japanese wife It's really disconcerting for them But I think what's fascinating at this point is that double perspective about what belonging means Englishness means L in England, you have this enormous pressure at this point to legally define Englishness, subjecthood. and English identity But then there is this man who has sworn allegiance to the Japanese emperor still insists that at his heart he is a Kentish man Where do you draw those boundaries Again, those ideas of Englishness become really complicated. In Adams's story kind of makes Englishness portable. And once it's portable, It becomes much harder to define or to control Takeularly on the open seas particularly beyond the strictures land defined boundaries. And in your book, you tell an equivalent story of Jack Ward whom people won't know so well, but it just goes to show like us and Ua, there are these You know, once Thampson Ry, these these stories of assumed identity is William Adam, St, William Adams or is he Andon Sammer? You know, who are you once your identity has been so thoroughly absorbed into a different culture Oh, absolutely. and Ward, particularly, I think is an even more telling example in the sense that pirate firstly and James I F really didn't like the pirates. In fact He sets out this proclamation against piracy and spends two paragraphs absolutely fulminating about Ward specifically W is enemy number one for the state? when James is on the throne And that's partly also because he leaves England, but unlike Adams His transformation is much more radical. He converts to Islam He takes on a new name, he becomes Yusuf Raes, this Ottoman Nobleman. esssentially and sets up his own palace His story, I think, is also interesting because it forces us to confront comfortable possibility that Englishness is not something that one carries unchanged. something that can be abandoned or reshaped or redefined entirely So what happens when far from English shows someone who was born and brought up in England not only adopts another culture and another religion but actually can be perceived as an enemy to the state Where do you then draw the boundaries of Englishness talked a lot about men, largely because it's men who leadave the charge when it comes to emigrating. They're the ones who There are some female pirates, but you' mostly pirating or piloting But you do draw attention to A woman called Elizabeth Tanfield Elizabeth Tanford Carry in the end as an example of A woman or the many women who were confined, but as you've put it so beautifully, wrote outwards Placed does her story have in your tale Care is very much at the heart of this whole story. And you know, throughout writing this book, I was deeply conscious of the necessity. of giving these women their voices too like Livina Taillink and then I have Elizabeth Carey and later on I have Elizabeth Key who's another Aazing figure. The first mixed race woman to claim freedom Yes, we'll talk about her. donon't worry. I'm better jump I'm jumping ahead and you're rightly telling me off there, Susie. But Hry is is fascinating because she doesn't really travel very far. I mean, she travels more than some of the other women of a time Her husband becomes is posted to Ireland as part of the English colonial presence in Ireland. and one of the things that I I to understand and try to unpack for myself is the extent to which Ireland becomes the laboratory in a way the lab where those colonial techniques and strategies are worked out that we later see across the world in this period But the interesting thing about Carerie is that for her, that also ultimately triggers a deep spiritual transformation so she converts to Catholicism. and is disowned by her husband herer son In fact, her children, most of her children get taken away, she has to kidnap two of them from her eldest son and sneak them over to Paris so that they could be brought up as Catholics. So within that one single family, you have the snapshot of the absolute inter leaving of political and religious pressures that inflects belonging because you have one family where Some of the children are Protestant and the others are nuns in a Catholic nunnery. in Europe who later write their mother's biography Cry herself even when she is locked up by her mother in law at one point because she reads too much and it's obviously not good for a woman to read too much So she gets her books taken away, she starts writing She writes her own stories and one of the first things she writes essentially establishes her name for us is a closet drama, so a play that is not meant to be performed on stage, but meant to be read call the tragedy of Mariam And it's this amazing play about two women. Salomi and Mariam kking Herod's sister in the Bible and Mariam whom he wants to marry. E of them emphasizing their presence there agency as women completely different ways. And all of that is caught up in this really complex geopolitical land. in a way and she is absolutely fascinating So interesting it's about the same time as Francesca Cacinia's writing. herer operas and she is giving women different forms of agency at one saves the day. We think of this age as the G age of patriarchy and yet we've got these women who are ab absolutely writing a different version of events. Absolutely. And I was struck as you were speaking there about her love of reading and know The listener won't be able to see us, but both of us are sitting against her a wall of books. We are both her descendants in a way. We are her beneficiaries. Absolutely There's so much we could say. I'm aware of your timer. Let's talk about the other Elizabeth whilst're here then, the Elizabeth Key and the implication for her case. on what it meant to be English. because this is I didn't know anything about this story. It's such a striking story. I'm so glad you have shared it to tell us about it Elizabeth Key's story I actually found really difficult to write Because we're discovering that story. prically in the sense that we know what happened after. Essentially her story starts at the County Court of Northumberland County Court in Virginia you know, across the Atlantic We think about these issues of strangers and belonging as being internal to England. But one of the things that I wanted to show is How far those ripples went Elizabeth brings a court case case is about her right to freedom and not just her right to freedom, but the right of her children freedom because she is the daughter of an Englishman, Thomas Kee and an African slave mother whose name we we will never know It's never recorded So Elizabeth and her husband who is an indentured Englishman, William Grinstad claim that accccording to English Common law in this period The woman didn't have control over her children the father who has control, the ultimate say But they take that bit of common law. to defend Elizabeth's rights. They say, well, if Elizabeth's father was a free born Englishman then his daughter cannot be a slave And ultimately after multiple iterations of this court case being fought and argued multiple levels has to agree to agree. Thomas Kee was a freeborn Englishman And if liberty is one of the characteristics, of any freeborn Englishman then Elizabeth and her son to be deemed free cannot be enslaved exxcept of course that door that Elizabeth open in a way. is soon slam shut in the face of others only about a decade after that particular case. Another multiple cases actually come up at the same Virginia countounty courts, which say, well, there's this little doubt about identity And we need to resolve it because otherwise we stand to lose a lot in terms of our slaves So at that point, They agree Eernal law pos for everyone apart from the children of African born slaves So from that moment Savery becomes defined in terms of race essentially So if you're a daughter or a son of an African born enslaved mother You will never be free Yes, and and you to the three moments in your book that come out of that That one which that makes slavery hereditary and freedom not another six years later when the argument that had been made in the past that baptism, a Christian could not be enslaved. that then disappears and now Liberty is no longer something that' people are entitled to by being baptized. and then sixteen ninety one that interracial marriage would be bound. And if you could see my copy of your book, you'll see written in pencil, large letters next to this, you know my goodness, not overturned until nineteen sixty seven. Absolutely. I mean the legacy of this moment and the sense, as you say, that Elizabeth Key is pushing open a door and we see through it an alternative future But instead it's slammed and we move into a period in which English liberty becomes dependent on the enslavement of others. Absolutely. And you know historians quite often talk of this as a contradiction that in the same period when Elizabeth is fighting for her liberty You also have people in England and this is the period of the War of the Three Kingdoms of the English Civil War. and the Royalists and the parliamentarians are also talalking about liberty. So how can that be How can both of those things happen at the same time? But one of the things that I think emerges from archival material that I've been looking through is that the mechanism of both freedom and unfreedom Al already there in a sense And it is just that Elizabeth's case becomes the flame, the little spark to the tinderbox to actually codify What was already enabled within English common law, what was already enabled within English mercantile systems That differentiation suddenly becomes part of legal structure in North America at this point and in other colonies around the world. There's so much in the latter part of your book thinking about the combination of the hunger for knowledge and curiosity with this skill colonial violence and possession of the period But it's interesting that what we see as a paradox, you're saying actually, in many ways, these have always been intertwined Reach our final thoughts Nandini for today, at least. What would you like people to take away from your book. You say these stories are not instruction manuals for the present, fair enough. but what are we to do with them Yes, u. That iss the question, isn't it I think what at most What use is history as just a You've written about this so you will know that sense that it It seems terribly comforting to think about history as teaching us lessons, but at the most what history does is teach us to understand, recognize certain patterns in a way. What I'd like most is for readers, I think to come away slightly unsettled in a productive way We're so very used to thinking of Tudor and Stuart England as a kind of pageant of monarchs Kenry eight, six wives, Elizabeth. drama of the Civil War. And those stories are compelling, but they give that impression that the nation is shaped from the center outward as of identity is something that is red and then everyone just simply falls into line. Everyone knows what Englishness is all the time I hope this book does is in a way Til to the camera a little bit. if that makes sense because Alongside the kings and the quQeens then you start seeing this much busier and really frankly noisier world Migrants haggling over their status in city courts, gardeners quietly planting What's going to become traditional English plants in a way Jewish merchants petitioning Parliament exiles writing home from Ga and grumbling about or singing the praises as it might be of Indian languages And looking at them, I think reveals what I find absolutely crucial and moving in many ways that these aren't marginal stories. They're the places where the meaning of belonging is actually being worked out so much in those portraits. as such But in those Galleys of London and Portsmouth and Southampton And what you see I think across about that hundred and fifty years that I cover is that shift from belonging as loyalty to a monarch to something much more complicated. It's about status, about rights, about participation. So if there's one thing I want readers to take away, it's this that The nation And we use that term so easily sometimes But it isn't a finished monument that's polished and complete that someomehow people have inherited at some point It's more like a building site, really. and it's always been a building site It's noisy and contested and occasionally chaotic and it is still under construction And once you start seeing that in the past It becomes very difficult not to see that in the present Well, that is a wonderful place to end and This is such a joy U to talk to you to read your book. called this littleittle world and as I said earlier, the title is so clever because it speaks Paradox simultaneously to the idea of isolation and of course, to connection It's been wonderful to speak to you about it. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you, Cusy