In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Venerable Bede recounts a visit Pope Gregory the Great made to a Roman market, where he sees two slave boys of striking appearance. They are Angles, he is told, to which Gregory punningly replies: “Non Angli sed angeli” – “Not Angles, but angels.”
By the 17th century, the English were regarded as somewhat less angelic, hence a Dutch pamphleteer’s suggestion that Angel-Land might more accurately be described as Devil-Land. Foreign observers thought England’s “political infrastructure weak, its inhabitants capricious and its intentions impossible to fathom”. Yet by the end of the century, England, soon to be united with Scotland as Great Britain, was transformed into a military-fiscal state of limitless ambition, financially ingenious and militarily strong. It had joined France and Spain among the premier powers and would eclipse both. Its path to ascendancy was an unlikely but fascinating one, tracked in this compendious, detailed study by the Cambridge historian Dr Clare Jackson.
Two dramatic events took place towards the end of the 1580s that were to set the tone for the next 100 years. In 1587, Mary Queen of Scots was executed for her alleged role in the Babington Plot against Elizabeth I. Mary had been a thorn in her cousin’s side, not least because she had hereditary claims on Elizabeth’s title. She was the legitimate great-niece of Henry VIII, who had declared Elizabeth, his daughter by Anne Boleyn, illegitimate. Catholics, of whom Mary was one, considered Elizabeth “a Protestant heretic bastard”. What is more, Elizabeth, unlike Mary, had no issue. The vexed issue of succession would mark these turbulent times.
Just over a year later, in 1588, a huge Spanish fleet sailed out of Lisbon headed for England: Europe’s greatest Catholic power sought to bring its Protestant outlier to heel. As it turned out, a “Protestant wind” played havoc with Philip’s Armada: a third of its ships and half its sailors were lost. Good Queen Bess milked her good fortune, though the problem of succession remained.
When Elizabeth died in 1603, Mary Queen of Scots’ Protestant son, James VI of Scotland, “lineally and lawfully descended from Henry VII”, became England and Ireland’s first Stuart king. He spent the day of Elizabeth’s funeral with Sir Oliver Cromwell, uncle to the namesake who would sign the death warrant of James’s son. A bloody war of succession had been averted and a foreign king acquired, who just two years into his reign was delivered from the “thundering sin of fire and brimstone” that was the Gunpowder Plot, which destroyed any prospect of tolerance for Catholics, all of whom were now “identified as potential terrorists”.
