The Elizabethans by A.N. Wilson

Author:A.N. Wilson [Wilson, A.N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

18

Hakluyt and Empire

IS ENGLAND, OR what is now called Britain, at one with the rest of Planet Earth, or is it pursuing a parallel life of its own, with its own Church, its own weights and measures, its own monarchy, its own arcane sense of comedy? This is a question that sets up puzzles in many non-English minds, and in the writings of our contemporary historians and political commentators. Conversations about, for example, modern Britain’s relationship to Europe or to the United States might begin with very specific concerns: the economic advisability of joining a single European currency, the need (or otherwise) to send troops alongside American forces to one of the world’s troublespots. Sooner or later, however, when the pros and cons of such a strategy have been rehearsed, we find ourselves in the realm of metaphysics; we find that our view of contemporary events – in Afghanistan, in Ireland, in the Church – is determined by some vision of a Platonic England. And the origins of these concepts took shape in the sixteenth century during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when England – here the word means the land-mass containing the English counties and Wales – shaped an entirely new relationship with the rest of the world. On the one hand, because of its decision to reject the Pope, England cut itself off from the European mainstream; it became a beleaguered little island doughtily maintaining its difference from the rest of Europe, and prepared, ultimately, to ward off an invasion threat from the greatest military and naval power in the world. In this respect, Elizabethan England’s attitude to Philip II and the Spanish Armada prepared generations of English people for the belligerently insular mindset that served it so well when resisting Napoleon and Hitler, but which, viewed from another perspective, seemed embarrassingly anachronistic when contemplating the new world order and the European Union. Another part of the story, however, is of an Elizabethan England which, because of the skills of its navigators and its pioneer geographers, had a truly global sense of itself. The two most portentous examples of this are from the English advances into India in the 1570s, with the subsequent founding of the East India Company, to compete with Dutch merchants; and, second, the establishment of English colonies in America, and the efforts, between 1583 and 1588, by Walter Raleigh, to found what became, in turn, the states of Virginia and North Carolina. From these two outgoing ventures stemmed the growth of the British Empire (the phrase first coined by Dr John Dee) and the existence, on the western side of the Atlantic, of an English-speaking people.

From this it can be clearly seen that modern history began with the Elizabethans: not simply modern English history, but the modern world as we know it today, with the English-speaking United States, with the post-colonial East. And these two great enterprises, as we have already hinted when considering Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the Earth, are only two of the Elizabethan expansions into the greater world.

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