England

England is at once the setting of political upheaval and the object of that upheaval: a realm whose past is claimed through myth and whose future is being negotiated through Parliament, royal power, and competing religious jurisdictions. The novel traces how arguments about who may govern the church, define lawful marriage, and legislate for the people become arguments about what England itself is.

Mythic origins and contested inheritance

In the account of Britain’s legendary beginnings, the island is first named Albina, after the eldest of thirty-three exiled princesses. Their descendants, a race of giants, rule for eight centuries before Trojan Brutus arrives, defeats their leader Gogmagog, and establishes a new order. The story begins in violence, and its succession of conquest and replacement supplies a usable origin myth: before London was called Lud’s Town, it was New Troy, and the English could claim, “And we were Trojans.”

The Tudor claim to the realm is placed within that legendary lineage. Some say the dynasty descends from Brutus through Constantine, son of St Helena, and then from Arthur, High King of Britain. The story does not present this inheritance as uncomplicated fact: Arthur’s tomb is said to be at Glastonbury, but he is also imagined as not truly dead, awaiting his return. This mythic uncertainty gives royal succession a double character, at once a matter of genealogy and a story sustained by belief.

That history bears directly on the living Tudor line. Prince Arthur, eldest son of Henry, married Katherine of Aragon and died at fifteen. If he had lived, he would have been king; his younger brother Henry might instead have become Archbishop of Canterbury. The contrast makes the present king’s pursuit of a new marriage inseparable from the counterfactual succession that might have followed Arthur’s survival. England’s past is not background alone: it supplies competing versions of who should rule.

A realm defined through law

In the disputes over Henry’s marriage, England’s jurisdiction becomes a practical and immediate question. The king seeks an annulment on the ground that Katherine had been his brother’s wife, and Cardinal Wolsey considers convening a court in London to begin proceedings within the king’s own jurisdiction. He also imagines alternatives involving Rome and European diplomacy, showing how domestic authority remains entangled with papal and international power.

The novel gives the conflict a human and constitutional voice in Katherine’s meetings with Thomas Cromwell. She insists that she came to England as a child, married Prince Arthur as a virgin at sixteen, became queen at twenty-four, and is still queen at forty-six. Her appeal is not merely to personal dignity: she rejects the idea that a court in England can settle a case she believes belongs at Rome. Cromwell, by contrast, presents the king’s intended process as a matter that England can determine. Their disagreement exposes the collision between royal proceedings within the realm and the authority Katherine assigns to the church beyond it.

By 1531, the dispute has widened into a debate over the laws and revenues of the church. Katherine accuses Cromwell and his associates of making the clergy answerable under the laws of praemunire and demanding more than one hundred thousand pounds. Cromwell distinguishes the payment as a benevolence; she calls it extortion. She also objects to Parliament’s movement toward naming the king head of the church in England, while Mary argues that the Pope’s authority underlies the lawfulness of government. The exchange shows how a question of jurisdiction reaches into taxation, political obedience, and the legitimacy of the laws themselves.

Parliament, sovereignty, and public authority

The narrative presents Parliament as an instrument through which royal supremacy is made into policy, not simply proclaimed. In spring 1532, its business includes breaking episcopal resistance and preparing measures that would reduce revenues sent to Rome and give the king’s supremacy practical force. Cromwell works through a petition against the church courts and, with Rafe Sadler and Thomas Wriothesley, revises its wording through the night. The process is incremental: papers pass among officials, opposition is identified, and legislation is prepared even while its operation remains suspended.

A bill to suspend annates—the payments owed to Rome—makes the parliamentary struggle visible. Cromwell calls for members of the Commons to divide according to whether they support or oppose it, an unusual tactic that lets the king see who stands on each side. The king approves the method, while in the Lords he must appear three times in person to argue his case. The distinction matters: royal policy depends not only on the monarch’s will but on gathering support, identifying resistance, and working through separate institutions.

In 1534, Cromwell brings Henry arguments drawn from Marsiglio of Padua. In this account, Christ did not make the Pope a ruler, nor grant churchmen the right to legislate or levy taxes. Priests, like other people, are subjects; the prince governs within the realm, while kingship derives through a legislative body acting for the citizens. Cromwell reassures Henry that this theory does not license rebellion: the king is not a despot if he rules within the law. The argument offers royal sovereignty a political rationale while locating its lawful expression in Parliament.

The same framework recasts the church’s wealth as a question of public authority. If religious orders have taken vows of poverty, Cromwell argues, their claims to property and landlord status can be questioned; the legislative body should provide for priests and bishops and direct church wealth toward public good. Henry leaps from this legal reasoning to the possibility of breaking shrines. Cromwell follows his thought, but the moment preserves an important distinction: the planned process of dispossession and the king’s image of direct action are not identical, even as the argument brings them into contact.

Who counts as the political community

The legislation surrounding Anne’s children makes the realm’s political membership explicit. Cromwell proposes that subjects swear to uphold the succession arrangement enacted by Parliament. He argues that an oath can make the country endorse Parliament’s decision, answering those who might claim that Parliament is bought, misled, or incompetent to decide matters that belong to Rome. In this account, a national oath is a means of asserting that England has no legitimate external voice governing its affairs.

The proposed oath is also connected to the people beyond the court and Parliament. In arguing with Stephen Gardiner, Cromwell points to poverty, displacement, and the growth of large sheep farms that drive smallholders from their land and ploughboys from their homes. He supports a proposed limit of two thousand animals for a grazier and says ordinary men and women, not only bishops, can be called to swear. The policy argument links national allegiance to social conditions: the people whose livelihoods are unsettled are also part of the community whose assent the government seeks.

Cromwell’s insistence that “England can be otherwise” joins reform to a vision of change in public life. He imagines that within a generation people can learn to read and that a ploughman can take up a book. The claim does not erase the limits and conflicts surrounding royal policy; it places them alongside a possibility of broader literacy and participation. England is not only the object of laws made at court, but a society whose inhabitants may acquire the means to engage with them.

The disputed limits of Parliament

The conflict with Thomas More clarifies that the novel does not treat parliamentary authority as unlimited. When Richard Riche reports a conversation with More, he recounts More’s distinction between Parliament’s power to alter temporal jurisdiction and its inability to legislate spiritual jurisdiction. Parliament could, in More’s hypothetical, make Riche king; it could not make God cease to be God. For More, the king’s title as head of the church concerns authority outside the realm, not a matter Parliament can settle by vote.

Cromwell sees the political consequence in More’s refusal to accept that Parliament can name the king head of the church. If More denies Parliament that capacity, Cromwell reasons, he denies the king’s title and may be understood to have committed treason. Yet the report is not a simple confession: the exchange took place as a discussion of hypothetical cases, and Cromwell recognizes that More might say it was talk rather than a deliberate denial. The episode keeps the legal question alive even as it becomes evidence in a political prosecution.

Across these disputes, England emerges neither as an ancient, fixed inheritance nor as a settled constitutional arrangement. Its legendary past supplies rival claims to legitimacy; its current institutions try to establish jurisdiction through courts, statutes, parliamentary procedure, and oaths. The novel’s central tension is that the effort to make England self-governing depends on contested laws and political power, while its boundaries—between temporal and spiritual authority, ruler and subject, inherited story and enacted rule—remain under active negotiation.