New Troy

New Troy is the legendary Trojan origin through which the novel connects Britain’s mythical past to its political present. Invoked by Thomas Wolsey as he argues about England and a proposed royal marriage, it makes national history a resource for thinking about sovereignty, inheritance, and the authority of the state.

The Trojan Foundation

The account places New Troy within a deep, violent prehistory. Before the Romans, Britain is imagined as a land without priests, churches, laws, or even a means of telling time. After eight centuries of rule by giants, Trojan Brutus arrives to overthrow them. A descendant of Aeneas, born in Italy, Brutus has fled after his father’s accidental death and become leader of men who had been enslaved in Troy. Their northward voyage brings them to the coast associated with Albina and her sisters, where they fight the giants led by Gogmagog. The giants are defeated, and their leader is cast into the sea. The narrative presents this beginning as inseparable from slaughter, making the foundation of Britain an act of conquest rather than an uncomplicated origin story.

Wolsey’s Political Use of the Myth

When Thomas Wolsey is challenged to explain what political advantage the king could gain from marrying Anne Boleyn, he responds by telling the story of England. He reaches back beyond Caesar’s legions to the age of giant bones, New Troy, and New Jerusalem, then to the crimes of kings associated with Arthur. The move enlarges a question about a particular marriage into an argument about the realm’s historical identity: England cannot be understood, in Wolsey’s account, without tracing the stories through which it has imagined itself.

New Troy therefore functions as more than an antiquarian reference. Its Trojan ancestry supplies a foundational narrative for the country, while the story’s repeated changes of ruler make political authority appear historically made and remade. Wolsey uses that long view to place the present dispute within a history of dynastic choices and contested rule.

From Origin Story to Self-Rule

The novel returns to the question of what England is in explicitly constitutional terms. Its concern is not merely to measure harbours and border walls, but to estimate the realm’s capacity for self-rule: what protection a king owes his people and whether an English subject should be free from outside claims over how to speak to God. The story of New Troy belongs to this larger effort to imagine England as a realm with its own political past and capacity for government.

That argument becomes practical through legislation. In Parliament, Thomas Cromwell proposes a division on a bill suspending payment of annates to Rome, allowing Henry VIII to observe who supports the measure and who opposes it. The mythic account and the parliamentary maneuver belong to different registers, but they converge on the question of where authority lies: an inherited story can establish a national identity, while laws and political procedures attempt to give that identity institutional force.

Competing Claims to Authority

The novel also tests the limits of parliamentary power against claims of spiritual jurisdiction. In a discussion of Thomas More’s position, More distinguishes temporal matters, which Parliament can determine, from spiritual jurisdiction, which he argues lies outside the realm. The dispute shows why New Troy’s function is not simply to provide England with an impressive ancestry. The novel places national self-definition beside unresolved conflicts over the reach of domestic law, the church, and Rome.

The myth’s lasting significance lies in this tension between origins and authority. Britain begins in a story of conquest and successive rulers; England’s present is likewise shaped by arguments over marriage, legitimacy, law, and the right to govern. By invoking New Troy, Wolsey makes the past politically active: it is a means of explaining what England might claim to be, even as the novel shows that such claims must still be contested and enacted.