Bordragings

We​ should have known that Putin was serious about invading Ukraine when, in July 2021, he published his essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’ on the Kremlin website. This long, part-legendary account traces the Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples back to the ancient kingdom of Rus, centred on Kiev. The ‘Russian nation’, according to Putin, is ‘triune’. It maintained this triple unity despite the complications of early modern state formation, survived inside the envelope of the Russian empire and outlived the Leninist policy of granting autonomy to Soviet republics. That Ukraine is now caught up in meddling by the Great Powers is not, Putin argues, a new phenomenon; something similar happened after the First World War. But through and beyond it all the unity of the ‘triune people’ persists.

Early modernists are familiar with this sort of retrospective chronicling. Putin’s treatise looks very like Henry VIII’s justification for invading a sovereign, neighbouring state in his Declaration, containing the just causes and considerations of this present war with the Scots (1542). The medieval legends and hints of trinitarian theology in Putin’s narrative were anticipated by Henry’s claim that he had suzerainty over Scotland because he descended from Locrine, one of the three sons of Brutus, the first monarch of Britain, who ‘appointed Albanact to rule what now is called Scotland, Camber … Wales, and Locrine that now is called England: unto whom as being the elder son, the other two brothers should do homage’. According to Henry, whose evidence is spurious, a long succession of Scottish kings has paid homage to the kings of England in the same way.

Henry was, like Putin, interested in unity of religion and church government across the island named after Brutus. Putin notes that in the Middle Ages ‘people in the western and eastern Russian lands spoke the same language. Their faith was Orthodox. Up to the middle of the 15th century, the unified church government remained in place.’ It was only when Poland extended itself through union with Lithuania that ‘part of the western Russian Orthodox clergy submitted to the authority of the pope’. The gravitation of the unreformed Scottish Church to French Catholicism was equally unwelcome to Henry, and led, as he saw it, to a break in church history. During the reign of Edward I, ‘the bishops of Saint Andrews and Glasgow were not as they now be archbishops, but recognised the province of our archbishop of York, which extended over all that country.’ Is it any wonder that the Venetian historian Sabellicus ‘calleth Scotland part of England’?

Empire is never slow to find reasons for enlargement. In the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533), Henry rejected papal authority by declaring, ‘this realm of England is an empire.’ Ten years later, he invoked the triple unity of Britain to pressure the Scots by force of arms into a marriage between his son, Edward, and James V’s daughter, Mary, the infant queen of Scots. This step towards Anglo-Scottish union was designed first to pre-empt a marriage that would strengthen Scotland’s ‘auld alliance’ with France and second to neutralise the north while Henry’s war against France was prosecuted. In the event, his military campaign failed, though it’s possible that he did succeed in laying some foundations during the wars of the 1540s for the Scottish Reformation of 1560 and growing co-operation between English and Scottish Protestants.

Lorna Hutson throws these decades into relief in England’s Insular Imagining. English ambitions to control and incorporate Scotland led to incursions that have been forgotten, she argues, because of the later, more united history of the island. The 16th century saw the ‘erasure’ of Scotland from England’s idea of Britain, which was perceived as an extension of itself. Maps reduced Scotland to a coastal outline while such encyclopedic works as The Faerie Queene ignored it altogether. Elizabethan drama, Hutson contends, blanked out Scotland or gave it a bit part in plays about legendary British history. The ‘weasel Scot’ in Henry V is a nuisance not a nation, briefly distracting the king, like Henry VIII a century later, from his planned invasion of France. After the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603, Shakespeare’s outlook changed, but Hutson sees King Lear as turning away from the matter of Britain while Macbeth plays down the constitutional integrity of medieval Scotland. The ‘erasure’ of Scotland, she claims, continued in Jacobean England.

Some of these assertions are disputable, but by considering them together, Hutson develops an argument that will transform discussion of early modern literature. Studies of anglophone writing across the archipelago have focused on the late Elizabethan and Stuart periods, when wars within and between England/Wales, Scotland and Ireland were caught up in culturally complex processes of nation-building. But key elements of this story, including the growth of imperial ideology, go back to the Henrician period. Hutson tracks these developments through an astonishing array of poems, plays, chronicles, political treatises and images, taking us from topographical descriptions to disputes about tattooing and the racial origins of the British.

In her analysis of the Anglo-Scottish axis, Hutson identifies concepts and practices that would be put to use across the archipelago and in the global empire. So although her book ends with Macbeth, its implications reach much later, alerting us to the role of the Scots in arguments about colonialism during the Plantation of Ulster, the settlement of North America and again when Cromwell’s defeat of Scottish armies in the 1650s made way for a ‘Western Design’ in the Caribbean. Those ambivalent about empire, such as Marvell, or opposed to it, such as Milton, often focused on Scotland when discussing the make-up of the empire of Great Britain. Hence the rebel Highlanders in Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’, Milton’s denunciation of royalists in the Kirk and his analysis of the Scots in Ireland after the execution of Charles I.

A clear path runs from such writings to Milton’s little-read History of Moscovia and Guy Miege’s Relation of a 1663 embassy to Russia (a mission that included Marvell) because Russia was taken to be paradigmatic of the grandeur and fragility of empire. The tsar’s possessions had been growing before Henry VIII became an imperial monarch, and English merchants got to know them after the foundation of the Muscovy Company in 1555. But there were difficulties for both visitors and subjects. The tsars were said to be capricious (unsurprisingly, given the mood swings of Ivan the Terrible) and their regime oppressive. The diplomat Giles Fletcher wrote in 1591 that ‘the Russe Emperors of late years have very much enlarged their dominions,’ yet the ‘colonies’ were held ‘by force’ and subject to extortion. The people lived cold, dark, hyperborean lives similar to those endured by the Scots. Their cabins were made out of tree trunks, with moss stuffed into the cracks. ‘Every house hath a pair of stairs that lead up into the chambers out of the yard or street after the Scottish manner.’

Milton addressed the sweep of this empire when, in his role as secretary to the Protectorate, he composed a letter to the tsar:

To the most Serene and Potent Prince and Lord Emperor and great Duke of all Russia; sole Lord of Volodomaria, Moscow, and Novograge; King of Cazan, Astracan, and Siberia; Lord of Vobscow, Great Duke of Smolensko, Tuerscoy, and other places; Lord and great Duke of Novogrod, and the Lower Provinces of Chernigoy, Rezansco, and others; Lord of all the Northern Climes; also Lord of Eversco, Cartalinsca, and many other places.

This is the sort of empire Putin would like to have back. As an epic catalogue of names it is the most thunderous in Milton outside Paradise Lost. Willy Maley, the Scottish expert on the British-Irish archipelago, has noted an association between the tsar’s lordship of the ‘Northern Climes’ and Milton’s placing of Lucifer and the fallen angels in ‘the north’. Recurrently in Paradise Lost, empire is the ambition of Satan, as it was for Milton the aim of Stuart kings.

The elaboration of Milton’s greeting was in line with Russian requirements. English visitors to Moscow often commented on the exhaustive, repeated recitation of the tsar’s titles. For Thomas Smith in 1605 this was ‘ever their custom’. Miege, less patiently, described it as ‘troublesome and ridiculous’. And there is an element of absurdity even in Milton’s salutation, as though the list of fantastical-sounding lordships running from Moscow through Kazan to Siberia was politically as well as syntactically overstretched and owed more to sound than substance. In Moscovia, Milton notes that the extent of the empire led to instability during the ‘time of troubles’ that coincided with the first decade of James I’s rule in England: ‘The Empire of Russia broke to pieces, the prey of such as could catch.’ We know from Jacobean letters that the privy council discussed how a protectorate could be established in the territory opened up by the Muscovy Company. The project wasn’t pursued, but the British used their influence to shape peace treaties between the tsar and Poland and later Sweden.

That early modern Britain had ambitions to the north and east is not generally recognised, but on the basis of the Scottish coastline, claims were made to an oceanic empire that reached far beyond Shetland. This sort of mental mapping went back to the medieval chronicles: according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, King Arthur routed the Picts and Scots, and ruled the entirety of Britain, thus underpinning English claims to overlordship of Scotland. But Arthur’s legendary transatlantic northern empire became even more influential on Elizabethan strategic thinking. According to the magus John Dee, whose antiquarian researches captured the attention of the queen, Elizabeth had ‘title royal to all the coasts and islands beginning at or about Terra Florida, and so alongst, or near unto Atlantis [America], going northerly, and then to all the most northern islands great and small, and so compassing about Greenland, eastwards until the territories opposite unto the farthest easterly and northern bounds of the Duke of Moscovia his dominions’.

Like Nato, the Arthurian empire stretched across the Atlantic and met the Russian empire. The presence of Scottish and English troops in the armies of Poland and Sweden as they harried Russia in the early 17th century looks familiar. In News of the Present Miseries of Russia (1614), Henry Brereton records ‘the memorable occurrences of our owne national forces, English, and Scots, under the pay of the now King of Swethland [Sweden]’. Without this military involvement, James I could not have shifted from making plans for a British protectorate in Muscovy to brokering the 1617 Treaty of Stolbovo between Sweden and Russia, which cut off Russian access to the Baltic. Putin apologists have a point when they say that British missiles in Ukraine are the latest manifestation of an old imperialism.

It is a measure of​ the suggestiveness of Hutson’s book that her arguments prompt thoughts that go far beyond the 16th century and reach halfway across Asia. Yet it rests on a questionable paradox. Her claim that the English ‘occluded’ Scotland because they regarded it as integral to the British project may be more attractive than historical because it draws on unionist assumptions she also wants us to resist. Most historians would say that Scotland was ignored as long as it was no threat to wealthier, populous England. Although Elizabeth enabled a series of manipulative interventions, for example, during the civil war that followed the murder of Lord Darnley, the second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, her default policy was indifference. She did little to exploit the claim to suzerainty that had rationalised the ambitions of her father. About James VI’s rights to inherit her throne she was reticent. She took small steps, disposing of Mary and enforcing security along the border.

It was partly because of the French that Scotland mattered to England. On both sides of the border, monarchs made claims about status and self-sufficiency, drawing on classical iconography, Renaissance architecture, the curbing of magnate power and a consolidation of boundaries. These processes developed in Scotland as a result of James V’s residence in France, his French marriages and susceptibility to Gallic culture. The Scottish historian Roger Mason has said that the 1550s saw the ‘establishment of what amounted to French colonial rule in Scotland’. Hutson obscures this story with her insular narrative, yet the English and the Scots were both impelled by wider conflicts.

Confessional differences were crucial. Early in Elizabeth’s reign, Scotland went from being a Catholic kingdom in the orbit of France to a Protestant kingdom aligned with England. Hutson writes grippingly about the iconoclasm of the English when they attacked Scottish churches and monasteries in the 1540s, ‘the treasures of the abbeys violently desecrated and looted’. She is less interested in the applause this drew from militant, godly Scots, and in the vandalism associated with the Reformation of 1560 and later regretted by voices in the Kirk. Distancing herself from the notion that Protestantism brought unionism to Scotland, she offers no analysis of the way the Presbyterian Reformation made the Scots problematic participants in the construction of a British state. The train of gunpowder that led to the civil wars was lit when Charles I tried to impose an Anglican prayerbook on the Scots in 1637, who then defeated the English in the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640.

This playing down of Presbyterianism is consistent with Hutson’s attraction to classicism rather than religion, but it also reflects a focus on England that is both explicit in the title of her book and works tacitly to reinforce its major thesis. Although she includes a chapter on ‘Scottish Literature and the Marian Constitutional Crisis’, and informs us about ‘Scottish origin stories’ designed to counter Geoffrey of Monmouth and the achievements of George Buchanan as Latin poet, political theorist and exposer of royal scandal, she tells us relatively little about Scottish culture. A more pluralistic version of her book would bring in the satires of David Lyndsay, the poetry of Alexander Hume and the boisterous, incisive prose of John Knox, who pushed forward the Scottish Reformation while being open to English perspectives. There is a paradox behind the paradox on which this book is based, which is that it objects to the occlusion of Scotland while itself occluding Scotland.

Hutson is at her most dazzling in the chapter on Spenser that sets out her leading claims. She argues that The Faerie Queene encouraged a shift away from Galfridian tales about Brut and Locrine to ‘the idea of England as always already an island nation, now girding itself to embrace its imperial maritime future’. In pursuit of this, she follows the interlaced stories of the female knight Britomart, the maiden Florimell and the knight Marinell (a sea nymph’s son), whose grapplings with desire and chastity take place at coastal locations and whose problems are eased by the marriage between the Medway and the Thames. Hutson reminds us of the use made of the Scottish littoral by John Dee and others to extend the limits of an Arthurian-style, oceanic empire to the Arctic and the Americas, but she also invokes Elizabethan ‘analogies between coastal and riparian geographies’ and cites poems that present rivers as vectors of sovereignty.

‘The greater Britaine’ is Spenser’s theme, yet none of the rivers enlisted to celebrate the wedding of the Thames and the Medway comes from north of the border. It makes more sense than Hutson allows that Irish rivers are included, because, after James V of Scotland refused the Irish crown in 1540, Henry VIII accepted it. So Ireland was under the same authority as the kingdom of the Thames and the Medway, as the Clyde and the Forth were not. Yet it adds to the case for a deliberate ‘erasure’ of those rivers that the word ‘Scotland’ is never used in The Faerie Queene. This omission is extraordinary given the importance to the poem of Mary, Queen of Scots, who is depicted as a richly dressed, seductive witch with eagle’s talons and a fox’s tail and reconceived as an English problem.

Spenser’s erasure of the north looks the more calculated when we contrast The Faerie Queene with his View of the Present State of Ireland, in which the Scots are a major preoccupation and Scotland a potent locus. Spenser argues that the Scots (along with the Irish) are descended from the Scythians who once inhabited the territory now known as Ukraine. This genealogy was widely accepted and not inherently invidious. In the document often regarded as a foundational statement of Scottish independence, the Declaration of Arbroath (1320), we are told that the Scots ‘journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain … Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west.’ Spenser relates the same history but degrades it by listing the savage customs derived by the Irish (who are Scots) from Scythia.

Much has been written about what the View of the Present State of Ireland tells us about the Irish, who threatened Spenser’s estate in County Cork and later burned down his castle, but little attention has been given to the Scottish side of his treatise. Hutson argues that the Scythian genealogy was in Spenser’s mind when he read William Harrison’s 1577 account of English rivers, just as he was preparing to write an erotic poem, an Epithalamion Thamesis. This is a speculative but likely context for Spenser’s response to ‘the connection between rivers, eros and empire’ that informed the legends of Britomart, Marinell and Florimell. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History was adjusted to fit. In Book II of The Faerie Queene, the Scots are described as a ‘straung’, swart-visaged inundation pouring across the Humber into the kingdom of Locrine ‘like Noyes great flood’. Spenser reduces Scotland to a tide of destructively alien Scythians.

Hutson’s chapter on popular drama includes fine accounts of Henry V, with its Scottish captain, Jamy, who shares a name with James VI, and the partly Shakespearean play that is its template, Edward III. Less plausible is her claim that Scotland was occluded in the playhouse, a contention that is sustained by her discussion of a group of works, including Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, that ‘invite us to align a young prince or king’s inward/inland reformation with a sense of England’s readiness, as an island nation, to do battle’. This bypasses the simple fact that dramatists did write about Scotland, partly in response to the public’s mixed feelings about a Scottish succession. Two such plays have been lost – Robert II by Jonson and others and Charles Massey’s Malcolm, King of Scots – but a number survive, including George Peele’s Edward I, which shows John Balliol swearing allegiance to the English king, in an act of homage remembered in Henry VIII’s Declaration, and another romance history by Greene, James IV, which has many scenes set in Scotland and uses ‘a young prince or king’s inward/inland reformation’ to mark out a path to Anglo-Scottish union.

The action starts with James newly married to the king of England’s daughter, Dorothea. Unfortunately, his head has been turned by a Scottish noblewoman called Ida and he is encouraged by a follower to have the queen murdered and take Ida instead. Greene shows himself interested in the way lords in northern England get along with lairds from across the border, and in the corrupting influence of a Frenchman called Jaques. Ida is betrothed to an Englishman called Eustace, figuring Anglo-Scottish union at a lower level. The plot twist is that, after Dorothea flees in male apparel, like a Shakespearean heroine, and is wounded by the nefarious Jaques, her father assumes that she is dead and leads an army across the border to punish the Scots, who ‘cry against the king, their cause of loss’. The play climaxes in a stand-off between the Scottish and English monarchs, and battle is prevented only when Dorothea shows up and takes back her husband.

In Greene’s source, a story by Cinthio, a king of Ireland marries a princess of England and falls for a Scotswoman. By moving his protagonist around the archipelago, Greene creates an articulate allegory, because James’s desire for Ida figures an impulse to Scottish self-sufficiency, while his return to Dorothea makes union with England the romantic option. The same adaptation of Cinthio also allows the play to reflect elements of the historical reign of James IV while alluding to late Elizabethan conditions. We know that this was Greene’s aim because a character called Bohan declares, in the play’s induction: ‘In the year 1520 was in Scotland, a king overruled with parasites, misled by lust, and many circumstances, too long to trattle on now, much like our court of Scotland this day.’ Given James VI’s sensitivity to disrespectful representations of Scottish kings on the London stage (for which there is documentary evidence), this was a bold thing for Greene to write and closer to highlighting than to erasing Scotland.

The historical James IV represented the potential for Anglo-Scottish union because he was married to Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister. This conjunction lay at the root of James VI’s claim to the English crown. To please his auditors, Greene imagined marital and political union almost as a wish fulfilment of what Henry VIII sought in 1542. Not just because, as not quite historically, an English military campaign in James IV confirms a royal marriage but because the play shows condescension towards the Scots being complicated by English weakness, given that Elizabeth had no heirs while James VI, recently married to Anne of Denmark, offered the prospect of dynastic security. You could force James IV into Hutson’s thesis by arguing that it depicts a Scotland so fictionalised as not to represent the country, effectively erasing it, but a more realistic assessment would be that, although stylised, the play does stage elements of Scottish society (as in a scene that presents the opinions of a merchant, a lawyer and a divine) and uses romance plotting to sidestep censorship.

Equally thought-provoking is the prominence it gives to the Borders. The induction could be a draft of A Midsummer Night’s Dream because it shows Oberon, the king of the fairies, waking up ‘Bohan a Scot, attired like a Redesdale man’. Though Bohan speaks Scots, Redesdale was then a liberty – an area possessing some independence – on the English side of the Marches. Bohan will have reminded audiences that the Borders were a plural, transitional region. Well into the Tudor period there were ‘debatable lands’ and uncertainty about which country Berwick belonged to. England had its divisions, but Scotland was more riven by inward border zones, between the Lowlands and the Gaelic Highlands, Norse Orkney and Shetland – which were in and out of Scottish sovereignty – and the Lordship of the Isles that gave so much trouble to James VI and I and to Duncan in Macbeth. Spenser writes in A View of the Present State of Ireland about the Scottish/Irish edges to the English Pale, from without which came angry incursions. What The Faerie Queene calls ‘sundry bordragings/Of neighbour Scots’ effected a takeover of what remained of the English enclave in the north, between Newry and Carrickfergus.

The case is not unique. Ukraine was criss-crossed by shifting borders between the Middle Ages and the foundation of the USSR, and its borders changed again to include Crimea in 1954. For Putin, who is as serious as Henry VIII about homage, real and imagined, when the Cossacks swore allegiance to the tsar in 1654 they brought their lands under the control of Moscow in perpetuity. The entire region, including modern Ukraine, constitutes a border zone between Russia and Europe. You could say that, like early modern Scotland, there were borders in its heartlands. Putin is in agreement with most scholars when he traces ‘the name “Ukraine”’ to ‘the Old Russian word okraina (periphery), which is found in written sources from the 12th century, referring to various border territories’. With the unleashing of missiles from these borderlands, infiltration by saboteurs and now the incursion into Kursk oblast, Russia is being exposed to Spenser’s ‘sundry bordragings’. This makes Putin’s case even more like that of Henry VIII, who justified his attack on the Scottish borders and on to Edinburgh by saying, in his Declaration, that with the encouragement of James V, ‘a great number of the Scots, then not looked for, made a foray into our borders, to the great annoyance of our subjects, and to their extreme detriment.’

Hutson set herself​ a challenge when she subtitled her book ‘The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland’ but ended it with Jacobean works: Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, King Lear and Macbeth. In each case she establishes striking continuities with the 16th century. Jonson’s masque draws on Camden’s Britannia (1586), which, Hutson shows, replaces Geoffrey’s vision of an island anciently peopled by Britons but disrupted by Picts and Scots with ‘an ethnic identification of the Britons and the Picts as a single racial group … on the evidence that they painted their skins’ (Hutson’s italics). This allowed Camden to enlarge the sphere of Britishness and leave only the Scots off-limits, in an ‘imaginative de-territorialising of Scottish antiquity’. Jonson’s masque correspondingly centres on the black daughters of Niger, played by dark-painted court ladies, who visit the sun-king of Britannia to be blanched or washed clean of their colour. When Hutson calls this ‘a devastating trivialisation and negation of African racial difference’ she may be projecting onto the masque a modern disapproval of blacking up, but her larger inference is devastating enough, that blackness can only find a place in the empire of Great Britain (in 1605 and after) if it becomes white.

The origins of King Lear are similarly found in Elizabethan plays about the division of ancient Britain, from the stately Gorboduc, which culminates in an invasion by the Duke of Albany (Scotland), through The Misfortunes of Arthur, which rises to a battle between King Arthur and his son by incest, Mordred. There is a Senecan, Oedipal relationship between the politics of nationhood and the maternal body of Britain, nurturing but afflicted. The main action of Shakespeare’s play is taken from Galfridian history as it figures in Henry VIII’s Declaration and again in Spenser. Rather than unpacking the politics of Lear’s break-up of his kingdom, however, Shakespeare compounds sexual and familial disorder by adding from Philip Sidney’s Arcadia a subplot about Gloucester and his legitimate and bastard sons. By the end of the play, only two characters survive who could inherit the throne: Albany, who shares his Scottish title with King James, and Edgar, who has the name of a Saxon monarch with imperial claims to Britain. For Hutson, those associations are truncated because Britain is a failed state and the audience’s attention is consumed by family tragedy. It certainly accords with the argument of her book that Albany displays no Scottish traits. The northern realm is occluded.

After these heavyweight chapters, her Coda on Macbeth is abrupt. Perhaps this makes sense because the Anglocentric predicates of the tragedy are now so widely acknowledged. As Scotland sinks into tyranny, it has to be rescued by an English army. At the end of the play, the new king, Malcolm, turns thanes into Saxon-style earls. But Hutson wants to go further. She sees the play as almost evasively translating political breakdown into images of sickness and effusions of grief, and she scrutinises Malcolm’s laborious testing of Macduff’s good faith as an opponent of Macbeth – which is also a testing of what licence Malcolm, as a king, would be allowed – to show that Shakespeare has left out the climactic discussion of trust and authority given in Holinshed’s Chronicles and replaced it with more gestural suppositions of vice. For most Shakespeareans this shows Malcolm trying to provoke Macduff with high-flown threats to ‘confound/All unity on earth’ while starting to believe in his integrity. But Hutson, conscious of Elizabethan indifference to Scottish political traditions, takes it as evidence of vacuity and erasure on Shakespeare’s part.

‘Stands Scotland where it did?’ Macduff asks Ross after his exchange with Malcolm. Any open-minded reader would conclude that, although Hutson has not managed single-handedly to pull Scotland out of Great Britain, she has put its geopolitical situation into a new perspective. The history she lays out is both distant and familiar. Drawing on such remote sources as Claudian, Thomas Maitland and Hector Boece, she gives an account of Scotland’s standing that still looks recognisable. That her book was written during a period of nationalist ferment after the failure of the independence referendum in 2014 is shown in the attention she gives to the distinctiveness of Scottish political culture. Yet the slump in SNP support over the last few months has created a more instructive environment for the book’s reception. We have seen, yet again, that Scotland only becomes visible to the English political and media class when independence is at issue and the Scots find allies in Europe. The revival of Scottish Labour has meant a return to business as usual, with Scotland fading into the margins of Anglo-British hegemony.