Fording the Nation: Abridging History in Perkin Warbeck (1633)

Abstract

In chapter 5, I cited Francis Bacon’s History of King Henry VII as a text preoccupied with questions of union and succession. Bacon, we recall, alludes to Henry’s advisers warning ‘that if God should take the King’s two sons without issue, that then the kingdom of England would fall to the King of Scotland, which might prejudice the monarchy of England. Whereunto the King replied; That if that should be, Scotland would be but an accession to England, and not England to Scotland; for the greater would draw the less: and it was a safer union for England than that of France’. In this chapter, I want to suggest that the new British historiography, combined with the recent turn towards the matter of Britain in Shakespeare studies, can be employed to good effect in a reading of John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck (1633), the story of the pretender who threatened to usurp — with a little help from friends in France, Scotland, Ireland and Cornwall — the throne of Henry VII, King of England and Wales.1 The English history play is a dramatic form most often viewed within a single national milieu rather than in the context of an emerging multination state. It is associated with the maintenance of the Tudor Myth and the projection of the Elizabethan World Picture, and with a particularly triumphant version of English nationalism.KeywordsLiterary TextPrivy CouncilBritish StateHistory PlayBritish IdentityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.