The Subject of Britain 1603–25 by Christopher Ivic

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Subject of Britain 1603–25 by Christopher Ivic Andrew Hiscock The Subject of Britain, 1603–25. By Christopher Ivic. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2020. x+ 242 pp. £80. ISBN 978-0-7190-8870-4. Christopher Ivic's monograph is a very readable study and a timely corrective to received critical thinking inherited down the generations (and endlessly recycled) concerning Jacobean succession literature. Drawing itself explicitly into the lively scholarly debate relating to early modern formulations of what has been termed more recently the British nations or Archipelagic studies, Ivic's enquiry explores 'the complex and often contradictory ways in which the heterogeneous writing of Britain' might be understood and how these interventions introduced 'new ideologies and new ways of thinking about collective and individual identities within the context of the island's increasingly intersecting and intermingling peoples and [End Page 123] cultures' (p. 3). The first chapter concentrates on responses in 1603 to James VI/I's accession from a host of sources, and the following chapter builds on this discussion, analysing the panegyrics surrounding the Stuart king's arrival in London, paying particular attention to 'occasional texts' by Drayton, Daniel, and Jonson. The third chapter is in many ways the strongest and most revelatory in this study, focusing on print and manuscript union tracts and treatises, leading to a sensitive re-evaluation of Francis Bacon's role as counsellor/pragmatist (often angling for promotion) and making deserved space for a consideration of David Hume of Godscroft's De Unione Insulae Britannicae Tractatus (first published 1605) and 'De Unione Insulae Britannicae Tractatus Secundus' (unpublished). Ivic points out that Bacon was one of the few common-law lawyers in the Commons to support James's project of political union, which won support elsewhere among MPs in the Lords: 'Like Hume, Bacon sees a potential union as a Machiavellian occasione' (p. 135). The sequence of chapters is brought to a close with a study of Macbeth in the context of the Anglo-Scottish union debate. As was mentioned above, one of the key contributions of this study is the way in which it urges the reader to scrutinize received thinking about the critical status and function of so-called 'occasional' texts (that 'Jacobean succession literature was produced in the main by writers of little or no significance' (p. 12)); the 'simple for-or-against binary' (p. 53) of panegyric; and the parameters (or elisions) involved in formulating Brutayne/this Iland/this State/this Kingdome and so on at the turn of the sixteenth century. Apart from ongoing equivocation widely expressed concerning the statehood or political integrity of Ireland and Wales, for example, in these debates, Ivic underlines that James stressed in Basilikon Doron (1603): 'as for the Hielands, I shortly comprehend them all in two sorts of people: the one, that dwelleth in our maine land, that are barbarous for the most part, and yet mixed with some shewe of civilitie; the other, that dwelleth in the Iles, and are utterly barbarous, without any shew of civilitie' (p. 123). The Stuart king's political tract Basilikon Doron, ostensibly a handbook for kingship bequeathed to his son and heir Henry, was published in Scotland in 1599, but on his accession to the English throne in 1603 it was made newly available to London booksellers. James was far from being a solitary voice in this discussion of the matter of Britain. Ivic draws attention to Bacon's correspondence later, in which the Irish are described as 'a people barbarous and not reduced to civility' (p. 136), and goes on to make the more general point that the 'rethinking of group identities [in the period did not] […] include the Gaelic communities of Scotland and Ireland' (p. 4). More broadly, Ivic highlights that the Stuart accession was very far from being inevitable in the minds of many, even though on Elizabeth's death he was the eldest of Henry VII's living descendants. In this debate, figures such as Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton are given very welcome attention and, indeed, could have been afforded even more prominent status for the ways in which they return attention in their writings to...