Strangers and aliens in Tudor England

Summary

HistoryExtra Podcast — “Strangers and Aliens in Tudor England”

Host: Charlotte Vosper
Guest: Professor Nandini Das
Date: June 16, 2026

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Main Theme & Purpose

In this episode, Charlotte Vosper speaks with Professor Nandini Das about “This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England.” The conversation delves beneath the familiar narratives of monarchs and courtiers to explore how ordinary people—immigrants, exiles, artisans, religious refugees, and traders—shaped what it meant to be “English” in the 16th and 17th centuries. Together, they interrogate notions of migration, identity, and belonging, exposing the myth of an insular “sceptered isle” and revealing national identity as fluid, negotiated, and continuously reshaped through encounter and movement.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening the Book: Everyday Perspectives

• Letters as Lenses:
  • Nandini Das begins her book (and this discussion) not with royalty, but with letters from Claes van Verviken, a Flemish hatmaker in Norwich, and Hassan Aga, an Englishman-turned-Ottoman official in Algiers (03:00–04:44).
  • Notable Quote:
    • “Those letters shatter that island myth... Tudor England isn't and never was an insular prelude to empire." – Nandini Das (05:20)
• Global Networks:
  • England was already deeply enmeshed in global exchanges—of people, objects, words, and ideas.
  • The presence of Venetian glassmakers, Dutch seamstresses, African servants, and Jewish merchants stands as evidence for vibrant multiculturalism.

2. The Multicultural Tudor Court

• Courtly Projection and Immigrant Labor:
  • The Tudor monarchy relied heavily on immigrant artists and artisans to construct its image of permanence and power (06:02–07:52).
  • Hans Holbein and Lavinia Tirlink (a little-known female artist) exemplify how foreign talents shaped the face of Englishness.
• Propaganda and Perception:
  • “Propaganda requires labor. And that labor came significantly from artists... a huge percentage... came from immigrants.” (06:40–07:05)
• Irony of Image-Makers:
  • The image of a “pure” English identity was—ironically—crafted by strangers.

3. Strangers and Aliens: Legal and Social Categories

• Definitions and Distinctions:
  • “Stranger” and “alien” were technical, legal terms, not insults; they denoted people from outside the King’s jurisdiction, subject to special taxes and restrictions (10:18–11:41).
  • “Denizen” status mapped onto a kind of permanent residency; full naturalization required expensive legal acts.
  • Even an Englishman could be called a “foreigner” in another city (e.g., Shakespeare in London).
• Social Attitudes:
  • Emphasized dynamism: a stranger could simultaneously be a scapegoat, a neighbor, a spouse, or even oneself when abroad.
  • Memorable Point:
    • “The category never settled... it keeps continuously shifting... rewriting what it means to be a nation.” (13:21–13:37)

4. Reformation and Religion: Changing Criteria of Belonging

• Pre- vs Post-Reformation Allegiance:
  • Before the Reformation, loyalty to the monarchy and birthright defined Englishness; afterward, religion became entwined with identity (14:01–16:13).
  • Oscillation between Protestant and Catholic regimes created new insiders and outsiders.
  • Example: Catholic Thomas Stevens flees to Goa, writes a biblical epic in Indian languages, his identity growing “messier or richer.”
• Quote:
  • “To be English increasingly means to be Protestant. Then it means to be Catholic, then it means to be Protestant again.” (14:51–15:01)

5. Assimilation and Everyday Negotiation

• Integration at the Local Level:
  • Ordinary life for immigrants involved work, guild membership, parish life, family—assimilation through action, not abstraction (19:41–21:56).
  • Case study: Jacques de Hem in Norwich—the “good immigrant”—buys city freedom, integrates deeply, but usefulness confers only conditional security.
  • Case study: Rodrigo Lopez, Elizabeth I’s Jewish-Portuguese physician, whose rise and fall reveals the precariousness of belonging.
• Language and Identity:
  • John (Giovanni) Florio, a second-generation Italian, straddles identities, “an Italian in tongue, but... English at heart.” (23:40–24:02)

6. Union of the Crowns and Stretching Englishness Abroad

• James I and New Questions:
  • The accession of a Scottish king amplifies questions of birthright and place—does “Englishness” pass through blood, soil, or both? (24:40–25:53)
• Travel, Trade, and Identity:
  • Increasing overseas activity (East India Company, colonial ventures) makes the national identity more complex.
  • William Adams: First Englishman in Japan, deeply embedded in Japanese society but identifies: “I am a Kentish man.” (26:29–26:54)

7. Colonialism, Race, and Legality

• Imposing and Resisting Englishness:
  • In colonial Ireland, identity, language, and religion intertwine—Elizabeth Carey’s story underscores how colonizers themselves could become “othered” (29:27–32:12).
• Racialization of Belonging:
  • The case of Elizabeth Key in Virginia—a woman of English paternity and African maternity—marked a historic moment where Englishness became legally racialized (33:08–34:21).
  • The law swiftly shifts to deny belonging on maternal (and thus racial) grounds, anticipating the embeddedness of race in later legal frameworks.

8. Instability and Relational Identity

• Mobility as Defining, Not Disruptive:
  • National identity emerges not as a fixed inheritance but as a negotiation triggered by movement (35:31–36:49).
  • “Belonging is never final... granted and contested and revoked and renegotiated.” (36:11)
• Garden as Metaphor:
  • Foreign plants—the lilac, horse chestnut—become “archetypally English,” just as people and cultures do.

9. The Stranger as Motif

• Reciprocity of Migration:
  • The English were as often strangers abroad as they were hosts at home (38:01–38:31).
• Identity as Relational:
  • Difference reveals the boundaries of identity—“it becomes visible not when everyone fits... but precisely when someone doesn’t fit.” (38:41–38:55)
• Belonging as a Process:
  • Not a closed inheritance, but “worked out in movement, through encounter, through adaptation, sometimes conflict.” (39:14–39:36)

10. Modern Resonance and the Nature of National Narratives

• Cautious Parallels:
  • While historical contexts differ, today’s debates over belonging, migration, and exclusion resonate with early modern patterns (40:01–41:22).
  • “History can offer perspective ... Economic strain, religious conflict, political uncertainty... sharpen anxieties about who belongs.” (40:19–40:38)

11. Implications for Historical Understanding

• Beyond Monarchs and Courtiers:
  • Nandini Das hopes her work helps move national narratives beyond the perception that Englishness was made only from “the center outward,” instead showing how it was “forged repeatedly through encounter.” (41:50–43:41)
• Re-reading the Myth:
  • Even the most iconic “island nation” rhetoric (e.g., Shakespeare’s Richard II) is, at its core, a lament for a fragile, unattainable ideal, not a triumphant celebration.
• Key Takeaway:
  • “The nation has always been argued over... administered and contested, but also reshaped and enriched by encounter.” (41:06–41:22)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On shifting perceptions of Englishness:
  • “Tudor England isn't and never was an insular prelude to empire.” – Nandini Das (05:20)
• On legal categories of belonging:
  • “Stranger and alien at this point were not vague insults... They were technical categories.” – Nandini Das (10:18)
• On the instability of identity:
  • “Belonging is never final... it is granted and contested and revoked and renegotiated.” – Nandini Das (36:11–36:20)
• On assimilation and hybrid identities:
  • “He [John Florio] might be Italian in tongue, but he's also English at heart.” – Nandini Das (23:40)
• On the importance of mobility:
  • “National identity is not a settled inheritance that is disturbed by mobility. It is actually something that is clarified by that mobility.” – Nandini Das (35:47)
• On race and legal belonging in colonial America:
  • “[Elizabeth Key’s] story reveals the precise moment where belonging becomes racialized.” – Nandini Das (34:21)
• On the myth of the island nation:
  • “It's really about that tension between imagining England as an island and discovering that it was already global.” – Nandini Das (43:41)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:45] – Opening with letters from Claes van Verviken and Hassan Aga
• [06:02] – Multiculturalism at the Tudor court and image-making
• [10:18] – Technical definitions of “stranger” and “alien”
• [13:37] – The shifting category of the stranger
• [14:01] – The Reformation and the remaking of Englishness
• [19:41] – Practicalities of assimilation for migrants
• [24:40] – James I, birthright, and the union with Scotland
• [26:29] – William Adams: Englishness abroad in Japan
• [29:27] – Colonisation in Ireland, Elizabeth Carey, and the complexities of empire
• [33:08] – Elizabeth Key’s legal battle and the emergence of race in colonial law
• [35:31] – The instability and negotiation of identity
• [38:01] – The stranger motif, reciprocity of migration
• [40:01] – Modern resonance and the lessons of history
• [41:50] – Rethinking the center–periphery model and Shakespeare’s “sceptered isle” myth

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Conclusion: Tone & Takeaways

Nandini Das’s account is rich in nuance, balancing the erudition of a historian with an eye for the emotional texture of letters and ordinary lives. She invites listeners to see national identity not as a top-down or static inheritance but as a patchwork, always argued over and reshaped by exchange—where both inclusion and exclusion, stability and instability, are essential to the story. The episode builds a compelling case for viewing the making of “England” as inextricably linked to migration, encounter, and the persistent presence of the stranger, with resonances for our own times of anxiety and movement.

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For further reading and stories of ordinary early modern people, Nandini Das’s book "This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England" is recommended.

Transcript

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[Charlotte Vosper]

When we think of the Tudor period, for many of us, images of the glittering court come to mind. Henry VIII standing square or Elizabeth I draped in her pearls. But there's another side to this history. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Nandini Das traces the lives of ordinary early modern people to reveal a world of constant movement and migration. Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Nandini explains that beyond the monarchs and courtiers, Tudor and Stuart, England was actually being shaped by the ordinary people who crossed its borders.

You open the book with the letters of Claes van Verviken, an ordinary Flemish hatmaker, and of Hassan Aga, treasurer to an Ottoman governor. Why are these letters significant? How does this set the tone for your book? What is it about?

[Nandini Das]

Thank you, Charlotte.

[Interviewer]

You know, we think we know about Tudor England. Henry's wives and codpies, Elizabeth's jewels, Shakespeare's sceptred isle.

[Nandini Das]

And there was a moment of doubt when I started my book instead, with

[Interviewer]

not all that glamour and sensationalism, but with a hat maker complaining about lard.

[Nandini Das]

This is Claes, who's a Flemish hat

[Interviewer]

maker, writing home to his wife from Norwich in 1567 and urging her to come quickly to England.

[Nandini Das]

Except that he says she must remember

[Interviewer]

to bring two wooden butter dishes, because here, he says, they cook with lard, with pig's fat.

[Nandini Das]

And it's such a small detail. It's a matter of taste and habit and homesickness. Anyone who has packed about, you know, tin of Pringles when they're going on their year away or something like that will immediately understand the pull of it. It's funny and intimate and domestic, but

[Interviewer]

it tells us something profound. I think Klais is a fitting opener

[Nandini Das]

for me, precisely because he's not important. He isn't a diplomat, he isn't a

[Interviewer]

courtier or a king.

[Nandini Das]

And then, of course, the book pivots, as you said, to Hassan Agha, this man who was once, we are told,

[Interviewer]

Sampson Rowley of Bristol, a merchant's son

[Nandini Das]

who reappears in the archives as the treasurer to an Ottoman governor in Algiers, an Englishman in a turban. And all of a sudden, the Tudor

[Interviewer]

world isn't a sceptered isle anymore. It's a web stretching right the way

[Nandini Das]

from Norwich to North Africa. And that's what really attracted me.

[Interviewer]

There are so many of them.

[Nandini Das]

Venetian glass makers, Dutch seamstresses, English samurais, African servants, Jewish merchants. Even the words and objects that we think of as being quite conventionally English. Tulips in the garden, sugar in your tea, tobacco in pipes. All of those came to England through global networks. So that's probably why I wanted to start with those letters. Those letters shatter that island myth in a way. Tudor England isn't and never was an

[Interviewer]

insular prelude to empire.

[Nandini Das]

It wasn't even an island nation, if

[Interviewer]

you think of it. It had always shared space with Wales

[Nandini Das]

and with Scotland, and it was already a node in a really global transcultural web. And that's what the book argues, that

[Interviewer]

the nation didn't precede mobility in fact, it took shape through that mobility of people both in and out of the country.

[Nandini Das]

So.

[Charlotte Vosper]

So this is a history of migration, belonging and identity. So let's start with a setting which might feel a little bit more familiar to our listeners, the Tudor court. If we were to step back in time into the court of Henry viii, what evidence would we see of multiculturalism?

[Nandini Das]

That is exactly where so many of us start, our familiarity with this part

[Interviewer]

of history, because the Tudors in school, teaching of history is such a central foundational.

[Nandini Das]

And the things that immediately come to

[Interviewer]

mind are really familiar images.

[Nandini Das]

Henry VIII squaring himself up like a

[Interviewer]

boxer in a codpiece. Elizabeth standing like a goddess over a map of the nation in all her pearls and jewels and finery, perhaps.

[Nandini Das]

And those all give us a sense

[Interviewer]

of Tudor England as something almost monumental, self contained, complete.

[Nandini Das]

But those images are really propaganda, and propaganda requires labor.

[Interviewer]

And that labor came significantly from artists. Some English, of course, we know. But a huge percentage of the work that went into that labor came from immigrants, artists, and artisans.

[Nandini Das]

It meant importing skill. And this was really important for Henry viii. We have to remember that the Tudors were still a very young dynasty, and both Henry VIII and his father, Henry

[Interviewer]

vii, the founder of the dynasty, were punching above their weight.

[Nandini Das]

They were competing against the vast imperial

[Interviewer]

missionary of people like Charles V in Europe.

[Nandini Das]

But both of those first Tudor kings

[Interviewer]

realized and knew this really well that what mattered was perception.

[Nandini Das]

Except that they didn't call it perception.

[Interviewer]

They called it magnificence. And that magnificence was created through people like Flemish painters and Italian financiers, that kind of people. You know, we know about Hans Holbein, but Holbein is just one among many.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Just to probe a little bit further, what view of Englishness and the English monarchy did the Tudor court try to project during Henry VIII's reign?

[Nandini Das]

The view that the Tudors would like

[Interviewer]

to project primarily came down to two things, power and stability. That they were powerful and they were here to stay. And these were crucial for them.

[Nandini Das]

And as I said, you know, there were multiple artisans who were working on gold and jewelry and clothing for Henry VIII in this period. But the key thing that I focus

[Interviewer]

on are the painters, the images that last.

[Nandini Das]

And Lavinia Tirlink, who forms the focus of my opening kind of chapter in

[Interviewer]

story that I tell in book, is very much one of them.

[Nandini Das]

She appears in the records of the tudor monarchy around 1546, almost incidentally. You know, it's a really brief note of appointment. Mistress Lavena Turling Paintrix. We don't know for certain which paintings she produced. Her paintings are scattered throughout the parliamentary records and the court rolls and courtly

[Interviewer]

documents of the period.

[Nandini Das]

But that invisibility almost is precisely why

[Interviewer]

I was so fascinated by her, because

[Nandini Das]

she stands as a symbol of all those figures whose presence you can just about discern through the corner of your eye, almost as you look at those

[Interviewer]

portraits of Henry or Elizabeth or Mary Tudor in this period.

[Nandini Das]

Of course, I've mentioned Holbein already. He is absolutely a really illustrative figure

[Interviewer]

in this respect about the power that the artist's brush could wield.

[Nandini Das]

We know that not only through his portraits of Henry, but of course, through his role in things like producing portraits of the women that Henry may or

[Interviewer]

may not want to marry, for instance.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Absolutely. And I think there's some irony in the idea that actually you've got immigrants being the people who are painting and projecting this image of consolidated Englishness and a strong Tudor monarchy. How did contemporaries view these people who were immigrants, working in amongst them, alongside them, in their daily lives? In the book, you mention the categories of stranger and alien. I just wonder if you could explain about that a little bit.

[Interviewer]

Absolutely.

[Nandini Das]

So, firstly, we should make it quite clear that stranger and alien at this

[Interviewer]

point were not vague insults or science fiction references in any way. They were technical categories. So an alien or stranger was someone

[Nandini Das]

from a land beyond the control of

[Interviewer]

the English king, who had arrived in England and therefore would pay higher duties, higher taxes, would have certain restrictions on their freedom.

[Nandini Das]

Quite often there was a distinction made

[Interviewer]

between a stranger who was from another country and a foreigner who might be English, but from just another taxpaying region. So in those senses, you could argue that Shakespeare, a man who had been born and brought up and had a house in Stratford, was a foreigner in London, because he wasn't born and brought up and paid his taxes in London itself.

[Nandini Das]

A denizen would be another category. For instance, a denizen is someone kind of comparable to a permanent resident today, someone who had purchased limited rights, but you could also, by paying significantly more,

[Interviewer]

get yourself an act of Parliament which naturalized you as a citizen, and then, by effect, by all rights, you would

[Nandini Das]

be comparable to anyone who had been

[Interviewer]

born and brought up in England.

[Nandini Das]

So, as you can see, there are

[Interviewer]

a whole load of gradations there, in a way.

[Nandini Das]

And you see that circulating throughout this period in popular discourse, in entertainment, in

[Interviewer]

all sorts of ways.

[Nandini Das]

So, for instance, in 1517, a London preacher famously preached a sermon that incited

[Interviewer]

one of the biggest riots against immigrants in London, the evil Mayday riots.

[Nandini Das]

And he talked about aliens and strangers

[Interviewer]

who steal the bread from the mouths of our children.

[Nandini Das]

On the other hand, in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, you have a man who faces execution precisely because he's a stranger, except that he's ultimately revealed not only

[Interviewer]

to be a brother, but the twin of one of the citizens of the city that he had survived in. And that doubleness runs throughout this period. This is what I find so very fascinating.

[Nandini Das]

In early modern England, a stranger could

[Interviewer]

be a tax liability, someone who is siphoning off state resources, the scapegoat for a riot.

[Nandini Das]

But it could just as easily be

[Interviewer]

the neighbor next door, the man or woman you married and loved, the teacher

[Nandini Das]

who taught you your letters or your

[Interviewer]

sums, the friend who brought you ale

[Nandini Das]

when you were unwell and knew your children's names and stood in as a witness at their baptism. So the stranger could be a scapegoat.

[Interviewer]

They could be a neighbor, stranger, could be a kin.

[Nandini Das]

The stranger, in fact, could be you stepping off a ship in Venice or

[Interviewer]

in Algiers, or in Goa in India. The category never settled. And that's what's fascinating about it. It keeps continuously shifting throughout this period. And as it shifts, it rewrites what it means to be a nation.

[Charlotte Vosper]

So we've essentially got this population living in England, many of which are strangers and aliens, as you've explained, some of them involved in creating this image of Englishness and projecting a view of a stable Tudor monarchy. How did that notion of state sanctioned Englishness change when the Reformation came along? And suddenly we've got the division of religion coming into play.

[Interviewer]

The Reformation absolutely changes the grammar of Englishness.

[Nandini Das]

Pre Reformation, belonging was largely, you could say, loyalty to the monarch and to a given dynasty.

[Interviewer]

It was your birthright. Belonging was measured by where you were born. Perhaps you could hold private views and

[Nandini Das]

still serve the Crown. We have seen that happening for a

[Interviewer]

significantly long period, even within Henry VIII's reign.

[Nandini Das]

But the break with Rome absolutely unsettles

[Interviewer]

that framework, because suddenly allegiance is not

[Nandini Das]

simply to a king, but to a

[Interviewer]

religious sentiment, to a religious faith. And that faith becomes entangled with nationality. Questions of loyalty.

[Nandini Das]

To be English increasingly means to be Protestant. Then it means to be Catholic, then it means to be Protestant again. So there's a lot of oscillation going

[Interviewer]

on, and that makes the boundary between an insider and an outsider increasingly more fraught. What happens if you're an English Catholic under Protestant rule?

[Nandini Das]

Are you as English as your Protestant neighbors? Some of the Protestant neighbors would argue that you weren't English at all and your citizenship should be stripped from you. So for instance, one of the figures I follow in the book is a man called Thomas Stevens, who I'm absolutely

[Interviewer]

fascinated by and have been fascinated by for a long, long time.

[Nandini Das]

Stevens is a young Catholic and he escapes from England and ends up in

[Interviewer]

Goa in western India.

[Nandini Das]

And there, far from England, he's the

[Interviewer]

first Englishman to write a biblical epic, 50 years before John Milton's Paradise Lost.

[Nandini Das]

But he writes it in Konkani and

[Interviewer]

Marathi, the languages of western India.

[Nandini Das]

So in his identity, those things, those strands of what Englishness mean, become significantly, depending on your perspective, either messier or

[Interviewer]

richer in some ways. And that's entirely the doing of that post Reformation aftermath.

[Charlotte Vosper]

So essentially the Reformation brings in another avenue for negotiating what counts as Englishness.

[Interviewer]

Absolutely.

[Nandini Das]

And this is something that I argue throughout the book, actually, over that 150

[Interviewer]

year span that this book covers.

[Nandini Das]

What I traced is essentially a shift of allegiance conceived primarily as a personal

[Interviewer]

bond between either the soil, the land and a subject, or a monarch and a subject to much more complicated ideas of civic status, participation and rights.

[Nandini Das]

And religion is one of those things

[Interviewer]

that complicate that issue.

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[Charlotte Vosper]

Moving away from the realm of theological divisions between Catholicism and Protestantism, how did ordinary people negotiate the boundaries of what it meant to be English? I know we touched on this a little bit with your discussion of strangers and aliens, but could immigrants expect assimilation into Elizabethan England?

[Nandini Das]

Yes, I think once you move away from kings and bishops, belonging looks much less doctrinal and much more practical. As anyone who reads the book will

[Interviewer]

realize, I've spent far too long poring

[Nandini Das]

over letters written and exchanged among displaced

[Interviewer]

families, both English and non English, and

[Nandini Das]

they cover things that we can identify with. They worry about work. They miss familiar food. They think about new fashions that they need to absorb. They worry about rumors of the death

[Interviewer]

and marriages and pregnancies of loved ones who are far from them.

[Nandini Das]

They join guilds and baptize their children. Assimilation isn't automatic, but it's hugely possible. It was worked through labor, through marriage

[Interviewer]

and language and parish life.

[Nandini Das]

So for instance, one of the people I follow is a merchant called Jacques

[Interviewer]

the Hem, who lands up in Norwich.

[Nandini Das]

And Norwich, of course, throughout this period

[Interviewer]

takes in huge waves of migrants from Protestant migrants from the Low Countries, so Dutch and Flemish communities. And they are not the only ones. There are multiple cities across England who

[Nandini Das]

essentially put together the list of preferred

[Interviewer]

immigrants to supply skills and jobs for which their own populations cannot supply the need.

[Nandini Das]

So if you walk into St. Michael at plea in Norwich today, you'd be standing in the parish where Jacques de

[Interviewer]

Hem lived, and he was very much a very noticeable member of the community during the 1590s, when there was a harvest crisis. He sources grain for Norwich from Amsterdam during the fear of the Spanish Armada,

[Nandini Das]

when all the cities are having a

[Interviewer]

muster of able bodied men to protect the city's resour.

[Nandini Das]

He puts his name in that muster,

[Interviewer]

along with his other immigrant Dutch contemporaries.

[Nandini Das]

He buys the freedom of the city

[Interviewer]

for himself and for his family.

[Nandini Das]

He enters the names of his children

[Interviewer]

in the city's registers. So that's the classic story of the good immigrant. In some ways he's industrial and useful and loyal. But there is another side of the story, of course.

[Nandini Das]

Rodrigo Lopez, who is Portuguese born, a

[Interviewer]

Jewish Christian convert, has a meteoric rise. He is Elizabethan, England's celebrity doctor. He sees everyone who is worth knowing, including the Queen. And then the tide turns.

[Nandini Das]

One day he's writing a grumpy letter

[Interviewer]

to his son's headmaster complaining about his son's handwriting. The next day he's been arrested for

[Nandini Das]

treason, has this very high profile case tried against him and is executed. And in a blink, the Lopez family's

[Interviewer]

fortunes have been overturned.

[Nandini Das]

Usefulness offers him a protection until it doesn't. But people like them aren't marginal curiosities. Even the English language evolves in this period.

[Interviewer]

We talk about Shakespeare creating new words, but so much of that language is

[Nandini Das]

also the work of one of Shakespeare's

[Interviewer]

contemporaries, a man called John or Giovanni Florio. He's a second generation Italian immigrant and he really knows firsthand how it felt to be on the receiving end of that accommodation, or assimilation, whatever you might want to call it.

[Nandini Das]

There's a wonderful moment where he says in one of his books that I know they have a knife to my throat.

[Interviewer]

They believe that an Italian Englishman is a devil incarnate.

[Nandini Das]

But at the same time, he insists that he might be Italian in tongue, but he's also English at heart. Italus aure Anglo spectore, he says, and

[Interviewer]

it's a huge thing for him, and I find that absolutely fascinating.

[Nandini Das]

Florio puts this across so wonderfully that

[Interviewer]

within him there's space both for his Italian heritage and his English allegiance.

[Nandini Das]

Being a member of two nations, two

[Interviewer]

cultures, doesn't divide him, it makes him richer. And that's also a story that I

[Charlotte Vosper]

want to tell that really complicates the idea of Englishness which people typically have for this period. I think moving on chronologically after Elizabeth I's death, James I's reign brought with it questions of allegiance for English and Scottish people. Did national identities clash as Scotland was unified with England under one monarch?

[Nandini Das]

Well, when James I comes to the English throne in 1603 as a Scot,

[Interviewer]

that alone kind of completely unsettles that grammar of belonging.

[Nandini Das]

And we can actually trace that through

[Interviewer]

the legal records of this period.

[Nandini Das]

Suddenly, the question isn't only who is English, but about birthright. Does where you're born, who you're born to matter?

[Interviewer]

And how much becomes a really key thing in James's reign. What made you English?

[Nandini Das]

Is it the fact that your parents were English? What about your grandparents, then? Or is it the fact that you

[Interviewer]

were born in England?

[Nandini Das]

And this happens with a lot of

[Interviewer]

James's Scottish subjects, for instance, who come over with him and then have children in England. But then again, on the flip side, what happens when an Englishman has a child abroad? Where did that child's allegiance lie?

[Nandini Das]

Did it matter if the child's mother

[Interviewer]

wasn't English, for instance?

[Nandini Das]

So these were debates around the right

[Interviewer]

of soil and the right of blood, two ways in which you could measure or map belonging.

[Nandini Das]

And you could see that English identity

[Interviewer]

itself was stretching far beyond the island.

[Nandini Das]

So, for instance, I talk about William

[Interviewer]

Adams, who's the real life inspiration behind the blunt English hero of James Clavell's Shogun.

[Nandini Das]

Adams is an English sailor who sails

[Interviewer]

in a Dutch ship, arrives in Japan,

[Nandini Das]

and was living in Japan advising the emperor, married to a Japanese woman, deeply embedded in a foreign political system. And yet, when he writes, and here again, we come to a letter, when he first finds out that the English

[Interviewer]

believe he's dead, and he finds a means of sending a letter back to the East India Company back home in London, that letter home begins with him saying, I am a Kentish man.

[Nandini Das]

And that's so hugely resonant that this

[Interviewer]

man, who now has a new name, a new language, a new family thousands of miles away, still measures himself through

[Nandini Das]

his roots in Kent.

[Charlotte Vosper]

It's an incredible example. And I'd like to just ask you a little bit more about that. How people's sense of allegiance and belonging and Englishness changed as people were able to travel and trade with other countries during the 17th century, like William Adams.

[Nandini Das]

Well, people like William Adams and his

[Interviewer]

children, in fact, the children he had in Japan, complicate that issue of birthright. They complicate that issue of a national identity.

[Nandini Das]

And he, of course, is just one

[Interviewer]

among hundreds who are traveling abroad with the various trading companies in these days.

[Nandini Das]

And that's something that we perhaps don't really quite often acknowledge.

[Interviewer]

The scale of the sheer kind of presence of trade within international geopolitics in this period and the way it facilitated connection and exchange and therefore complicated identity.

[Nandini Das]

And one of the spaces where that

[Interviewer]

identity is really complicated is on the high seas.

[Nandini Das]

It is all very well to talk about your right of soil, but what

[Interviewer]

happens when there is no soil under your feet?

[Nandini Das]

Just the creaking, groaning planks of a ship. And it's a ship that is manned,

[Interviewer]

and they would be manned because it was a predominantly male profession in this period by a hugely multilingual, multicultural community. Shipboard life was immensely risky.

[Nandini Das]

So you wouldn't have a single ship

[Interviewer]

manned or crewed by an English, predominantly English crew. It would be multicultural. So that complicates that idea of where

[Nandini Das]

does Englishness slip away? Does the fact that William Adams wears

[Interviewer]

a kimono and eats Japanese food and seems to enjoy Japanese music mean he's not English anymore?

[Nandini Das]

This is something that the East India

[Interviewer]

Company captain who arrives in Japan in 1611, worries about. How far can he trust this man who looks English but doesn't quite seem English to him?

[Charlotte Vosper]

In a similar vein to travel and trading, how did people adapt notions of nationhood as the English colonies became more established and the imperial venture solidified throughout the 17th century?

[Interviewer]

You're quite right to bring that up,

[Nandini Das]

I think, because particularly as the 17th

[Interviewer]

century progresses, that is another dimension that becomes increasingly urgent and also increasingly fraught,

[Nandini Das]

because Englishness, ironically becomes something that is

[Interviewer]

enforced far more stringently in those contested territories, first in Ireland and then across the Atlantic. Ireland, of course, is England's rehearsal space in terms of that colonial identity.

[Nandini Das]

And it's particularly interesting how issues of

[Interviewer]

language and religion and belonging kind of come together in those colonies in Ireland in those negotiations.

[Nandini Das]

So, for instance, Elizabeth Carey is, by

[Interviewer]

all rights, if you look at her early life, a typical aristocratic English girl. Yes, she is significantly kind of bookish, and we know that from contemporary records. But she's married off at 15. She's an heiress who marries a more aristocratic but cash strapped courtier.

[Nandini Das]

And she soon has children and is

[Interviewer]

shipped off to Ireland following her husband, who becomes the Lord Deputy of Ireland. So he is very much part of, and in fact the leader of the colonizing forces in Ireland.

[Nandini Das]

All her actions in Ireland come from a very good place, but go terribly

[Interviewer]

haywire in various ways.

[Nandini Das]

She talks about the necessity of English

[Interviewer]

control and order, while at the same time herself rebelling against that English control and order, because it is in Ireland,

[Nandini Das]

we suspect, where she becomes increasingly familiar with Catholicism.

[Interviewer]

And then she returns back to England and very publicly, sensationally converts to Catholicism.

[Nandini Das]

She's disowned by her own family, by

[Interviewer]

her mother, she's disowned and divorced by her husband, her children are taken away from her. And all through this she sticks to

[Nandini Das]

her faith, so she's hugely important for

[Interviewer]

understanding the implicit presence of the English in Ireland. She's so heavily caught up in both

[Nandini Das]

that colonization, but also, ironically, in the flexibility and the freedom that she herself

[Interviewer]

appropriates for herself as a Catholic in Protestant England.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Yeah, I think Elizabeth Carey is a brilliant example of contemporary negotiating the ideas of colonisation, of what it means to go and live in Ireland.

[Interviewer]

She's also a typically complicated case because she has deep sympathy for the Irish,

[Nandini Das]

but also has this absolute sense of

[Interviewer]

her English superiority that she knows better. So she is an absolutely wonderful example of that doubleness. This is not a binary of being either pro or anti colonial, It's a

[Nandini Das]

really messy, complicated mixture of the two.

[Interviewer]

By the time we move to Virginia in North America, of course, the question becomes even more brutal, what is English blood worth ultimately?

[Nandini Das]

So, for instance, I trace the story of one particular woman, Elizabeth Key, who's the daughter of an Englishman, a slave

[Interviewer]

owner and an enslaved African mother.

[Nandini Das]

And she brings a case to the

[Interviewer]

Virginia High court claiming her freedom because the court, by law, has to recognize paternal Englishness. In other words, a that the father

[Nandini Das]

is the more important parent where a

[Interviewer]

child's identity is concerned, and be that an Englishman or an English woman cannot be a slave. And Elizabeth Key uses those two, the conjoined power of those two arguments to claim that she is a free woman and so is her children. They have to be free because her father was English. The colony agrees and she's given her freedom.

[Nandini Das]

But then soon after, the colony changes the law and enslavement becomes hereditary through the maternal line. So if you have an enslaved mother,

[Interviewer]

you are doomed to enslavement.

[Nandini Das]

This is a moment I find profoundly

[Interviewer]

important because this is the moment where belonging becomes racialized. For some people, it's going to be easier to belong than to others. And that ease of belonging depends on which race you belong to, on your appearance, on your background.

[Nandini Das]

But also what these stories reveal is that colonization and empire didn't just expand

[Interviewer]

English identity, it transforms it. It shapes, continues to be changed from year to year, not only within England, but beyond it, in North America, in India, in Japan, in various far flung

[Nandini Das]

places, wherever the English had set foot.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Yeah, I think complexity is a common theme that we keep coming back to in these stories, taking together the stories that we've spoken about so far. Elizabeth Key, Elizabeth Carey, Thomas Stevens, William Adams. Is there a common factor which defines the nature of identity, of migration, of belonging in this history?

[Interviewer]

That's such a lovely question, and I

[Nandini Das]

think that's, in a way, the argument that holds the book together. What I try really to put across and what emerges from this history is that national identity is not a settled

[Interviewer]

inheritance that is disturbed by mobility. It is actually something that is clarified by that mobility. So every time a stranger appears or an Englishman becomes a stranger abroad, the state has to articulate who he is or she is, who counts, who doesn't,

[Nandini Das]

and those articulations accumulate.

[Interviewer]

Belonging is never final throughout this history of 150 years that I trace. It is granted and contested and revoked and renegotiated. That instability is the story, the stranger, the exile, the denizen, the naturalized citizen, the child born on the wrong side of a boundary. All of these figures, I think, demonstrate

[Nandini Das]

just a simple key fact, which is

[Interviewer]

that what appears natural or what we appear to take for granted, national identity is, in fact, contingent. It's granted and withdrawn in response to mobility.

[Nandini Das]

And yet the story is not just

[Interviewer]

one of exclusion either.

[Nandini Das]

When the gardener John Tradescant and his son, for instance, traveled to Russia and North Africa and Virginia and planted the lilac and the horse chestnut tree in English soil, those plants were foreign arrivals, like so many of their human counterparts. Yet today we call them archetypally English. The garden and the nation naturalizes what was once alien.

[Interviewer]

It reforms itself in response to that movement.

[Charlotte Vosper]

That's a really powerful idea. That instability is the story that we're telling here. Another continuity that actually stood out to me when I read the book is that often in these stories we're telling, there is the notion or the specter even, of a stranger. That's something that consistently comes up. What does that tell us that that figure keeps reoccurring in this history? Can we take anything positive from that, do you think?

[Interviewer]

Absolutely.

[Nandini Das]

I think if there's one thing that this book tries to communicate is that it tells us that the stranger is

[Interviewer]

not just someone who arrives at a nation's door.

[Nandini Das]

It's also the person who leaves it. So in these stories, the stranger is

[Interviewer]

Lavinia Tirling at court, or Jacques the Hem in Norwich.

[Nandini Das]

Yes, but it's also William Adams writing from Japan, Thomas Stevens writing in Goa. English settlers in Ireland, merchants in Venice, sailors in Algiers, the pirates on the high seas. The English are as often the strangers abroad as they are the hosts at home. And that reciprocity is quite crucial, I

[Interviewer]

think, because it destabilizes any simple story, any binary structure that we might want to set up of inside versus outside.

[Nandini Das]

And what that reveals is that national identity is relational in Other words, it becomes visible. Not when everyone fits and there's only a single story, but precisely when someone

[Interviewer]

doesn't fit, or when you yourself no longer fit.

[Nandini Das]

The migrant, the exile, the expatriate force.

[Interviewer]

That question, what travels with you?

[Nandini Das]

Is it Englishness? And if it is, is that Englishness?

[Interviewer]

Soil, language, loyalty, memory? What is it?

[Nandini Das]

And there is something positive, I think, in that understanding, in that recurrent pattern that we trace. It shows that belonging has never been a close inheritance. It has never been something that is

[Interviewer]

absolutely owned by some and withheld from others. It has always been worked out in

[Nandini Das]

movement, through encounter, through adaptation, sometimes conflict. The stranger, whether they are incoming or outgoing, is not an anomaly in the story of the nation. They are part of the mechanism through

[Interviewer]

which the nation tells its story.

[Charlotte Vosper]

Bringing this story up to today, then, does this history speak to our modern political climate, do you think?

[Interviewer]

That's always such a tempting question, isn't it? But I'm cautious about drawing neat parallels

[Nandini Das]

purely because the 16th and 17th centuries,

[Interviewer]

quite explicitly aren't the. There are different pressures.

[Nandini Das]

The political structures, the scale of movement,

[Interviewer]

the language of rights are very different.

[Nandini Das]

But what history can offer, I think, is perspective. One of the striking things about this period is how familiar the certain rhythms feel. Economic strain, religious conflict, political uncertainty. These are the things that repeatedly sharpen

[Interviewer]

anxieties about who belongs.

[Nandini Das]

The language hardens and then boundaries are debated. And yet those same societies remain deeply

[Interviewer]

dependent on movement and exchange. That tension isn't new.

[Nandini Das]

What the book suggests, I would say, is not a lesson, because history can't

[Interviewer]

really, despite all we hope, teach us a lesson. What it can offer are patterns.

[Nandini Das]

Political communities repeatedly recalibrate the terms of

[Interviewer]

belonging when faced with mobility and change. I think sometimes we tend to forget that the nation has always been argued over. It has been administered and contested, but it has also been reshaped and enriched by encounter.

[Nandini Das]

And that is ultimately what this early modern period reminds us of.

[Charlotte Vosper]

That reminder is definitely an important one in our modern day. Now, finally, something which we have touched on a little bit, but I was hoping we could just pull out a little bit more, is how do the stories in your book complicate the well worn Tudor histories centered on monarchs and courtiers? What do you hope the impact of this history will be?

[Nandini Das]

You know, those well worn Tudor and Stuart histories are where my fascination with this period started.

[Interviewer]

And I'm still fascinated by them, because who wouldn't be?

[Nandini Das]

These are huge, towering figures. Those stories matter, but they can also make the nation look as if it

[Interviewer]

were shaped only from the center outward.

[Nandini Das]

What this book shows is that England was also being made in workshops and parishes and on the streets of London

[Interviewer]

and Southampton and Portsmouth, in courtrooms, by migrants and gardeners and schoolteachers and writers and all of those people.

[Nandini Das]

My title comes from Shakespeare, from John of Gaunt's Speech in Richard ii, where

[Interviewer]

England is called this little world.

[Nandini Das]

And that speech quite often tends to

[Interviewer]

be taken out of context. It's seen as this wonderful celebration of a golden England in the past. But here's the thing. Even in John of Gaunt's Speech, it is not only in the past, but it's a broken ideal that you can

[Nandini Das]

only just about reach for.

[Interviewer]

It's a lament of a very fragile vision of an England that was crumbling rapidly under political pressure and greed and all of those things.

[Nandini Das]

So that's what I want to convey. If the book has an impact, I hope it's this. That readers stop seeing national identity as something declared from above or from the centre, and start recognizing it as something

[Interviewer]

that is forged repeatedly through encounter. It's really about that tension between imagining England as an island and discovering that

[Nandini Das]

it was already global.

[Charlotte Vosper]

That was Nandini Das speaking to Charlotte Vosper. Nandini is professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Her book, this Little A New History of Tudor and Stuart England, is full of even more stories about the early modern people who negotiated identity, belonging and migration.