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- [00:01]
Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold?
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History Hit Host (possibly Susannah Lipscomb or a producer)
With a subscription to History Hit, you
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Susannah Lipscomb
can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release
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History Hit Host (possibly Susannah Lipscomb or a producer)
every single week covering everything from the
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Susannah Lipscomb
ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
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Acast Announcer
Acast powers the World's Best Podcasts Here's a show that we recommend.
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Knox
Do you like being educated on things that entertain but don't matter? Well, then you need to be listening to the Podcast with Knox and Jamie Every Wednesday. We put together an episode dedicated to delightful idiocy to give your brain a break from all the serious and important stuff.
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Nikayla Matthews Akome
Stuff.
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Jamie
Whether we're deep diving a classic movie, dissecting the true meanings behind the newest slang, or dunking on our own listeners for their bad takes or cringy stories, we always approach our topics with humor and just a little bit of side eye. And we end every episode with recommendations on all the best new movies, books, TV shows or music.
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Knox
To find out more, just search up the Podcast with Knox and Jamie wherever you listen to podcasts and prepare to make Wednesday your new favorite day of the week.
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- [02:18]
History Hit Host (possibly Susannah Lipscomb or a producer)
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.
- [02:47]
Susannah Lipscomb
In June 1586, William Harborne, England's ambassador to the Ottoman court, sat down to write a difficult letter. A group of Englishmen had been taken prisoner by the Ottomans, and all Harborne's attempts to free them had been in vain. He had repeatedly petitioned the Ottoman governor of Algiers, Uluch Ali Pasha, to no avail. This time he changed his target. His letter was written to Uluch Ali Pasha's treasurer, a eunuch called Asan Agha. Harborn reminded Asan Agha of the biblical story of Joseph, the boy abandoned by his brothers in Egypt. Later, their savior, Harban, was urging the treasurer to treat the imprisoned Englishmen as his brothers in the same way. And he included these Notwithstanding your body be subject to Turkish strudrum, yet your virtuous mind be free from those vices. It was an interesting meditation on liberty in the circumstances. The reason for Harborn's strange rhetoric is that he knew Asan Aga's secret. The eunuch had been born Sampson Rowley, the son of a Bristolian merchant. He'd been taken into captivity by the Ottomans while aboard the merchant ship Swallow. He had risen up the ranks of Ottoman bureaucracy until he became the right hand man of the Ottoman governor. He was English, but he also was not. Ideas of England and Britain, of Englishness and Britishness, have never been uncontested. There has perhaps been no moment in history when their definitions were more up for grabs than in the 16th and 17th. This was an age of immigration and emigration, of global entanglements and intersections, an age in which national identities were being continually remade through encounter. My guest today, Professor Nandini Das, has written a lyrical, brilliant and bracing book about this age of flux that causes us to reassess our understandings of Tudor and Stuart England with a touch of rhetorical genius. It is called this Little World. It's an absolute treat to talk with her again today. And Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And this is not just the Tudors from history hit Professor Das Nandini, welcome back to the podcast.
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Professor Nandini Das
Thank you, Suzie.
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Professor Susanna Lipscomb
It's such a pleasure.
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Susannah Lipscomb
It's such a treat, as I said, to talk to you about this, especially as it's brand new and the ideas in it are so important and I think are going to be really key to redefining how we see this epoch. Because this is an age of extraordinary change, of extraordinary numbers of people emigrating and immigrating. That is the way we're using the verb. I mean, one of the numbers I was struck by is 30,000 Protestants. You say on your first few pages, escape from Catholic Europe to England between 1567, 1573, within six years. I mean, it's vast. So I guess the book couldn't really feel more topical. But I wonder if discussions about immigration have always felt topical.
- [05:59]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
I think so, in some ways, the numbers particularly is exactly what struck me when I first started looking at it. That sheer concentration of unfamiliar faces, unfamiliar sounds, unfamiliar voices on familiar streets in familiar spaces, and the kind of tensions that brought up.
- [06:20]
Professor Nandini Das
And what's striking, I think, is also not simply the scale, but the rhythm. So by that I mean, you know, you have these moments of welcome letters
- [06:30]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
that I talk about in the book urging families to join loved ones, you in England, full of reassurance and you have real sense of a shared humanity and pity and sympathy from the English hosts one moment and then they sit alongside outbreaks of violence like the evil mayday riots of 1517 that I also write about.
- [06:55]
Professor Nandini Das
And what you realize when you look at those is that immigration is never
- [06:59]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
just about the movement. And discussions of immigration are never just about the movement.
- [07:05]
Professor Nandini Das
It's about how that movement unsettles what
- [07:09]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
people think they know about themselves and about their worlds. And that's what I really wanted to get into.
- [07:15]
Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, it's an interesting contradiction, or it feels like a contradiction, or at least a tension here when you write. It was precisely this deep involvement with the world through trade, conquest, diplomacy and migration that shaped the imagining of the nation as singular, exceptional, providentially set apart. Talk me through this. How does this contradiction work? And how does this history create ideas of Englishness and later Britishness?
- [07:44]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
It is a contradiction, or at least it sounds like one. But it's also, I think, the engine of the story of an emergent national identity and nationhood.
- [07:55]
Professor Nandini Das
On the one hand, you had England
- [07:57]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
as a nation that was beginning imagine itself as being set apart, this precious stone set in the silver sea.
- [08:06]
Professor Nandini Das
The title of the book, this Little World, of course comes from John of Gaunt's famous speech in Richard ii.
- [08:12]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
On the other hand, it's also a
- [08:15]
Professor Nandini Das
nation that already at this point is
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Professor Susanna Lipscomb
deeply entangled through trade, through diplomacy, migration, conquest. The more contact it has with that world, however, the more urgently it tries to define itself against that world.
- [08:32]
Professor Nandini Das
And that's the thing that I was trying to decode to some extent, that
- [08:37]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
we quite often think about Englishness as a kind of self sufficient entity, as something that's formed in isolation, this island nation. But even if you think about that phrase, this island nation, England was never by itself an island.
- [08:57]
Professor Nandini Das
It had always shared its space with
- [09:00]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
other nations within the island.
- [09:03]
Professor Nandini Das
Englishness is formed not in isolation, but
- [09:06]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
in response, in conversation.
- [09:07]
Professor Nandini Das
Always encounters abroad, whether with Ottoman officials
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Professor Susanna Lipscomb
like Asanaga and his superiors, the story that you opened with or with Flemish
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Professor Nandini Das
artisans or Native American visitors. All of that feeds back into how
- [09:24]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
the Eng think about themselves.
- [09:27]
Professor Nandini Das
And you can see that quite beautifully in someone like John Tredescant, who I
- [09:32]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
write about in the book A gardener, the royal gardener, in fact, bringing back plants and curiosities from across the world, which are then cultivated, adapted, and eventually
- [09:43]
Professor Nandini Das
absorbed into what we think of as this typical English space, the English country garden.
- [09:50]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
In a way, something imported becomes naturalized,
- [09:54]
Professor Nandini Das
and then in time, becomes a marker of Englishness itself.
- [09:58]
Susannah Lipscomb
Literal transplantation, I suppose.
- [10:00]
Professor Nandini Das
Yeah, absolutely. And that paradox is real, I think, but it's also really creative.
- [10:05]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
I found that absolutely fascinating, that push and pull between separation and absorption, between distinction and anxiety, on the one hand, an absolute appetite and curiosity for the world on the other.
- [10:20]
Susannah Lipscomb
This question therefore feels like maybe it's a little reductive, but I think it's important to address the terms at the time. Migrants from other countries, and not just that, but certainly for immigrants, were described as aliens or strangers. Does that reflect attitudes to immigration accurately?
- [10:45]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Yes, but only partially. I think aliens and strangers are essentially are legal terms quite often, and they're
- [10:56]
Professor Nandini Das
used either individually or together.
- [10:59]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So you have various kinds of permutations and combinations, like stranger, aliens, alien strangers, everything that you might think of.
- [11:08]
Professor Nandini Das
But a stranger is quite literally someone
- [11:11]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
who doesn't fit into existing categories, someone whose presence raises questions. Are they inside or outside, Friend or enemy?
- [11:22]
Professor Nandini Das
But what's important is that all of
- [11:24]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
these labels are really unstable in practice. And you can see that when you look at court records or archival records of this period, the same person might be taxed as an alien, yet you
- [11:36]
Professor Nandini Das
have other civic court records where they are treated as a neighbor, a colleague, even family.
- [11:41]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
You know, there's intermarriages between stranger families and English families quite often.
- [11:48]
Professor Nandini Das
And then you have, even more interestingly, I think, a term like denizen, which
- [11:53]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
I spend a lot of time unpacking to some extent, which is, I think, absolutely wonderfully ironic. It originally, if you said that someone was a denizen somewhere, it meant a native, someone who belonged by birthright. But by the 16th century, that term
- [12:11]
Professor Nandini Das
is turned inside out and applied almost exclusively to foreigners who had been granted limited rights.
- [12:18]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So it's kind of like a permanent leave to remain.
- [12:23]
Professor Nandini Das
So the very word that seemed to admit you into the nation also quietly
- [12:27]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
recorded that you didn't quite belong. So it's Very messy in this period.
- [12:32]
Professor Nandini Das
And that messiness itself is both frustrating, of course, but also you can see
- [12:37]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
that that's the space within which those conversations and discussions could take place about identity, about belonging, about who you were, who being English, meant.
- [12:50]
Susannah Lipscomb
In this period, you follow the stories of many people, some names that will be familiar to people and some that will be new. One name that's somewhere between those things is Lavinia Teelank, an artist at the Tudor court, one of many artists who come from Europe. And following her story gives us something of a sense of the multilingual, multicultural nature of that court, particularly around cultural and artistic creation. What do we know of Lavinia Teelink and her work?
- [13:29]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
If you want a short answer, it's very little. When I started writing that chapter, I
- [13:37]
Professor Nandini Das
wanted to write part of the story
- [13:40]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
through the images that come to our mind. If anyone talks about the Tudors or about Henry viii, the images that come to our mind are from Tudor portraits. They're like the kind of dysfunctional family portraits lurking in the background always. You know, Henry VIII and his power pose and Elizabeth I with all her glitter, all that kind of stuff. But I didn't want to write about Holbein because, you know, we know about Hans Holbein, we know about his influence on the. That early Tudor monarchy, that Tudor propaganda, and it is propaganda to some extent.
- [14:20]
Professor Nandini Das
The Tudors were fairly meal in the
- [14:24]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
political space for me.
- [14:27]
Professor Nandini Das
Laveena was a really interesting figure because she is one of those figures who's both absolutely central and almost completely invisible, both because she's foreign and also because she's a woman.
- [14:41]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And she's covered by, literally, in legal terms, she's a femme cavet. So she's covered by the independent identity of her husband, who's the male, who's getting paid for her work. But she does get paid. I mean, she gets paid more than Hans Holbein does in his lifetime. So she is absolutely central to this period.
- [15:02]
Professor Nandini Das
And I found that irresistible. You know, here is a woman helping
- [15:06]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
to create the very image of Tudor England, the portraits, the seals, the visual language of monarchy, and she absolutely disappears behind that work. We cannot certainly identify any single one of her work till this day. We know from court records that she illustrated various court orders, records she may have had a role in designing royal seals.
- [15:34]
Professor Nandini Das
She serves all four of the Tudor
- [15:36]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
monarchs after Henry viii, so she had a substantial role. And I liked that idea of really
- [15:45]
Professor Nandini Das
trying to trace this person who's not just an artist, she's a migrant, a woman, a Mother.
- [15:53]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And these things matter. Those identities too matter. In the story of England, there's an
- [16:00]
Susannah Lipscomb
interesting development in Elizabeth's reign, perhaps from Mary's reign onwards, but this growing sense of. Of attention, a connection between political identity and religious identity, and one of the ways in which that's manifested is the suggestion, although it's not passed, that recusants, so those Catholics who refuse to attend church should be made to pay double rates of tax, like those imposed on strangers and aliens, you say. I mean, it conveys very powerfully something of the status of the Catholic remnant, those who are recusants, those who are exiles. I mean, do you think there's a. There's a parallel here? There's something about the formation of the identity of Englishness that we can see encoded in that suggestion.
- [16:51]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
That's a really interesting question. I think, yes, to some extent it does. And it gets to something quite fundamental about how belonging is being redefined in this period. The argument for treating the recusants like strangers rests on a fairly fundamental but quite striking idea. Essentially, the argument was that they had in effect estranged themselves. England had become Protestant.
- [17:21]
Professor Nandini Das
But in the wake of Elizabeth's excommunication
- [17:25]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
by the Pope and the hardening of Protestant identity, you have this emergent sense
- [17:31]
Professor Nandini Das
that loyalty is no longer simply about where you're born or who your parents
- [17:36]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
are, it becomes confessional. And to refuse the established Church of England is, in the eyes of some contemporaries, to place yourself outside that community. So you become, as some of them put it, a kind of spiritual stranger to your own country. And that's a really interesting point. I think that it's not just a policy proposal, this thing about taxing strangers, but geographical strangers and spiritual strangers similarly at this point. It's a sign of how fragile and negotiable identity itself is becoming in this period. The boundary between insider and outsider is no longer fixed by geographical position or accent or how you look or the fashion in which you dress. It's defined by allegiance, by conformity, by perception.
- [18:37]
Professor Nandini Das
In other words, strangeness is no longer
- [18:40]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
something that comes from elsewhere. Your next door neighbor might equally be a stranger, even if they were born in England.
- [18:48]
Susannah Lipscomb
That's really interesting because you also look at people like Asan Agha. Another example is Thomas Stevens, and we'll see some others as we go along who are comprehending the experience of exile as something that looks like reinvention, where they are choosing an identity internally. Can you tell me about him and how that reflects back onto this bigger question?
- [19:18]
Professor Nandini Das
I'm so glad you asked, because Thomas
- [19:19]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Stevens is just such a fascinating character. I've been obsessed with him for a
- [19:25]
Professor Nandini Das
long time now, and he really is one of the most quietly radical figures in the book.
- [19:32]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So he's an English Catholic.
- [19:34]
Professor Nandini Das
He grows up in England, born in Wiltshire, goes to Winchester School, and then
- [19:41]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
he leaves England, not as an adventurer, but because he's essentially leaving to save both his life and soul as a Catholic, and ends up first in Lisbon,
- [19:51]
Professor Nandini Das
Portuguese Lisbon, and then in Goa in Western India.
- [19:55]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And that's where he does something remarkable. So he learns local languages, Marathi and
- [20:01]
Professor Nandini Das
Konkani, writes grammars at first, catechisms, and then ends up composing this magnificent epic
- [20:11]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
retelling of the Bible in the local poetic form and language.
- [20:16]
Professor Nandini Das
So this becomes the first epic retelling
- [20:19]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
of the Bible by an Englishman, but
- [20:22]
Professor Nandini Das
in Marathi, 50 years before John Milton.
- [20:26]
Susannah Lipscomb
It's incredible.
- [20:28]
Professor Nandini Das
He is absolutely fascinating. And again, what it makes you think
- [20:32]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
is what then defines him as English.
- [20:36]
Professor Nandini Das
Precisely.
- [20:37]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Like the Hassan Aga example, there's a moment where Thomas Stevens, despite being a Jesuit priest in Goa, actually acts on behalf of some English merchants who had been caught by the Portuguese and imprisoned.
- [20:54]
Professor Nandini Das
And that brings up this whole mess of identity to the foreground.
- [20:59]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Again, what does it mean to be English? It's not obviously, simply Protestantism, despite all those arguments about spiritual strangeness, because here is this English Catholic Jesuit priest, Padre Tomaso Estevan, as the Portuguese called him,
- [21:17]
Professor Nandini Das
who's acting in defence of his Protestant English countrymen. So what is it that holds them together?
- [21:26]
Susannah Lipscomb
At the same time, back in England, you detail the experiences of another extraordinary man, Giordano Bruno, who might best be known to people for the awful fate he suffers in the end. But let's talk about this moment where he's encountering London. It seemed to me so much to sort of codify that ambivalence. He's experiencing London as a city hostile to foreigners. At the same time, he has moments of feeling really accepted. Tell us about him and how his story helps us understand the reaction to strangers.
- [22:05]
Professor Nandini Das
You know, I have a soft spot for Bruno.
- [22:07]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
He is your typical irritable academic in so many ways. He does not take criticism well, bristles at everything.
- [22:16]
Professor Nandini Das
He's so very confident about his own views. But he's also just such a good
- [22:22]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
example, or such a good eyewitness, really, of that particular London that we are talking about.
- [22:28]
Professor Nandini Das
And I write a chapter which opens with his. His nightmare trip from hell in London,
- [22:35]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
going to a dinner party. When he takes the wrong route, he
- [22:39]
Professor Nandini Das
gets stuck in mud. His dinner party host Starts eating dinner without him, so he doesn't get food. People are insulting towards him.
- [22:49]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So there's that side of England that is deeply spikily suspicious of foreignness, of anyone who seems or sounds different to them. And equally on the other side, you have foreigners or strangers who have heard those stories, right? Like we do when we go anywhere foreign. And you know, you read these travel accounts and they frame your perception. So he has come with this assumption that the English are hostile to strangers.
- [23:25]
Professor Nandini Das
But as, and this becomes a recurrent
- [23:28]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
theme throughout the book, I think that encounters are rarely binary, so there is rarely a simple one to one story to be told. So on the one hand, Bruno faces
- [23:41]
Professor Nandini Das
all of this hostility and gives as
- [23:43]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
good as he gets in terms of his satire of English life in this period.
- [23:50]
Professor Nandini Das
But on the other hand, he's also
- [23:53]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
so at home within this thriving intellectual environment, which is multicultural, multilingual, absolutely sparking with new ideas, new imagination, new excitement about the universe in general. And Bruno isn't the only one. He's part of this really widespread intellectual network, a network of academics and scientists and philosophers who think of themselves as citizens of everywhere, borrowing a term from Iran, Erasmus, the great humanist philosopher. And they believe that intellectual work should not be defined by geographical or political limits. It should be for all, of course, that all is kind of frameworked and defined.
- [24:44]
Professor Nandini Das
The all does not include women, for instance, or people of certain other races or religion.
- [24:51]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
But there is a sense of this expansion, and that's what I was trying to communicate through my attention to Bruno, that you have that tension between those two elements. At the same time, it's striking that
- [25:05]
Susannah Lipscomb
we see that expansion happening on a sort of etymological level with the expansion of the English language at the time, or the sense that it needs to expand. What does the changes happening in the Elizabethan Jacobean period to English as a language tell us about the culture of assimilation?
- [25:27]
Professor Nandini Das
Oh, so much.
- [25:28]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
I mean, on the one hand you have writers like Edmund Spenser writing to his friend Gabriel Harvey and grumbling about, you know, why can't England have a kingdom of its own language? So there's a great deal of anxiety. You know, there's always a sense in this period among English writers, and you see that cropping up repeatedly about being slightly slow on the uptake as far as it comes to this upsurge of creativity around the Renaissance. They're terribly belated and they feel that, and they're made to feel that from
- [26:06]
Professor Nandini Das
Virgil onwards, people talk about England, this
- [26:09]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
little island entirely divided from the rest of the world.
- [26:13]
Professor Nandini Das
So there's a little bit of a
- [26:14]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
chip on the shoulder about that in a way. But then there's a flip side to it.
- [26:22]
Professor Nandini Das
So you, on the other hand, you
- [26:23]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
have people like George Gascoigne, another writer who writes about how the truest English is really monosyllabic.
- [26:33]
Professor Nandini Das
So he says if you're using multiple
- [26:35]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
syllables and long words, chances are these are Italianate borrowings. They're foreign, so they are not truly English in that way. So if Gascoigne had his way, we'd be talking in very short words and
- [26:51]
Professor Nandini Das
not using words like monosyllabic.
- [26:55]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So you have that tension. But you know what? In the middle of that, you just have to pick up any book in this period to get a sense of all those words coming up in from everywhere.
- [27:09]
Professor Nandini Das
You have those little moments like Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth trying to wash her hands of blood. This is a Scottish figure right in
- [27:18]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Shakespeare's imagination and saying, the blood on
- [27:21]
Professor Nandini Das
my hands would this multitudinous seize in carnadine?
- [27:26]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
You couldn't get any more complex than that in terms of the richness of the language.
- [27:42]
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Carvana Customer
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Professor Susanna Lipscomb
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Professor Susanna Lipscomb
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- [30:28]
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- [31:25]
Susannah Lipscomb
Well, actually, there's this wonderful example, very similar, which is why you've made me think of it. Where Shakespeare, I think, must be mocking the. You know, the whole inkhorn movement to introduce Latinate words because he gives the clown in Love's Labour's Lost. Let me see if I can get this right. You know what I'm going to say, don't you? The word honorifica billitudinitatibus, which means the state of being able to achieve honours. And it's exactly a sort of point to show how ridiculous these neolingisms Sorry, Gascoigne. New words are, you know, actually we've got too many stupid things being made up. But it absolutely shows also the ability of English to do precisely that.
- [32:12]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Exactly.
- [32:13]
Professor Nandini Das
And you have that kind of tension, that push and pull. But then you also have people like John Florio, who's a translator.
- [32:22]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
He's a second generation immigrant, Italian. But he says very famously that he might be Italian in tongue, but he's English at heart. And he's bringing in all these Latin words and terms into the English language. He's talking about how you can enrich the language itself. He's also editing loads of English writers in the period, including Sir Philip Sidney. So you have a whole wonderful mixture of it.
- [32:52]
Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, it's such a fascinating time. Okay, well, let's think also about the other things that the people who are coming in. We've talked about the influx of immigrants and these, at some level, these are quite humble people. We've got carpenters, we've got weavers, as well as merchants. You know, is it possible to recover the stories of these refugees?
- [33:14]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Yes.
- [33:14]
Professor Nandini Das
And this was one of my favorite things. You know, I was talking to my
- [33:19]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
students and my friends about writing the opening. And as any writer will know, the opening is what you agonize about. How do you start telling this story?
- [33:28]
Professor Nandini Das
And whenever people talk about Tudor history,
- [33:31]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
we talk about kings and queens. And here I was thinking about a Flemish hat maker complaining about lard.
- [33:39]
Professor Nandini Das
And that story is a letter, essentially. So this is a man called Clius
- [33:44]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
van Vervicen who writes a letter to his wife in 1560s telling her England is very welcoming towards strangers. Come over. You don't have to stay under this looming fear of Spanish Inquisition. You can come to England, but remember to bring two butter dishes, because the English here cook with pig's fat. He says, you know, whoever has heard of such a thing? And I loved that. These are not grand narratives. They are domestic, practical, human.
- [34:18]
Professor Nandini Das
And sometimes when we are talking about
- [34:20]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
whether we are talking about monarchy and politics or we are talking about immigration and identity, I think we sometimes tend to forget that there are real people,
- [34:33]
Professor Nandini Das
mothers, fathers, brothers, grandmothers, who are caught
- [34:38]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
up in that tension, individuals.
- [34:42]
Professor Nandini Das
But this cluster of letters were wonderful
- [34:45]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
in revealing that texture of migration, the
- [34:49]
Professor Nandini Das
small adjustments, the negotiations, the mixture of
- [34:53]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
hope and uncertainty that people went through as they moved both in and out of the country.
- [34:58]
Susannah Lipscomb
In this period, in the Elizabethan period, there is a famous immigrant, Rodrigo Lopez, Portuguese physician to Elizabeth I. We've talked about him on the podcast before, but I Wondered whether you might reflect for me on his downfall and the public reaction to it, because does it tell us something about how Elizabethans now are reckoning with strangers in their midst? We're decades on from the May Day riots. How has it changed, Changed over time, do you think?
- [35:32]
Professor Nandini Das
Well, Lopez is in many ways the kind of ideal test case for what
- [35:38]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
we might now call the idea of the good immigrant. By the 1580s, he's done everything right. He's a highly skilled professional, he's a physician, and in fact, he is a doctor to some of the greatest men and women in the land, including the Queen. And he's settled, he's prosperous, he's outwardly conforming, even his name shifts from Roderigo to Roger in the court records of this period.
- [36:09]
Professor Nandini Das
So in many ways, he's precisely the
- [36:12]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
kind of figure who seems to embody successful assimilation. And, of course, that's when the tide turns.
- [36:20]
Professor Nandini Das
What his story, I think, reveals is how conditional acceptance always was.
- [36:27]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So, yes, you're absolutely right that there is a shift to some extent, because of political circumstances, about anxiety about Spanish and Catholic influence just on the doorstep for the Elizabethan state. And that triggers some of the anxiety around him, but it also reveals anxieties that were always, always already simmering underneath, I think, the same markers that made him valuable. So, for instance, the fact that he had foreign connections, foreign origins, that he was multilingual, all of these, in a moment of political crisis, could be reinterpreted as signs of duplicity rather than usefulness, rather than signs of flexibility. That volatility, I think, is crucial.
- [37:21]
Professor Nandini Das
It shows that the category of the
- [37:23]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
good immigrant isn't stable, and it never was stable.
- [37:28]
Professor Nandini Das
It depends not just on behavior or
- [37:31]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
contribution, but on circumstance, on mood, on things that the individual can't really control. And that's what happens with Lopez. Lopez starts acting as a mediator in political dealings with Spain and Portugal, and then the Earl of Essex, who desperately wants to step into the role of the most important political advisor to Elizabeth I, picks him up. In this kind of unfolding of a plan of poisoning the Queen, the Essex says that Lopez had planned as a double agent of Spain and Portugal to poison Elizabeth I.
- [38:16]
Professor Nandini Das
And Lopez is tried for treason and
- [38:20]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
then hanged, drawn and quartered.
- [38:23]
Professor Nandini Das
So Lopez's downfall, for me, is not
- [38:26]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
simply a story of individual tragedy in that sense.
- [38:30]
Professor Nandini Das
I think it exposes this deeper uncertainty
- [38:33]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
at the heart of the system, that acceptance is never unconditional and it's never permanent. If you're an outsider in this period, it's Something that that line between insider and outsider can be redrawn at any moment.
- [38:50]
Susannah Lipscomb
It seems to me one of the moments at which it was being redrawn was when an outsider became king, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England. Can we talk about how that shifted ideas of Englishness? Because there's this sense, isn't there, that perhaps the sort of ancient rites of the English, the nature of what it means to be English, is now under threat? Let's talk about that.
- [39:19]
Professor Nandini Das
Oh, absolutely.
- [39:21]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
That really messes things up at this point.
- [39:26]
Professor Nandini Das
A Scottish king becoming king of England. It's inevitable that it's going to raise urgent questions at this point. You know, what is England? What is Britain?
- [39:36]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Are these identities even compatible? So one of the things that we see is that this idea, this term, Britain itself, which for over a century had been used by the English to incorporate other parts of the island, like the Welsh and parts of Ireland that it had control over, and occasionally also Scotland that it was desperately trying to control, all of a sudden becomes seen as a foreign imposition on Englishness. So you have all these anxieties in Parliament that this new king is imposing this foreign term that will erase English identity. But there's something even bigger, I think, there, which is about how belonging itself is defined.
- [40:31]
Professor Nandini Das
So for a long time, people may have said that you were English, if
- [40:35]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
you were born on English soil and therefore you owned allegiance to the English king. What happens when you have someone who's born on English soil, but their parents had owned allegiance to the same king,
- [40:53]
Professor Nandini Das
but when he was king of Scotland
- [40:54]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
rather than of England? So you have these huge, really convoluted legal cases being fought. And I talk about a particular case called Calvin's case, which is hugely influential, and it has been actually hugely influential right till the present day in terms of determining those legal definitions around birthright,
- [41:19]
Professor Nandini Das
whether it is a right that is
- [41:21]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
given to you by soil, by the place that you're born in, or by blood?
- [41:26]
Susannah Lipscomb
And to what extent does it stay your right? I mean, I start to think of the discussion that there's been in recent years about Isis brides who leave and whether they retain their Englishness, their Britishness. Because we have this extraordinary case that will be so well known to people who read James clavell in the 1970s, or who watched the series more recently of William Adams, who became of the level of samurai in Japan. Tell us about his story. How did he end up in Japan? And, you know, for our purposes for today, how do we see him shaping his narrative and his identity.
- [42:14]
Professor Nandini Das
Oh, this is such a wonderful, amazing story.
- [42:18]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
It almost seems made for fiction in a way.
- [42:22]
Professor Nandini Das
And you just have to imagine this
- [42:24]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
moment where a letter arrives in England written by someone who's believed to be dead. And he says, I am a Kentish
- [42:34]
Professor Nandini Das
man, but this is a sailor. He's a Kentish pilot who at first is employed on English ships during the
- [42:44]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Armada, when there's a great need for mariners.
- [42:46]
Professor Nandini Das
And then what happens after that?
- [42:49]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Push towards national defense dies down a bit. When Elizabeth dies and James I comes to the throne, you have this sudden body of sailors who are suddenly without jobs.
- [43:03]
Professor Nandini Das
So you have sailors, English sailors, taking
- [43:06]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
up positions in ships of other nations. And Adams is one of them. He signs up for a Dutch shipping voyage and ultimately ends up shipwrecked in Japan, where he is one of the very few people who survive he's taken. The Portuguese, who were already in Japan, are really not pleased to see this Dutch ship and Englishmen suddenly wash up on their shore. So they desperately try to convince the shogun that these are pirates, you know, you should kill them. But Adams manages to convince Tokugawa Ieyasu, the shogun, that there was old blood
- [43:48]
Professor Nandini Das
between the Portuguese and themselves, so he
- [43:51]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
shouldn't trust the Portuguese version of events. And ultimately he becomes a hatamoto, a samurai. He marries again. He has a concubine and children. In Japan, there's this wonderful moment when the first English ship lands in Edo, modern day Tokyo, the capital. And they're really not pleased to see this Englishman they had depended on who
- [44:19]
Professor Nandini Das
wears Japanese clothes, prefers Japanese food, speaks
- [44:23]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
in Japanese, and has a Japanese wife. It's really disconcerting for them. But I think what's fascinating at this point is that double perspective about what belonging means, what Englishness means. Back in England, you have this enormous pressure at this point to legally define Englishness, subjecthood and English identity.
- [44:53]
Professor Nandini Das
But then there is this man who has sworn allegiance to the Japanese emperor,
- [44:58]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
who still insists that at his heart he's a Kentish man. So where do you draw those boundaries?
- [45:06]
Professor Nandini Das
Again, those ideas of Englishness become really complicated. And Adams's story kind of makes Englishness portable. And once it's portable, it becomes much
- [45:18]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
harder to define what or to control, particularly on the open seas, particularly beyond the strictures of land defined boundaries.
- [45:38]
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- [46:57]
Susannah Lipscomb
And in your book you tell an equivalent story of Jack Ward, whom people won't know so well, but it just goes to show, like us and Aga, there are these want Samson Rowley this these stories of assumed identity. Is William Adams still William Adams, or is he Anjahn Sammer? You know, who are you once your identity has been so thoroughly absorbed into a different culture?
- [47:23]
Professor Nandini Das
Oh, absolutely. And Ward particularly, I think, is an
- [47:27]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
even more telling example, in the sense that he's a pirate, firstly. And James, I really didn't like the pirates. In fact, he sets out this proclamation against piracy and spends two paragraphs just absolutely fulminating about Ward. Specifically, Ward is enemy number one for the state when James is on the throne.
- [47:50]
Professor Nandini Das
And that's partly also because he leaves England.
- [47:53]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
But unlike Adams, his transformation is much more radical. He converts to Islam, he takes on a new name. He becomes Yusuf Raees, this Ottoman nobleman essentially, and sets up his own palace.
- [48:09]
Professor Nandini Das
But his story, I think, is also interesting because it forces us to confront that uncomfortable possibility that Englishness is not
- [48:19]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
something that one carries unchanged. It's something that can be abandoned or reshaped or redefined entirely. So what happens when, far from English shores, someone who was born and brought up in England not only adopts another culture and another religion, but actually can be perceived as an enemy to the state? Where do you then draw the boundaries of Englishness?
- [48:49]
Susannah Lipscomb
We've talked a lot about men, largely because it's men who lead the charge when it comes to emigrating. They're the ones who There are some female pirates, but you're mostly pirating or piloting. But you do draw attention to a woman called Elizabeth Tanfield. Elizabeth Tanfield Carey, in the end, as an example of a woman or the many women who were confined. But as you've put it so beautifully wrote outwards. What place does her story have in your tale?
- [49:23]
Professor Nandini Das
Carrie is very much at the heart
- [49:27]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
of this whole story.
- [49:28]
Professor Nandini Das
And you know, throughout writing this book, I was deeply conscious of the necessity
- [49:34]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
of giving these women their voices too, like Lavena Tailink.
- [49:38]
Professor Nandini Das
And then I have Elizabeth Carey. And later on I have Elizabeth Key,
- [49:42]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
who's another amazing figure, the first mixed race woman to claim freedom.
- [49:50]
Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, we'll talk about her, don't worry.
- [49:52]
Professor Nandini Das
I'm going to jump. I'm jumping ahead.
- [49:54]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And you're rightly telling me off there, Susie. But Carrie is fascinating because she doesn't really travel very far. I mean, she travels more than some of the other women of her time.
- [50:06]
Professor Nandini Das
Her husband is posted to Ireland as
- [50:10]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
part of the English colonial presence in Ireland. And one of the things that I try to understand and try to unpack for myself is the extent to which Ireland becomes the laboratory, in a way, the lab where those colonial techniques and strategies are worked out that we later see across the world in this period.
- [50:34]
Professor Nandini Das
But the interesting thing about Carrie is that for her, that also ultimately triggers
- [50:41]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
a deep spiritual transformation. So she converts to Catholicism and is disowned by her husband, her son, in fact, her children, most of her children get taken away. She has to kidnap two of them from her eldest son and sneak them over to Paris so that they could be brought up as Catholics.
- [51:04]
Professor Nandini Das
So within that one single family, you
- [51:06]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
have the snapshot of the absolute interleaving of political and religious pressures and how that inflects belonging, because you have one family where some of the children are Protestant and the others are nuns in a Catholic nunnery in Europe who later write their mother's biography.
- [51:30]
Professor Nandini Das
And Carrie herself, even when she is locked up by her mother in law at one point because she reads too much and it's obviously not good for
- [51:40]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
a woman to read too much. So she gets her books taken away, she starts writing, she writes her own stories.
- [51:47]
Professor Nandini Das
And one of the first things she writes, which essentially establishes her name for us, is a closet drama.
- [51:55]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So a play that is not meant to be performed on stage, but meant to be ready, called the Tragedy of Marium. And it's this amazing play about two women, Salome and Mariam, King Herod's sister in the Bible and Mariam whom he wants to marry. Each of them emphasizing their presence, their agency as women in completely different ways. And all of that is caught up in this really complex Geopolitical land, in a way. And she is absolutely fascinating.
- [52:35]
Susannah Lipscomb
So interesting. It's about the same time as Francesca Coccini is writing her operas and she is giving women different forms of agency at one saves the day. You know, we think of this age as the great age of patriarchy, and yet we've got these women who are absolutely writing a different version of events.
- [52:52]
Professor Nandini Das
Absolutely.
- [52:52]
Susannah Lipscomb
And I was struck, as you were speaking there, about her love of reading. And the listener won't be able to see us, but both of us are sitting against a wall of books. We are both her descendants, in a way. We are her beneficiaries.
- [53:08]
Professor Nandini Das
Absolutely.
- [53:10]
Susannah Lipscomb
There's so much we could say. I'm aware of your time, but let's talk about the other Elizabeth whilst we're here, then, the Elizabeth Key and the implication for her case on what it meant to be English. Cause this is. I didn't know anything about this story. It's such a striking story. I'm so glad you have shared it to tell us about it.
- [53:32]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So Elizabeth Key's story I actually found really difficult to write because we are discovering that story proleptically, in the sense that we know what happened after.
- [53:45]
Professor Nandini Das
Essentially, her story starts at the County
- [53:48]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Court of Northumberland, County Court in Virginia. You know, across the Atlantic, we think
- [53:56]
Professor Nandini Das
about these issues of strangers and belonging
- [53:59]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
as being internal to England. But one of the things that I wanted to show is how far those ripples went.
- [54:07]
Professor Nandini Das
Elizabeth brings a court case, and the case is about her right to freedom.
- [54:14]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And not just her right to freedom, but the right of her children to
- [54:19]
Professor Nandini Das
freedom, because she is the daughter of
- [54:23]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
an Englishman, Thomas Key, and an African slave mother whose name we will never know. It's never recorded.
- [54:33]
Professor Nandini Das
So Elizabeth and her husband, who is
- [54:36]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
an indentured Englishman, William Grinstead, claim that according to English common law in this period, the woman didn't have control over her children. It's the father who has control, the ultimate say. But they take that bit of common law to defend Elizabeth's rights. They say, well, if Elizabeth's father was a freeborn Englishman, then his daughter cannot be a slave. And ultimately, after multiple iterations of this court case being fought and argued at
- [55:15]
Professor Nandini Das
multiple levels, the court has to agree.
- [55:19]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
They have to agree that if Thomas Key was a freeborn Englishman, and if liberty is one of the characteristics of any freeborn Englishman, then Elizabeth and her son have to be deemed free. They cannot be enslaved.
- [55:37]
Professor Nandini Das
Except, of course, that door that Elizabeth
- [55:41]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
kicks open, in a way, is soon slammed shut in the face of others.
- [55:48]
Professor Nandini Das
Only about a Decade after that particular
- [55:51]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
case, another multiple cases actually come up at the same Virginia county courts which say, well, there's this little doubt about identity and we need to resolve it
- [56:03]
Professor Nandini Das
because otherwise we stand to lose a
- [56:05]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
lot in terms of our slaves. So at that point they agree that paternal law holds for everyone apart from the children of African born slaves. So from that moment, slavery becomes defined in terms of race, essentially. So if you're a daughter or a son of an African born enslaved mother, you will never be free.
- [56:35]
Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. And you point to the three moments in your book that come out of that, that one which that makes slavery hereditary and freedom. Not another six years later when the argument that had been made in the past that baptism, a Christian could not be enslaved, that then disappears and now liberty is no longer something that people are entitled to by being baptized. And then 1691, that interracial marriage would be bound. And if you could see my copy of your book, you'll see written in pencil, large letters next to this, you know, my goodness, not overturned until 1967.
- [57:18]
Professor Nandini Das
Absolutely.
- [57:19]
Susannah Lipscomb
I mean, the legacy of this moment and the sense, as you say, that Elizabeth Key is pushing open a door and we see through it an alternative future, but instead it's slammed and we move into a period in which English liberty becomes dependent on the enslavement of others.
- [57:36]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Absolutely.
- [57:37]
Professor Nandini Das
And you know, historians quite often talk
- [57:39]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
of this as a contradiction, that in the same period when Elizabeth is fighting for her liberty, you also have people in England and this is the war,
- [57:49]
Professor Nandini Das
the period of the war of the
- [57:51]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
three kingdoms, of the English Civil War. And the royalists and the parliamentarians are also talking about liberty. So how can that be? How can both of those things happen at the same time?
- [58:03]
Professor Nandini Das
But one of the things that I think emerges from the archival material that I've been looking through is that the
- [58:10]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
mechanism of both freedom and unfreedom were always already there in a sense. And it is just that Elizabeth's case becomes the flame, the little spark to the tinderbox to actually codify what was already enabled within English common law, what was already enabled within English mercantile systems, that differentiation suddenly becomes part of legal structure in North America at this point and in other colonies around the world.
- [58:47]
Susannah Lipscomb
There's so much in the latter part of your book thinking about the combination of the hunger for knowledge and curiosity with this sort of the colonial violence and possession of the period. But it's interesting that what we see as a paradox, you're saying, actually in many ways these have always been intertwined. Let's reach Our final thoughts. Nandini, for today, at least, what would you like people to take away from your book? You say these stories are not instruction manuals for the present. Fair enough. But what are we to do with them?
- [59:28]
Professor Nandini Das
Yes, that's the question, isn't it? I think what I'd most
- [59:35]
Susannah Lipscomb
what use is history?
- [59:38]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
You've written about this, Suzy, so you
- [59:40]
Professor Nandini Das
will know that sense that it seems
- [59:43]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
terribly comforting to think about history as teaching us lessons. But at the most, what history does is teach us to understand, recognize certain patterns. In a way, what I'd like most
- [59:57]
Professor Nandini Das
is for readers, I think, to come away slightly unsettled in a productive way. We're so very used to thinking of
- [60:05]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Tudor and Stuart England as a kind of pageant of monarchs. Henry VIII's six wives, Elizabeth Drama of the Civil War.
- [60:14]
Professor Nandini Das
And those stories are compelling, but they
- [60:16]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
give that impression that the nation is shaped from the center outward, as if identity is something that is declared and then everyone just simply falls into line. Everyone knows what Englishness is all the time.
- [60:33]
Professor Nandini Das
What I hope this book does is, in a way, tilt the camera a little bit, if that makes sense. Because alongside the kings and the queens,
- [60:42]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
then you start seeing this much busier and really, frankly, noisier world.
- [60:49]
Professor Nandini Das
Migrants haggling over their status in city
- [60:51]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
courts, gardeners quietly planting what's going to become traditional English plants, in a way, Jewish merchants petitioning parliament, exiles writing home from Goa and grumbling about or singing the praises, as it might be, of Indian languages.
- [61:08]
Professor Nandini Das
And looking at them, I think, reveals
- [61:11]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
what I found absolutely crucial and moving in many ways, that these aren't marginal stories.
- [61:18]
Professor Nandini Das
They're the places where the meaning of
- [61:21]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
belonging is actually being worked out. Not so much in those portraits as such, but in those back alleys of London and Portsmouth and Southampton.
- [61:33]
Professor Nandini Das
And what you see, I think, across about that 150 years that I cover,
- [61:38]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
is that shift from belonging as loyalty to a monarch to something much more complicated. It's about status, about rights, about participation.
- [61:48]
Professor Nandini Das
So if there's one thing I want
- [61:50]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
readers to take away, it's this. That the nation, and we use that term so easily sometimes. But it isn't a finished monument that's polished and complete that somehow people have inherited at some point. It's more like a building site, really. And it's always been a building site. It's noisy and contested and occasionally chaotic, and it is still under construction. And once you start seeing that in
- [62:19]
Professor Nandini Das
the past, it becomes very difficult not
- [62:22]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
to see that in the present.
- [62:25]
Susannah Lipscomb
Well, that is a wonderful place to end. And this is such a joy to talk to you, to read your book. It's called this Little World. And as I said earlier, the title is so clever because it speaks to that paradox simultaneously, to the idea of isolation and, of course, to connection. It has been wonderful to speak to you about it. Thank you so much for taking the time.
- [62:51]
Professor Nandini Das
Thank you, Susie.
- [62:53]
History Hit Host (possibly Susannah Lipscomb or a producer)
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher, Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddow, who edited this episode.
- [63:04]
Susannah Lipscomb
We are always eager to hear from
- [63:06]
History Hit Host (possibly Susannah Lipscomb or a producer)
you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line and Not Just Just the tutors@historyhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors From History Hit.
- [63:29]
Hayden
Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
- [63:37]
Stephen
And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball. But you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [63:42]
Hayden
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
- [63:50]
Stephen
That's right.
- [63:51]
Knox
Hey.
- [63:51]
Stephen
Hey. So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
- [63:55]
Hayden
And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
- [64:02]
Stephen
Newsflash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy fanfellas wherever you get your podcasts.
- [64:10]
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