In his 1990 article ‘War and the Commonwealth in Mid- Tudor England’, Ben Lowe argues that the term ‘commonwealth’ took on ‘nuances of meaning’ over the course of the sixteenth century that did not exist at its beginning. The earlier form (‘common weal’ or ‘common wealth’) referred to organic, societal relationships among the estates, and their productive interconnection for the good of all. The mid-sixteenth-century compound form (‘commonwealth’) which increasingly replaced it referred to the state, or respublica, and to associations among its peoples, a development that allowed for the eventual emergence of classical republicanism in the seventeenth century. Clearly the terminological shift did not signal the supersession of the older, medieval conception of the ‘common’ (sometimes ‘public’) weal. Instead, attention to the ‘commonwealth’ on the part of humanists, first at Henry VIII's court, later at Edward VI's, represented a means by which to assimilate the core values associated with the ‘common weal’ to England's new identity as a godly empire.