“This realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world.” With these words Parliament in 1533 declared England's independence from the Pope in Rome. Although our more familiar sense of empire as a political unit encompassing far-flung territories and heterogeneous peoples was current in the sixteenth century, the meaning here concerns absolute sovereignty. An empire is a polity that owes fealty to no one under God. Because England is an empire, England's king has, in Parliament's words, “plenary, whole, and entire power” in all matters within his kingdom. In place of the overlapping patchwork of regional, national, and international jurisdictions that had characterized medieval governance in Western Europe, monarchs in England and elsewhere were intent on seeing their rule penetrate more evenly into all aspects of life in the territories under their control. This “improvement of the sovereignty,” as the Elizabethan poet and historian Samuel Daniel was to call it, had an inevitable cultural dimension.