To describe Scottish, English, Irish or Welsh national discourses in the latter half of the sixteenth century as discrete intellectual traditions would credit unduly the propaganda of nationhood itself, and grant the claim of national autonomy to a moment when national identities were even more interdependent than they would become. Such interdependence is perhaps especially true for members of the British archipelago (both then and now). It is not that the concept of an independent Scotland or England does not exist in this period. (Ireland and Wales are largely beyond the pale of national self-representations at this time–at least in the English language – though they did indeed have identities within an imperial British state thrust upon them.) But the identities of these British nations are developed in relation to each other, both discursively and politically. Their representations are further interwoven both by virtue of their authors’ membership in a common cultural milieu, and especially by virtue of the fact that the two countries define themselves first and foremost as an effect of Protestantism, and in relation to its enemies. When Henry VIII declared in 1533 that ‘this realm of England is an empire…without restraint or provocation to any foreign princes or potentates of the world’, he struck a rhetorical alliance of Protestantism and resistance to alien domination which would circulate throughout the Tudor century, sometimes in ways uncongenial to monarchy.