During the last half of the twelfth century the kings of England ruled a vast constellation of lands stretching from Ireland to the Mediterranean, known traditionally, if not quite accurately, as the “Angevin Empire.” While the empire lasted, its rulers were the richest and strongest in Christendom. When King John lost Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Touraine, he also lost much of his income and influence, and the kings of France became the great royal figures of the thirteenth century. It is the purpose of this paper to explore the origins of the Angevin empire, and in particular the union of its two chief components — the Anglo-Norman state and the county of Anjou. Did the empire come about by accident or by political design? And if by design, who was its architect? Was it Henry I, who arranged the crucial marriage between his daughter Maud and Geoffrey, heir to Anjou? Was it Geoffrey, or Maud? Or was it their son, Henry Plantagenet — the ultimate beneficiary of the marriage?

At first glance, the empire would seem to have been conceived in the calculating mind of Henry I, who could hardly have failed to grasp the implications of a marriage joining the Anglo-Norman heiress to the Angevin heir. Indeed, many treatments of the subject, both old and recent, have suggested that the Angevin empire arose from King Henry I's “immensely grandiose designs” to absorb Anjou. But did Henry I have any such desire, or any such intention? The question can only be answered after a careful analysis of Henry I's diplomacy, both in its general contours and in its relation to Anjou.

There is nothing particularly subtle about a coat of arms with a crest depicting “a demi-Moor proper bound in a cord.” Nearly anyone can deduce from it that the bearer of these arms was probably a figure in the black-slave trade. Deductions along those lines would be right on the mark in the case of this particular heraldic device, for it was granted in 1565 by Queen Elizabeth I to John Hawkins on the recommendation of Sir William Cecil and the Earl of Leicester. The arms commemorate the origin of the English slave trade during the first decade of Elizabeth's reign. Under closer scrutiny, they reveal a wealth of further information about late Tudor history, telling us something about the nature and direction of economic enterprise in the 1560s, the interests of some of the key personalities of the period, and the ways in which diverse elements of society and the state combined their resources for mercantile purposes. Altogether, the crest of John Hawkins constitutes a remarkable lens through which can be seen in microcosm the variety, aggressiveness, and daring which have come to characterize Elizabethan England.

During the past quarter century, a number of distinguished scholars have analyzed Elizabethan overseas enterprise, of which the Hawkins slaving voyages were an important part. Lawrence Stone was the first to ask fundamental questions about the late Tudor economy in a provocative essay published in 1949. The same year saw the appearance of James Williamson's revised biography of John Hawkins, replete with substantial new material drawn from Spanish sources.

“Oh, Mr. Pym, this breaks the heart,” lamented Sir Richard Grosvenor in the House of Commons in 1629; “if God be God, let us follow him, and if Baal be God, let us follow him, and no longer halt between two opinions.” The Baalites, it was clear to the Commons, were the Arminians, who threatened “the very ruin and desolation if not dissolution of Religion in this land.” Such was the threat of Arminianism that when the Commons presented its Protestations on March 2, the first article read,

This was no ordinary condemnation of schism or theological haggling. The members of the Commons shared a strong suspicion of Arminianism as a political as well as religious heresy. They had a clear idea of what English Arminianism was and who was an Arminian. Before 1624, no Englishman had even been accused of Arminianism, either in Parliament or in contemporary literature devoted to religious controversies. How did the definition of English Arminianism develop between 1624 and 1629? How did Arminianism, originally a moderate Dutch Calvinism, come to be considered along with Popery as a treasonable theology?

At the turn of the seventeeth century, Jacobus Arminius, Divinity Reader at the University of Leyden, had proposed a theological compromise between Supralapsarian and Infralapsarian Protestantism.

On January 6, 1649 the House of Commons set its seal of approval on the agency by which Charles I would be tried and sentenced to death. By an Act “for erecting of a High Court of Justice for the Trying and Judging of Charles Stuart, King of England,” he was charged with “a wicked design totally to subvert the ancient and fundamental laws and liberties of this nation, and, in their place, to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government.” The Commons maintained that they had shown tolerance toward such “high and treasonable offenses.” But the King's persistence in perverse activities — his raising of “new commotions, rebellions and invasions” — had forced them to take the present course. They were determined that no future ruler should “presume traitorously or maliciously to imagine or contrive the enslaving or destroying of the English nation, and to expect impunity for so doing.” The measure designated one hundred and thirty-five persons to try and adjudge the royal defendant.

Thus came into being the most extraordinary judicial body to be met with in English history. Certainly, no court has ever been so vigorously disclaimed as to jurisdiction, or so bitterly vilified as to personnel. To the Cavaliers, who had fought for Charles at Marston Moor and Naseby, as well as to the Presbyterians, who had trooped under the banners of Parliament to reshape, but not destroy, the monarchy, the court and its works were anathema.

The influential Wellek and Warren, in their Theory of Literature, view biography as the servant of a scholarly master. They concede that certain biographies have their own “intrinsic interest,” but the main bias of their work is towards the perception of biography as a quarry from which facts are to be mined and then put to other uses.

There seems to be little doubt that for the majority of biographies Wellek and Warren are correct, and their conclusions readily find support among the most serious surveys of the biographical tradition. Yet a disinterested bystander would surely observe with great curiosity how frequently in our age older and apparently outmoded factual mines are replaced by new ones. Moreover, he would surely be puzzled as he scrutinized the biographical scene more carefully and discovered in the background a number of works written between 1640 and 1851, which retain a perennial fascination and freshness and show no signs of becoming outmoded, despite numerous objections that they are unreliable and generally untrue. These works, which shall be called primary organic biographies, are defined below and include Walton's Lives, Burnet's Life of Hale and his Life of Rochester, Johnson's Life of Savage and his “Life of Thomson,” Goldsmith's Life of Nash, Boswell's Life of Johnson, and Carlyle's Life of Sterling.

Universally regarded as works of art but castigated in varying degrees for the alleged unreliability of their facts and thus for their departure from the straight and narrow path of truth, the primary organic biographies are part of a tradition that critics have consistently failed to understand.