Historical revivalism has proved to be an ever-constant thread in the reception of Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries. Question of cultural heritage and national history were pressing ones during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime, both as topics of academic study and subjects of popular appeal. England in this period drew enormous pride from its literary and artistic history, and this history in turn fuelled a national image that helped create a sense of a unique national destiny. For the period’s perceived musical ‘renaissance’, similarly, the important influence of English heritage and the nation’s historical musical canon on new English works was a persistent trope.

It is important, however, to create more nuanced accounts of how historical revivalism figured in English musical modernism. In this chapter, I focus on three main elements in English musical revivalism during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime. First, I explore contemporary attitudes towards history, English musicological writing during the period, and new attitudes towards manuscripts and archival research. I then outline how the products of music historians and archival researchers created actual performances of early music via editions and concerts. Finally, I note the expansion of this ‘sounding’ early music into spaces where historical music could be marketed as an element of mass culture.

The Introduction sets the scene for a reassessment of the transformative reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (1485–1547). It addresses recent treatments of this period as the threshold between the late-medieval and early modern worlds, associated only with the growth of monarchical power. As this book reveals, a formalised system for dispensing royal justice emerged under the first two Tudor monarchs. The engagements between sovereign and subjects it facilitated provide insight into how a vulnerable regime was legitimised. Analysis of this point of contact in the following chapters proceeds through three frameworks. First is the administrative-history approach central to mid-twentieth-century scholarship on this period, which this study revives but also revises. Second is the emphasis on litigation to the Crown as a means of state–society cohesion in histories of the Elizabethan and Stuart ages, projected into earlier decades and given greater practical definition in this book. Third is the overlooked presence of contention within royal justice, given full assessment in the present study and crucial to understanding why this jurisdiction was dissolved in 1641.

By way of a firm case study for the new system of royal justice in action, Chapter 3 provides the first history of the Court of Requests from its initial entry in the historical records in 1483 through to its settlement at Westminster by the end of Henry VIII’s reign. The origin of this tribunal is located in the practice of receiving petitions during royal progresses, particularly in the reign of Richard III. Thereafter, Requests was part of the itinerant household, following Henry VII and Henry VIII as they travelled around their dominions. It only acquired a more defined timetable, judiciary, and seat at Westminster in the 1530s, when it became subject to ministerial reform programmes. Importantly, this evolution to courthood was neither smooth nor linear: its business levels peaked and troughed, it could seemingly always revert to acting on the road, and it was rarely referred to by the name ‘Court of Requests’. With these interpretive challenges in mind, this chapter argues that, contrary to administrative historians’ tendencies to identify positive development in improved bureaucracy, Requests’ flexibility and proximity to the king’s person was advantageous to petitioners.

Among the first historical writers to reflect on the long sixteenth century (1485–1603), Sir Francis Bacon marvelled at the dynastic fortunes of the Tudor monarchs. Henry VII had ridden from distant exile to win his throne at Bosworth Field (1485) yet his son Henry VIII was a king ‘absolute in the sovereignty’. Then came the reigns of ‘a king in minority; of a queen married to a foreigner; and lastly of a queen that hath governed without the help either of a marriage, or of any mighty man of her blood’.1 These circumstances – a bloody usurpation, the rule of a minor and then by females – seemed perilous to contemporary observers. Contested successions and vulnerable rulers had led to the Wars of the Roses (1455–1485). Even the death of the childless Elizabeth I raised fears about civil war. Consequently, James VI and I’s peaceful accession to the English throne in 1603 signalled a remarkable achievement. After the tumults of the fifteenth century the Tudors had successfully defended their dynastic claims and reconstituted royal authority.

This chapter explores how the conciliar and coercive discourses of Renaissance historiography and lyric poetry intersect in Shakespeare’s early history plays. It focuses on scenes of textual composition, and other engagements with the construction and interpretation of literary language, in plays including Edward III, Arden of Faversham, Richard III, The First Part of the Contention, and Titus Andronicus, to show how they illuminate the uneasy overlap between political advice and gendered, sexual coercion during Elizabeth I’s reign. The plays’ treatment of the coercive properties of poetry cast monarch and subject in fluid, shifting roles, and highlight the awkward ethical implications of mobile rhetorical authority, ultimately troubling the distinction between good and bad political advice. Moreover, the chapter considers the centrality of collaboration to the production of meaning, not just between actors, printers, and playwrights, but also of genres and discourses, within this intensely self-referential cluster of Shakespeare’s co-authored early works.

By abandoning the focus on virtue and replacing it with a focus on preservation by means of occasional deception, the Machiavellian discourse throws suspicion on the role of the counsellor, and especially problematises his powerful role in relation to the monarch. This is especially the case in late Tudor England, ruled by monarchs perceived to be ‘weakened’ by their age or gender. Whereas the Henrician humanists had advocated counsellors who ruled their princes, the threat of Machiavellianism and weak monarchs renders such arguments threatening, and the counsellor falls under greater suspicion for his perceived usurpation of power. At the same time – and by contrast – there is a view that such weak monarchs require strong counsel to guide them. If this cannot come from individuals, as they are likely to be self-interested, then it must come different, ‘dis-interested’, sources. Whereas single private counsellors will be self-interested and thus ought not to rule a monarch, especially a female one, assemblies such as parliament will guide the prince according to the good of the commonwealth. For this reason, they need to have a share in the government. Command becomes ‘bridled’ by this source of counsel.

The introduction of Machiavellian political thought into the context of an England weakened by perceived monarchical instability – the reign of a minor and two women – opens a new chapter in the history of the English discourse of counsel. Machiavelli, in The Prince, offers a reversal of the traditional humanist model of counsel; the prince’s prudence is what determines the quality of the counsel he receives. Counsellors, given Machiavelli's pessimistic account of self-interest in The Prince, are not likely to demonstrate the civic spirit that the humanist took to be foundational to their image of the counsellor. Thus, they need to be held in suspicion, and cannot be given any real power.