Search

The concept of Britain which dominated the history of Wales in the Tudor period was the long-held belief that the Welsh were the descendants of the ancient Britons and that they spoke ‘the British tongue’. The consciousness of this inheritance, heightened by the perception that the dynasty was of Welsh name and descent, was to have a transformative impact on the sense of a national identity which survived the constitutional union with England. Indeed Wales and Welsh identity emerged from the imperial programme of the Tudors strengthened rather than undermined. The explanation of this paradox is central to the agenda for the new British history in its Welsh dimension. It has long been evident from the anglocentric character of the traditional accounts of early modern England that the most persistent ‘British Problem’ is one of historiography. The call to revision invites a discussion of the extent to which the old British History – including the Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, as it was manipulated by Welsh historians and other writers in the post-union period – shaped not only dynastic propaganda but national identity and British consciousness. Some of these commentators even aspired to exercise a formative influence on Tudor and early Stuart policy or statecraft. The so-called Act of Union of 1536 (27 Henry VIII, c. 26), formed part of Cromwell's legislative programme for the integration of the realm. The dissolution of the marcher lordships in this act was complemented by the abolition of liberties and franchises within the realm in a contemporaneous act (27 Henry VIII, c. 24). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The constitutional annexation of Wales to England, begun under Edward I and completed by Henry VIII, extended the respective powers of king and parliament first over parts and finally over the whole of the country. In the ‘act of union’ of 1536 what was proposed was a parliamentary arrangement of laws and justice, an enlargement of the Edwardian settlement designed for all Welsh lands. The historic principality – the territory ruled over by the Welsh princes of Gwynedd until the conquest of 1282 and since 1301 reserved for the eldest sons and heirs of the kings of England – appeared to have been extinguished in the Tudor ‘union’. In 1543 the ‘second act of union’ of Henry's reign (as it is known in modern Welsh historical accounts) contained a proviso which tempered the parliamentary union of laws previously proposed by reaffirming the royal powers to legislate for Wales that Edward I had originally assumed in 1284. This proviso supplies a key to the constitutional relationship of crown and principality over the previous two and a half centuries. Neither that relationship nor the proviso itself has always been well understood, and it was an anachronistic reading of the latter that led to its repeal in 1624. The original legislative intention in 1543 was to be subjected to conflicting interpretations in James Ps reign by those who sought to identify the historical nature of the principality and the crown's prerogative in Wales in order to define their present extent and future potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]