ABSTRACT
It is far easier to write the history of a single nation than to take a holistic approach to the islands which lie off the north-western corner of mainland Europe and to attempt to present a full, balanced history of the area referred to variously as ‘Britain’, ‘the British Isles’, ‘Britain and Ireland’ or, more lyrically, ‘the Atlantic archipelago’. Their interrelating histories are particularly complex during the early modern period. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the four British nations repeatedly clashed, as one of them (England) completed the political and administrative absorption of its western neighbour (Wales), sought to dominate a second kingdom across the sea (Ireland) and maintained often uneasy relations with the third kingdom on its northern border (Scotland). Moreover, throughout the period the English monarch claimed to rule Wales and Ireland, for most of the sixteenth century the monarchs of England and Scotland were related, and from the early seventeenth century England and Scotland shared the same monarch. From 1603 the Stuarts ruled the four disparate nations of the Atlantic archipelago.
