ABSTRACT
While the role of the state in the reduction and elimination of its aristocratic and religious competitors has been a mainstay in the historiography of the period, this aspect of Tudor rule has received less extensive treatment by literary critics.1 To be sure, recent criticism has tackled the issues of English nationalism and national identity; but we still lack an adequate way of relating the growth of state power in the early modern period to issues of national identity, especially as the latter was formed in the crucible of the encounter between state and overmighty subject on the peripheries of the Tudor polity. In the most comprehensive study of English identity formation in this period, Richard Helgerson argues that early modern England witnessed a transition from 'dynastic state to land-centred nation' in which a national community of landowning individuals came into being 'in dialectical opposition to royal absolutism' (1992, p. 120). In his 'Afterword' to Forms of Nationhood (1992), Helgerson notes that 'the state was almost indistinguishably identified in this period with the crown' and goes on to posit a series of binary oppositions following from this identification: 'State/nation, court/country, king/people, sovereign/subjects' (p. 296). As this list indicates, for Helgerson, as for many New Historicist critics, the state is identified with a centre which dominates the land and its people. I believe that this conception of the early modern English state is flawed for a number of reasons. The English state was characterised not only by a precocious centralisation of administrative organs, but also (and concomitantly) by a dispersal of power among the landowning aristocracy and gentry of England whose identity as national subjects was called into being precisely by participation in the state apparatus (which thus has to be much more widely defined than consisting solely of a royal and courtly apex). Secondly, the state (in this wider definition) was crucial in securing the space of the nation, the space of a horizontal community of civic minded gentry and aristocratic landowners, Davies's 'magistrates of the sovereign'. Finally, Helgerson ignores the role of the state on the peripheries of the Tudor polity, where the creation of a recognisably English national community was most definitively a product of techniques of state power which sought to forge an English freeholding landowner class by co-opting or destroying the jurisdictional and economic powers of bastard-feudal and tribal lords.
