ABSTRACT
The policy of centralisation achieved greater cohesion between regions, and the use of history and popular myths to prove the monarch's noble pedigree did succeed in promoting loyalty to Crown and in creating greater internal unity. For example, Henry VIII's Act in Restraint of Appeals called on British history to justify England's break with Rome. It proclaimed that by diver's sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed, that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world. For the history Polydore Vergil was dependent on Gildas, Bede and the newly discovered Classical works in Italy, which included Cornelius Tacitus's account of Boudica's rebellion against the Romans, and for the British geography he used Ptolomy. However, he also took the difficult step of discrediting Britain's fantastic myths of origin on the way, a move that made him particularly unpopular with other writers of British history because he was not English.
