MATTHEW DIMMOCK ILLUSTRATION BY BEN JENNINGS
Facing a clamour of demands for a vision of post- Brexit Britain and its place in the world, the beleaguered prime minister might find instruction in her favoured period of England’s past. When asked by the Observer 13 years ago which historical figure she most identified with, Theresa May chose the indomitable Tudor queen Elizabeth I, a woman “who knew her own mind and achieved in a male environment.” More recently, the press have been quick to invoke Shakespearean ideas of a sceptered isle and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and more diffuse golden-age mythologies, all of which will rouse cynicism in suspicious minds. But the late Tudor age really does have deeper lessons to teach us about the dark arts of Brexit.
Elizabeth I did, after all, come to the throne facing her own Brexit moment. In reconstituting the Protestant Church of England, she reinstated the break with Rome and papal authority that her father Henry VIII had initiated earlier in the 16th century, but which her sister Mary had bloodily sought to reverse. This move rendered her heretical for the Catholic bulk of Europe. At a stroke, England was once again severed from the community of European Christendom.
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