Isobel Johnstone:

Right. Ok. Good evening everyone. My name is Isobel Johnstone and I'm a programme manager in the archival team within Collection Management here at the National Library. Thank you so much for being here with us tonight and a warm welcome as well to everyone watching online. 

To begin, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of this land, the Ngunnawal people. I acknowledge their ongoing connection to the land and pay my respects to their elders past and present, and through them to all First Nations people here tonight or listening online. As a meeting place, Canberra has been the cradle of stories, a country of creativity. The Ngunnawal and First Nations people across Australia have been the keepers and sharers of stories and histories for millennia, and this is a legacy the Library continues to uphold today.

Tonight we're delving into a topic that feels both historical and surprisingly current, how England came to imagine itself as an island nation. Like Australia, England has long been described as an island nation. This is an idea that we take for granted, one so familiar to us that it seems natural. Professor Lorna Hutson will reveal the ways in which this idea was constructed, shaped by poets, lawyers, and mapmakers.

At the National Library, we hold extensive collections of early maps as well as letters, ships, log books, and official records documenting sea voyages and many of the processes Professor Hutson explores. For instance, in relation to the ways we understand and conceptualise geographic boundaries are visible in the national collection. Tonight we explore the complex question, the subject of so much ongoing debate. Who owns the sea? It is something, is it something that one nation can claim or is it common property belonging to no one? These ideas weren't just debated in legal contexts, but seeped into poetry and cartography influencing how we think about England's national identity. Lorna looks at how English poets, lawyers, and cartographers helped sow the seeds of a British sea empire in the national imagination.

Lorna is merchant professor of English literature at the University of Oxford and one of the most respected voices in early modern literary studies. She has taught across the US, UK, and New Zealand, and published several highly regarded and thought provoking books including the invention of suspicion and circumstantial Shakespeare. Lorna's work has explored the intersections between legal and poetic thinking. Her recent project, 'England's Insular Imagining' explores the ways in which literary, legal and cartographic artifices helped create the idea of England as an island, an idea with very real and often messy and contested political consequences. No doubt these revelations will spark many questions which we will have time for at the end of this evening's talk, both for our theatre audience and for those joining us online. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Professor Lorna Hutson as she guides us through the imaginative, legal and poetic origins of England's so-called island nationhood.

Lorna Hutson:

Thank you. Thank you very much, Isobel. Good evening everyone. I'm delighted to be here. I'd like to thank Professor Rosalind Smith, Chair of English at ANU, for inviting me and Professor Kate Mitchell from the Research School of Humanities and Arts for supporting my visit. And thank you all for coming out here this evening.

I'm a literary scholar, as Isobel said, and this is a talk about poetry. It's about the vision of English freedom and virtue evoked by John Milton in his early poetry of the 1630s, but it's also a talk about law and geopolitics, centering on the early 17th century debate in international law, over whether the sea could be owned or possessed.

So on the one hand about poetry on the other hand, law and geopolitics, I want to show how the two are interlinked. How legal debate in this period deploys what we would think of as poetic arguments, and conversely how texts we think of as purely fictional involving sea nymphs and sorcerers such as John Milton's 1634 'Mask', which we used to call Comus, but it's now called 'A Mask at Ludlow Castle', affect what we might call our geopolitical imagining.

Now, Milton is of course famous for justifying the ways of God to man in 'Paradise Lost' in the 1670s, but an epic poem on the loss of paradise was not his original idea. His first plan seems to have been to write an epic poem on the legendary history of King Arthur.

As Milton critic Paul Stevens has written, the source of the Arthurian legend Geoffrey of Monmouth, history of the kings of Britain from 1137 had enormous impact on the young Milton, so much so that he imagined rewriting it as an English and national epic, and Stephen goes on to show that what appealed most to Milton in this legendary history was Geoffrey's emphasis on the freedom of the British people.

For that reason, I'm going to start this lecture with some discussion first of Geoffrey, Geoffrey of Monmouth, then a little bit about the distribution of legal freedoms across the island in 1603, and then I'll look at Milton's poetry of the 1630s, 'A Mask at Ludlow Castle and Milton's 'Lycidas'. Finishing up with two sections on the politics of English dominion in British seas.

So first, Geoffrey of Monmouth history of the kings of Britain written in 1137 Geoffrey's 12th century history is essentially the story of a mono national Britain ruled by a people called the Britains, who are regularly throughout their history, threatened by foreign invasion and division of this island kingdom, this single mono national island, but who are finally united by Prince Arthur, who is prophesied to return.

Now because Geoffrey's not exactly a household name, I'm just going to give you some selected highlights, indicating the book's astonishingly powerful and influential afterlife. So first we start with the Trojan Prince Brutus who founds the island and names it for himself; and then we have the first disastrous division, Brutus sons divide Britain: Locrine has Logres (England), Albanact has Scotland and Camber, Wales; and this is disastrous because then the Huns invade, killing Albanact, Locrine kills the Hun leader and drowns him in the Humber, but has a love child with the Hun Princess as Estrild, and she in turn has drowned in the river Seven.

So these are etiological stories about the names of rivers basically; and then just basically the rest of the book is just disastrous division after disastrous division. But you will know, you'll recognise some of these because one of these, who divides the kingdom is King Leir, whom you will have heard and Gorboduc also divides the kingdom and kings just keep dividing the kingdom with disastrous results; and nations invade the Saxons and the Piets and the Scots, these dreadful foreigners.

And then we have Uther Pendragon who tries to fight the Saxons, Piets and Scots, but he dies and is succeeded by his son Arthur, who becomes the famous king, conquers them all and makes the Scots where the yoke of perpetual servitude. And then that's basically it. Arthur is defeated by Mordrid and whisked away to Avalon, but prophesied to return and unite Britain again.

And there's just an astonishingly vast poetic afterlife of which some highlights are Spencer's Faerie Queene, which reinvents Geoffrey's Arthur, and of course Shakespeare's 'King Lear', which sort of explodes the whole thing, but reinvents Geoffrey's Leir.

So as we will see, Milton makes transformative use of these legendary materials of Geoffrey of Monmouth in his poetry but before I come on to Milton, I'd like to emphasise the Anglo-imperial uses of the Geoffredian legend. So you'll note that while the legend celebrates the unification of Britain under a British king called Arthur, and it's really Welsh, but British, it defines the Scots and Picts as foreign, not British, foreign invaders.

Historically, the legend was thus used because Arthur makes the Scots wear the yoke of perpetual servitude. The legend was used by English kings in the Middle Ages to justify their invasions of Scotland because it enabled them to deny that Scotland was a sovereign nation, and it enabled them to say that the Scots were vassals and that they were their overlords.

So thus in 1299, when Edward I invaded Scotland, the Pope remonstrated with him. but Edward wrote back to the Pope arguing that he had a right to invade because Brutus gave to his firstborn son, Locrine, that part of Britain called England and blah, blah, blah. And so he just goes through the legend and says he therefore has a right to invade Scotland because he's an overlord.

And astonishingly, this very same argument was used as late as 1542 by Henry VIII when he invaded Scotland at the beginning of an attempted conquest that lasted for nearly a decade. So Henry wrote the declaration concerning the just causes of his present war with the Scots and argued that he had a right to invade because Brutus had three sons Locrine, Albanact and Camber, unto whom as being the elder, the other two brothers should do him homage.

So you can see again this argument of English overlord ship was made. It wasn't considered a legend or fiction, it was a real just war argument and it was supported by the fact that a man called John Harding had as well as rewriting Geoffrey had added to it lots of forged homages, lots of forged documents of homage by Scottish kings to English kings, and these were all in the English exchequer.

And so the English really believed that they had all this evidence that Scottish kings were indeed the vassals of English kings. In fact, they weren't found to be forgery until 1847. I mean, really astonishing because they're not that convincing, to be honest. But anyway, the first time that the term Great Britain ever appeared in print was at this time in the 1540s as a part of this decades long attempt to conquer Scotland at this very, very brutal war.

It appeared in English propaganda, urging the Scots to surrender to the English who were marching towards Edinburgh in 1547 with a 15,000 strong army equipped with movable field artillery accompanied along the coast with ships carrying gun platforms and the army went ahead distributing propaganda, exhorting the Scots to realise that they should be with the English like us two brethren in one island of Great Britain. And that's the first time it appears in print in that propaganda. And if they refused, they would suffer the consequences. Of course, the army was coming towards them, so they didn't have a lot of choice.

One thinks of Trump. Anyway, this war ended in defeat for the English in 1550, so the English were defeated. Yet when after the death of Elizabeth Tudor, about 50 years later, James, the VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne in 1603, all the English enthusiasm for one island of Great Britain appeared to have ebbed away proposals for the mutual naturalisation of the Scotts and English were rejected by the English House of Commons as were proposals for mutual freedom of trade. Pretty basic. So Inland's original desire to conquer Scotland had been according to the propaganda, to achieve a great Britain with two brethren in one island.

Yet in 1603, it appeared that that was no longer desirable. Now why was this? It couldn't be that the English ambition to control the British coastline or British waters had in any way waned in the 1540s. On the contrary, these desires must have seemed increasingly urgent because the Dutch challenge to the domination of the Portuguese in the East Indies coupled with extensive Dutch fishing in English and Scottish coastal waters, had suddenly in 1609 been legally justified by a powerful new doctrine.

This was the doctrine of Mare Liberum or Freedom of the Sea, expounded by the young and brilliant Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotius, who argued that the sea was according to the law of nations, res nullius or common property so far from becoming irrelevant, the stakes of the question of whether England could claim dominion in the sea had suddenly risen exponentially.

The Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland, in other words, coincided with the heightened scent of the English need to rival the Dutch at sea to refute the Grotian claims of 'Mare Liberum' by which the Dutch justified their intensive and lucrative herring fishing in British coastal waters as well as their domination of trade in the Dutch East Indies.

So the question I want to explore today is how was it that the English were able to imagine their island nationhood and their dominion over British seas as existing, not because of the union of two nations to make one great Britain as an island, but because of their rejection of that union?

I mean, it does seem quite paradoxical. And the answer I propose, or at least one answer lies in what Milton's visionary poetry of English freedom and virtue has in common with the lawyer John Selden's, surprisingly poetic conception of 'Mare Clausum' close seas or English sea dominion.

In his poetry of the period, the young Milton develops the legendary British materials of Geoffrey of Monmouth's history, which Spencer had already taken in a seaward direction in book three of the Faerie Queene in ways which associate a proactively chased and virtuous English freedom with the spiritual guardianship of a land sea boundary.

And at the same time as Milton is writing this kind of poetry, the English jurist and legal scholar John Selden is developing an English discourse of 'Mare Clausum' or closed seas or sea dominion, which draws conceptually on the metaphoric of freedom of the seas that it actually seeks to oppose.

As we will see, Selden's refutation of Hugo Grotius does not so much deny as appropriate the metaphors of affluent freedom of the seas, and it redefines that freedom as an ancient English dominion. So first I'll just talk for a little bit about English legal freedoms in 1603. So it's commonplace to speak of the English from the 16th century onward as an island nation, and it can be no coincidence I think that for legal historians, this is also the period of a new identification of the English common law with the freedom of the Englishman born.

In other words, an identification of freedom with being of a certain nation. Legal historians have shown that this is the moment when the hierarchically structured and fungible and plural freedoms of mediaeval English law first resolve themselves into what we now think of as the fundamental division of the law of persons into subject and alien or English and foreign.

Contributing to this process was the English reinvention of Magna Carta as the procedural guarantor of the liberties of the subject, which in turn, as Paul Halliday has shown, meant that the English common law was increasingly being spoken of in theological terms in relation to the Old Testament story of Esau and Jacob as the Englishman's birthright. And all these changes which legal historians do see as paradigm changes were energised by the desire to retain the integrity of English, common law, and English nationhood as opposed to being subsumed into a great Britain shared with the Scots.

Thus, for example, in 1606, so Edwin Sandys objected to the naturalisation of the Scots because he said that word, make it the man inheritable unto Magna Carta, which was too much. And Henry Spelman remonstrated that to accept a union in Scotland would be a selling of the English legal birthright.

Let us not, he said, make with Esau so little account of so greater blessing as to exchange our freedoms of England for those of Scotland. So thus it was that having lost their king in court and their autonomous foreign policy in 1603, the status of James's Scottish subjects remained legally speaking extremely problematic. Only denisation with very limited legal freedom could be permitted to most Scottish subjects leaving their fates not only unresolved but misunderstood within common law, most crucial of all seagoing trade was restricted for them in this century of unprecedented expansion of English seagoing commerce, both east and west. The 17th century is the big expansion of English colonisation and commerce.

James's Scottish subjects were denied legal rights of trade with England and with the rest of the world from English ships. Now, Scottish merchants did find various workarounds, but the official embargo on their participation in English overseas trade was cited by them as a cause of their nation's decline into poverty in the 17th century and a motive for exceeding to union on very disadvantageous terms in 1707.

So the afterlife of this artifice, sorry, the artifice of this English island nation appears very explicitly in graphic form. In this front is piece that you see on the slide to Marchamont Nedham's translation of Selden's 'Mare Clausum' in 1652. So you see in the frontispiece Neptune who has empire over the sea is addressing a complaint to Britannia who is sitting on an island rock of the English commonwealth, which is labelled, so Anglia Republica has now become an island.

Neptune addresses Britannia as the state, and he says he's wronged by the Dutch doctrine of 'Mare Liberum' because he says "if o're seas there be no sway, my Godhead his clean tane away. England he says, hath great wealth possesst by sea's access and therefore blessed. And he says that there will acquire more seas, new seas thou gain'st and to the ancient four by Edgar left and I'll come back to Edgar thou addest many more."

So the message seems to be that it is from the island of England, from Anglia Republica that the sway or jurisdiction that guarantees Neptune's empire should emanate. Now this was 1652 a time when Cromwell's army was occupying both Scotland and Ireland. So they do appear here as conquered countries. But even in 1637 when John Selden wrote the 'Mare Clausum' in the original Latin, even then when Scotland was not a conquered country, Selden argues that although there is no territorial Great Britain, the seas called British form part of the empire and dominion of the kings of England.

So in book one of 'Mare Clausum', Selden undertakes refuting Hugo Grotius to prove that the sea is capable of dominion in the first place. And in book two, he seeks to prove that kings of Great Britain have had domination over the sea as a bound, not bounding their empire, but bounded by it. Now you see here Selden refers to kings of Great Britain historically, but in his own time of course, no such realm existed because the House of Commons had rejected Great Britain in 1604. So Selden's, great Britain is a sea empire without a corresponding land kingdom. So now I'm going to turn to Milton's poetry of the 1630s.

The British legendary and our theory and materials of Geoffrey of Monmouth were immensely important to Milton. Throughout the 1630s, Milton's early enthusiasm for Geoffrey was naturally Anglocentric and was based on ideas of freedom and virtue. When Milton first read Geoffrey, there's no sense he's reading the history of any people, but his own Geoffrey's emphasis on liberty seems to have had an extraordinary effect on the young Milton, writes Paul Stevens, what thrills Milton is Geoffrey's identification of national feeling with heroic liberty.

And so we might point to the end of Milton's 'Mask' at Ludlow Castle "love virtue, she alone is free". So turning to Milton's 'Mask' at Ludlow Castle, I want to examine what critics have found puzzling about it. This mask was written for John Egerton, the Earl of Bridgewater, when he was made the president of the Council of Wales in 1634. The mask enacts a drama of endangered freedom and virtue, specifically endangered chastity.

Bridgewater's daughter Alice is the heroine, the chaste young lady who wandering through the woods as darkness falls, gets separated from her brothers and is ensnared by a wicked sorcerer called Comus. And we see her, as you see in the slide, spellbound, immobilised in an enchanted chair in Comus' palace as he attempts to seduce her. Luckily her brothers with the help of an at attendant spirit sent from heaven break in and interrupt the scene in Comus fleas. But one aspect of this in particular remains a mystery critics puzzle over the fact that although the brothers and the attendant spirit come in and interrupt the spell and Comus fleas, the lady is still imprisoned in the chair, she can't get out. So she is said to be in stony fetters, fixed and motionless. This seems odd because she's been so eloquent in her opposition to Comus, her refusal to be seduced.

Her chastity is said to be so dear to heaven that a thousand liberated angels will come to her aid and yet remaining imprisoned unable to move. She seems somehow still to be the prisoner of lust if you like. It's not until the attendant spirit from heaven thinks of asking for the aid of a local river spirit, Sabrina the nymph of the Severn River that the lady is finally freed.

Now this figure of Sabrina who releases the lady comes from the legends of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Sabrina is the daughter of King Locrine. But what seems so weird about Milton's choice of her as the saviour of Chastity is that in Geoffrey, she's herself the fruit of lust. She's the daughter of King Locrine by his mistress Estrild and the reason she's associated with the river seven is because Locrine's wife Queen Gwendolyn is so angry at her husband's adultery that she kills him and drowns his daughter in the river and then commands that the river should be named after the drowned girl.

So the River Severn gets its name from her name, Hafren or Sabrina. So you can see that why the Milton critics say in their footnotes that Sabrina is a very odd choice for Milton to have made as the saviour of chastity. She is an unsuitable figure in a masque treating the theme of chastity being an illegitimate daughter. So why does Milton make the ladies virtue and her chastity depend on this legend of the illegitimate birth, which comes from Geoffrey of Monmouth and then from Spencer.

Well, if we look at the side, we can see what Spencer and Milton do with this, Spencer introduces the idea of the girls' innocence and virginity, but the sad virgin innocent of all adowne the rolling river; she did poure. That's Gwendolyn. Which of her name now Severne men do call Milton introduces a further proactive virtue. The guilt, the dame flying, the mad pursuit of her enraged step. Dame Gwendolyn commended her fair innocence to the flood. So she's proactively, in a sense devoting her virginity and her innocence to the river.

That's good, but we might still object. The lady herself was very proactive with her virginity and her brother said that she was clad in the complete steal of chastity and no savage fierce bandit or mountaineer could dare to soil her virgin purity. Yet there she is stuck in a chair, apparently a prisoner of Comus' lust and in temperance. So what is it still about this Sabrina, this river nymph that makes her the saviour of an English girl's virtue and freedom? Well, I think we see here the idea of Sabrina as a rescuer comes to the attendant spirit from another poet.

So the attendant spirit can't think how to rescue the lady. Then he suddenly thinks some other means I have which must be used, which once of Meliboeus old I learnt. And Melibeus old the shepherd poet is Edmund Spencer, critics think it's Edmund Spencer. And then he says there is a gentle nymph not far from, hence that with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream. Sabrina is her name, a virgin pure whilom, she was the daughter of Locrine that had the sceptre of his father Brute.

And as I say, she commends her fair innocence to the flood. Now a flood designates not just any old river, but the inflow of a tidal river, a tidal river, a flood links the land and the ocean. So when Sabrina curbs the smooth severance stream, she is in a sense exercising a jurisdiction over the tidal flow that links this ancient British river to the Atlantic seaboard.

You remember in 'Neptune', in Selden's book says, "if o're seas ther be no sway, my Godhead is clean tane away", so Sabrina sways the smooth Severn stream. Now Milton insists on the elemental identification of the nymph with the flowing water. She says she's going to come in her chariot, set with agate and the azurn sheen of turkis blue and emerald green that in the channel strays.

Well, Her chariot is nothing other than the iridescent flow of the river's waters varying from translucence to opacity like the turkis blue and emerald green. The release of the lady from enchantment is affected by the touch of Sabrina's chaste palms, moist and cold. And the repetition of this word moist links this release from enchantment to a notion of government or sway. Because it's with moist curbs, she sways the smooth Severn stream. So Sabrina's chastening touch releasing the virgin seems somehow to govern or regulate the water's relation to the land.

So what we see here, I think is Milton's strengthening of an identification of the ancient British legend from Geoffrey of Monmouth with the idea of a governance of the seas flowing about the British Isles. Now three years after, Milton published three years after 'A Mask'. Milton published another poem, 'Lycidas' in a volume of obsèques or funeral rights for a young Cambridge scholar called Edward King who had drowned in a shipwreck in the Irish sea.

Why did Milton call this poem 'Lycidas'? In doing so, he was recalling the first of a set of so-called Piscatorial eclogues, I like that term, which is a version of pastoral poetry, but sort of set among fishermen, and this was by the Italian poet Jacopo Sannazaro. Now in Sannazaro's eclogue, a poet called Lycidas laments by the ocean grave of his beloved Phyllis, and concludes with a song consigning her to the siren Parthenope, on whose tomb the port of Naples was founded and Phyllis is to be hailed as the Godhead or new men of the waters a happy sign to fishermen.

Milton's 'Lycidas' Edward King becomes not the new men, but the genius, the guardian spirit of the shore. Now Lycidas the shepherds weep no more; henceforth thou art the genius of the shore, in thy large recompense and shalt be good to all that wander in that perilous flood. Now in the verses leading to this final triumphant transfiguration, Milton conjures a very distressing vision of the violence and vastness of the waters moving along Britain's western seaboard, which render impossible, those rites of mourning to the body of the drowned youth. And these verses, I've put them on the slide as they were in Milton's notebook "Ay mee whilst thee the floods and sounding shoars wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld, whether beyond the stormie Hebrides where thou phapps under the humming tide visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world, or whether thou to our moist vows denied sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old where the great vision of the guarded mount looks towards Namancos and Bayona's field look, homeward Angel now and melt with ruth and O yee Dolphins waft the haplesse youth."

In this extraordinary passage, a terrifying sense of the seas immensity the violence of its formless moving depths and distances; imperceptibly shifts into the dispersed bones of Edward King tracing a kind of limit from beyond the Hebrides to St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall, the archangel Michael, who is not named looks first westward to the Celtic and Iberian fields. Where Comas comes from that is Spain and France and then homeward to St. Michael's Mount and as in Comas.

So here the legendary matter of Britain becomes less etiological and more elemental. So note for example, Milton's strange revision of Corineus to Bellerus there on the slide Corineus of Cornwall is the father of Locrine's Queen, Queen Gwendolyn, the one who drowned Sabrina; Bellerium on the other hand is the name of the Promontory land's end.

You can see it at the end there Belerium Prom Vulgo, the land's end. So it's as if Milton has replaced the legendary material with the actual cardiographic promontory itself, the fable of Bellerus old, and where Sannazaro's 'Lycidas' promises to sacrifice deep water monsters at altars along the shore. Monstrousness in Milton's poem is rather the frightening physical sense of the disperse of the corpse as an effect the seas incessant motion.

And finally we see the transfusion of the guardian angel St. Michael into the figure of Lycidas as the genius of the shore both committed to the spiritual guardianship of the English nation. And what finally about that word wafting in the last line, I think mean I think of wafting as kind of moving with gentle breezes from something like handles waft her angels through the skies, but that's actually an 18th century colouring.

The verbs original meaning in the 16th and 17th century is a sea guard or a sea convoy, so wafting actually means being guarded by a sort of tugboat or a ship, and the dolphins are wafting or guarding Lycidas' body. So what I think we see from this is that Milton's identification of Englishness with freedom and virtue is strikingly in these poems of the 1630s associated with the curb and sway of seas, tides, and rivers as powerful elemental entities and here a new biographical context for Milton's 'Mask' is salient.

The Milton critic, Sharon Achinstein has explained that Milton's patron, John Egerton, the Earl Bridgewater, was in the early 1630s very deep in business dealings with an Anglo Dutch merchant called Sir William Courteen. And just around the time of Milton's 'Mask' Courteen involved the Earl Bridgewater in an audaciously ambitious attempt to challenge the trading monopoly of the East India company in Asia, and fascinatingly, as I just found the dictionary of national biography says that Courteen's involvement may be in this East India company may be linked with overlapping ambitions to discover and colonise new lands in Terra Australis Incognita, which he lays out, you see in the petition on the slide to Charles, he says, "Petition of Sir William Courteen to the King; lands in the south part of the world called Terra Australis Incognita are not yet traded to the King's subjects and the petitioner desires the right to trade those."

So the commission that he actually got from Charles in 1635 authorised a trading voyage to Goa, Malabar, China and Japan in rivalry with the East India company and so Sharon Achinstein argues that we should register the linguistic presence in Milton's 'Mask' of products from England's long distance trade with Asia such as vermet or cinnabar or gums and resins, diamond, silks and the turkis I mentioned, or the turquoise these are all luxury products from the east.

The imagery and themes of 'A Mask' are very much speaking to the Bridgewater families. Eastern Enterprises says Achinstein and she quotes this final speech of the attendance spirit to Sabrina "Virgin, daughter of Locrine sprung from old Anchises' line may thy brimmed waves from this, their full tribute never miss, may thy billows roll ashore the beryl and the golden ore", the beryl comes from Goa, "may thy lofty head be crowned with many a tower and terrace round and here and there thy banks upon with groves of myrrh and cinnamon."

So in this poetic passage, Sabrina and the Severn, that great estuary are being imagined as a kind of place of the incoming trade of all the luxury goods of the east. So in this context, how are we to read Milton's Sabrina? On the one hand, she's a redemptive figure of flowing water, conceived as proactive virginity, able to release an English girl from luxurious temperance. On the other hand, in this context of oceanic trade, Sabrina's descent from Locrine that had the sceptre from his father Brute transforms the Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Galfridian British genealogy, into an identification of freedom and virtue with England sea dominion or future prosperity by sea.

So I'd like to return now to law and geopolitics. In the 1540s, as we saw earlier, Geoffrey's history, Geoffrey Monmouth's history was used to justify the invasion and attempted conquest of Scotland as territory, as land but the failure of that attempted conquest in 1550 turned English uses of the Galfridian history away from justifications of land war and towards new arguments involving sea limits and coastal security; and an advisor to the Monarch John Dee was crucial in this change in his writings and cartography as Mapmaking Dee blends his reading in Geoffrey of Monmouth and Harding, I mean Dee believed in Scottish vassalage, he believed in Geoffrey of Monmouth.

He called his own son Arthur, for example, with new legal arguments for England's rights to jurisdiction over the seas. So in his various writings, John Dee rehearses the old proofs from Geoffrey of Monmouth, of Arthur's conquest of the Scots and Oceanic empire, but more innovatively, he adapts Roman civil law arguments that grant kingdom's jurisdiction or imperium overseas to the halfway point between their coasts and the coasts of another land.

So Dee's application of these Roman civil law arguments to Galfridian British history enables him to use Scotland as a way of extending England's coastal limits. So England has claims, he says, in North America and then the Arctic and in Norway, thanks to England's title to Scotland. So in his annotations to things like Geoffrey of Monmouth and John Harding, he always emphasises things like conquest of Orkneys and the Hebrides, and in his maps he links, he argues for England's Arctic possessions by look, there's the tip of Scotland at the very bottom there and the Shetland island, so that's a way not really of being interested in Scotland at land, but being interested entitled to Scotland as a way of extending English coastal and sea claims to other countries.

So in '[unclear]', he writes that England has claims in North America. And interestingly I just found this where in his copy of Geoffrey Monmouth, which is in the Christchurch Library in Oxford, he annotates the bit where Gwendolyn drowns Sabrina in the Severn and he uses it to find an etymology of Severn as sea harbren because of the great arm of the sea, which is 30 miles wide in the midst.

So he's actually emphasising the sort of geographical extent of the estuary and how useful it is for sea trade. So Dee introduces a new model of English political virtue based on navigation and thalassocracy or sea empire and his great heroes are Minos of Crete, Pericles of Athens and a legendary king of England, Edgar, the Saxon, who was supposed to have circumnavigated the British Isles on an annual basis because these are all great naval commanders.

So instructing Queen Elizabeth in her title to the seas around Britain dee cites Pericles from '[unclear]' "It is a great thing to possess the sea" he says "for consider", this is on the slide, "si [unclear] essemus if we were an island, how invincible we should be". So it's only hypothetical at that point for England, if we were an island, how invincible we should be and he praises Minod of Crete who made himself master of the Grecian seas and all the islands called Cyclades.

And he praises Edgar the Saxon who called himself the empire of all the islands and the oceans around Britain. Now this is a complete forgery by monks of Worcester in the 12th century, but people believed that Edgar, the Saxon had called himself empire of the British seas. So these proposals of Dee were in Elizabeth's reign a bit premature because Elizabeth didn't like to claim sovereignty over the sea.

She preferred to work by privateering and not claiming anything but once James had come south and there was no land border with Scotland, there was a sort of new opportunity really to claim empire in the sea or sovereignty in the seas and so these arguments become more imminently realisable. Oddly enough though, treatises on Great Britain do cite Dee, but they cite him not for Great Britain, but against it, it's kind of weird. So here's Sir Henry Spelman in of the Union 1604, which is a treatise saying that we should definitely not unite with the Scots.

But it starts by saying it's citing Pericles and saying we can see that this uniting of Scotland brings us great wealth, "the sea has taken us into a protection and sequestered our enemies and none can assayle us. Oh said Pericles, if we were an island, we were invincible" So to conclude this point, we are and we are. So he's very happy by this. But then he goes on to say, should we grant freedom of trade to the Scots and should we naturalise them?

And his answer is no, because the Scots are so poor that they would somehow outmarket us. So he says at the end, in the third section on the handout, on the slide, "the freedomes that God giveth us to nations by their birth is no light thing". This is English common law as birthright, "let us not then with Esau make so little accompt of so greater blessing, let us not exchange our ritche freedoms of England with those of Scotland".

So in the end he concludes that England must stay just England must not join with Scotland, but somehow must be an island. So this is the sort of paradox that I'm interested in here. So to return to Milton's conception of Sabrina, we wondered why it was that the lady that for all her arguments of temperance and virginity and all her virtue, the lady remained stuck in that chair immobile subject to Comus' enchantment. Until Sabrina, the goddess of Tidal River released her and I talked about the attendance spirit's illusion to Malibus or Spencer.

Now I don't have time to talk about that in this lecture, but Spencer had already in book three and four of the 'Fairie Queene' in his legend of chastity, he had already transformed the Arthurian legend into a new kind of erotic story of chastity at the coastline involving a night called Britomarte and involving jurisdiction at the coastline, which I don't have time to talk about, be happy to talk in the questions, but by the 1630s when Milton was writing, and I do think Milton was rewriting that legend of chastity of Spencer's, English legal thinking about coastal waters and the ocean's vastness had changed considerably complaints against the Dutch from regularly fishing from Shetland down the east coast of England and from the Hebrides down the west grew very vociferous English schemes put forward at this time invoked King Edward and his circumnavigation of Britain and invoke the idea of English sovereignty in British waters.

And these claims are angry responses to the Dutch lawyer, Hugo Grotius' book 'Mare Liberum', which in 1609 declared an international legal right to freedom of trade and navigation through the world's oceans. Grotius articulated a fundamental distinction between those things that could by the law of nature be occupied, bounded, and possessed, and those that could not, the vast ocean he contended simply could not be possessed, "the subject of our discussion", he reminded his readers, this is the second paragraph on the slide, "is the ocean, which was described in olden times as immense infinite, the father of created things bounded only by the heavens, the ocean who's never failing waters fed not only upon the springs and rivers and seas according to ancient belief, but upon the clouds and also in a certain measure on the stars themselves; in fine that ocean which encompasses the terrestrial home of mankind", it encompasses the terrestrial home, it is the surrounding of the land "with the ebb and flow of tides and cannot be held or enclosed being itself, the possessor rather than the possessor".

You can see he equates the encompassing of the terrestrial home of mankind with being the possessor of it. Now how was John Selden going to counter this? I mean, that is just an amazing passage, very poetic. I think the greatest challenge Selden had really was the conceptual challenge of Grotius' image, the imaginative purchase of Grotius' claim that the perceived infinity of the ocean's liquid state seems to prove that it is incapable of dominion.

Well, what Selden does, he does an amazing thing. He just sort of turns the argument around so conceding that the sea contains and encircles the earth, Selden queried why the container should not be bound by the thing contained, why the land should not bound the sea even though the land is contained by the sea, the land should bound the sea rather than the other way around.

"Boundaries and limits are reform of justice", he says, "nor is Sylvanus" the God of woods "any more, a guardian of bounds, the Neptune, the sea and land", he says "mutually embrace each other with crooked windings and turnings. This with peninsulas and promotories butting forth and creeks bending inward and that working up its waves about all the passages of its vast body".

So the effect of Selden's formulation works to deny that the incessant motion of the water as an element makes it incapable of dominion. So does metaphors of land and sea embracing and into penetrating one another suggests that the movement of waters outward and around the estuaries, promotories, rivers, and inlets constitutes a form of dominion and its justice, which is redefined as a form of freedom of title in hearing in the land's channelling of the seas around Great Britain. So Selden's metaphors are not of enclosure of fencing the sea, but of a controlled freedom of outward movement from the land to the sea emanating from the interconnectedness of land and sea.

So my argument is that we have here a perceptible affinity with Milton's early poetry of the 1630s and the way that it uses ancient British materials. If we go back to the problem of Milton's choice of Sabrina as the saviour of chastity and virtue in 'a Mask', we can see that Milton has gone out of his way to tie her efficacy in saving the lady's virtue to her identification with the curb and sway of the flood a tidal river and this corresponds to the metaphoric of Selden's notion of a title over British seas coming from the inflow and outflow of waters and from the way that peninsula, promotories and creeks shape inlets and waterways. Milton imagines that when Sabrina drowns the nereids or sea nymphs drop reviving oils into her ears and eyes or what Milton calls the porch an inlet of each sense.

So where human senses are imagined as inlets which enact kind of metamorphosis from human body into the shaping of water by the land because an inlet is a coastal indentation or a passage which makes water flow from one place to another. But the other thing I've never seen critics acknowledge is the fact that Milton sets this 'Mask' not in Wales, but in a sea empire. Critics say that it's set in Wales, but in fact the attendant spirit who opens the mask describes his descent to earth as it is on the slide here, "but to my task, Neptune, beside the sway of every sort flood at each ebbing stream, took in by lot to tie of the Jove, imperial rule of all the sea girt isles that like to rich and various gems and lay the unadorned bosom of the deep, which he to grace his tributary gods by course commits to several government and gives them leave to wear their sapphire crowns and wield their little trindents", but this aisle, "the greatest and the best of all, the main he quarters to his blue hair deities, that's a reference to Edgar's four Cs and all this track that fronts the falling sun, a noble peer of mickle trust and power in his charge".

The noble peer, of course is Bridgewater, but you can see that from this, his jurisdiction extends not so much over Wales alone, but over the Atlantic seaboard, all this track that fronts the falling sun, the Welsh Atlantic seaboard and the Welsh connection with the Irish sea.

So the Severn becomes important because it opens out into the Bristol channel and is open to the incursions of Dutch fishing ships, but also to the Celtic and Iberian fields where comas is described as coming from and to which the Archangel Michael looks out in 'Lycidas'.

So in this context I'm finishing now, it's highly relevant that the earlier Bridgewaters Business Association with Sir William Courteen and the Courteen Company in the East Indies has British ramifications as well. We've seen how the poet Lycidas evokes with unforgettable vividness, the horror of Edward King's bones being hurled beyond the stormy Hebrides.

But what was happening to the Hebrides in the 1630s? Well, if we think Grotius' 'Mare Liberum' terms, the Hebrides decidedly not part of England were set amid the wealthiest fishing grounds in Europe, halfway between the Shetlands and Ireland along the main Dutch Sea Road from their colonies in the Americas and when tensions ran high in England from the Dutch East Indies.

By the 1620s and 30s, the chief of clan McKenzie, Colin McKenzie, the aptly named Earl of Seaforth, was seeking Dutch expertise and investment to help develop the Isle of Lewis and stored away on Lewis as the centre of a highland Dutch East India company, and you see in the map there, Dutch ships in the Minch, Dutch ships near the Hebrides, his business partner was a founding member of the Dutch West India company, Jan de Moore. And amid the memoranda of negotiations for Dutch development of Stornaway were clauses giving the Lewis company rights to traffic in any places in Europe, east or west, anywhere, it says, and you note on this slide, this beautiful carved bed is an Indonesian bed. It was in the Mackenzie Castle in Easter Ross, a sign of the close ties of the clan Mackenzie with the Dutch East Indies in the 1630s.

The castle was demolished, actually fairly recently in the 20th century, but the bed still exists in Falkland palace and you can see it there. So in the Atlantic facing seas around Britain, the interests of the chiefs of the Hebridean sea board were joining up with Dutch interests in a daring embrace of Hugo Grotius' principles of the freedom of the seas without any deference to John Selden's argument that the Hebridean seas were under the sway of the king at Westminster, they're just completely ignoring Charles because of course Scotland wasn't a part of England.

Anyway, around 1630, Charles and the English crown put a stop to this. They put a stop to the Mackenzie's development of Stornaway by proceeding with a proposal for a British fishery and you can see that in the notes for this. So John Cook's proposition for fishing in 1632, John Cook first enunciates here, the principle of Charles's empire by sea.

He doesn't say that Charles rules over a great Britain because of course he doesn't, but he says the greatness and glorious, "the greatness and glory of this kingdom of Great Britain consists of not so much in the extent of his majesty's territories by land, but in the sovereignty and command of the seas", now, unfortunately, for Charles, the Scots presented him with a problem, they were very troublesome and persistent about their reserved waters, that is their reservation, their legal reservation to native Scots fishermen of rights to fish up to 14 miles off shore.

They would not accept the doctrine of Charles' sovereignty over British seas. They objected that the prejudice Scotland sustained by the use of this name Great Britain in the royal patent, Ritz and records pertain to Scotland for there was no union yet as yet with England and they refused to countenance the creation of a British fishery unless the Scots were naturalised in England until that time, they declared their own waters were reserved for native fishing and the Englishmen as foreigners could not fish there.

Yet Charles persisted in the name of the British crown arguing that this would be a common benefit to all three kingdoms and the treasurer he appointed to this Hebridean British fishery was of course none other than the Earl of Bridgewater's, great friend Sir William Courteen.

So to conclude, Milton critics examined Milton's early poetry of the 1630s for signs of his later opposition to prelacy and monarchy. They also insist that his nationalism is not racial, but is much more civilised than that based on notions of spiritual virtue and freedom. I've tried in this talk to suggest that the Republicans and the royalists might have more in common than they have to separate them in terms of claims in the sea and I've tried to point to affinities between Milton's early poetry and a developing sense of English island nationhood, which conceived of sea dominion not as an enclosure of waters, but as a self-regulating sort of temperate, virtuous self-regulating exclusively English legal freedom of movement through the ocean.

The incoherence of this conception emerged intermittently as in the snags that thwart Charles' plans for a British fishery. But Charles, of course, was soon mired in constitutional crisis, which began, as you will remember with a thing called ship money. So the internal contradictions and injustices of the English island nation concept never really emerged into visibility, and the entirely spirits concept continues to inform our sense of history. So Milton's rewriting of Geoffrey of Monmouth in his poetry of the 1630s identifies English and freedom and virtue with the rights of guardianship or sway over British waters and beyond and this is way of seeing how poetic texts may be linked with and inform our legal and geopolitical history in ways which still affect us. Thank you very much for listening.

Isobel Johnstone:

And thank you so much Lorna, for that fascinating talk. It's one that I'm definitely going to be thinking about for some time to come. I was really interested in the way that so much of that imagery is repeated in the text that you explored. Now we do have a little bit of time for questions. We've got a couple of staff in the theatre with microphones. We just ask that you wait until the microphone is handed to you before asking our question so that we can make sure that everybody here is including those people watching online. So if you have a question, please just raise your hand.

Audience Member 1:

Thank you so much for that talk, Lorna. So I feel like you've almost in your book, you gut the English canon and lay it out for us and I found your argument about Milton utterly new and utterly compelling and I dare say that it will upset a fair few, Milton-ists.

Lorna Hutson:

It already has.

Audience Member 1:

I guess my question, I noticed that Marchmont has, sorry, Nydham has translated the Selden in 52 and then it's 54, which is the western design, so the first state run colonial expedition to basically get all of the Spanish holdings and it's a kind of a failure, but then, well, it's the kind of failure that ends with the occupation of Jamaica. But my question is, do you see this the way in which Milton is using his poetry to really justify a British taking of the sea? Do you see that continuing after the revolution, after we've had the failure of the Western design and after the royalists, in fact appropriate a lot of that kind of Republican colonialism and a Republican forms. Do you see it continuing on into the major poetry?

Lorna Hutson:

Into Milton's major? I'm afraid that's something I'd like to explore. I mean, I can't say that when I taught 'Paradise Lost', I mean I'm not a Milton scholar, but I teach 'Paradise Lost'. I was never thinking about the sea in merchants, although there is quite a lot of criticism that does talk about Satan's link to the imagery of sea voyaging. But that's something I would really like to explore.

I certainly think that this goes across Republicans and royalists this interest in claiming sea dominion and it's the sort of Robert Brenner argument that revolutionary agitation in the 17th century was really about breaking the old monopolies of first the monopolies of the chartered companies and allowing joint stock companies and allowing more people to set up companies like the New Turkey and Lavan companies and then the East India company, but also the Western voyages, which needed even more kind of what he calls interlopers.

They needed more sort of lowly people to be allowed to go and set up plantations and get things going so that there would be supply lines. It was a complex process and it couldn't work if it was very closed company and Brenner talks about all that, and he talks about the navigation act and he says this "free is every Englishman", but again, what's not noticed is it doesn't, it's a small point, but it doesn't allow the Irish and the Scots. It is every Englishman.

So I think this is something that runs through the century and that in a way runs a thwart the royalist Republican divide because when Charles II comes to the throne, he's busy setting up company companies and giving rights to trade to favoured courtiers. So yes, but I think I don't really know enough about it. I'd love to know more and I think it would be something worth exploring.

Isobel Johnstone:

Unfortunately, it looks like we might be sorry.

Audience Member 2:

It's very interesting talk and being from the United States, I have my own interesting ideas about these whole who has what, but one of the things that I couldn't help noticing on your maps were Hibernia Hibernia, where's Ireland all this time.

When did the thought that Ireland was part of Great Britain come in or was that inherent in what you were saying already? I must admit I don't understand everything about the philosophy and the poetry, but I wonder when it was that the British decided Ireland was theirs.

Lorna Hutson:

That's a very good question and I mean the reason in a way, I'm talking about a sort of minor part of this story, the's, the England Scotland one, I mean the Ireland is a much bigger part and has been much more written about. So the same legendary materials, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales also gave a sort of historical basis for England's claim to be overlords or sovereign in Ireland as well. And there were sort of several plantations of Ireland, but the first plantation in the Middle Ages, the English who went over then became the Anglo-Irish. And they sort of seemed to, in the 16th century, it was felt that they'd sort of gone native. So there were further attempts of Elizabethan governors of Ireland sending armies into Ireland. And Edmund Spencer, the poet that I mentioned who wrote the 'Fairie Queene', was in Ireland himself serving as a colonial servant of the crown.

And he wrote a pamphlet called 'A View of the Present State of Ireland', in which basically he went through the possibilities imposing English common law, and he basically recommended extermination. He said, it's not going to work English, common law in Ireland, basically and it's interesting because a lot of his material on the Irish and their bad habits, their sort of barbarism was actually taken from George Buchanan's history of the Hebrides in Scotland.

So it's all mixed up this stuff about barbarism, but Milton was very influenced by it. He read Spencer's view of the state, present state of Ireland and Ireland was brutally conquered again and again colonised, it suffered much more than Scotland. Scotland's history isn't a colonial one, and in fact it's all very complicatedly interlinked because I said that the Scots Antenati, that is the people who were born before James came to the throne, their legal position was very anomalous.

They could only have denisation, they couldn't have full naturalisation in England, but they too went to Ireland to plant, to claim property. They had to have denisation as Englishmen first to do that. So there are kind of layers to all this subjugation and colonisation and the kind of uneven spread of legal liberties. Does that begin to answer your question? In other words, it goes right back to the early legendary stuff, but it's really, really being pursued militarily in the 16th and 17th century. So Cromwell takes an army into both Ireland and Scotland. Yeah.

Audience Member 2:

Thank you.

Audience Member 3:

Thanks very much for the talk. It's been fantastic. I just wanted to leap forward a couple of centuries to perhaps the continuing poeticisation of rivers and empire with Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. I couldn't help think of that getting on the river, it's just really a thought bubble really rather than, but there seems to be some continuities there.

Lorna Hutson:

I think that's very suggestive. I mean, I hadn't really thought about river poetry much before I started working on the Scottish material, and then I felt, how could I not notice all this that rivers are associated with empire from Greek and Latin texts and Virgil and so on and then in the 16th century poets, they really do the way they imagine empire is personifications of rivers and then going to the new world.

Explorers and colonisers are baffled by rivers. And coming to Australia too, I think they found that the rivers didn't sort of move in the way they expected or create the kinds of estuaries and so on, they expected. But you're absolutely right. I think moving through the river into the heart of the country is the way that you imagine empire and colonisation. I can't say much more about that, but I think that's a really suggestive idea. Thank you very much.

Isobel Johnstone:

Thank you. Thank you again, Lorna. And thank you to our audience for those thoughtful questions. For those who would like to learn more about the influence of the arts on culture and national identity, we have a special event in partnership with the Bell Shakespeare in March.

Dr Kate Flaherty will deliver a deep dive into Julius Caesar exploring what the play says about our past, present, and future. So please see our what's on page for more information and a link for how to book tickets and please join me in thanking Lorna once again for such a fascinating talk.