This book explores England's self-image in the earlier Tudor period as a sovereign realm, independent of Rome and the rest of Britain, ‘an Empire off hitselff’, as Cuthbert Tunstall called England in 1517, poised between the Holy Roman Empire under the Habsburgs, the Roman church under Leo X and his successor popes, and the British Empire that gathered steam under the ageing Elizabeth. It looks at the figures – both historical and rhetorical – that were used to write England's evolving self-image as a sovereign realm, or empire, in seven principal texts – two pageant sequences, two plays, two pamphlets, and Leland's Laboryouse Journey, the subject of this Introduction – all printed or performed between 1520 and 1553.

Chapter One explores England's relations with the Habsburg Empire under Charles V before the onset of the Break with Rome in the early 1530s. Its subject is the literature surrounding the visit of Charles V to England in 1522, in which England was in relation to the Habsburg Empire imagined as an ‘Empire off hitselff’. Chapters Two to Five focus on royalist literature written in the two decades after England's Break with Rome, arguing that England was imagined in this literature as a sovereign political community, a ‘nation’ free to rein in royal power, but happy to consent to the imperial powers granted to Henry VIII and his successors, within the Royal Supremacy acts of 1532–34.