The English Crown, the Principality of Wales and the Council in the Marches, 1534–1641

Abstract

Accounts of ‘Tudor policy in Wales’ have been beset in the past by unresolved problems of definition. What do we mean by ‘policy’ in the age of monarchs who ruled as well as reigned; and what, or when, was Wales?¹ What is incontestable is that there was no systematic approach to the government of the country as a whole on the part of English kings until the formation of the unitary state in the 1530s. Wales was the creation of the Henrician ‘union’ with England in the sense that it then achieved territorial integrity for the first time in history. Incorporation with the realm brought with it an unprecedented measure of administrative uniformity. Although the Welsh people were recognised in the Middle Ages as forming a distinct nation, they had never inhabited a single polity; the limited unity achieved by Hywel Dda in the tenth century had not been matched by any subsequent Welsh ruler, while the medieval kings of England had never exercised direct rule over the whole country.²