The first Tudors are generally supposed to have done more to centralize the government of England than any earlier monarch. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign areas outside the jurisdiction of the crown, such as feudal liberties and religious sanctuaries, had been significantly diminished, and papal jurisdiction over spiritual affairs had in theory been destroyed by the break with Rome. Most historians would agree that Parliament was closer to conceiving itself as law-maker for the entire nation by 1550 than it was in 1485. The great architectural monuments of Tudor England, the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey and King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, are studded with Tudor roses and Beaufort portcullises, and visibly seek to establish a picture of a nation unified by the Tudor victory at Bosworth Field in 1485. These monuments, though, also aim to dazzle their viewers into forgetting that the claims of Henry VII to the crown were insecure. The early years of his reign were troubled by the Yorkist pretenders Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, who attempted to rouse opposition to the new dynasty. Henry VII paid architects and historiographers to mask these awkward facts with panegyric and architectural ornament.

He was not so generous with poets. The centripetal tendencies in early Tudor juridical and spiritual affairs might lead one to expect the literature of the period to abound in poets of the centre, who would hymn the Tudor unification of the nation and rejoice in their own central position in the court that welded the realm into one body.