When in December 1553 Mary I renounced her title ‘supreme head’ of the English church she brought to an end a unique period of English constitutional history, a period begun almost exactly two decades earlier with the passage of the Appeals Act through parliament in April 1533. As the subject of Chapter One revealed, the Appeals Act was not the first text to use the word ‘empire’ as a shorthand for England's political independence, but it was the first to include the English church within England's empire apart, to separate England from Rome as well as from Britain and the rest of Europe – or as the wording of the Appeals Act put it, from ‘the anoyaunce aswell of the See of Rome as fromme the auctoritie of other foreyne potentates’. Mary's efforts to reconcile England with Rome succeeded in closing this chapter of English constitutional history. From this perspective, then, the court festivities at Christmas 1553 provide a fitting terminus to this study of early Tudor England's self-image as empire.

Yet for the Royal Supremacy, Mary's reign turned out to be less a terminus than a caesura, for in 1559 the Elizabethan Supremacy Act restored to the ‘Imperiall Crowne of this Realme’ its full responsibility for the governance of the English church. This revival under Elizabeth of England's former ecclesiastical independence also revived an interest at this time in Tudor England's literary portrayal as an empire apart, with Elizabethan writers borrowing from the lexicon of their predecessors, to identify England with the English church and English Bible.