The Idea of Royal Empire and the Imperial Crown of England, 1542–1698

This article explores an ideological basis for a Stuart royal empire in early modern Britain that encompassed not just the three kingdoms of the Atlantic archipelago but also the overseas possessions held by the Crown. It argues that contemporaries articulated and acknowledged, especially from the 1620s into the 1680s, a fully realized entity, headed by the Stuart monarchs, and that royalism was one of the defining ideological foundations of this empire. By recovering this language of empire, it becomes possible to provide a more holistic narrative of the intellectual history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.