Strangers and aliens in Tudor England: what was it like to be an outsider in Henry VIII's realm?

Strangers and aliens in Tudor England: what was it like to be an outsider in Henry VIII's realm? Nandini Das speaks to Charlotte Vosper about her new book revealing the colourful characters who helped create a global England in the Tudor and Stuart eras Charlotte Vosper: You begin your book with letters from a Flemish hatmaker, and others, to an Ottoman governor’s treasurer. Why are these significant? Nandini Das: We think we know about Tudor England. We’ve all heard about Henry VIII’s wives, Elizabeth I’s jewels and Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle”. Instead of all that glamour and sensationalism, I start with a Flemish hatmaker complaining about lard. In 1567, Clais van Werveken wrote home to his wife from Norwich, urging her to come quickly to England. He wanted her to remember to bring with her two wooden butter dishes, because he’d found that, rather distressingly, the English cooked with lard – pigs’ fat – instead of butter. It’s a small detail, but I think it tells us something profound about displacement. Also at the start of the book, I share letters sent to Assan Aga in Algiers. Assan was once known as Samson Rowlie of Norfolk – now he was the eunuch treasurer to an Ottoman governor. These letters help shatter the myth that Tudor England was a homogeneous monoculture. They show us that the Tudor world was part of a global web stretching from Norwich to north Africa, populated by individuals who travelled, lived, worked and communicated over long distances: Venetian glassmakers, Dutch seamstresses, English samurai, African servants and Jewish merchants. These historical figures reveal that Tudor England wasn’t an insular prelude to empire. By the 16th century, England was already a node in a global, transcultural network. What evidence of multiculturalism at the Tudor court can we find? The images that typically spring to mind when we think of the court of this period are of Henry VIII in his Tudor power pose, and Elizabeth I standing over a map of the nation in all her finery, reflecting a sense of Tudor England as something monumental, self-contained and complete. But those images are the results of Tudor propaganda. We have to remember that, during Henry VIII’s reign, the Tudor dynasty was still in its infancy compared with well-established European ruling families such as the Habsburgs. Henry knew that perception mattered, and he wanted to project an image of a stable and powerful Tudor England to surrounding nations. Interestingly, this image was in part created by non-English artists such as the painter Levina Teerlinc from Bruges, who appears to have been appointed at the Tudor court around 1546. Though we don’t know how many paintings she produced, the fact that she earned more as a court painter than Hans Holbein the Younger did in his day suggests that she must have been prolific. References to her works are scattered throughout parliamentary records and court documents, but she herself is almost invisible. I think that’s what fascinated me about her: she’s a symbol of many other immigrant artists, including German painters and Italian craftsmen, who played crucial roles in creating this image of the Tudors we know so well – yet we can only just about discern their presence from the historical record. How did English contemporaries view immigrants? In English historical records, we see immigrants such as Levina described as ‘strangers’ or ‘aliens’. I should make it clear that these terms were not vague insults but technical categories. An alien or stranger was someone from a land beyond the control of the English monarch, who had arrived in England and would pay higher taxes and have certain restrictions on their freedom. - Read more | Want to live like a Tudor? Historian Ruth Goodman did, and here are five crucial lessons she learned Quite often, a distinction was made between a stranger who was from another country and someone who might be English but from another tax-paying region. In this sense, you could argue that Shakespeare, who had been born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon, was a foreigner in London. You could also be a denizen – someone who had purchased limited rights. By paying significantly more, you could have an act of parliament naturalise you as a citizen, comparable to anyone who had been born in England. These categories could mean several things, though. In 1517, a preacher incited a mass riot against immigrants in London, accusing ‘aliens’ and ‘strangers’ of stealing bread from the mouths of children. Meanwhile, in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, a man who faced execution as a stranger is revealed to be the twin of one of the citizens of the city in which he had arrived. This contrast is what I find so very fascinating in early modern England. A stranger could be someone accused of siphoning off state resources, or the scapegoat in a riot – but they could just as easily be the person you married or the friend who brought you broth when you were unwell. The stranger, in fact, could be you, stepping off a ship in a foreign land. The category of ‘stranger’ never settled, instead shifting continuously throughout the early modern period. The category of ‘stranger’ in England never settled, instead shifting continuously throughout the early modern period How did the Reformation disrupt the image of Englishness that Henry VIII had sought to project? It changed the very grammar of Englishness. Prior to the Reformation, belonging was largely about loyalty to the monarch and to a given dynasty, but the break with Rome unsettled that framework. Suddenly, allegiance was not simply to a king but to a religious sentiment. Faith became entangled with questions of nationality. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign, to be English meant increasingly to be Protestant; then, under Mary I, it meant to be Catholic; and under Elizabeth I, it meant to be Protestant again. This oscillation made the boundary between ‘English’ and ‘stranger’ increasingly fraught. What happened if you were an English Catholic living under Protestant rule? Were you as English as your Protestant neighbours? One of the many people caught in this crossfire was Thomas Stephens. He was a young Catholic when he left England for Rome and joined the Society of Jesus. By 1579, he was a Jesuit missionary in Goa, where he became the first Englishman to write a biblical epic – a retelling of Christian salvation history. Crucially, he wrote it in Marathi and Konkani, languages of western India. Stephens’s life and work capture how unsettled Englishness had become in the wake of the Reformation: shaped not just by where you were born, but by the faith you followed and the worlds you inhabited. His story shows just how far those boundaries could stretch, until being English no longer sat easily in one place or allegiance, pulled as it was between competing loyalties, worlds and ways of seeing. By the reign of Elizabeth I, could immigrants expect to be assimilated into English society? In writing this book, I spent a lot of time poring over letters written by displaced families, both English and non-English, containing experiences with which we can identify. These people worried about work. They missed familiar food. They worried about the rumours of deaths, marriages and pregnancies of loved ones who were far away from them. They joined guilds and baptised their children. Assimilation wasn’t automatic, but letters from 16th-century displaced families show us that it was definitely possible. For instance, one of the people I follow in the book is a Dutch merchant called Jacques de Hem. In the 1580s, he landed in Norwich, which took in huge waves of immigrants – including Protestants fleeing persecution in the Spanish-controlled Low Countries – who supplied skills and jobs needed by the city and its economy. Jacques was one such man, and he became a very notable member of the community. During a harvest crisis in the 1590s, he sourced grain for Norwich from Amsterdam. When growing fears about the threat of a Spanish Armada drove English cities to undertake muster calls of able-bodied men to protect resources, Jacques put his name forward. He went on to buy citizenship for himself and his family, and the names of his children are in Norwich’s registers. Jacques offers us the classic story of the good immigrant: he belonged because he was useful and loyal. There is, though, another side to this story. Roderigo Lopez was a Portuguese-born Jewish-Christian convert who enjoyed a meteoric rise. He was Elizabethan England’s celebrity doctor, tending to everyone who was worth knowing – including the queen herself. But then the tide turned. One day Roderigo was writing a grumpy letter to his son’s headmaster, the next he was arrested for treason, based on his passing information about the English court to Spain, and an alleged plot to poison the queen; he was executed in 1594. In the blink of an eye, the Lopez family’s fortunes had been reversed. Usefulness had offered him protection and a route to assimilation – until it didn’t. England and Scotland were unified under James VI & I in 1603. What new questions of allegiance did his reign raise? When James – a Scot – came to the English throne, the question suddenly wasn’t only about who was English, but about what made you English. Was it that you were born in England? If so, then what about James’s Scottish subjects who had come to England with him and had children there? What happened when an English man had a child abroad? Where did that child’s allegiance lie? These were the debates around right of soil and right of blood. Their resonances carry even today. One example of this is William Adams, an English sailor who left his wife and children and boarded a Dutch ship bound for Asia in 1598. Having survived the arduous voyage, Adams arrived in Japan in 1600, married a Japanese woman, and became deeply embedded in the foreign political system, acting as an interpreter and negotiator for European companies trying to set up trade relations with Japan. Yet when he wrote a letter back to England, he started by declaring: “I am a Kentish man.” It’s incredibly telling that this man – who now had a new name, a new language, and new family thousands of miles away – still identified himself through his roots in Kent. William’s story shows us how the idea of birthright and national identity became even more complicated during the 17th century, when trade facilitated exchange and connection on an international scale. How did ideas of nationhood change as the English colonies became more established throughout the 17th century? Englishness was enforced far more stringently in contested colonial territories as the 17th century progressed. This happened first in Ireland, then across the Atlantic, where negotiations involving language, religion and belonging became even more brutal. We can see this in the story of Elizabeth Key, daughter of an Englishman, Thomas Key, and an enslaved African woman in the colony of Virginia. In 1656, Elizabeth brought a case in Virginia, claiming that she could not be held as property because by law the court should recognise her paternal Englishness. Her suit rested on the idea that the father was the more important parent when it came to determining a child’s identity, and that, crucially, an English man or woman could not be enslaved. Elizabeth used these arguments to assert that she was a free English woman – and the court agreed. However, in 1662, soon after Elizabeth had won her freedom, the Virginia General Assembly changed the law. Enslavement became hereditary through the maternal line – so if your mother was enslaved, you were doomed to enslavement, too. This moment of legal change feels hugely poignant because it is a moment at which belonging became racialised. In Virginia, it became easier for some to belong than it was for others, and that ease of belonging depended on your race, your appearance and your background. Stories such as Elizabeth Key’s reveal that colonisation and empire didn’t just expand English identity – they actually transformed it. The concept of a national identity was repeatedly redefined beyond English shores throughout the 17th century, because cases such as Key’s surfaced wherever the English had set foot. Can we trace any continuities across these stories of negotiating identity and belonging? What emerges from this history is that English national identity is not a settled inheritance that was later disturbed by mobility. Instead, English identity was clarified by that mobility in the Tudor and Stuart era. Every time a stranger appeared in England or an English person became a stranger abroad, the state had to articulate who counted and who didn’t. That constant redefinition shows us that belonging was never final in the 150 years of history my book covers – it was granted, contested, revoked and renegotiated. Instability is the common thread in this history. In a way, the stranger, the exile, the denizen, the naturalised citizen and the child born on the wrong side of a boundary all collectively demonstrate a simple key fact: national identity is contingent, and is granted and withdrawn in response to mobility. The stranger is not just someone who arrives at a nation’s door – it’s also the person who leaves it. So in these stories the stranger is Levina Teerlinc at court or Jacques de Hem in Norwich, but it’s also William Adams writing from Japan and Thomas Stephens settling in Goa. As often as the English were hosts at home, they were strangers abroad themselves. That reciprocity is quite crucial, I think, because it shows us that belonging has never been something that was absolutely owned by some and entirely withheld from others, simply by virtue of birth, religion or language. Belonging has always been worked out through encounter, movement and adaptation. Do you think that this history speaks to our modern political climate? I’m cautious about drawing neat parallels because the 16th and 17th centuries are quite explicitly not the 21st. That said, what history can offer is perspective. The early modern period reminds us that national identity has never been static, and that the tension around belonging isn’t new. Political communities repeatedly recalibrate the terms of belonging when faced with mobility and change. There are cycles and pressures – such as economic strain, religious conflict and political uncertainty – that sharpened anxieties about belonging in the early modern period and which continue to do so today. I think we tend to forget that the nation has always been argued over. The early modern period reminds us that national identity has never been static, and that the tension around belonging isn’t new How do these stories complicate the well-worn Tudor and Stuart histories centred on monarchs and courtiers? Those well-known histories are where my fascination with this period started, and I’m still fascinated by those monarchs and courtiers. Those histories matter, but they can also make it look as if the nation were shaped solely from the centre outwards. What my book shows is that England and Englishness were also being forged in workshops, on the streets of towns such as Portsmouth and Southampton, in courtrooms and in parishes, by English and non-English people. The title of my book comes from Shakespeare’s play Richard II, in which John of Gaunt calls England “this little world”. Quite often, this speech is taken out of context, seen as a wonderful celebration of a ‘Golden England’ in the past. But even in John of Gaunt’s speech, “this little world” is not only already in the past – it’s also a broken ideal. It’s a lament for a very fragile vision of an England that was crumbling rapidly under political pressure and greed. If my book has an impact, I hope that it will encourage readers to stop seeing national identity as something that is declared from above or the centre, and that they will recognise it as something that is fragile, contested and repeatedly remade through encounter. This book is about the tension between imagining England as an island-bound nation, and discovering that in the Tudor age it was already shaped by the world. Nandini Das is professor of early modern literature and culture at the University of Oxford. Her previous books include Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023) This article was first published in the June 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine