Niall Ferguson got me thinking about this in his Sunday Times piece, in which he rejected the allure of Brexit and declared himself an ‘Anglosceptic’. He concluded: ‘In the days before empire, Henry VIII’s version of Brexit was to renounce Roman Catholicism and divorce Catherine of Aragon. A true sceptic in those days would have advised him to Bremain — and unite against the Turk.’
It’s an odd choice of illustration, because in that case Brexit did work, it paved the way for a stronger braver England, then Britain. It was the making of us. Tudor history is surely a precedent in the Brexiters’ favour.
So can Boris dress up as Henry VIII, so to speak, and paint Brussels as Rome? In a sense he is doing exactly this, when he talks of sovereignty. Henry’s Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533 declared England to be ‘an empire unto itself’, meaning a sovereign nation that must reject alien laws coming from another European city.
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