The first accessible history of Tudor Wales to integrate cultural and social history with the relatively familiar political story of the Tudor period. The way in which Henry VIII's government 'united' Wales and England through the acts of Union has often been told, but at a time when a semblance of Welsh autonomy has been at last conceded, what this Union meant for language, culture and identity remains a divisive legacy. The Union was an act of state intended to strengthen the Tudor dynasty in the aftermath of the break with Rome occasioned by Henry VIII's divorce from Anne Boleyn. It was an act welcomed by the local big-wigs in Wales, gentlemen of both native and colonist stock. In the fifteenth century Englishmen fearful of rebellion had been given to racial and cultural stereotypes that demeaned the Welsh; by 1550, if not before, the Welsh were 'safe', politically neutralised, and quiescent in the face of a religious revolution. The gentry had become junior partners in the Tudor state.After all, a dynasty of Welsh descent sat on the throne, and it would not be long before Elizabethan intellectuals sought to incorporate a mythology of Welsh 'Britons' into the cultural pot-pourri that evolved to reinforce the mystique of the Queen's court.
