Writing the Forgotten War II: Somerset’s War, 1547–1550

Chapter 2 considers the war led by Edward Seymour, Protector Somerset. Somerset saw the Scots as culpably resistant to God’s providential plan for an imperial ‘Great Britain’ with Edward VI as emperor. Metalepsis, a reversal of cause and effect, governs Somerset’s rhetoric and military strategy. His 15,000-strong amphibious army entered Scotland in 1547, heralded by a proclamation declaring that Scots who did not recognize the peaceful aim of this invasion would be the cause of violence against themselves. This preposterous logic is perpetuated by modern reference to the wars as ‘Rough Wooings’. The chapter analyses Somerset’s innovative amphibious strategy (fortifying the Forth and the Tay) in terms of the incoherence and hidden violence of his favoured metaphor of Britain as an island fortress walled by the sea, garrisoned by Anglo-Scots love. It interprets Hans Eworth’s arresting painting of Sir John Luttrell rising, naked, from the Firth of Forth. The chapter lays the ground for understanding what is wrong with the modern critical assumption that ‘Great Britain’ was James VI and I’s project and what is at stake in the occlusions that such a misreading of history permits.