‘The Rose of Sharon’

This chapter explores metropolitan and colonial English thinking about England’s place in Europe from the Reformation of the sixteenth century to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, including the emergence of primitive ideas about English hegemony from the pens of Francis Bacon and James Harrington. It also looks at the impact of foreign affairs on England’s domestic politics, including the Civil War and the Restoration. And it shows how the early colonization of North America, from Hakluyt’s narratives to the revolutions in Boston and New York in 1688, via John Winthrop’s Long March and Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design, was conducted in close and conscious union with thinking about the European system and the peace of Christendom.