By ERASMUS
YOUR correspondent was chatting the other day to a young home-furnishing salesman, representing a firm in the north of England whose market is mostly British. He proved to be a strong believer in Brexit, hard if necessary, and the reason he gave was slightly unexpected. As he saw things, the nation was reliving the age of Henry VIII, who in 1534 renounced the authority of the Pope, declared himself head of the church and laid the foundations of Anglicanism. “The king went for a complete break, and England soon started doing better than anywhere else in Europe. It will be the same after Brexit.”
Not all Brexit voters would pitch their case in such religious-historical terms, but English nostalgia has long had a weakness for the Tudor age: an era when Anglican heroes were burned by the Catholic Queen Mary, and William Shakespeare (in between pinching plots from Italian cities like Verona and Venice) lauded his country as “a sceptred isle” which stood proudly apart from the continent, “a precious jewel, set in the silver sea”.
