Occasionally one encounters an academic volume that leaves the reader profoundly uneasy. J. P. D. Cooper's Propaganda and the Tudor State is one such book: for what ought to have been a stimulating and provocative contribution to an energetic debate about the place of Cornwall and the Cornish (as well as Devon) in the history of the early modern British state is instead an unhappy confusion. The confusion is, as we shall see, twofold: first, in the use of evidence and, second, in the presentation of arguments to support a thesis that ultimately does not hold water.

In recent years, it has been argued strongly that Cornwall was one of the component territories and the Cornish one of the constituent peoples of the “Atlantic Archipelago,” and that the Cornish reacted violently in a series of rebellions—from 1497 to 1648—to successive intrusions in their affairs by the expanding Tudor and Stuart states. This view has been associated especially with the work of Mark Stoyle, exemplified in his recent West Britons: Cornish Identities and the Early Modern British State (Exeter, 2002). Stoyle's intervention has been welcomed generally as a major contribution to the “new British history,” but Stoyle himself has anticipated a “Kernowsceptic backlash” that would attempt “to thrust the historiography of early modern Cornwall firmly back into the box labelled ‘English local history’” (Mark Stoyle, “Re-discovering Difference: The Recent Historiography of Early Modern Cornwall,” Cornish Studies, 2nd ser., 10 [2002]: 112).

At first glance, Cooper's volume is just the response that Stoyle had expected. Far from asserting Cornish “difference,” Cooper adopts a Devon-and-Cornwall approach for his study, implying a cultural-political as well as geographical unity for this peninsular region. Moreover, in contrast to the emphasis on resistance and rebellion, Cooper sees Tudor Cornwall and Devon as exemplars of “obedience and uniformity” (261), with Cornwall as well as Devon integrated firmly “within England's national imagination, as well as its administrative and judicial frameworks” (3). Indeed, for Cooper there is “an eloquent … case for the coherence of Devon, Cornwall, and Scilly as a unit of analysis” (5). And this regional coherence, far from challenging the authority of the crown, nurtured allegiance to the monarchy and loyalty to the nation-state of which the peninsula was a part.

The stage is set then, or so it seems, for a stimulating contest between the perspectives of Stoyle and Cooper, between the opposing models of Cornwall as a hotbed of rebellion and Devon-and-Cornwall as a contented bastion of loyalty. Unfortunately, it proves to be no contest because Cooper's analysis is fatally flawed.

First, Cooper's use of evidence is often partial and unsatisfactory. For example, to show that “far from being a dangerous and restless borderland, Devon and Cornwall were integrated within the allegiance demanded by the English state, and were increasingly keen to celebrate the fact” (51), he relies on fragmentary churchwardens’ and borough accounts. He asserts, for example, that Elizabeth I's ascension day was celebrated vigorously throughout Devon and Cornwall. He finds evidence for eight Devon parishes but for just three in Cornwall: North Petherwin, Antony, and Stratton. What Cooper does not tell us is that North Petherwin, situated on the border, was administered as part of Devon until as recently as the mid-1960s and that Antony (opposite Plymouth) and Stratton (in the far northeast) are also border parishes isolated from the greater part of Cornwall.

Likewise, Cooper suggests that there was little likelihood that Arthur was still a folk hero in Tudor Cornwall, observing confidently that “there is little in the way of drama or literature to prove it” (108–9). And yet one of the most breathtaking discoveries in Cornish-language studies in recent years has been the miracle play Beunans Ke—the Life of St. Kea—that has a strong Arthurian theme! Elsewhere Cooper's sketchy knowledge of the state of Cornish-language studies is also apparent, especially in his reliance on long-supplanted research on the extent to which Cornish was spoken in Tudor Cornwall. His suggestion that by the mid-sixteenth century Cornish had become confined to two small areas in the far west is simply wrong, as recent research confirms.

Second, Cooper ultimately seems unsure of his thesis. Despite his apparent confidence in the Devon-and-Cornwall model, and in the supposed allegiance of this region to the crown, at times Cooper's guard collapses, and he is forced to admit the strength of Cornish distinctiveness. For example, he devotes a chapter to “Tyranny and Drama” (69–84), dismissing interpretations of the Cornish-language miracle play Beunans Meriasek—the Life of St. Meriasek—that have suggested that it was a subversive document aimed at criticizing the Tudor regime. Yet he appears unconvinced by his own arguments, concluding lamely that “it cannot be denied that Beunans Meriasek might have had political overtones to an audience in and around Camborne when staged after the uprisings of 1497” (81).

Similarly, in his overall conclusion to the book, he cannot avoid the admission that “there was certainly something distinctive about the culture of Tudor Cornwall, setting it apart from Devon and the rest of England” (254). Alas, had Cooper cared to take greater notice of the wealth of research produced in the field of Cornish Studies over the past ten years or so, he might have found the means of resolving the many contradictions and paradoxes that clearly troubled him in the fashioning of this volume.