reigns, / ’Twere all in vain, for heavens and destinies / Attend and wait upon
her majesty” ( 2. 4. 103 – 8 ).
Although this passage speaks to “the condition of England” in an overtly
conventional form, English audiences are to take no more—and maybe less—
stock in Sebastian’s encomium, I think, than they are in John of Gaunt’s va-
cantly nostalgic idealization of the “sceptred isle” (R 22. 1. 40 ) in Shakespeare’s
Richard II( 1595 ), both which seem strangely out of touch with the political
realities unsettling the imagined nation.^54 Indeed, Sebastian’s vision of an in-
violate, impenetrable England should give pause to spectators who have just
seen where isolation leads Muly Mahamet: to a debilitating despair, impo-
tence, regression, and retreat. In any case, in playing up England’s strength,
Sebastian’s point is solely to play down Stukeley’s, to prove his forces “far too
weak” for the invasion of Ireland that would otherwise keep him from Mo-
rocco ( 2. 4. 100 ). These forces are stronger in Peele than they were historically,
adding up to seven ships and six thousand troops rather than the three ships
and six hundred soldiers of the “real” faction.^55 The difference may work to
amplify the threat that Stukeley poses to Ireland and so to England—a threat
that Queen Elizabeth apparently feared, worrying that Sebastian and Stuke-
ley would head there instead of Morocco.^56 But if the troop increase makes
Sebastian’s derailment of the Irish campaign a welcome side effect of his
self-promotion, his ostensible idealization of England’s natural and national
sovereignty betrays itself nonetheless as what it is: self-serving propaganda,
designed to advance Portugal’s, not England’s, fame. Though Stukeley acqui-
esces, pausing to “admire [Sebastian’s] words” ( 2. 4. 137 ), the Catholic leaders
who accompany him do neither, “willingly” agreeing “to be commanded”
only because the king has “made [them] captives at [his] royal will”
( 2. 4. 158 – 60 ).
Ultimately, Sebastian’s alliance with Stukeley does not speak well for
either Portugal or England, or for a nationalist cause. Though he asks Stuke-
ley to follow him to “fruitful Barbary” “in honour of thy country’s fame”
( 2. 4. 85 , 87 ), the “Englishman” defines himself as fervently against the bounds
of nation as the Portuguese king defines himself through them. The “real”
Stukeley was infamous for being a renegade expatriate, if also a “bubble of
emptiness, and meteor of ostentation.”^57 A known Catholic, he was alter-
nately embraced and spurned (even imprisoned) within England, with the re-
sult that he spent substantial portions of his career in Catholic Europe.^58 In
the 1550 s, for example, he fled to France and allied himself with Henri II after
participating in a potentially treasonous plot against the English state. He
Enter Barbary 37