{{Use dmy dates|date=September 2019}} {{Use British English|date=September 2019}} '''James Henrisoun''' (died before 1570) was a Scottish merchant of Edinburgh, and writer in favour of Anglo-Scottish union.<ref name="ODNB">{{cite ODNB|id=69905|title=Henrisoun, James|first=Marcus|last=Merriman}}</ref><ref name="Armitage2000">{{cite book|author=David Armitage|title=The Ideological Origins of the British Empire|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PkuozOfNnKkC&pg=PA40|date=4 September 2000|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-78978-3|page=40}}</ref>
==Life== Successful in business, Henrisoun traded with Middelburg in the Netherlands, and encountered the Protestant Reformation there.<ref name="CarleyRiddy1997">{{cite book|author1=James P. Carley|author2=Felicity Riddy|title=Arthurian Literature XV|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Mh9Uw00jD6MC&pg=PA188|date=1 January 1997|publisher=Boydell & Brewer Ltd|isbn=978-0-85991-518-2|pages=188–9}}</ref> A Protestant convert in Catholic Scotland, he went to the Earl of Hertford during the 1544 English campaign in Scotland, the Burning of Edinburgh. He was taken back to London, and placed on a government pension.<ref name="Mason">{{cite book|author=Roger A. Mason|title=Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=tEx03wVgd0kC&pg=PA171|date=27 April 2006|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-02620-8|page=171}}</ref>
==Works== From 1547, by which time the young Edward VI was on the English throne and Hertford had become Protector Somerset, Henrisoun produced pro-union pamphlets.<ref name="Mason"/> His major work was ''An exhortacion to the Scottes to conforme them selfes to the honorable, expedient, and godly union betwene the twoo realmes of Englande and Scotlande'' (1547).
==Views== Henrisoun used the term "Great Britain", which may have been a neologism for the Scots language. His ''Godly and Golden Booke'' (1548) argued strongly that England and Scotland should become a single Protestant nation.<ref name="CarleyRiddy1997"/> He wished to abandon the terms "Scots" and "Englishmen", appealing to an underlying ethnicity of blood that was largely British.<ref>{{cite book|author=Philip Schwyzer|title=Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=L7yK4nvXmMYC&pg=PA36|year=2004|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-1-139-45662-3|page=36}}</ref>
In dealing with the myth of origins of the Scots, Henrisoun attacked Hector Boece, and his credulity in the matter of the Gathelus myth. He managed the dating of the arrival of Gaels in what is now Scotland with fair accuracy. At this period the mythological setting was significant.<ref>{{cite book|author=Marcus Merriman|author-link=Marcus Merriman|title=The Rough Wooings, Mary Queen of Scots, 1542–1551|year=2000|publisher=Tuckwell Press|isbn=1-86232-090-X|pages=[https://archive.org/details/roughwooingsmary00merr/page/45 45–6]|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/roughwooingsmary00merr/page/45}}</ref>
==Notes== {{Reflist}} {{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Henrisoun, James}} Category:Scottish merchants Category:16th-century Scottish writers Category:16th-century Scottish male writers