Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England 9781441149442, 9781441195012, 9781472599896, 9781441156754

Table of contents :
HalfTitle
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgements
1 Reading authority and representing rule: Introduction
I
II
III
IV
V
PART ONE Reading authority
2 Reading James writing: The subject of royal writings in Jacobean Britain
3 Uncommon places? Sir William Drake’s reading notes
4 Reading revelations: Prophecy, hermeneutics and politics in early modern Britain, 1560–1720
I
II
III
IV
V
5 Transplanting revelation, transferring meaning: Reading the apocalypse in early modern England, Scotland and New England
I
II
III
IV
V
PART TWO Representing rule
6 Sacralization and demystification: The publicization of monarchy in early modern England
Representation and regality
Tudor representations
Publicity and politics
Representation and revolution
7 Virtues, passions and politics in early modern England
8 Van Dyck, the royal image and the Caroline court
9 ‘So hard a text’? Images of Charles I, 1612–1700
I
II
III
IV
V
10 ‘Something of Monarchy’: Milton and Cromwell, republicanism and regality
I
II
III
IV
11 Restoration and reconstitution: Politics, society and culture in the England of Charles II
Contrary interests: England in 1660
A new politics
Toleration and a more secular spirit?
The woman as good as the man
Party lines: Politics and literary culture
Tradition and innovation
12 ‘Thy longing country’s darling and desire’: Aesthetics, sex and politics in the England of Charles II
13 Whose life is it anyway? Writing early modern monarchs and the ‘Life’ of James II
I
II
NOTES
INDEX

Citation preview

Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England

Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England Kevin Sharpe

L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 110 USA

www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Kevin Sharpe, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Kevin Sharpe has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. EISBN: 978-1-4411-5675-4

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

In Memory of Sir Joseph Williamson and for Keith Baker and Charles Malyon

Contents

List of illustrations  ix Preface and acknowledgements  x

1  Reading authority and representing rule: Introduction  PART ONE  Reading authority 

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29

2 Reading James writing: The subject of royal writings in Jacobean Britain  31 3 Uncommon places? Sir William Drake’s reading notes  47 4 Reading revelations: Prophecy, hermeneutics and politics in early modern Britain, 1560–1720  55 5 Transplanting revelation, transferring meaning: Reading the apocalypse in early modern England, Scotland and New England  85 PART TWO  Representing rule 

103

6 Sacralization and demystification: The publicization of monarchy in early modern England  105 7 Virtues, passions and politics in early modern England  8  Van Dyck, the royal image and the Caroline court  9  ‘So hard a text’? Images of Charles I, 1612–1700 

141 153

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CONTENTS

10 ‘Something of Monarchy’: Milton and Cromwell, republicanism and regality  173 11 Restoration and reconstitution: Politics, society and culture in the England of Charles II  193 12 ‘Thy longing country’s darling and desire’: Aesthetics, sex and politics in the England of Charles II  209 13 Whose life is it anyway? Writing early modern monarchs and the ‘Life’ of James II  229

Notes  243 Index  317

List of illustrations

1 Extract from Ben Jonson, Sejanus, made by Sir William Drake  2 Frontispiece to Precationes Privatae Regiae E.R. (1563)  3 Tin-glazed charger plate, 16  4 Van Dyck, The Continence of Scipio  5 Van Dyck, Cupid and Psyche  6 Inigo Jones, The Storm & Tempest  7 Inigo Jones, A Peaceful Country  8 Van Dyck, Charles I on horseback  9 Van Dyck, Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson  10 Robert Walker, Oliver Cromwell  11 Cromwell Charter  12 William Faithorne, Oliver Cromwell  13 Olivarius Cromwell  14 Pierre Lombart, Oliver Cromwell  15 Dirck Roderigo Stoop, Charles II’s cavalcade through the City of London  16 David Loggan, King Charles II (‘The Return of the Monarchy’)  17 Coronation of Charles II: The Choir of Westminster Abbey  18 Stephen College, The Solemn Mock Procession  19 Peter Lely, Diana Kirke, later Countess of Oxford  20 Peter Lely, Barbara Palmer (née Villiers), Duchess of Cleveland with her son  21 Remigius vam Leemput, Henry VII, Elizabeth of York, Henry VIII and Jane Seymour  22 Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Queen Elizabeth I  23 Isaac Fuller, King Charles II in Boscobel Wood  24 Medal commemorating the Peace of Breda, 1667 

Preface and Acknowledgements

With hindsight – certainly without ever having planned it – I can see that I have been inclined to publish a collection of my own essays about every ten years. I am not sure why. As I indicated in the preface to my last, financial incentives explain nothing: with each volume I probably spent more preparing the collections than I earned. In each case, I wanted to make a statement about the field of early modern studies and my own place in it. I published Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England (1989) in an attempt to extricate my own work, and to move the historiographical debate, from a revisionism which had no place for ideas; in Remapping Early Modern England (2000), I more polemically set out an interdisciplinary agenda for my own future studies and, I hoped, as a spur to others; I advocated a new rhetoric of history and a ‘cultural turn’ and outlined what I proposed to try to contribute to it. Reading Authority and Representing Rule looks both backwards and forwards. Many of the essays in this collection were written as forays into two terrains I had mapped as promising areas of historical enquiry: the history of the book and reading and visual and material culture, the history of the representations and perceptions of authority. The essays I have selected here were originally written for different purposes and I have deliberately chosen to include, as I did before, a couple of contributions intended for broader audiences or exhibitions. In the introduction, I have tried not only to assess my own work but to review the state of the art in early modern English studies since 2000 and to propose, perhaps less polemically than a decade ago, some suggestions about what remains to be done and what to me seem to be promising questions and approaches. Controversially, I assert that, for all the rhetoric of the modern academy, there has been a retreat from interdisciplinary scholarship in an age of retrenchment and disciplinary conservatism and defensiveness. In this volume, as before, I seek to counter this trend and to argue that many of the questions in which historians are most interested invite – I would go so far as to say compel – address to a wide range of texts (poems and plays, prints and playing cards, medals and coins) and interdisciplinary methods of reading and explicating them. I make this case at the end of two decades

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of working in this way and in full awareness of the disinclination of many of my historical colleagues to these approaches and of some of the critical responses to my own recent work on images of power. Except to standardize notes or correct an occasional typo or error, I have published the essays as they first appeared. Rather than attempting to update the text or the notes (except where a work listed as forthcoming has now appeared), I have, in my introduction revisited many of these subjects in the light of recent research and publications. For permission to publish these pieces here, I thank, in order of chapters, Daniel Fischlin, Mark Fortier and Wayne State University Press; the Folger Shakespeare Library and Sabrina Alcorn; Steve Zwicker and Cambridge University Press; Allan Macinnes, Arthur Williamson and Brill; Jeroen Deploige, Gita Deneckere and Amsterdam University Press; Karen Hearn and Tate Britain; The Historical Journal and Cambridge University Press; Julia Alexander, Catharine MacLeod, the National Portrait Gallery and Yale University Press (chs 11 and 12); and Steve Zwicker and Oxford University Press. As always I would like to express my thanks to all the friends and colleagues with whom I have a stimulating conversation about early modern England: Julia Marciari Alexander, Alastair Bellany, George Bernard, Tom Corns, Karen Hearn, Ann Hughes, Ronald Hutton, Mark Kishlansky, Mark Knights, Peter Lake, Catharine MacLeod, John Morrill, Annabel Patterson, Steve Pincus, Joad Raymond, Greg Walker and Steve Zwicker. I am especially grateful to Julia Alexander and Catharine MacLeod for inviting me to participate in the exhibition, catalogue and colloquium for Painted Ladies at the National Portrait Gallery and Yale Centre for British Art and to Karen Hearn and Stephen Deuchar of Tate Britain for inviting me to act as historical consultant to the Tate exhibition Van Dyck in Britain. Ann Hughes and Steve Zwicker did me the great favour and kindness of reading and commenting on the introduction. These essays were all made possible by generous leaves funded by the Huntington Library, the California Institute of Technology, the Humboldt Foundation and, especially, the Leverhulme Trust: I would like to publicize my appreciation to them all. Though I cannot, alas, express any gratitude to the present senior management at Queen Mary, I would very much like to express my thanks to colleagues who have always stimulated and supported my work there, especially Jerry Brotton, David Colclough, Trevor Dadson, Lisa Jardine, Colin Jones and Michael Questier, as well as to former colleagues at Warwick  – notably Trevor Burnard, Elizabeth Clarke, Steve Hindle, Peter Marshall and especially Mark Knights and Matthew Neufeld with whom I have had many profitable discussions. Liz Cameron took on the unenviable job of retyping all the essays and assisting with common formatting. I am grateful to Srikanth Srinivasan copy editor and Newgen Knowledge Works who prepared the index, a

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task that experience has shown I am not suited to executing. Most of all at Bloomsbury, I would also like to thank Ben Hayes who first encouraged me to prepare this collection and Claire Lipscomb who has been supportive and helpful throughout, especially with obtaining illustrations. The collection is dedicated to my old schoolmasters, Keith Baker and Charles (‘Charlie’) Malyon and to the memory of the founder of my school, the Restoration Secretary of State, Sir Joseph Williamson, where I had the benefit of a high-quality academic state school education sadly only rarely experienced today. Sir Joseph Williamson’s Mathematical School was relentlessly meritocratic and competitive and has continued to send pupils to Oxford, Cambridge and the best universities since I left.

1 Reading authority and representing rule: Introduction

I Over ten years ago, in an introduction to a volume of my essays, Remapping Early Modern England, I set out an agenda for a new cultural history of early modern politics.1 I urged a broader definition of the political and address to a wider range of texts for studying early modern politics; proposed the adoption – or rather the appropriation from other disciplines – of some new methods and approaches; and set out a number of projects that illustrated the kinds of interdisciplinary practice that I sought and in particular some that I was engaged upon. As my own contributions towards ‘a cultural history of politics or a history of political culture’, I planned a study of – then almost entirely neglected  – royal writings;2 promised a study of the reading of authority, shaped by the work of critics and historians of the book who have demonstrated that it is readers as much as authors who make and determine the meanings of texts; and sketched a ‘major project’ – a study of royal representations and images of power from the Henrician Reformation to the 1688 Revolution. A decade later seems a good time to take stock of those projects and the larger agendas that I outlined, as well as to reconsider the state of the field and the future (as I see it) of early modern studies. First, however, it seems fitting to look back: to how Remapping was reviewed and at the reactions to the arguments I ventured and the agenda I outlined. As a contribution to early modern studies, I had intended that the volume move away from what I had come to think was a stale and sterile debate between revisionists and anti- or post-revisionist historians. Some critics, however, read  – and criticized – the book as still a revisionist study: the essays, it was objected (even by friendly reviewers) played down the revolutionary changes of the

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century and their revolutionary causes; they focused on the monarchy, the court and elites and ignored, among other subjects, religion and popular politics.3 One long and considered review essay judged Remapping as, if not still an entirely revisionist text, a book yet immersed in the debates over revisionism, not one that would productively lead us out of them.4 I think those criticisms are largely fair in so far as it is true that my own work did then focus – and has since continued to focus – on rulers and courts. But what I had sought and seek is a history that recognized that the exercise of rule and the culture of authority could never simply focus on rulers and elites: that, as I have gone on to argue at length, the representation and exercise of authority perforce involved a dialogue with subjects.5 Given that recognition, I wanted to reject the prevailing revisionist high narratives of politics in which, as well as the people, it often felt that ideas and ideology had no place. As a former (though, as reviewers observed, never in some respects a straightforward) revisionist, I published Remapping to insist that the ideas be put back into the story of seventeenth-century politics and to make it indefensible to write that narrative without them. To what extent it was a consequence of my intervention is not for me to say, but what has clearly happened since 2000 is the end of the historiographical wars that first fired, then attenuated, work on early modern England. Historians of the period now seldom identify themselves or are labelled as ‘revisionist’ or ‘anti-revisionist’; more importantly, the perspectives of both now inform the best work which, as well as a broad address to popular politics and a ‘public sphere’, retains a concern with exact moments and contexts so often missing from the old whig narratives.6 Though there remains uncertainty (to which I will return) about where the field is going, it is clear that historians of early modern England have moved on. As well as a contribution to our history of seventeenth-century England, the essays in Remapping urged historians to embrace new materials and new methods for study of the Renaissance state. As an academic who had spent time in interdisciplinary research centres and libraries in the United States, I had been influenced by the methods of other disciplines (then principally literary studies but also anthropology) and had  – reluctantly and resistantly  – been compelled in discussion to confront the challenges of various theoretical moves to the (untheorized) assumptions and working practices of historians.7 While I never fully embraced the turn to theory that characterized much discourse in the humanities  – with (in the main) the exception of history  – in the 1980s and early 1990s, I had found the questions about claims to historical truth, the constructedness and ideology of all historical narratives and representations stimulating.8 And I was certain of the importance for historians of the critic’s concerns with language, metaphor and trope, of the critical languages (of genre, for example) and of the engagement with records of the past as texts rather than mere documents: that is with processes of reading and interpreting which encompassed all the rhetoricity and instabilities of texts and meanings, the affective as well as

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rational force of scripts, and the anxieties and faultlines they disclosed  – some of which new schools of criticism (feminist or deconstructionist, for instance) had emphasized more than had traditional close readings.9 More particularly – and more pertinent to my own area – was the influence on my work and working methods of the ‘new historicism’ which flourished in the 1980s. In collapsing borders between historical documents and literary texts, in reading all discourses as texts of power and resistance, in insisting on ‘the historicity of text’ (and more radically, ‘the textuality of history’), new historicist critics seemed to me to extend an attractive invitation to historians, especially of early modern England to cooperate in a better explication and understanding of a Renaissance culture in which modern disciplines had neither existed nor would have made any sense.10 Though already by the time I prepared the essays in Remapping, there were many criticisms of new historicist scholarship and methods  – both by critics and historians who largely discredited its claims to be historical – I still felt the best work showed the rich opportunities that might lay ahead for collaboration across the disciplines which Remapping was published to advance.11 Though critical approaches and new historicism had been at the centre of my interdisciplinary project, by 2000 I had become interested in other kinds of texts (partially or non-verbal) in and through which contemporaries explored meaning and their own identities and communities, personal, social and civic. From the early 1990s I had been working on images of authority in early modern England; and, along with research, I had been engaging with new scholarship in not only art history but what was beginning to be renamed the history of visual and material culture and with the challenges and questions such work had presented to a connoisseur tradition that still dominated in some fields and which had helped to marginalize visual texts and objects such as copies of paintings, prints and woodcuts, medals and porcelain.12 Though it was then early on in my own thinking about those challenges, I discerned not only the subjects  – and texts or documents  – they opened, but the possibilities for a methodological dialogue between those working with written and visual texts and conversations between both and social and political historians, many of whom had paid them scant or no attention. Accordingly, in Remapping, I advocated a ‘cultural turn’ (a term I used consciously to echo the ‘linguistic turn’, which had transformed the history of political ideas) which, I then hoped, might enrich our understanding of early modern England and transform the way we wrote political history.13 For all their rather different reactions, it was evident that both literary scholars and historians (interestingly – and perhaps a sign then of the distance between them and historians – no art historian reviewed it) recognized my polemical agenda. Though he regretted my insularity that had precluded a European perspective, a French reviewer observed that Remapping had laid out a long-term programme for interdisciplinary research; the reviewer in Shakespeare Studies, with a nice sense of the polemical edge implied by

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the term, called it an ‘agenda’; a later website using more explicit political terms, described my introductory essay as ‘the closest thing there is to a manifesto for the benefits of interdisciplinary work on this period.’14 In the main that manifesto was greeted more positively by critics than historians. One reviewer in a major historical journal (who had clearly not been much immersed in scholarship that had problematized his terms) sounded concerned that my approach would ‘substitute language for process and structure’; a similar anxiety may underline another reviewer’s summary of my claim that ‘Language, symbol, and gesture were as political as were debates and statutes.’15 On the other part, some commentators lamented that my own methodological invocations were inadequately theorized or drew on eclectic and contrary theoretical schools.16 To that last criticism I happily plead guilty. Rather than attaching myself to any school, I have preferred to borrow and use whatever keys open new doors for me or whatever tools help me to do my job of understanding early modern English culture and politics.17 What then of the agenda and approaches I advocated? By 2000, there was already a clear reaction in the academy to the dominance of theory; along with historians who breathed a sigh of relief that the challenge had passed, critics, though they continued to be influenced by various moves lumped together as postmodernism, increasingly ceased to foreground a theorist or theoretical school in their work. Less apparent at the time, but now more increasingly obvious (as I shall discuss) new historicist criticism had also passed its heyday and few young scholars positioned themselves as doing new historicist work. Whether a consequence of these developments or another unconnected causally to them, the interdisciplinary doors opened in the 1980s also began to close. As I will explore further, the rhetoric of interdisciplinarity remained ubiquitous; but in reality the disciplines of history (particularly) and literature returned to police their borders and to insist on the unique skills and rigour of their methods – or craft as historians preferred to call it. Professor Richard Evans’s In Defence of History, published in 1997, was symptomatic of the new mood, which has even led literary critics to talk of a new formalism.18 This is not to say that literary scholars are not doing historical work  – though the reverse is true: few historians engage with literary texts let alone critical methods. But the historical studies published by literary scholars no longer emerge from any evident dialogue with historians who, in the main, feel entitled to ignore them as existing in a parallel universe, in the same way that ‘popular’ histories were (and still are?) disregarded by academic historians. In universities, certainly in the United Kingdom, since the turn of the century when Remapping appeared, interdisciplinary schools have been closing as programmes are organized in departments, and my sense is that joint degrees are fewer and less popular than they were.19 Only in one area of early modern studies has there been an increase in the kind of interdisciplinary work that I had urged  – visual culture.

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Since the end of the 1990s, perhaps as a consequence of the pioneering exhibition and catalogue by Anthony Griffiths of The Print in Early Stuart England and Timothy Clayton’s study of engraving in sixteenthand seventeenth-century England, several young scholars have turned to the study of a neglected genre of visual culture and have read prints as texts and records of the past, not (as was long customary) used them as mere illustrations to decorate their books.20 While much of this work has come out of scholars in departments of literature, historians such as Mark Knights have centred satirical prints and even illustrated playing cards in their analyses of politics and partisanship at the end of the century, and (not least thanks to the pioneering databases such as British Printed Images) early modern English historians are increasingly venturing to ‘read’ visual and material texts – as well as portraits. title pages, ballads or landscapes.21 Recently too the work of art historians of early modern England has taken a more historicist turn as exhibitions on and studies of the Reformation, Tudor and Stuart portraiture and statues, early tapestries and textiles, silverware and gardens have situated and interpreted various visual texts as performing in and on their age.22 I shall return to consider the future research possibilities this promises. For now, I wish only to note how in this respect what I had hoped for in the 1990s has surpassed my greatest expectations. For all the nervousness that remains among historians concerning reading visual texts, younger scholars are publishing exciting and truly interdisciplinary studies which have overturned many earlier assumptions: about Protestant iconophobia, the exclusivity of courtly visual forms, the representation of early modern women and the relationship of visual materials to politics.23 More generally, historians – especially younger scholars – have taken ‘a cultural turn’ and, as some scholars lament, traditional political narrative has become an unfashionable form. Though the interdisciplinary agenda I laid out in 2000 has not been pursued, some of the most interesting recent studies of the seventeenth century have moved far from the narrow conceptions of politics and restricted materials of older and revisionist narratives to embrace the visual representations of rulers, favourites and courtiers, the rituals of Restoration kingship and the cartoons through which, along with pamphlet polemics, party warfare was conducted from the 1680s.24 Albeit not entirely in the ways I had advocated, and although the contours yet remain unclear, seventeenth-century English history is indeed being remapped.

II In Remapping Early Modern England, as well as proposing a programme of interdisciplinary research for others, I outlined a cultural history of politics or history of political culture from the Reformation to the 1688 Revolution

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and specified three projects that I was setting myself – as examples of the kind of studies and approaches I sought. The first was a study of royal writings and locutions from Henry VIII to William III. I had long been puzzled as to why and how historians had all but ignored the various genres and forms of script written by monarchs: as well as speeches, declarations and proclamations, pamphlets, political treatises, prayers and biblical commentaries and devotions, stories, poems and songs. Historians had, of course, cited royal speeches or proclamations, but these had almost never been read as texts – as rhetorical performances that artfully deployed language, syntax and trope to make a case or to evoke feelings and fears. And the other genres – especially poetry and song but curiously also scriptural exegesis and memoir  – had been neglected, as though the proper terrain of others, perhaps critics or theologians.25 Just as curiously, literary scholars had shown surprisingly little interest in royal poems, songs or stories (such as Charles II’s escape from the battle of Worcester and his hiding in the oak tree).26 Though it might have been expected that new historicist critics, with their focus on discourse and power, might have seized the opportunity to study royal texts, they showed no interest in the writings of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth I or their Stuart successors – perhaps on account of a political aversion to regal forms. During the 1980s and 1990s, as critics assiduously sought and found republican voices and sensibilities in early modern texts, with a few exceptions (such as the Eikon Basilike) royal writings remained unstudied.27 Just as Remapping was published, however, the situation began to change. I suspect that it may have been (feminist) political commitments that encouraged, as it did so many biographies of the queen, the project to edit the works of Queen Elizabeth that has provided us with definitive texts of the last Tudor’s speeches and letters, prayers and poems, and translations in Latin and foreign languages as well as English.28 And, in the wake of that edition, literary scholars have at last published studies of some of the writings of Henry VIII and James I, and a much-needed edition of the works of Charles I is in preparation.29 It is worth observing that in all cases these editions and critical studies have been the work of literary scholars and that historians have remained uninterested in royal texts, especially verse; indeed an edition of James VI and I’s political writings omits any poems by a monarch who prided himself on his vatic accomplishments, wrote what amounted to two volumes of verse and published a treatise on the art of poetry which he considered related to the arts of government.30 Moreover, for all these invaluable works, I remain struck by what remains unedited and unstudied: in the case of Henry VIII, the polemical pamphlets such as A Glass of the Truth, or A Necessary Doctrine; the diary of Edward VI, the prayers of Charles I or the devotions of James II, for example.31 And beyond texts of the royal hand, we need to consider all those writings – proclamations and prayers – which were published under the royal name, with royal privilege and by the royal printer but where we cannot be sure how much, if any, was

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the monarch’s own words. As I argued, in early modern England, the term author was not restricted to one who created or produced a work but was used to identify he who authorized it.32 When contemporaries received and perceived works under the name of the sovereign as royal texts, we may need to widen our own categories of royal writings and their place in the discourses and politics of early modern England. In my own case, I did not pursue the project of a study of royal writings in quite the way I had intended, that is as a historical and critical monograph. In some of the essays that follow, I took a foray once again into James VI and I’s writings and wrote for the first time on James II’s war memoirs and devotions; and I devised and taught an MA course on royal writings across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.33 In the end, however, or rather somewhere along the way during my researches of the past decade, I made the decision that the best way to explicate royal words was to study them alongside other forms of royal representation – visual and ceremonial – and in the context of contestatory scripts. I shall return to discuss my larger project. For now, I remain uncertain whether I took the right decision and am clear that, in folding royal writings into a larger project, I lost dimensions of royal texts and the space to analyse them as they deserve. I can only hope and urge, therefore, that along with the recent work of Peter Herman, Curtis Perry, Jane Rickard and others, my recovery of a range of royal writings might stimulate the further editions and critical surveys and studies we need to understand both the rulers themselves and the relations between discourses, authority and animadversion in the early modern polity.34 The second project I outlined in Remapping was, as it were, the corollary of a study of royal writing: an investigation of the reading of authority in early modern England. At the time of writing the introduction to my collected essays, I was just completing a case study of a seventeenth-century reader for whom we had the largest collection of reading notes, commonplace books and annotated books that we have hitherto discovered.35 Sir William Drake of Shardeloes, Buckinghamshire (some of whose reading notes are the subject of Chapter 3), I argued, moved, as all readers do, between his books and his world, reading contemporary events through the prism of his (ancient and modern) books and interpreting his texts from his experiences of personal life, society and politics – he was an MP before and after the Civil War. Drake, I hope I showed, was able to form quite amoral values and radical political views not so much from reading heterodox works as from his own bricolage of texts, his reading, for example, the Bible and Machiavelli in parallel. Though, as I explained in the preface, the book began life as an accident, when I was consulted about a manuscript diary the Huntington Library was planning to purchase, it happened at a time when I was, not least through the influence of young scholars at the library, becoming interested in the histories of the book, reading and reception. When, therefore, I published my case study of Drake as Reading Revolutions, I intended the title to have a double meaning. That is, as well as arguing that Drake read through revolutions

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and experienced revolutionary changes in his reading, I wanted to claim that we too, as historians and critics, needed to fundamentally redirect our own practices by paying attention to the receptions of texts, to historical acts of reading and to recognize that authors (including royal authors) perforce always had readers – and resistant readers – in mind in all acts of writing. By situating my case alongside other, more famous readers (and writers), I pressed my case that the history of reading was – and needed in our own writings to be – central to the history of politics. Far from being an isolated case study, though it was clear that the case study was a promising genre for this kind of work, I had wanted to write a – yes, another – polemical treatise, urging scholars but more particularly historians to incorporate all the aspects of the history of the book (materiality, distributions, commerce, etc.) and reading in their work. Though they were in some respects a (predictable) disappointment, the immediate reactions to Reading Revolutions certainly made the point about the power of readers and underlined my other concerns about disciplinary practices and proscriptions. I recall when I gave talks about the book, where, in audiences dominated by students of literature, I was introduced as having written a book on early modern reading, historians typically announced that I had published a biography of William Drake! Not a few historians advised that I (I think they meant they) would have been better served had I omitted the methodological introduction and proceeded immediately to the archive, ignoring the fact that without the theoretical context supplied by work on reception and reading, I would have not seen the potential of the archive – some of which had been identified decades before –in the first place; and Drake, as David Norbrook astutely observed would have looked like a far more conservative figure than he was.36 The reviews were no less revealing. Some focused on the case, several observing that, for all his axioms for conduct and self-counsels for advancement, Drake was neither very active in politics (he fled abroad during the Civil War) nor did he secure high office, only obtaining by purchase the post of custos brevium of the Court of Common Pleas which he appears to have exercised by proxy.37 Such observation led to the criticism that, despite my arguments, there was a disjuncture between texts and readings on the one hand and politics and the ‘real world’ on the other – which questioned implicitly the larger claims I was making for the importance of the history of reading for historians. While these criticisms are important, they also missed my point but were again revelatory of much historical thinking. For, in contrast to those historians who looked for Drake’s part on the public stage of real politics and power, my argument was that we needed to broaden our sense of what constituted (and constitutes) politics – to recognize that private meditation on books can form a political consciousness, that (again to quote David Norbrook) Drake was radical ‘behind the study door’.38 For most historians, then, Drake  – and my study of him  – might be of secondary interest as the life of a minor gentleman who lived from the 1620s

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to the 1660s and kept a diary of events, but my larger and methodological injunctions were anathema. Again interestingly but perhaps predictably, where most historians  – and even a leading historian of the book – had not favoured my injunction of theory or methodological introduction, critics found value in my (only partially successful) attempt to marry such perspectives with the archive. David Loewenstein, a leading literary critic and literary historian of the seventeenth century predicted that, where historians resistant to the textuality of their own subject would dislike the methodology, literary scholars would welcome it.39 His prognostication was not entirely borne out: some critics did not think the results were worth the effort and a few historians opined that some theoretical perspective was not misplaced, that the book opened a broader historical vision and that, as Brown Patterson put it in his review, ‘to study reading . . . is to trace the history of human minds and imaginations in a social and political context’.40 But as Loewenstein foresaw, critics indeed applauded the book’s ‘engagement with many cutting edge questions’ and its ‘challenging and lucidly informative introduction’.41 Some reviews by literary scholars, in the spirit of my polemical injunctions, critically debated the problems of interdisciplinary methodology and the risks involved in an interdisciplinary praxis.42 What the various reactions convinced me of was the importance of the history of the book and reading and the need for historians to engage with them. And I was encouraged in that belief by the work of a historically informed and sensitive critic whose thinking over thirty years mine has traced and paralleled and with whom I had edited two influential collections of essays at the interface of history and literature.43 In 2003, therefore, I co-edited with Steve Zwicker a collection of essays on Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, which brought together a number of senior and younger scholars working on the materiality of books, and the reading of various (elite and popular) genres and forms across the long period from the Reformation to the Augustan Age.44 In our introduction, we endeavoured to sketch a history of the reader and reading communities in the story of the early modern book – its forms, materiality, commerce and consumption, and to connect changes in hermeneutic practices with moments in the religious, social and political life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We asserted that, and argued how, acts of early modern reading and interpretation were political and argued that political and hermeneutic crises were often contingent and related. Beyond that, we posited a few suggestions as to how acts of reading might be recovered and reconstituted not only in marginalia and commonplace notes, in catalogues and library lists, but also in portraiture and theatre; we insisted by way of conclusion that ‘the history of reading is . . . necessarily . . . interdisciplinary’.45 As my own contribution, I wrote a short study, reprinted below, of how the book of Revelation was read over the century from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century by Protestants, Catholics, Puritans and deists, kings,

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scholars and radical preachers, women as well as men.46 I developed the study in a further essay (now happily published here with the former piece) on how the reading and exegesis of that scriptural book were performed in the New World where the very geographies and spaces of reading and preaching pointed to new interpretations and hermeneutic practices.47 Researching these essays, I had been surprised how little work had been done on reading Scripture in early modern England. My desire to see more work on this subject was in large part answered by David Daniell’s The Bible in English – still more, because more focused on reading, David Katz’s massively erudite and wide ranging study of Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism  – published the year after our collection.48 But both studies paid a price for their chronological reach and range, with space for only a couple of chapters on the seventeenth century; and it is only as I write, against the background of the celebrations of the King James Bible’s quatercentenary, that there is again interest in a subject that engaged Christopher Hill long before the turn to the history of books and readers.49 Even these anniversary publications have dwelt more on the making of the King James Bible and it subsequent influence on the world than what Katz described as a history of reader response to the Bible in early modern England. I still hope to see further studies, of the type I essayed, of how – and in what forms, places and spaces – particular books of Scripture were read, discussed and interpreted by various different readers over England’s (and here I’d want to add Scotland’s) century of revolutions. As Hill reminded his readers, the Scriptures contain matter concerning commonwealths and monarchies, rich and poor. It was readers who made the Scriptures highly contested texts of church and state and readers who ensured that, for all the efforts of the monarchs and the makers of the authorized version to control them, the Bible remained a site of multiple meanings and a text for multiple ways of reading and shaping society and state.50 If the early modern Bible has received surprisingly less attention than we might have expected in the wake of the history of the book and reception, since I published Reading Revolutions and the essays on reading Scripture, there have emerged a number of vital studies of early modern reading practices, which, as well as advancing our understanding of the book, might (and I shall return to this) have led to new historical and critical directions. Just as my book went to press, one of the founding fathers of the history of the book and reading co-edited a volume on The History of Reading in the West, which included valuable survey chapters of reading in the age of humanism and in early modern Protestant and Catholic Europe.51 Though the broad sweep and European context were welcome, the volume had relatively little to say about early modern England.52 Of more local pertinence, in 2002, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain reached its fourth volume, covering the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.53 A mine of information on publishing, the print and book trades, the volume had surprisingly little  – and no specific chapters  – on reading practices,

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albeit several touched on the subject incidentally. More specifically and perhaps in the wake of the theoretical decentring of authorship, a number of works have importantly emphasized the conversation among authors, printers and readers that were integral to all stages of the early modern book from creation to consumptions and so invited wider consideration of the implications of the agency of readers for our models of early modern society.54 A number of studies have explored some of those implications. Cecile Jagodzinski’s Privacy and Print, though not without problems, argued for the centrality of reading to a ‘new consciousness of the self’.55 In her closing chapters, Jagodzinski emphasizes the place of reading in the gendering of the self; the relationship of reading to gender has attracted a number of feminist studies, notably Eve Sanders’s Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England.56 The relationship of gender  – and class – and reading to genres has also been developed in important studies such as Sasha Robert’s Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England and Lori Newcomb’s Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England.57 Here is not the place to list (still less to review) all the works on the history of reading that have appeared since Remapping and Reading Revolutions; but I must draw attention to three that have been transformative in our understanding of early modern readers and reading practices. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer’s edited volume, Books and Readers in Early Modern England (albeit in some areas out of date by the time it was published) gave early taster essays of forthcoming books by scholars at the forefront of the field – two of whom I had been influenced by when they were graduate students.58 Heidi Brayman Hackel’s Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy has not only provided an invaluably comprehensive and up-to-date review of the literature in the history of reading, combining broad brush with case study and illuminating detail, she recovers (sometimes in ways we might not have expected possible) from archives of commonplace notes, libraries and annotations, as well as consideration of sites and spaces, a range of ordinary readers engaging with books.59 The result is a more than a contribution to the history of reading; it is, as that field (now, as I regret, a subfield), a major work of social and cultural history.60 Different but complementary and also of the first importance is William Sherman’s Used Books. As his title indicates, Sherman’s subject is the vital one of how early modern owners – readers and browsers – used books. More than another study of marginalia (such as the magisterial survey by Heather Jackson, or early modern case studies of Gabriel Harvey or (Sherman’s own) John Dee), Used Books recovers and interrogates the marks made in Bibles and prayer books, in the books of scholars and lawyers, by ordinary women and men.61 As Sherman demonstrates, as well as marginal notes, diagrams, place markers of various types, personal indexes, tables of contents and doodlings, early modern users scribbled names, family records, financial accounts, recipes, shopping lists – all the traces of lives as well as books. In

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fine, Sherman makes his case for a far wider notion of ‘reading’, urging us to embrace books as the archives of early modern men and women, not just their reading habits or thoughts. In doing so, Sherman invites historians into a new archive and underlines, as I did more polemically in Reading Revolutions, the importance for all historians of work on the history of the book and reading. Curiously, however, it is an invitation and injunction they have resisted. My term is not innocent. Since the pioneering studies of Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, Anthony Grafton and others, the history of the book and reading, as Brayman Hackel and Sherman remind us, have been led by literary scholars; in my case, Reading Revolutions was not only better received by critics, it was the occasion of my own move from a history to a literature department.62 The explanation is not clear; but I suspect the necessity for the history of the book to be an ‘interdisciplinary discipline’ (as Cyndia Clegg puts it) has alienated most historians who, retaining a confidence in (or is it an anxiety about?) the superiority of their own discipline, have eschewed interdisciplinary work.63 To that generalization, there is, in studies of early modern England, a conspicuous and important exception. In the spirit of Sharon Achinstein’s pioneering Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, Ann Hughes resituates Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena, a 1646 Presbyterian dissection of the religious sects, not just in the polemical conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s but in Civil War habits of writing and reading.64 Recognizing, as early modern historians seldom do, that texts were written always with readers in mind, Hughes shows how ‘implied readers’ and actual readers as well as printers helped to fashion and shape the text and researches the responses of owners and readers of the book to Edwards’s own imaginings and desires.65 Arguing compellingly on the one hand, that Gangraena was only possible as ‘a series of collaborations’ with and was ‘dependent on readers’, the book examines closely how the material text, its tables, signposts, fonts, margins and manicules as well as words sought – in this an extreme example of many early modern texts – to guide readers.66 And while acknowledging that the evidence for how readers did read the book, are ‘partial, elusive and difficult to pin down’, through careful examination and imaginative use of bindings and marks of ownership, along with annotations, Hughes succeeds in discovering reactions beside the many responses in print elicited by Edwards’s polemic.67 As historical reviewers have recognized, Hughes’s book is a rich contribution to our understanding of Edwards, Civil War Presbyterianism and religious polemic. As they have been less inclined to acknowledge, it is also a book which quietly insists that the study of ‘high politics’ benefits from ‘insights from literary criticism, the history of the book, and studies of print culture as well as local, political, and religious history’.68 As I shall argue when looking ahead, it is in Hughes’s drawing on a wide range of approaches, especially the history of the book, as well as her close and exact historicizing that opens fruitful new possibilities.

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The third project I outlined in Remapping was the most ambitious – albeit in 2000 I had only an inkling of just how ambitious it would become. In 1992, having just published The Personal Rule of Charles I, a book that had taken me ten years, I began a year’s research leave at the Huntington Library in California.69 I had not then a clear idea of what I was going to write next but, while working on my study of Charles I, I had become convinced that any understanding of that king or his rule necessitated address to visual and literary materials as well as the archives and records (in this case over fifty) I had consulted. The neglect of poems, plays and especially visual texts by the leading historian of the seventeenth century, Conrad Russell, puzzled me, especially as Russell was an active Liberal politician and peer at a time when politics in England and America (Russell had held a chair at Yale) was increasingly as much about the image of politicians and the perception of them as about policies or parties. Nor was Russell alone among historians in this neglect of – I came to see it in some cases as a resistance to – visual, as indeed literary, sources. For, albeit at that time we still awaited publication of the magnificent catalogue raisonné of the oeuvre of Van Dyck, there was no shortage of experts or books on art history – the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Sir Oliver Millar, was a world renowned authority on seventeenth-century British art.70 It seemed that, against the grain of modern experience, Russell and others did not regard paintings (let alone other visual materials) as ‘real’ historical evidence or as having any bearing on ‘politics’. In the case of the Caroline period, this seemed to me to expose him and them to the charge that (ironically) revisionist historians in particular were quick to make against others: anachronism. While they criticized earlier Whig scholars who had written from a teleological perspective and not adequately respected the period they studied, the revisionists  – and many other historians too – fundamentally misrepresented the seventeenth-century past by isolating politics (which they anachronistically construed) from the culture of humanism, from the literary and visual arts, from poets and painters immersed in courts and politics, from a Renaissance culture which scholars of other countries had shown to be inseparable from power and authority.71 Such a reflection reinforced the sense I had developed while working on court poets and masques that a true understanding of the Caroline period made an interdisciplinary history not a choice but a necessity.72 As I reflected, however, in the shadow of a British election in which two very different styles of leadership had competed for electoral support, I felt that historiographical neglect of the images and perceptions of rulers had been a wider problem in early modern English history.73 While historical studies of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were commonly illustrated with Holbeins and Hilliards, the portraits (and it was largely only portraits) were seldom, in historical texts, made integral to analyses of the reigns; and with virtually every other monarch there were, in academic biographies and histories, few references to any visual materials at all. Without then a clear sense of where it would lead, I decided in my year of research leave to try

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to bring the visual back into the narrative of politics and power in the early modern English state. Fortuitously, the Huntington (the launch pad for so many new explorations) had, as well as a world-class rare book library, a photo archive which, in the age before widespread digitization of images, enabled me simply to look at photographs of a wide range of paintings and artefacts (statues, for example) of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs. More importantly, the library owned an invaluable (and still regrettably uncatalogued) resource, the Richard Bull Granger, to which I was directed by the curator, Robert Wark, and which during the year I studied became the focus of a brilliant study of portraiture and ‘social formation’ in eighteenth-century England.74 Following the publication in 1769 of James Granger’s Biographical History of England, which listed (but did not reproduce) illustrations to accompany the short biographies, a fashion began for collectors to acquire engraved images as near contemporary to the person or subject as possible.75 Granger’s History, as well as (to Horace Walpole’s annoyance) hiking the cost of prints, led to the practice of extra illustration, the insertion into books, especially histories, of numerous illustrations, most commonly portraits. Perhaps responding to consumer demand or with an eye to his market (he was proud of his sales) in his later editions, Granger interleaved blank sheets for the convenience of collectors.76 Though Granger did not himself illustrate his books, he was soon followed by major contemporary collectors who did, the most notable of whom was the MP for Ongar in Essex, Richard Bull, who extra illustrated 70 books, including a copy of Granger’s Biographical History.77 This is the volume, assembled around 1769, which I saw in the Huntington and which contains 35 volumes of hundreds of sheets each. To give an example of its riches, for the reign of King James VI and I (not one of the monarchs we easily visualize), Bull’s collection contains over 500 sheets with often more than one engraving on each sheet, including 60 of the king; and there are over 80 engraved portraits of William III. Not at that time knowing of the Sutherland collection of extra-illustrated books at the Ashmolean or the illustrated Clarendon at the Royal Library, the Huntington Bull Granger was a revelation to me – and in a number of ways. In the first place, though not all the images were contemporary, most were and made evident how, from the late sixteenth century, engraved and woodcut images of monarchs were being produced, some with royal privilege, and were being sold, collected, distributed and displayed. As the inscriptions on prints evidenced, by the seventeenth century there was a dedicated print shop in London and by the Restoration period more than a score of them.78 What this brought home to me was that the many images that I had followed others in assuming were seen only by princes, courtiers and envoys – in engraved form –were reproduced increasingly broadly. Together with the numerous studio ‘copies’ and portraits ‘after’ famous artists, which I was tracing as I went through the photo archive, I began to appreciate that

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images of monarchs were beginning to reach into a broad public – and that that had serious implications for our existing models of court culture and royal authority. Secondly, the Bull Granger collection included engravings of medals and seals, coins and flags, most of which I had neither seen nor read about. Spending half of my week between the Granger and the photo archive, I began simply at first to look at and annotate a range of images of Tudor and Stuart monarchs. The other half of the week, back in a historian’s comfort zone, I compiled from the Short Title Catalogue a bibliography and read an eclectic range of sixteenth-century books which promised to illuminate the ways in which Tudor monarchs, through speeches, proclamations and declarations, pamphlets and prayers, represented themselves or how they were, in sermons, histories and genealogies, polemics and popular ballads represented by others. Naturally, it took little time before I came to see that it was precisely in the relations between the two halves of my week and the archives (separated even at the Huntington by different buildings) that the most interesting questions lay. Along with the rare books and archive, the Huntington offered a third resource for my thinking about my new project: its perhaps unrivalled community of scholars, working across periods, countries and disciplines but committed (thanks to the Huntington ethos) to the exchange of ideas and collegiality across interests, academic cultures and generations. I have already mentioned the (then) young scholars I encountered working on the history of books and reading.79 As well as prompting me to write a contribution of my own to that burgeoning field, they also led me to sense that my work on the projection and representation of regality would also need to take on board a number of issues central to book history: the materiality, distribution, commerce and consumption of texts, most of all issues of reception – and of how the processes of representing rule were inextricably bound with imagined (as well as actual) readers, audiences and viewers. Along with a greater appreciation I gleaned from work on book history of the complications of authorship in texts representing rulers (proclamations were not commonly – though James I boasted his were – writ with the royal hand; royal entries, though financed by the City, almost always involved close cooperation with councillors), this emphasis on audiences again for me complicated the historical and historiographical models I might otherwise have worked with.80 In particular, I became dissatisfied with approaches that had studied official representations as ‘propaganda’ that either misled (as Marxists held) or bypassed (as Warburg scholarship implied) ordinary people. Indeed, it increasingly appeared to me, as I examined cheap print, artefacts (such as illustrated playing cards and porcelain), languages of official pronouncements and the ritual representations of rule that the people, even ordinary people, were – and were becoming more – central in and to the representation of authority. And that meant to the exercise of authority. For some time English historiography – and sometimes political sympathies –

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had separated historians of kings, courts and elites from the practitioners of ‘history from below’. Not only did I become certain that this separation made no sense of the period, I began to discern that, whatever the ‘intentions’ of rulers and their advocates, indeed, perhaps as a consequence of their very success in centring monarchy in the public imagination, the processes of representation and propaganda paradoxically served to empower subjects, to make the consumers and readers of official texts and images active participants in the commonweal – or, we might say, citizens. As research in images and words, conversation with colleagues about reading and reception and reflections on the historiography took place over that year, I knew that any study I would write would be based on  – and hopefully persuade fellow political historians of – a very different way of conceiving the early modern polity: as not a top-down exercise of power but as a dialogue or series of conversations about authority, conversations that could be excavated from a wide variety of records if they were read – as they needed (and still need) to be as texts.81 Aware of the imperative that I needed to be alert to grammars and terms, allusions, omissions and anxieties that underlay the ‘contents’ of early modern texts (verbal, visual and performed), I could not but be more self-conscious about the language of my own craft and moment: what it repressed as well as opened and how it determined as much as signified what I was arguing. Already then by the early 1990s, I had begun to worry about terms like ‘propaganda’ and ‘representation’ and how they occluded as well as enabled understanding. As I began to write as well as research and think across that Huntington year, I remained unclear about how the processes I had gone through might end up. When I returned to teach in 1993, I had a mass of material and inchoate thoughts but only scores of pages in crude draft and little prospect of developing them during a busy academic schedule. By happy chance, it was America that took me back to the project again in the shape of a job offer which the Dean of Arts and Vice Chancellor of Southampton University countered by a five-year secondment to research and graduate teaching. What, I see even more clearly in retrospect, that unexpected and generous period provided was the opportunity not to have to choose between the various aspects of my subject and research – the chance to work on related things in parallel. During those years, I was also able in the innovative new interdisciplinary graduate school to work closely with colleagues in literature and archaeology and to teach MA students (also from a variety of disciplines in the same seminars) courses in ways of working with texts, as well as more traditional history classes. Time allowed me to indulge what might have seemed a distraction from my main project  – but which was in some ways fundamental to it  – my study of the reading practices of a seventeenth-century gentleman. By the end of the five years, I had written Reading Revolutions, published a number of essays as prolegomena to my large study, and begun to conceive its shape and daunting scope. I had also been offered and accepted a move to another university – and from a history

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department, in which I had spent twenty years, to an English department, where I was a novice. Published the year of that move, in Remapping I outlined as my ‘major project’, a ‘study of representations and images of power, of the culture of authority, from the Henrician Reformation to the 1688 Revolution’.82 I had, however, little idea of how I would ever write it. For all that I had a draft of sorts of a book covering the Tudors, much of the research and all of the writing for later periods (where the material – and perhaps the problems – were greater) remained to be done, at a time when I had commitments to a new institution and the challenges of teaching a new discipline. Close reading texts with students, in a manner untypical of history teaching, however, underlined my sense of what other disciplines could do and contribute. And, as my thinking was rejuvenated, fortune favoured me with a series of fellowships, especially a Leverhulme Major Research fellowship, which left me with no excuse not to complete what I had set out to do.83 As I write, the first two volumes of my study of representations of rule have been published and the third final one, covering the period from the Restoration to the accession of George I, is in press – nearly 20 years after I first considered it.84 What I essayed across all the volumes was to study verbal, visual and ritual or performative modes of representation together and in conversation with each other. My early concerns about terms and approaches led to a (controversial) introductory chapter on premises and methods. As in researching each volume, I found myself surprised – at the importance of visual representations in James I’s reign, for example, or of speeches in Charles II’s – I hope that I have made contributions to our understanding of each of the Tudors and Stuarts and their times. Overall, the trilogy endeavours a larger  – and (to me at least) unexpected claim: that across the two centuries the processes of representing rule resulted in (sometimes simultaneously) the mystification and desacralization of authority, the enhancement of state power and popular political agency. Though the Tudors’ self-promotion had put them in thrall to popularity, in the next century it was the populace which at moments of crisis preserved the monarchy and the people who often used the languages that kings and queens had deployed to represent themselves. It was, I suggest, the changes in the image of monarchy effected by William III, rather than opponents of kingship, which, as much as the constitutional changes, transformed the representation and exercise of monarchical rule. With the third volume as yet unpublished and the second only just being reviewed in the journals, it may be too early to assess the reaction to or impact of this large project. A few overtly hostile reactions were to be expected – and indeed welcomed. I had wanted my methodological injunctions and polemics to rile the most unthinkingly traditional kind of historians – ‘tweedy dons’ one sympathetic reviewer called them – and they did.85 Less sympathetic critics regretted what one of them (with obviously little understanding of what it is) declaimed against as ‘postmodernism’; another dyspeptically asked, ‘why

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the hell did he not get on with it’ before making a need for at least some such discussion evident by tangling himself in knots through a failure to define or explain how he understood terms like propaganda.86 But other criticisms have been incisive, telling and revealing. Some reviewers have regretted that in my emphasis on image and spin, I did not engage more the facts and narratives of administrative and political history or of brutal repression and rebellion in Tudor England.87 The point is well taken; but I am concerned that behind it lies or lurks a distinction between culture and ‘real power’, between the real and the represented, that I sought to complicate if not negate.88 The Tudor historian Cliff Davies’s call for a ‘new realism’ seemed to be a lament for a golden age in which historians could do their empirical work untroubled by the questions of critics or art historians whom Davies (as crudely as rudely) dismisses as devoid of any valuable reading skills and lacking the interpretative sensibilities of political historians.89 Defensiveness about one’s discipline is understandable and not inappropriate but it cannot substitute for engagement and argument. Perhaps it was to be expected that critics and art historians welcomed the interdisciplinarity and even the chapter on method; but – encouragingly – they were joined by younger historians who, whatever their criticisms, found value in and engaged with my discussion of terms and approaches.90 Only the brilliant Berkeley Tudor historian Ethan Shagan objected that, if anything, my injunctions were familiar, even old hat to American scholars – an observation which I am still pondering but which was supported perhaps by the fact that the most hostile responses were indeed from the United Kingdom and that the greatest recent influences on my own scholarly practices have come from several years in the United States, at interdisciplinary centres.91 Albeit some objected to my language – Davies sneered at the terms ‘negotiation’ and ‘representation’, which he insisted in keeping at a safe distance inside inverted commas – most appear to have been persuaded by my model of a dialogue or negotiation over images, not least because it accorded with the social histories of scholars such as Mike Braddick and Steve Hindle who had used the same terms.92 Even those accepting that model, however, criticized Selling the Tudor Monarchy and Image Wars for not adequately treating questions I had myself posed: about how far official representations reached into the culture, most of all exactly what impact they had, how they were received and what were the responses to them.93 My own judgement is that in this respect I did not fulfil my own aims of exploring fully the receptions as well as (complex and multi-authored) productions and distributions of royal representations. As I explained in my preface to Selling the Tudor Monarchy, a full history of such receptions and reactions would need to embrace the social history of early modern England: from riot and rebellion through non-cooperation (with, say, taxes or the enforcement of recusancy laws), to local customs and traditions, civic culture, popular revels, ideas of rights, memories and imaginings. But, accepting the charge that I might have done more, I would reaffirm

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that rulers’ sense of audiences was always in my mind and shaped my – as well as their – reading of texts. Beyond that, I hope that what I have done and not done will encourage more dialogue between political and social historians (the two have virtually – in Cambridge have long been actually – separated into subdisciplines) as well as across disciplines.94 And, having completed three large studies, I would hope too that, ‘going forward’ the representations of rulers and receptions of them will be regarded as central to our understanding of the politics of the early modern state as studies of parliaments, parties or parishes.95

III So where are we and where are we going? In these closing remarks, I want to give a personal take (is there any other?) on the state of our scholarly practice and on the current situation in early modern English history. First the vexed question of interdisciplinarity. One would not think it vexed judging from the ubiquitous references to it as a requirement for grants, fellowships, publishing series and research programmes or the recitation of it as a vaunt in glossy university brochures, or vice-chancellor’s speeches. Sometimes, however, when a word is everywhere, it may be because the practice is not96 and in this case, it seems to me that, as I have said, disciplinary borders have hardened and that there is less exchange across them than was the case two decades ago: we are not being interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinary opportunities, however, have in one respect at least never been greater: that is new technological and resource developments that have made whole kinds of new work possible. I mentioned above how while I was privileged beginning my project at the Huntington to have written and visual materials at the same library, they were in different buildings. And obviously paintings, ceramics, coins and medals and books have been  – and still are – separated into galleries, museums and libraries, often not in the same city or even the same country or continent. Until recently it took a sophisticated visual memory to make connections between paintings and prints, to identify allusions and borrowings; and when photo reproductions were either not permitted or prohibitively costly, it was nigh impossible to bring images and other texts together for study; one often had to rely on notes, hardly the best record of the visual text. Now – and this has occurred during the course of working on my three volumes – scholars have, as well as whole databases of digitized books (to which I shall return), magnificent collections of image databases, such as those from the British Library, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Collection and others. Of course, these cannot be substitutes for looking at the actual objects – a turn to the materiality of texts underlines the downsides of viewing inadequate, small digital reproductions; but such digital databases at least make it possible for a scholar in her study to move between a myriad of texts and types of text,

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connecting high art and woodcuts, with artefacts and rare books, not to mention secondary literature, electronic journals and research aids, such as the invaluable databases of biblical and classical references.97 Such resources enable and facilitate not only interdisciplinary scholarship but different and innovative ways of working. While there has rightly been concern (as well as whimsy) expressed at how digital books encourage a student habit of reading snippets and not whole texts  – of, that is, decontextualized readings  – new technologies have opened countless new research possibilities in our work on all kinds of texts. Even the reading of snippets, facilitated by digital texts, can serve to reintroduce scholars and students to common Renaissance practices, technology here giving our post-modern age a closer proximity to the pre-modern than the modern privileging of authors and books. Digital book searches also make possible the kinds of tracking of unacknowledged quotations and borrowings, allusions and echoes, that once required a lifetime of scholarly experience; while a database such as Perseus (as I found when working on medal inscriptions) almost immediately locates a passage from the classics, making it possible for the modern reader to enter into all the associations and evocations an educated early modern audience would have known and early modern authors would have assumed. Moreover, while it comes with risks, as did the old card index, word searching facilities across digital book collections enable all scholars to do the kind of work once reserved to only advanced practitioners: the collection of extracts relating to a word or topic which Keith Thomas has explained as his working method for many of his celebrated essays, or the tracing of paradigmatic shifts in language or discourses famously advocated in the work of John Pocock and Quentin Skinner.98 Digital resources give easier access to an intertextual world  – the world that those we study occupied. It is not yet evident that all these possibilities have been fully (or much) exploited; but the indications are that traditional research will be easier – and within the reach of those without great libraries – and that there may be new approaches to how we read and understand texts. In the case of visual texts, the new possibilities are even more exciting. That anyone in a decent university library can now see a reasonably good (and sometimes excellent) reproduction of a vast range of images is only the starting point. As with books, scholars can now look at images of paintings hung in galleries across the world and view them alongside copies and engravings after them, medals, and other visual material forms. Such possibilities clearly encourage the new kind of art history that, moving from connoisseurship, addresses a broader visual and material culture. Technology has done more. Thanks to infra-red images and magnifications, scholars far from the gallery or museum are able to see and read what it was not easy to do before, even with the painting or print in front of them. Often, by magnifying a digital image, I have seen a detail  – or been able to read a scroll or inscription – that I could hardly make out on the original. Often

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within minutes, another search engine or scholarly resource based on these new digital archives will have identified the source of an emblem or biblical passage, leading me back to reviewing the image now as part of a larger story: of past readings and viewings, indeed a history of appropriations and polemics. Specialized resources, such as the British Printed Images database, proliferating in the new academic culture of team projects and digital media, fruitfully reorganize and recatalogue materials – in the case of this example by arranging together the various states of a print in a manner that itself suggests a new history of performance in changing circumstances and across locales and allegiances as well as time. And while it has by no means always been a force for the good in educational or cultural life, an element of competition promises that more museums and galleries are likely to follow the leaders in making their collections searchable online, so enriching the resources for scholars almost by the month. The implications of these developments for teaching are both obvious and surprisingly little discussed – except by those ‘professional’ ‘educators’ who, having no discipline, would yet claim to teach university lecturers and teachers. Of course, colleagues will respond, we all now use PowerPoint illustrations in lectures – though perhaps we should not forget that this is a pedagogic tool prepared in hours where slides took months to order. What I am referring to is the opportunity of bringing the archive – and artchive – into the classroom. Some years ago, while teaching Ben Jonson’s satirical play, The Staple of News, I sent off my undergraduates to find (on Early English Books Online) some seventeenth-century corantos or newspapers and to compare them with the theatrical representation of news. Now, many more sophisticated possibilities present themselves, especially for students to explore a multiplicity of genres. The availability of such resources and the opening of such possibilities has encouraged – and needs more to foster – a greater address to skills of reading and viewing texts, especially at graduate level. Whatever the resistances of old disciplinary phalanxes, new research archives and tools are inclining young scholars to interdisciplinary work and leading them to desire an interdisciplinary education. If at present, this is not commonly provided, a new culture of response to demand may well lead to a very different graduate training (of, to recall Shagan, the sort typical in the United States) where students take courses in other disciplines, giving historians say at least the skills of English or Art History 101. (Personally I have long tried and failed to persuade colleagues of the virtues of admitting MA students not to a discipline but to a degree in, to take, for example, Enlightenment Studies.) Given the ferment in the digital humanities, it seems ironic that our own moment is not proving auspicious to interdisciplinary study. While there are signs that art historians have opened themselves to conversations with historians and critics  – and some of the best studies of visual culture are published out of literature departments – historians, with a few notable exceptions have still tended to use visuals as decorations to their work.99

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Where literature and history are concerned the gap between them is now being widened by both sides. Possibly because historians rejected the project of new historicism and asserted their own special disciplinary virtues, recently many critics have begun to turn away from all historicizing, proclaiming their unique skills as readers and, as ‘new formalists’, arbiters of taste.100 The economies of the modern academy are exacerbating these tendencies. With tight budgets in the wake of drastic cuts in education, especially in the humanities, departments are competing – and sadly are being prompted to fight each other – for scarce resources and posts; and so are led to advertise their special importance and at times downplay that of others. And though there are interdisciplinary postdoctoral positions, all the while few (I’m tempted to write no) permanent posts cross departments, young academics, whatever their training, are led back to single disciplines, sometimes as combatants as well as colleagues.101 Disciplinary territorialism and xenophobia may be short lived as universities are steered towards collaborative research and as new digital resources and new habits of research cross boundaries. At the least the anecdotal evidence suggests that young scholars are most interested in interdisciplinary questions and approaches, and their best work is manifesting rich fruits – not least in early modern studies. But we are far from there yet.

IV What then of the current history and historiography of early modern England? One of the most obvious – and given what I urged in 2000 to me most welcome – developments has been the significant growth in interest in visual culture and visual texts, especially engraved prints and mezzotints. Only a decade or so ago, there had not been either a significant exhibition or a major study of prints. Now, following Anthony Griffith’s pioneering exhibition and influential catalogue, we have a major database of British Printed Images 1500–1700 (accessible to all) and a number of important studies: a survey of the print in the seventeenth century, studies of the print trade in London and of seventeenth-century graphic satires and cartoons.102 And important theses are in the process of becoming books – including one on Anglo-Dutch prints during the Civil War and revolution.103 It is no coincidence that one of our most imaginative historians, Mark Knights, has put visual materials – playing cards as well as prints – at the centre of his recent work and provided an exemplary model of how to ‘read’ visuals and of the possibilities open to other scholars.104 As yet the broader historical potential has not been realized (just as it has never been by Yale historians with the Centre for British Art on their doorstep) but all the evidence is that, whether carried out by historians or scholars in literature as well as art history, we can anticipate exciting new work.105 What we still need are catalogues of the major collections of

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early modern prints – in the Huntington and Ashmolean, for example – to join those of the British Museum and National Portrait Gallery, and further studies of the distribution, commerce, consumption and collecting of prints. It will be important too that prints are not studied apart from the broader textual culture in which they performed; indeed inscriptions, verses and writing on prints could fruitfully be resituated as texts in the polemical and party discursive contest which were its origin and impetus. The history of prints, that is to say, must be integrated with the history of print and be an interdisciplinary field of study. Work on playing cards also reminds us of other visual and material texts which have been all but ignored by historians.106 We have had major studies of Henry VIII’s textiles and tapestries, Queen Elizabeth I’s jewels and clothes, and artefacts and mementoes of Charles I circulating after the regicide.107 Yet, these have not been integrated into wider historical studies of Tudor and Stuart culture and politics, and whole subjects remain, to my knowledge, uninvestigated – souvenirs, for example, of the Restoration or Royal Oak (including the ubiquitous inn signs displaying Charles II hiding in the tree), Queen Anne’s wardrobe or Jacobite memorabilia. Elsewhere I have touched upon the significance of pottery and porcelain depicting kings, queens and coronations, which appear to have been increasingly collected over the course of the century after Elizabeth and which, I suggest, offer insights into a psychology of power and subjectivity worthy of further exploration.108 More surprising, given the easy availability of visual reproductions of them and their centrality to military and political history is the almost complete neglect of medals.109 The history of the English medal begins essentially in the reign of Henry VIII, who emulated his continental rivals in this as so much else; the seventeenth century saw hundreds, even thousands, produced and distributed, especially after the Restoration and with the wars of the 1690s and 1700s. Medals designed and produced at the Royal Mint, I have argued, are important evidence of how rulers (including rulers not renowned for sitting for portraits) visually represented themselves. Official medals, however, are only half of the story. During the Civil War, Exclusion crisis and age of party, satirical medals mocked official representations and, like prints, were part of an international contest for power and the struggle of parties at home. Accordingly, those executed in the wake of the Popish Plot were memorialized as Whig martyrs on medals and medals celebrated the seven bishops prosecuted by James II and were worn as markers of allegiance to the church against a Catholic king.110 Again like prints, we must never forget that medals were nearly always issued with inscriptions as well as images; while they typically were taken from Scripture, the classics or emblem books, those legends were usually applied precisely to the times and invited viewers to the full recollection and application (and appropriation) of texts to moments and causes. Like prints, medals need to be read – in every sense of that word – as well as viewed as historical sources. Their different materials (expensive silver or cheap

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copper and lead) and forms, their distribution (some were given away to commemorate a coronation or victory or to promote a political party), their use (some were clearly worn, some collected) also open onto questions of audience and reception histories, which, like that for prints, could fruitfully be further explored. To move for a moment from a type of source material to a period, perhaps the most significant development of the decade since Remapping Early Modern England has been the shift of historiographical interest from the pre-Civil War decades to the period after the Restoration and to the Revolution. Certainly, it feels to me that this is where the energy has been; it is hard to think of many recent books on the early seventeenth century to compare with studies by Tim Harris, Mark Knights and Steve Pincus of the later.111 The explanation for this may lie in the fall-out from revisionism which has – infamously in the eyes of critics – left the early Stuart period without a teachable narrative or, some would say, any clear direction. Whatever the explanation, the consequences of the Civil War are now attracting more scholars than the causes of the revolution and the historical landscape of the late seventeenth century is being remapped. Importantly, Restoration historiography has also richly transcended the divide between political, social and economic and cultural history. While scholars by no means agree, Harris and Knights place the people and public opinion at the core of their studies of (even high) politics and parties; Harris provides a broad cultural history of politics, while Pincus, influenced by sociology and political science, vigorously argues that ‘the first modern revolution’ was in part caused by and made possible economic changes (and changes in political economy) that made Britain a modern imperial power.112 It is to be hoped that such studies are followed by renewed scholarship on the 1690s and Queen Anne’s reign. For if these decades have until recently been relatively neglected by historians for four decades, in terms of literature (as a session of a recent conference lamented) and the visual arts they are virtually unexplored terrain.113 Where, therefore, Pincus’s engagement with the social sciences valuably cautions us not to conceive of the interdisciplinary project as only a matter for the humanities, the demonstrated interdependence between culture and politics points up the need for a full study of post-Revolutionary panegyrics and satires, plays and poems, histories and sermons, travel literature and translations – as of mezzotints and Delftware.114 The absence after 1688 of canonical literary giants like Dryden or Milton may help explain lack of critical interest in this period; but the literature, not least because it is so topical, so written out of and into events, so preoccupied with people and partisanship, remains a rich unmined seam for historians – especially when it is read, as contemporaries read it, alongside contestatory pamphlets, discourses and cartoons.115 The triumph of the Whigs was effected by a cultural programme as well as party manoeuvres; we need to explicate how writers and artists helped entrench the Revolution and secure the Hanoverian succession.

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The shift of attention towards the late seventeenth century has also been (at least partially) responsible for what has latterly become a central topic of debate across early modern English studies: the model of a ‘public sphere’. The original thesis of the emergence of – and then (for the author the more important) decline and demise of – a public sphere was posited by the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas in 1962, though the work received little attention in the Anglophone world until it was translated in 1989.116 Habermas argued that in early eighteenth-century England a bourgeois public sphere of rational critical debate developed to critique and transform the representational monarchical state; in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was in turn overtaken by consumer capitalism, a mass society and welfare state. English historians have always been more interested in the origins than transformation of Habermas’s public sphere, not least on account of the prominence the author gave to the English periodical press and coffee houses. However, the new Restoration historiography, with its emphasis on the people and popular political participation in the political process, through frequent elections and petitioning, refined  – if it did not reject – Habermas’s model; in doing so, it invited historians of other periods to consider the applicability of the idea (now only loosely connected to Habermas’s formulation) to earlier periods. Several historians were quick to argue that the English Civil War unquestionably gave rise to a public sphere before Habermas’s; but bids for first sightings did not stop there.117 Accordingly, contributions to a recent volume of essays on The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England include claims for it in Henrician, Elizabethan and early Stuart England as well as its traditional Augustan home; and I have myself suggested a public sphere grew out of the Reformation and developed from – not in opposition to – the representational state.118 The widespread (not quite ‘ubiquitous’) interest in the public sphere grew out of a reaction to revisionism, an insistence on the centrality of ideology and a putting of the people back into politics; it also expressed and drew from a greater interest in those very late twentieth-century issues: ‘political communication’, appeals to a (newly identified) public and partisanship.119 Regrettably – and curiously – to date work on the early modern public sphere has not much addressed the audiences of print and rumour, the ‘readers’, literate and illiterate, or how they responded to print, manuscript libel or crude woodcut. A true understanding of how an early modern public sphere performed, indeed of popular politics, yet requires a better reconstitution of the conversations among authors, distributors and readers of the vastly expanding amount of text  – and visual material  – across the seventeenth century and a more nuanced consideration of forms of cultural ‘literacy’ and the paces and communities in which texts were received, debated and disputed.120 I close my thoughts on the state of the field, then, with a regret not only that the fields of literature and history have become more separated but that the history of the book, reading and reception has not  – for all the

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excellent work in the field  – changed all our historical work with texts. Along with historians of the public sphere, scholars of visual culture have paid too little attention to the concerns (materiality, commerce) and methods of book history and the history of reading. Rather, there is a danger that the history of the book has become its own subdiscipline with its specialized conferences and journals, which most historians feel entirely justified in ignoring – and not reading. It would be a serious understatement to describe that as unfortunate. An excellent recent issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly, dedicated to ‘The textuality and materiality of reading in early modern England’ includes among the 11 contributors not a single essay by a historian; yet, the range of texts discussed includes obvious historical texts such as commonplace books, biblical books and scriptural commentaries.121 Where I was not long ago excited by the prospect that the history of the book (a catch-all term for a number of research agendas in the study of texts and their readers) might, as new historicism had once been, a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on early modern England, it is on the brink of being left  – well, on the margins, to the impoverishment of all our scholarly readings and interpretations. As the American historian Joan Shelley Rubin recently remarked in the Journal of American History: ‘The history of the history of books presents an opportunity for those dealing with all sorts of texts – not just literary or journalistic expression but also laws, sermons, scientific papers, business manuals, or political tracts  – to think anew about how such artifacts acquired their particular shape and significance.’122 Commending the breaking of subdisciplinary boundaries, Rubin adds that ‘the principle animating the most exciting work . . . is that the history of the book is more than the sum of separate “social, cultural, and economic” histories; rather, it integrates the lessons of all three.’ It asks the most fundamental of all questions: ‘How does a culture work?’123 That, one might have thought, would have been of interest to those on both sides of the old revisionist/anti-revisionist debate and all who have struggled to understand the political culture of the early modern state. When we return to that question we must, I would posit, bring the perspective, as Ann Hughes did, of the nature of texts and their readers and to recognize, as Jennifer Richards and Fred Schurink ask us to, that the traces that readers left in the margins and on the flyleaves of books and pamphlets are ‘just as worthy of our attention’ as the texts they surround.124 We need as well as what Jason Scott-Warren desires, ‘an anthropology of reading’, a truly historicized history of receptions of various genres of texts firmly rooted in moments and circumstances.125 As Rubin rightly observed, inviting all historians to contribute to the field: ‘“conventions, whether literary or social, gain meaning and force in a particular context” and historians may be better equipped than students of literature to re-create that context fully.’126 In a generous review of Reading Revolutions, Germaine Warkentin predicted that the book would ‘surely begin to attract to the field historians who will richly profit from it’.127 Hitherto she has been proved wrong. Even the

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contributors to The Textuality and Materiality of Reading, while asserting the ‘centrality’ of biblical hermeneutics to ‘the political and religious controversies of seventeenth-century England’, imagine future work by literary scholars rather than historians.128 If I may be permitted a return to an old injunction of 2000, the questions raised by the history of the book and reading are ‘essential for the historian of political culture’ and I hope they will not be disconnected from historians’ practice.129

V I ended the introduction to Remapping with an outline of my own future work, much of which has now been published; how far it executed what I then advocated is for others to judge. A decade nearer to retirement (not to mention death), I do not now lay out such ambitious plans; but my own projects may contribute to some of the developments that are transforming the field and still more, I hope, may further a genuinely interdisciplinary study which I remain convinced is essential to an understanding of early modern England. One project is to essay a very different biography of Charles II. My plan is to write a book that is, in accordance with my above injunction, perception led: a book about Charles II as a dozen contemporaries read him, viewed him, talked and gossiped about him – and remembered him. The project starts from the premise of much recent life writing: that lives are not organic wholes, their histories determined and narratives plotted by a stable self as the author and subject: rather lives unfolded and were lived as a series of interreactions with others and with a variety of other texts and stories.130 My focus will be on how others perceived and received the king and on how those receptions helped to fashion the king’s life itself as well as the reactions of others and of history and memory. In keeping with my interdisciplinary commitments, I will choose as the subjects of chapters contemporaries such as Hobbes and Boyle who open the worlds of science and scepticism; literary figures, such as Dryden and Rochester who disclose the anxieties of courtliness and intimacy with power, Milton and Marvell who, in different ways, wrestled with Restoration church and spirituality; and Evelyn and Pepys who exemplify a new society and demystified monarchy. Other chapters will take Lely as the recorder and artist of a new style of kingship, and Clarendon and Aphra Behn as, respectively, the voices of the past and history and of new worlds, geographic and sexual. Naturally, these characters and their milieus intersect and cross as they all cross with the life and reign of Charles II, a king who cleverly performed a variety of roles in the Restoration theatre of state. As the particular chapters unfold and the relationships of the figures with each other and with the king is explicated, I plan that the book will build a fully rounded portrait of Charles and open the relationships among politics, history, literature and visual, material and popular culture. As such I hope it will make an interdisciplinary contribution

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to the new historiography of the Restoration and late seventeenth century – a historiography which still too little studies the culture of kingship. In keeping with the historiographical move to the later seventeenth century, my second project also sets out to reconnect historical and literary studies through a book on the life and work of, and the contemporary and later controversy surrounding, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Rochester is best known as the libertine and pornographic poet. My objective is to interrogate why contemporaries perceived and the poet himself projected such an image, to complicate it, and to resituate Rochester in the old worlds of the pre-Civil War Cavalier poets and court, the post-Restoration worlds of religious scepticism, philosophy and a post-Hobbesian atomism and politics of interest. As well as taking us into the worlds of the court, favouritism, royal debauchery, Restoration aristocratic society and changed attitudes to women, gender and sex, Rochester (a master of disguise, like his own master) captures key ambiguities in the culture, the monarchy and the king; indeed, ambiguities of conservatism and change central to Charles II’s reign and character. Moreover, the fate of his works (in manuscript and print) and life after death – when he was represented as a penitent convert – opens onto large questions about the relations between literature, nationalism, the reformation of manners and Whig poetics and politics. I am hoping that a study of Rochester will underline that we cannot confine such a figure to the straitjackets of one discipline’s questions or approaches. Not least, Rochester’s writings compel us to reconsider the languages (of sex and the sacred as well as economy) in which Restoration and Revolution politics was written and the ambiguities and tensions of values and morals (past as well as present), freedom and restraint, sex and power in late seventeenth-century England. As well as illuminating the age of Restoration, a book on Rochester will combine my interests in languages, literature and politics, in the perceptions and receptions of texts, in life writing and identity formation. It will also evoke, 45 years after I left, the town and school where my own writing life began.

PART ONE

Reading authority

2 Reading James writing: The subject of royal writings in Jacobean Britain

Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I is an important and original volume. Indeed its importance is underlined by the remarkable fact that no full study of the writings of James VI and I – or for that matter of any British ruler – has been undertaken before.1 Historians, predictably, have long cited James’s speeches to his parliaments and studied his treatises on kingship, the Basilikon Doron and The True Law of Free Monarchies, especially after they were collected and edited in Charles McIlwain’s Political Works of James I (1918). McIlwain, however, was a constitutional historian, interested more in the evolution of the English parliament and law than in James’s own views on church and state; McIlwain’s selection of ‘political’ writings was determined by his own notion of what constituted politics. The edition therefore detaches the treatises and speeches from the large body of James’s Works, removing them from the contexts in which contemporaries read them and viewed the king.2 Since 1918 James’s other writings gathered in his Works – paraphrases of Scripture, defences of the oath of allegiance, interventions in European controversy and his diatribe against tobacco – have been largely ignored. Moreover, his treatises on the Gospel of St Matthew and the Lord’s Prayer, written after the 1616 Works, have scarcely been noticed, presumably because it was assumed they had nothing to offer the historian of politics. By the same token, historians have ignored the considerable body of James VI and I’s poetry and his Short Reulis and Cautelis to Be Observed and Eschewed in Scottis Poesie.3 Our post-Romantic sensibilities have tended to categorize poetry as an aesthetic genre and to view the private voice as separate from the business of public and political life. Moreover,

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for all Sir  Philip Sidney’s arguments about the truth content of poetry, historians have tended to shy away from reading literature, especially verse, as historical evidence. Though partly a function of lack of training, this reticence is more a consequence of untheorized (indeed unthought) but rigid distinctions between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, reliable and unreliable types of sources, and historical ‘realities’ and ‘representations’.4 As for literary scholarship, critical fashion for long consigned James’s writings to obscurity. The New Criticism, which dominated literature departments for half a century, seemed concerned (perhaps understandably in an age of two world wars) to detach great texts from historical circumstances and to focus study on those writers and works that were not for an age but for all time: the great literary geniuses who seemed to provide a refuge from history. James VI and I was not among them. His was a pen and mind manifestly engaged, in verse no less than polemical tract, with his time. For all his importance in forging a literary circle in Scotland and a unique royal representation in England, he earned no place in the canon of eminent writers. Though the Scottish critic James Craigie performed a patriotic act in his excellent editions of James’s poetic works, the texts, though now readily available, attracted little more critical than historical interest.5 At this point, it would be gratifying to shift from regretful comments about past neglect to praise of more recent historical and critical scholarship. Gratifying but inaccurate. For though revisionist historians redirected close attention to the early Stuart age and rejected the anachronistic perspectives that distorted our view of it, their notion of politics was as attenuated as that of the Whig historians they criticized. While revisionists have – through revisiting the histories of the court and church, faction and parliament  – rehabilitated James, they have shown little interest in his writings, beliefs and values. If anything, revisionist historians have exhibited more disdain than their predecessors for printed and literary sources, erecting a higher, more rigid barrier between historical facts and representations. Recent studies of the Jacobean church and religion pass over James’s scriptural exegeses.6 In Johann Sommerville’s 1994 edition of what are still differentiated as James’s ‘political writings’, poetry has no place.7 The hope for a new approach lay rather in the revisionist critical movement that soon came to be known as New Historicism. New Historicism’s project was to open the category of ‘literature’, to study all ‘texts’ – not just canonical ones – as literary productions, and to situate and read texts in their moments of construction, publication, dissemination and reception. More importantly, New Historicism focused on the relationships of discourse and power, analysing texts as sites for the constitution of and contest for authority in humanist rhetorical culture.8 Such scholarship produced dazzling new insights into the politics of Spenser and Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton. But oddly, the most obvious texts of power – the writings of kings and queens – were for the most part ignored. Here the striking and brilliant exception was Jonathan Goldberg. In James I and the Politics of

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Literature, Goldberg combined New Historicist interest in authority with an older historicizing, and traditional close reading with deconstructive criticism, to explore representations not just of the king’s authority but as the king’s authority. Goldberg studied not merely James’s ideas on kingship but his means of articulating his power. This book was intended to open up new critical/historical agendas and further the study of James’s writings. However, historians reviewed Goldberg unfavourably  – even, in Jenny Wormald’s case, with uncharacteristic hostility – while literary critics remained more at home with canonical texts and authors.9 Both critics and historians have missed a rich opportunity. As I discovered while teaching a graduate class, interdisciplinary address to royal writings opens myriad insights into the central issues of historiographical and critical till debate: questions of authorship and authority; representation and power; the receptions and appropriations of texts; the politics of genres and material forms; the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in acts of speaking and writing – and ruling; and the negotiations with readers and subjects inherent in both authorial and regal performances. Beyond that, the study of royal writings enables a review of critical theories and historical methods of textual exegesis, offering fruitful suggestions for approaches to other Renaissance texts and other periods. It is to some of the issues raised by the critical and historical conversations in this volume on the writings of James VI and I that I shall now turn. What several essays make apparent is the extent to which the very subject of this volume  – the writings of James, authorship  – needs to be problematized.10 We learn, for example, from Sarah Dunnigan’s essay that James’s Amatoria, poems we might consider the most personal of all his writings, were most probably collaborative.11 To take another case, though James undoubtedly translated some of the Psalms, the volumes of Psalms published in 1631 and 1636 as translated by King James contain the work too of Sir William Alexander and reflect the influence of Charles I, who also edited other of his father’s manuscripts.12 (By contrast, though his name did not appear on the title page, many of James’s translations found their way into a 1650 edition.13) The fact that, as the title page proclaims, they were The Psalms of King David raises larger questions about translation as ‘authorship’, and these merit further examination. Indeed many of James’s writings were as much readings of biblical hermeneutics and exegeses as they were also the readings of God’s divine decrees and natural laws. Collaboration, translation, exegesis and paraphrase not only raise the question of who was the author; they also compel consideration of the shifts in the relationship of authoring to authorizing (the two terms were used virtually indiscriminately) and exercising authority.14 Two contributors here make incisive but undeveloped, and interestingly contradictory, observations. James’s 1616 Works, Fischlin and Fortier write, marked ‘a major moment in the history of English authorship’: a moment when the authority of the text resided in the name of the creator.15 By assisting that development, James

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furthered the claims of other authors to property, notably Ben Jonson, who gathered his folio works the same year. Thus, he may have helped to disperse cultural authority – that is, authority itself – to all writers: writers who were to emerge by the end of the seventeenth century as powerful political agents, not all in the service of the king. Curtis Perry extends the observation about authorship and collaborative writing to politics, stating that ‘the public persona of a monarch is produced collaboratively.’16 As with authorship and writing, all representations of monarchy in early modern England were multiple performances and, as we are beginning to see, authority was constructed by several different, often differing, agents.17 Whatever the complexities of authorship, what clearly emerges from the essays in Royal Subjects is James’s sense of the centrality of writing to his exercise of rule. As Perry writes, ‘more than any other monarch, James forged a connection between absolutism and the authority of the printed word’.18 He was not the first monarch to make such a connection. Henry VIII constructed his role as Defender of the Faith and, later, Supreme Head of the Church not least through religious texts written by him and/or published under his own name. Queen Elizabeth, too, authored and authorized volumes of prayers.19 But where both Tudors are more remembered for their images, James was a monarch of the word. By corollary all his words were regal acts, or, as Peter Herman puts it, ‘for James no discourse existed separate from sovereignty.’20 In contrast to McIlwain and Sommerville, who address only prose treatises as political writings, Morna Fleming shows that James ‘used poetry throughout his life as an attempt to control events’.21 He clearly believed the identity of kingship and writing to be ancient and divine. He turned to the Psalms because they were the work of a biblical king, and clearly, in his paraphrases of Revelation and Chronicles, he manifested the belief that it was the duty of God’s lieutenant on earth to explain to his subjects the text of the king of kings.22 For James, scriptural exegesis was part of divine kingship, the fulfilment of the king’s obligation to lead his subjects to faith and truth. In turn, these writings announced and publicized James as a divine king and claimed scriptural authority for royal words. James’s Basilikon Doron, his principal treatise on kingship, was a royal ‘gift’ to his son – and, once published, a gift also to his subjects. Historically the royal word uttered to subjects was (and remains) an especial mark of favour, a priceless gift in the culture of feudal personal relations. As a burgeoning market economy loosened seigneurial ties, gifts too  – symbolic capital  – became tainted by money and exchange, as contemporaries observed with anguish. Simon Wortham interestingly suggests that James endeavoured to preserve the royal word as a priceless gift that could be bestowed exclusively by a sovereign who was positioned above the relations of exchange.23 But as we shall see, writing partook of and valorized commodity culture. Yet, if he could not (as at times he seemed to acknowledge) resist textual exchange, James did reinforce the authority of royal words. As James Doelman shows, the king’s intention to produce a new Psalter foreclosed other editions, and

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in the case of the controversy over tobacco, many were evidently willing to agree with James’s (controversial) views about its bad effects simply because he was king.24 Despite challenges, royal words continued to have special valence. As he grappled against the extraordinary power and popularity of the Eikon Basilike of Charles I (which incidentally owed some of its strategy and authority to James’s writings), Milton acknowledged how ‘advantageous it is to a book only to be a king’s’; for once ‘a king is said to be the author’ (my italics), ‘there needs no more among the blockish vulgar to make it wise, and excellent, and admir’d, nay to set it next the Bible’.25 In very obvious ways James set his writings ‘next the Bible’. For as well as containing scriptural paraphrases, the king’s 1616 Works adopts some of the material forms of the King James Bible, which was issued as the new ‘authorized version’ five years earlier. Like the 1611 Bible, James’s Works was a large folio, with a complex engraved frontispiece that echoes the title page of the Bible. Where in the Bible his majesty’s name appears on the slab that bears the title, surrounded by the patriarchs and apostles, the title page of his Works, his own words, is flanked by the figures of religion and peace, presenting James as the biblical Solomon, the embodiment of divine wisdom.26 The reader of The Works of the Most High and Mighty Prince James by the Grace of God King . . . Defender of the Faith was drawn to recall the text of the king of kings ‘revised by his Majesty’s special command’. Daniel Fischlin suggests persuasively that James took trouble over the arrangement of the texts in his volume of writings, and he attaches special significance to its opening with commentaries on Revelation.27 As the placement of essays on poetry (which is traditionally not read as political) at the start of Royal Subjects reminds us, the organization, the material, of books is integral to their performance and reception. James not only attributed importance to arrangement, he excluded sonnets from his verse collections and deployed those arts of authorial influence – prefaces, for example – to direct readings and, in the case of the 1591 edition of Lepanto, rereadings.28 We need to pay more attention than we have to the materiality of James’s texts, both manuscript and printed, and especially to frontispieces, title pages, prefaces and epistles dedicatory. But in doing so we must also come to see how royal books, like all books, could also slip out of their original form, with radical consequences for their performance and reception. Royal texts, as James complained in connection with his Basilikon Doron, could be prostituted and corrupted by others.29 As James Doelman shows, when James’s Psalms were published in the 1630s, they were sent to Scotland bound with the new prayer book for the Kirk.30 As such they became not what James had intended – the Psalter for the new united British church – but part of a text that would script Civil War and regicide.31 Questions about the material form of texts leads us to another central subject on which these studies of James’s writings cast valuable light: the relationship and authority of manuscript and print. Earlier histories, notably Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change,

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were premised on the thesis that print overtook manuscript and gained authority as a more reliable and uniform mode of textual communication: that print in fact authorized texts as reliable and true.32 Recently, in The Nature of the Book, Adrian Johns has questioned these assumptions and argued that manuscripts were, and for a long time were seen to be, more dependable and authoritative.33 Harold Love, meanwhile, in his Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, demonstrates not only the survival of manuscript culture deep into the age of print, but also the two-way textual traffic – from print to manuscript no less than the reverse.34 Early seventeenth-century England and Scotland were literary and political cultures in which the relative authorities of manuscript and printed forms were unstable, shifting and dependent upon all the circumstances of production and reception. Autolycus in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale sold his ballads as more ‘true’ because ‘in print’ but among court and aristocratic coteries, manuscript carried the cultural authority, and printing and publishing were regarded as vulgar.35 James’s writings certainly support scepticism about the fixedness of print. Variants of most of James’s writings were published in his lifetime, not to mention the obvious differences of Latin, Scottish and English editions. In the case of the king’s Letter and Directions Touching Preaching and Preachers, Joseph Marshall argues that different versions, in print and manuscripts, fractured the authority of the royal word, enabling one version to be quoted against another.36 More generally, James seems to epitomize the ambiguities about manuscript and print. He did not ‘publish’ his early verse, but he clearly intended that it should circulate and influence (which it did); subsequently he gathered some of his poems and his treatise on poetry for publication. When he printed Basilikon Doron he issued initially just seven copies, only publishing it more broadly, in a changed version, when he ascended the throne of England.37 As Simon Wortham puts it, early on James appears to have tried to deploy print as if in the privileged manner of manuscript circulation.38 It would seem that in England, with the 1603 issues of the Basilikon Doron and True Law as well as the 1616 Works, James had become firmly converted to ‘publication as a means of government’.39 Here, however, we must recall the extraordinary poems that James penned in the 1620s to counter criticisms of the Spanish match and the ‘raylinge rhymes’ against his government.40 Clearly, whether wisely or not, James felt the need to answer squibs circulating in manuscript with manuscript verse from his own hand. Interestingly, too, in 1622 he wrote a mocking poem ordering the nobles to leave London, expressing his hope that a manuscript verse might persuade those to obey and leave whom ‘scarce a [printed] proclamation can expel’.41 For all the humour (and that was not incidental), it would appear that the king regarded these personal interventions as more authoritative than printed proclamations and statutes. Whatever his belief, James’s acts – acts of printing and not printing – express complexities in the culture and politics of manuscript and print that we are only beginning to address.

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The performances of texts were also conditioned in the Renaissance by genres: by the associations and expectations genres aroused and the authority which, from classical antecedents and theory, they conveyed.42 In the case of James VI and I, scholars have not sufficiently noticed the range of genres in which the king wrote or the relationship of generic election to the purposes, authority and reception of his writings. Epic, for instance, was regarded as the highest of literary forms. In choosing epic for his poem The Lepanto, James selected a genre fitting to a great Christian triumph over the infidel and one that perhaps suited his personal polemical purpose of subjugating the quarrels among Christians to larger ideals of ecumenism and accommodation, which W. B. Patterson has recently documented.43 Just as translation and exegesis brought to royal texts the authority of divine originals, so epic could evoke global ideals and imperial associations of an age prior to the fissure of Christendom into warring denominational camps. James emerges from the essays in Royal Subjects as a writer and ruler sensitive to the cultural power and politics of genre. As Perry effectively demonstrates, James’s use of the pastoral for his poem ‘Off Jacke and Tom’ translates the very real and dangerous journey of Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham to Spain into the aestheticized balm of pastoral.44 Moreover, it deploys what had been an oppositionist genre to counter criticism of royal policy. The fact that both the king and his critics, however, could deploy pastoral reminds us that genres, because they conveyed expectations, were not the exclusive property of any one writer or group; nor was their meaning fixed. Indeed the very authority associated with genres resulted in a contest between writers – and readers – to appropriate them. Genres, that is, were multivalent, as Sarah Dunnigan well demonstrates in her essay in this volume on James’s love poetry.45 Love was a privileged discourse of power at the Elizabethan court, and James, as author of sonnets to both Queen Elizabeth and his own Queen Anne, sought to deploy it to construct ‘a perfect kingdom of sexual authority’.46 But as Dunnigan argues, not only because they dealt with passions ‘never felt by me’, love poems presented James with problems.47 For love at best implies a reciprocity, and ‘in the act of desiring, the lover of necessity renounces authority.’48 If James chose not to include love poems in his collected verse, it may be because he did not wish to publicize such submissiveness to his subjects, over whom he frequently claimed to be the ‘lawful husband’.49 But this ambivalence invites us to consider the problems for James in writing letters as a king and a lover, especially to favourites who were subjects, and for whom sexual love was proscribed by cultural norms and his own declamations against sodomy.50 Though as a king he could threaten his favourite Carr, as a lover he felt the need to express a willingness to surrender all, his foreign policy objectives and everything, to have his beloved Buckingham ‘in my arms again’.51 David Bergeron’s recent pioneering studies of James’s love letters suggest that letters may be the most revealing sites of the contradictions of genre and,

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also, of the king’s two bodies: contradictions a discourse of authority was meant to conceal.52 Address to genre will require us to ask again whether when he stepped from the pedestal of his folio Works to write doggerel verse in the strain of the libels circulating against the court, James appropriated a popular genre for his own purposes or was debased by its popularity. Genres are part of that ‘interpretive community’ that enables writers and readers to communicate, even though they do not construct identical meanings.53 In recent years literary critics and theorists of textual performance have shifted emphasis from the writers to the readers of texts, and to acts of reading as constituting the meanings that texts enacted. As I argue in a recent book, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England, historians have largely ignored reception theory and the histories of reading, even though there is abundant evidence from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that authors acknowledged, even feared, that their fates lay in readers’ hands.54 Though he was a king, as an author James VI and I was no exception. As he acknowledged in publishing Basilikon Doron, ‘this book is now vented and set forth to the public view of the world, and consequently subject to every man’s censure.’55 Even in the case of A Counterblast to Tobacco James seemed less than confident about the reception of his work. If his words, he wrote, ‘carry the force of persuasion with them it is all I can wish, and more than I can expect’.56 For all his deployment of authorial devices for control of interpretation, of the imaginary of the reader, and for all his investment in his writings as acts of authority, James was right to suspect and fear the independence of readers. In our own day the sharply different interpretations of James’s political ideas held by historians such as Johann Sommerville (who categorizes him as an absolutist), Paul Christianson (who sees him as a constitutionalist who changed) and Glenn Burgess (who takes him as a spokesman for a cultural consensus on law and prerogative) speak to the enduring capacity to read the king’s words very differently.57 And James’s words were read differently by his contemporaries and seventeenth-century commentators after his death. As we have seen, in the debate over James’s Letter and Directions Touching Preaching and Preachers, some used variant editions and James’s other, earlier texts to claim a meaning quite other than the king’s own. As Mark Fortier shows, a text such as the True Law, written in the context of James’s struggles with the Kirk, might be read quite differently amid English debates over impositions, equity jurisdiction and royal prerogative.58 Whatever James’s stress on the obligations of rulers, his theory of divine right came, in changed circumstances in his lifetime and after, to arouse concerns, ultimately contributing to the Whig myth of the rise of absolutism. Full understanding of the importance of James VI and I’s writings awaits a study, too, of the traces of the readings of the king’s works in marginalia and glosses, and, more broadly, a study of the reception of the king as a text. The capacity, the opportunity to read the king’s works in ways that he had not desired suggests, of course, that the royal texts were less determining,

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more open than we once assumed such scripts to be. Deconstructive criticism (dismissed by most historians) has theorized and demonstrated the instabilities of meaning in and the self-consuming nature of all texts. For all that royal writing or speech was intrinsic to the exercise of rule in the Renaissance, royal texts could not but reveal the ambiguities and contradictions of a political culture that was wrestling with fundamental issues and debates about faith and obedience, community and individual, stasis and change, traditional values and market relations, power and subjectivity. Indeed, while on the one hand early modern emphases on unity, commonweal and consensus sought to write over these differences, rhetorical training and habits, arguing in utrimque partes or the idea of discordia concors, opened any text to alternative readings and writings.59 Daniel Fischlin writes that ‘the very textuality that is used as a prop to authoritarian regimes can also serve to subvert the terms by which those regimes enlist textuality in their support.’60 Fischlin discusses James’s scriptural exegeses, especially of Revelation, which had (and has) a long history of contested hermeneutics. But Royal Subjects identifies potentially self-subverting contradiction across all the genres of James’s writings. John King reminds us that, as well as scriptural validation for divine rule, there was also a ‘profoundly anti-monarchical strand’ in the typology of David appropriated by James and other monarchs.61 For while the biblical patriarch who united kingdoms may have seemed an ideal model for James – who sought the union of England and Scotland (he recommended David as a pattern to Prince Henry) – David was also a sinner, an adulterer and murderer, who brought disaster on his royal house and suffered reproof from the prophet Nathan. We have already noticed the contradictions implicit in the Amatoria – the ambiguous stances of authority and subjection in the voice of the suitor. But we should note that Dunnigan’s study suggests a full recognition of such instabilities by a learned monarch who was ‘a writer of contradiction and paradox’.62 Indeed, as Fleming shows, in ‘Two Sonnets to Her M:tie to Show the Difference of Stiles’, James plays with Petrarchan conventions to demonstrate how they ‘could be used for a totally invented statement of emotion’.63 He juxtaposes, that is, honesty and artifice. Such contradictions, and displayed contradictions, situate royal texts in a rhetorical and Reformation culture preoccupied with representation and misrepresentation, truth, and what Perez Zagorin has called ‘ways of lying’.64 Close readings and deconstructive readings of James’s writings not only enable us to observe a ruler endeavouring to overwrite challenges to authority, but a king, a thinker, a rhetorician, a lover and man (‘As man, a man am I composed all’) participating in those contradictions – personal, social, religious and political.65 A contemporary recognition of contradiction, James’s own awareness of the ambiguities of the Davidic, and his contrast (one he made in several speeches) between honesty and dissimulation may, I would suggest, have broader implications for his writing and exercise of authority. In its early

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manifestation New Historicism tended to study the discourse of authority as controlled and controlling, as hegemonic and willing to license dissent only so as to contain and neuter it in the service of enhanced power.66 In his later work, Stephen Greenblatt shifted to a more dialogic model of discourse and authority, using in the title of a famous book the term negotiations.67 It is this second model, I believe, that offers more potential insight into early modern political and literary culture, and into the writings of James VI and I. Throughout Royal Subjects we see royal texts as open and multivalent, addressing ambiguity and paradox, airing contradiction, in dialogue within themselves as well as beyond themselves with other texts. Political historians of recent years have characterized James (often in contrast to his son) as a king who excelled in the political arts – flexibility, compromise and manoeuvre – as a ruler ever willing to adjust to circumstance. For all the sincerity and consistency of his fundamental beliefs, James’s writings reveal some of these same qualities – a willingness to discuss, compromise and negotiate.68 Though he did famously tear the Commons’ Protestation from their journal in 1621, James, as argued by Marshall, was also willing to abandon one of his own pronouncements, his directions to preachers, ‘under pressure from his readers’.69 When he penned in kind a verse in response to libels, rather than accepting a collapse in the relationship between author and reader, James perhaps showed, in difficult circumstances, some willingness to renegotiate that relationship.70 If my suggestion that an absolute divine king was willing to enter into dialogue and negotiation with subjects itself reads as a paradoxical text, it goes I think to the heart of early modern politics, where authority ultimately rested on consent and cooperation and involved dialogue and negotiation.71 James’s writings may offer us invaluable insights into how a complex set of cultural codes were negotiated in the king’s own mind. Though the past 20 years of scholarship have produced important works on the Jacobean court and church, foreign policy, and political ideas, we await, as Fischlin and Fortier argue, a modern biography of King James VI and I.72 Though James’s writings have been neglected hitherto, Royal Subjects makes it evident that such a biography must make full use of them; moreover, careful study of these works will refine and revise even recent scholarship. Essays on James’s Amatoria and Bergeron’s evaluation of his love letters open to study a passionate man whose humanity and affective life have been erased or derided by most critics and historians. To say the least they impel a new approach to the history of all James’s affective relations and to their significance for politics; and the dramatic tensions and clashes between the royal bodies, private and public, within the king’s own being and on the public stage. Historians of the ‘British question’ will here see the need to pay attention to James’s poetry written in Scotland and to the relations, as Carolyn Ives and David Parkinson describe them, of ‘poetic invention’ and ‘national identity’; and perhaps, consider the possibilities of a

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‘British’ poetic (James carefully anglicized his texts) after 1603.73 Certainly, Doelman’s observation that James hoped for a revised Psalter that ‘could be a unifying element in all the British churches’ suggests the need to explore James’s writings as key devices in his project of union.74 Several essays in Royal Subjects, as we have seen, take up James’s political ideas and attitudes to the law, subjects of recent monographs and controversy. Here, reading nothing but James’s own words, Louis Knafla depicts a monarch who was by no means a threat to the common law but one who, it seems to me, contests the labels of ‘absolutist’ and ‘constitutionalist’ that Sommerville has somewhat anachronistically imposed on seventeenth-century discourse.75 Whatever our future approach to the ‘voices’ of the early modem constitution, this volume shows they will need to be situated in a broader range of articulations than those privileged as merely legal’ or ‘political.’ It is James’s churchmanship that has most benefited from recent scholarship: Patrick Collinson, Peter Lake, Kenneth Fincham, and others have depicted and praised a king able to sustain a peaceful religious settlement by balancing different groups while upholding the ‘Calvinist consensus’ that, they argue, bound those who differed on matters of ceremony and church government.76 As I have argued elsewhere, and as others have shown, the picture of a Jacobean ecclesiastical peace only disrupted by the Thirty Years’ War and the ‘rise of Arminianism’ tends to downplay the very real doctrinal divisions that spilled over from Elizabeth’s reign to that of the first Stuart.77 More importantly, much of the new scholarship has left James’s own position and faith confusing and unclear – not least because it has paid too little attention to his own works. While Fincham and Lake are right to argue that James’s hostility to Puritans was sharpened by their opposition to the Spanish match, that hostility seems evident in all James’s writings, from the paraphrase of Revelation to the neglected treatises on the Gospel of St Matthew and the Lord’s Prayer.78 Here, while underlining both the importance of context for all James’s utterances and his enduring suspicion of Catholics, Malcolm Smuts shows how, from his writings in Scotland to the 1620s, ‘the king’s hostility to Protestant radicalism never abated’.79 Importantly, too, Smuts argues that James’s (infamous) advocacy of peace was deeply rooted in his providentialist thinking, that his diplomacy, like his domestic government, was taken from his reading of God’s divine will and plan. As Fischlin puts it, all James’s works, actions and writings were acts of faith.80 Ecclesiastical historians need to return to all the writings through which James demonstrated and worked out a faith involving far more than the theological disputes that have dominated our historiography. Study of James’s writings enables a far better understanding of the man and monarch as well as of the nature of Jacobean literary and political culture. Beyond, it points to broader possibilities for elucidating other reigns and representations. Most obviously, James’s writings direct us to the discourses of royal predecessors (on which his own drew in ways we have yet to examine) and indeed successors, and to the changes in the genres and

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circumstances of royal textual performances.81 Historians of the reign of Henry VIII have briefly noticed Henry’s most polemical works – the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, A Necessary Doctrine and The Glass of Truth  – but they have not subjected them to close rhetorical and critical analysis in order to study the means by which Henry endeavoured to construct his supremacy. The king’s 80 letters, meanwhile, especially his intimate letters, have only recently received critical study (by Seth Lerer) and his songs and love poetry remain little read.82 Similarly Edward VI’s diary calls out for a critical reading that goes beyond the historian’s concern with content to study its sparseness, chronicle style, repressions and emotional distancing as themselves evidence of a politics of representation. Queen Elizabeth’s verse, prose translations and poems are at last being edited, and feminist criticism is adding new perspectives to them as texts of female rule in a patriarchal culture.83 But we need more extensive editorial and critical work on the prayers written by Elizabeth and/or published under her name, and closer study of the language of female devotion in a Protestant realm and the gendered discourse of the queen’s own conscience and faith.84 Crossing to the other side of the Civil War, Charles II’s and others’ narratives of his escape from the Battle of Worcester and hiding in an oak tree were widely distributed and popularized, yet only some of the significantly varying texts have been published and edited, and none has been critically analysed for the deployment of narrative technique and novelistic devices.85 James II’s war memoirs have been ignored by all but military historians, and his devotions are most often referred to merely as texts of Jacobite nostalgia.86 We must hope that the fertile fruits of these investigations of James VI and I’s writings stimulate work on other monarchic texts. My brief catalogue of royal texts, of course, passed over Charles I. James’s son and heir, of his works no less than his crown, seemed before his death, as I have argued, to prefer silence to words – or at least to appear to discern the risk that too much speaking and writing opened the possibility of debate and dispute.87 In this context it may be revealing that, according to Marshall in his essay in Royal Subjects, James I came to think the same. For all his inclination to loquacity, in 1621 James threatened to be silent in future because his words had been turned ‘like spittle against the wind upon mine own face’.88 James did not keep his resolution; but his experience, and his son’s experience, of the vulnerability of the royal text to discursive contest may have helped shape Charles’s non-writing – that is, his political – style. And in the end it may have influenced his most powerful textual and political performance, that most ‘unwriterly’ of texts, the Eikon Basilike.89 Royal writings, however, were only one form of royal representation, and they need to be studied in the context of those other representations – whether visual images, ceremonies or performances. Fischlin and Fortier’s introduction to Royal Subjects discusses James’s writings as ‘an aestheticization of politics and a politicization of aesthetics’.90 Indeed, in the early modern Renaissance state, aesthetics was politics, and politics involved a set of presentations and

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representations on canvas as at court, in church and on coin.91 In Jacobean England, the principal royal patrons of the visual arts were the king’s wife and son; James himself was said to dislike sitting for portraits.92 We may need to return to his writings, with all their rich and evocative figurations, with that reluctance in mind, and consider the importance and reception of texts in what the Tudor arts of representation had made a visual and iconic political culture. But we should also be wary of entirely dissociating King James from the visual, and of detaching words from images. James’s coins were the first to depict a monarch imperially wreathed in laurel, and it is clear that he perceived coins, seals and medals as symbols and enactors of union. Several coins and medals bore the inscription Nemo Separet Quae Deus Coniunxit and the imperial crown. As we have seen, James’s 1616 Works bore an elaborately engraved title page by Renold Elstrack, the complex symbolism of which suggests that James was not unaware of the intricate interdependence of the verbal and visual in an emblematic culture. Interestingly, one of the most powerful representations of James as king of the word is an image – an engraving by William van de Passe – of the family of James I.93 In this engraving James is enthroned with crown and sceptre, surrounded by his family. On his right Prince Charles stands as his heir – to his teaching and words as well as to his crown. Charles extends his right hand to touch an open Bible – the constant text of divine monarchy, as his father had stated in his advice to his sons. Next to it on the table lie other books, only one of which is named: the Opera Regis, the writings of King James. King James, the engraving suggests, was his works; but also, he was not. Charles I, I have suggested, followed his father’s words almost to the letter, but he did not emulate that other daily representation of monarchy – the king’s actions and example. Many venomous and biased accounts of James have undoubtedly distorted our image of his behaviour. Yet, it cannot be denied that in matters personal and public, he often failed to practice what he preached. And as Marshall puts it, ‘By fixing his own words in print and enshrining them in his Works, James had given his readers the opportunity to judge his actions against his writings.’94 Discussion of representation takes us to the heart of Renaissance monarchy. But representation is a term, concept and subject still neglected by most historians of early modern politics. Revisionist historians such as Conrad Russell write about seventeenth-century politics as though it were as much about ministries and factions as modern politics. He accordingly finds no place in his history for the discussion of a painting or statue, a medal or mausoleum, a play or poem – even a royal poem.95 The so-called anti-revisionists have taken us no further: Sommerville here adheres to a narrow definition of what counts as ‘political’ writing and to an attenuated notion of politics.96 But what Royal Subjects makes manifest is the pervasiveness of the political and the claim of all James’s writings to be political texts. Several essays, as we have seen, reclaim poetry for the historian of politics. But perhaps the best demonstration of the need to expand our very

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idea of the political is Sandra Bell’s rich reading of James’s A Counterblaste to Tobacco. The subject could hardly appear more removed from politics. However, as Bell shows, in this, the first of his works directed specifically to his new English subjects, James sketched a vision of commonweal and kingship. And in scripting himself as the only ‘proper physician of his politic body’, as the embodiment of and protector of community against disease, foreign invasion and decadence, he rewrote his authority and the values and ideals that sustained it.97 Future study of early modern politics must extend to the smoke as well as mirrors of magistrates and to all the leaves in and out of James’s books. A notion of politics that takes in tobacco as well as treatises on law and kingship will require different and rather more approaches than historians in particular have ventured. If the strengths of Royal Subjects lie, as I believe they do, in the interdisciplinarity of the contributors, the various essays also clearly mark the great differences in methods and the gulf that divides historians from literary critics and theorists. For instance, Knafla finds more consistency in James’s ideas in part because he moves around texts written over decades without close address to the moments and circumstances of their production, which Smuts stresses more. Both approaches are legitimate, but unsurprisingly each influences the ‘meaning’ the historian discovers – and may even decide whether the subject should be characterized as ‘absolutist’ or not. ‘Absolutist’ (I am using language I find unhelpful to explore others’ readings) views in Scotland may not be so in England; what seems extreme in 1610 may not appear so in 1621, and so on. Historians, in other words, read and study texts differently. But what they seldom do is read them closely for language, metaphor and trope, for the means of persuasion and the cultural vocabulary they deploy to persuade. For instance, in Fleming’s simple reference to James’s ‘proclivity for natural imagery’ lies an important aspect of the naturalization of authority in early modern discourse that awaits full exploration.98 Still less do historians address what post-modern criticism has addressed: the repressions and disjunctures in texts that can reveal as much as what they desire to disclose. In this collection, deconstructive, Derridean methods have clearly influenced Fischlin’s identification of the fissures and contradictions in James’s paraphrase of Revelation  – an example as he puts it, of ‘the arbitrariness of interpretative positionings.99 Similarly, deconstructive, feminist and gay criticism inform Ives and Parkinson’s and Bergeron’s essays, in ways that enable them to illuminate the divided bodies of the writer and his texts. The point is that each of these approaches offers a new perspective, a reading, of James’s writings, and all are essential to a more complete understanding of those writings (their strategies and style) and of the writer. To argue for such diverse perspectives is to advocate, as I emphatically do, an interdisciplinary practice that early modern studies, especially historical studies, whatever the rhetoric, eschews. Historians may be discomfited by talk of texts ‘constructing’ sovereignty and subjectivity,

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but Royal Subjects underlines how far James exemplifies such an approach and how he must be read and studied in the context of such a discursive theory. Royal Subjects has triumphantly demonstrated the importance of the king’s texts. If beyond that it leads historians to new approaches, to consider royal authority itself as a set of texts requiring critical exegeses, it will be a larger triumph still.

3 Uncommon places? Sir William Drake’s reading notes

Folger MS V.a.263 is described in the Folger Shakespeare Library catalogue as ‘A collection of proverbs, apothegms .  .  . ca.1650.’ It is one of many commonplace books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the manuscript collection. The Maggs Bros. Sale catalogue of 1925 from which Henry Clay Folger purchased the manuscript advertised it as a ‘commonplace book of a seventeenth century student, extending to 307 pp.’ and emphasized its special interest on account of a long extract from Ben Jonson’s tragedy, Sejanus in which ‘William Shakespeare was one of the principal actors (see Figure 1).’ Doubtless it attracted the attention of Mr Folger for just such a reason. The practice of keeping a commonplace book was widespread in early modern England; indeed, it was recommended by all the leading educational theorists of Renaissance humanism – notably Erasmus, Vives and Bacon – and prescribed by most grammar school masters and tutors. The purpose of commonplacing was to build up a storehouse of wisdom and Christian virtue under headings such as ‘Friendship’ or ‘Faith’. Scholars have rightly analysed commonplacing as an ideological as well as a pedagogical practice, describing the extracts annotated as ‘building blocks of common knowledge and thus basic elements of social cohesion’.1 At first glance the Folger manuscript may appear to be just such a familiar text. Certainly the volume, as is typical of the genre, consists of a number of extracts – proverbs, adages and emblems – many of them repeated and glossed by reference to other works, historical examples and the lives of famous figures. Accordingly, the author annotates the emblem ‘Cunctatio prodest’, illustrated by the mulberry tree, with reference to Fabius Maximus who was famous for his deliberation.2 The ‘student’ of the Folger commonplace book

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not only arranges proverbs ‘backed with examples’, he evidently had other collections of adages indexed for convenience.3 Moreover, Folger MS V.a. 263 evidences the raison d’être of commonplacing: self-instruction. On the front board of the calf bound octavo the owner has instructed himself to write the choicest adages next to 20 words. If the format of the book and the method of glossing the adages appears familiar, the exegetical practice is beyond surprising; it is shocking. Far from the traditional virtues of Christian humanism, the extracts copied and recopied are resolutely cynical, indeed amoral in tone. The heart of man is always deceitful, the compiler records; by mutual lies men dispatch their business; accordingly, a so-called friend should be treated as an enemy. For, the gloss continues, ‘vita nostra est militia’  – our life is a warfare  – and in such a war one should ‘presuppose the ingratitude and faithlessness of friends’ as much as the ‘envy of neighbours and the fraud and force of enemies’.4 Any expectation we might have that our commonplacer looked traditionally to virtuous governors to rectify the vices of selfish subjects is quickly quashed by a startlingly amoral catalogue of adages and proverbs about public life. The writer regularly repeats aphorisms such as ‘he who knows not how to dissimulate knows not how to rule’, and recommends that unjust acts of power are better dissembled than acknowledged or atoned for.5 Citing advice that princes should imitate the stealthy wolf and the wily fox, as well as the strong lion, the writer also copies a maxim which flies in the face of all the contemporary literature of politics: ‘a bad man may make a good king.’6 Such statements, copied and glossed seemingly with no disapproval, evoke a figure who, in urging the prince to imitate the lion and the fox, subverted the moral foundations of Renaissance politics and religion: Niccolò Machiavelli, ‘Old Nick’. The Folger commonplacer, as well as invoking the Florentine’s counsel to seize every opportunity and to divide and rule, cites Machiavelli as the source of the advice to rulers to deploy fear as an instrument of government; he annotates his transcription of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy with further examples of rulers’ pursuits of interest by subtlety and artifice. Not only are Machiavellian injunctions repeated throughout the commonplace book, but also the annotator’s personal gloss on his reading appears to be written in the ink of Machiavellian values. The historical figure our commonplacer most invokes to illustrate wise proverbs in practice is Louis XI, whom he clearly admires as ‘a great imitator of the subtle prince in all his actions’.7 The other writers he cites, such as Tacitus, Comines and Cardano, Guicciardini and Bacon, were all seen to be apologists for realpolitik. And even when our commentator refers to texts which exemplify more traditional moral codes  – Aristotle, Socrates and Plutarch, for example – he seems to make them serve a different turn, rendering Aristotle an apologist for raw cunning and Plutarch an advocate of fear as a device of rule. Indeed, in this commonplace book even Scripture is used to teach Machiavellian lessons, the Apostles being cited as support

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for the view that life was a warfare and Herod taken as a fitting illustration of the efficacy of fear as a mode of government.8 What we discern, in other words, is a commonplacer who not only read to extract the wisdom of others but one who read to construct a world-view and, beyond that, one who brought to his texts and found reinforced by them a pragmatic, utilitarian and amoral stance on private, social and public affairs. It is in this context, rather than Shakespeare’s acting history, that we should consider the extensive notes from Sejanus. Ben Jonson had freely adapted his source in Tacitus to stage an examination of Machiavellian politics in the court of Emperor Tiberius and his favourite Aelius Sejanus. The Folger annotator worked carefully through Jonson’s text, noting passages on the arts of tyranny and flattery and the use of dissimulation and fear. Sometimes he quoted directly from the play text while in other places he subtly changed Jonson’s words into his own idiom, into the language of convenience and necessity. Whatever Jonson’s purpose, our commonplacer evidently found in the drama of Tiberius and Sejanus powerful amplification and investigation of the social warfare of human and, especially, political life which he had read in his proverbs and histories. While other contemporary commonplacers were filling their books with adages exemplifying moral virtue, our annotator had a radically cynical view of the world, with no respect for conventional values and, indeed, still less regard for religion which ‘makes of men’ ‘excellent fools’.9 We know that, as well as being widely read, he was learned in Latin and Italian, the languages of many of the proverbs. We know too, from his comments and illustrations, that he had a knowledge of recent English history and politics and of favourites such as Robert Carr, first Earl of Somerset, and George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham.10 Most importantly, we know that he was reading and taking notes during the 1650s by his references to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and John Rushworth’s Historical Collections, books published in 1651 and 1659 respectively.11 Beyond that, at least from the manuscript itself, we know nothing of the unusual ‘student’ who compiled it. We have direct evidence, however, of the nature of his reading and extracting. On folio 74v of his commonplace book, commenting on Tiberius’s covering his evil designs with ‘the cloak of religion and liberty’, the annotator cross-refers to the ‘Duke of Rohan’. As it happens, the Folger Library’s copy of Henri, duc de Rohan’s Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome (London, 1641) is extensively annotated with marginal comment – in the same hand as the commonplace book. Rohan’s Treatise surveys the various countries and powers of contemporary Europe and analyses and assesses the ‘standing of the present affairs’ and what ‘hath caused the ruine of some or the greatness of others’.12 The tone of the treatise is pragmatic and the observations made and lessons drawn are those of a commentator immersed in the realpolitik of the age of the Thirty Years’ War. It will come as no surprise, therefore, that the Folger annotator was attracted

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to the text and subjected it to his own close reading and comment. The theme of interest dominates the manuscript underlinings and annotations of the reader (which we find on almost every page) as well as the authorial printed book. Indeed, the Folger commonplacer makes his own headings such as ‘maxims of interest observed’, ‘errors committed against interest’ and ‘princes observing their interest’ and concludes towards the end of his reading, ‘men do not only not gain but lose their estates by neglect of their interest.’ And here, in accordance with the notes describing life as a war, the reader of Rohan doubts not that ‘every one seeks his own advancement . . . which depends ordinarily upon the destruction of another.’13 Our reader also brings onto the pages of Rohan’s Treatise the cross-references to other texts that he deployed to explicate proverbs. Along with citations of Tacitus, Malvezzi’s commentary on Tacitus, Campanella, the historian Sir Robert Cotton, and Francis Bacon, the authors he most frequently cites are Guicciardini and Machiavelli (both The Prince and The Discourses). Such cross-referencing evidently had a purpose: the extricating of lessons from the fortunes of states and princes, or, as a note on the title page of Rohan’s treatise puts it: ‘’tis good to observe the arts and errors in great states and to consider what were the events of each.’ Indeed, our annotator flushed out many of Rohan’s buried lessons formulating them as maxims. Such maxims are flagged in the margin with the marker ‘Sen’, for ‘sentence’, and indexed, suggesting that they were to be copied into another commonplace book of adages – perhaps that one referred to in the Folger notebook.14 The lessons that our annotator observed and proverbialized were not simply those of Rohan’s text. This reader had his own contribution to make and deployed Rohan as a place for reflecting on related affairs, noting, for example, on a blank page of the printed book his own ‘Points of Interest’ – among them the arts of dexterity in negotiations and the need to check the greatness of neighbours. Other marginal notes comment, where Rohan does not, on the ‘admirable prudence’ of the Venetians in refusing the Turks’ aid against the papacy, on the reasons for Gustavus Adolphus’s entering the war in Germany, and on the folly of the king of Spain ‘first straining his power so much and after let[ting] it down too low’. Our reader has clearly used Rohan for his own meditation on ‘the causes of the advantages of the world’.15 The marginalia offer no clear points to the identity of the hand behind them. They suggest a breadth of reading in several languages; and we have a date, for on page 91 he writes, ‘they this instant year 1645 in their treaty at Munster endeavour to make the Duke of Bavaria an Elector.’ If our annotator was reading attentively in 1645 and, as the reference to Rushworth indicates, still doing so in 1659, he was clearly a ‘student’ of affairs long beyond any normal, formal programme of school or university education. The wide reading suggests an older man rather than an adolescent, as too the interest in pragmatic politics points to a man of the world rather than an academic. Beyond that, though their author may elude us, what we can conclude

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from the two Folger documents more generally and importantly is that this early modern reader, far from following the pedagogic prescriptions of the humanist educational programme, studied for his own use, to formulate his own codes for a world he perceived as deceitful, vicious and violent. There I would probably have left the Folger documents and their author. As it happened, however, I arrived at the Folger after encountering our annotator in four other places, 6,000 miles apart. While I was beginning research on a study of representations of authority and images of power at the Huntington Library in 1993, they purchased from Phillips of London what was described in the sale catalogue as a ‘major new seventeenth-century diary’, the ‘autograph journal of Sir William Drake, scholar and manuscript collector, member of the Long Parliament and associate of the Parliamentarians.’16 The 160-page journal, written from both ends, covered the period from 1633 to 1642. No simple diary, it is a book recording events, some legal cases and conversations, with mementoes of self-admonition and advice and notes on skills to acquire and books to obtain and study. The tone of the entries is pragmatic and utilitarian, sometimes ruthlessly so. Headings to notes like ‘friendship with many for converse but few for endearment’ or ‘the several uses I may make of men’ disclose a chillingly cynical, self-interested approach to society.17 The same preoccupation with interest and advantage informs Drake’s view of courtiers, MPs, and rulers. ‘The whole world’, he writes, ‘is nothing but deceit, lying and vanity’; the law, he reflects, favours the most powerful not the just; religion was used most often to dupe men. ‘Interest and advantage with princes’, he observes, ‘overweighs all other considerations’; ‘the most crafty, faithless and audacious men are those that rule the world.’18 Drake’s diary is not that of a ‘student’: born in 1606, he was in his twenties and thirties during the period it covers. Nor is it the text of a scholar. The manuscript is full of records of land transactions, business, and converse with men of affairs from the archbishop of Canterbury to MPs such as John Pym and John Hampden and common lawyers. Moreover, Drake counsels himself ‘not to study much books of learning for they divert business . . . and keep one from more useful things.’19 Here the reading he most recommends to himself is in law and ‘policy’ – statutes and proclamations, books on the jurisdiction of courts, parliamentary journals, and such like. Beyond these, his reading list includes the classic texts of policy and realpolitik – Tacitus, Cardano, Comines, works ‘profitable for a civil life’. We find him referring most frequently to Machiavelli and Guicciardini, ‘the most judicious of modern authors’.20 Drake’s diary, in other words, is the work of a practical and cynical man, a Buckinghamshire gentleman living in early Stuart London, reading and observing in order to equip himself to survive in a competitive world, advance his fortunes and rise in place. After encountering him for the first time at the Huntington, I followed Sir William Drake back to England. Here the scale of his programme of self-instruction in the ways of the world became abundantly apparent. In

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the library of University College, London, are volumes of manuscripts from the Drake family house, Shardeloes, in Buckinghamshire; among them are 37 commonplace books of reading notes, 15 in Sir William’s hand, the rest in that of a scribe. In addition, I found 2 other notebooks by him, unidentified, in the Buckinghamshire Record Office and the House of Lords Record Office, along with other printed books with marginalia in his hand.21 All the holograph manuscripts (and indeed those in the scribal hand) contain notes in English, Italian, Latin and French from classical and humanist texts and commentaries, notably histories and works of policy, books of adages and proverbs, fables and emblems. In all of them, Drake meditates on the extracts he notes, glosses with reference to other works, illustrates axioms from historical examples and characters, and distils the practical lesson (moral would be an inappropriate term) from an event, life or adage. The notes are a record of a man who, as Stuart Clark observed, ‘set out to acquire an arsenal of sententious materials’, and they are dominated by the writings of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the Florentines who were anathematized as very devils subverting all Christian morality and virtuous government.22 William Drake penned the Folger commonplace notes and the marginalia in the Duke of Rohan’s Treatise. Drake was not, however, as the Maggs cataloguer believed, a student. He was in his forties and fifties when he made these notes. Born to godly parents, he was tutored by Dr Charles Croke before going up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1624. In 1626, he proceeded to the Middle Temple, where he was bound with Sir Simonds D’Ewes, and went on, it seems, to some legal practice. Though he consolidated his Buckinghamshire estates with the purchase of the manor of Amersham, Drake also had property and lived much of the time in London. In the 1630s he travelled to France and the Low Countries. He was elected to parliament in April 1640 and in 1641 was made a baronet. He was appointed a member of the Parliamentary Association for Buckinghamshire but, soon after the outbreak of Civil War, he went abroad and, except for brief periods, did not return until the Restoration when he again sat in parliament until his death in 1669. That is all we know about the facts of his life. Although a speech by Drake, supposedly to the Long Parliament, was published, we have no independent evidence that it was delivered, and he has left almost no trace in the public records of the years of personal rule, Civil War and interregnum.23 Drake’s lack of public prominence makes his numerous volumes of commonplace books, if anything, all the more interesting and valuable.24 For here we may eavesdrop on a gentleman on the fringes of court society, conversing with men of affairs, and weighing experience with his reading and rereading. The unusual number and the radically amoral tone of his notebooks must lead us to ask why he kept them. We can discount the normal reason  – humanist education and scholarship – for, as we have seen, Drake had little time for contemplative study. The notes were, as he constantly indicates, for use, to equip him with life skills needed to survive

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and thrive in the competitive and self-interested society and polity of early Stuart England, which was far removed from the ideals of harmony and cooperation it celebrated. From time to time, evidently, he returned to look over his notes and to add new reflections. Whether he achieved his goals is not clear. He inherited and amassed a considerable estate and purchased a reversion to an office; but whether he harboured higher ambitions remains uncertain. What is certain, and revealing, are his perceptions of the men who governed England from the age of Queen Elizabeth to the Restoration, and his analysis of society, religion and government. William Drake’s notebooks demonstrate how a gentleman with a conventional upbringing and education could, and did, principally through his own reading, formulate values and beliefs radically at odds with the official scripts and teachings of his age. Of course he prompts us to wonder whether there were others like him – not only his circle of acquaintances who appear to have shared with him his cynical world-view as well as books, but others who, also through a dialogue between reading and experience, constructed personal codes and social and political ideas far removed from our assumptions about the early modern mentalité. Men like Drake read the great works of political thought from which we still write the history of ideas – Aristotle, Machiavelli and Hobbes. But Drake’s process of constructing a world-view and system of belief was what modern critics would call intertextual, a reading of fables, emblems and proverbs as much as histories and formal political treatises. The Folger commonplace book MS V.a.263 is not of the ‘first importance’, as the sale catalogue vaunted, on account of Shakespeare’s acting in Sejanus. It is, however, an unusual volume of notes and reflections on texts and events that manifests both a process of self-fashioning by a citizen and the formulation of independent political thinking. It is a manuscript which should lead scholars to look for political ideas not only in the traditional canonical texts but also in such ‘uncommon’ places.

4 Reading revelations: Prophecy, hermeneutics and politics in early modern Britain, 1560–1720

I The histories of reading and the book have largely been written in two, very different ways. Early research concentrated on the long durée of publications and reading habits – on the shift of the quantities, materials and genres of books over several centuries and on the move from the intensive study of a few titles to the extensive reading of a myriad of print. Changes in habits of reading, that is, have been viewed as changes in the types and availability of books: we write of reading revolutions effected by print, the penny pamphlets or the novel. Alternatively, specialized case studies have focused on the reading habits of particular individuals who brought to the often familiar books of their culture a radical new hermeneutics which was sometimes personal, as with Menocchio the Friulian miller of Carlo Ginzburg’s study, and sometimes, as with Jean Ranson, the mark of shifting cultural sensibilities, in this case what we characterize as Romanticism.1 What neither approach offers is an understanding of how books with a continuous history were read, interpreted and deployed in different circumstances over long historical periods. What, in other words, did it mean to read the same texts  – the classics, Scripture, legal treatise or fable  – through the upheavals of Reformation, Civil War, Hanoverian succession, scientific revolution and Romantic movement? Any such history must endeavour attention to local circumstances and moments, but, for all the difficulties, it is study of the receptions of a text over the long historical arc that elucidates the relationship of cultural and political to hermeneutic

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change and brings the history of reading to where I argue it belongs: at the centre of all histories, of History. This, of course, is, as most histories of reading are, a history based on writings, some of which have been studied before. My approach here differs in foregrounding those texts not simply as arguments but as readings of Scripture, and reviewing these as texts that bring to attention and priority acts of reading and readers. The sketch that follows, therefore, is not just a history of biblical interpretation – though we still need that; it discloses the ways in which readers read and were thought to read Scripture and it charts the endless negotiations between the efforts of authors and exegetes to impose and control readings and of readers to follow their own minds and faiths. In doing so it offers an exemplar of that larger negotiation that we call the exercise of authority, be it textual or governmental. For early modern English men and women the most important book was the Bible. The Bible was for all classes the book they first heard and read, and the text they reread most often. Scripture was the only text regularly expounded to the illiterate and the foundation text in any training in literacy received in the school, parish or household. The Bible was also the platform on which the whole edifice of early modern religious, social and political institutions was built. Robert Browne, the separatist (for once), stated nothing controversial when he told Lord Burleigh that ‘the word of God doth expressly set down all necessary and general rules of the arts and all learning.’2 Early modern educators, churchmen and governors regarded it as their Christian duty to come as close as possible to realizing the word in the world. They sought, that is, to restore fallen man and society to the state of grace and to frame a government that fulfilled not only Aristotle’s goal of the good life but Augustine’s model of the godly commonweal. Almost no one in early modern England disputed the centrality or authority of the Bible. Differences, therefore  – over matters of faith and liturgy, indeed over social codes and political programmes  – arose from various interpretations of what Scripture ‘meant’. Disputes about the meaning of Scripture were ideological and political disagreements. From the beginning of Christianity the meaning of Scripture had been disputed and contested. The ambiguity of Scripture was explained as a consequence of the fall which had separated sinful man from God’s revealed truth. The quest to return to knowledge of that truth (to the reason of the first man created in God’s image) was the goal of the Christian life and society. A true understanding of the word of God would both restore fallen man to grace and unite all Christians in harmony. Efforts were therefore made to find a perfect text of Scripture and a perfect understanding of biblical language. Though historians have tended to emphasize its importance for classical texts, Renaissance philological scholarship was concerned first with the recovery of a pure biblical text and with the lost language of Adam. Even before the rent of Christendom in the sixteenth century, scholarship failed to resolve all the textual and hermeneutic problems

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concerning the Bible and its meaning. Nor was scholarship the only road taken to reveal God’s truth. Throughout Christian history there have been mystics, visionaries and prophets who have claimed personal revelation of God to them and, under the guidance of the spirit, special understanding of his word. At every period authorized interpretations of the Bible have been open to scholarly disagreement and subject to challenge by personal revelation. The Reformation compounded both problems. In the first place, the attack on the Vulgate Bible and the proliferation of vernacular Bibles exposed the problem of scriptural translations and variations, and made explicit the relationship between different texts and contesting sects and churches. Secondly, the Protestant emphasis on the household and on individual Bible reading promoted and legitimized a personal interpretation of the meaning of Scripture, one unmediated by clerical authority. If these were the logic of Protestant scripturalism and solifidianism, Protestant churches and countries proved no less concerned than their Catholic counterparts to insist on religious orthodoxy and obedience to the magistrate. That is to say, they were no less concerned to secure an authorized and agreed text and interpretation of Scripture. Beza’s Geneva Bible was the first to order Scripture by arrangement of the text into verses; the Geneva Bible bore printed marginal notes included to direct the reader, to delimit the potentially boundless possibilities of personal interpretation. Moreover, the Protestant emphasis on godly preaching and upon the sermon as the core of worship arguably rendered the service a more didactic and less participatory experience. From the pulpit elevated above the altar, the word of God was expounded and determined. In addition to the differences between Protestant confessions – Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist – there were tensions within the heart of Protestantism: tensions concerning the authority of the word and its exposition, between the community of the visible church and the elect, between clerical authority and the freedom of the godly, and between conscience and obedience. In large part all these issues came down to the question of which Bible was valorized and who had the ultimate right to teach and interpret God’s word – that is, to the authority of the text and authority over the text.3 In early modern Britain, the tensions and ambiguities were exacerbated by the peculiar nature and chronology of its reformations. As we know, the Church of England was a mix of Erasmian, Lutheran, Zwinglian and Calvinist theologies blended with traditional Catholic ritual, which could be (and often was) viewed as tempering pure Protestant doctrine. And within the small confines of Britain, where Wales remained for most of the sixteenth century a dark corner of Catholic conservatism, Scotland underwent a radical reformation which to many hotter Protestants presented a model for further reform. Even within England, we have learned, reformation proceeded at a very different pace in different parts of the country, and authority permitted a wide variety of practice and belief.4

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But if we have long appreciated that in early modern Britain God’s word meant many different things to different people, we have paid inadequate attention to the question of which Bible was favoured and read and how Scripture was interpreted and expounded. There were, of course, a number of Bibles available throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Hebrew, Greek and Latin editions as well as vernacular Bibles – Erasmus’s New Testament, Coverdale’s Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops’ Bible, the Rheims-Douai translation and the Authorized King James Bible. In each case, new editions not only came in varying formats and typographies, but also introduced ‘improvements’ to the translation – that is, further changes to the meaning.5 Among English Protestants, the Geneva Bible increasingly gained popularity over the Great Bible, but even talk of the Geneva Bible oversimplifies a complex textual history. For although the 1560 Geneva Bible was widely available in England, the first English edition appeared in 1575, the year of Grindal’s elevation to the see of Canterbury. Thereafter there were not only myriad different formats of the Bible, some bound with a Puritan revision of the Prayer Book, some in roman type, some in black letter, some with maps and illustrations, but also editions with very different marginal notes. In 1576, for example, an English edition was published with notes by the Cambridge divine Richard Thomson, fuller than those of 1560. Then, in a 1602 edition, Thomson’s notes were in turn replaced by those of Franciscus Junius, which constituted a ‘massive and violently antipapal diatribe’ by a scholar and polemicist who had ‘experienced the horrors of the French wars of religion’.6 The notes attracted immediate attention and notoriety. If Thomson’s annotation avoided some of the more contentious glosses of the 1560 edition, Junius’s excited ‘vivid apostolic expectations’.7 It was not least concern about the Geneva notes that led Archbishop Whitgift, the opponent of further godly information, to endeavour to enforce use of the Bishops’ Bible, and subsequently impelled James I to commission a new English Bible free of all marginal annotation or gloss. But neither the Bishops’ Bible nor the Authorized King James Bible supplanted the Geneva editions. Indeed, Thomas Fuller maintained that some complained specifically about the removal of marginal notes on the ground that ‘they could not see into the sense of the Scripture without the spectacles of those Geneva annotations.’8 Even after 1611 Robert Barker, printer to the king, continued to publish ‘cum privilegio regiae majestatis’ new editions of the Geneva Bible with Thomson’s and Junius’s notes. In an edition of 1616, the preface to the ‘Christian reader’ acknowledged that ‘some translations read after one sort and some after another’ and advertised that ‘we have in the margent notified the diversity . . . of reading.’9 The Bible itself, therefore, was, in early modern England, a varied and variant text which in its varying forms and translations, its editions and annotations, offered a variety, indeed a multiplicity, of reading experiences. Within these books, moreover, were other ‘books’ of the Bible which themselves differed generically, some being history, some prophecy or gospel.

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And beyond the text, early modern English people encountered a growing literature of interpretative guides, ranging from 1,000-page scholarly exegeses to brief paraphrases and pulpit expositions. We know too little about which Bible, still less about which commentaries, were favoured by particular religious or social groups, let alone by individuals. That is to say, we have scarcely begun to ask the question of what it meant to read the Bible in early modern England. The full answer to such a large question, of course, lies beyond the scope of this essay. What I endeavour is some examination of various attempts to read and interpret one book: a sketch not just of the different interpretations but of the hermeneutic principles they recommend to readers and apply – or do not apply – themselves, and a glance at the contemporary reading practices they disclose and often seek to change.

II The book of Revelation was widely held to be the most important and the most difficult of all biblical books. ‘Not one necessary point of belief’, wrote John Bale, ‘is in all the other Scriptures that is not here also’; ‘he who knoweth not this book, knoweth not what the church is.’10 Yet, Arthur Dent admitted, ‘it is so dark and hard to understand’; ‘in manner riddle like’, Augustine Marlorat described it.11 From the first age of the church there had been many attempts to decode and appropriate its message. Where St Jerome found in Revelation ‘as many sacraments as words’ and that ‘in every of the words are his manifold understandings’, other commentators divided into those such as Irenaeus, who approached it literally, and who interpreted it, with Augustine, as spiritual allegory.12 Politically, while followers of Joachim of Fiore seized on the Emperor Frederick II as the fulfilment of millennial hope, Hussites and Anabaptists looked to apocalypse in a communist utopia.13 Erasmus questioned the authorship and authority of the book, as at first did Luther. But Luther’s mounting conviction under pressure that the pope was the biblical Antichrist refocused attention on Revelation and emphasized its polemical importance in the struggle against Rome.14 In Revelation, too, the Protestants were to find a history which enabled them to answer the charge of innovation and prophecy of a triumphant future to sustain them during the dark days of persecution. From the sixteenth century, Revelation was inextricably linked to reformation and the apocalyptic with the political.15 Despite Calvin’s reticence on the subject, the sixteenth century saw an outpouring of paraphrases and commentaries on the text. They constitute a hermeneutic history which charts and crosses the ecclesiastical and political history of early modern Europe. In early modern England, as we have seen, the text appeared in different forms, Revelation being the book to which annotations were heaviest, most revised and most controversial.16 Some texts of the Geneva Bible introduced

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the complex book with a summary of ‘the argument’, others with a historical ‘order of time’, ‘whereunto the contents of the book are to be referred’.17 Where all editions with notes tried to assist the reader with the general structure of the book and with the elucidation of difficult passages, some were more philological and historical while others were more concerned with applications and prophecies of the future. The language and tone of the annotations differed markedly: the word ‘reprobate’ used to gloss chapter 9 verse 2 in the 1602 edition does not appear in the 1560 Bible. Interestingly, the 1560 gloss on chapter 21 verse 24, noting that ‘kings are partakers of the heavenly glory if they rule in fear of the Lord’, did not appear in many later editions. Variations in the text were only the first of the problems that confronted the reader of Revelation. From the start, the book seemed to announce both its openness and impenetrability. The first chapter promises that ‘blessed is he that readeth and they that heareth the words of this prophecy’; in chapter 5, by contrast, the reader confronts the sealed book that none could open. Revelation was also generically indeterminable. Was it history or prophecy? Were some chapters narrative of church history, others moral allegory? Were the visions, figures and tropes to be interpreted literally or parabollically? As early modern readers used to a textual culture in which meaning was encoded in genres grappled to assign Revelation to generic classification, they only encountered more problems and disagreements. What some took as history, others read as ‘epistle monitory’ to the church, and others still as ‘heavenly drama’ or interlude.18 Edward Waple was not alone in his inability to decide what it was. Even those who concurred in viewing it as ‘a prophetical drama’ could not agree about the subclassification of its dramatic form  – whether comedy, ‘truly tragical’ or ‘tragical comedy’.19 Given the textual instabilities, generic uncertainties, complex structure and difficult language of Revelation, it is not surprising that there was an industry of commentaries and evidently a market for them. The many commentaries also evidenced a number of authors with a wish to advance an interpretation and a cause. That involved steering and persuading the reader to adopt a particular approach or interpretative strategy towards the biblical text. As we shall see, several commentaries explicitly outline a reading method in epistles dedicatory or addresses to the reader; in other cases, the method unfolds in the course of interpreting the text. What all have in common is a need and endeavour to make sense of the book by explicating it within cultural contexts and language familiar to the early modern reader. Bernard, Pareus and others discuss the prophecy as if it were a piece of theatre, while William Perkins tries to make Revelation into an early modern book with its ‘proem’, epistles dedicatory and ‘an entrance to the vision’.20 Several commentators describe Christ and his kingdom in the language of earthly kings, with their ‘chamber of presence’.21 John Tillinghast domesticated scriptural mystery by writing of Christ gaining the ‘outshires and suburbs’ of the

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Antichrist’s city,22 and in a quotidian reference Dent compared the drying up of the Euphrates (Rev. 16.12) with the draining of ‘great fish ponds’.23 Such cultural referents, of course, as well as rendering Revelation more familiar, also situated the text in the midst of contemporary debates and polemics – that is, outside the author’s control. The forms of commentaries differed as authors endeavoured to reach different audiences at different times. Some were learned exegeses of hundreds of pages, others short octavos or revised sermons. In some, Scripture was carefully separated from paraphrase or comment, in others Revelation, comment and annotation became hard to distinguish. The tone in some cases was didactic, even authoritarian; others, especially in the 1640s, took the form of a dialogue which invited the reader’s participation. But in every case the independence of the reader was, implicitly or explicitly, acknowledged. Nearly all commentaries open with self-justificatory or apologetic addresses to the reader; John Napier closed with an appeal to ‘the misliking reader’ whom he feared he had not persuaded.24 As authors recognized, each reader, in each moment of reading, brought to the commentary, as did the writers themselves, the concerns of their personal circumstances and time. From the lines – sometimes between the lines – of commentaries, therefore, we may not only read the efforts to interpret Revelation in changing circumstances but also discern the negotiations between authors and readers and the shifting strategies deployed to delimit and direct interpretations. We may, that is, trace the contest for ecclesiastical and political authority which was (and is) never separable from the struggle to control interpretation of valorizing but ambiguous texts. In the late sixteenth century, English commentators on Revelation were undoubtedly preoccupied with the threat of Catholicism, domestic and foreign, and with the need to establish Protestant doctrine in a church which had in 1559 left much open to interpretation and preference. In 1574 the English translation of the Huguenot Augustine Marlorat’s Catholic Exposition upon the Revelation voiced anxiety about the continuing attractions of ‘gorgeous’ Catholic churches, feasts and holidays and about the persistence of a good-works theology of salvation.25 His solution was to gloss Revelation as an unequivocally Protestant text. Accordingly, Marlorat and his translator use the language of ‘election’ and ‘reprobation’ to paraphrase the text, and in lengthy passages of explanation denounce Catholic practices and pilgrimages, pardons and images.26 Marlorat is at pains to make Revelation ‘simple, plain and clear’ to the faithful, who, as they follow the exposition, affirm their Protestant commitment and their hostility to Rome.27 Marlorat does not pause to weigh scholarly debates or ponder difficulties. Yet, for all his clear purpose and straightforward exposition (‘his meaning is this’), he in passing acknowledges the ‘university’ of interpretations, both the textual variants (‘some copies have it’) and exegetical disputes (‘as many expositions as there are expositors’).28 Marlorat’s concern was that the reader might be drawn to approaches less ‘to

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the advancement of Christ’s glory’.29 As Arthur Golding put it in dedicating his translation to Sir Walter Mildmay, the devil worked all the mischief he could; to counter him, Revelation had to be read with ‘a Christianly mind of being edified to salvation’.30 Paradoxically, just as faith was built upon the word, so the right reading of Scripture depended upon faith. The threat from Spain and defeat of the armada in 1588 unquestionably heightened English interest in the apocalypse as events appeared to confirm an English history founded in biblical prophecy. Some went to the lengths of identifying the woman clothed with the sun in Revelation 13 as Queen Elizabeth.31 But even amid the euphoria of English victory, Revelation did not simply applaud authority. Martin Marprelate infamously identified the bishops as the beast and made interpretation of apocalypse central to the conflict between the church and the Presbyterians.32 We have another window onto the relationship of hermeneutics to ecclesiastical contest in George Gifford’s sermons on Revelation published in 1596.33 Gifford, deprived of his living in 1584 for his nonconformity, had other goals than the celebration of armada victory. In a dedication to the Earl of Essex, champion of the Protestant cause, he wrote of the need to recruit ‘noble warriors’ for Christ at home and abroad.34 For Gifford, exposition of Revelation was part of the war against the papists who sought to ‘drive men from the reading and study of it because it pointeth out great Babel’.35 However, the expositors he favoured were not the bishops, but the ‘pastors’; ‘there is’, he added in words freighted with Elizabethan controversy, ‘a great matter depending upon this ministry’.36 While he was at pains to distance himself from radical extremists such as Anabaptists, Gifford’s whole exegesis of Revelation focused on the importance of godly ministry to teach the errors of the Antichrist and the glad tidings of the gospel. He closed his commentary with a denunciation of ‘dumb dogs’ and of those who persecuted the true preachers of the word: ‘the state of every church’, he maintained, ‘is set forth under their pastor’.37 Gifford placed little emphasis on the capacity of the common reader to interpret Scripture – he was scathing about those who came to church with their Bibles but had no understanding of their faith.38 He stressed the godly preacher rather than the individual believer or the church as the expositor of the word. In his hands, Revelation became a godly treatise for a preaching ministry. The openness of Revelation to readings and groups critical of the establishment in church and state was not lost on Elizabeth’s fellow sovereign James VI of Scotland, who succeeded amidst the Civil War that followed reformation in Scotland. In 1588 the king took the unusual step of writing an interpretation of the text  – in a meditation on chapter 20 and in a ‘paraphrase’ of the whole book.39 Because he knew that ‘of all the Scriptures the book of the Revelation is most meet for this our last age’, James sought to impose his own interpretation upon the text, and to support his authority with biblical prophecy.40 Indeed, in his paraphrase James erased the distinction between text and commentary and wrote in

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the first-person pronoun of St John.41 When he paraphrases verse 8 of chapter 10 as ‘that voice which I heard spoke to me from heaven’, he is claiming divine inspiration for himself as exegete as well as for the apostle.42 James even denies the place of commentary, claiming that Scripture is its own interpreter: ‘we are taught’, he writes in the meditation, ‘to use only Scripture for interpretation of Scripture’.43 But in practice he does deploy other texts. And, while claiming merely to ventriloquize the word, James rewrites Revelation for his own purposes. In his paraphrase there are no notes, no references to textual differences or alternative meanings, no epistles dedicatory or prefaces to the reader. The impression given is of Scripture ‘laid open’ without gloss. Yet, James outlines the structure of the book and the ‘argument’ of each chapter. And in the course of ‘paraphrasing’ he in fact makes a number of important polemical and political points. The comment, for example, on chapter 20, that between election and hell ‘there is no midway’, was obviously directed against the doctrine of purgatory,44 as the gloss on the ‘grasshoppers’ (chapter 9) was intended to compliment Queen Elizabeth, who had begun to adopt the phoenix as her emblem.45 At the close of his paraphrase, James’s final words seek to foreclose other interpretations than his own: ‘whosoever’, he writes in a loose rendering of the original, ‘in copying or translating this book adulterateth any ways the original or in interpreting of it wittingly strays from the true meaning of it . . . to follow the fantastical invention of man or his own preoccupied opinions shall be accursed.’46 The language bears witness to a nervousness. For all his robust exposition, James knows that the text is open to other readings, as his own authority is subject to debate and dispute. James claimed to resolve doubts about Revelation through privileged access to God’s meaning, just as he claimed divine right for his rule. But there were others who regarded even royal exegesis as ‘of man’ rather than God; and some would also come to view monarchy as of mere human constitution. By the time James, now king of Great Britain, published his Meditation and Paraphrase as the first items in his folio works of 1616, several other commentators had tackled the mysteries of Revelation. Some were undoubtedly encouraged by the king’s own exposition; John Napier dedicated his Plaine Discovery to James VI and published ‘cum privilegio regali’. But even the loyal Napier’s treatise opened up other ways of interpreting apocalypse. Napier was readier than James had been to draw attention to obscure and ambiguous passages and his identification of different translations, of irony and figure, opened the text. More importantly, Napier’s statement that ‘one hour of prayer took me further than a thousand days of inquisition’ ultimately passed exegetical authority to, as he put it, the ‘auditor’.47 In his valedictory remarks to the ‘misliking reader’, Napier acknowledged that since ‘infinite and repugnant interpretations do arise’, ‘we shall greatly differ’.48 Ultimately he knew and accepted that he could not exercise sovereign interpretative powers, but had to fall back on ‘brotherly

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admonition’.49 James I and his successors were to find that, in large part, the same was true for their proclamation and their rule. One of the outcomes of James’s meeting with Puritan critics of the church at the Hampton Court conference was the Authorized Version of the Bible. The team of translators entrusted with the task included conservative divines such as Lancelot Andrewes as well as those of godly sympathies such as Lawrence Chaderton, John Reynolds and Richard Thomson. If the project was to produce a text that put an end to ‘infinite and repugnant interpretations’ of Revelation, it was very soon shown to have been a failure. One of the most popular expositions of Revelation in early seventeenth-century England was that of the Puritan divine Arthur Dent. In the preface to his The Ruine of Rome Dent freely admitted that many held it dangerous to expound apocalypse to the people, with all its ‘uncertain conjectures’ obscuring the ‘true meaning’.50 Dent, however, believed it should be ‘openly preached’ and read by ‘all the Lord’s people’, there being nothing that ordinary men could not understand ‘with prayer and humility’.51 Indeed, Dent continued, the times made it easier for a man of mean learning to comprehend than it had ever been before. He did not deny the value of study or the knowledge of Old Testament prophets, antiquities and histories as aids to understanding. But in the end, he assured readers, God would open Revelation to all who ‘are earnest and humble suitors . . . for the illumination thereof’.52 Here, authoritative and authorized interpretation gives way to an exegetical democracy of the godly. This, of course, was the hermeneutic version of the Puritan plan for the church and state, and much of Dent’s language encourages us to link textual with social argument.53 As he proceeded through the text, Dent’s reading was not particularly radical. For the most part he avoids controversy, draws back from close application to the times, and expresses a willingness to refer all ‘to the judgement of the church, and such therein as are indued with the spirit of God’.54 But the ‘and’ in that quotation reads as conditional as well as conjunctive: the church may exercise judgement only if it consists of those ‘indued with the spirit of God’  – the elect. Here Dent’s church appears to be not the institution but the invisible community of the chosen who, as readers of Revelation, will, like Dent, ‘set down that which God hath given to see and which in mine own conscience . . . I suppose to be the truth’.55 Whereas to Dent (as well as to a preaching ministry) the freedom of each to come to his own knowledge of God’s word was ‘the felicity of the elect’, to James VI the appeal to individual conscience represented a threat to the authority of monarch as well as church.56 No less popular than Dent’s exposition were the lectures and commentaries on Revelation preached by the ardent Calvinist William Perkins and published from 1604. In his Godly and Learned Commentaries on Revelation, Perkins offers us insights into the concerns of those whom historians have labelled Calvinist conformists and the relation to those concerns of reading and interpreting the word of God.57 Perkins stressed the importance of Revelation.

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Because ‘the author is Jesus Christ’, the ‘author of truth’, he maintained, the book was ‘certain and in plain terms delivered’.58 Yet Perkins granted that it did not always appear plain and certain: ‘it is hard for any to set down certainly what the Holy ghost intendeth.’59 Translation, he accepted, could not always do justice to holy writ and led to misunderstandings. Beyond that, there was ‘such diversity of opinions’, ‘yea of the Scriptures themselves’, that certainty eluded the reader.60 Perkins’s answer to the problem was to return to the very text that appeared opaque. The key to finding Christ in Revelation lay in reading and rereading. Reading, he explained it, was an active process that involved ‘searching out the knowledge’ of God and his word.61 To read aright a man needed a humble, believing heart and to live the message of the gospel; he needed the ‘light of the spirit’.62 Perkins feared that there were few right readers who spent time searching out the word: ‘nay men will not be at a cost to buy a bible and if they have one they will not take pains to read the same.’63 The Protestant faith depended on reading, but people, it seemed, could not be trusted to read. Perkins’s solution was the central platform of the godly programme: preaching. ‘The duty of those which cannot read the Scripture’, he asserted, was ‘to procure others to read to them’.64 He did not refer only to the illiterate – ‘all . . . are bound . . . to frequent sermons’.65 Preaching, of course, required the right kind of preachers. Perkins urged that ‘every good minister should be a good text man.’66 Ministers, he insisted, should not overemploy themselves in ancient writings, the Fathers, philosophers and poets, but focus on Scripture. And rather than obscure Scripture with witty, rhetorical conceits and ‘vain delivery’ (was he attacking the court preachers such as Andrewes?), they should expound the word ‘in a plain, easy and familiar kind’.67 Preaching was to teach men and women how to read aright so as to come to faith. But preaching presented its own problems. Not only were there too few preachers of the best sort, too many inclined to take pride in their own words; congregations did not sufficiently value preaching: their manner was ‘to be snorting and sleeping at sermons’.68 After all, they retorted, there was no need for sermons when men had ‘their bible . . . than which no man can preach better’.69 Perkins grappled with the central problem for the godly. Protestant belief depended upon the reading of the word but ultimately the reading of the word was an act that required the reader to be imbued with faith. The success of reformation rested not on hermeneutics but, we might say, within a hermeneutic circle. It may be ironic then, but it is not surprising that though he condemned ministers who did not confine themselves to the plain word, Perkins himself deployed his commentary on Revelation to reassert core Protestant doctrines which he feared were undermined by those who mocked ‘preciseness’.70 In the course of expounding Revelation, Perkins rearticulates Protestant doctrine on works, the sacraments, the Sabbath and the theology of election. Quite a lot of space, for example, is given over to proving that the elect cannot fall from grace, a doctrine ‘oppugned earnestly not only by the church of Rome

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but also by some churches .  .  . of the Protestants’.71 Concern to reassert such positions arose from the persistent hold of Catholic beliefs ‘among our people who call it the old religion’ and from the ‘abundance of atheists’ ‘in the midst of our congregations’.72 Perkins deployed Revelation to try to persuade men to Calvinist orthodoxy. He endeavoured to lead them attentively to hear the word preached and diligently to read the Scripture. He sought to exercise influence, even wield authority. But the dilemma that faced the champions of the godly was ultimately inherent in Protestantism; and it was a problem for all who sought to exercise authority in a Protestant polity. Perkins put it well himself: ‘no man in the world’, he wrote, ‘hath authority over this book’, neither preacher nor prince.73 Ultimately, at least in this world, the meaning of the book lay with the reader. That tension between instruction, authority and the freedom of all to find their own way to God’s truth plays across the prefatory pages of Richard Bernard’s A Key of Knowledge for the Opening of . . . Revelation (1617). Bernard, a godly preacher of Batcombe, Somerset, opens his book with a series of epistles dedicatory that map the ecclesiastical and secular order of Jacobean England. In the first to his bishop, Arthur Lake, Bernard praises the episcopal office as protector of the church against Brownist schism. In an address to the judges Bernard praises the laws that preserve his mother church and the ‘prerogative royal’ and supremacy; Revelation, he tells them, authorizes them to act against the Lord’s enemies, and to frame laws against the locusts.74 In a third epistle, Bernard calls on the Justice of the Peace to be vigilant against church papists in an age of plots and conspiracies. Penultimately, he summons ‘martial men’ to avenge the saints and secure England against the Antichrist. Last, but in this case far from least, Bernard addresses the ‘Christian reader’ whom he seeks to persuade to truth and right understanding of the word.75 Having addressed the authorities in church and state, Bernard catalogues the interpretative authorities that direct right understanding. He cites all the major commentators on Revelation  – Bale, Bullinger, Beza, Napier, not least James VI’s ‘learned pen’  – and he advises readers against ‘going by themselves without respect of others’ in interpreting the text.76 Understanding, he counselled, may require knowledge of histories and biblical commentaries, as well as the skills of rhetoric, grammar, logic and philosophy.77 Yet, just as he would seem to confine Revelation to the learned and restrict interpretation to established humanistic scholarship, Bernard identifies the limits to traditional learning. For one, learned men had been known to err; after all, papists were learned but failed to probe the secrets of God’s kingdom.78 Learned men also disagreed – to the point where ‘their discord may seem to withdraw us from the study of this book.’79 Exposition of Scripture, then, by ‘more wit and only human learning’ was an unreliable path to truth.80 Knowledge of God’s word came from the revelation and the spirit: ‘the author must be the revealer, even the holy spirit without which

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we cannot conceive the things here delivered.’81 And rather than following learned authorities, ‘the spirit enlighteneth whom he pleases’, enabling him to ‘find out the true sense’ amid ‘all the variable interpretations’, or, rejecting them all, ‘go almost alone’.82 For all the address to authorities and all the citation of authorities, Bernard, in fine, gives the key to Revelation to the godly reader, to open the secrets of God ‘almost alone’. Bernard’s oxymoron concisely expresses the tensions we are examining not only between public church and private believer, but between godly preaching and teaching and the priesthood of each believer. As a preacher, aware of the false teaching of Rome, Bernard desires to instruct and direct his flock. The elaborate engraved title page to his Key of Knowledge structures the story of Revelation in a comic strip of scenes, each with explanatory verse, culminating in the day of judgement. Within his treatise he guides the reader, advising him to lay out the whole text in its ‘principal parts’ analytically, then the contents of each chapter so as to grasp the ‘coherence’.83 He urges frequent rereadings of Revelation and comparison with other biblical books and provides cross-references to passages that elucidate the meaning, as he discerns it. However, in the end even Bernard’s own directions took second place to the reader’s personal determination. Each reader, he conceded, must gather rules for himself to help the interpreting of this book, and each must follow ‘the guiding of the spirit in his own order, word for word’.84 ‘The guiding of the spirit in his own order’: rather than pursuing the radical hermeneutic and political consequences of this principle, Bernard, we have seen, sought to reconcile it to the established authorities – educational, ecclesiastical and political. There were, however, others more willing to take further the implications of autonomy and to apply their own radical readings of Revelation to the times. The Baptist John Wilkinson published his Exposition of the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation of Jesus Christ in Amsterdam in 1619. He had, the preface made clear, intended an exegesis of the whole book, but the ‘malice of the prelates’ had prevented him by detaining him in prison, leaving his friends to ‘set forth this little treatise from his own papers’.85 Wilkinson graphically illustrates not only the inefficacy of early modern censorship when publication abroad remained easy, but, more important for our purposes, the dangers presented by the freedom to interpret Scripture when it was practised by sects hostile to the established church. For sure, his denunciation of the pope and the Catholic church were, if more strident than most, innocent enough. But whereas for James and others it was the Church of England that was the citadel of the true faith and bulwark against the Antichrist, for Wilkinson the church and its governors were themselves the handmaids of the beast. The church of England, he proclaimed, was not a true church, nor did it have powers to ‘make laws in matter of religion’.86 The 1603 canons, he continued, had no authority from Christ; the Book of Common Prayer was full of ‘absurdities and blasphemies’; the copes and rituals prescribed were but ‘foolish ceremonies’, commanded by a ‘lordly

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prelacy’ who were the ‘dragon’s ministers’, the ‘mark of the beast’.87 ‘This church of England’, Wilkinson asserted, glossing his text, ‘still remaineth under the bondage of antichrist and is ruled and governed by the image of the beast’.88 Though in a placatory gesture he allowed for the authority of godly kings in matters ecclesiastical, Wilkinson’s diatribe against the bishops, as James was quick to recognize, was also an assault upon the royal supremacy.89 Indeed, Wilkinson’s reference to convocation as the Presbyterians’ preferred ‘national synod’ makes his threat explicit.90 Ministers may have the duty to teach, but the saints, those called ‘precisians or puritans’, had the ultimate right to determine all for themselves, to separate.91 The way to the word for Wilkinson lay outside the church with the separated congregations, and ultimately with each believer. We may be familiar with assaults on the church such as this; what we need to appreciate is how radical ecclesiology developed from an individual and radical hermeneutic. Given the view of exegetes such as Wilkinson, it is not surprising that there appears to have been some wariness about publishing on Revelation. Even Thomas Brightman, whose exposition was far from radical, was published posthumously and abroad. Brightman had addressed his A Revelation of the Revelation of 1615 to the ‘holy reformed churches’ of Brittany, France and Germany, telling them that the last act had now begun and ‘thy husband is about to arise even now for the avenging of thy grief.’92 Within three years the Thirty Years’ War erupted across Europe, signalling to many that the last age had come and that the final war between Christ and Antichrist had commenced. James I, anxious to keep out of the war and fostering closer relations with Spain, was concerned to cool rather than enflame millenarian fervour and became equivocal about the identity of the pope with the Antichrist.93 Charles I, especially after 1629, endeavoured to suppress the millenarian hopes excited by the victories of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. At home, his archbishop, William Laud, emphasizing the continuity of the church of England with the pre-Reformation church rather than its affinity with continental reform, questioned whether the pope was the Antichrist and was accused of expunging such references to Rome from books he licensed for the press.94 As Anthony Milton writes, ‘the doctrine of the papal antichrist was clearly on the retreat in the 1630s’; and divines such as Joseph Mede held back from publishing English editions of their expositions of the apocalypse ‘for fear of .  .  . an overpotent opposition’.95 Like Mede’s, other expositions of Revelation remained untranslated or were published abroad.96 But, while official disapproval discouraged commentators and exegeses of Revelation, events in Europe and Britain stimulated millenarian expectations and prophecies  – in popular as well as elite circles. Corantos, newsbooks and almanacs increasingly deployed apocalyptic language, as each victory or setback was seen to herald the last days.97 Puritan émigrés to New England and the Netherlands also found ‘apocalyptic significance’ in their flight and became acquainted with radical literature on Revelation which found its

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way back to England through the networks of the godly.98 By the late 1630s, as the disputes over the Scottish Prayer Book flooded England with radical Presbyterian pamphlets, the Covenanter Andrew Ramsey issued from Edinburgh A Warning Come out of Babylon.99 In England, John Lilburne denounced the bishops as the ‘work of the beast’ and called upon his readers to study Revelation and separate from the church.100 The book of Revelation had, in the sixteenth century, provided an arsenal for all Protestants against Rome. But its openness to interpretation had always rendered it a text that could be deployed against authority. By 1640 it had become the manifesto for Puritan opposition to church and state, and justification for their destruction and for the rule of the spirit.

III Civil War, as we have learned, polemicized and rendered overly partisan all the literary forms and genres – epic, pastoral and play.101 What we need to appreciate is how conflict and the opening of arcana imperii to popular debate transformed traditional genres, such as biblical exegesis, in similar ways. During the 1640s and 1650s commentaries on Revelation echo with the noise of battle and skirmish as protagonists looked for signs of the Lord in unfolding events. Sancroft may have mocked the radical preacher ‘puzzling his geography to find Armageddon about Preston and Warrington bridge’, but none could afford to disregard the signs of divine providence which might herald the final victory or defeat.102 Millenarian hopes and fears pervade the language and literature of Civil War across genres and forms, popular as well as elite.103 As well as the first English commentaries hitherto deemed too radical or risky (such as Mede), a different genre of exegesis – shorter, more polemical and often in the form of a dialogue  – emerged to address the new audience created by the pamphlet and the newspaper. The new genres fostered as well as reflected changing habits of reading as well as writing.104 With the collapse of authority, the proliferation of print and the daily exchange of arguments, readers were faced with the need to choose and discriminate. Milton, it has been argued, deliberately promoted the independence of the reader as the key to successful revolution.105 The reading of Scripture, especially Revelation, led some readers beyond the reform of constitution favoured by Milton, even further than regicide, into advocacy of the end of all government and social order. Having originally united the godly cause, Revelation, once again, became the text which fractured and destroyed it. In expositions of Revelation during Civil War and commonwealth we may read not just another chapter in the long contest for biblical validation, but a larger story of struggle for hermeneutic authority and control. Two early examples of the impact of events on interpretations of Revelation may be taken from the eve of conflict in 1641. Napier’s Narration, or an

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Epitome of His Book on the Revelation and A Revelation of Mr Brightman’s Revelation were both short, punchy comments on the learned treatises published by John Napier in Edinburgh in 1593 and by Thomas Brightman in Amsterdam in 1615. Napier’s Narration takes the form of a colloquial dialogue between Napier and ‘Rollock’, with simple, direct questions (about, for example, how long the world would continue) answered as simply and straightforwardly. There is nothing newly radical in the content of the exposition. Rather it is the form that is striking, with ‘Rollock’ having the last word – ‘I take leave of you for this time’ – and indicating his right to ask more when he pleases.106 The Revelation of Mr Brightman’s Revelation similarly stages a dialogue, very much reminiscent of contemporary pamphlet literature, between a minister and a citizen of London. Here the tone as well as the form makes this tract a radical attack on the church. The minister, having fled persecution by the bishops, invokes Brightman to declaim against the inadequacies of ‘lukewarm’ reformation in England. Castigating the bishops as agents of the Antichrist, the minister praises the Scottish kirk for triumphing over prelacy. The citizen is persuaded  – ‘we shall have great cause to thank the Lord for their [the Scots’] coming into England’ – and awaits further fulfilment of Brightman’s prophecy: ‘he speaks of our times.’107 In a text that replicates the social role of the ministers in driving men to radical beliefs, a reading of Revelation is itself reread and polemically appropriated for altered times. When Joseph Mede’s Clavis Apocalyptica of 1627 appeared in translation in 1643, it was the circumstances of reading rather than the writing that made it a treatise of radical politics. Mede, in most church matters a conservative ceremonialist, had penned a cautious and historical interpretation of Revelation based on his rule of synchronisms between one set of visions and another. He had concluded his commentary leaving ‘the whole matter to the church to be determined’.108 By 1643, however, there was no established church in existence, and Mede’s editor, William Twisse, prolocutor of the Westminster assembly, felt more inclined to ‘let the reader judge’ and to stress the prophetic elements in both Revelation and Mede’s Key.109 The translator, Richard More, Puritan champion of the parliamentary cause in Shropshire, similarly urged the reader to be guided by the spirit to the ‘course of all prophecies’.110 Another writer, John Trapp, minister of Weston-super-Mare, found new and different messages in Revelation in the 1640s from what his master had preached in his childhood at Evesham. Indeed, he came to believe that it was the role of ministers ‘by reading and meditation’ to ‘digest the holy scriptures that . . . they may draw out new and old for the use of the church’.111 When he published his commentary on Revelation in 1647, therefore, he pointed up the fulfilment of the prophecy of the red horse in ‘our late battle of Edgehill and the downfall of the Antichrist at Naseby’.112 Though he thus associated the Royalists with the Antichrist, Trapp, a scholar divine, drew back from the most revolutionary apocalypticism, leaving his readers to ‘ruminate what ye read’ and ‘stay for the explication

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by the event’.113 Others were less circumspect. After 1647, as Charles I was characterized as a ‘man of blood’, so increasingly was he identified as a servant of the Antichrist.114 The prophetess Eleanor Douglas, performing a radical act in essaying biblical commentary as a woman, published The Revelation Interpreted in which she detected the rise of the beast in the beginning of Charles’s reign.115 In ways that still await elucidation, regicide was advanced and defended in apocalyptic language and literature which radicalized the hermeneutic as well as the political process. Another woman, the prophetess Mary Cary, associated radical politics with a radically gendered hermeneutics when she predicted in 1648 that not only would Christ ‘bring down the power of the beast’ but that ‘women shall prophecy’.116 Those who would interpret God’s word would be ‘not only superiors but inferiors; not only those that have university learning but . . . servants and handmaids’.117 After the regicide, in commentaries on apocalypse which she dedicated to Elizabeth Cromwell and Bridget Ireton, Cary showed how ‘the late king’s doom and death was . . . predeclared’ and how prophecy was fulfilled when the royal beast ceased to prevail.118 In his prefatory remarks, Hugh Peter appeared somewhat uneasy about a female exegete who taught her sex that ‘they that will not use the distaff may improve the pen’. ‘Doubtless’, he concluded in language that returned her to her place in the patriarchy, ‘she had good help from above in her travail for this birth.’119 Yet, it was as much in that claim of help from above as in female authorship that the radicalism of Cary’s commentary was manifested. For though she gestured to praise of Oliver Cromwell, ‘the great Lord General of the army of saints’, Cary ultimately bowed to the authority of none, claiming personal direction from God.120 ‘All saints’, she argued, ‘have a spirit of prophecy’.121 God was her ‘sufficiency’ to prophesy that Christ would soon appear to raise the saints to reign with him. And when that day came, she knew, there would be no division and no other authority, either hermeneutical or political, as the saints would recover the ‘spiritual language’ of Christ, direct access to the word and the Lord.122 The logic of Cary’s claims was made manifest by the activities of the millenarians in the Barebones’ assembly of 1653.123 As we shall see, it was to be a turning point in the history of biblical hermeneutics as well as interregnum politics. For, when he set up the Protectorate, Cromwell sought some form of established church and a measure of ecclesiastical authority against the claims of the individual spirit. His move did not go unchallenged; and not for the first or last time, a reading of Revelation provided the script for opposition. In 1654, to take a case, the rector of Trunch, Norfolk, and Fifth-Monarchist John Tillinghast dedicated the third part of his Generation Work, an exposition of Revelation 16, to the Lord Protector. If the dedication appeared a conventional gesture to authority, it quickly became clear that Tillinghast wrote to admonish rather than praise. ‘If what is written be truth’, Tillinghast warned, ‘it is your duty to hear it’.124 The word, he instructed Cromwell, was sovereign over all others. Scripture

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provided the example of Asa, who turned away from God to oppress the prophets: ‘that it may never be our highness’s case is my prayer’.125 In no uncertain terms Cromwell was warned not to persecute the saints – those who have ‘the signs of the times grounded upon the word’.126 Scripture, Tillinghast argues, was the property of the godly reader. In an epistle to the reader he explains the method of interpretation he has followed and recommends. Though he had read other commentators, he advised that it was best to ‘take the naked Scripture and read it over and by some distinguishing marks made in the bible to sever those Scriptures . . . which treat of the last times’.127 The choice of passages was for each reader to make himself: to read the Bible ‘diligently thyself’, Tillinghast counselled, ‘and mark them out will do thee much more good’.128 James I, we recall, had removed from the Authorized Version the marginalia of the Geneva editors. In 1654, Tillinghast granted to every reader the right to ‘mark out’ holy writ. Such authority over the holy writ, as Cromwell understood no less than James, implied power in church and state too. ‘I greatly rejoice . . . to see so much power in saints’ hands’, Tillinghast writes, ‘and believe more will be every day’.129 Indeed, in a final address he appears willing to surrender his own authority and to give literally the last word to his readers. Listing the printer’s errors, Tillinghast desired the reader ‘with thy pen to amend’ them. As for punctuation and orthography, he closed, ‘let thine own reason be thy monitor.’130 The course of politics was soon to remove power from the saints’ hands. Nor will we be surprised to discover that increasingly there was a reaction against the hermeneutic freedom of the individual and renewed emphasis upon authorized and authoritative interpretations of God’s word and will. The backlash against millenarian fervour came early from expected quarters. In 1650, for example, Joseph Hall, former bishop of Norwich, published a ‘polemical discourse against the tenets of the millenaries’ in The Revelation Unrevealed.131 Hall’s title epitomized his interpretative strategy – or rather his arguments against interpretation itself. Surveying some of the many interpretations and applications of the book of Revelation in recent times, Hall dwelt on the ‘obscurity’ and ‘multiplicity of sense’ in the biblical text and the ‘multiplicity of judgement amongst learned and Christian interpreters’.132 Rejecting the claims of the spirit to probe God’s meaning, he asked: ‘which reader doth not find himself lost in this wilderness of opinions?’133 Too many exegetes, Hall protested, ‘strained [Scripture] to the defence of their assertion’; the millenarians in particular ‘put a merely literal construction upon the prophecies’, which were better spiritually understood.134 Hall dismissed their false confidences and urged readers to beware their ‘errors of opinion’.135 Amidst uncertainty he advised all to a safe suspension of judgement in a matter so abstruse and ‘altogether interminable’.136 Only the course of events would disclose the meaning of prophecy; till then it ‘will become modest Christians . . . to leave the unlocking of the secret cabinets of the Almighty’.137 Coming from a former bishop, Hall’s denunciation of

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prophetic policies may seem unworthy of remark. But we should note that his book was licensed in 1650 as a ‘learned and judicious work’ by John Downham, Puritan divine and licenser of the press.138 A sense that radical reading of Revelation was again causing concern in official circles is confirmed by Samuel Hartlib’s English translation of Comenius’s Clavis Apocalyptica in 1651. Comenius himself, unlike Hall, may have recommended Revelation to all ‘such as know what the communion of saints doth mean’, but the preface to the English edition both qualified millenarian expectations and denounced radical politics.139 In his prefatory address to Hartlib, the former royal chaplain John Durie, condemning those sects who ‘dethrone God and Christ in their ranting and blasphemous imaginations’, proceeded to cautionary remarks about the interpretation of prophecy.140 Durie did not deny Comenius’s learning. But where Comenius’s purpose had been to relate Revelation ‘unto our present times’ and to encourage ‘every rational man’ to ‘make the application’ for himself, Durie ‘confessed himself, though once drawn by such arguments, now to be sceptical of the predictions .  .  . and unhappy with the whole method’ of exegesis.141 He had come to consider historical exegesis and direct application neither ‘certain’ nor ‘obvious’, nor ‘proportionate to the capacity of all sincere professors’.142 Durie argued instead that the kingdom of Christ was manifested not in ‘particular concernments’ but in ‘the nature of man’.143 In an explicit rebuke to those who applied biblical prophecy to contemporary events, Durie italicized his counter-hermeneutic rule: ‘no prophecy is of particular application’.144 After 1653 the shift to more conservative politics was progressively accompanied by efforts to delimit hermeneutic freedom and to exercise that control over the interpretation of Scripture that Hobbes had argued was essential to order and government.145 Towards the end of the Protectorate, in 1658, James Durham, a confidant of Cromwell, published a Commentary upon the Book of Revelation which may be revealing of the shifting times. Durham did not discourage the reading of apocalypse – ‘it is a good thing’, he wrote, ‘soberly and humbly to read and to seek to understand it’.146 The problem, as he identified it, stemmed from the wrong sort of readings and readers. In a section subtitled ‘Of Reading and Readers’, therefore, Durham expressed his conviction that readers could not ‘be left to arbitrariness’ in interpreting Revelation.147 For too many manifested ‘lightness .  .  . in the practice of reading’, still worse, an ‘itching after some new doctrine and a . . . discontent with sound doctrine’.148 Re-emphasizing informed judgement over personal inspiration, Durham insisted that ‘seeing every one hath not that ability to discern poison from good food, there must therefore be a necessity that people regulate their Christian liberty in this.’149 In reading, that is, Christians should be guided by what the most learned commentators had written and what the most judicious preachers expounded. In a move that explicitly connected hermeneutic to political authority, Durham proceeded to discuss ‘church government and discipline’, and to

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stress the necessity for regulation here too: ‘authority’, he proclaimed, in language that had become unfamiliar, ‘lies in God’s appointing such to rule and such others to obey’.150 The individual had no more ‘Christian liberty’ to determine his own church than to make his own meaning of Scripture. Enacting his belief that Christians needed to be told and taught, Durham published a series of lectures on Revelation, nearly 800 pages in length, the very size and form of his book announcing the authority upon which the author insists. Durham displays formidable learning; he identifies but resolves difficulties and interpretative differences; his tone is didactic, in places authoritarian. What he eschews is application. Asserting against the familists that events ‘cannot be expected from the text’, Durham denounces those who ‘expect too great a temporal kingdom or an absolute universal freedom to come’.151 Christ, he maintained, against Tillinghast especially, would not reign with his saints on earth.152 Durham, like James VI, closed his exegesis with a warning to other commentators. ‘God’, he admonished, ‘will preserve this piece of sovereignty to himself to decide what shall be accounted his revelation and will have no other meddle with it.’153 It is no coincidence that within two years another Stuart, claiming, with the approbation of his readers, to be God’s lieutenant on earth, would again assume ‘sovereignty’ and assert once more that in ‘his word’ his ‘supremacy doth especially consist’.154

IV During the interregnum the millenarians had turned the world upside down. We might therefore expect that the Restoration marked the demise of apocalyptic hermeneutics as well as millenarian politics: Christopher Hill has indeed asserted the ‘rapid disappearance’ of the Antichrist after 1660.155 The story is not so simple, however, and it is one of change rather than termination.156 Revelation remained a text too fundamental to ignore. In the so-called age of science and reason, we now know that Newton laboured to calculate the day of the Second Coming. Rather than abandoning Revelation, in the changed and changing circumstances of Restoration England, old and new readers read the book differently and devised different, and competing, hermeneutic methods to make apocalypse speak to their situation and for their cause. As the radicals confronted defeat, as the church faced the revived threat of resurgent Catholicism and the new challenge of atheism, all looked to Revelation, for solace and ammunition. When the ‘great deliverer’ William III arrived to rescue Protestantism from the beast of Rome, millenarian languages and images were heard and seen again, to underpin rather than undermine authority.157 Far from it marking the end of scriptural politics, Jonathan Clark has argued for eighteenth-century England as a theocratic state.158 In any such state, Revelation remained a text that all needed to read, own and appropriate.

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Amid the euphoria of Restoration, with Charles II heralded as a returning David, those who had expected God’s rule on earth were forced to review their course. In 1661, the Fifth-Monarchist preacher Thomas Venner led a last desperate rising to set up Christ’s kingdom. Milton, contemplating a paradise lost, sought the ways of God in epic. The visionary London tailor Lodovick Muggleton penned A True Interpretation of . . . the Revelation. Muggleton’s reading had certainly led him to reject kings; he was sure that the red horse of apocalypse represented ‘kings and magistrates who do ride upon the people’; even Protestant monarchs had shed the blood of the faithful.159 Bishops, too, he saw, were guilty of superstition and persecution.160 But Muggleton had no more time for the sects who had ruled during the interregnum. Baptists, Ranters and Quakers he dismissed as ‘all superstitious’; Presbyterians and Independents had been the ‘two anti-angels’ of the church.161 Muggleton rejected all their claims to authority as the voice of the beast. Articulating a revolutionary epistemology as well as a radical theology, Muggleton denounced the authority of reason as that of the devil. As he glossed Revelation, he found the bottomless pit to be the ‘imagination of reason in man’ and the devil’s work most in evidence when ‘the imagination of reason is exercised upon a religious account’.162 In his preface to his readers, Muggleton explained that the right interpretation of Revelation necessitated the experience rather than the rational understanding of vision – ‘visions are hard to be interpreted by one that never had them.’163 It was the revelation of faith in visions that opened the interpretation of the chief things’; to those to whom the faith had not been revealed the mysteries were ‘hard for me to explain in words’.164 In place of preachers and learning Muggleton proclaimed the sole authority of the ‘spirit of faith’ to open the mysteries and ‘hard sayings’. ‘God hath given us’, he assured his readers, ‘the chosen witnesses of the spirit, more knowledge in the Scriptures than all the men in the world . . . the gift of revelation and interpretation of many visions and revelations.165 Though he stopped short of revolutionary action, Muggleton made dangerous claims for the hermeneutic authority of the visionary witness at a time when the church, like the king, was trying to regain control. Not surprisingly, therefore, conservative commentators wrote to dampen the flames of millenarian passion and to narrow the scope for radical interpretation of Scripture, just as the Royal Society was established to promote the authority of treason over enthusiasm and of logic over the anarchic ambiguity of words.166 In The Meaning of the Revelation (1675) the Oxford theologian Richard Hayter poured scorn on all the recent attempts to apply Revelation to the times – ‘what is it’, he asked, ‘that one may not find there?’167 To rein in interpretative freedom, Hayter denied that prophecy had already been realized and observed that it was anyway ‘written unto Asia and not unto Europe’.168 More generally, he argued forcefully against mystical interpretations which led to ‘absurdity’; ‘the literal sense of Scripture

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is .  .  . the only rule both of faith and manners’.169 Mystical reading, he explained, ‘subjects the Scripture to our vain lusts and humours and gives everyone liberty to interpret as his humour leads him’; ‘it makes men’, he continued, in language that resonates with recent history and conflict, ‘to interpret the Revelation . . . of themselves or of their own party’.170 We may not, he took it as a rule, ‘make of the Scripture a nose of wax and turn it whither we please’.171 But while further denying the freedom of readers to apply and deploy Revolution as they chose. Hayter certainly had his own agenda – and one for the times. In the first place, he evidently did not regard Rome as the threat other commentators had feared and was sceptical about the identification of the pope with the Antichrist. In consequence, he maintained, ‘we may not begin a war with papists, thinking thereby to fulfil the prophecies of Revelation’.172 Rather, the text suggested that Christians should ‘live peaceably’ with all men and leave battles against false religion to the day of judgement.173 Indeed, it was not Catholics but separatists and visionaries whom Hayter took to be the principal threat. In language that directly answers Muggleton, Hayter affirmed that ‘men have reason to guide them’ and reason was the best interpreter of Scripture.174 In his exegesis of Revelation, Hayter argued that the structure of the text (which many others had found confused and disordered) expressed the rational order that he desired in church and state. Denying that holy writ could possibly be a ‘confused chaos’, and rejecting Mede’s synchronisms, he found that Revelation ‘set down things in order, as a chronicle doth’.175 Dismissing the ‘vain hopes’ of millenarians, Hayter reread Revelation, and counselled others to read it, as a book that revealed the rational order of the world and taught peace and patience to all Christians. ‘On earth peace’, he closes with a prayer for the healing of dispute, ‘and good will towards men’.176 As time passed and the threat of revolutionary millenarian politics subsided, the Restoration church faced other challenges. In general, a mood of scepticism became fashionable among the court and coffee-house wits, leading to fears of atheism and unbelief.177 More particularly, Charles II’s foreign policy and most probably private faith had fostered closer relations with France and a greater tolerance towards Catholics. We can hear contemporary concern about both developments in Henry More’s Apocalypsis Apocalypseosis, or The Revelation of St John the Divine Unveiled, a work published in 1680 amid the paranoia of the Popish Plot. More, one of the so-called Cambridge Platonists, had written before in defence of the church against both Rome and the sectaries. In 1680, his commentary was directed first and foremost at the ‘profane Hobbians and Spinozans’ who dismissed Revelation as imagination and who did ‘laugh at anyone for a fool that pretends the endeavouring to understand prophecies’.178 Scepticism about Revelation was, More feared, the first step to atheism: ‘the pretending to understand the apocalypse seem[s] a fanciful ridiculous thing to the wits of this age that are ready to sneer and flear at any such profession, and indeed

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at the serious profession of any religion at all, as if it were an indication of but mean parts and wit, and in great ignorance of matters of philosophy’.179 Against them, More argued that it was Revelation that revealed the truth of natural religion and confirmed the existence of God.180 As well as defending Christian belief, More was concerned to read Revelation as support for the Church of England and to discourage other interpretations. Against those who had claimed that a man may ‘make [of the text] quidlibet ex quolibet as he pleases’, he affirmed that ‘there is but one right sense’, the elucidation of which was not for ordinary men.181 ‘And therefore’, he argued, ‘enthusiasts that attempt any exposition of this book without carefully consulting the most likely interpreters before them, it is no inspiration of the spirit in them but a blind puff of pride and vanity of mind’.182 Understanding required careful scholarly exegesis, and More himself favoured learned commentary, detailed annotation and historical method based on extensive research. Such scholarship revealed the ‘right sense of Revelation to be a justification of Protestant separation from Rome and celebration of the Church of England as the fulfilment of prophecy’.183 That Rome was the whore and the church of England the true church, More was ‘as well assured of and as little doubt of as I do any demonstration in Euclid’.184 The next year, More returned to the apocalypse at a time when he feared that ‘but dough baked Protestants’ were in ‘great peril to be kneed again into the old sour lump of popery’.185 In circumstances where there was ‘strong effort by the popish party to bring their religion again here in England’, he frankly stated that his first duty as an exegete of Revelation was to ‘defend the established religion’.186 Far from abandoning Revelation, the church took it up as a principal weapon against critics and foes. Within a few years, as we know, realizing all More’s fears, the popish party brought their religion to the very throne of England. Interestingly, few commentaries on Revelation were published in England during the reign of James II  – apart from anonymous supplements to More.187 Revelation had become a Protestant text in England and no attempt appears to have been made to publish a Catholic exposition. Rather, during the 1680s, apocalyptic language was the discourse of opposition and apocalypse the theme of virulently anti-papal cartoons as well as pamphlets and squibs.188 No less than the repulsion of the armada in 1588, the invasion of William of Orange in 1688 was viewed as a national deliverance, a victory over the Antichrist foretold in Revelation. As Tony Claydon has shown, William III was lauded as the angel of the apocalypse and depicted as the saviour riding the white horse, restoring the word and rescuing the realm from the bottomless pit.189 In retrospect the 1688 Revolution may appear an inevitable success. But the outcome of William’s invasion, planned in that summer, hung in the balance until James II fled in December. During those anxious months, the Baptist émigré who had returned to London, Hanserd Knollys, undertook an Exposition of the Whole Book of Revelation which would advance the cause

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of William and Protestantism. Knollys’s book was licensed – we know not by whom – in September 1688, when the French attacks on the Palatinate led William to embark for England, and was clearly intended to help secure him a welcome.190 Throughout his exposition Knollys rereads Revelation as the demonstration of ‘antichristian papal power’, but this time his emphasis is also on the allies of the beast.191 The ‘sun’ of chapter 16 he instructed readers now to understand as the emperor and king of France, the ‘lights of Rome’. But Revelation foretold deliverance, and Knollys comforted his readers, ‘if the historians say true we may conjecture that the ending time of the beast’s forty two months . . . will be about 1688.’192 From that ‘conjecture’ came a deduction very much for the moment. Knollys closed his treatise ‘with an invitation to all the people of God to come out of Babylon’. ‘Leave going to and worshipping in . . . popish temples’, he admonished, or face the plagues of Revelation 18.8 – famine, fire and death.193 England responded to his call. By November, William was on his way to his ‘spiritual Jerusalem’, London, where he was heralded as a second Elizabeth, who had rescued the kingdom from darkness.194 Amid the celebrations, Walter Garrett, vicar of Titchfield, Hampshire, reread his Bible and found ‘the Church of England . . . particularly described’ in the fourth and fifth chapters of the book of Revelation.195 Garrett prefaced his Essay of 1690 with a dedication to William and Mary, expressing ‘rapturous excess of joy and gratitude for [our] late wonderful deliverance’. His design in writing, he informed them, was ‘to make it evident to your majesties, and to all the world, in my way (that is by Scripture prophecy) what a heavenly church . . . your Majesties have saved from ruin’. ‘You are’, he told the royal pair, ‘the chosen servants of Christ’.196 As he proceeded to explain the ‘main strokes’ of the chapters, Garrett pointed up the resemblance of the sitter with the sealed book (Revelation 5) to the kings of England who enjoyed the title ‘Defender of the Faith’.197 God had throughout history chosen as protectors of his church kings whose laws had proved ‘thunders’ against Rome.198 And now he presented William as the heir to Elizabeth, who had checked ‘the deluge of popery’.199 In a new and at first reading surprising departure, Garrett, in his catalogue of kings, singled out Charles I ‘of blessed memory’ as a godly ruler, the lion of the tribe of Juda who, in fulfilment of prophecy, had been slain, as indeed the representative of Christ. Charles, Garrett continued, was ‘the root of David’ and who again brought back the ark of the lord.200 As he read on in his Revelation, Garrett became certain that ‘the wonderful work of God in restoring both king and church in the year 1660 . . . are things worthy to be made the subject of this prophecy.’201 As Garrett makes plain, the succession of William had restored the historical bond between church and monarchy which James II had ruptured but which Charles I, in the royal rhetoric of Restoration, had come to symbolize no less than the Protestant Deborah, Elizabeth.202 For Garrett, it was now fitting not only to read but to ‘make’ Revelation a prophecy of

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recent English history and ‘not applicable to any other king and church in the whole world’.203 The Church of England, Garrett concluded, transmuting radical millenarian prophecy into conservative polemic, was the Fifth Monarchy: ‘there seems to be no fear that the Church of England should ever be destroyed another time.’204 It now remained only for God and his exegetes to illuminate the minds of others, so that ‘both the erroneous may come over to the communion of this excellent church [and] the wavering may be established in it.’205 In a short, revolutionary year, readings of Revelation had shifted from fearful anxiety to confident celebration. As William prepared to lead his armies in Europe, Revelation was quickly mustered to support his cause on the international stage. In a sermon on Revelation 2.11 of 1692 Thomas Beverley saw foretold in the rising of the witnesses ‘the great works that will . . . show forth themselves so as to be completed by 1697’.206 For the kingdom of Christ was approaching, and ‘why’, he asked, ‘may not this be this summer’, as William moved to rescue the oppressed Protestants in Piedmont.207 Reading with a ‘sound sober mind’, not indulging fantasy or enthusiasm, Beverley instructed his flock to ‘compare what I declare to you from the word of God and what you see come to pass’.208 Thence they would see the ‘undertaking of Protestant princes and their arms’, which signalled the arrival of God’s kingdom.209 At home, as the Revolution settlement in church and state looked more established, the political emphasis shifted to healing and settling and the alleviation of bitter exchange and party division. In his preface to his paraphrase of The Book of the Revelation of 1693, Edward Waple explicitly connected biblical exegesis to contemporary politics when he advised that ‘a man who would understand the will of God in this prophecy must . . . renounce parties and prejudices.’210 The ‘prejudice’ Waple seemed most concerned about in 1693 was no longer Catholicism but an overzealous Protestantism. While he would not subscribe to a jejune formality in religion, Waple felt his nation too ‘prone to enthusiasm’.211 And in an excellent demonstration of the relationship of textual form to ideological position, he promised that in his own writing ‘bare imagination hath not been the least indulged but in the annotations where it is lawful to pose conjectures to the learned world and to give the reins of fancy but under the curb and restraints of Reason and Prudence’.212 Waple’s text was what he wished his church to be: inspired but restrained, divine but rational, fervent but prudent, a church (and text) that restricted theological quarrels to the learned and promoted the core of Christian belief to the people. In his long treatise, Waple cross-referenced to all the Scriptures, closely examined difficult passages and drew on a wide range of earlier commentators, such as Mede, Grotius, Hammond, Beverley and others.213 Like several post-Restoration commentators, he claimed Revelation as the ‘most illustrious proof for the being of a God’ against the ‘atheists’, and as demonstration that ‘the papacy is the antichrist’.214 What is novel in

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his exegesis is his finding in the text the lessons of unity and tolerance. Waple even half apologizes to Catholics, whom he asks to take no offence at the sometimes ‘harsh expressions’ he has used.215 When he turns to the Protestants, his message is clear: the divisions among them evidenced the imperfection of the Reformation, which had, in England, been tarnished since Elizabeth’s reign by ‘the contrary strugglings of two parties’ through whose ‘mutual animosities and immoderate opposition .  .  . things have sometimes rather gone back than forwards’.216 Division was the obstacle, Waple argued in the language of politeness, ‘to all noble and peaceable designs’.217 Revelation, as he read it, taught Christians that since all churches were imperfect, the best ‘ought to bear with the worst’; for there was ‘scarce any erroneous persuasion in religion that hath not some truth mixed with it’.218 Pointing out that even the Quakers, the most feared of the sects, taught the duty of Christian patience, Waple argued for toleration of all confessions as both the message of Scripture and the interest of the state.219 It was, he posited, right for the church to ‘consider what is good’ in other sects rather than ‘to confute them’, and ‘of greater benefit to the state to amend the faults which occasioned them than to prosecute them with rigour’.220 Now that Protestantism was secure, Revelation, once the text for Civil War and sectarian strife, was being reread and rewritten as a script for unity and toleration. The 1688 Revolution produced a stable settlement not least because the Whigs secured a cultural as well as political dominance. It was the Whig view of the constitution, of history and of the law that became the ‘national’ view.221 No less was it a Whig reading of church history and Scripture that underpinned the more latitudinarian church of England that emerged after the Toleration Act of 1689. For 30 years Walter Garrett continued his series of chapter-by-chapter expositions of the book of Revelation.222 Garrett discussed various approaches to Revelation and engaged with some other commentators. But his own view was clear: Revelation told the history of two churches – that of Rome until the reign of Queen Elizabeth and that of the Church of England thereafter. From that hypothesis he interpreted every vision, showing that Elizabeth, Charles I and Charles II represented God the creator, Christ the martyr and Christ the resurrected. Though ‘pseudo-Protestant’ popish persecutors had brought down Charles I, the Lord had restored his church in 1660, as indeed he again saved it from the ‘serpentine practices’ of papists under James II and of sectaries under William III.223 Garrett saw 1697 as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy. When William led the gallant army of the fifth trumpet to victory at Ryswick, and so forced the French to recognize his legitimacy, he finally extirpated the Antichrist. Here, Garrett opined, was ‘the greatest revolution that ever befel this powerful nation’, one that secured at last both the church of Christ and ‘that admirable constitution that we . . . by the singular favour of our good God are blessed withall’.224 ‘No man’, Garrett concluded, ‘can have a right understanding of the Revelation but he must have a more than ordinary

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esteem and veneration for the Church of England, which questionless is thus singled out by the spirit of prophecy’.225 The Revolution had brought to England the end of Revelation. Garrett’s became the official, even the established, view. But it was by no means the only view of the church in the past or present. Queen Anne’s reign again witnessed fierce argument and bitter division as high Anglicans attempted to regain control of the church and prosecute dissent.226 And the voices of millenarian prophets were still heard, not least through the writings of the Quaker Jane Lead and of John Lacy, who published his Prophetical Warnings, ‘a pseudo-biblical rant’, as they have been described, in 1707.227 During the last years of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth, Paul Korshin writes, ‘the church establishment stayed aloof from the contemporary debate over millenialism and the genuineness of prophetical inspiration about the apocalypse.’228 But official disengagement from millenarian controversy by no means signalled the end of the exegesis of Revelation, in the parish or in print. In his dedication to the Archbishop of Canterbury of his guide to Revelation, Edward Wells, rector of Cotesbach, Lincolnshire, emphasized the vital need ‘to find out the true meaning of this .  .  . book’, though it was ‘the most difficult in the whole canon of Scripture’.229 In a very learned tome, Wells printed the original Greek text alongside a translation and textual notes, and with, on the facing page, a full commentary. Here, Wells identified and discussed textual variants, reviewed other interpretations and deployed philological and historical analysis. His tone appears scholarly, judicious and unpolemical throughout. Rather than pointing up differences, Wells writes to mitigate the ‘great and unhappy difference of opinions which is now in the church’.230 In this case, in a move that speaks to a new literary as well as political culture, the polemic lies in the denial of polemic and partisanship, and in the form as much as in the content of Wells’s treatise. The form of the text with its layers of commentary, with variation and disagreement displaced to the notes, not only made Revelation a learned work; it made its, indeed all, religious ambiguities and variations the subject of textual rather than ecclesiological or political dispute.231 Just as in the wider culture violent conflict transmuted into party rivalry and propaganda, in Wells we discern an attempt to move religious controversy from the parish to the scholarly page.232 We have learned, however, that if Civil War and revolution ultimately civilized political engagement, they also fully politicized society and culture. That is to say, while politics became increasingly a battle of books and words, all texts and textual performances participated in and were marked by political contest. After 1642, as Steven Zwicker has demonstrated, all literary forms and genres were rendered partisan; even those that seemed to eschew engagement, like Walton’s Compleat Angler, were no less polemical than those which embraced it.233 We need to appreciate that this is true for other texts which critics have yet fully to examine: travel writing, medical and scientific treatises, histories – and scriptural exegeses. Dryden, Swift and

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Pope were not only immersed in political as well as literary skirmish; they all devoted time and space to mocking and satirizing millenarian beliefs and prophecies, just as the scientific establishment increasingly characterized them as insane. Yet, we should not take the Dunciad as the death knell for apocalypse: mockery and charges of madness express anxiety about the persistent force of heterodox beliefs. The new aesthetic of reason, wit and ridicule discloses an enduring fear of enthusiasm and the broadest cultural moves to contain it. We may also discern them in the last of the commentaries on Revelation we shall consider, Charles Daubuz’s A Perpetual Commentary on the Revelation, published in 1720. Daubuz, the son of a French émigré and vicar of Brotherton, Yorkshire, had little time for those who dismissed prophecy in a ‘sceptical and inquisitive age’.234 He regarded Revelation as the best commentary on the history and destiny of the church and therefore held it imperative to ‘convince all men’ of its importance and meaning.235 Like Wells, Daubuz eschewed the interpretational war over the text in which ‘each endeavours to draw it to his side’.236 He sought rather a ‘full account of this prophetical enigma’ which was ‘able to bear itself out with such clearness as to convince all men that the whole is understood’.237 Daubuz’s desire for agreement was not new. But the language and strategies he deployed in making his case open interesting windows onto the textual and political culture of eighteenth-century England. In the first place, Daubuz found the unity and harmony he sought in the world within the text of Revelation itself. The key to the book, he argued, ‘depends upon the admirable conjuncture of its parts and their mutual relation’, the ‘harmony and correspondency’ of the parts together.238 Secondly, he insisted that the key to understanding was knowledge of the symbolic system from which it emerged, a ‘system of principles to understand the prophetic language’.239 But as he turned to explicate the symbols by reference to Egyptian and Jewish antiquities, poetry and dreams, Daubuz read his Scripture, as perforce all exegetes did (and do), as a text of his own culture, with its own signifying forms and systems. To assist readers with mysterious symbols, Daubuz advised them to consider the contemporary blazons or imprese which were an essential part of aristocratic and heraldic culture: ‘the visions of St. John’, he advised, ‘are emblems or prophetical impressas, having figures exposed to the sight and mottoes to explain the precise meaning of the symbol’.240 If here Revelation becomes a book of eighteenth-century aristocratic society, Daubuz proceeds to read it as a text of Augustan aesthetics – as a piece of theatre and painting. Some commentators, such as Mede, he pointed out, had passed over certain passages of Revelation as mere decoration. But, he asked a society in which scene had recently become vital to drama, ‘is not the decoration of a theatre and the preparation of the scenes as necessary to the full representation of the actions as words?’241 So, he continued, ‘without these decorations of the theatre and particular scenes of the actions in these apostolical visions, they would be inexplicable.’242 Similarly, to a society in which the decorative and

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visual arts had become part of polite culture, Daubuz explicated the form of Revelation as if he were a critic analysing a canvas. For, he explained, ‘prophecy is a picture or representation . . . in symbols’; so ‘as in a picture, which is a kind of human invention . . . the principal and fairest part of the object for the sight and to strike in the spectator the greatest attention, is placed in the fairest light . . . so it is the method of the holy ghost.’243 To win the attention of his own ‘spectators’, Daubuz did not confine his analogies to the visual and performative arts. Though he admitted to a sceptical age that he could not provide ‘philosophical demonstrations’ of his case, Daubuz stressed the ‘reasonableness’ of the Holy Ghost and the rationality of his ‘system of principles’ that enabled his exposition to be ‘as certain and evident as that of geometrical theorems’.244 In Daubuz’s hands, Revelation folds into the scientific and aesthetic culture of Augustan England, to become a set of symbols and representations rather than a script for millenarian action.

V Daubuz, like all the commentators we have encountered, read and interpreted the book of Revelation in and for his own age. The elucidation of the meaning of Scripture was, and is, always an act of interpreting and commenting on the exegete’s own time. That is to say, of course, that it was always an ideological and political act, intended to validate a view or position. Scriptural exegesis, therefore, is a genre that historians cannot afford to ignore and to which they need to pay greater attention. In commentaries on Revelation we have seen a set of contemporary perceptions of faith and church, society and state, which have revised as well as complemented the traditional picture. In most of the expositions of the text we have discerned ambivalencies and anxieties which take us to the heart of early modern society and the early modern psyche  – anxieties about faith and reason, order and chaos, certainty and indeterminacy, authority and individual freedom. These anxieties have been disclosed in contemporary readers’ encounters with the prime text of their culture, the Bible. In other words, as we are beginning to appreciate from other disciplines and perspectives, the historical processes that determined the institutions of church and society, self and state, were predominantly textual, hermeneutic processes. To put it boldly, the history of early modern England was (as our telling of it is) a hermeneutic history, a series of successive, and contested, acts, in particular and changing circumstances, of reading and interpretation. The fortune of Mede’s Clavis Apocalyptica provides a good example of the way an interpretation of Scripture could be read in different times by different groups as learned biblical scholarship, script for revolution and Anglican apologia. Expositions and commentaries, that is, were as unstable and as open to multiple interpretations as Scripture itself.

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Indeed, what all the works we have examined also suggest is that, with varying degrees of approval, our readers and commentators on Revelation recognized that their own readings would be reread, and that their endeavours to establish authoritative interpretations would be frustrated. The often elaborate and plaintive epistles to readers, the form and arrangement of texts, with (or without) careful charts and detailed notes, witness both the authors’ quest to determine meaning and their recognition that ultimately it lay outside their control – with printers who introduced changes and errata, with licensers, most of all with readers. Beyond a history of biblical exegesis, then, we are led to the reception of expositions and to the occasional traces of individual readers who marked up their text, scribbled in the margins or bound their books together, as did the late seventeenth-century antiquaries Ashmole and Wood, in ways that disclose how they interpreted and valued and engaged with books.245 While that next move lies beyond the scope of this essay, one cannot help but ponder Robert Kelsey’s references to classical pagan texts as he read Gifford’s sermons on Revelation, or the pen that marked the passage of Knollys that foretold the end of the beast in 1688.246 Such marks of reading are inconsistent and hard to interpret, just like Scripture itself. But far from telling us nothing about the past, they graphically underline how textual, hermeneutic and political authorities were, and remain, in a continuous but shifting process of debate and exchange – one we might even call the human condition.

5 Transplanting revelation, transferring meaning: Reading the apocalypse in early modern England, Scotland and New England

Where the older historiography on exploration and colonization emphasized the authority and control of the mother country, recent scholars write of connections and exchanges in both directions and of cultural as well as commercial traffic between the Old World and the New. Moreover, authority and settlement are now presented in both worlds as textual as well as institutional processes. Traditionally, the author and book stood in intellectual history as controlling authorities that determined meaning for domestic readers and transferred meaning to other people, cultures or subordinate territories and communities. In a Whig history of England and America, Magna Carta or John Locke’s Treatises on Government (written about 1681 but not published until 1690) are often presented as texts that wrote the American constitution and structured American politics and values. More recently, however, scholars working in that interdisciplinary field called the history of the book have questioned the model of stable textual authority and transference and have drawn attention to the complex multiplicities of acts of authorship, to the instabilities of textual production, the diffused authority of textual interpretation, most of all the role of readers in determining meanings.1 The authority of texts, we have come to see, lay not simply  – not even primarily – with authors, but with a variety of agents involved in the process of producing, distributing and consuming books: with the connections and

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exchanges in the commerce of print in which the reading subject exercised as important and potent a role as the author.2 That Whig historiography and the more recent transatlantic textual criticism have followed complementary trajectories is no coincidence. For some critics have argued that, especially in early modern Europe, power (the capacity to enforce one’s will) as well as authority (the cultural processes that determine acquiescence) were textually constituted: that is that power depended upon codes and traditions as much as on armies and institutions.3 This of course was all the more the case when transatlantic distances made the enforcement of royal will even harder in the colonies than in the outlying regions of the mother country and so perforce at times rendered the interpretation as well as enforcement of government orders a local matter. Authority was – and remains – a hermeneutic process: an exchange, sometimes a contest, between authors and readers, authorities and citizens, about the meaning and interpretation of texts and traditions, one that is always being renegotiated.4 Though the fortunes and fates of texts depended upon acts of authority, such as imprimatur, licence and censorship, the practice of authority involved the compliance of readers of all the scripts of state, not only constitutions and canons.

I In the early modern Christian world, the most important text and authority was, of course, the Bible. On the Bible was founded the authority of the word, of kings – and indeed the rights and duties of colonizers. The Bible, however, was not a text that offered up clear, unambiguous meaning; its books of prophecy and parable were coded and veiled; the Bible foregrounded reading as an act, a Christian duty, of interpretation, of determining meaning. In early modern Europe, the division of Christendom into Catholic and Protestant, and then into a myriad of religious movements and sects, stemmed from different interpretations of Scripture; and, in turn, different denominations favoured and authorized different translations of the Bible – the Catholic Vulgate, the Lutheran Bible and the Geneva text. The King James Version of 1611 offered a new standard not only for England, but also for the Stuart’s British dominions.5 Along with these variant texts, a multiplicity of commentaries and glosses explicated the meaning of scriptural books and passages in different, sometimes directly contradictory, ways for readers of various persuasions in a variety of circumstances. The more obscure and visionary the biblical book, the more it provoked an industry of exegesis; the harder it was to fix the meaning, the more it was open to readings and to applications, to the readers’ circumstances and sympathies. If no biblical book was of greater importance to Christians than the Revelation of St John, no book was more coded or drew as much attention to hermeneutic processes and their relation to truth, salvation and the last

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things. Where early Protestants insistently read Revelation to identify Rome as the Antichrist, the Elizabethan and early Stuart Puritans and radicals came to find in it a denunciation of the hierarchies of the Church of England. And where, in the age of the Royal Society, some insisted on rational scientific exegesis of the text, others claimed the authority of personal inspiration as the key to discovering meaning. The commentaries on and interpretations of Revelation clearly disclosed how acts of reading were temporal and ideological, how they shifted with the changing historical circumstances in which individuals and factions found themselves.6 Time, however, is only one of the circumstances of reading and interpretation. And it is certainly no more important than the locales or geographies in which hermeneutic and exegetical acts are performed. At the simplest level, even within a country, the discrepancies between metropolis and province, town and country, with their different levels of literacy, access to books, communications and communities, fundamentally influenced modes of reading, as well as what was read.7 In early modern Europe geographies were religious as well as territorial; and, as well as Catholic and Protestant states, there were Catholic and Protestant regions, or Jansenist or Huguenot enclaves, not to mention cities like Amsterdam which were notorious as centres of many faiths – or none. These geographies and locales determined, as they were in turn fashioned by, the books and communities of readers and ultimately by local acts of interpretation, by how readers read in their communities. If the early modern maxim cuius regio cuius religio places too much emphasis on the capacity of early modern rulers to determine faith, we might offer a reformulation (eorum legendes, eorum religiones) that geographies shaped habits of reading and they, in turn, belief. Certainly those English Puritans who lamented the ‘dark corners of the land’ identified ungodly terrains as those in which the word was not preached, understood or read.8 In the case of the Bible, geography and locale were not only conditions of reading but very much part of what was being read – of the message of Scripture. As much as it is a book of time, of creation, fall and eschatology, the Bible is a text of myriad geographies and journeys: paradise and exodus, Promised Land and Babylon, Judea and Jerusalem. In many instances, and especially in the case of Revelation, places, such as river, or wilderness, are indeterminate and it is left unclear whether even those named  – the holy Jerusalem, for example  – are specific or symbolic, in this case of arrival and reconciliation with Christ.9 Just as the understanding of biblical events was shaped by the reader’s own moment in time, so the meaning of biblical geography was influenced by the reader’s own locale. Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden’s prophetic acclamation as lion of the north was founded on Scripture; while in England Civil War radicals were said to expect Armageddon ‘about Preston or Warrington Bridge’.10 With Revelation both the sites of reading and the interpretation of biblical geography were directly connected to the text of Scripture that was favoured. While modern commentaries point out

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that there is no need to do so, and other translations did not, the Geneva Bible interpreted the seven hills on which the woman sits in Revelation 17.9 as Rome, as indeed the notes throughout identify the Antichrist with the papacy. What Revelation 11.8 merely calls ‘the great city which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt’, the Geneva annotations gloss as ‘that is, openly at Rome’; what the text calls Babylon, the commentary reads in every instance as Rome. Where in antiquity the names were used to designate vaguely any northern population, and where Luther was inclined to see the Turks signified by Gog and Magog, through the notes to the Geneva Bible readers were led to take them as the pope and the papacy.11 Through the notes compiled by exiles from Marian England to Geneva, or indeed of the Huguenot Franciscus Junius to the 1602 edition, the anti-Catholic apocalypticism of the continental Reformation was translated, in both the geographical and textual senses, to England.12 However, popular though it was and remained, in England the Geneva Bible competed with other translations of Scripture: Miles Coverdale’s Bible, Henry VIII’s Bible and, after 1611, the King James Authorized Version, which was  – quite deliberately  – published without notes or commentary. Moreover, in England the Scriptures were, for the most part, expounded and read within the community of the Anglican Church, which all were obliged to attend and of which the successive heads were as keen to distance themselves from the radical reformation of Geneva as from the papacy in Rome.

II The story was not the same throughout the British Isles. Under the leadership of one of the returning exiles, John Knox, the reformation in Scotland was driven by a militant apocalypticism that never held sway in England. Knox’s ‘conviction that the world was divided into two armed camps stayed with him, and so too did the belief that the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation had a peculiar significance for his own times’ and country.13 Knox saw it as his role to denounce Rome and to pave the way for the victory of Christ foretold in prophecy. His legacy, along with the Geneva Bible which remained the version favoured in Scotland, was a strong sense in the northern kingdom of the interrelationship between past and present, prophecy and affairs of state, and a belief too that it would be prophets more than princes who would fight Antichrist to secure Christ’s kingdom. The importance of Revelation to the Reformed Kirk and state in Scotland is nowhere better evidenced than in the attention given to the text by King James VI. In 1588, in the wake of the Spanish armada, James published a commentary on the seventh to tenth verses of the twentieth chapter of Revelation, the verses dealing with the final battle and defeat of Satan.14 In what was intended as a testament of his devotion to true (Protestant)

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religion, and a marking of a clear distance from his Catholic mother Mary at a critical time in Europe, James presented himself as champion of the war against the popish Antichrist. In the spirit of Knox, James read Revelation as a text for the time – for ‘this our last age’.15 James was principally concerned with ‘what we should learn of all’ – the application to the times which he fully understood was an important matter for kings.16 In what he called a ‘sermon’, James explained how the passages pointed to the release of Antichristian errors and to ‘nations following them . . . hating the truth’.17 As Satan waged a last battle against the elect, James had no doubt that it was the pope who was here figured, stirring up princes like the Habsburgs who were his ‘slaves’ to persecute the faithful – in France and Germany, as in Flanders.18 But God, he assured readers, protected his chosen and promised ‘deliverance of his kirk in this world and perpetual glory of the same in the world to come’.19 Since God assured victory in the world, the text, James urged, exhorted men to fight ‘for maintenance of the good cause God has clad us with and defence of our liberties, native country and lives’  – to militant action on the European stage, not least in defence of Protestant rulers and nations.20 In the preface to the ‘Christian Reader’, Patrick Galloway, minister of Perth, hinted at the forthcoming publication of ‘a greater work’ and ‘larger proof of his majesty’s meaning . . . in that same argument’.21 The reference is almost certainly to A Paraphrase Upon the Revelation of the Apostle of St. John, a work directed to the international church militant composed in 1588 but not actually published until 1616,22 in which James explicitly named the papists as their ‘common adversaries’ and defied any to refute his interpretation.23 James was concerned to assert the centrality of Revelation and to clarify its meaning and application: ‘how profitable this book is for this age.’24 No less than with his sermon on chapter 20, in his paraphrase James reasserted his Calvinist faith, founded on election and reprobation, his belief in the prophecy of a final struggle and his sense that some nations, notably Scotland united with England in Great Britain, were chosen to ‘shake off the yoke’ of the Egyptian monarchy.25 Summarizing the argument of chapter 17, he describes how ‘the angel expounded to John this vision of the pope . . . and clearly declares the author and manner of his destruction.’26 In this case, however, for all its ardent apocalypticism, the form of James’s text suggests his desire to emphasize not only the authority of Scripture but his own. Here in the paraphrase, the king speaks as a prophet in the voice of St John and in royal as well as apocalyptic terms. ‘I declare you’, James writes, ‘my name the oftener lest the authority of the book should be called in doubt, through the uncertainty of the writer.’27 In a spirit very different from Knox, James connects his royal authority with prophecy and presents his position as king as that of godly exegete – ‘I am commanded to write.’28 In the paraphrase, the militant apocalypticism of the Scottish Reformation was rewritten to emphasize the role of a godly Constantine who might lead the British elect in their spiritual warfare.29

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The royal claim was repeated explicitly in another Scottish treatise on Revelation that appeared under the influence of James’s commentaries and was published with royal licence and royal arms.30 In his dedication to James, John Napier observed how John entrusted the great work of the destruction of Antichrist to the ‘kings of the earth’ and how his subjects looked to him to lead the battle against ‘the apocalyptic sea and city’. Combining oblique criticism with praise, Napier exhorts James to reform court and country and to ‘purge . . . all suspicion of papists’ but, like him, he emphasizes the role Reformed princes are to play in the destruction of Antichrist.31 In his exegesis of the text, Napier assigned dates to periods and events, future as well as past, and in so doing he made Revelation a text of his own times: the seventh trumpet, he opined, had sounded in 1541; the destruction of abbeys in England, Scotland and France about 1560 had pulled down one of the dominions of the papistical empire; the defeat of the armada in 1588 and the murder of the Duke of Guise in 1590 were prognoses of the fall of Babylon.32 As a consequence, Napier invited speculation about the future not in vague or symbolic terms but as detailed predictions. As Katharine Firth writes, ‘Not only did Napier write more plainly than many of his predecessors, but he also greatly accelerated expectation.’33 For Napier the time of Revelation was come and the time for action was now. During the 1590s, apocalyptic fervour reached a new height in Scotland as a series of events appeared to presage the final battle. After the defeat of the Spanish armada, many ships of which were destroyed in Scottish waters, the birth of Prince Henry in 1594 was interpreted as a sign. ‘You press under your foot the triple crown of the papacy’, the Presbyterian Andrew Melville prophesied as he greeted a new prince whom he saw as forging the Scots and English into a ‘single body of Scoto-Britannic people’.34 As Arthur Williamson has shown, the prospect of a united Scotland and England, two nations that, as Napier had observed, had resisted Rome, fuelled apocalyptic expectations. In the minds of Melville and those who thought and read like him, ‘Britain emerged with a deeply apocalyptic mission, indeed as a state fundamentally conceived within religious terms.’35 Together with James’s own avowed interest in the role of godly princes in the war against Antichrist, the expectation of the union of the British kingdoms as unfolding of apocalyptic prophecy ran high. In the southern British kingdom, however, events had forged a different environment for the interpretation of Revelation. Unlike in Scotland, the impetus for the English Reformation had emerged not from below but from the king; and not from a fervour for religious reform but a dynastic need to secure a divorce and an heir. Though apocalyptic hopes were raised during the brief reign of Edward VI, and even during the Marian persecutions, which were read as Satan’s war against the saints, events did not bear out those hopes. For all that John Foxe greeted her as a godly ruler in the battle against Antichrist, Elizabeth favoured a church settlement that contained too much of the whore of Babylon for the taste of her more godly subjects.

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Neither on the international nor domestic stage did Elizabeth fulfil the expectations of Foxe or the authors of the Geneva Bible who dedicated their translation to her in the hope that it would spur her to perform her role in the fulfilment of prophecy. The queen refused almost to the last to aid the Dutch in their war against the Habsburgs and at home seemed ever more concerned to temper the heat of religious controversy than to advance apocalyptic strains. Even after the defeat of the armada, the queen eschewed action on the European stage. Though figures like Edward Hellwis identified her as the woman of Revelation 12, Elizabeth in her published prayers, quite unlike James VI, displayed no interest in apocalypse and the Church of England establishment in general steered clear of the book of Revelation.36 The most significant commentator on Revelation during the 1590s was in fact a leading Puritan critic of the Elizabethan settlement. Though significantly his commentary was not published until the next reign, William Perkins preached extensively on Revelation in Cambridge in 1595.37 Like James’s, the epistle dedicatory to Perkins’s commentary stressed the ‘application’ of the text as ‘fit and pertinent to our times’.38 But in the different circumstances of Elizabethan England, his reading was quite other than royal exegesis in Scotland. Rather than the authority of a godly Constantine, Perkins emphasized the subordination of princes to Christ and the role of the godly as true priests and kings. And rather than a godly nation full of apocalyptic expectancy, Perkins took his country as one in Ladoceia’s condition, ‘in danger to be spewed out of Christ’s mouth’ as unreformed and degenerate.39 As he wrote without equivocation: As lukewarm water troubleth men’s stomachs, so do we trouble Christ and therefore are like to be cast out even as that is. We may flatter ourselves and think that all is well . . . but know it, we are in danger of a most grievous judgement, namely, to be cut off from Christ.40 For English Puritans like Perkins, no less than Scottish ministers like Melville, the succession of a king from Scotland, brought up in the Kirk and a contributor to the apocalyptic literature that he read as prophecy of the godly cause, represented revived hopes of a more vigorous campaign against the Antichrist. Not only were Perkins’s own writings on Revelation freely published in 1604 and 1607, King James’s published Works of 1616 publicized his exegeses of apocalypse, which were placed at the beginning of the volume, as important representations of his kingship. Even in Scotland, however, James’s apocalypticism was articulated with different emphases and in different contexts to that of Perkins or Melville. As his poem ‘Lepanto’ had  – somewhat notoriously  – suggested, James did not damn all papists as horns of the beast and could on occasions stress the need for Christian unity to counter the threat of the Turk.41 He had even shown favour to Catholics, which astounded the Kirk.42 When he succeeded to Elizabeth’s throne, not least because he was fully aware of the different religious

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topography of his new kingdom, James tempered his earlier apocalypticism, or rather complemented it with other discourses and ambitions, principally his quest for a reunification of Christendom.43 In his own speeches on the union of England and Scotland, James manifested none of the apocalyptic expectation that had fired Puritans and Presbyterians. As Williamson points out, the Scottish courtiers Sir William Alexander and James Maxwell, while still ‘deeply immersed in sacred prophecy’, posited a very different vision of apocalyptic Britain, with King James and Prince Henry as leaders of a Christian crusade against the Ottoman Empire rather than Rome.44 James I soon made it clear which side he supported after he unified the British monarchy.45 He made peace with Spain, long regarded by the godly as the principal arm of the beast. Though he met with the Puritans at Hampton Court, James rejected almost all their demands for further reform of the church and under his first archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft, sought strictly to enforce conformity and to support the authority of his bishops. Most importantly, James’s anxiety about the Geneva Bible, especially its notes equivocal about the power of kings, led him to commission a new authorized Bible that, to say the least, muted the strident apocalypticism of some Geneva annotators. As Brown Patterson has persuasively argued, rather than a militantly anti-papal policy, James cast himself as the champion of a reunified Christendom and of a European conciliarism as the means to effect it, while preserving the authority of elect kings and nations from the ultramontane claims of Rome. If James I did not change the fundamental beliefs he held as James VI, the new English as well as new British locale in which he articulated them, still more acted on them, was quite other than it had been in Scotland. In the northern kingdom to champion apocalypticism was to enhance royal authority by making (in James’s case, writing) a place for the king as godly ruler.46 In England, from Henry VIII on, the monarch was Supreme Head of the church and the champions of militant apocalypticism were critics of that royal supremacy, not to mention of the hierarchy of archbishops and bishops that James famously identified with the authority of kings.47 In England, therefore, James’s apocalyptic beliefs did not translate into that action on the world stage for which many had hoped.48 Indeed as the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War appeared to herald the final battle between Christ and Antichrist, the king pursued a pragmatic neutrality which to some appeared as collusion with the forces of darkness. Their fears and suspicions were not allayed by James’s readiness in conducting a balanced diplomacy to pursue a Spanish marriage for his son, still less by his rethinking the question whether the pope really was the Antichrist figured in Revelation.49 Disappointment hardly begins to describe the reaction of the godly to these changes – in both England and Scotland. When James made his only return visit to Scotland in 1617, the people of the town of Dumfries called upon him to fulfil Christian eschatology and to lead a crusade against the beast.50 It may be that in the northern kingdom, James’s failure as king of

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Great Britain to act as the godly Constantine he had represented himself as being sharpened the Kirk’s suspicion of kingly power that was to explode into Presbyterian revolution in the reign of his son. Certainly in England, where, since Foxe, the hopes of a church militant lay with a godly ruler, James’s actions, or perhaps one should say inaction, effected a fundamental change that helped to shatter the fragile peace of the church and state.51 Quite simply, some found themselves forced to conclude that England was not the elect nation chosen to be the New Jerusalem, the holy place of Revelation chapter 21.52 One may begin to discern this process in the writings of Thomas Brightman, the Cambridge Puritan who wrote A Revelation of the Revelation in the first decade of the century.53 Brightman retained some sense of Foxe’s belief in England as an elect nation, with a special place in apocalyptic history; but, in Firth’s words, his expression of his country’s special election ‘was given more in the terms of hope than conviction’.54 Perhaps disenchantment led him to stress the role of godly magistrates as well as princes. Towards the close of his long commentary, he pointed out ‘fearful signs and evident prognostications that this departure of the glory of God from amongst us is at the very doors.’55 Brightman associated the defeat of the Antichrist less with England than with the conversion of the Jews: ‘after the Jews are called and a new church is made, God will wipe away all tears.’56 And rather than in his own country Brightman was published in Latin at Frankfurt, then in English at Amsterdam, and directed his commentary to the Reformed churches of Germany and France as much as Britain.57 Brightman’s suggestion that a particular passage (that which stated that ‘the woman fled into the wilderness where she hath a place prepared of God’ pending the final victory of the saints) might not figure England not only translated the meaning of Revelation but transferred a whole apocalyptic understanding to another people and place.58

III From the first voyages of discovery, the New World had, understandably, been invested with apocalyptic significance: Columbus indeed promised Queen Isabella that he would find there enough gold to rebuild the temple of Jerusalem.59 During the religious wars in Europe that followed the Reformation, the existence of a land beyond the conflict served to endow the Americas with a sense of purity and promise; and, of course, the discovery of a primitive people in need of Christian mission fuelled apocalyptic as well as evangelical zeal. For most of the first century of the history of exploration, Europeans (Spaniards and Portuguese, later French and English) saw themselves as translating civilization and religion from their homelands, extending the mission of their chosen nations to the ends of the earth as prophesied in Revelation 7.1. This was very much the case with the first

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English colonization and remained the perception in Virginia where settlers continued to regard England as the elect nation.60 From about the first decade of James I’s reign, however, when they began to doubt whether the apocalypse would be fulfilled in England, some Puritans began to invest the new world with a sacred meaning as the place where the last battle would be fought and won and the new Jerusalem established. A tendency to see the new world in apocalyptic terms in England was by no means confined to Puritans. In his Clavis Apocalyptica, one of the most influential English exegeses of Revelation, published in Latin for scholars in 1627, the impeccably orthodox Joseph Mede suggested that it would be in the New World that Gog and Magog would rise against the saints.61 But where Mede saw little prospect of the New World becoming the chosen land, his correspondent, the Puritan and future prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, William Twisse, discerned that the plantations in America might be the promised holy land.62 It was this view that increasingly took hold in English Puritan circles and led some to read America as the sacred wilderness of Revelation (12.6, 14) to which the woman, representing the true church, should fly to be nourished far ‘from the face of the serpent’. This sacralization of the New World, alongside the corresponding Puritan desacralization of England and Europe, led to an entirely new type of colonization  – what Avihu Zakai has called the Exodus model  – and to a refigured apocalyptic geography.63 Those Puritans who decided on emigration to a new England would translate with them the text of Revelation which they would read in their new land in ways quite different from interpretations in their old. The revolutionary hermeneutic change may be traced in the writings of John Cotton, an Emmanuel Cambridge scholar who from 1612 was vicar of St Botolph’s in Boston, Lincolnshire. For more than a decade, Cotton had ceased to observe Church of England ceremonies and was connected with those circles of Puritans emigrating to America.64 In 1630 those organizing John Winthrop’s fleet to New England invited him to preach a sermon at Southampton. Although he was to preach regularly on Revelation, in the sermon he published as Gods Promise to His Plantation, Cotton preached on the seventh chapter of the second book of Samuel: ‘I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them.’ Cotton assured the migrants and the larger community of his readers that the journey had God’s warrant. He compared them to the first planters of the Christian church, urged them to win the natives to Christ, and saw them becoming ‘trees of righteousness’ in their new land.65 At this point, far from thinking of joining them, Cotton used language that indicates that he had not yet despaired of England fulfilling its mission as elect nation. ‘Be not unmindful of our Jerusalem at home’, he exhorted them, and he promised, ‘As God continueth his presence with us . . . so be ye present in spirit with us.’66 Two years later, facing persecution by the Court of High Commission for his nonconformity, Cotton took ship to follow Winthrop’s band and to preach in a new Boston. In the new

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geography of New England, as others, Cotton was to find in Revelation a very different prophecy and a different ecclesiology and politics. Before he or they were transplanted, however, the migrants encountered an experience that drew attention to their remove to the furthest corners of the world: the ocean passage. By no means all, or most, of the passengers were Puritan, but for any Christian familiar with a scriptural discourse that rendered the path to salvation as a journey and the assaults on faith as a storm, the voyage took on a religious significance. For the Puritans, it represented, in David Cressy’s words, ‘a series of tests and revelations’.67 To the godly, a safe passage was evidence of divine protection, while the taunts of more worldly passengers who did not join them in prayers underlined the Puritans’ sense of themselves as different, an elect band. A sense of the voyage as transformative experience, of the ocean as a hermeneutic geography, is borne out by the ubiquity of marine and nautical metaphors in New England sermons and tracts.68 For some, too, the voyage may have represented a cleansing of old world impurities and a baptism into a new spiritual life in what, after travel, they were more inclined to treat as a sacred land. If that were the case in 1630, news over the next decade of Laudian ceremonialism, stricter enforcement of conformity and punishments of the godly at home, can only have confirmed a feeling of the righteousness of their actions and the sanctity of their mission in a new apocalyptic space and time – a time in which, from 1638 in Scotland, then in Ireland and England, the old world and church were thrown into confusion. In 1642, John Cotton published two treatises on Revelation that bring into sharp focus the consequences of reading a familiar text in a new geography and circumstance. In The Church’s Resurrection or the Opening of the 5th and 6th Verses of the 20th Chapter of the Revelation, Cotton showed how far he had travelled  – exegetically as well as geographically. Influenced by Brightman, he associated the resurrection of the church with the conversion of the Jews, a theory given further impetus by the speculation advanced, and later fully outlined by James Thorowgood, that the American Indians were the lost tribes of Israel.69 But far from following an English apocalyptic tradition that had emphasized the leadership of a godly prince, Cotton asserted that God did not give the keys of the bottomless pit to magistrates but to spiritual governors.70 Nor were those spiritual governors the hierarchy of the church at home. Episcopal terrains, Cotton preached, were ‘plantations God hath not planted’; those who doted on bishops ‘undermine all reformation’ and served not Christ but Antichrist.71 It was in New not Old England that there was to be a ‘resurrection . . . from resting in forms’.72 There the church was ‘but a company, a body of godly persons’, demonstrating signs of saving grace, and all were ‘spiritual priests and kings unto God’.73 To those tempted to return to their native country, as it was rent by Civil War, Cotton presented a choice between sacred and reprobate communities, Jerusalem and Babylon.74 In The Pouring Out of the Seven Vials, Cotton glossed Revelation chapter 16 which he took as ‘very fit and

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necessary for this present age’.75 Here, denouncing James’s ecumenism as a vain and misguided attempt to bring heaven and earth together, Cotton praised the likes of Perkins at home and Gustavus II Adolphus on the world stage, as agents of the Lord.76 Cotton now interpreted the fifth vial as poured onto the bishops, first by the likes of Theodore Beza and Thomas Cartwright, now by the Scots who heralded the downfall of Antichrist’s kingdom;77 the removal of episcopal pomp he saw as making way for the conversion of the Jews and so for Armageddon.78 When all the vials were poured out, he promised his auditors, they would see the true church was not a cathedral nor a diocesan church with bishops but ‘congregational only’, with pastors and teachers.79 In Cotton’s developing exegesis of apocalypse, the true saints were those who had ‘come out of England’ for ‘liberty and purity of ordinances’.80 Cotton read the Prayer Book rebellion and the formation of the Covenanting movement in Scotland as signs of Antichrist’s imminent fall and prayed for his native country in which God was enacting great things.81 Though he urged his listeners to stay in America, he asked them now ‘to help with that light we have so there may be no more refuges of lies in that land’ of England.82 Not long before he had dispatched emigrants with the injunction to think of the Jerusalem at home; now the apocalyptic geographies were reversed. Rather than being an outpost of an elect nation, Revelation revealed New England as the model for reform of the old, the hope of its rescue from the paws of the beast. Indeed, Cotton’s commentaries were exported to England allegedly from notes taken by members of his congregation. Published in London, Cotton’s works were thrown into the pamphlet controversies that raged in and between the British kingdoms. The Scottish Presbyterian Robert Baillie, for example, denounced Cotton as ‘If not the author, yet the greatest promoter and patron of Independency’ and the two engaged in a polemical exchange that led Cotton to a full justification of the American congregational system as well as of his reading of the apocalypse.83 Just as Cotton took with him to the new world a tradition of reading Revelation practised by the likes of Perkins and Brightman, so his own rereadings in his New England home were recirculated back into the debates over the nature of the true church and religious settlement in the British kingdoms that followed the collapse of the Church of England and the abolition of episcopacy. For much of the 1640s, especially after the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant that brought the Scots into the Civil Wars in 1643, Presbyterians struggled to establish a national church, opposed by Independents and sects who dominated in the ranks of the army. John Cotton’s important interventions in those debates were founded on his reading of apocalypse that had shown him that the congregational way was the road to the New Jerusalem. In The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, Cotton questioned the excessive power of synods and elders and wrote to assert the independency of each congregation and its members.84 And in a full

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response to Baillie and Samuel Rutherford’s The Due Right of Presbyteries, titled The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared (1648), Cotton argued that independency ‘had been bred in the womb of the New Testament’.85 Citing Revelation 14 on the souls who follow the lamb, Cotton recalled the ‘so long and hazardous . . . voyage’ to ‘a land of liberty’, and expressed his pride at how, by their preaching to the Indians, his church had, as the Jesuits themselves acknowledged, become ‘dangerous supplanters of the Catholic cause’ and enemies ‘to the antichristian world’.86 But in 1648, the Catholic was not the only Antichrist. Cotton wanted also to vaunt how the churches of New England had made others question and reject episcopacy, just as earlier Cartwright in Old England had influenced him to begin to do. Quoting Revelation and his own gloss on the seven vials, he asserted the congregational discipline to be the way to the last victory: for where it was ‘there would be no place nor way open for the advancement of Antichrist nor for the usurpation of episcopal prelacy.’87 Having ‘suffered this hazardous and voluntary banishment into this remote wilderness’, the members of the congregational churches had made ‘a little sanctuary’.88 And though he did not deny the help of others – even the Presbyterian Scots – in showing the light, Cotton insisted that it was the New England way that England must follow; for it was Christ’s model revealed in apocalyptic prophecy and now realized in Cotton’s own time and place.89 Among the works of Cotton that were printed first, or only, in England and published to address English circumstances were the important texts of sermons he had delivered weekly at his Boston church on the thirteenth chapter of Revelation.90 The language of commerce serves only to underscore the traffic in exegesis. In his Exposition of the 13th Chapter of the Revelation, Cotton advocated a new individual hermeneutics of apocalypse. Though acknowledging that readers were often not satisfied with any one interpretation, Cotton was sure, following the promise of chapter 1 verse 3, that ‘so much light God casts almost into the head of every man that takes this book in hand . . . that he adds some light more than hath been brought before.’91 The light Cotton added in this text was very much cast from a New England that had developed a patriotic sense of identity from its sacred mission into the wilderness. It was the New Englanders, Cotton asserted, who had cast off the monster of Babylon and the ‘diocesan or national church’ which was ‘but an image of the great beast’.92 To those who yet hankered after their old country or who ‘look at things as mean and poor here’, he urged a counting of spiritual riches and asked: ‘Will you go back to Egypt?’93 Only in America could men find the true church and perhaps a true polity, too, in which the prerogatives of rulers were limited and the Lord entrusted his chosen with ‘establishing jurisdictions and liberty for well ordering our families and townships’.94 Now, while praising ‘holy Brightman’, Cotton dissented from his interpretation of Revelation in one important respect.95 He calculated that the time of the woman going into the wilderness fell in the time of Elizabeth and that the year 1655 would see another blow

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dealt against the beast.96 In the wake of the Puritan migrations to New England, and as the convulsions in Scotland and England were unfolding as Cotton preached, he feared an assault on the colonies: ‘if wars come against New England’, Cotton warned, ‘it will be from principalities’ which might have to be resisted.97 For, though some advocated yielding to Caesar in matters of worship, Cotton instructed his countrymen, ‘it will not be safe for you to receive the image of any other church than that which Christ hath established.’98 In Old England, even with a parliament, it remained ‘a very difficult thing to have the state ruled by apostolical judgement’.99 Only in New England where ‘neither the pope nor the king hath power to make laws to rule the church’ could God’s truth be pursued and his apocalyptic prophecy be fulfilled.100 Reading Revelation over the decade after he fled, John Cotton had become ever more certain that only New England could be the New Jerusalem of chapters 3 and 21.101

IV John Cotton died in 1652, a little before his predicted date for Armageddon and just a year before his native country embarked upon the experiment he did much to influence – the rule of the saints in the Barebones assembly.102 It was the high point of millenarian excitement in England; correspondingly, the collapse of the assembly signalled a conservatism not only in the realm of ecclesiastical politics but also in biblical hermeneutics that sought to dampen apocalyptic expectations.103 In New England, for all the spiritual anxiety of contemporaries, the mid-century is seen as marking a new era of prosperity and confidence – of a confidence that owed not a little to a clear self-perception, based on reading Scripture, of living in a sacred land.104 In the revisionist historiography of colonial America, it is this second generation, rather than that of Winthrop and Cotton, that invented the myth of New England as the land of the woman in the wilderness, the refuge from the dragon.105 More recently, however, Avihu Zakai has powerfully restated Perry Miller’s original thesis of a ‘founding errand’ on the part of the first generation of American Puritans and posited, against the argument of an invention mid-century, the continuity of ideology and belief in apocalyptic mission: ‘the redemptive, prophetic flight of the church of the wilderness passed without change from the first to the second and third generations of puritans in New England.’106 While Zakai’s critique of revisionism is in the main convincing, the second and third generations of New England Puritans were conscious of living in different circumstances to the founding migrants. And in consequence they read, and reinterpreted, and applied, the book of Revelation differently. But, as with the founding fathers, the second generation of American Bible readers were fashioned not only by their own circumstances and moments but also by place: by their own locales and by the remembered or imagined

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geographies of their mother country which still cast its shadow over their interpretation of Scripture. The year 1660 that seemingly witnessed an end of millenarian hopes in England marked in America the ‘height’ of ‘apocalyptic and eschatological consciousness’.107 The contrast, however, did not simply manifest the difference traditionally described between an Old England in which a more secular, rationalist culture replaced the zeal of the sects and a New England where all were ever more confident of their apocalyptic mission.108 In his election sermon to the General Assembly of Massachusetts, the pastor of Roxbury, Samuel Danforth, seemed anxious to counter the possible attractions to many of an England again at peace and enjoying a vibrant commercial and cultural life. Reminding his auditors that ‘we came not hither to see men clothed as courtiers’, Danforth, concerned about the worldliness of his congregation, laid emphasis on the position of America as a wilderness, a land of ‘wild woods and deserts’, and stressed the riches of a New England colony that had been formed out of a special religious mission and enjoyed a unique spiritual life.109 Had they not, he asked, braved ‘the vast ocean’ in hope and search of ‘the pure and faithful dispensation of the gospel and kingdom of God’?110 ‘The times’, he continued, ‘were such that we could not enjoy it in our own land: and therefore . . . we left our country, kindred and fathers houses and came . . . where the Lord hath planted us.’111 But the temptations of Epicureanism and atheism arose anew, and, even in America, the preface to his sermon detected ‘a laodicean lukewarmness in the matters of God’. The strains of the earlier English Puritans’ disappointment at a promise unfulfilled begin to sound as the preacher sought to recall his audience to their mission and former zeal.112 Danforth’s address marks a turning point in the history of what is known as the ‘American Jeremiad’, a sermon based on the biblical lamentations of Jeremiah.113 For its theme is not the special godliness of the congregation but their lapse from the piety of their fathers into worldliness. In the shifting history of this genre, the readings of Revelation are central. So too were the heirs and successors of the first American exegetes of apocalypse. Increase Mather, the Dorchester, Massachusetts, clergyman and first president of Harvard College who named his son after Cotton (his father-in-law) was preoccupied with Revelation, apocalypse and the mission into the wilderness from the early years of Restoration in England to the turn of the century and beyond. In his The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation (1669), preaching on the establishment of Christ’s kingdom after the pouring of the sixth and seventh vials, Mather made clear that he expected the Lord shortly.114 The time was at hand ‘when all Israel shall be saved, and then will converting work go on gloriously all the world over, even amongst Indians’; then, he promised using language that connected geography with apocalyptic time, the world may be ‘termed a new world’.115 Contrasting his own country with Old England where he interpreted the Great Fire as part of the fourth vial, Mather assured Americans that Brightman’s prediction that ‘some faithful

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ones of God in a wilderness’ would have special advantages to understand these mysterious truths of God had been realized in ‘such of us as are in exiled condition’.116 St John had led them there, he continued, to witness the destruction of Rome. Over the following years, Mather preached and wrote to sustain belief in New England’s apocalyptic mission and to counter the influences, not least from England, of rational scepticism and worldliness that, he feared, infected the new world as well as the old. In 1677, for example, pointing to things ‘that look with an ominous aspect upon poor New England’, he called upon the people to renew their covenant with God, to make them ‘the Lord’s covenant people [who] are in the Revelation said to have the name of God and the name of Christ on their foreheads.’117 Subsequently in The Necessity of Reformation, presenting New Englanders as akin to the Jews, and cataloguing the sins of profanity, Sabbath breaking and intemperance they perpetrated, Mather warned that, like the Israel of the Old Testament, ‘we are a perishing people if we reform not.’118 Corrupting with drink the Indians whom an earlier generation had come to convert as part of its mission symbolized for Mather the New Englanders’ fall and the need for redemption.119 As time passed and approached what he believed would be the last days, his tone became more strident. In Heaven’s Alarm to the World (1681), he prophesied that the ruin foretold in Revelation 8.10 hung over them;120 in a 1688 Narrative of the Miseries of New England, he feared that England under James II would deliver sinful New Englanders into the hands of the papist French.121 But as crisis came and passed, Mather held onto his personal conviction that he belonged to a people chosen to make the way for Christ’s kingdom. In 1689, as William of Orange took the throne in England, he could write again of ‘the Almighty’s most wonderful blessing and prospering New England and his gospel among the heathen there, which to me looks like the beginning of the fulfilling those many prophecies in Holy Writ concerning them.’122 Though struggles continued, writing in 1700 on The Order of the Gospel, he felt confident that Brightman’s reading of Revelation had been ‘fulfilled in what has come to pass in this American desert’.123 In particular, for Mather America had seized from Antichrist control of the church by establishing a congregational system in which ‘the essence of a minister’s call is the mutual election between him and his people’ – a system Mather later promoted on his visits to England and Scotland as a model for all Christian churches.124 In the circumstances of post-Revolutionary England, Mather could find common accord with Presbyterians and some others of the old world.125 But his sense of the rightness of the New England way and of the sanctity of his country remained strong. Increase Mather’s combination of pride in the New England mission and denunciation of those who lapsed from it was his spiritual bequest to his son, Cotton Mather, named after his maternal grandfather, whose life he wrote. Cotton Mather, a prolific preacher and author, published no fewer than 50 works in which eschatology played a central role.126 As a third-generation New Englander, he contributed to the New World apocalyptic mission by

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combining biblical exegesis with a religious history of the colony that charted and illustrated biblical prophecy as it had unfolded there, and that established a native pantheon of divines for an American church. Mather’s life work, his Magnalia Christi Americana: Or the Ecclesiastical History of New England from 1620 to 1698, combined a narrative of providences (such as the success in promoting the gospel to the Indians) and afflictions with the lives of divines and governors and the history of the seminary, Harvard College.127 While lamenting and admonishing against backsliding, it yet saw for New England a great future, described in apocalyptic terms: ‘There is a resolution and a reformation at the very door, which will be vastly more wonderful than any of the deliverances yet seen.’128 For Mather, a review of the New England past pointed up the mission to the wilderness and his country’s chosen place as the site of the last glorious battle; as he put it in Theopolis Americana, ‘our glorious Lord will have a holy city in America.’129 Though in many respects he followed as well as piously recounted the works of his father, Cotton Mather’s reading of apocalypse was undertaken in altered circumstances, changed over his long life, and was shaped by the shifting relations between the colony and mother country. Even more than Increase Mather, he felt the need to support prophecy and revelation against the scepticism of the rationalists; his Triparadisus has been described as ‘a hermeneutical bulwark against the allegorizing deists’.130 To strengthen the cause of revealed religion, he took up the early eighteenth-century philological scholarship of William Whiston, and the science of Isaac Newton and the Royal Society, as well as the texts of Joseph Mede and others.131 By the end of his life, he revised the eschatological views he had inherited from his father as well as his own earlier position. For one, Mather came to renounce belief in the conversion and restoration of the Jews as the herald of Christ’s second coming.132 And Cotton’s nationalism, forged by his experience and his writing of American history, led him to dissatisfaction with Mede’s casting of America as the land of Gog and Magog where Satan would rise to attack the saints. ‘I that am an American’, he wrote in a new language of self-identity, ‘must needs be loath to allow all America still unto the Devil’s possession’.133 Against Mede, Cotton Mather read from Scripture that America was the land promised, and he interpreted the Salem witches as the Devil’s last attempt to secure a place that was destined to be the land of his destruction. Cotton Mather’s American identity was still formed out of, rather than in conflict with, England. The intellectual and scholarly influences on him – Thomas Burnet as well as Whiston – were English as much as American; as he figured the palaces of the holy city he thought of the great houses of Britain.134 As well as cultural, the ties to the old country were bonds of political allegiance – to ‘our good king on the British throne’.135 When he prophesied that ‘the fall of the new popish Babylon will be accompanied with the loss of her American interest’, Mather probably imagined a godly Anglo-American empire rising from the subjection of France and Spain.136 Yet, Cotton Mather, in his biblical hermeneutics as much as his ecclesiastical history, wrote an American future as well as an American past: a future in

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which the fulfilment of its prophetic role would override all other allegiances and obligations. Over the course of the following decades, events rendered England and America very different geographies of scriptural exegesis. As in the mother country the Church of England entered a period of spiritual torpor, New England witnessed a popular evangelical revival  – a reaction to the more secular spirit denounced in the jeremiads.137 As in Cotton Mather’s writings, the millennial enthusiasm that accompanied it was coloured with a strong American nationalism. But now it was a nationalism fashioned increasingly in opposition to an England, which, with the rise of deism and Arianism, appeared to be more the Antichristian Egypt than an elect nation. As political tensions compounded these differences, the book of Revelation was reread in New England, not now as a text for unity, but as a manifesto for resistance and rebellion.138 Though it signified differently to successive generations, the wilderness of Revelation was for the seventeenth-century New Englanders America, just as it had been England for the Tudors. And where in England the apocalyptic tradition had emphasized godly rulers, in America, even more than in Scotland, it supported clerical oversight of civil authority – and ultimately a republic.

V Just as readers and exegetes struggled to translate the ‘time and times and half a time’ or to square the thousand years or 1,260 days (Rev. 11.13) with a contemporary calendar, so they endeavoured to identify precisely the places and spaces of Revelation. And just as time was read into as well as out of biblical prophecy, so geographies were a condition of reading as well as what interpreters strove to read and understand. As one critic observes, place and space are central to Revelation and inseparable from time: ‘space in this narrative is the place of a conversion’, of the last temporal things.139 For most Protestants, reading and hearing the word was the means to conversion. But the spaces as well as moments of reading were vital in determining the nature of conversion – more broadly in shaping spirituality, identity and public life. Like the ‘wilderness’ of John Cotton and the Mathers, the frontier has been – and remains – a defining space of American exegesis: of nation, the world and the last things. Latterly, ‘space’ itself has been, and is, a defining hermeneutic condition. Like other texts, Scripture was transferred from the old world to the new. But a recognition of common texts and traditions should not dull our sense of how, through translation – movement to another place  – those texts and traditions were reread and reinterpreted. Or indeed of how Atlantic textual exchanges fashioned new modes and models – of piety and power.

PART TWO

Representing rule

6 Sacralization and demystification: The publicization of monarchy in early modern England

Representation and regality The defining terms of the volume, Mystifying the Monarch: Studies on Discourse, Power and History, have, until recently at least, seldom appeared in the same sentence, even the same book. Indeed ‘discourse’ and ‘monarchy’ have for the most part been separated by disciplines and by the separate, often antagonistic, approaches of critics and historians. For more than two decades, critics and theorists have drawn attention to the relationships among languages and signs and power and authority from a variety of perspectives. Working from entirely different positions and faculties, scholars as different as Michel Foucault and Clifford Geertz have powerfully argued that authority, even power, is and was not constituted simply by institutions and armies but, rather, depends upon words, images, rituals – representations.1 Representations, they have posited, not only displayed power but also endeavoured to construct and sustain it. To govern was to publicize. These perspectives were most forcefully brought to bear on our approach to the history of early modern England not, at least initially, by historians but by those literary critics called ‘new historicists’. Combining neo-Marxist and Foucauldian approaches with Geertz’s brand of symbolic anthropology, new historicists insisted that in early modernity power was culture  – representations and texts; and, correspondingly, that power could be most incisively interrogated through the texts of early modern culture: verse and drama as much as pamphlet or sermon.2

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Such an approach helpfully redirected scholars to early modernity’s own preoccupation with texts and with discourse. Central to Renaissance humanism (a set of values as well as an educational programme) was a belief in, a concern with, the power of words. The early modern students’ extensive and rigorous training in rhetoric assumed a connection between social status and the capacity to argue and persuade, between rhetoric and authority. And it was a connection fully comprehended and strengthened by monarchs who patronized the new learning, employed the best humanist scholars as royal servants, and who felt the need to master languages and the art of rhetoric themselves. As more than a few observers began to comment, in early modern England, agility with arguments (topoi) became as important as skill in arms, and rhetorical flair emerged as the principal courtly art.3 Where historians were concerned, a particular group  – in origin more a duo  – were finding a somewhat different path to the study of history and language. From the 1960s, with different emphases but in similar ways, Quentin Skinner and John Pocock refigured approaches to the history of political thought by arguing for an address to language and to paradigmatic linguistic shifts as the markers – and makers – of larger changes in political ideas and polities.4 As I have argued elsewhere, though the methodology of what came to be termed the ‘linguistic turn’ had implications for all historical writings, Skinner and Pocock concentrated on canonical texts of political theory: on Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke, not on royal speech, statute or proclamation. In reality they became in some ways a subdiscipline, and their work, though venerated, was long viewed as exotic, at the margins rather than the centre of history.5 Certainly political historians, who still claimed (indeed claim) the centre, paid little attention to language  – even royal language. No historian of early modern English monarchy has analysed royal speeches, letters or proclamations as rhetorical texts or as representations of regality. None has studied other genres of royal writing, such as prayers, translations, paraphrases or poems.6 The works of Elizabeth I and James I have been edited by literary scholars and still sit unexamined by historians of society and state.7 This lack appears all the more striking in our own twenty-first-century moment. For example, when President George W. Bush makes a speech, the media report not simply – often not primarily – what is said, but also report on the arts and strategies of self-presentation: grammar and syntax, the deployment of personal or inclusive pronouns, the use of affect, the evocation of memory or anxiety; they go beyond, reporting on tone, gesture and body language to delve yet further into psychology. By contrast, when historians cite the words or addresses of early modern monarchs who inhabited a culture obsessed with the arts of persuasion, they limit discussion to the content of what is spoken or written. And all too often historians of politics pass over the principal object and subject of royal words  – the audience. Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, was premised on dialogue: on the presence of others

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who needed to be persuaded, probably because they held different views. In addition to injunctions to subjects, royal (and other official) speeches, proclamations and statutes were acts of persuasion directed to auditors and readers who, whatever their predisposition to obedience, needed to be won over to particular courses. Moreover, royal rhetoric had to adjust to and perform differently in sometimes radically shifting circumstances. Who would doubt, even if historians have not quite written about it in these terms, that Henry VIII had to construct a new language of regality after the break from Rome, or that Charles II and Queen Anne had to alter modes of royal self-presentation after the revolutionary events of 1649 and 1688?8 The shifts in the linguistic and symbolic paradigms of their representation, the adaptations and deployments of traditional languages and tropes, is an as yet unwritten study of early modern government. My purpose here is more modest. It is to identify, by means of three cases, some shifting historical circumstances and the relationship of those circumstances to royal self-presentation in early modern England. By circumstances I mean not only events – Reformation, regicide or revolution – but changes in the media of representation, in the audiences for and receptions of royal address, in the culture of commerce and consumption in which royal texts and artefacts circulated, in fine in the modes of publicizing authority itself. I argue that the break from Rome compelled a renewed emphasis on and a programme of sacralizing royal authority.9 And I want to suggest that the process and media of publicizing sacred kingship served, seemingly paradoxically, to demystify it  – by casting the mysteries of rule into a public domain. Further, I shall dare to suggest the reverse also: that the demystification of power stimulated at key moments a desire for sacred authority. Rather than a Whig or modernizing narrative of rationalization (though I believe there remains a measure of truth in that), I shall suggest a complex and shifting psychology of power, which we may yet recognize, but which has a very specific early modern history that needs to be brought up and analysed. The centrality of the word in early modern culture was not only an aspect of the new humanism; it also owed much to what were to be the religious upheavals of the age. Perhaps every faith has been constructed on the words of some foundational prophet or text. In the case of Christianity, the Bible is explicit: as St John’s gospel chapter 1, verse 1 reads: ‘in the beginning was the Word’. The Word was God, and his son Jesus was the Word made flesh. Moreover, the Bible connected the authority of words directly with secular political power; in the words of Ecclesiastes 8.4: ‘where the word of a king is there is power’. Both as a prince and as Christ’s representative on earth, the monarch’s authority rested on Scripture and the injunctions of Scripture: on the Word and on his own words which a Christian prince took from his faith. In preliterate society, the royal word quite literally determined courses of action, legal judgements, grants of estate, fortunes and lives. Even in a preliterate society that moved from memory to written record and then, in

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early modernity, to print, the royal word – spoken as well as ‘writ’ – was still foundational and determining.10 It was Elizabeth’s supposed naming of her successor on her deathbed that finally secured James VI of Scotland the throne of England. The early modern period witnessed, if anything, a new preoccupation with the word. As, first within the Catholic church, men began to ask questions about or challenge the practices or teachings of the church, debate turned to the meaning of Scripture. Some scholars sought the solution to threatened schism in biblical philology, the search for the lost language of Adam that would restore to fallen man direct access to God’s locution, and in a perfect text of Scripture on which all could agree.11 But, as we know, the Reformation exploded from different readings of Scripture into different texts of the Bible and into a myriad of vernacular Scriptures and exegeses which appeared to replicate the biblical story of Babel. For all that it underlined the vital authority of the word, the Reformation rendered Scripture, God’s Word, unstable and multiple, the text of many nations, communities, denominations, and, ultimately, readers.12 Given the foundation of royal authority on the Word, these developments could not but have profound consequences for Christian princes. Indeed, the Reformation made it all the more important for the ruler to determine the meaning of Scripture, so as to preserve unity and authority, but in the end made it impossible for him to do so. Attempts by successive English monarchs to establish an official text of Scripture and, beyond, to determine who could read it and how it was interpreted proved futile. In translation, the Word was Everyman’s, and the logical outcome was that royal words, in some measure, became Everyman’s too. In England these developments coincided crucially with the first age of print. The vernacular Bibles, unlike say the earlier Wycliffe Bible, were published and broadly disseminated: they were open to all who were literate and beyond to those who heard Scripture read; and in turn they advanced literacy and debate. As I have argued elsewhere, print presented princes with both a medium and a problem.13 Print enabled the publicization of regality  – the printing not only of statutes and proclamations but also of royal processions and pamphlets, prayers and poems. Officially approved texts were published with printed royal licence or privilege.14 Yet, while it provided new opportunities to authority, print gave rise to new difficulties which compromised it. The printed word may have been delivered by authority, but it was consumed in communities of readers or alone by men and women who, increasingly in a divided nation, interpreted it differently. And print was a medium of communication open to critics as well as supporters of authority. In Germany, cheap print and woodcuts pilloried the authority of the clergy and church; in England, Henry VIII found his attack on Luther answered in excoriating terms and circulated back to his subjects.15 With publication, he discovered, came contest. It is this dilemma  – the need to publicize authority and the risks in doing so – that is my subject in this essay,

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and it is one I wish to address by brief remarks on three English monarchs over a period of revolutions, from Reformation to Restoration.

Tudor representations Henry VIII was the first English king of print: a monarch who, throughout his reign, published in an attempt to enhance his authority and to make it sacred. As early as 1521 Henry obtained the title Defender of the Faith as a result of publishing a defence of the seven sacraments against Luther’s assault on church orthodoxy.16 When he failed to secure a divorce from Rome, Henry, no longer wishing to represent himself as the lieutenant of the papacy, sought directly to figure himself as God’s own agent and exegete, in his patronage of an English Bible. On the engraved title page of the Bible, Henry sits enthroned beneath the godhead, scrolls from his mouth mingling with those of the Lord himself. The king presents with both hands ‘Verbum Dei’ to bishops and nobles seated left and right beneath his throne, who pass the book to preachers and magistrates and on down to civilians, even men in prison, who cry out ‘God save the king’.17 Henry VIII also wrote and published specifically and polemically to advance his case. His A Glass of the Truth of 1532 staged a dialogue between a lawyer and a divine who, through discussion, come to concur about the ‘plain truth’ and rights of the king’s suit for a divorce and to wonder how any might find it ‘disputable’.18 A decade later, with the realm sharply divided over doctrine, he wrote again in an attempt to impose a royal orthodoxy which he discerned as essential to the maintenance of royal authority. In A Necessary Doctrine (1543) Henry, mingling his own with scriptural injunctions, sought to define the faith and underline the necessity of obedience to a ruler whom God had appointed as his spokesman.19 Henry published, that is, in order to define and control; and in proclamations and statutes banning apprentices and women from access to the English Bible, he sought to determine readership and interpretation.20 Such control was not only beyond him, however: in publishing, Henry unwittingly contributed to the very debates and differences he wrote to suppress. We have noted Luther’s immediate rejoinder, which worsted Henry in an encounter published throughout Europe. Moreover, Henry’s work survived to provide weapons for critics of his later, less orthodox, courses, enabling the royal words to be turned against the king. As for A Glass of the Truth, not only did the dialogue form enable and encourage reader debate, but the king’s justification of his divorce also led him to divulge explicit details concerning Queen Katherine’s virginity at the time of their marriage.21 In opening his troubled conscience and justifying himself in public, Henry published what had been arcana imperii  – and himself. There can be no doubt that such publicization fuelled public curiosity and debate: about the king’s interior life, his privacy and his sexual body. Royal

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publication allowed subjects to read Henry’s texts against each other and encouraged them to widely publicize ‘the king’s great matter’. Tavern talk and rumour pilloried Anne Boleyn as a seductress and whore, and print lent authority to rumour, redistributing it alongside royal text into what we will categorize as an emerging public sphere.22 Royal proclamations against rumour and statutes making words treason evidence official panic at a loss of control in an England in which, whatever the proscriptions or penalties, it proved impossible to police all who did ‘print or write or else speak, sing or declare’ of state matters.23 Indeed, whatever his distaste for it, Henry himself had recognized public debate, not least in ventriloquizing it in A Glass of the Truth. The divorce, the break from Rome, and the doctrinal disputes that ensued, necessitated Henry’s writing, arguing, and presenting himself as sacred. But such acts of representation publicized and, by plunging royal words into the arena of public debate, began to demystify his authority. As we shall see, both the necessity to publish and its demystifying consequences only increased as the century progressed. For Henry’s daughter from his marriage to Anne Boleyn, the difficult dilemma we are discussing was exacerbated by her sex. Not least from Mary Tudor’s loss of control of her representation and Elizabeth’s own contribution, while princess, to that failure, Queen Elizabeth learned and fully appreciated the importance to her rule of her image and her words. However, in addition to being (in the eyes of Roman Catholics) illegitimate and a heretic, as a woman Elizabeth was proscribed from the public sphere and from publicizing herself, that is, from speaking and writing. Though rule depended upon acts of speaking and writing, female publication and loquacity were associated with whoredom. Moreover, after the radical Protestant evangelism of Edward VI’s brief reign, followed by the Catholic reaction under Mary, the public realm was more than ever divided, and the need to assert royal authority was both greater and more problematic than ever. The conventional historical orthodoxy is that Elizabeth brilliantly overcame those difficulties and strengthened the crown. Whatever her particular political failings, she proved brilliant in the arts of representation, in her image and words. Elizabeth I, as scholars since Roy Strong have argued, successfully sacralized her authority, presenting herself as Gloriana, the Deborah, the Judith, and most of all the mystical Virgin  – an icon impenetrable to rational scrutiny and debate.24 Such a portrait, significantly, is taken more from visual than verbal representations of the queen. Though a few famous speeches have often been quoted, Elizabeth’s works, her letters, prayers, poems and translations have only just begun to be edited and have yet to be seriously examined.25 Nonetheless, in all the various genres in which she wrote, Elizabeth’s writings complicate the usual picture of her representation and disclose the complex ambiguity of mystery and publicity which is my subject. Let us take, for example, Elizabeth’s prayers. Several volumes of these were published throughout her reign and, whether she authored them or not, were issued

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or received as hers. Some were published with an engraved frontispiece of the queen in her closet, without any of the trappings of majesty, kneeling in prayer before a Bible and before her God.26 As with the title of one collection, Precationes Privatae, the scene is one of privacy: we have a sense of eavesdropping on a queen alone in her private devotions, oblivious to our gaze (Figure 2).27 And yet, of course, the private is here published and printed. The prayers publicize Elizabeth as devout, as a queen fully aware of her duties to God, even in language that soothes anxieties concerning gender, as God’s ‘handmaid’.28 I want to suggest that, as with other texts of the queen, notably her poems and translations, here Elizabeth pursues a strategy for negotiating a royal dilemma and one exacerbated by her sex. That is, she publicizes the private, while endeavouring to keep public matters private, under her personal control. This may add an unexplored dimension to the observation often made about her use of a language of love. For love was in early modernity (and still is) both an intimate and a social discourse. Amorous language enabled Elizabeth to make public comment while retaining a sense of intimacy, just as her representation as the virgin queen rendered mysterious a queen who deployed with kings, courtiers and commoners the informal and familiar word or gesture. It is in this neglected respect, I suggest, that Elizabeth most skilfully turned the disadvantage of her sex into a resource. For though – and she often used the masculine noun – a prince, as a woman Elizabeth was not ‘public’: and though as a woman she was ‘desired’, as queen she was unavailable, at least to her subjects. By skilfully negotiating this privacy and publicity, through the use of genre as well as language, Elizabeth endeavoured, as she knew she must, to be both mystical and familiar, sacred and popular – the dream combination for rulers even to this day. Did she succeed? To that key question the answer must be less clear than conventional historiography has given: yes and no. For, though Elizabeth undoubtedly succeeded in being regarded both as sacred icon and good queen Bess, for all her desire to do so, she could not control how she was debated and represented. Recently, important work on Elizabeth has identified the extent of alternative images of the queen and the number of writers and speakers who ‘dissed’ her in ways quite destructive of mystery.29 At various points before and throughout her reign, there were rumours that Elizabeth was pregnant: by Seymour or Leicester, by Hatton or the Earl of Essex. Stories circulated in and out of print of her offspring or, contrarily, of her genital abnormalities which rendered her infertile; or of her lesbianism which made her monstrous.30 As Hannah Betts has shown, especially in the last decade of her rule, Elizabeth was the subject of an explicitly pornographic literature which exposed in words and blazons the ultimate mystery of female rule, ‘those secrets [that] must not be surveyed with eyes’ – the vagina – to public imagination and comment.31 Such counter representations of the queen were ironically stimulated by her own acts of representation, still more by the erotic language and forms

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of her self-presentation.32 Through printed and published images and words, Elizabeth fostered public desire; but in doing so she rendered herself a public object as much as a mysterious icon. As I shall observe later, Elizabeth’s reign witnessed a huge increase in publications, panegyrics and portraits of majesty and saw a vogue for medals and mementoes of the queen. Elizabeth was not only desired but also was consumed by a broad public and, in some measure, penetrated and owned by them in the process. Both in her lifetime and for centuries after her death, Elizabeth was (perhaps still is) made to stand for many things she would not have supported  – radical religious reform the most obvious among them.33 Though she sought to limit its meaning and political performance, Elizabeth became in two senses the people’s princess: a queen constituted by and for a variety of people, as well as a loving ruler over them. Moreover, in the process of publicizing herself, Queen Elizabeth helped to foster developments and changes in the culture of representation and publicization that were to prove vital, in some cases fatal, to the exercise of royal government. By the end of her reign, the queen advanced and had to respond to new conditions: an increase in print and public discussion; the emergence of a metropolitan and consumer society stimulated not least by the royal court; most of all the increasing centrality of monarchy in the public imagination and a broad fascination with figures of authority and power and its representation. Though they are large subjects which cannot be adequately treated here, we must touch upon each of them insofar as they affected the publicizing and the dilemmas in the publishing of regality.

Publicity and politics If Henry was the first English ruler to inhabit a world of print, the medium rapidly took off, stimulating a wider readership that in turn accelerated print production. The figures tell the story: where in the 1530s on average about 80 books were published annually, by the end of the century annual publications exceeded 250.34 The expansion of print was accompanied by a clear perception that it carried with it a loss of royal control. As early as Edward VI’s reign, the government complained of ‘divers printers and booksellers’ who published and sold ‘whatsoever any light fantastical head liketh to invent’.35 Attempts to ban books only added to their frisson and commercial success. In particular, pamphlets dealing with matters of state were, as a proclamation of May 1551 put it, ‘spread and cast abroad in streets at such privy corners where they might best publish their malice’.36 As we know, from the mid-century on, the increase in published output increased exponentially. But what has been less remarked is the relationship of this to the monarchy and its own publicizations of regality. As a perusal of a chronological catalogue of books printed in England or in English before 1641 discloses, over the second half of the sixteenth century

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there was a marked increase in the number of books about monarchs and courts, even books with terms like ‘majesty’ in the title. The growth in print was stimulated by a wider public interest in regality and in turn furthered that interest, making it all the more necessary for the queen and government to use the medium and attempt to regulate it. For to not use print was to surrender it to others: as Joad Raymond has demonstrated, from about 1580 a ‘business of news’ emerged in England with pamphlets independent of earlier official directions and financed by a market.37 Though pamphleteers were often loyal, the Martin Marprelate tracts, attacking the church hierarchy in a popular genre and plain prose, underlined the need for official responses and defences and so furthered even more the discussion of politics in print, as did momentous events abroad and at home, notably the armada.38 Whatever their mutual discomfort at times, print and authority were becoming inextricably interrelated and increasingly dependent upon each other. Through print, Elizabeth’s speeches to parliament became addresses to the nation, just as the stories of her actions, progresses and suitors provided good copy for the commerce of print.39 These developments and relationships gave rise to the emergence of a public sphere. The phrase was first coined by the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas to describe a condition that he regarded as a herald of modernity at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In Habermas’s formulation, first published in 1962 but only translated into English in 1989, a bourgeois public sphere emerged at the dawn of the Enlightenment to replace the representational state and to provide a rational critique of sovereign authority.40 For all the stimulus it has provided, there are many historical objections to Habermas’s model, but over the past decade or so historians have rather been competing to push it further back into early modernity.41 Accordingly, David Zaret has argued for the Civil War as the dawn of a public sphere in England; Joad Raymond sees its emergence with the birth of news pamphlets and news in the first decades of the Stuart age; and Peter Lake argues for an Elizabethan public sphere formed in and by confessional disputes and foreign threats combining in moments of crisis, such as the Anjou match or armada.42 While I would want to argue that Henry’s divorce and the obsession with rumour was the moment a public sphere was formed, the important point is that by Elizabeth’s reign, it not only existed but also was seen to exist and was itself the subject of discussion and representation. An account of a pageant staged for Elizabeth on her visit to the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth in 1575 contains a scene which has elicited surprisingly little comment. During the entertainment, a Captain Cox is presented, carrying with him copies of Virgil and Spenser’s works, Colin Clout (perhaps Skelton’s poem) tales of Robin Hood, almanacs, and popular ballads – a remarkable bricolage of elite Latin and English writers with the texts of low culture, in the hands of a mere soldier.43 Four years later, the pamphlet News from the North features, in conference with Simon Certain, one Piers Ploughman who enters an inn with a pile of books to discuss whether magistracy was ordained

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by God!44 In such cases, print is imagined and staged as the stimulus to, in this instance, radical political debate, even among those below the literate elites and whose names – Cox and Ploughman – may stand for Everyman. Such instances lead us to ponder whether the complaints of figures such as Dr Richard Young were more than mere rhetorical paranoia. ‘Who is there’, Young lamented in a sermon of 1575, ‘be he of never so vile and base condition, what artificer, servant, prentice, but hath a commonwealth in his head and nothing in his mouth but the government of commonwealth and church.’45 While he bears powerful witness to it, Young clearly disapproved of a public sphere which was rendering arcana imperii the stuff of tavern talk.46 But not all commentators were as negative. A 1576 English edition of Francesco Patrizi’s A Moral Method of Civil Policy proclaims the view that ‘it goeth not well in that commonweal . . . where citizens . . . dare not speak freely.’47 Perhaps the notion of counsel lent itself to broader interpretation in the new world of print and publicity.48 But whatever the views of the queen or her government, address to a public sphere and participation in public conversation were necessary. And with royal participation came both an impetus to yet further publicization and even some legitimization of it. Print was part of a larger commerce that was itself in many ways related to developments in the culture and representation of authority. The wider cultural and ideological reach of commerce and consumption have been valuably explored for eighteenth-century England.49 By contrast, little attention has been paid to the early modern period, the age of the birth of capitalism and a metropolitan culture of consumption and commodification, beyond a somewhat narrow concern with trade and economics. Commerce and commodification, however, were important to the early modern publicization and reception of authority in a number of ways. First, and a subject to which I shall briefly return, theatre was the first commercialized leisure industry, and it not only connected the crown and court, through the various Queen’s companies or Lord Chamberlain’s men, but also ubiquitously staged regality, as many of the most popular plays were those about kings and courts.50 A fascination with power had other commercial expressions. From quite early in Elizabeth’s reign we sense a desire to possess some personal memento or image of the queen. A draft proclamation of 1563 indeed acknowledges the ‘desire’ of ‘all sorts of subjects both noble and mean’ to acquire some portrait of Elizabeth and announces plans for a licensed image to satisfy it.51 From about 1572, perhaps to mark Elizabeth’s triumph over smallpox as well as the rising of the Northern earls, a series of medals representing Elizabeth was issued;52 from the 1580s the production of portrait miniatures became, in Roy Strong’s words, almost a factory production;53 and after 1588 even such lowly objects as playing cards figured Elizabeth and her victory.54 The interest in regality was not confined to Elizabeth. From her reign, books of engraved images of all the monarchs of England were published as commercial enterprises.55 But it was Elizabeth herself who made the monarchy part of the material culture of consumption.

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Copies of the queen’s speeches and accounts of her progresses poured from the presses along with verse panegyrics on her reign.56 Souvenir plates like the one in the Museum of London (see Figure 3) and other artefacts evidently found willing purchasers who desired to ‘own’ something of the Queen. If Henry VIII was the first prince of print, it was Elizabeth who was the first monarch of the marketplace – the object of consumption and capitalist desire. The performance of royal representation in a public sphere and the immersion of regality into a commercial society were to effect vital changes in the relationships between sovereigns and subjects, and in the perception and discussion of those relationships. Because in England there was no standing army or paid bureaucracy to enforce royal wishes, the monarch had always needed to ‘secure compliance’, in Penry Williams’s phrase, through patronage and negotiation; aristocratic involvement in royal government was enshrined in the obligation of counsel.57 Ultimately, authority depended on the compliance of the people which, for all the repetition of injunctions to obedience and deference, also needed to be secured, at times by withdrawal of unpopular measures (like the Amicable Grant) or by sops to the people’s wishes.58 Over the sixteenth century, however, the course of events and royal policy, notably the popular and nationalistic rhetoric deployed to support the break from Rome, involved the commonalty more than ever in the affairs of state. The Tudor ideology of the ‘commonweal’ may have been an official programme to cement unity at a time of threatened division, but it served to advance ideas of a polity in which the people were participants as well as subjects. Like the language of love, increasingly deployed by rulers over the sixteenth century, the discourse of the commonweal implied an element of reciprocity in the relationships of ruler and ruled. Neither the relationship of these developments to an emerging public sphere of print and rumour, nor the contribution of these languages to changes in political thinking, to the imaginings of politics, towards the end of the century has been adequately considered. But it may well be that they were the stimulus to that imagining of what Patrick Collinson and others have called a ‘monarchical republic’ in Elizabeth’s reign.59 By the last decade of the Queen’s rule there was certainly a lively debate about, even interrogation of, the business of politics and the exercise of power. As Malcolm Smuts and others have argued, we discern a broad interest in Roman histories, especially Livy and Tacitus, and in the accounts of (good and bad) princes, republics and favourites that they recounted.60 Though he was not published in translation until later, the figure lurking behind discussions of power and politics was, of course, Niccolò Machiavelli, who was widely known in Italian editions and, among the students at Oxford, Cambridge, and the Inns of Court, through bootleg manuscript translations.61 Machiavelli infamously stripped authority of its foundation in Christian religion and ethics to expose the naked force and guile behind the exercise of rule. His works cast a shadow over early modern Europe

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and were the subject of near universal condemnation. But Machiavelli’s challenge to traditional thinking and his language had equally a nearly universal impact.62 Even Elizabeth I echoed the Florentine when she wrote to William Lambarde ‘now the wit of the fox is everywhere on foot’.63 Perhaps the most radical of all Machiavelli’s moves in The Prince was his exposure of the exercise of rule as an artifice, as a business involving performance, misrepresentation as well as representation, and at times dissimulation.64 In England the representation and performance of monarchy in a public sphere drew attention not only to the monarchy, as we have seen, but also to its performances  – and perhaps to power as a series of performances. Scholars have frequently quoted but not, I think, sufficiently pondered the novel and increasing use of metaphors of the stage to describe rule in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. In Elizabeth’s words to her parliament in November 1586: ‘Princes, you know, stand upon stages, so that their actions are viewed and beheld of all men.’65 Most obviously her metaphor, often repeated, was prompted by the newly erected theatres being built around London from the 1570s in response to market demand. But, as I have suggested, theatre itself was related to, and drew much of its material from, an interest in princes and power. The growth of the theatres, I would suggest, was one expression of the impact of the Tudor monarchs on the cultural imaginary. But the theatre became a Machiavellian space in which authority  – that is, monarchy  – was not only represented and performed but also scrutinized as representation and performance. Was Henry V a virtuous prince or a dissimulator who by artful rhetoric and disguise manipulated his subjects? Was his success dependent on craftiness and guile, as much as on faith and bravery? Theatre staged kings as human and fallible and represented their doubleness – their interior as well as public life, their sexual desires, jealousies and passions as well as public acts.66 If the events and representations of Henry’s reign had opened such subjects, theatre returned its own radical staging of them into a public sphere of political debate and imagining. Plays not only represented, they also helped to refashion politics, in both broad and specific ways. As Elizabeth famously observed, ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that.’67

Representation and revolution Elizabeth has been praised for her skilful efforts to negotiate the necessity to publicize her rule and the need to retain some element of mystery: to be both sacred and popular. Whatever our evaluation of her success, it is clear that the circumstances of that negotiation changed over the half century of her reign, and that she was by no means the least of the agents of change. Admiration for the queen’s success at the business of representation, in the eyes of many contemporaries as well as historians, was undoubtedly strengthened by what appeared to be the conspicuous failures in these arts

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of at least her first two Stuart successors. It may be, however, that here, as in other respects, Elizabeth’s legacy was far from unproblematic. During the last years of her reign the figuring of the queen as an iconic mask suggests some attempt to retreat from the glare of public scrutiny, as well as to deny the devastating political consequences of her mortality.68 And, as I have suggested, though she skilfully turned the limitations of her sex in many ways to her advantage, in so doing she gendered the art of royal representation, the portrayal of private and public bodies, in ways that male successors could not emulate. But most of all, her bringing herself and the monarchy to the centre of public attention bequeathed a condition, a challenge, and a role to a successor which required the most skilful of performers on the public stage. The traditional narrative is that Elizabeth’s Stuart successors not only failed in these arts but failed spectacularly. Interestingly, they failed very differently  – or in completely contrasting ways. James VI and I, we have learned, from a Scotland where the sacralization of regality had not reached English heights, demystified and debased monarchical authority by his vulgar behaviour, debauched court and disregard for his representation and image.69 Charles I, by contrast, preoccupied with his representation, emphasized the sanctity of his kingship and through careful attention to ritual mystified the royal body but, silent and remote, appeared detached from his people.70 Each characterization is too simplistic. James I wrote scriptural paraphrases and exegeses not least to underpin his divine rule; Charles I’s court had some reach into popular culture, and the king certainly cared about the love of the people.71 But it is the different emphases in their representation that remain striking. These may be explained straightforwardly in terms of character and personal style. But in both cases – one thinks of James’s writing a verse libel to answer his detractors, or an occasional common touch by Charles – there appears to have been an element of strategy, that is, a consciousness of the art of representation and of its difficulties. It may be that, as well as their quite individual failings, the tensions between the king’s two bodies – the public and private, the need to sacralize and yet demystify royal authority – could no longer be contained, as early seventeenth-century newspapers, city comedies, satires, squibs and libels stripped away the veils of mystery. Certainly during moments such as the Overbury affair, the exposure of the court, of courtiers and, by implication at least, of the king to public examination and verbal vilification reached new heights.72 As political discontents and divisions mounted from the 1620s, contemporaries began to note the changed tenor of public debate. Later there was widespread talk of the ‘paper bullets’ that had preceded, and enabled, the outbreak of violence in Civil War.73 One might argue that the Civil War, still more the regicide, was made possible only by a long process of demystification which had rendered monarchy a human condition and the monarch a man, to be arraigned and judged for his crimes. But again I would suggest that, though inviting, such an argument is too simple. For

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in some ways it was the mystification of sovereignty that led to violent revolution, to political iconoclasm. And as events were swiftly to manifest, subjects as well as rulers faced the complexities of the sacralization and demystification of authority. For all the broad circulation of squibs and libels critical of the court or crown, we should not forget the popular desire for keepsakes of Elizabeth, some venerated as near sacred icons. Nor should we fail to note that some of the disappointment with James I stemmed from his failure to sustain the mystery of monarchical rituals and kingship. Charles I, then, may not have been entirely wrong in thinking that the mystification of rule might also be popular. Certainly, as he faced conflict, defeat, imprisonment, and then death, he endeavoured to garner the support of the people for sacred kingship. And his appeal, perhaps too late for his personal victory, was successfully to repaint kingship in sacred hues. It has often been observed that the Eikon Basilike, supposedly Charles I’s own account of his life and last days, was published on the day of regicide. What has not been noted is that the day of the execution of a divine king also saw the publication of the text of the most powerful sacralization of monarchy, a work that was immediately a popular bestseller and that went into 36 editions in the year of publication.74 The famous Marshall frontispiece, depicting the king as a Christ figure, gave rise to miniatures, medals and objects figuring Charles as sacred martyr which circulated into popular culture, as well as among the king’s immediate followers.75 Like Elizabeth, Charles became a popular icon, a subject of veneration and commemoration, albeit in different ways. I have argued elsewhere that the short-lived English republic may have been undermined by the powerful image and memory of sacred kingship.76 But it was undermined as much by its own lack of the mystical and the sacred. Though defended in part as the work of divine providence, the republic was presented and justified in a new rationalist, utilitarian language which seems never to have gained widespread, certainly not popular, support. Indeed, the most articulate spokesman for de facto government, Thomas Hobbes, was condemned as much in parliamentarian as royalist circles and became, not unlike Machiavelli to whom he owed a debt too rarely acknowledged, a demonized figure for decades after the publication of Leviathan in 1651.77 The respective fortunes of the Eikon Basilike and Leviathan not only nicely capture the continuing engagement with both the sacralization and demystification of authority at a critical moment, they also warn us not to subscribe to a Whig narrative of the rationalization of power as the cause and consequence of revolution. If the Civil War did not have its origins in a simple desacralization of authority, neither was its legacy one of rationalization and demystification, even after 11 years without monarchy. If anything, the experience of Civil War and republic, and as much the determination not to see them repeated, suggested a need and sharpened a desire for the mysteries of regality. On the other hand, the lessons of Civil War and regicide could not safely be forgotten, chief among them that mystery and divinity had not secured a

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crown. The ambiguity about sacralization and demystification that was an early modern condition therefore, not surprisingly, resurfaced at the Restoration, albeit in somewhat different ways. ‘Let a prince’, advised the author of England’s Beauty in 1661, perhaps with Charles I’s failings in mind, ‘show himself affable to the people, but let him not suffer himself to be contemned’, held in contempt, despised and pilloried.78 ‘Matters of policy, the arts of government’, a sermon of Benjamin Calamy still asserted in 1680, ‘are things too sacred to be profaned by unhallowed hands’.79 Yet as another preacher had by this time come to acknowledge, men were ‘arguing pro and con, making it a moot case whether monarchy be the government that God approves or whether the nation [was] as happy under a republic’.80 Far from being silenced by its revolutionary explosion during the 1640s, the noise of print and public debate in Restoration England spilled out into coffee-houses and clubs as well as congregations and street corners.81 Whatever mystery subjects desired in their new king, it was a mystery that had to be enacted on a public stage and in a public sphere, by a man who was ‘affable’, as well as a monarch who was sacred. If that did not present difficulties enough, one senses that, for all the invocation of the past, some had come to see that the arts of representation were just that – arts, a fiction as well as a performance, still more that the claim to mystery itself may be no more than ‘poetical and rhetorical flourishes’.82 At the Restoration, that is, English men, and now more than ever women, sought a ruler who could reconcile seemingly irreconcilable needs and who could sustain and render believable what at some level they sensed were fictions of state, not truths of faith. No monarch was better suited to that impossible brief, no ruler of early modern England more successful in negotiating ambiguity, than Charles II. The king’s own experiences had been of sacred authority and the indignities of flight and exile; his upbringing had been orthodox Anglican and his companions in exile Catholic, but his tutor had been Hobbes. He had heard from his father the importance of convictions and principles, yet had lived for 20 years a life of compromise and manoeuvre. He had been schooled in sincerity but had necessarily learned disguise. And successive circumstances had led him to perform as pious son, martial leader, rightful heir, king in exile, man of the people, diplomat and merciful sovereign. Perhaps such experiences naturally endowed him with the qualities he needed. But Charles certainly intuited, with greater acuteness than most, the doubleness of his position. And he negotiated the ambiguity brilliantly. No king touched more than Charles to cure the king’s evil.83 At the same time, none was more openly available to his subjects, walking unattended in St James’s Park.84 Charles joined his people on the streets of London to assist with quenching the Great Fire;85 infamously, he paraded his mistresses and publicized his sex life in a manner that suggests strategy.86 Charles II was not only both mystical and familiar but also, as I have argued elsewhere, made his very ordinariness a means of elevating his kingship, of attracting public affection and support.87 For sure, Charles was sharply criticized in satires, but by the

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end of the reign, while a public monument commemorated his role in fighting the Fire, his monarchy was lauded in sacred strains not heard for decades. Unquestionably, it was the crisis of the Popish Plot and the renewed threat of Civil War that led many again to emphasize the sacred.88 But Charles had made it possible for the sacred to be popular – and indeed for the ‘affable’ to be mystified. His personal acumen is nowhere better demonstrated than in the fate of his successor and brother, James II. James saw Charles’s triumph, but it is not clear that he understood the ambiguities at its core. He emulated the script of – he embodied – sacred kingship without pursuing popularity (and he had enjoyed that as Duke of York) and he lost his throne. But even the 1688 Revolution did not simply mark a modernizing stage on the road to a rational attitude to power.89 Revealingly, the last of the Stuarts, Queen Anne, appears to have drawn on the examples of her most successful kin in an attempt to negotiate the ambiguities of the sacred and demystified. Like Charles II, she frequently touched – she was the last monarch to do so – for the king’s evil; she adopted Elizabeth I’s motto, along with other representational tropes, as her own.90 But she presented herself, too, as the mother, and on canvas she appears almost as a bourgeois housewife, with no hint of the mystical or iconic.91 If Anne’s sex was again a resource, so unquestionably were her dynasty and her nationality. The Hanoverians, who enjoyed no such advantages, attained neither sacred status nor popularity. Significantly, they were the first rulers to be represented in that site of demystified power, the (sometimes scatological) cartoon. Eighteenth-century England is often presented, and indeed often figured itself, as an age of reason. But even at the end of my sketch, I would not want to suggest the ambiguity of sacralization and demystification resolved. The narrative is rather one of a dialogue and tension between the sacred and demystified, both related to the necessary process of publicizing and publishing authority. It is, as some have observed, a narrative that continues because it expresses a still deeper psychological doubleness – a desire for and loathing of authority that is founded on the love and fear of that analogue of the sovereign, the father.92 And recent experience in England has familiarized us with the tensions within the modern royal family, between notions of mysterious majesty and popular accessibility, not to mention given us a princess, Diana, whose ordinariness served to render her sacred. For all that they may endure, however, the tensions and ambiguities in authority of sacralization and demystification need to be historicized and have, in early modernity, their specific, key moments. That the moments of greatest difficulty in resolving this ambiguity were moments of political crisis and revolution, and that the rulers who most successfully negotiated the ambiguity died peacefully in their beds, only underlines the importance for the master narrative of a subject yet to be explored.

7 Virtues, passions and politics in early modern England

The last half century has seen a rich ferment in the history of ideas in the Anglophone world. In some respects, however, the promises of new perspectives and approaches have not been fulfilled, and the history of ideas has been studied at too great a distance from the histories of religion, economy, culture and state. In their brilliant early methodological essays, Quentin Skinner and John Pocock urged a ‘linguistic turn’ in the study of political ideas and argued that paradigmatic shifts in key terms were often the markers of important intellectual changes.1 While the logic of this approach invited new readings of all texts, in practice Skinner and (to a lesser extent) Pocock confined their own studies to the canonical texts of traditional political theory – Machiavelli, Hobbes, Harrington and Locke.2 Neither has paid much regard to sermons or devotional writings, let alone to plays or poems, or to the literature of a wide variety of social and cultural practices that contemporaries imbued with ideological meaning, values and preferences: music, dance or horse riding for example.3 To a regrettable extent (at least to me), the history of political ideas and the new cultural history have proceeded without much dialogue with each other. Even in the history of political thought we await a ‘cultural turn’ to develop the linguistic turn, a move that will interrogate the changes in, and tensions between, a range of texts and terms, discourses and concepts in early modernity.4 Study of the virtues and passions in early modern England may offer a case study in the approach that I advocate. The terms virtue and passion themselves need first to be returned to their early modern meanings and significations, not least because they are far removed from our own. As Michael McKeon has recently reminded us, the modern idea of liberty (which he discerns in the late seventeenth century)

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involves the ‘conviction that liberty requires the liberation of the passions from control’.5 The idea of the passions as positive forces was not widely held in early modernity. Though the word signified the greatest of divine and human sacrifices – that of Christ – from its Latin etymology it signified a suffering or affliction, a disorder – often of the body – or an overpowering emotion or feeling. Often in early modern discourse preceded by pejorative adjectives such as ‘base’ or ‘wanton’, the passions represented a loss of control, a surrender of the self to anarchic forces. Milton accordingly wrote of ‘distempered passions’ and ‘corrupt affections’ (which he contrasted with reason), while, on the other side of the Civil War divide, the poet Abraham Cowley defined liberty as the state of ‘freedom’ from ‘all the passions’.6 Immediately we note how the language of the passions was political and politicized – a language of liberty and control. This was as much the case with the concept of virtue which had as its first meaning ‘the power . . . inherent in a supernatural or divine being’ and also in prelapsarian man, made in God’s image. This association of virtue with power is again evident in Milton’s list of ‘Dominations, Princedoms, Vertues, Powers’ and in a multitude of texts in which virtue – or ‘vertue’ – was used as a synonym for strength or power, from its Latin root, from ‘virtus’  – manliness.7 From these meanings came the idea that virtue was obedience to God’s natural laws and involved acting in accordance with that reason which God had instilled in man as a divine strength that enabled him to resist evil. Passions and virtues represented, we might say, the Manichean struggle between evil and good – within man and in the world. Indeed in early modern England, the person was perceived and conceived as a site of that cosmic struggle. In man, it was believed, the bestial and the divine, the body and the soul, the passions and the reason, contended for the mastery. Once again contemporaries described that struggle very much in political, as well as religious, language. In his popular Resolves, Divine, Moral, Political, a guide to good conduct, the Jacobean essayist and poet, Owen Felltham wrote: ‘My passions and affections are the chief disturbers of my civil state. What peace can I expect within me while these rebels rest unovercome? If they get a head my kingdom . . . cannot stand.’8 The bishop of Exeter and satirist Joseph Hall developed the analogue with the body in even more politicized language. In his Meditations and Vows, first published in 1605, and which went into six editions by 1621, Hall mapped on to man all the places and offices of the early Stuart state: ‘Every man hath a kingdom within himself; Reason as the princess dwells in the highest and inwardest room. The senses are as the guard and attendants on the court. . . . The supreme faculties . . . are the Peers. The outward parts and inward affections are the Commons. Violent passions are as rebels to disturb the common peace.’9 As a Christian, Hall resolved to ‘hold them down’.10 It was for the soul, or the reason, to suppress passions, appetites and affections, just as ‘wise princes’ dealt with unruly factions. The self in early modern England was not what we would call

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a private site or space; it was a polity. In the words of the Jacobean civil lawyer, John Hayward: The whole world is nothing but a great state; a state is no other than a great family; and a family no other than a great body. As one God ruleth the world, one master the family, [so] all the members of the body receive both sense and motion from one head which is the seat and power of the understanding and the will.11 Regulation of the passions in early modern England was of metaphysical, physiological and political import. In the first place, the early modern discourse of the virtues and passions was a religious discourse. As I have noted, passions and appetites were perceived to be obstacles to man’s proximity to God, to man’s fulfilment of his diving being, and to his salvation. It was the regulation of unruly appetites, of body by rational soul, that brought man (who had been created in the image of divine virtue) closer to God – closer to salvation. From at least the time of St Augustine, though there were some senses in which it was thought that affections could lead to goodness, passions were treated as anarchic forces in need of control and as symptoms and consequences of the Fall.12 In Augustine’s writings, the well-ordered soul was what reconnected man to God, and what he called in his Confessions unbridled passions separated him from God.13 Nearly a millennium later, Aquinas, starting from a different (Aristotelian) place, similarly instructed Christians in the need to subject the passions to the soul: ‘one will find less . . . of passion . . . in the cognitive faculties, since they are the more primary powers of the soul.’14 Of virtue, Aquinas gives this definition: ‘virtue is a good quality of the mind by which we live righteously . . . which God works in us.’15 For both theologians, ‘the future beatitude that Christian people could hope to receive through grace was one in which passion played no part and the activity of the intellect was unimpeded by the rebellion of lower appetites.’16 The theology of the Fathers on virtues and passions, as most else, for long dominated early modern attitudes. Protestantism, however, led, if anything, to an even greater dichotomizing of the soul and body as it stressed the utter corruptibility and irredeemability of fallen man without grace. In his commentary on the evangelists, Calvin, glossing Matthew 26.39, reflected: ‘how carefully ought we to repress the violence of our feelings which are always . . . rash and full of rebellion.’17 In the regulation of these rebellious passions, Calvin assigned little role to the intellect which he described, in fallen man, as ‘ignorant of true knowledge of the divine law’.18 Rather, from Scripture he proved ‘that the intellect and will of man are so corrupted that . . . no knowledge of God can now be found in him’.19 There were different emphases in the large corpus of Calvin’s writings and more still between the reformers. But reformed theology certainly departed from an Erasmian emphasis on the human intellect as a potential force for good. In his Ecstasy

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John Donne had to battle against prevailing ideas of the total corruption of the reason as well as the body to posit some union between the realms of spirit and body.20 The reformed emphasis on grace as the only path to good placed greater stress on the need – ubiquitously preached from devotional works as well as pulpits – not only to discipline the appetites but to distrust the intellect too. It hardly needs saying that injunctions to subjugate the body and restrain the passions predate Calvin  – indeed predate Christianity. Plato had contrasted the pure eternal essences and forms with inferior earthly copies and had posited that the intellect must (and was able to) comprehend the eternal. From Plato onwards there was a (the indefinite article needs to be emphasized) classical tradition that bequeathed a culture of discipline and restraint. One philosophy that was to appeal to early modern Europe was Stoicism, a school founded in Athens by Zeno but known more widely from the Romans Epictetus and Seneca. The Stoics taught that reason, an understanding of divine nature, might free men from passions that enslaved them. ‘Freedom is secured’, wrote Epictetus, ‘by the removal of desire’; ‘Virtue’, Seneca, defined, ‘is nothing else than right reason’ and to follow reason was to rule oneself.21 For the Stoic, happiness (‘eudaimonia’) was a life lived with ‘apatheia’ – without passion. It was ‘brutal’, Seneca wrote in his Morals, and ‘unworthy of man to place his felicity in the service of his senses’; happiness depended upon virtue and reason.22 Forty years ago, the German scholar Gerhard Oestreich identified the appeal and importance of the Stoical tradition for early modern Europe.23 Though he did not live to complete his monograph on the subject, in a series of essays, Oestreich identified the Netherlandish philosopher and philologian Justus Lipsius as a leading exponent, especially in his Politicorum Sive Civilis Doctrinae Libri Sex (1589), of a neo-Stoic political ethics. Oestreich has been criticized for exaggerating the specifically Stoic elements in Lipsius’s political theory, which owed much to the Thomist tradition and to Tacitus and Machiavelli.24 However, Lipsius published two major works on Stoicism and drafted a life of the Roman Stoic Thrasea Paetus, so there can be no doubting the influence of Stoicism on his thinking.25 Lipsius’s emphasis in De Constantia (1584) on the regulation of the emotions certainly owed something to the Stoics, albeit in the circumstances in which he lived, his concept of discipline led him to support a strong, even authoritarian ruler.26 There has been almost no work on the impact of Stoicism in England, though Lipsius’s works, in Latin and in translation, were published throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, together with editions and lives of Seneca written by Lipsius. And there is some evidence that, as well as general currency in early Stuart England, Stoic ideas influenced the ethical and political ideas of statesmen.27 Thomas, Earl of Arundel embraced and patronized Stoic thinkers and ideas and numerous Stoic works were found in his library.28 Charles I’s chief minister, Thomas Wentworth, also proclaimed his attachment to Stoic ideas as a philosophy of state as well as a personal

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code. Writing to a correspondent in November 1636, Wentworth described Stoicism, which he acknowledged some regarded as ‘antiquated and grown out of fashion’, as ‘the best morality and duty of a man in employment’.29 As I shall suggest, it was a philosophy that influenced Wentworth’s master, King Charles I, himself. Wentworth’s letter should caution early modern scholars not to limit the study of political thinking to the canonical texts of political theory. The relationship, however, between the virtues, passions and politics was central to those texts of political theory, and not least in early modern England. For all their different emphases on the capacity of man to rise to the ideal, both Plato and Aristotle held that virtue lay in the domination of reason over passion and in the regulation of the passions and appetites. For Plato the best rulers were philosopher kings whose reason ruled in their own soul and so qualified them to rule the polis and rule over the baser sort who were dominated by their passions and appetites. Aristotle, more optimistic about the capability of man for the virtuous life, posited that human happiness lay in the exercise of the soul according to reason and that virtue involved the regulation of the appetites to moderation, to the mean. For all their differences, both agreed that the most virtuous persons were continent and that philosopher kings and the aristos (literally the best men) were alone those qualified to rule; by contrast, those who did not possess virtue or reason were naturally subjugated  – were slaves. Augustine and Aquinas Christianized these arguments making devotion to God and the spiritual custodianship of the people the essential virtues of the best rulers who sought to return fallen man to virtue. Put simply, the most virtuous person, who regulated his own passions to let reason rule in himself, was held to be the ideal ruler, and his rule was deemed necessary over those who could not order their baser appetites. Such ideas prevailed more or less until they were challenged – as so many other fundamental precepts were  – by Machiavelli. Like his classical and Christian predecessors, Machiavelli scorned the masses because they were ruled by their appetites and desires. Machiavelli regarded the appetites and emotions as what threatened the health of a body politic and delineated the best state as that in which they were properly directed. What Machiavelli meant by that, however, was quite different to his predecessors. Not only did the Florentine uncouple the Christian religion from his prescriptions for government, he also redefined, indeed revolutionized, the concept of virtue. Like his predecessors, Machiavelli ascribed a key role to the ruler but, in chapter 15 of The Prince, he made clear that what he prescribed ‘differs from the precepts offered by others’.30 Because, he argued, men did not live as they ideally should, rulers could not afford to simply stand as examples of virtue. A prince who ‘persists in doing what ought to be done will undermine his power, rather than maintain it’.31 Rather than ruling in accord with moral virtues, it behoved the prince to deploy all means – ‘to act immorally’ when necessary.32 Rulers, Machiavelli counselled, should avoid a

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reputation for vice; but it was the appearance that mattered more than the reality, and circumstances often required force, guile and dissimulation more than the exercise of the cardinal virtues. Machiavelli separated those virtues from his own central concept of ‘virtù’, the qualities that enabled the prince to harness or counter Fortune and to obtain glory. Machiavelli, it has been said. ‘substituted hardness of calculation in place of the noble and enduring qualities of the soul’.33 Machiavelli sent shockwaves throughout Christendom and was universally demonized as an atheist, as wicked, as a monster who subverted all the tenets of a Christian society and state. Yet, as some acknowledged, Machiavelli was read by many and there were those who were ready to see that he described the realities of the age.34 Machiavelli wrote his most notorious work, The Prince, amidst a crisis and it was England’s own mid-seventeenth-century crisis that saw a sympathetic reception of key Machiavellian tenets and the publication of a revolutionary treatise of political theory. There is neither space in this essay nor need for me to outline Hobbes’s theory of the passions and virtues.35 Hobbes started from the radical premise that the passions of men were natural, but that they led to continual rivalry and warfare. For Hobbes those passions were not – at least until a law forbad them – a sin; but they were destructive of order and so even of man’s self-interest which was the preservation of life and security. In the Leviathan Hobbes came to argue that the only solution to the anarchy of passions was power – and not the power of virtue or ethical good, but of any force able to secure order. Hobbes’s sovereign was neither required to be good nor to promote virtue. His – or their or its (Hobbes did not prescribe forms) – duty was to secure the lives and peace of those who entered into civil society for these ends. In a reversal of Aristotle, Hobbes defined ‘good and evil’ as names which signify our ‘appetites’ and ‘aversions’.36 And, in a move that effected a radical separation of ethics and politics, he contrasted what he called ‘civil science’ (the rights and duties of sovereigns and subjects) with moral philosophy.37 While some aspects of traditional values and virtues have been found in Hobbes’s discussion of the laws of nature, the foundation of his state was not on virtue but on interest and (predominantly) self-preservation. From the 1640s and 1650s onwards in England the language of interest was increasingly heard and slowly valorized. The experience of Civil War, regicide and republic, however, if anything led Englishmen to stress ever more the need to regulate the passions which had become a synonym for Civil War anarchy. For all the rearticulation of traditional languages at the Restoration, the discourse of society and state had changed. But it took a Dutchman and another half century of economic and political change before a political theorist again directly addressed the subject of virtues, vices and political order from a very different perspective: different not only from Aristotle’s ethics but from Hobbes’s mechanistic materialism. Writing in 1705, and in 1714, Bernard Mandeville argued, in defiance of classical moral philosophy, that the traditional conception of virtue ‘by which man

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. . . should endeavour the benefit of others, or the conquest of his passions, out of a rational ambition of being good’ was entirely ‘contrary to the impulse of nature’.38 In opposition to Hobbes, Mandeville did not regard these passions as corrosive of security or society. In his chapter of ‘enquiry into the origin of moral virtue’, Mandeville summed up the centuries old philosophy that he was to unsettle: The chief thing .  .  . which lawgivers and other wise men that have laboured for the establishment of society have endeavoured has been to make the people they were to govern believe that it was more beneficial for everybody to conquer than indulge his appetites and much better to mind the public than what seemed his private interest.39 Gently mocking those who ‘bestowed a thousand encomiums on the rationality of our souls’ and disagreeing with Hobbes on men’s unsuitability for civil society, Mandeville reversed all the assumptions about virtue, vice and order.40 Taking ‘our appetites and passions’ as ‘necessary’ for economic advancement in trades, and arguing that the desire for pleasures was necessary to society, Mandeville daringly posited that what had been categorized as vices could be turned into public benefits: in his words, ‘private vices by the dexterous management of a skilful politician may be turned into public benefits.’41 As well as being ‘offensive to Christianity’, Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, with its argument that the most vicious in society yet contributed something to the common good, upended all prevailing moral assumptions and theories of state.42 ‘What we call evil in this world’, he wrote recognizing his radical subversion of norms, ‘moral as well as natural, is the grand principle that makes us sociable creatures .  .  . the moment evil ceases, the society must be spoiled if not totally dissolved’.43 Mandeville’s tone was wry and ironic; he described his fable as an ‘amusement’.44 Yet, after being attacked as a subverter of religion and morality, Mandeville wrote a vindication of his work which he audaciously described as ‘a book of severe and exalted morality’.45 It seemed to many, however, as Hume was to observe, ‘upon any system of morality little less than a contradiction in terms to talk of a vice which is beneficial to society’.46 Our brief sweep over some of the canonical texts of political theory, in so far as they engage the issue of the virtues and the passions, traverses a long period in early modern England from humanism to Augustan modernity and capitalism. If we are to understand the importance of early modern attitudes to the virtues and passions for ideas of society and state, we will need to look beyond works of political theory to sites of political thinking. And not only to the discourses and languages but also the metaphors, tropes and signs by means of which contemporaries engaged the relations of personal and public passions, and virtue and social order. As we have seen, what we might categorize as a physiological or medical discourse of the body

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was deeply politicized. Moreover, in the case of the ruler and his (or her) connection with subjects, the analogy of the body developed into a central concept of early modern politics: the theory of the king’s two bodies. In its origins – a reminder that in early modernity, political theory and theology cannot be separated  – the concept was what Ernst Kantorowicz called a ‘political theology’.47 The concept of the natural and mystical bodies began with the theology of Christ (man and deity) and his relation with his church and was transferred to the body politic at a time when ideas of nation and sovereignty were emerging. The king was figured as having two bodies: the natural body subject to frailty, disease and death, and a mystical body free of natural defects, which represented the body politic. In his law reports, the Elizabethan jurist Edmund Plowden reported lawyers agreeing that ‘the king has in him two bodies viz. a body natural and a body politic.’ The body natural is ‘subject to passions . . . as other men are’ whereas his politic body is ‘utterly void of . . . natural defects and imbecilities’. In the body politic the king is the head, the locus of reason and intellect, and his subjects are the ‘members’ and the mystical body of the king is ‘not subject to passions as the other is’.48 Kantorowicz has been frequently quoted but there has been surprisingly little attention paid to the valence of the concept of the king’s two bodies in early modern political thinking. Surprisingly little attention, for example, has been paid to Edward Forset’s Jacobean treatise, A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politic, which was printed by the royal printer in 1606.49 Forset’s treatise was an exposition of what he called (in several places) a ‘similitude’ between the body and the state.50 In it he equated the soul and reason with sovereignty and the body with affections and obedience. Just as there was in each man a soul and body, and the soul was the image of God, so in the state the king was of God ‘the political soul . . . in his full royalty’.51 Rehearsing directly the theory of the king’s two bodies, Forset described the sovereign as both human and mystical. ‘In his personal respects’ the sovereign exhibited frailties. But his sovereignty was invincible. ‘In his personal respects he is as one man . . . yet as in the right of sovereignty he gaineth the .  .  . capacities of a corporation.’52 It was for governors to rule and regulate by reason those who lived ‘sensuously’, that is following their ‘affections’.53 Accordingly, the sovereign was like a physician who with ‘the vigour and powers of the soul’ purged the ‘raging vices’ and disordered manners from the body politic.54 Because the sovereign could himself be subject to ‘sensual and irrational motions’, the best of them took advice of the ‘noblest and choicest’.55 It was not, however, for subjects, whose senses could not ‘penetrate into the essence . . . of the soul’, to question them; their place was to obey the ruler for the good of all.56 It is worthy of note that, though his work has found almost no place in the history of political theory, Forset called his book both political philosophy and political science.57 Yet he also described it, we recall, as a ‘similitude’ – a metaphor or analogue; and, along with political philosophers, he cited

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poets and painters, the devisers of fictions and figures.58 His Comparative Discourse was also, as much as a philosophical disquisition, a tract for the times. Forset alludes to contemporary events and issues  – the gunpowder plot and James I’s inclination towards favourites – and, as the printing by John Bill suggests, his book, for all the caveats he raises, largely supports James I’s pronouncements on the divine right of kings.59 Two years before Forset’s publication, in a speech to parliament, James had described himself as the ‘head wherein the great body is united’ and the people as members.60 As the soul of the commonweal, the king was like unto God. Such was not the only representation or interpretation of the similitude of the two bodies. James’s old tutor and bête noir, George Buchanan, had, in his treatise on The Rights of the Crown of Scotland described the law as a regulator of the king’s passions.61 Even Forset, though he did not dwell on it, had allowed for the frailties of a king and for the need for laws and counsel to redirect him. However, it was on the theatrical rather than political stage that these ambiguities in the theory of the king’s two bodies was (sometimes radically) explored. In his founding study, Kantorowicz included a chapter on Shakespeare’s Richard II and suggested that the playwright was familiar with Plowden and the legal constructions of the theory.62 In Richard II, it was the body natural that prevailed over the ‘godhead of the crown’ and, Kantorowicz argued, even mystical kingship came to mean death; the crown that ‘rounds the mortal temples of a king’ is found to be ‘hollow’. In Richard II, that is, ‘the fiction of the oneness of the double body breaks apart’.63 No wonder that it was regarded as a radical, even subversive play. Since Kantorowicz’s stimulating chapter there has been extensive work on Shakespeare’s politics but surprisingly little written on the representation and interrogation of the concept of the king’s two bodies in early modern drama.64 I cannot, of course, attempt such a study here; but the staging of countless kings ruled by their passions (as they should not have been) and the raising the question where obedience ends to a deranged ruler  – such as Lear or Leontes in A Winter’s Tale – invites a rereading of plays as texts which engaged with the reason and the appetites, the virtues and the passions. To recall Forset, what Kantorowicz called a theology and we often refer to as political theory was also a ‘similitude’: an allegory or parallel. Once we recognize that, we perforce, as I shall argue, come to suspect that studies of political concepts and ideas have passed over some of the richest texts of contemporary reflections on the state; and to conclude that we need to embrace whole genres of writing – and I shall suggest all forms of representation – as the materials of political thought. Forset incorporated into his explication of the bodies natural and politic as well as ideas of the humours and the affections, religious, legal and medical ideas, while calling it a work of political science. Following him, we begin to discern how in early modern England, all these subjects and all writings on the body should be considered works of political philosophy.65 Along with medical treatises, such writings include sermons, devotional manuals

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and religious tracts, courtesy literature and books of manners directed at self-regulation and civility, books of pedagogy, education and child rearing, household books and books on family and gender, and on marriage and sex which (as we shall discuss) were often sites for discussing the politics of the virtues and the passions. All these literatures are, of course, familiar to early modern historians of society, science and gender. Still, however, they feature rarely as the materials for the study of political thought. It is, I want to suggest, the application to these texts of discourse analysis and the linguistic turn that would disclose key concepts and terms in contemporary reflections on the virtues and the passions, reason and affections, ruler and ruled. Moreover, it is a mapping and a close historicization of shifts in those terms and concepts, including metaphors and tropes, that would help us to understand how writers like Hobbes or Mandeville came to subvert prevailing moral and political paradigms. Such a different agenda for the history of early modern political theory should not be restricted even to these writings and approaches. Shakespeare has already reminded us that some of the most incisive mediations on the ‘similitudes’ of state were produced by those skilled in representing  – in communicating by symbols and signs – social realities and questions: that is, artists. It was a truism of Renaissance thinking that the arts, by representing virtues, passions and vices could transform and educate readers and observers to emulate good and resist evil, to be virtuous rulers and citizens. In one of the most important ethical (hence political) as well as aesthetic treatises written in early modern England, Philip Sidney argued that poetry was more effective than philosophy (or history) in leading men to virtue. Poetry, he maintained, could elevate man to some semblance of his prelapsarian reason – the ‘inward light each mind hath in itself’.66 In teaching the mastery of the passions, in laying ‘to the view’ ‘all virtues, vices and passions’, in counselling princes, poets, Sidney claimed, excelled all philosophy: even in the most excellent determination of goodness, what philosophers counsel can so readily direct a prince as . . . Cyrus in Xenophon? Or a virtuous man in all fortunes as Aeneas in Virgil?67 Consequently, he concluded, ‘of all sciences . . . is our poet the monarch. For he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way’ of virtue.68 Early modern poetry, because it was concerned with leading men to virtue, was politics; in the spirit of Sidney, Ben Jonson famously compared the poet and the king in an epigram to a monarch who, sharing those values, himself wrote poetry and a treatise on poetry.69 The idea that artists were the helpers and companions to kings in teaching virtue was not confined to poets. In his copy of Aristotle’s Ethics, now in Worcester College Oxford, the Jacobean architect and stage designer Inigo Jones marked and annotated passages on moral discipline and the regulation of the passions.70 And, as Jonson did poetry, Jones coupled architecture with

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authority because he held that its perfect forms and proportions helped to effect the rational ordering of the senses and appetites. Such ideas had clear expression in the new form that, under Jonson’s and Jones’s collaboration, became the principal court entertainments of the early Stuarts: the masques. A persistent theme of these entertainments by poetry, music, dance and stage architecture and scene, was the triumph of reason and virtue over the passions. The wild passions and appetites represented by gross figures, ‘swayed by their affections’, in the ante or antic masque gave way to order or reason in the main masque – usually at the moment when the king or queen entered on the stage.71 In masques, royal authority was figured as rule by virtuous example rather than by force, as the government of a philosopher king who, as the embodiment of reason and soul, taught his subjects to regulate themselves. This is a large subject which several scholars have recently illuminated. What I have argued  – and would here wish to emphasize – is that masques, not least because they almost always staged the triumph of reason over the passions, deserve to be read as more than entertainments, indeed to be studied as works of political theory. Masques direct us, along with poetry and architecture, stage design and scene, to other arts which directly engaged with the virtues and passions in early modernity: music and dance. Renaissance views on music owed much to the classical concept of the musica universalis, or music of the spheres, a belief that celestial bodies moved in a form of harmony which was related (as was classical architecture) to mathematical ratios. In the first book of The Courtier, published in 1528 and translated into several languages and over a hundred editions within a century, Baldesar Castiglione summarized the idea: ‘the world is made up of music . . . the heavens in their motion make harmony, and . . . the human soul was formed on the same principle and . . . has its virtues brought to life . . . through music.’72 Music, he expanded, had the ‘power . . . to induce a good new habit of mind and an inclination to virtue’; as the Orpheus legend had taught, music ‘often tames wild beasts’ and the bestial passions and appetites of men.73 Such ideas were familiar and often rehearsed in early seventeenth-century English music literature. In his dedication to Lord Brooke of his Mottects or Grave Chamber Music, Martin Peerson described ‘music and harmonical proportions’ as ‘heavenly’ and as that which ‘regulates the whole frame of nature in her being and motions’.74 Thomas Ravenscroft, as befitted the title of his discourse on the ‘degrees’ in music, used yet more politicized language. Recalling in his preface how the ancient Greeks had educated their children in music so that ‘they might temper their minds and fully settle therein the virtues of modesty and honesty’, Ravenscroft described music as ‘a very . . . necessary course for the best institution of life and correction of ill manners’.75 Because, he explained, reason was ‘the soul of the arts’, because music ‘set the Spirit from passions free’, music had a ‘sovereign’ authority: ‘we see the sovereignty of music . . . by the cure and remedy it affords . . . to assuage the turmoils and quiet the tempests.’76 In the masques, or rather antemasques, scenes of turmoil

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and tempest were often accompanied by what early modern contemporaries sometimes called ‘rough music’. So, for example, in Tempe Restored (1632) the ‘confused noise’ of trumpets of the antemasque gave way to Harmony who came ‘to reign this day’; in Britannia Triumphans (1638), the music of ‘hell’, tabors, pipes and knackers, surrendered to the figure of Music who led all to ‘move in such a noble order’.77 In several masques (The Lords Masque and Albion’s Triumph, for instance), Orpheus appears to ‘allay the fury’ with ‘soft calm sounds’ or ‘soft sweet music’.78 In Neptune’s Triumph, as the king sat, the loud music ceased, as if signifying how his very presence quelled cacophony.79 Musical harmony in the masque represented the harmony the sovereign brought to the state and assisted him in effecting it. Masque musicians, members of the king’s court, ‘elucidate[d] the mysteries of the masque’s device’ and aided its ‘magical transformations’.80 A similar argument needs to be made for  – and hence a key place in the literature of political idea assigned to – dance. Like music, dance was held to be a reflection of the order of the heavens or spheres; it replicated divine motion and order. Dancing, like music, was also recommended as a means of regulating the baser passions by means of disciplining the body.81 In his influential The Book Named the Governor, a manual dedicated to Henry VIII, Thomas Elyot answered those who doubted the moral value of dancing to argue that dancing could be an introduction to the moral virtues. ‘Keeping just measure and time’ and marking ‘sundry motions and measures’, Elyot explained, helped to instruct youth in prudence, the chief of the virtues.82 He went on to explicate in some detail how various dance steps inculcated particular virtues (the ‘reprinse’, for example, circumspection) and concluded that in imitating the perfection of the cosmos, dancing promoted ‘temperance’ and ‘moderation’.83 Dancing took up a large amount of space in Elyot’s instruction manual in virtue and government because it was ‘as well a necessary study as a noble and virtuous pastime’.84 The rise of Puritanism in Elizabeth’s reign led some to very different attitudes to dancing which many preachers regarded as a stimulus to lust and fornication. Christopher Fetherstone, for instance, penned in 1582 A Dialogue Against Light, Lewd and Lascivious Dancing and refuted defences of it; similarly Thomas Lovell in a verse dialogue denounced the wantonness and the abuse of the sabbath in the custom of dancing; and the preacher John Northbrooke condemned dancing and interludes along with other vices as against the injunctions of Scripture.85 Far from being a spur to virtue, he asserted, dancing was ‘a liberty to wantonness’: ‘And therefore not only the abuse but also the dancing itself ought to be taken away and not to be used of any godly Christian, for that there cometh of it all wantonness and wickedness.’86 As these Puritan preachers were quick to recognize, theirs was not the only, or the prevailing, attitude. Along with the popular inclination to it, dancing had defenders who, in opposition to Puritan jeremiads, emphasized, often from a rehearsal of classical arguments, the place of dancing in regulating the passions. In his manual on the training of children,

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the scholar and St Pauls schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster set out to ‘clear’ dancing from the charges levelled against it, not least by citing ‘so many and so notable writers’ of antiquity who had commended it.87 Dancing, Mulcaster insisted, was good for bodily health, was an aid to military training and an education in sobriety and regulation. Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the lawyer and poet Sir John Davies published a poetic defence of the ‘laudable use of dancing’ in his Orchestra.88 Countering by allusions, recent Puritan objections that dancing was ‘a frenzie and a rage’, Davies praised dancing as ‘a moving all in measure’ and connected dance to the perfect motions of the natural world: Kind Nature first doth cause all things to love, Love makes them daunce and in iust order move.89 Urging especially ‘Learne then to daunce you that are Princes borne’, Davies represented dancing for all as a training in ‘civil moderation’ and ‘decent order’, as ‘the Art that all Arts do approve’.90 These differences, I shall suggest, arose in part from the tensions in sixteenth-century England between the classical and religious inheritances as well as between customary recreations and a new Puritan asceticism and sabbatarianism. What both sides of the debate evidence, however, is contemporary recognition that dancing was connected with the passions and the virtues – either by fostering lewd wantonness or in bringing men and women to reason, order and virtue. The discussion of dancing and the disagreements about it do not just belong to the religious writings and disputes of early modern England but were (and in some cultures still are) also texts of government and politics. In his section of the Governor in which he discussed the practices and exercises best suited to the training of future princes or magistrates, Elyot expressed his view that ‘the most honourable exercise . . . and that beseemeth the estate of every noble person is to ride surely and clean on a great horse . . . which undoubtedly . . . importeth a majesty and dread to inferior persons, beholding him above the common course of other men, daunting a fierce and cruel beast.’91 Elyot’s language – of mastering a fierce and cruel beast – echoes much of the literature of the passions, as his term ‘majesty’ connects the mastery of the great horse with the reason of the ruler who was qualified to rule on account of his virtue. We note that Elyot recommends riding as the practice of noble persons, aristocrats – which, as we noted, means the most virtuous. He expressed a commonplace of early modern European humanist thinking in which, as Walter Liedtke has written, ‘the horse was a common Renaissance symbol of unbridled passion’ and the bridle ‘an attribute of temperance’ which frequently featured in sixteenth-century emblem books.92 Riding signified innate virtue as much as bravery and stood as a frequent metaphor for governing by example and persuasion rather than force, we still speak of ‘reining’ someone in. Interestingly, discussions of riding were

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often conjoined in early modern courtesy books with discourses on music and dance as early modern courtly societies, as part of what Norbert Elias called the ‘civilizing process’, became preoccupied with self-restraint.93 In England, a number of writers on horsemanship incorporated these attitudes and values into popular and practical manuals for riders, breeders and soldiers. In his long treatises on horsemanship, first published in 1561 and enlarged in later editions, Thomas Blundeville (who also wrote on moral virtues) instructed riders on the taming and correction of ‘vices’ and the importance of the rider’s ‘mastery’ of them.94 In similar vein, but with a more Machiavellian twist, in The School of Horsemanship, Christopher Clifford contrasted the man of reason’s government of the inferior brute beast with that of men ruled by appetites, adding the capacity to dissemble to the arts required of the rider – and perhaps the ruler.95 By the seventeenth century, English horse riding treatises engaged more directly and specifically with the ethics and politics of horsemanship. In the preface to his The Perfection of Horsemanship, dedicated to James  I, Nicholas Morgan explained that, on account of his reason, man was ordained to rule over other creatures. Morgan related the art of riding to ‘temperance’ and ‘keeping . . . appetites and unruly affections of nature in awe and government’.96 Like all arts, Morgan explained, the art of horsemanship ‘worketh by true reason’ which baser creatures were inclined to obey; so the greatest rulers had been the most excellent horsemen whose arts manifested their reason and fitness for rule.97 As chapter 50, ‘Of Riding’ opens: ‘the perfection of every work consisteth in this that it be done by . . . a constant reason’; accordingly, the good rider yielded to no ‘perturbations’, his reason freeing him from the faults of nature.98 In his Complete Horseman, Thomas de Grey outlined the qualities of a good rider in explicitly moral terms: ‘He must not be of life dissolute or debauched . . . he must be of life sober . . . he must be master of his passions for a wise man knoweth how to conquer and overcome himself.’99 The discussion of virtues and passions in relation to riders and horses became a commonplace conceit in a whole range of contemporary literature and discourses as well as in riding manuals themselves. In his popular Essays or Observations Divine and Moral, John Robinson observed that ‘as for violent and inordinate affections, the person in whom they are found . . . is no more to be trusted to than the chariot drawn by unbroken horses’.100 The ‘moral musings’ of the essayist Owen Felltham, published in several editions from 1623, likewise described the man who did not regulate himself as ‘like a blind horse without a bridle’.101 Such language and such metaphors took on more particular force in the 1620s and 1630s, in relation to Prince, then King Charles. De Grey dedicated his treatise to Charles I who evidently required as a young man a reputation as a skilled horseman; in his 1640 edition of Machiavelli’s Prince, Edward Dacres probably intended to flatter the king when he observed that ‘a prince excels in riding the great horse rather than in any other exercise.’102 Skilled horsemanship not only

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symbolized, it manifested, good rule: the rule of a king who by his reason and virtue led men to self-regulation and obedience. When in 1623 Prince Charles was entertained in Madrid, the observer Almansa de Mendoza singled out his skill as a rider. Describing the prince among the troupe, he noted of the horses that ‘their mouths were curbed with no bits’ and yet, in recognition of the virtue of the riders, ‘they laid down all their natural and brutish fierceness’.103 Looking back on the life of his sovereign King Charles, Henry Wotton noted the king’s ‘use of the great horse of which no man doth more skilfully manage . . . or tame the furious’.104 In both Spanish and English panegyrics, it was as a skilled rider, hence virtuous ruler, that Charles was represented. De Gray’s Complete Horseman with its frontispiece illustration of Charles controlling a large rearing horse leads us to other genres in which the virtues, passions and their politics were represented: in visual texts as well as verbal discourses. Indeed once we recognize that music, dancing, riding – and other practices contemporaries discussed as educating men in the regulating the passions – were ethical and political pursuits, we are led to appreciate that not only discourses but all the representations of those practices (on the stage, on canvas, in pageant, for example) constitute texts of the virtues and passions and hence texts of politics. In the case of riding we think immediately of the vogue in early modern Europe for the equestrian portrait, especially of the prince. As Walter Liedtke has shown, the fashion owed much to the Roman bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius whose Meditations were a manual for governors on self-regulation, service and duty. Rubens modelled his portrait of Philip IV on horseback (now in the Uffizi) on it and the image of the good rider as a figure of virtuous self-regulation became a familiar visual emblem in Renaissance Europe. Velasquez’s equestrian portraits of the Habsburgs and the leading minister Olivares are studies in effortless self-control as the virtues of the greatest rulers. The equestrian portrait came late to England and it is no coincidence that its most spectacular examples come from the reign of a monarch obsessed with self-discipline and regulation of the appetites.105 In Anthony Van Dyck’s portrait, Charles I on Horseback, the king, who holds a baton signifying command in his right hand, while his left only lightly touches the reigns of a dun charger which, the canvas implies, he controls by his natural authority based on reason and virtue, rather than by strenuous effort. Behind the mounted king, the sky and landscape are tranquil, signifying (as masque scenes did) the tempest tamed by a ruler who governs by example. Though he wears a sword, the king’s greatest weapon is his innate virtue; we might note that, disproportionately almost as big as that of his horse, Charles’s head symbolizes the dominance of reason over the brute appetites and bestial passions. Van Dyck’s other equestrian portrait, of Charles with his riding master Monsieur St Antoine, conveys similar messages even more directly. Mounted on a great horse, Charles effects a complicated turn through a draped arch (a symbol of triumph). Again his hold on the reins

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is light; though the supposed riding master, St Antoine looks up with awed admiration to a king who needs no instruction in the equestrian arts – or the art of rule. Virtue equips him for both and his equestrian skill symbolizes his authority, the natural authority of a divine like reason. In a third Van Dyck canvas, albeit not strictly an equestrian portrait, the horse from which Charles has just dismounted bows its head in obedience towards a king whose divinity is alluded to by the portrait’s debt to Titian’s Adoration of the Magi from which Van Dyck took the figures of the groom and the horse’s bowed head. Placed again in a calm landscape, Charles is figured as a ruler whose virtuous self-regulation (it was his own self-image) had ordered his kingdom, by example not by force.106 These portraits by Van Dyck and the debt of the equestrian portrait to the statue of Marcus Aurelius lead me to a final body of texts of virtues and passions that I shall discuss: the discourses and other representations of sex, continence and marriage. In early modern England, perhaps the most commonplace discussions about virtues and passions were conducted in relation to lust and sexual restraint. There were good reasons for this: as social historians have shown, illegitimacy was common, especially among the lower orders whose bastards were a charge on the parish rates. One of the attractions of Puritanism to the middling sort, it has been suggested, was its strict code of sexual morality and discipline that countered the sensual and often promiscuous pleasures of popular festive culture.107 Countless courtesy manuals in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England prescribed abstinence or marriage for young men and especially young women who were believed to be physiologically more prone to lust and less able to regulate their passions  – hence ill equipped to participate in government. Though the belief was honoured at times in the breach, sexual continence was held to be important for legitimate and good rulers as a public evidence of their self-regulation; promiscuity, by contrast, was associated with feminine excess and with tyranny, the rule of passion over reason. In Renaissance Europe one of the most famous representations of sexual restraint was the story of the continence of Scipio, an episode of particular significance to Stoics and neo-Stoics. The story, from Livy, told of a lovely young captive presented, after his victory at the battle for New Carthage, to the Roman general Scipio Africanus who was said to have a weakness for beautiful girls. Scipio, however, found the woman to be the fiancée of a Celtiberian chieftain, Allucius, who loved her. Commending ‘upright and legitimate love’, Scipio returned her (also refusing a ransom) inviolate to her husband-to-be.108 The story was the subject of numerous paintings in early modern Europe, including dramatic versions by Karl Van Mander and Rubens. In England, it was the subject of a painting executed by Van Dyck on his first visit to England in 1620–1, probably for the connoisseur and Stoic nobleman, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. The canvas has been studied as a celebration of the wedding of James I’s royal favourite, George Villiers Duke of Buckingham, whose features are painted onto the figure of Allucius (Figure 4). Recently an art historian has drawn attention to the

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image of an elephant woven into the carpet on which Allucius stands and demonstrated that the elephant was often a symbol of chastity.109 In short, the canvas represents Buckingham, already the subject of much criticism, as a figure of chastity and restraint – not only Allucius, but Scipio too – and magnanimity.110 In Livy’s story Scipio’s continence is politic as well as moral: in return for the maiden, he seeks and attains the alliance of Allucius and, as Giavanni Botero observed when glossing the story, enhanced his reputation as a leader.111 Van Dyck’s Scipio figures Buckingham  – and perhaps also James I – as a virtuous man and true leader, as one who wins fame for his self-regulation. For those who could not attain continence through celibacy, the church recommended marriage. The 1662 Prayer book service of matrimony describes it in terms of the regulation of the appetites. As well as a signifier of the mystical relationship between Christ and his church, marriage was commended to men, the service says, ‘not to be enterprised nor taken in hand .  .  . lightly or wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding, but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly’. In early modern England (and still in some measure today) leaders were expected either to show sexual restraint or to live in a faithful, stable marriage; those rulers who did neither, James I or Charles II, for example, found themselves facing opposition as a consequence. Indeed sexual libertinism was associated with the reverse of good monarchical rule  – with both Turkish tyranny and with republicanism, the republican Henry Marten (and even Oliver Cromwell) being the target of countless, often pornographic, squibs about their (actual or alleged) debauchery and lust.112 As I have argued at length elsewhere, Charles I placed his fidelity, his marriage and family at the centre of his self-representation: in masques and in portraits. He did so not just as a sign of fertility and dynasty but as an advertisement of ethical and political values.113 The Caroline cult of Platonic love, which influenced portraits as well as masques, was centred on the triumph of the soul over the bodily appetites. At Charles’s request, Van Dyck painted one of the few mythological works he executed in England, Cupid and Psyche, the latter representing the soul (Figure 5). It is in the context of these Neoplatonic ideas and images that we need to view all the representations of Charles I and his family, of his wife and children. The king’s happy, loving marriage symbolized his mastery of his passions as the portraits of Henrietta Maria with her monkey (a common symbol of appetite) (see Figure 9) or his young son prince Charles with his hand lightly on the head of a huge mastiff represented their rule over brute appetites, and the virtuous education they had received which had equipped them to rule through reason. To read royal portraits as texts of kingship and political thought is to recognize that – and how – any representations of the virtues and passions, verbal, visual or performed, were in early modernity sites of politics and political reflections. As with sermons, music books or horse riding manuals, books about marriage, family and sex have seldom been the materials of the

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historian of political theory. It is time that they – and a whole range of other discourses in which the virtues and passions are debated (medical treatises, fables and emblems, romances, epics and novels) – were.114 And it is time that we applied to all these texts the study of language and trope which has so enriched our understanding of the classic works of political theory. The history of political thought I advocate would be a cultural history as well as a history of ‘ideas’ – in fact a cultural history rather than a history of ideas divorced from their cultural, social and political histories, from time and circumstance. By way of brief epilogue, I wish to address two complications which I have not allowed so far to disturb my simplified outline and which perhaps too seldom inform traditional studies of political theory. The first are the tensions and contradictions that we immediately detect between and within early modern discourses of the virtues and passions. To make an obvious but important point, while both a classical tradition and a body of religious, especially Protestant, texts associated reason and regulation with virtue and incontinency and appetite with sin and vice, there were marked differences between classical and religious prescriptions and proscriptions. Not least, to give an example, the differences between a humanist neo-Stoical emphasis on man’s capacity for self-regulation was sufficiently at odds with a reformed emphasis on the fundamental corruption of all human nature for Calvin to add to his Institutes a margin note denouncing Seneca as one of those philosophers who boasted that by their own efforts men might ‘live well and holily’ and that ‘virtues and vices are in our power’.115 As well, of course, as between classical and Christian writings, there were differences within them: within reformed Protestantism different emphases on the role of the senses in leading men to grace and, among humanists, powerful anti-Stoic strands of thought which advocated the harnessing and directing rather than subjugating the passions. (Attacking the Stoic position in his Treatise of the Passions, Edward Reynolds asserted that ‘there is more honour in the having affections subdued than in having none at all.’)116 As Michael Schoenfeldt has demonstrated, some of the most important texts of contemporary engagement with these tensions were works of what we now call ‘literature’  – works of Spenser and Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton whose ‘entire career . . . could be seen as a meditation on the crucial issue of the Renaissance  – the respective claims of reason and passion in the formation of the moral individual’.117 Because these tensions were at the core of beliefs about government and obedience, as well as ‘moral individuals’, all the literary works in which they are – often uniquely subtly – explored must be incorporated as texts of political theory too. Schoenfeldt writes of Milton’s engagement with the question of morality: ‘the answers are different at different times’ as well as ‘conflicted within the same text’.118 Traditional students of political theory have been willing (though not always ready enough) to engage the contradictions within texts but have shown less inclination to examine exactly how moments

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and circumstances shaped different answers and emphases  – sometimes shifting over very short periods of time. In a long narrative arc, as we have seen, early modern England saw a fundamental shift from a near universal condemnation of unregulated appetites to a valorization of interests and pleasures by Mandeville. It is a narrative that plots fundamental social, economic and political changes, including the rise of ‘economy’ itself. A different narrative arc might plot across the same period a change from emphasis on continence and chastity to Rochester’s licensing and celebrating of sexual appetites and his locating human happiness in the senses (redefined as ‘the light of Nature’) rather than the reason – ‘the very reason I despise’: Your reason hinders, mine helps to enjoy Renewing appetites you would destroy.119 It would be naive to take either Mandeville or Rochester, who were both vilified, as exemplary of their times: Marvel, Milton and Bishop Burnet, to name but three, attacked Rochester’s licensing of sexual appetites. Yet, one is left with a clear sense that things had changed and that there was a connection between Rochester’s defence of sense and appetite and Mandeville’s capitalist theory of virtue: ‘the real pleasures of all men’, Mandeville agreed, ‘are worldly and sensual’.120 Pondering such a connection, the political theorist will be swiftly drawn to Hobbes whose state of nature and theory of appetites seems an obvious and vital influence on both the poet and political economist. The historian of politics and religion will agree but study Hobbes himself as a man writing in and through revolutionary times and circumstances in which traditional values, once the foundation of social order, appeared no longer to secure it and in which faith and virtue had themselves become violently contested and subverted. Cultural historians might point to shifts in sensibility and taste – in the theatres and fashionable London life, as at the Restoration court and Royal Society – that were to lead to changes in attitudes to public and private life and, along with them, to the novel’s valorization of emotion and feeling.121 What is apparent as we look from a Renaissance emphasis on the subjugation of the passions towards the Enlightenment ‘man of feeling’ and the Romantic elevation of the emotions is that changing attitudes to pleasure and self-discipline, the virtues and passions always mapped ideological lines – and faultiness – and were inseparable from discourses of state. Since, as we have seen, the representations of virtues and passions are found in myriad discourses and languages, metaphors and analogues, images and signs, fictions and imaginings, all the sites of these representations must become the materials of the political theorist and perhaps also of a refiguring and rewriting of our histories of political thought.

8 Van Dyck, the royal image and the Caroline court

The relationship between artist and patron, especially in the past, is often difficult to determine. Did a powerful patron, a prince or magnate, not only commission a portrait but also provide a clear brief for the canvas – pose, dress, accessories and, indeed, its meaning? Or did the great artists, whose skills were in demand among emperors and kings, exercise a large measure of independence even in executing royal portraits? Was the representation of authority, or as we might put it today the brand image, more the work of the ruler or the artist? It is tempting to suggest as a generalization that the most powerful royal images in our history have emerged from a peculiarly symbiotic relationship between sovereign and painter. In the case of Charles I and Van Dyck it appears certainly to be the case not only that the two formed a special relationship, but that the relationship transformed as well as expressed both of them. In Van Dyck’s hands Charles I, the former faltering prince and young king awkwardly depicted by Daniel Mytens, became the epitome of a majesty founded on natural authority and innate virtue. Under the patronage of Charles and his courtiers in England, Van Dyck, departing from his earlier oeuvre, became almost entirely a portraitist – and a portraitist who effected a revolution in royal and aristocratic portraiture. In order to understand the importance of the relationship between king and artist, we must briefly consider them separately, and before Van Dyck came to work for Charles in 1632. Van Dyck had been a star pupil in Antwerp of Peter Paul Rubens. In 1629 Charles I had commissioned Rubens to paint scenes of the apotheosis of his father, James I, to decorate the ceiling of the Banqueting House at Whitehall, the showpiece of Stuart palace architecture.1 Van Dyck had briefly visited England during James’s reign, apparently at the invitation of Viscount Purbeck, brother of the king’s favourite, George Villiers, Duke

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of Buckingham, and he probably painted canvases for Buckingham.2 He received a royal pension, but apparently executed no portrait for the king and left after three months. Over the course of the next decade in Italy and Flanders, Van Dyck painted principally religious subjects, including several canvases of the Crucifixion and Lamentation and images of saints, as well as portraits of cardinals, doges and grandees. Before he left the Low Countries for England in 1632, he was still widely known as an artist of sacred works, although his work as a portraitist was growing in quantity and recognition and he was working for the courts at Brussels and The Hague. In the Protestant England of Charles I, however, this was to change. Although Van Dyck executed a few mythological and historical canvases, and planned others, in the seven and a half years he sojourned in England – apart from a brief return to Antwerp and to biblical subjects in 1634–5 – he became principally a portraitist, producing some four hundred portraits for royal and aristocratic patrons.3 It was not only the move to a Protestant country that influenced Van Dyck’s career and work. In England, the artist came this time to work for a ruler who had a sophisticated appreciation of the arts and a firm belief in their role in government. Charles I was the first real connoisseur king to occupy the English throne; he also had a philosophy of rule and a powerful sense of the role of the arts in the representation and exercise of kingship. His father, James I, had insistently argued for the divine origins and sacred nature of regal authority in a large number of treatises, collected in his folio Works of 1616.4 Although Charles also believed in the divine right of kings, his reign saw a marked shift in personal and political style. Less inclined to words than his father, Charles preferred to assert his majesty and his claim to divine authority by other means, visual and ceremonial.5 In Spain, to which he had travelled in 1623 to court a bride, he had been particularly impressed by Titian’s portraits of the sixteenth-century Habsburg rulers hanging in the Escorial and other royal palaces, and had begun to collect the artist’s work.6 Furthermore, possibly encouraged after 1625 by his young French bride, Henrietta Maria, Charles devoted a great deal of time and attention to court masques, entertainments of music, dance and drama, as representations of his rule. Where James had never performed in masques  – and on some occasions had displayed a lack of patience with them – Charles and his queen regularly performed and rehearsed them and staged them for each other. The overarching theme of the Caroline masques was the transformation from chaos to order with the arrival on the stage of the king or queen. Since the royal actors did not speak, that transformation was effected by action, dance and changes in scenery: from scenes of darkness or storm to scenes of light and serene skies (Figures 6 and 7). An essential secondary theme was that of love. Charles I and Henrietta Maria represented their love as Platonic and chaste, a triumph of virtue and self-regulation over base appetites.7 Since self-regulation was a principal virtue that equipped men for rule, such a representation depicted the monarch as the perfect Platonic king, qualified to govern by virtue as

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much as by lineage.8 The royal marriage was also represented on the stage as a model of government: joined as one, the king and queen, the ‘Carlomaria’ as one masque described them, ruled by love and example rather than by force.9 Their union, it was argued, promised a loving relationship between a virtuous couple, and between them and their subjects who were led to virtue by them. In the words of one masque: All that are harsh, all that are rude, Are by your harmony subdued; Yet so into obedience wrought, As if not forced to it, but taught.10 Just as he changed the nature of Anglican worship to a more ceremonial and visual experience which expressed his personal form of piety, so Charles altered court rituals and ceremonies to reinforce his image as a sacred, virtuous king.11 He brought in a new archbishop and ministers, putting aside the leading masque writer of the previous reign, Ben Jonson, to give more scope to the architect Inigo Jones and his collaborators to represent visually his philosophy of rule. He was also, after some years, to dismiss Daniel Mytens, the ‘picture drawer’ who had continued in his employ since his father’s reign and who had executed early portraits of the new king and his bride to send abroad. Indeed, Mytens seems to have fallen from royal favour within weeks of the arrival in England of the artist who was his nemesis, Anthony Van Dyck. The circumstances that brought Van Dyck to London are not known. Charles I probably met the artist when he visited London in 1620, and the fact that in March 1630 the king seems to have purchased Van Dyck’s Rinaldo and Armida 1628–9 suggests that he had followed Van Dyck’s career.12 What is striking is the speed with which Charles immediately lavished favour on the new arrival. Van Dyck, who landed on 2 April 1632, was knighted in July and the following year given a pension and the gift of a gold chain, and a house was sought for him. In 1633 the artist returned to Brussels; by March 1635 he was not only back in London, but a permanent residence in Blackfriars had been provided for him at royal expense; in April the king had a special staircase down to the Thames constructed in order to facilitate his visits to Van Dyck’s studio. As well as scores of commissions for portraits, the royal favour continued unabated. Unlike so many unlucky servants of the Stuarts, Van Dyck had his pension paid and the arrears were even made up in the midst of the serious financial difficulties faced by the Crown during preparations to fight the Scots in 1638. Charles’s admiration for the artist was evidently reciprocated. It seems likely that Van Dyck had not initially intended to stay in England but was persuaded to do so. In his Self-portrait with a Sunflower, Van Dyck advertised himself as ‘Principal Painter in Ordinary to their Majesties’: the artist wears a gold chain, probably that given to him by the king in 1633, and the sunflower

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is a symbol of devotion (and an allusion to the sun of regality).13 The relationship between king and artist was clearly one of mutual admiration. Indeed, over seven years Van Dyck revolutionized not only the arts of royal portraiture, but also, by transferring a royal philosophy on to canvas, the arts of royal leadership. Van Dyck came to England at the height of his powers and with no little sense of his talent and reputation. Evidently he could be difficult, even when dealing with the great. The Cardinal Infante Ferdinand described him as capricious and irrational, and he had refused to finish some works of his former master, Rubens, preferring to repaint the subjects ab initio.14 In England, even with the aid of several studio assistants, his output indicates that his workload was almost incredible; but Van Dyck not only developed an affinity with his new country – to which (although he had entertained hopes of working in France) he returned to die – he adjusted his art to his English circumstances and particularly to the values of the Caroline court. We know little of his own values and intellectual development: we do know that he befriended the connoisseur and collector Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel and that he admired the treatise on art, De Pictura Veterum (On the Painting of the Ancients), penned by Arundel’s client and librarian Franciscus Junius.15 Both Arundel and Junius professed a neo-Stoic belief in the moral force of the arts to inculcate virtue and it may be that Van Dyck, who on his first visit to England had painted a classic depiction of neo-Stoic self-regulation, The Continence of Scipio (see Figure 4), had a wider sympathy with that philosophy which was fashionable in the Low Countries in the early seventeenth century.16 What we can say with more confidence is that, as well as appreciating Charles I’s taste (Van Dyck borrowed from and imported several references from Charles’s beloved Titian, and even owned some of his works17), the artist appears to have understood the king’s philosophy of rule and to have experienced the court masques in which it was represented.18 It was arguably that understanding which cemented the relationship of king and artist and informed Van Dyck’s transformation of English royal portraiture. It has rightly been observed that in his English portraits, unlike his earlier work, Van Dyck often depicted sitters, including royal ones, outdoors and his compositions draw the viewer’s gaze to the landscape beyond the figure or figures. While in some cases the scenery can be identified, in most the landscapes are imagined. Like Van Dyck’s skies, many appear to owe a debt (which still needs full elucidation) to masque scenery and the ideological role performed by Inigo Jones’s landscapes in masques. In placing his aristocratic subjects, and especially his royal sitters, in idealized pastoral surroundings and against serene skies, Van Dyck not only underlined the poise and self-control of the sitter; he connected personal virtue and self-restraint with wider public values and social order.19 It was Van Dyck’s embrace of royal values, furthermore, that influenced other changes both in his own style and in that of the evolving English royal portrait.

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One innovation in England that was likely to have expressed both Charles I’s and Van Dyck’s interest was the equestrian portrait. Van Dyck had executed equestrian portraits in Italy20 and Antwerp21 and may have painted the picture of Charles V now in the Uffizi.22 In England, the equestrian portrait was ‘almost unprecedented in . . . [painted] royal iconography’, the most recent example being Robert Peake’s of Prince Henry (now at Parham Park).23 Charles may have wished to be represented as his elder brother Henry’s martial successor in his two equestrian portraits by Van Dyck; but Van Dyck’s Charles I on Horseback (Figure 8) owes a more direct debt to Titian’s image of The Emperor Charles V at Muhlberg painted in 1547 (now in the Prado), which Charles would have seen in Madrid. Furthermore, Van Dyck’s portrait expressed a philosophy very much at the core of Charles’s values: in contemporary courtesy literature, mastery of a great horse was a symbol of the mastery of wild nature, of the passions, a virtue essential for aristocrats (the word aristocrat literally means ‘the most virtuous’) and princes.24 Charles had been praised for his capacity to tame his horses ‘with no bits’ and to control ‘their natural and brutish fierceness’.25 It is this natural authority of the self-disciplined ruler that Van Dyck presents in Charles I on Horseback. The king’s left hand only lightly touches the reins of the vast dun charger which he rides at the trot with relaxed ease, against the backdrop of a tranquil sky and a peaceful landscape pacified by beneficent rule. Although the king wears his sword, his greatest strength is his virtue. Van Dyck’s other, probably earlier, equestrian portrait of Charles with the riding master M. de St Antoine was probably painted in 1633 for the Gallery at St James’s Palace, which was filled with portraits of mounted emperors by Giulio Romano and Titian.26 It is the image of a British imperator, an image of triumph. But again we might discern that the triumph is of virtue as much as of arms: as Charles rides through the arch (an ancient symbol of triumph) his equerry can only gaze upwards in awed admiration of the king, who turns his white horse with effortless skill: the pupil is here the true master because, as the masque The Triumph of Peace asserted the same year, he has mastered his passions.27 We may discern, too, in the arch and in St Antoine’s gaze, allusions to the sacred and Christic nature of kingship in which James I had tutored his son, showing Charles as one come to lead and redeem his people as the embodiment of faith as well as of virtue.28 It is in the context of Van Dyck’s two equestrian portraits that we might helpfully consider his depiction of Charles in the hunting field. Though the canvas gestures to the portrait of Charles’s mother, Queen Anne of Denmark, painted in 1617 by Paul van Somer, and to Robert Peake’s of Prince Henry, it is the differences and the innovation in Van Dyck’s work that are striking.29 Though he is painted in hunting costume, nothing in Charles’s pose (unlike Prince Henry’s) suggests strenuous activity. The king turns away from the horse behind him, and from the attendants whose busy activity highlights his calm tranquillity. While Charles’s groom works to settle the beast, the horse bows its head in obeisance towards the king,

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who effortlessly commands the natural world. The composition of the canvas highlights his authority: he stands elevated on a grassy ledge, as one who commands naturally; his left elbow in foreshortening draws our gaze to his face, yet at the same time secures his command of space and of the viewer. Again there is a suggestion of a sacred dimension. Van Dyck may have taken the horse with its lowered head and the groom from Titian’s Adoration of the Kings (probably the version now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, of about 1556), and so gestured to Charles as a Christ figure.30 But what is most innovative about this image – and characteristic of Van Dyck’s portraits of Charles – is absence: the absence of the regalia or escutcheons that usually signified royalty. Charles the man is king because he literally embodies authority and naturally commands. We see here the monarch’s two bodies, personal and political, made one, the personalization of power in paint.31 Love, marriage and family were central to Charles I’s representation, not only as the traditional signs of dynasty fertility and patriarchal authority, but also as the manifestations of neo-Stoical values of self-restraint and a Neoplatonic philosophy of love and authority. Although Holbein and others had depicted Henry VIII and members of the Tudor royal family in dynastic canvases, Van Dyck effected a revolution in the portrayal of the royal marriage and family. The influence here seems very much to have come from the patron: as Oliver Millar wrote, ‘The double portrait, the relaxed conversation piece between relations . . . had appeared very seldom in Van Dyck’s work before he went to London.’32 It was quite probably Van Dyck’s first double portrait for Charles that secured his ascendancy over Daniel Mytens. In around 1631 Charles had commissioned Mytens to paint a double portrait of himself and Henrietta Maria, holding between them a laurel wreath, an attribute of Apollo and Daphne.33 The canvas did not please the king, who put it in store and commissioned Van Dyck, soon after his arrival in 1632, to paint another version.34 Since Van Dyck’s portrait, displayed prominently above the chimney at Somerset House, clearly pleased the king, its variations deserve attention as an early indication of the meeting of minds between artist and patron. Whereas in the Mytens version Charles and Henrietta Maria stand, somewhat stiffly, in an interior beneath red drapery, Van Dyck positions them on either side of drawn green curtains opening to a vista of landscape and sky. The changed setting throws light on the silver slashing of the king’s sleeves and on the queen’s gown, which now has ribbons matching her husband’s carnation suit. The matching colours symbolize their harmony and love, as do their (repositioned) hands, encircling the laurel to suggest victory over the baser passions. More than Mytens’s portrait, Van Dyck’s is a public and political proclamation: not only did he add the regalia behind the king to connect a private love and marriage to that wider union between the monarch and his people; the laurel wreath placed exactly in front of the open vista suggests a relationship between personal and public commitments and values. Van

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Dyck’s work not only stylistically improved the original version; he also made it a proclamation of the king and queen. During his early months in England Van Dyck was commissioned by Charles to paint at least nine ‘pictures of our royal self and the most dearest consort’, for which payment was ordered in May 1633.35 In some portraits the queen gestures to her pregnancy, holding her hands or a rose to her stomach. Such portraits underline the fertility of the Stuart dynasty (note the crown placed on a plane with the rose and queen’s womb) after centuries of childless monarchs and disputed successions; but they do more.36 The rose, a symbol of Venus, was also associated with the Virgin Mary (Henrietta Maria’s name was often anglicized as Mary in panegyrics). So once again it is chaste love and purity that are being depicted. It would appear that this is also the conceit of Van Dyck’s most beautiful portrayal of Henrietta: that of the queen with her dwarf, Jeffrey Hudson (Figure 9).37 Mytens had earlier executed full-lengths of the queen with Hudson but again Van Dyck reworks and repaints the scene.38 The column and crown placed behind the queen signify authority and regality, and the orange tree on the ledge behind her right arm probably represents chastity and purity, the fruit in Dutch art being sometimes an attribute of the Virgin. The monkey tethered to Hudson’s left arm was a familiar symbol of the senses and the baser nature of man. Henrietta Maria’s gentle but firm right hand on the monkey asserts her control over such base appetites, her virtue and gentle regimen. While this canvas has been described as a ‘lighthearted’ allegory of the conquest of beauty over the passions, the crown and column invite us to read it like masque, as a representation of regality.39 Indeed, a late Van Dyck work, Cupid and Psyche, one of the artist’s few mythological works in England, probably painted for the decoration of the Queen’s Cabinet at Greenwich, captures the philosophy of the masques. For Cupid and Psyche represented divine love and earthly desire and their union not only represented the perfect platonic love but, in John Milton’s words in his 1634 masque Comus, from it Two blissful twins are to be born, / Youth and Joy.40 Henrietta Maria was pregnant almost every year from 1629 and she gave birth to five children who were all still alive in 1640. Arguably Van Dyck’s portraits of the royal children were his most original contribution to the image of the monarchy; certainly his portraits of them convey an intimacy and tenderness greater than any to be found in his earlier family portraits executed in Antwerp and Italy. Charles’s early commission of a family portrait within weeks of Van Dyck’s arrival, the large dimensions and his description of the ‘Greate Peece’ depicting himself, Henrietta Maria, Prince Charles and Princess Mary, suggest the importance of this painting, displayed prominently in the Long Gallery at Whitehall.41

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After five years of marriage, two children, born within two years of each other, demonstrated the fecundity of the young queen and the security of succession. But Van Dyck’s composition is no mere formal dynastic proclamation. Quite unlike earlier family portraits, the arrangement emphasized the loving relationship linking the sitters. Henrietta Maria, holding the infant princess, looks not outwards to the viewer but adoringly towards her husband, the loving paterfamilias. On her right Charles is seated with, between them, two dogs, traditional emblems of fidelity. The king’s right arm reaches behind the figure of his son and heir, Prince Charles, who rests both his hands on his father’s leg. Touch, gesture and gaze unite the group in domestic intimacy. But the representation is not only domestic: since Aristotle the family had been widely described as a ‘little commonwealth’ and kings were frequently referred to as fathers of their subjects. The ‘Greate Peece’ encourages the viewer to make that connection by leading the eye to the orb, sceptre and crown on the table behind the prince, to the paper in the king’s hand – a reminder of business, to the column behind the king and, most of all, the vista opening in the background, with Westminster Hall and the Parliament House discernible. The love of the domestic family thus also represents the love and affection felt by the king for his people, and his loving, well-ordered family becomes a model of his beneficent rule. Though he painted no other comparable family portrait, Van Dyck produced three others of the royal children over the next five years. The last of these, showing the five royal children, was painted for Whitehall in 1637.42 In this canvas Prince Charles stands facing the viewer, his siblings placed two on either side of him, his brother James’s crimson sleeve echoing the colour of his own silk suit, connecting the male heirs. At the centre of the composition, young Charles places his left hand lightly on the head of a large mastiff, a symbol, like the horse, of wild nature, here governed by the reason and innate authority which a virtuous prince possesses, even at such an early age. Although Charles I, the father and monarch, does not appear in person, he is in many respects the subject of this painting: the sire of progeny and the father of the commonweal who has schooled his son in self-discipline, in preparation for good government. In the background, to which the viewer’s eye is led, the tranquil pastoral landscape and the dish of rich fruits with grapes signify the benefits of good, virtuous rule at a time when Charles I and his courtiers spoke of the happiness of England’s halcyon days.43 The year 1637 marked the end of the Caroline peace and the beginning of the troubles that were to explode in Civil War across the British Isles. The Scots resisted Charles I’s new Prayer Book and, after the failure of negotiation, the king prepared for war. The shift from a leadership based on virtuous example and love to that of a martial prince asserting his sovereignty presented challenges, to say the least, to the poets and panegyrists who sang the king’s and queen’s praises.44 In the case of paintings, it is notable that Van Dyck’s later portraits of both Charles I and his son showed them in

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armour. That of Charles I now in the Hermitage, St Petersburg, figures the king beside a table with an imperial crown and plumed helmet on it, and a gauntlet lying on the ground behind. Charles bears a sword at his left side, his left hand lightly resting on the hilt, while in his right he grasps a baton of command.45 What has been described as the ‘oddity’ of the right hand gauntlet may indicate the challenge laid down to the rebellious Scots: to be ruled by the baton of peaceful regimen, as it were in the one hand, rather than the sword, in the other.46 Whatever the possibilities, the idealized world of love and harmony forged by virtue and self-regulation had manifestly come to an end. Where only a couple of years earlier the young prince’s hand resting on a mastiff signalled his future promise as heir to his father’s philosophy of government, in one of the portraits of 1638–40, which clearly draws from his figure in the Five Eldest Children, he appears in an interior setting and armoured, his left hand resting on a plumed helmet and his right holding a pistol.47 The late portraits indicate that the future of Stuart rule – indeed, the future of the country – would be determined by arms. In 1640, as Charles went north to fight the Scots, Van Dyck left for France in the hope of securing a prestigious commission there; he returned to die just before the onset of the Civil War in England. In order to understand, indeed to appreciate, Van Dyck’s English work, the relationship between the artist and the king needs to be considered, and Charles I’s aesthetic and political philosophy examined. The symbiosis of monarch and artist produced an entirely new type of royal image in England, with royal authority represented as psychological as well as philosophical, and no longer simply signified by the accoutrements of regality. Van Dyck, we might say, addressed the tensions in the theory of the king’s two bodies (so well examined in Shakespeare’s history plays) and rendered the personal and political bodies of the king as one. Any assessment of Van Dyck’s royal portraits must obviously confront the fact that political events developed in ways quite contrary to Charles’s philosophy of order and authority. Even before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, rather than the harmony represented in masque and on canvas, Caroline aristocrats and courtiers were divided into rival factions by religious and ideological differences. The success of Charles I’s royal image is too complex to be evaluated here; but it is helpful to see the paintings, like the masques, not as simple statements of royal values but as part of the means of inculcating them, of persuading men and women to follow them.48 In that rhetorical process, Van Dyck’s non-royal portraits are important sources for the historian, complicating as they do the simple stories of emerging parties. What is striking about Van Dyck’s oeuvre is that he was patronized by not only future Royalists and those who clearly shared the king’s religious and political values, but also by peers and gentlemen who were regarded as champions of Puritanism, or whose constitutional and political views were far removed from Charles’s ideas of sacred kingship.49 The fourth Earl of Pembroke, a major patron of the artist, and the Earl of Warwick, for

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example, were regarded as supporters of the Puritans and of godly clergy.50 Philip, Lord Wharton, commissioned Van Dyck for numerous family portraits for his new long gallery.51 Wharton was an ardent parliamentarian who during the Civil War became a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, which met to restructure the Church of England and to establish a Presbyterian settlement; he also helped create the New Model Army which, under Cromwell, defeated the Royalist forces. Since some historians of politics and culture have suggested a growing divide in taste between royal sympathizers and opponents, it is interesting that Van Dyck’s portraits of future parliamentarians reveal no obvious stylistic differences from those of future Royalists. Although unquestionably depicted by Van Dyck as a man of action, Warwick, not much a courtier during Charles’s reign, stands in front of rich drapery, his armour behind him as he appears in fashionable and opulent courtly dress. As for William, Lord Russell, although on the outbreak of Civil War, accepted a commission in the Parliamentary Horse, his portrait image in sumptuous scarlet made him appear ‘a quintessential Cavalier’.52 The pursuit of fashion, of course, has often overridden different ideological preferences; but in early Stuart England religious preferences were often expressed  – and seen to be expressed – in external appearances, of dress as well as church interiors and furniture. If, on Van Dyck’s canvases, Catholic, Anglican and Puritan sitters do not appear very different – the one ironic exception being the intensely and almost uniquely austere portrait of Charles’s archbishop, William Laud – such images served to minimize those differences.53 The king himself appears to have sought to the end to unite his courtiers behind his authority. In his last masque, Salmacida Spolia, written by William Davenant and staged by Inigo Jones, Charles, as Supreme Head of the Church of England, and Henrietta Maria, his Catholic queen (unusually) presented the entertainment together.54 The theme was reconciliation, both with the Scots and between the contending factions at court. At the close of this masque the revels were danced by leading courtiers of opposing religious and political views (critics of Charles like the Earls of Bedford and Pembroke and Lords Paget and Russell, as well as loyalists such as the Duke and Duchess of Lennox, and scions of the Howard family), as though to persuade the nobles to suppress their differences for the higher virtues and values embodied by masque. It is tempting in some ways to see Van Dyck’s portraits as similarly underplaying differences, as representing and even forging a courtly community of men (and women) who shared values. In nearly all his portraits, the air of natural command and authority of the sitter is striking, be he a member of the royal family like Lennox55 a minister like Wentworth56 or Pembroke57 a writer such as Sir John Suckling58 – or even the artist himself.59 (As for the female portraits, nearly all are characterized by chaste beauty, purity and the command of the passions.60) Whatever the divisions between sitters, and the evolution of Van Dyck’s style during his period in England, the strong

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affinity between so many of these canvases makes them invaluable records of their age, as well as some of the greatest portraits of all time. Van Dyck was enormously well regarded, not only by the English monarchy (Henrietta Maria wrote to Jean Druy, Abbot of the Park Abbey near Louvain, about the artist’s excellent service) and the aristocracy.61 There was a demand for countless repetitions and copies (some close to, some distant from, the master’s hand) for the houses of minor nobility and perhaps even for public buildings. Miniatures and engravings enabled images, particularly of the king and the royal family, to be widely circulated. Van Dyck’s portraits were seen to be so powerfully evocative of authority that, although the Commonwealth regime ordered the royal collection to be sold, even Oliver Cromwell, who helped to bring Charles to the scaffold, directly appropriated poses, gestures and conceits from specific Van Dyck royal portraits for his own image as Lord Protector (see Figure 13, Cromwell as le roi). At the Restoration, Sir Peter Lely, who first came to England from the Netherlands in 1641, executed portraits of Charles II, his mistresses and courtiers, very much in the style of Van Dyck, as did, in some measure, Sir Godfrey Kneller for William III, to whom he became principal painter in 1691. Van Dyck’s influence on English portraiture, on the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds,62 Thomas Gainsborough63 and John Singer Sargent64 lasted well into the twentieth century and is even discernible in some celebrity images in the more modern genre of photography. Van Dyck was, in later times, emulated and appropriated for his ability to render psychological insight into, and the natural command of, his sitters – as Charles I himself apparently ordered inscribed on the artist’s tomb, Van Dyck ‘gave immortality to many’.65 If the works of his English heirs and successors never quite live up to the brilliance of the original, that may be because Van Dyck’s achievement, his revolutionizing of the English portrait, was not merely a matter of technical accomplishment but the product also of a cultural and political moment and milieu  – and arguably of a philosophy  – that were shattered on the battlefields of the English Civil War soon after the artist’s death.

9 ‘So hard a text’? Images of Charles I, 1612–1700

I Over the past 20 years or so historians of early modern England have revised and complicated our understanding of the royal court.1 The court is no longer regarded as a monolith, as a political body speaking with one voice. As we now describe it, the court was a stage of politics on which many voices were heard and disagreements and divisions were played out. Not only did factions, groupings and individuals vie for influence and contend over policies, but also courtiers and councillors were at times divided within themselves about right courses of action. Such revisions have begun to redraw our picture of early modern kingship. We do not have to go so far as to depict kings as puppets of their courtiers to appreciate that the making of ‘royal’ policy was often the product of many voices and negotiations, and that this was very much seen to be the norm of monarchical government. When, however, historians turn from the practices to the representations of kingship, these perspectives seem to be curiously ignored. Scholars write of ‘the king’s image’, as though all ambivalence, negotiation and division were erased.2 The image of the king is studied as univocal, controlled and controlling, as propaganda devised to sustain and enhance royal authority. In studying royal representation this way, historians are in part responding to what Harold Love calls the ‘fictions of state’ which were intended to present an image of unity and authority and to repress anxiety and division.3 Not least because they have paid little or no attention to critical theories of textual exegesis and reception, early modern historians have not attempted readings of royal representations, visual and verbal, as sites of multivalent and ambivalent meanings. Nor have they studied the ways in which the

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genres and forms of representation were open to multiple readings, and hence to appropriation and contest.4 Yet, images of authority could never be monolithic or controlled. No ruler constructed an image of his or her authority in a vacuum. The images of kingship from time immemorial, of the monarch as warrior prince, fount of justice or protector of the church, conveyed an authority which no ruler could surrender. And the recent histories and memories of predecessors  – the Virgin Queen for James I, for example  – bequeathed expectations and hopes which perforce helped to form the script of a new monarch’s self-representation. These various histories and memories constituted a multiple legacy to any new reign, a variety of patterns and models: of warlike and peace loving sovereigns, mild and authoritarian rulers, champions of the established church and godly reformers. The choice of which pattern to emulate or prioritize was not open only to the ruler. It is important to appreciate that there was space for subjects also to read these representations and to select those which for them most conveyed, and conferred, authority. The construction of a successful royal image, like most aspects of early modern government, involved a complex dialogue. In order to persuade, a representation had also to respond to the expectations, fears and desires of subjects. And anyone who appropriated an image of authority had, while reworking it for their purposes, also to fashion it out of materials that would be accepted as cloths of state. Though they conveyed and validated authority, most forms of representation were in some measure unstable and open to interpretation. Panegyrical verse could point to the ideals from which a ruler fell short, as well as praise his virtues; antimasques could raise problems that the masque itself never quite silenced or erased; the portrait could draw attention to the common humanity as well as divinity of the sovereign. Most of all, language itself, in the intensely rhetorical culture of the Renaissance, was not a fixed and sovereign signifier; rather words had multiple valence and carried traces of different meanings.5 All these instabilities were exacerbated by time. At the most obvious level, the changing age and circumstances of a ruler from childhood and adolescence, through marriage, parenthood and old age required changing vocabularies and motifs of representation; so each reign offered earlier and different images that could be played against currently authorized representations. As we shall see, the martial image of Prince Charles could be deployed to criticize the king of halcyon days. In the longer term, of course, changed circumstances involved adaptations of a royal image for the purposes of a new age or cause, making Queen Elizabeth in the early seventeenth century, for example, a champion of the godly and the ‘Protestant cause’. From the moment of their construction, representations of kings and queens were labile, open to reading and appropriation and shifting over both short and longer periods of time.

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A history of representations of rule, as part of the history of politics, of the exercise and experience of authority, is much needed. The case study I offer here may seem one of the less promising cases of image as negotiation. For, of all early modern monarchs, Charles I was the most in control of his image. He was a connoisseur, himself skilled in painting, music and the arts; the common themes and motifs in Caroline paintings, masques and architectural plans suggest an unusual degree of royal direction. Charles even wrote, or for long was held to have written, the significantly titled Eikon Basilike – ‘the royal image’. But what that singular title veils is the multiplicity of different images of Charles that had prevailed during his lifetime. And in successfully replacing them with the image of the Christlike martyr king, the Eikon Basilike remade Charles into a king and a text that all his successors, and any who challenged them for authority, would have to claim for themselves. In 1649, the Eikon Basilike appeared to elevate the king above the political fray. After 1660, however, Charles I became an image and text deployed in a new culture of party difference and contest. In the process, the image of the king was summoned in support of very different causes and re-presented, both by new rulers and by those who challenged their rule.

II From the beginning, the image of Charles was, to a large extent, outside his control, inherited and ambiguous. During James I’s reign, as Roy Strong and others have argued, there emerged virtually two rival courts – that of the Rex Pacificus, and that of his martial son Prince Henry who was seen as the hope of militant Protestantism by the heirs of the Leicester and Essex factions.6 Court entertainments for Prince Henry were marked by those tensions as James tried to rein in his son’s ambitions. On Henry’s death, Charles was expected by many to be not only his father’s heir but also his brother’s. James rededicated to his second son his Basilikon Doron, his manual of kingship written for Prince Henry; others consoled themselves at the death of the prince by looking to Charles to take up his banner.7 Many works on matters military and chivalric were dedicated to Charles; Robert Dallington described Charles as the ‘true inheritor’ of Henry’s virtues;8 Van Somer painted him in the armour of his brother, while an engraved portrait of Prince Charles mounted, by Delaram, was published with the verse inscription: Great hopeful Charles, who solely dost inherit, (Thy Father’s Goodness) Thy famous brothers spirit Long mayst thou live, and wee our Hope retain Till thou bee’st crown’d Great Britain’s Charlemagne.9

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Even before the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, then, the expectations upon, and representations of, Prince Charles were ambivalent and contradictory. Thereafter, events at home and abroad only added to complexity and contradiction. As we know, Charles, allied to his father’s favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, outran the slow pace of royal diplomacy, by going to Spain to woo the Infanta; then, on failing, returned to champion the war party in parliament, against James’s wishes. Failure to attain a Spanish bride necessitated a marriage of regal status, which meant a Catholic marriage – to Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henri IV. By 1625, then, when he succeeded to the throne, it was not at all clear whether Charles stood for war or peace, Protestantism or accommodation with Catholicism; it may be that, in the eyes of some, those uncertainties were never erased. What was unequivocally clear and an obvious cause of celebration was the succession to the throne not only of the first king of Britain, now joined to the royal house of France (a nation which English kings still claimed on their coin), but of the first married male monarch in England since Henry VIII. Moreover, unlike his father who was nearly 40 when he succeeded the Virgin Queen, Charles was a young monarch with a younger teenage bride. No wonder the early images of the new king and royal marriage were images of spring and fertility, of Phoebus and Daphne, of new hope and new beginnings.10 The reign, however, began in war with Spain; and the war went badly. Despite the royal marriage, Charles was then soon caught up simultaneously in war against France, a war waged ostensibly to protect the French Protestants, at the very time Henrietta Maria was arriving in England with her Catholic entourage of priests and confessors. The ambivalence of James’s foreign policy, perhaps the inevitable tensions in any foreign policy in the circumstances of the 1620s, were brought into even sharper focus by Charles’s marriage. And the costs of conducting the war led the government to extraordinary measures and levies that fractured the alliance that the prince and Buckingham had built with the Commons. Military defeat, broken parliaments and popular anxieties about a resurgent Catholicism abroad fanned by newspapers and corantos threatened to overshadow all the hopes of the martial prince and the virile young husband. The events may be familiar. What remains unclear is how far Charles’s image was damaged beyond repair during these early years. In so far as it was not (and there is certainly evidence of the king’s popularity during the 1630s and 1640s), Charles may have owed much to Buckingham who was, conventionally, blamed for failures at home and abroad. Buckingham both helped to protect, and complicated and obscured, the image of King Charles, as their relationship undoubtedly complicated the early years of the king’s marriage. For all that it struck Charles to the core, the assassination of the duke in 1628 opened opportunities for new beginnings: in the royal marriage, in more settled domestic politics, and for withdrawal from European entanglements.11 It brought the king into

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central focus, not only as the director of policy but as the orchestrator of his own representation: of an image that became more stabilized, more coherent and more consistent for much of the next decade. More than at any other time before his execution, the years after 1629 were those most in Charles’s control. The king took the reins of government into his own hands; no new favourite replaced Buckingham; Charles ceased to call parliament, and embarked on reforms of his court and administration. After initial tensions, the royal marriage became harmonious and happy; Prince Charles, the first of nine royal births, was born in 1630. Peace resolved some of the tensions that had led to the Petition of Right and enabled a time that Joad Raymond describes as one of ‘relative quiet’.12 And in terms also of his royal representation, Charles I not only took control, but, in Tom Corns’s words, ‘finally got the symbolism clear’.13 That symbolism focused on the royal marriage. Across all the media of representation, painting and engraving, medal, masque and verse panegyrics, the marriage of the king and queen, the royal family, was a central feature. Masque verses frequently alluded to the fertility of the royal couple, a message powerfully reinforced by Henrietta Maria performing in masques while pregnant. Volumes of celebratory poems addressed to ‘foecunda Maria’ not only starkly referred to ‘royal births’ that ‘do come so fast’; they physically involved the readers in the process of royal parturition: ‘we feel her pangs’.14 As William Struther’s thanksgiving sermon for the birth of a prince reminded subjects, after a century of uncertain succession, there was much to celebrate in an heir, and what, as more children were born, appeared to be an assured dynastic succession.15 The royal marriage, however, did not only or simply signify fertility and succession. Marriage and love had religious valence and were part of political discourse in a commonweal in which kings (and virgin queens) spoke of being wedded to their subjects. Charles I represented his marriage as an advertisement of his virtues as a ruler, his capacity for regulation of his appetites and his example to subjects whom he would regulate by love rather than fear.16 The report from court was of a new phenomenon of Platonic love, a chaste union of souls, which symbolized the higher reason. As I have argued elsewhere, and a rereading of Caroline masques reveals more clearly, such ‘arguments’ sit uncomfortably with the very physical language of fertility and sexual union in a manner that suggests that the masque writers were either not entirely ‘on message’, or were still negotiating a mixed message. Nor was this the only tension. The royal marriage also symbolized peace, and the greater triumphs of peace and love over the vicissitudes of lesser, worldly victories. ‘Those princes see the happiest days’, Aurelian Townshend wrote in Albion’s Triumph (1632), ‘whose olive branches stand for bays’.17 And Rubens similarly portrays Charles as St George slaying the dragon, not as a warrior prince but as a chivalric lover, whose love secures a realm of peace and harmony. Masque

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and canvas celebrated peace and relegated ‘the representation of a battle’ in Coelum Britanicum (1634) to antimasque.18 The problem here was that the noise of battle could not be so easily silenced. As Henry Hexham reminded readers, ‘our noblemen, volunteers and gentlemen’ bore arms abroad.19 The corantos praised Protestant heroes such as Gustavus Adolphus and implicitly condemned England’s inactivity. Sharon Achinstein argues persuasively that during these years Milton formulated a very different impression of the regime from its image of ‘halcyon days’.20 And such sentiments and criticisms were echoed at court among factions that supported a Dutch alliance. Not even the world of masque was free from such ambivalences. It was, after all, Townshend who wrote an elegiacal letter upon the death of Gustavus Adolphus and his fellow masque writer, Thomas Carew, to whom he addressed it.21 The ‘triumphs’, ‘victories’ and martial themes in Caroline masques may have been devised as triumphs of peace, but they also brought war into the Banqueting House at Whitehall. By the time of the last masque, Salmacida Spolia (1640), war – albeit against the Calvinist Scots rather than continental Catholicism  – shaped the backdrop to the entertainment, and Charles was again portrayed in armour.22 The image of halcyon peace was never free from other representations and evocations of war, and the authors of masques acknowledged their anxieties about such evocations. In Chloridia (1631), for example, the postilion demonizes the world of popular print: ‘never was hell so furnished of the commodity of news’, while in The Temple of Love (1635), Davenant stages an antimasque of libellers who are not only described as lovers of discord but enemies of poetry.23 While critics are right to point out that antimasques were succeeded by images of peace, order and authority, they nevertheless brought to Whitehall other representations, continuing the dialogue that took place outside the walls. Perhaps there were other ambiguities in the 1630s images of Charles I to which we have paid inadequate attention. In the masques the royal marriage is presented as that which makes the king complete: it was a vision of ‘perfect will and strengthened reason’.24 The ‘Carlomaria’ of masque was a ‘hermaphrodite’, a figure partaking of both sexes.25 At a time when there was mounting concern about the queen’s Catholicism and influence on government, such an image of them as one body may have added to the fear (quite unfounded in reality) that the king was ruled by his wife. And the image of the hermaphrodite, as well as the talk of Platonic love, may also have contributed to the charges, aired in the 1620s and again in the 1640s, that Charles was not fully masculine.26 Unfortunately, we cannot usually know how such images were read. But if despite all the fecundity of the royal marriage, Charles emerged from masque representation as dominated or feminized, we shall have to ponder again whether he got the symbolism right.

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III Salmacida Spolia was the last Stuart masque. The form of masque could not contain the Scots war, the quarrel within the king’s counsels and the recall of parliaments, the public discussion of arcana imperii, and the open disagreements and divisions that began to appear after 1640.27 Changed circumstances demanded different modes of representation. Whatever his preference for silence (in masque and on canvas and coin, the principal genres of the royal image in the 1630s), after 1640 – in and out of parliament  – Charles I had to argue his case. Words became the vital medium of representation, and as the pamphlet conflict sharpened, heralding the conflict of arms, winning the war of words became decisive in gaining support. Charles may have been reluctant to represent himself in words, needing to be persuaded by counsellors like Sir Edward Hyde who became the voice and pen of his early 1640s polemics. But we should not assume that when it came to words, the royal image was inevitably at a disadvantage in the desacralizing proliferation of print. The royal word was seen to convey authority, and the language of politics was language that elevated and favoured the king.28 Joad Raymond is, I believe, mistaken to assert that the commonplace depicting the king as sacred ‘grated in the then political climate’ of 1641.29 What strikes us rather is the lengths gone to by parliamentarian pamphleteers to criticize the king within this shared language, a concern exhibited in Henry Parker’s acknowledgement that ‘God sheds here some rays of majesty upon his vicegerents on earth.’30 Even after 1642 there emerged no clear alternative discourse. And though the language of law and constitution supported the limitations to absolute rule, they did not easily justify rebellion. Rather common metaphors, of the king as sun or head of the body, rendered rebellion as cosmic inversion and self-destruction. During the 1640s the magic and mystique of monarchy remained remarkably resilient. At Lincoln in 1642, the king’s ‘transcendent expression’, so an account had it, dispelled ‘clouds of fear’; in 1643 he was presented in a poem as the ‘Sunne that quickened, with new life, this Isle’; those who petitioned for cure of the king’s evil spoke of his ‘sacred hands’ and ‘miraculous medicinal virtue’; none dared represent the king in cartoon.31 Rather the parliamentarians were led to appropriate and redeploy the king’s image and words for their purpose, figuring Charles I on their banners and coins, and endeavouring to answer royal declarations in the king’s own discursive currency. This was why the discovery and publications of the king’s own correspondence was such a triumph and turning point in the representational history of the Civil War. With The King’s Cabinet Opened (1645), his opponents believed they would not only win the polemical war using the king’s own weapons and phrases, they could turn them against him. It mattered much to display the letters and have it believed that they

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were ‘real’, authentic, because the king’s words still had special force, and no other word could have as authoritatively discredited him as the royal word itself. The King’s Cabinet Opened was published not just to manifest Charles’s duplicity but to undermine all royal discourse as utterance possessed of higher authority.32 As Joad Raymond shows, the strategy worked in part. But it also reconstituted both the king and the royal image, foreshadowing the greatest triumph of royal discourse, the Eikon Basilike. For in The King’s Cabinet Opened, in the intimate, moving letters to his wife, Charles ‘showed himself to the life’. And as one defender put it, ‘the people will hence see the choice endowments of their king and so be brought to love and honour him.’33 This was no longer the monarch mysteriously distant from his subjects, but a man, a husband, flawed but human, with whom other mortals could empathize. Thereafter, as Raymond shows, empathy became sympathy as Charles was presented as a lonely victim, defeated, treated with contempt, and usually separated from his wife and children. Charles began to be represented as a man of sensibility and sincere emotion. His Majesties Complaint Occasioned by His Late Sufferings has the king declaring ‘with watery rivulets both mine eyes overflow’; ‘my heart is sad’.34 The sympathy such lines evoked was in no way unpolitical: as popular feeling for Charles I grew, suspicions simultaneously mounted about the characters and motives of those who hounded him. His Majesties Complaint warns the people that ‘They’ll sell me . . . else seek to make me shorter by the head’, and predicted that they ‘studied to root out Monarchie, to create an arbitrary Tyranny’.35 Turning the table on the king’s detractors, the pamphlet wrote of plots contrived to ruin the monarch and trick the people. By 1647, a major shift in the representation of Charles had been effected. As Edward Symmons, author of A Vindication of the king, admitted, the people had not been ready to hear him lauded until now. The King’s Cabinet Opened, he acknowledged, had led some to ‘scruple’ about his intentions, but only because his enemies had glossed them with ‘sinister constructions’. A less partisan reading revealed ‘His Majesty’s longing desire to see peace restored to his poor subjects’, which only trickery had obscured. In a new language of sensibility Charles was being presented, now with conviction, as the people’s prince, and a prince who, even amid adversity, ‘beamed forth in his dark condition’.36 By 1646, Charles himself had decided to retreat from pamphlet justification and exchange, and to accept what he already discerned would be his fate. He no longer needed to speak. Even as the radicals in the army were deciding to try him as a man of blood, his new image as father of the nation and martyr to church and law was already being established.37 There can be no doubt that the Eikon Basilike, published immediately after the regicide, dominated the political discourse of the next decade. As Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler and others have made us appreciate, its structure, form and language, its very non-specificity, its focus on the king’s character

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and conscience rather than details of deeds or policy, made it a text that it was as difficult as well as necessary to answer.38 Milton’s Eikonoklastes was in every way determined by the king’s book which he endeavoured to counter chapter by chapter. The length of his response, however, the tedium of detail, both missed the target and failed to capture the reader. As with other responses to the Eikon Basilike, such as Eikon Alethine, there is too in Milton’s treatise a tone of irritation  – about the ‘madness’ of readers ‘exorbitant and excessive in their motions’, ‘miserable, credulous [and] deluded’  – that contrasts with the patience, humility and approachability of King Charles represented in his book.39 Quite simply Milton and others failed to destroy the king’s (self-)construction as a martyr. As Lois Potter puts it, ‘the power of the martyr image was so strong in the 1650s the late king was attacked only within a context in which he could be seen as a victim.’40 The Eikon Basilike erased the ‘man of blood’ and rewrote Charles I as the suffering Christ.41 Potter also draws attention to a neglected and important consequence of the regicide and the Eikon Basilike: a profound sense and fear of national sin. His drawing attention to the sins committed against him was not the least of the devices by means of which Charles took from his enemies the support of Scripture and providence. The account in the Eikon Basilike of how Sir John Hotham, who had refused the king entry to Hull, met his death, reads like a Puritan providential narrative.42 And evidence after 1649 of a national fear of God’s vengeance for the death of his anointed lieutenant on earth is legion. The Subjects Sorrow published lamentations upon the death of Britain’s Josiah, thrown into the pit by the sins of the people who now faced God’s displeasure and woe for their sins.43 An elegy on Charles dwelt on ‘the guilt of a King-shed sacred blood’ and foresaw ‘the powers of vengeance on their heads to fall’.44 A flurry of pamphlets referred to ‘the general sin of the land’, the ‘damnable sin’, and called on readers: ‘O England, England, England, repent, repent, repent thy sins’, and cried for the vengeance that God had taken against other rebels – Corah and Absalom, Shimei and Achitophel.45 And, as if in answer to the call, God appeared to give a sign. While A Miracle of Miracles related the wonder of a maid at Deptford cured by a hand dipped in the martyr’s blood, The Confession of Richard Brandon, Charles’s executioner, recounted the neck pains he suffered from the moment he delivered the fatal blow and the apparitions of God’s judgement that tortured his soul in the days before he died.46 The sense of sin did not abate.47 In 1660 the appointment of 30 January as a day of remembrance and mourning evidently met a real need for a national atonement of sin, as it were a national confession. In other ways, too, the Eikon Basilike kept the image of the king and of monarchy alive during the years of the republic. Milton and others dwelt on the frontispiece of the king ‘ejaculating his prayers to God’ which led the ‘silly beholder to a belief that he died an innocent martyr’.48 It was

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indeed a powerful image that took not only with learned readers but the ‘image doting rabble’ who evidently contributed to the book’s success.49 The king’s image, in variants of the frontispiece to the Eikon, was reproduced in engravings, woodcuts, badges and mementoes that both sustained the memory of Charles I and lent support to the cause of his son and heir.50 Two years after the regicide, a pamphleteer complained that the people were still ‘going a whoring after [Charles’s] picture .  .  . set up in the Old Exchange’.51 Though some statues of the king were removed by official decree, paintings remained in country houses, and engravings and woodcuts were disseminated widely. During the Protectorate, and especially the late 1650s, a number of accounts of Charles I’s life and work, illustrated with his image, appeared provocatively to herald the succession of his son.52 The image of Charles I helped to fulfil the royalist interpretation of providence: it not only destabilized the republic, it helped to enact the Restoration. At first sight therefore, the Eikon Basilike appears as the most powerful articulation of conservative and royalist politics. Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler, however, persuasively and interestingly, complicates that conclusion. Rather than speaking univocally with the voice of authority, she finds the indeterminacy of the Eikon opens it to multiplicity – a multiplicity realized materially in the many editions, different illustrations, glosses and formats that make it inaccurate to talk of one text. The king’s book, she argues, was a text in the ‘totality of its editions, accretions, illustrations, and the experiences of its various readers’.53 Moreover, while the Eikon sacralized and mystified the monarch, it also commodified and democratized his majesty, opening arcana imperii and the king’s conscience to the consuming subject. Though the message of the Eikon was conservative, in its form, its language and its strategies, it was a radical re-presentation of the king. In its multiplicity, the Eikon Basilike points to the ambiguities of royal representation and the multivalence of the images of Charles I in the years after the Restoration.

IV On his restoration in 1660, as throughout the 1650s, Charles II was astute in evoking the memory and image of his father: the new king was another David returned from exile, in fulfilment of providence. As well as editions, including a two-volume folio, of Charles I’s Works, the Restoration saw David Lloyd’s publication of Eikon Basilike  – now called The True Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty Charles II. In his epistle dedicatory, Lloyd advocated that books showing how the country had been ensnared in calamitous Civil War be placed in every parish, and then proceeded to relate that history up to the return of his ‘sacred majesty’.54 Lloyd’s references to the nation’s sins were echoed in an outpouring of national penitence. ‘We had sinned’, a panegyric on the martyr reminded readers, ‘and Charles must suffer’.55 The author of A Most Certain Truth Asserted That King

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Charles the First Was No Man of Blood declaimed that ‘we will never be able to scour and wash away the guilt and stain of regicide’.56 No doubt the emphasis on Charles’s martyrdom was strategic: the cult of Charles the martyr was ‘deployed to drive out another, that of martyrs to the Good Old Cause’ who tried, like the king, to turn the scaffold into propaganda – in their case for republicanism.57 But we should not forget that 1660 offered the nation the first opportunity for public expression of the shock, grief and sin of regicide as well as an occasion for celebration. As Potter suggests, Charles II’s decision to mark not the day of his succession, 30 January, but the day of his birthday and restoration, 29 May, may have been taken to separate mourning and celebration, death and new birth, by a winter that gave way to spring, a lent of atonement and penitence.58 In October 1660, a panegyric on both kings, evoking the Eikon, described Charles I as ‘the best of texts’.59 On 30 January every year thereafter that was precisely what Charles became. A form of prayer was drawn up, asking forgiveness for the sin of regicide, and across the country sermons – 3,000 each year it was claimed – blended biblical passages with the texts of the martyr’s words and life, to point up a lesson.60 The obvious lesson in 1660 was the sanctity of kingship, the denigration of regicides and the fulfilment of God’s divine plan. But from the beginning the 30 January sermons allowed for the articulation of a number of issues and concerns, and deployed the text and image of Charles I for different purposes. Where to some the martyr embodied royalist revenge and triumph, the official prayers for 30 January 1661 endeavoured to ‘reunite all our remaining divisions’, to ‘reconcile our differences’.61 In fact, 30 January came to be an occasion on which remembering the Civil War served to bind the nation. Accordingly in 1664, Henry King took as his text 2 Chronicles 35.24–5, ‘And all Judah and Jerusalem mourned for Josiah’, to recall the virtuous example of a sovereign who ‘speaks this day from every pulpit’.62 During the honeymoon of the early years of Restoration, the image of Charles as martyr for a nation that had returned from madness to reason was dominant. Yet, as with all Restoration culture, we detect nervous anxieties beneath the surface; even Henry King closed with a prayer of hope that Charles II would ‘never be put to that cruel and bloody test unto which the piety and patience of his martyred father were . . . put’.63 Before very much longer such anxieties were being voiced more loudly as Charles II faced criticism of his religious and foreign policy, the impeachment of his first minister and opposition in parliament. By 1667, 30 January sermons were warning that ‘the people that have rebelled once, and so successfully, will be ready to do so often’, and claiming that the Great Fire that consumed London signalled the dangers of resistance.64 Thereafter, the 30 January sermons presented Charles I as a powerful reminder of the ills of opposition and conflict and as powerful advocate for the sacred authority of monarchy. Preaching on ‘a public and national sin’ at Salisbury in 1669, a prebend of the cathedral feared that ‘this nation must infallibly come into the

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same state and condition it was in anno 1642.’65 By 1674, after the bitter quarrels over the Declaration of Indulgence, Richard Meggott passionately defended kingship as the foundation of the ‘benefit and security’ of all, and, recalling the regicide, urged, ‘let not the distance of time since these things were done make us fancy ourselves the more secure.’66 Political tensions and divisions did more than excite a general fear of renewed civil conflict; they also punctured the illusion of unity and harmony that Restoration discourse had endeavoured to promote. Meggott abhorred, he claimed, ‘tearing open wounds which time is closing up’, but he did not hesitate to attribute the blame for unrest to ‘they of the consistory’, to Presbyterians and Puritans, who were again causing trouble.67 The next year, at Norwich, Robert Conold was more forceful and specific in his denunciations: ‘there is nothing’, he told his auditors, ‘so absurd and unreasonable as a blind and mistaken zealot’. It was schismatics who threatened to subvert government and ‘as long as the thirtieth of January stands in our calendar, we shall have reason to pray that we may be delivered from this sort of unreasonable and wicked men.’ Though the discourse of reason and ‘rational religion’ was new, the 30 January sermon evoked the old spectre of Puritanism to point up the dangers to monarchy and nation.68 Indeed, as fears of Catholicism and a Catholic succession mounted in the 1670s, the 30 January sermons were deployed to dispel them, or even to appropriate them for the cause of Charles II. Arguing that the institution of episcopacy as much as monarchy was ‘sealed by the blood of this day’s martyr’, John March, in a sermon at Newcastle in 1677, claimed that there was more to be feared from dissenters than papists: ‘Treason may be more commodiously hatched in a conventicle than in Fawkes’s cellar.’69 Two years later, Edward Pelling directly connected the commemoration of 30 January and 5 November and argued that it was the Puritans who most resembled the papists in advocating resistance to kings.70 As the Popish Plot scare and the attempt by the Whigs to exclude James, Duke of York, from the succession veered towards crisis, the text and images of Charles I were summoned to support his son. The Disloyal Forty and Forty One, and Nathaniel Crouch’s The Wars in England, along with republications of 1640s material, including Thomas May’s Breviary of the History of Parliament, engravings of Charles I, and the Eikon Basilike itself, publicized the connection between Civil War and the divisions over royal prerogative in 1680.71 Most of the preachers who invoked the name of Charles I did so to assert the duties of allegiance to sovereign power: Samuel Crossman, in a sermon preached on 30 January at Bristol, told his congregation that to atone for their sins against the father, they needed to ‘repay a double loyalty, the utmost allegiance and duty to the son’.72 But the 30 January sermon and the image of Charles I were not, even in 1679–80, simply the property of the Tories. Gilbert Burnet, sensing the need to claim the validation of the martyr for his own arguments, exonerated most Protestants from the charge of being schismatic and warned against the menace of popery.73 In a similar

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vein, No Popery but the Protestant Religion cited the papers of ‘the blessed martyr King Charles I’ to show that ‘popery he held absolutely inconsistent with the constitution of this realm’.74 Though the republican Whigs could not easily claim him for their cause  – they were said to have burned the Eikon Basilike in the 1680s – those who invoked the memory of Charles I had a variety of agendas, not all of which reflected royal policy.75 As we know, Charles II survived the crisis, defeated the Whigs, and re-established his authority. That he did owed much to the fear of renewed Civil War and the associated guilt over regicide – a fear and guilt that are evident in popular ballads and doggerel verse as well as in sermons and pamphlets. Indeed, we should not underestimate the role of 30 January sermons in shaping popular politics. In a discourse on ‘non resisting’, published in the wake of Exclusion, George Hickes explained that he had little altered the 30 January sermons which formed the basis of his book: ‘he chose rather to publish them as he preached them, sermons being more bought and read by common people.’76 It would appear from events and the popular support for Charles and his brother that he may have had a point. In the wake of the Exclusion crisis and the defeat of the Whigs at the Oxford parliament, there followed what historians describe as a Tory reaction. Once again the divinity and absolute power of kings was argued, and the image of Charles I, once an image for healing and reconciliation, was now appropriated by high Anglican Tories for their cause and to denigrate their enemies: the nation’s martyr became a standard bearer in party politics. We can hear the first cries for vengeance even before the final triumph, in Francis Turner’s reference to God striking blind the Milton who had justified resistance.77 Thomas Wilson’s sermon on The Martyrdom of King Charles I (1682) denounced the ‘rebellious practices and principles of fanatics’ from Knox to contemporary times and advocated unquestioning obedience.78 Henry Maurice’s sermon for 30 January 1682 damned rebels and, asserting the ‘necessity of joining religion to loyalty’, urged that his auditors ‘confirm ourselves with steadfast resolution of perpetual obedience to our sovereign’.79 John Watson’s 1683 Memoirs of the Family of the Stuarts and the Remarkable Providences of God Towards Them called up the memory of Charles I to show the ‘folly as well as impiety of all attempts against a throne of divine establishment . . . attended by so many miraculous deliverances and preservations’.80 The Rebels Doom connected the ‘chaos of distraction’ of Charles I’s reign to more recent troubles, and foresaw the ‘same vengeance from heaven’ on the fomenters of these troubles as on the regicides.81 Faced with a barrage of divine right apologia and the regained popularity of the king, the Whigs were stunned into near silence. In 1680 as in 1649, the image and words of Charles the martyr won the polemical argument: as Thomas Long put it, ‘his pen obtained what his sword could not’.82 It is not too much to suggest that it was the memory and legacy of Charles I that secured his son’s survival and effected the Tories’ triumph and the

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succession of James, Duke of York. In his much publicized last words to his children, Charles I had required that they allow no disruption to the succession, and the martyr’s dying words were used to counter those who sought to put aside his last son. As Matthew Taubman versed it in a ‘heroic poem’ to the Duke of York in 1682, Well did the ROYAL MARTYR e’re he fell To bind SUCCESSION shew his latest zeal ‘A king and martyr’s cry’, he continued, ‘deserves regard’.83 From 1660, the ‘text’ of Charles I had been glossed  – to heal and unify the nation, to support royal authority, but also to criticize the failings of a licentious king, to warn of the dangers of division, finally to lambast the Whigs as rebels and schismatics. When James II ascended the throne, the memory of Charles I was nearly as powerful and politically important as it had been in the 1660s. In many ways the images of James II recalled and traced the representational narrative of his father. As a prince he was known for martial valour on land and at sea, and the publication of his campaign memoirs in service with the French army presented him very much a man of arms.84 After 1688, however, in exile, he adopted the pose of the suffering martyr. His devotions written at St Germain and the passages of his life that he wrote echo the Eikon Basilike, as does the title, Imago Regis, of his personal memoir published a year after the reissued Eikon, in 1692.85 Far more than his elder brother, in style as well as experience, James II was the image of Charles I. Moreover, from the beginning of his reign he brought alive the memories of Civil War. Having survived attempts at exclusion, on coming to the throne James faced the rebellion of Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, and the nation again stared bloody conflagration in the face. Not surprisingly the 30 January sermons expressed those anxieties and the attempts to shore up royal authority and demonize opposition and resistance. Taking as his text Psalm 137, Edward Pelling extolled the virtues of Charles the martyr, the sad suffering that befell the nation after his execution, and the providential deaths met by his enemies. All he recounted ‘for the information of those who through this ignorance of the condition of those times are in danger of being misled into practices which naturally tend to draw on a second captivity’.86 Benjamin Woodroffe, in his January sermon dedicated to James, preaching on Jeremiah 3.8, revealed his fear that conspirators and traitors had not been humbled despite all God’s manifestations and closed with an appeal that the memory of the martyr might discredit and dispel republican principles and disaffection.87 In a sermon preached at Chard before the king’s troops that were sent to counter Monmouth, the preacher quoted from the Eikon Basilike to denounce those who under pretence of religion perturbed the state.88 The next year Thomas Manningham’s A Solemn Humiliation for the Murder of King Charles I asked readers: ‘is sedition and rebellion a repenting for the barbarous outrages of a civil war?’ and urged that the

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memory of a king sacrificed for his Christian faith might lead all to see that true piety lay in loyalty.89 The memory and image of Charles I, then, may have secured James the succession and helped him survive the first challenge to his rule. Certainly volumes of loyalist ballads and poems in the wake of Monmouth’s defeat make frequent references to the Civil War and the martyred monarch.90 But as we have argued throughout, the image and memory of Charles I were not univocal, nor the exclusive property of any one cause. Indeed, Pelling acknowledged that the distance of time and the emergence of a generation that had not experienced 1649 rendered Charles still more a text to be written and read for, and in, the contemporary moment.91 James II and his supporters relentlessly proffered Charles I as the model of his kingship: in 1687 there appeared the second edition of The Works of Charles I, with an account of his life and martyrdom, with the royal arms of James facing the title page.92 But to deploy the memory of the martyr to church and crown for James’s policies of tolerating and advancing Catholicism, especially after Charles had been represented as hounded by papist enemies of monarchy, presented difficulties, to say the least. It was surely not by chance that an account of the executions of the rebels in the West was titled The Protestant Martyrs.93 And even the natural supporters of monarchy, the Tories, were not willing to see Charles I hijacked for Rome. From 1649 and especially after 1660, Charles I had become the iconic embodiment of the unity of church and crown. In endeavouring to appropriate him for another church, James II lost too the support his image lent to the crown. For all the nation rallied to the martyr’s son in 1685, not least through fear of renewed civil conflict, in 1688 it risked a Civil War – and, in concurring in William III’s invasion, it breached the principle of divine succession for which Charles I had died.94 One might think therefore that the 1688 Revolution put an end to the cult of Charles the martyr, or at least displaced Charles I to the margins of Jacobite nostalgia. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Laura Knoppers demonstrates, ‘the character and imagery of Charles I continued to be interpreted, contested and debated long after 1688.’95 The story of the performances of the text and image of Charles I after 1688 is a complex and shifting one that awaits full explication. And it is an important aspect of a larger story: how the Whigs secured the Revolution by appropriation and control of the validating texts of authority, especially of England’s history.96 Over time, in fact, the image of Charles I came to assist in the establishing of the Revolutionary settlement, and so, ironically, was led to lend support to a Whig political culture, whose historians were to begin to rewrite the king as an absolutist enemy of unconstitutional governments, all too familiar from the textbooks of our own age.97 In the beginning, Charles I was not a promising text for the Whigs. Rather, the Revolution was justified in pamphlets that denied the necessity of hereditary succession, in pragmatic defences of the de facto government,

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most of all in sermons lauding God’s providence, some of which freely acknowledged the ‘extraordinary revolution’ that had taken place, and the new ‘fiction’ of state that posterity would see.98 There is little reference to Charles I in these texts. Indeed, the appointment of 31 January 1689 as a day of public thanksgiving for William’s deliverance of the nation may well have been a strategic attempt to erase the 30 January and the potentially embarrassing reflections to which it might give rise. On 31 January, preachers gave thanks ‘for the great deliverance of this kingdom from popery and slavery’ or ‘for having made his highness the Prince of Orange the glorious instrument of the great deliverance of this kingdom from popery and arbitrary power’.99 However, the text and memory of Charles I were too entrenched in the national calendar and imagination to be ignored, and the Whig apologists did not ignore them. The year 1689 saw the publication of Burnet’s The Royal Martyr Lamented, a sermon originally preached in 1675, full of echoes of the king’s words and the Eikon Basilike.100 The message – ‘so dangerous is it to nourish factions’ – was clearly as apt for 1689 as for Charles II, and Burnet’s was one of the first attempts to bring to the support of William and Mary the martyr as a symbol of the duties of obedience and allegiance.101 In a 30 January sermon preached in the cathedral of York, William Stainforth praised the Charles I who had been a Josiah, an earthly God. He argued that Charles had been free from any desire of arbitrary power, and concluded: ‘how happy might these nations have been under the indulgent government of such a prince.’102 The gesture to ‘arbitrary power’ seems clearly to point to the sins for which James II had met God’s judgement, and to attempt to connect the moderate rule of the martyr with William who was now delivering the realm again from what had threatened Charles’s principles.103 A reading in these terms is supported by other texts. In 1690, for example, An Epitome of English History specifically drew a parallel between the despotic and arbitrary regimes of Oliver Cromwell and James II, to render James illegitimate, to make the Revolution, as it were, another Restoration, and to connect William the Redeemer to the Christlike Charles who had died for his subjects. The Epitome is fulsome in its praise of Charles I  – ‘O glorious prince’  – and replete with references to ‘the most unheard of tragedy’, ‘the unparalleled murder’ of a great sovereign.104 The purpose of ‘viewing this picture’ was to persuade readers to ‘abhor’ and reject ‘arbitrary and tyrannical usurpation’, the usurpation manifested by James no less than Cromwell.105 It was a skilful deflecting of the charge of ‘usurpation’ from William to the Stuart he had eclipsed. And the Epitome did not recruit Charles only to support the legitimacy of William’s kingship. The frontispiece to the book presents an engraving that first appeared in the 1640s: an image of Charles I, armoured and with a sword, defending the tree of religion.106 The image contrasts Charles with his son ‘whose government was popery’ and implicitly connects the martyr to the Protestant Hercules who redeemed religion as well as a monarchy ‘equally divided betwixt king and people’.107 In

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a sermon preached at Newcastle giving thanks for William’s victories against the Jacobites in Ireland, George Tullie, subdean at York, made reference to ‘King Charles the martyr’, and to William as God’s instrument.108 Such connections not only bypassed and exiled, as had events, James II; they also painted William as the true heir of his grandfather the martyr. Ironically, in the process, the image of Charles I had once again become bound up with martial victory and the championship of Protestantism. Charles I was indeed a malleable and multivalent text. Events in 1691, however, cast doubts on the validity of the Caroline text, in the most damaging way. In 1691, a new edition of Milton’s Eikonoklastes was advertised with a brief memorandum allegedly found in the library of the Earl of Anglesey in 1686: it stated that Anglesey had heard Charles II affirm that the Eikon Basilike was not the work of his father but of Dr John Gauden.109 We might expect the revelation to have prompted a divided response. But what is interesting is that, in the pamphlet debate and exchange that followed, apologists for the government were as anxious to come to the defence of the authenticity of the Eikon as were old servants of Charles I or supporters of James II. Revolution Tories indeed defended the Eikon as a support of William’s kingship. Thomas Long dedicated to the Bishop of Exeter his detailed critique of the argument for Gauden’s authorship.110 ‘Their Majesties’ chaplain at St. Botolph’, Richard Hollingworth, penned both a Defence of King Charles the First’s Holy and Divine Book Called Eikon Basilike and A Defence of King Charles I.111 In the first, in a preface to the reader, he powerfully drew the connection between justification of the martyr and of his grandson William. The attack on Charles, he noted, had been launched at home while William brandished his sword for the nation abroad. He continued: It is plain these attempts upon the name and memory of King Charles I are in order to a Commonwealth, or else to bring the monarchy to the standard of Venice or Genoa; and therefore I think no man is to be blamed at this time for standing up for the ancient constitution of the kingdom and in order to it for defending that prince.112 Just as God had showed his displeasure at the treatment of the first champion of the ancient constitution, so he threatened again to punish the realm for any disloyalty to its second. Hollingworth called on readers to reject the attacks on Charles (and William) ‘that so we may not be disappointed of our hopes and expectations of success this summer, by sea and land, by provoking God’. As he put it in his defence of Charles, all ‘monarchy is struck through the sides of that great prince’. Hollingworth dedicated his work to William and Mary, the successors of a grandfather ‘whose virtues and graces you daily imitate’.113 Such defences of Charles I and the Eikon helped to appropriate the martyr for the Revolutionary regime. William Sherlock began his

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30  January sermon for 1692 condemning the ‘venomed pens’ that had attacked Charles’s memory, and proceeded to use his memory to defend King William’s authority against his critics. Some, he had heard, were claiming that the late Revolution had been founded on the principles of the opposition to Charles I: that a prince was accountable to his subjects. Countering their arguments, he invoked the murder of Charles, and the guilt that still adhered to regicide, as the ill fruits of such ‘loose notions’. Orange, he continued, succeeded to the independence and ancient government of his grandfather ‘so that . . . the late Revolution has made no alteration at all in the principles of government and obedience’. All the ‘pretences’ for opposition or faction were, he protested, ‘silenced by the advancement of their majesties to the throne’.114 Defended from the attacks launched by Milton, Ludlow, and the Anglesey Memorandum, the memory of Charles survived both 1688 and 1691 to become a defence of Revolution. In 1693, Thomas Long, in defending the Eikon, put the case succinctly: if Charles I’s murder could be ‘openly justified, what monarch can be secure?’ And restoring the martyr’s reputation, he virtually constructed Charles as a talisman against opposition, confidently believing that ‘nor will the consults of papists, republicans or regicides have any operation upon us as long as the Reliquiae Carolinae have their due respect and influence upon us’.115 Though it had been a masterful achievement to recruit him at all, the Williamite regime did not have Charles all to itself. Laura Knoppers explores how ‘in a pointed rebuttal to the “Glorious Revolution”, Jacobite verse revived the martyr-king Charles I to legitimate and sanctify the exiled Stuart family’, and to sustain their divine right. However, as she argues, James II remained too controversial, and too unpopular, to ‘assume the full lineaments’ of the martyr for the church and crown.116 And by the time his son James Francis Edward came of age, the cult of patient suffering martyr, renewed in James II’s devotions and engraved images, proved an unhelpful representation in any call to action or arms. Moreover, with the death of William III and the succession of James’s daughter Anne as queen, many of the tensions over the memory of the martyr subsided.117 Anne was not only a Stuart; she displayed herself as a Stuart. Though as a woman she adopted the motto and other representational motifs of Queen Elizabeth, Anne was painted and engraved surrounded by, and as the heir of, her Stuart antecedents, even with the new Garter badge introduced in the reign of Charles I.118 During Anne’s reign, the image of Charles I became very prominent in the bitter debates among divines that followed Henry Sacheverell’s high church sermons against Presbyterians and dissenters. Literally so, for Sacheverell was depicted holding a miniature of Charles I, with the inscription ‘ye face of truth you’ve wronged before’.119 High churchmen and low, Tories and Whigs, fought over the next years to claim Charles for their cause. After Anne’s death even the Hanoverians appear to have attempted to temper their alterity by paintings and poses in the manner of Charles I and Van Dyck.

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Wreaths were laid at the martyr’s tomb until early this century, and there are those who still attend sermons in commemoration of the martyr on 30 January. Doubtless when the time comes for Charles III to succeed to the throne, histories, images and films of Charles I will appear in proliferation. We can be fairly confident that they will be deployed, appropriated and contested  – by the advocates of a republic as well as the friends of monarchy.

V Ironically, the very success of the Eikon Basilike in replacing different and contested representations with an authoritative image of Charles led to that image being appropriated and rescripted by Catholics and nonconformists, Whigs, Tories and Jacobites, Stuarts and Orangists. Because the image and memory of the martyr carried such authority, all needed to claim him for their cause. In 1650 the author of a verse prefacing the Reliquiae Sacrae Carolinae lamented: Unvalued Charles: thou art so hard a text, Writ in one age, not understood I’ th’ next.120 What his lament still expressed was a cultural yearning for stability, for fixed meaning. But for all his understandable desire, neither the texts of authority nor authority itself were (or are) fixed or resistant to different understandings. They were (and are) polyvalent, malleable, open to multiple interpretations. No more can our own histories fix their meaning, only continue to reread and rewrite them for ourselves.

10 ‘Something of Monarchy’: Milton and Cromwell, republicanism and regality

I Though it is 50 years ago that E. R. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture and A. P. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being were published, it was for many more years that it was widely held by scholars that monarchical government in early modern England was a natural constitution and that few – if any – contemporaries pondered, or could even imagine, any other polity.1 In short, the consensus was, republicanism was literally inconceivable as Gloriana held sway in the hearts and minds of her subjects. A description of England as a natural monarchical state had always to face the fact that royal authority had often been challenged by legal courses, by aristocratic and popular rebellions, and by depositions and murders of kings. And, for all that the Henrician Reformation placed more stress on the sanctity of a monarch who was now also Supreme Head of the Church, the events and legacy of Henry’s reign made monarchy more vulnerable to resistance justified by conscience and faith and increased the authority of parliaments and the involvement of subjects in what was newly called the ‘commonwealth’ of England.2 Still, despite this ambiguous legacy, it was widely held that by the end of the sixteenth century, English monarchy had reached an apogee of power beyond any medieval sovereigns would have imagined: the claim to divine right by the first Stuart, though more insistently articulated, was neither revolutionary nor particularly contentious. More recently, scholars have raised fundamental doubts about this depiction of the early modern English state. Famously in 1987, Patrick

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Collinson, drawing attention to schemes of her ministers to form a government in the event of her death, characterized Elizabethan England as a ‘monarchical republic’.3 In a mixed polity, with semi-autonomous agents in central and local government, acting independently of the crown, Collinson identified not merely the capacity to imagine non-monarchical rule but ‘quasi republican ideas’.4 While it controversially questioned a tradition of English historiography, Collinson’s essay complemented a body of scholarly work that had been recovering late humanism’s interest in classical and republican ideas. The work of Quentin Skinner and John Pocock, then of Markku Peltonen and Martin Van Gelderen demonstrated a widespread European fascination with classical republican polities and Ciceronian ideas of citizenship.5 The classical republican tradition, they reminded us, shaped the Machiavelli of the Discourses and influenced the development of the European city states and quasi-republics of Venice and Amsterdam. Along with the defences of the right of resistance against heretic kings championed by both Protestants and Catholics in France, the Low Countries and Scotland, classical republicanism helped to form the texts which, and influence the writers who, published fundamental challenges to monarchy: Buchanan, Bellarmine, Du Plessis Mornay and Parsons, to name a few. Humanism and the Reformation provided the impetus for those challenges: in England as well as Europe. Indeed, the identification of republican ideas and sympathies became, in the wake of this scholarship, something of a new orthodoxy. Intellectual historians and literary scholars began to write of a republican culture; and even Shakespeare, for so long taken as the spokesmen for an Elizabethan world of regality and harmony, began to be refigured as an apologist for resistance to authority and republics.6 By the 1990s, the early Stuart age, the age of divine right kingship, was being represented as one in which republican ideas flourished, paving the way for the Civil War and regicide. In these studies the English republic of 1649, for long regarded as almost an accidental consequence of civil conflict, emerged rather as a logical outcome of habits of thought which had driven events. But was the short-lived English republic the logical outcome of an ideological programme or tradition of republican thinking? And were, as some scholars have cautioned, those who defended limited monarchy or a mixed polity in fact republicans?7 What, in other words, did republicanism mean in early modern England?8 And who exactly were its protagonists before, on the eve of, and after 1649? Amid all the questions about definitions and the debates about the motivations of the principal actors in the drama of the 1640s, one towering figure clearly stands as an important test case. John Milton was the most famous public defender of regicide and the new English Commonwealth. As Latin secretary, he was the official spokesman for the republican regime. Was Milton, then, a republican – and, if so, when did he become one?9 If the first question seems easier to answer than the second, I shall nevertheless argue that Milton offers a complex case which impels us to refine (if not rethink) what we understand as republicanism and

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that, while supporting arguments for a republican imaginary, Milton’s case also documents the hold of monarchy in the culture and minds of English men and women. Milton, I shall argue, underlines how what emerged in 1649, still more in 1653, was never a republic pure and simple; but indeed (to invert Collinson) a monarchical republic – which was always prone to drifting back to monarchy.

II Was John Milton a republican? For all that the question seems straightforward, when one reviews the critical and historical literature, the answers range from ‘yes’, through ‘maybe’ to ‘no’, with most acknowledging that the answer involves the question of what type of republican he was. Leading the yes camp is David Norbrook who has since the 1980s argued for Milton as the champion of a long republican literary tradition which helped to ‘write’ the actual English republic of 1649.10 Even in the youthful Milton, the writer of aristocratic verse and entertainments, who lived on the fringes of the Caroline court, Norbrook identified a scourge of monarchy and apologist for godly republic.11 Norbrook has been joined, albeit less zealously, by another literary critic and historian, Martin Dzelzainis, who has traced the influence of Livy on Milton and who has characterized his treatise on education as ‘something very close to a “republican moment”’.12 Though he was not explicit about constitutional forms, Dzelzainis concedes, Milton supported republic rather than mixed monarchy. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, was, Victoria Kahn agrees with Dzelzainis, not merely ‘a bonfire of constitutionalism’, it was a republican treatise.13 In the no camp, Blair Worden has persistently questioned Milton’s republicanism. While acknowledging that radical ideas can be found in Milton’s earliest writings, Worden sees the poet as a critic of kings and courts rather than a republican and castigates those who too readily confuse the two.14 Only in 1659–60, Worden observes, did Milton renounce monarchy – and even then not unequivocally.15 Milton’s biographer and one of our greatest Milton scholars comes close to the same position: neither The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, nor Eikonoklastes, Thomas Corns reminds us, mentions republic; and Milton went to some lengths to distinguish good kings from tyrants, not least in the Second Defence of the English republic.16 Indeed the only texts in which Milton sketched out the model of a polity were the Letter to a Friend, Proposals of Certain Expedients and, most importantly, The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, all written in reaction to the heady rush back to monarchy in 1660. Even at that late hour, a Milton who was ready to back government by the army, the restored Rump parliament or a single person was one who believed that the forms were not the most important matter. Milton, Corns persuasively argues, was not a constitutional republican, or even a theorist of republic;

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he cared most about religious toleration and was ready to support whatever leaders and forms of government best secured it.17 While those who have figured Milton as the champion of an English republican tradition have manifested more enthusiasm than evidence, one is left with a sense that it is perverse not to see something of republic (to paraphrase Cromwell) in his writings and thought. If not his constitutional programmes or preferences, Milton’s sympathies  – his language, values and the virtues he lauds, his ‘attitude of mind’  – feel republican.18 It has been rightly said that Milton embodied a republican morality.19 I wish to argue that his republicanism was also – and as much – a matter of style, an aesthetic as much as a constitution; and that the aesthetics of politics (and vice versa) are central to understanding Milton’s ideas and actions.20 The chronology of Milton’s ideas is vital to determining their meanings and the circumstances of commission, writing and publication may indeed be central to whether we describe them as republican or as anti-monarchical. One of the richest sources for Milton’s thinking also presents a number of difficulties. The commonplace books, in which, like most educated young men in early modern England, Milton jotted reading notes, axioms and thoughts, are not always easy to date.21 Notes were clearly added under headings over the years and in most cases we cannot be sure when. But the headings and notes are revealing. Under topoi and headings such as ‘King’, ‘Various Forms of Government’ or ‘The Tyrant’, Milton copied passages from classical and contemporary authors and ventured his own commentaries. Those who seek the republican Milton will be immediately struck by his reading Buchanan, Jean Hotman and the Machiavelli of the Discourses.22 But Milton also annotated Sir Henry Savile, William Camden, historian and panegyrist of Elizabeth, and Jean Bodin, champion of absolutism (though Milton only cited him on divorce).23 Many of the entries unsurprisingly support Milton’s hostility to arbitrary monarchical rule: kings, he was sure, were not anointed by God; tyrants could be resisted and deposed; rebellion had often been in history necessary for recovering the people’s freedom.24 In one or two passages we may begin to think Milton has unequivocally stated his constitutional preference: ‘Machiavelli’, he notes, ‘much prefers a republican form to monarchy citing reasons by no means stupid’.25 That lukewarm endorsement is strengthened by the poet’s own approval of the statement that ‘a commonwealth is preferable to a monarchy because more excellent men come from a commonwealth.’26 However, our half sense from these lines that again Milton’s position is more a moral than constitutional one is also supported by his disclaimer – ‘some live best under monarchy’ – and his acceptance at least of moderate kingship restrained by laws.27 In the commonplace books, Milton’s antipathy to kings seems, as well as a matter of civic morality, to arise from their claims to sacred rule: ‘kings’, he remarks with near audible contempt, ‘scarcely recognize themselves as mortals’; but – and, he revealingly concedes, ‘contrary to what people think’ – they were.28 What we may discern in the commonplaces is an antipathy to the

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mystification of power that was to be so important in Milton’s developing thought. Given that space prevents a review of all Milton’s writings, I shall fast forward to 1649 when Milton wrote official apologia for the regicide. Now, with Charles I executed and monarchy itself abolished, one might have expected Milton to lay out a model for a new republican government. In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, he argues forcefully that ‘it is lawful . . . for any who have the power to call to account a tyrant or wicked king’ and praised the late actions of the army and parliament.29 However, as his language makes clear, Milton was not condemning all  – only wicked or tyrannous – kings; and he went further, remarking ‘how great a good and happiness a just king is.’30 Far from sketching a republican constitution, Milton describes how the people came to elect kings. And though he asserts their accountability to the people and the law, kings form the subject as well as title of Milton’s treatise. The Tenure has been described as a ‘key republican text’.31 Yet, for all the half glimpses of Milton’s preferences, there is no argument for republic here.32 The same may be said of Eikonoklastes, the response the Commonwealth commissioned Milton to make to Charles I’s best-seller, the Eikon Basilike. Published some nine months after Charles I’s alleged testament, Eikonoklastes, as I have argued elsewhere, was a reactive text which, against itself, acknowledged the hold of monarchy in the hearts and minds of the people: Milton’s object, he informs us, is ‘to set free the minds of English men from longing to return . . . under that captivity of kings’.33 Milton subjects each chapter of the Eikon Basilike, the king’s narrative of events and his prayers, to searching criticism. He tries to educate readers to critique the texts of power – and especially the words of a king.34 But his long treatise, more than twice the length of the Eikon, almost pays homage to the hold of monarchy. Indeed, rather than making an explicit argument for republic, Milton focuses on Charles I and the cult that was already celebrating him as a martyr. Ironically, the poet attacks most of all the poetry of the Eikon, and its ‘stage work’ and powerful frontispiece by William Marshall, depicting Charles as Christ: in short the aesthetics of the text and of regality – both of which had, to Milton’s evident frustration, gained the ‘worthless approbation of an inconstant, irrational and image doting rabble’.35 Far from being a straightforward republican tract, Milton discloses real doubts about the suitability of the people for republic. But what one clearly discerns is not merely a hostility to kings and courts but what I want to call a republican aesthetic, which, I shall argue was at the centre of Milton’s republicanism. Though there were few explicitly republican publications in 1649, the English Commonwealth began to establish itself and to obtain some recognition from foreign powers. It was this that Charles II (as the prince became on the day of his father’s death) feared most; and he probably commissioned as well as financed an attack on the regicides and the new government, along with a defence of divine kingship, from the French

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classical scholar, Claude Saumaise, in Latin Salmasius. It was this work, published in November, shortly after his own, that Milton was asked to counter in a work that did not appear in print until 1651: Defensio Pro Populo Anglicano or a Defence of the English People.36 With the regime now established, Milton, as well as again defending regicide and praising the brilliance which had ‘flashed forth from the people’, was able to claim that England ‘being a commonwealth is so much the stronger’.37 Yet even now, when one might have expected him to do so, Milton does not argue directly for republic. Observing that different constitutions suited different peoples and times, he frankly acknowledged that ‘our form of government is such as our circumstances and schisms permit; it is not the most desirable, but only as good as the stubborn struggles of the wicked citizens allow it to be.’38 While he praised the Roman republic, Milton seems to doubt whether conditions were right for it in his own time and country: ‘I confess that those who long for liberty or can enjoy it are but few.’39 Even now, though he is clearer that ‘a republican form of government’ is ‘better adapted to our human circumstances than monarchy’, the poet devotes more space and attention to kings and to declaiming Charles I than to republican argument.40 Once again the target of his polemic is the superstition that has made the English ‘dazzled by . . . gazing on the royal splendour’, a superstition that was ‘the greatest evil’ because it robbed citizens of the virtue needed for self-government and left them in thraldom to kings.41 Against ‘those whose hearts are clouded by superstition . . . that they can see no . . . magnificence in honest virtue or freedom’, Milton was unsure how to argue.42 But that regal splendour corrupted citizens and disabled them for virtuous republican government was at the core of his belief: a republican polity depended on a republican culture and aesthetic. Not only, as Milton feared, did the memory of monarchy and Charles I continue to dog the fledgling republic, royalist polemicists continued the pamphlet attack on the Commonwealth both to gain foreign support and to sustain and strengthen royalism in England.43 In 1652 an anonymous Latin pamphlet (in fact written by Peter du Moulin), Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum Adversus Paricidas Anglicanos (the cry of royal blood to heaven against the English parricides), launched savage abuse and innuendo against the poet personally, excoriated Milton’s First Defence, and called for vengeance on the regicides for the blood of the martyr Charles I. In 1654, Milton responded with self-defence and counter-attack and with a proud justification of regicide and, now that the republic was five years old, with a less equivocal endorsement of the English people.44 ‘What’, he vaunted, ‘can tend more to the honour and glory of any country than the restoration of liberty’?45 The English people, he was proud to say, had not indulged in licence and deserved praise for their ‘renewed cultivation of freedom and civic life’.46 For all a more positive tone, however, the poet still lamented the ‘deep rooted prejudice . . . of the mob and their fondness for the name of “king”’ and warned of the need for vigilance.47

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By the time of his writing, a major change had occurred: Oliver Cromwell had dissolved the Rump parliament and had been appointed Protector of England, in what amounted to a reinstitution of single-person rule. In the Second Defence, Milton countered the various charges against Cromwell – ‘this great man who has deserved so well of the state’.48 Distancing Cromwell from the act of regicide, and defending the dissolution of parliament, Milton presented Cromwell as father of his country, the liberator of his people and the hope for a future of liberty.49 Cromwell, Milton praised, had nobly spurned the title of king to serve the people and had taken on the great responsibility of being the custodian of England’s liberties. With the aid and counsel of officers like Fleetwood, Lambert, Desborough and Overton, Cromwell, Milton hoped, might lead the people from superstition and make them worthy of a free polity. Perhaps in part because he recognized the government’s need for good relations with Sweden (whose queen Christina he praised), Milton still does not declaim against monarchy tout court: ‘as a good man differs from a bad’, he writes in the Second Defence, ‘so much, I hold, does a king differ from a tyrant’.50 And, as the praise of Cromwell evidences, Milton was far from opposed in principle to rule by a single person, acting with counsel: nothing, he states, was more expedient than ‘the rule of the man most fit to rule’.51 In 1654, what mattered to Milton was not the exact constitutional form of the government but the capacity and suitability of the governors to lead and instruct the people in the virtues of freedom and ‘civil life’.52 Since 1649, while championing civic and religious freedom, Milton had ardently defended regicide and supported successive governments by the Rump and the army, a nominated assembly (the so-called Barebones parliament) and a protector and council.53 Throughout the Commonwealth and Protectorate he served as Latin secretary as well as polemicist, going blind (he noted in the Second Defence) in an honourable cause of service to the new state.54 But from 1654 until the collapse of the Protectorate in 1659, Milton fell silent. Was his silence evidence of his satisfaction with the state of affairs that unfolded after 1654 or that of a figure who, though still a civil servant, had become disillusioned with the regime? As so often silence is difficult to interpret; but we must try. When Milton next published, there had been revolutionary changes. Oliver Cromwell had died in September 1658. After the brief rule of his son, Richard, who was ousted by an army coup, in a series of chaotic and unstable putsches, various army factions and Rumpers endeavoured to form regimes before Colonel Monck intervened to call new elections that were widely held to presage a restoration of monarchy.55 In this period, as everything he had struggled for looked to fail, Milton not only re-emerged as a leading polemicist; he wrote what were his most republican treatises and perhaps his only sketch for a model English republic. The very title of The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth of itself signals an author moving from ‘defences’ and apologia to proposing a

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constitution. As Milton was writing, Monck was supporting the popular tide of opinion that the excluded members of the Rump (who had opposed regicide) should be restored and with them the likelihood of some form of monarchy.56 As its opponents looked set to return, Milton praised the achievements of the Rump in establishing a free commonwealth which had ‘testified a spirit in this nation no less noble and well fitted to . . . liberty . . . than in the ancient Greeks and Romans’.57 But where now, the poet wailed, ‘is this godly tower of a Commonwealth which the English boasted they would build to overshadow kings and be another Rome in the West?’58 A free commonwealth, he explicitly affirmed, was ‘the noblest, the manliest . . . the justest government’ – ‘if it can be had’.59 And, he urged, it still might be had, if the Rump recruited its own choice of members and, rather than under a figurehead like the Doge of Venice, ruled with a council of the ablest men sitting in perpetuity.60 By contrast what the multitude were ‘now so mad upon’ was the return of a monarch; the people looked to ‘creep back . . . to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship’.61 Milton was bitter in again denouncing the pomp of kings adored like demigods, of courts, masques and pageants of state. He railed against, once more, the aesthetics of royalty which reduced the nobility of true citizens to the ‘perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people’.62 With the restoration of monarchy looming, he for the first time proposed a form of government that would lay the foundations of a free commonwealth. Milton freely admitted that it looked like that set up in 1649: ‘what I have spoken’, he concluded, ‘is the language of the Good Old Cause’.63 Comparing The Ready and Easy Way with the Second Defence one is struck by the paucity of references to a single person.64 That this was not incidental is confirmed by Milton’s letter to a friend, written in October 1659, when Lambert dissolved the restored Rump, but not published until the end of the century.65 Here Milton made ‘the abjuration of a single person’ a principle of any constitution and recommended a senate, with a parliament and/or a council of state as the best government.66 Similar recommendations were made in his Proposal of Certain Expedients for the Preventing of a Civil War, written the next month, in which Milton urged the creation of a ‘Grand or Supreme Council’ to sit in perpetuity.67 As Austin Woolrych observed, as he moved to outlining a constitution, Milton was dissociating himself from the Protectorate he had earlier heralded as the best hope for Britain.68 Even as he wrote, however, we sense Milton knew that the cause was likely to be lost. And events moved quickly to virtually ensure it was. In the short month between the publication of The Ready and Easy Way and a second edition, published in April 1660, the republicans had been barred from the Council of State; formerly excluded members of the Rump were newly elected to a parliament; and the revival of the Solemn League and Covenant (which contained a clause in defence of monarchy) signalled the strength of the Presbyterian party, which supported a Restoration that

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was to take place within weeks.69 With the Rump no longer in existence, Milton’s scheme for a government based on it was in tatters. The pamphlet still asserts that ‘of all governments a commonwealth aims most to make the people flourishing’; Milton again recommends a ‘sanhedrin’, an aristocratic council of the godly.70 Yet, for all the assurance to readers that ‘this way lies free and smooth before us’, in this second edition the author returns to the negative: to damning kings and according blame for the failure to fashion a lasting Commonwealth.71 ‘When monarchy was dissolved, the form of a Commonwealth should have forthwith been framed and the practice thereof immediately begun.’72 Instead, England, Milton now admitted, was heading back to captivity, led by the servile multitude who were now about to enslave the more noble minority.73 I shall return to Milton’s apparent rejection of a single person in the polities he outlined in these treatises. But that the precise constitution still mattered less to him than the ends and values of government is demonstrated in his last printed treatise before Restoration. Days after publishing the second edition of The Ready and Easy Way, Milton replied to a sermon by the royalist preacher and former royal chaplain Matthew Griffith, The Fear of God and the King.74 In his Brief Notes Upon a Late Sermon, written in mid-April, Milton summoned old arguments against kings and repeated his assertion that ‘free commonwealths have been ever counted fittest and properest for civil, virtuous and industrious nations’.75 But if events ‘sadly betake us to our . . . thraldom’ – back to kingship – then Milton had one last suggestion: let the king be chosen ‘out of our own number’, ‘one who has best aided the people’.76 Milton’s suggestion that Monck be elected to the throne was indeed, as his editors posit, ‘despairing’.77 But it is a reminder that in strictly constitutional terms, whatever his preferences, even to the last Milton was prepared to countenance various forms of government to secure what could be preserved of religious and civil liberty. So, our brief review of some key texts prompts us to return to the big questions: is it right to call Milton a republican? If so, what was the nature of his republicanism? More particularly, why did he, having praised it in 1654, condemn single-person rule in 1659 and 1660? What prompted the bitter passages in the writings of that year and what did Milton think had caused the people not to be educated in the virtues that befitted a commonwealth but led back to monarchy and servility? It is time to turn to Milton’s relationship to the figure who more than any other determined the course of these years: the military leader, then Protector, Oliver Cromwell.

III As scholars we cannot but be interested in the relationship of a political figure whose highly rhetorical speeches have been quoted through the ages and a great poet and prose writer working at the centre of politics. In the

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words of one critic: ‘the imagination is excited by the tricks of history which brought these two together.’78 The problem is that we have little idea how much, if at all, they were brought together. Though he served him as Protector, Cromwell makes no mention of Milton, and Milton provides no evidence in his writings of a close relationship with Oliver. Clearly the two shared important values, in particular a belief in religious toleration. Like Milton, Cromwell (who early on announced himself as ‘not wedded or glued to forms of government’) was more interested in ends than means.79 But he was more conservative than the poet and less hostile to monarchy, arguing in 1651 for a settlement ‘with somewhat of monarchical power in it’.80 Just as there have been opposed views on Milton’s republicanism, scholars have also been divided over his attitude to Cromwell, some emphasizing panegyric, some circumspection, others outright criticism. Milton’s sonnet to Cromwell, composed in 1652 (though not published until 1694) is an alloy of admiration and reservation, far more equivocal than the poet’s verse on Sir Henry Vane, written about the same time.81 Cromwell is lauded for his military victories, fortitude and faith; but he is counselled that in peace he will face new challenges, and the poet warns that he is on trial as he faces them. We might have expected that the Milton who admired the Rump and wrote to defend the Commonwealth might have been, as others were, opposed to Cromwell’s dissolution of the parliament (and its successor the nominated assembly) and hostile to the resumption of government by a single person. As we have seen, however, in the Second Defence he praised Cromwell as ‘so great a man’, as ‘illustrious’, ‘supremely excellent’ and ‘worthy of all praise’.82 Cromwell was important to Milton as the enemy of the Presbyterians and royalists: when in 1654 the poet told the protector ‘Cromwell we are deserted! You alone remain’, he expressed the reality of the situation we well as his hopes.83 On Cromwell more than on any other the securing of liberty depended. Though others have disputed it, I think that there is a tone of circumspection, of counsel and admonition as well as praise, in the Second Defence’s handling of Cromwell.84 Through the familiar Renaissance rhetorical device of laudando praecipere, deploying praise in order to advise, Milton lauds Oliver for having spurned the ‘haughty title’ of king and lofty adulation and for having ‘come down so many degrees from the heights’.85 But in a move that seems to undermine the panegyric, Milton insists that, had Cromwell not done so, he would have been guilty of hypocrisy: for to have pursued pomp or lofty title would have been ‘to worship the gods you had conquered’.86 Since it is likely that Milton knew that some army officers had – and might again – offer Oliver the crown, the poet was trying to keep him honest. In that spirit, after lines of statement and praise the poet abruptly shifts to invocation and admonition – ‘May you then, O Cromwell, increase in your magnanimity.’87 The Cromwell who had emerged as the ‘the author of liberty and .  .  . its guardian’ is instructed: ‘consider again how precious a thing is this liberty . . . entrusted and commended to you.’88

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In what carries echoes of the advice-to-princes genre, Milton instructs Cromwell to honour all who had fought and sacrificed for liberty but most of all to regard the trust placed in him and ‘honour yourself’, so that liberty may not be ‘violated by yourself’ or by others.89 Were the republic under his care to miscarry, Cromwell is told, shame would befall the country and its leader. If a man considered excellent should threaten the liberty he had defended, it would be fatal to ‘the cause of all virtue and piety’.90 If Milton’s praise had translated into counsel, it ended by coming close to warning as he told Cromwell: ‘You have taken upon yourself by far the heaviest burden, one that will put to the test your inmost capacities .  .  . and reveal what spirit, what strength, what authority are in you.’91 Compared with the heavy responsibilities he now bore, Cromwell was told, military victories were easily accomplished: ‘to yield to no allurements of pleasure, to flee from the pomp of wealth and power, these are arduous tasks to which war is a mere game.’92 Lest the Protector be too confident, the poet warned: ‘these trials will buffet you and shake you’; lest he trust too much in himself, Milton urged him to admit as counsellors men (such as Fleetwood, Desborough and others) who could assist him and (it is at least implied) keep check that he serve the cause of liberty and lead his countrymen to be worthy of it.93 With a tone of the preacher as well as tutor, Milton (who ironically prophesied what came to pass) told Cromwell as well as England that posterity would pass judgement on them if, having been given an opportunity, they were found wanting. So what was Milton’s own judgement on the man he had both praised and placed on trial in 1654? Again we confront Milton’s silence and the various interpretations of what it might signify in terms of his attitude to Cromwell. Robert Fallon, reminding us that Milton continued in uninterrupted service to the Protectorate, reads it as acquiescence with the regime; Blair Worden, by contrast, describing the silence as ‘loud’, suggests that it may indicate some disillusion with, if not outright opposition to, the Protector.94 Certainly during the years after 1654 Cromwell pursued a different path to religious toleration to that Milton favoured and fell out with, and was criticized by, several figures, among them Fleetwood, Overton and Sir Henry Vane, whom Milton had praised as guardians of liberty and had urged Oliver to take as his advisers.95 If that is no more than circumstantial evidence for Milton’s view of Cromwell, by 1659 we know that the poet was no longer in favour of rule by a single person. Was that a consequence of no suitable successor to Cromwell emerging or of Milton’s distance from Oliver himself? Martin Dzelzainis has argued that before Cromwell died, in his 1658 edition of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Cabinet Council, Milton pointed, as had Raleigh, to a corrupt regime; furthermore, he suggests, the republication that same year of the First Defence, with praise of the Rump rather than a single ruler, served to undercut the praise of the Protector in the Second Defence and imply a desire to return to the old cause.96 Paul Stevens has rejected such suggestions, positing that the republication of the Cabinet Council may be

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explained in the context of England’s war with Spain. The case for Milton’s opposition, Stevens concludes, rests on nothing but ‘highly circumstantial and speculative evidence’.97 Milton, after all, walked in Oliver Cromwell’s funeral procession, a public demonstration (for Stevens) of his continued allegiance to the Protectorate. Whatever the explanation for Milton’s later critique of single-person government, Stevens dismisses the idea that it implied a ‘denunciation’ of Oliver Cromwell. Stevens’s caution is salutary; but there remains a sense that at least in 1659, Milton was viewing the Protectorate or Cromwell himself critically. Not only does he praise the Rump which Oliver dissolved, and abjure rule by a single person, he appears to describe the Protectorate, in words that echo Henry Vane’s, as ‘a short but scandalous night of interruption’ – interruption, if our reading is right, of the republican project.98 I would suggest that there are also more specific criticisms of Cromwell personally in the late tracts. We have noted the bitter attacks on the pomp of kings and courts in The Ready and Easy Way and Brief Notes on a Late Sermon. Clearly these were directed against the tide towards Restoration. But, especially in the case of the Brief Notes (of October 1659), was it only regal pomp that Milton was decrying? Moreover, a passage in the first edition of The Ready and Easy Way reads oddly if we take it to apply to Charles Stuart. Here Milton marvels ‘how any man who hath the true principles of justice and religion in him can presume to take upon him to be a king and lord over his brethren’ who were equal to him.99 And, he further asks: ‘how can he display with such vanity and ostentation his regal splendour so supereminently above other mortal men?’ Since it is highly unlikely Milton ever thought that Prince Charles had ‘true principles of justice and religion in him’, the passage may be read as referring to Cromwell. The Ready and Easy Way (first edition) is full of references to ambition – again a curious accusation against the heir to a throne, but all too applicable to Cromwell.100 The application to the Protector is surely even more specific in Milton’s denunciation of that quasi-republic of Venice and its Doge which approximated to the constitution of the Protectorate. England would be wise, he counselled, to reject ‘the fond conceit of something like a duke of Venice, put lately into many men’s heads, by some one or other subtly driving on under that pretty notion his own ambitious ends to a crown’.101 Just as these criticisms reflect others’ accusations against Cromwell, Milton’s denunciations of ‘stewards, chamberlains, ushers, grooms’ echo charges levelled against the Protector and his court from as early as 1656.102 When the poet warns readers looking to reinstate monarchy ‘so far we shall be from mending our condition by monarchizing our government’, one senses that he is writing of the recent past as well as imminent future.103 The evidence  – essentially of the tone and specific resonance and applicability of passages  – is tentative. But I hear a Milton who regards Cromwell as having failed the test he set him in 1654; as one who succumbed to temptations of ambition and aggrandizement; who, rather than keeping

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to just principles he had exhibited, ‘monarchized’ his single rule. In doing so, Cromwell, instead of tutoring the people to republican virtues, led an ‘image doting rabble’ back to abject thraldom. By 1659, Milton had walked in the cortege for Cromwell’s funeral, which, as several envoys commented, was one of the most magnificent of the century, surpassing that of kings. The Venetian ambassador, for example, reported the ‘extraordinary pomp and magnificence’ of the lying in state, in a room illuminated by 500 candles, the ermine and purple, and the effigy with the imperial crown on a cushion beside.104 With the pomp, effigy, prayers for the deceased’s soul and interment in King Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, Cromwell’s funeral, as well as regal, was what some – and surely Milton – would have regarded as superstitious. Milton’s republicanism was inseparable from his religious beliefs and sensibilities  – and, I would argue, from his aesthetics and the politics of the aesthetic, which had so dominated Eikonoklastes. The disenchantment the poet felt for the Protector by 1659 or earlier, I would suggest, was less about constitutions than about Cromwell’s departure from a style and aesthetic of rule which were vital to Milton’s politics as well as faith.

IV For some time, scholars followed the historian Roy Sherwood in seeing Oliver Cromwell becoming an increasingly regal ruler, developing a court and court culture and emerging as ‘a king in all but name’.105 In recent years, however, and perhaps as a consequence of the fashion for identifying republican strains in early modern culture, critics, such as David Norbrook and Laura Knoppers, have argued for a Protectoral aesthetic that was far from monarchical, even if it was not unequivocally republican.106 While this work has been invaluable in helping to elucidate the (curiously) neglected images of Cromwell, it remains, in my view, unpersuasive. And, for my purposes here, I want to ague that it obscures the ways in which representations of Cromwell offended Milton’s aesthetic sensibilities and values. It was not only the constitution that was changed in 1653 with the dissolution of the Rump and the establishment of the Protectorate by the Instrument of Government. Single-person rule, implicitly outlawed by ordinance in March 1649, returned in 1653 and the change was as much in the culture as the constitution of England.107 Particularly, 1653 marked a change in Oliver Cromwell himself. For much of the 1640s and early 1650s Cromwell had kept a low profile, representing himself as a soldier and servant of the parliament, then Commonwealth. Notoriously absent from the centre at key moments, like the seizure of Charles I by the army, Cromwell seems concerned not to be seen as ambitious for power or honours – even though royalist critics regularly levelled such accusations against him.108 With the resignation of Barebones, however, there was a power vacuum and

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Cromwell became, as Milton himself had recognized in 1654, the principal governor. And in many ways he began to represent himself as just that: as the locus of an authority he had earlier denied. In his speech to his first protectoral parliament, for example, Oliver changed his rhetorical style of service and subordination to underline his personal authority in a battery of personal pronouns. ‘I said you were a free parliament’, Cromwell told the Commons in September 1654, before adding, ‘and so you are, whilst you own the government and authority that called you’.109 The use of ‘calling’ – summoning and naming – whether consciously so or not underlined how Cromwell’s authorial word was inseparable now from his authority. And it was a different kind of authority he claimed: in contrast to the parliament called by him, ‘my calling be from God’.110 Though he had always claimed Providence, Oliver now came close to reclaiming divine right rule: ‘I am deriving a title from God’.111 Though space prevents a full exposition here, it is important to recognize how far Cromwell reassumed regal discourses of authority and even sanctity. He revived royal declarations in some of which he appealed, as had earlier monarchs, over parliaments to the people; he reinstated, as had kings and queens who were Supreme Heads of the Church, services of official prayers; in declarations and speeches he claimed to mediate God’s word and be an exegete to his subjects of God’s will.112 When we recall how in Eikonoklastes Milton had vilified a royal claim to interpret God’s decrees and how he utterly rejected the king’s seeking to stand as the conscience of the nation, we must conclude that the poet would have been profoundly alienated by the discourses of Protectoral power.113 At the core of Eikonklastes and of Milton’s religious and political values was a belief in the individual conscience, and in the liberty and right of each citizen to ‘choose . . . interpretation’, to form his own judgement.114 A regal style of discourse was not Cromwell’s only move towards ‘monarchizing’ the republic. We recall Milton’s scornful deriding of, and anxiety about, the frontispiece to Eikon Basilike which figured Charles I as a martyr and saint: ‘the conceited portraiture before his book’ which Milton thought was ‘set there to catch fools and silly gazers’.115 As the title announces, Eikonoklastes was an attack on the iconicity, the image of the king as much as the monarchical constitution; Milton suspected superstitious images which, bypassing the faculty of reason, kept ‘an image doting rabble’ devoted to kings.116 As I have remarked elsewhere, the new Commonwealth eschewed the visual imagery favoured by kings, especially the connoisseur Charles I, and sought to depersonalize (and perhaps demystify) authority by avoiding elaborate state portraits.117 Indeed Cromwell himself had, after the victory at Dunbar, advised parliament to figure on the medal issued to celebrate it an image of the Commons in session rather than a portrait of the then Lord General.118 Again, the Protectorate soon saw a dramatic change. A month after the dissolution of the Rump, Cromwell’s portrait was set up at – significantly – the old Royal Exchange, with accompanying verses urging him to ‘ascend these thrones’.119 The coupling of the visual

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and the regal was prophetic. For as his style of rule became increasingly monarchical, so the Protector increasingly favoured quasi-regal genres and forms of visual representation, even directly aping images of Charles I. Laura Knoppers has argued that the Protectoral aesthetic was distinct from the regal: that Cromwell cultivated a ‘plain style’ befitting his position as head of a republic.120 She rightly adduces the famous (if unreliable) anecdote of Cromwell’s instruction to Peter Lely that the artist paint him ‘warts and all’.121 There are indeed portraits of Oliver Cromwell which  – though their very number marks a change to a greater personalization of power – were quite removed from the flattering portrayals of Charles and Henrietta Maria by Van Dyck. But in other cases, it is the similarities, even the outright plagiarism, that strike us. Until the mid-1650s, the most widely circulated portrait of Cromwell remained that by Robert Walker, depicting Oliver in armour with a baton and with a handsome long-haired page tying a silk sash around the Lord General’s waist (Figure 10). As has been noted, the portrait owes a direct debt to two Van Dyck canvases: the picture of Viscount Wentworth, Lord Deputy of Ireland and the double portrait of Viscount Goring and Lord Newport, painted around 1639.122 In this courtly portrait, the features of Cromwell are softened and idealized; the armour is tilt armour, the genre is chivalric – what Milton had contemned as ‘pageanting’.123 There are several other portraits more in this mode than a demystifying warts-and-all depiction. Lely’s portrayal of Cromwell, for example, softened and elongated the sitter’s features. And while Samuel Cooper’s miniature (now at Buccleuch) did not flatter him, the representation of the Lord Protector in a miniature itself signalled a revival of a predominantly courtly genre.124 Indeed Cromwell commissioned miniatures of his wife and family, following a fashion of the French royal family and court. In his own case, he revived the practice of stamping his image in miniature at the head of charters and letters patent, implicitly representing, in regal style, his body personal as the mystical body of the state (Figure 11).125 It was exactly this tendency by Cromwell in visual media to render what was still supposedly a collective civic authority dynastic and personal that Milton had spurned as vanity and warned against in the Second Defence. Cromwell, however, was probably guilty in Milton’s eyes (and I will return to that problematic metaphor) of worse sins than that. The poet had praised the Protector for having in 1653 rejected the title of king for the more noble role of father of his country. At least one image of Cromwell, however, executed by William Faithorne and probably published with approval, described him as ‘Olivarius Primus’, as the founder of a new regal dynasty (Figure 12).126 If such a depiction flew in the face of Milton’s injunctions not to seek any glory or ‘haughty title’ that amounted to a hypocritical appropriation of the ‘idolater’ he had conquered, another representation of Cromwell surely offended the poet in figuring Cromwell as the descendant of biblical patriarchs and kings, as the heir of David and Solomon, as, in other words, a sacred ruler.127 Such images made it appear as though Cromwell

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had succumbed to all the temptations Milton had told him to resist – and more. Titles and honours had come to matter more than honourable deeds and the care of the people’s liberty. Cromwell’s image did not just gesture to fairly explicit regal heights and claims; some images of the Protector appropriated and reprised portraits of the great idolater Charles I himself. To take just a few examples that space permits, one anonymous engraving (whether from a portrait or not remains unknown) of Cromwell in a plumed hat with his left elbow in foreshortening and his right hand on a cane clearly recalls – and must have to contemporaries – the Van Dyck of Charles I ‘a la chasse’ (Figure 13).128 Infamously sometime in the mid-1650s, Pierre Lombart, who was paid by the government ‘for presenting several portraits of his Highness [Cromwell] to the council’, engraved Cromwell on horseback, attended by a page, in what was an exact replication, other than the background scene, of Van Dyck’s most famous image of Charles I on Horseback with Monsieur St Antoine (Figure 14).129 In keeping with the miniatures of the Cromwell dynasty, the Protector was also represented with his wife Elizabeth on an engraving that reprised an image vital to Charles I’s representation: the print by Rupert Van Voerst of Van Dyck’s reworking of a double portrait of the king with his queen Henrietta Maria.130 While, in the absence of direct contemporary comment, we are left to surmise that contemporaries, familiar with the court and image of Charles I, could not but have recognized these appropriations and revivals, in the case of Cromwell’s seal, which again figured a single person and on which he added his personal motto and heraldic achievements, the medallist Thomas Simon submitted accounts for ‘two seals in imitation of Charles Stuart’.131 Cromwell was widely seen as a king in all but name because he was being represented as one. Of course the question arises of Milton’s blindness, which meant that he did not literally see these regal images after 1654. But, given his office, the wide circulation of Cromwell’s image and the circles in which Milton moved, it seems highly unlikely that they did not come to his attention. As his writings disclose, Milton retained in blindness a highly visual sensibility and used (as he was to continue to do) evocative visual imagery. A man who had reacted so passionately to William Marshall’s frontispiece to the Eikon Basilike, and to its corrosive effects on the people of England, was likely to have paid attention to the images of the Protector, displayed, as well as on canvases and engravings, in arms on the uniforms of bargemen and court servants. Even in his blindness, Milton could see how far Cromwell had come to becoming king. In Eikonoklastes, Milton had made many disparaging references to courts and courtiers whom he regarded as servile, sycophantic and parasitic  – the very inverse of virtuous citizens.132 Yet, from the establishment of the Protectorate, Cromwell progressively restored a court and household and, perhaps even more offensive to the poet, a court culture. As Roy Sherwood demonstrated long ago, Cromwell reappointed a Lord Chamberlain and

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was attended in his personal quarters by Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber and Gentlemen of the Bedchamber.133 The Protector also had liveried bargemen and a guard of halberdiers referred to by some contemporaries as Yeomen of the Guard.134 These were, of course, formerly royal officers and attendants and the reappointment of them was widely regarded as a sign that Cromwell might become king. Old Commonwealthsmen mocked the Protector’s courtiers: in a dialogic satire The Picture of a New Courtier, published in 1656, Mr Plain Heart denounced the ‘the gentlemen ushers and gentlemen waiters, the grooms of the stool, gentlemen sewers, besides the fiddlers and others . . . which shine in their gold and silver’ and declared his opposition to such a court.135 The list of officers immediately leads us to recall the scorn Milton expressed in The Ready and Easy Way for court officers such as ‘stewards, ushers, grooms even of the close stool’ and a ‘haughty court of vast expense and luxury’.136 We cannot but begin to suspect that Milton’s hostility was directed as much against the Protectoral court as that of Charles I, dismantled now nearly two decades in the past when the king fled London. The reality was that, while he did not reconstitute a full royal court, Cromwell lived in quite a lavish style. The Picture of a New Courtier’s references to ‘new rivers and ponds at Hampton Court, whose making cost vast sums of money’ and dining on delicacies and fine wines are supported by John Evelyn’s description of Cromwell’s court in 1656 as ‘glorious and well furnished’.137 Moreover, Cromwell’s court was a centre of entertainment, ceremony and ritual: a theatre for what Milton derided as the pageanting of majesty. Oliver appointed a Master and Gentlemen of His Highness’s music; and licensed theatrical performances, even a quasi-masque: in 1660 Milton contemned ‘masks and revels’ for debauching the youth of England.138 The Protectorate also marked the return of ceremonial pomp in the receptions of ambassadors and other state occasions, which had been far less elaborate under the Commonwealth. Soon after becoming Protector, Cromwell was entertained by the City of London. After a stately progress in a richly decorated chariot, wearing a gold embroidered riding coat, Cromwell was what one contemporary significantly described as ‘royally entertained’ at Grocer’s Hall in full pomp and magnificence.139 For his first parliament as Protector, Oliver revived the formal state opening, making his progress ‘in stately equipage’ from Whitehall to Westminster, with his mace carried before him.140 The processions of barges and coaches, the entertainments and magnificent display prepared for the receptions of envoys from the Netherlands and France in 1654 similarly signalled a return to full royal ritual.141 And on these occasions, addresses to Cromwell again revived the languages and tropes of royal panegyrics, describing, for example, the ‘rays of his majesty’.142 As we read contemporary accounts of these ritual celebrations and laudations, we again recall Milton’s admonition to the new Protector, urging him to eschew ambition and being ‘borne aloft’, to resist the ‘allurement of pleasure’ and ‘the pomp of wealth and power’. If they

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led Milton soon to despair of the new regime, things only got worse. As treatises like The Picture of a New Courtier and The Unparalleled Monarch evidenced, Cromwell was increasingly perceived as all but a king  – and perhaps as a king in waiting. Cromwell was indeed offered the crown in the Humble Petition and Advice  – a move that itself suggests MPs had some realistic expectation that he would accept. Though he declined, Oliver did agree to a revised constitution that made his Protectorate hereditary and in other respects (including a revived upper chamber) near to monarchy. Fittingly therefore, Cromwell’s second investiture followed many of the ceremonies of a coronation. Albeit there was no anointing, the use of St Edward’s chair and the conferment of the regalia suggest that Clarendon was not amiss in recalling that there was ‘nothing wanting to a perfect formal coronation but a crown and an archbishop’.143 Others readily compared the occasion to the ‘solemn investiture of princes’.144 Attended by his son and heir and sons-in-law, Cromwell was invested as what Faithorne had engraved him as, the head of a new dynasty. Milton had since at least 1649 harboured doubts about hereditary rule; by 1660, he reflected again (in a letter to Monck) that ‘it may be well wondered that any nation, styling themselves free, can suffer any man to pretend hereditary right over them.’145 By 1657, it would seem that everything that Milton had denounced and warned against had been brought back by King Oliver. Much has been made by those who deny any hint of criticism of Cromwell of that fact that Milton processed in the Protector’s funeral cortege. We have remarked reports of extraordinary pomp and the body lying in state in a room lit by hundreds of candles. It is important to add that Cromwell was represented, in regal style, by an effigy which bore not only the regalia but ‘a crown on the head’.146 An effigy, with the face modelled from the death mask and dressed in the deceased’s own clothes, as well as bearing the regalia of office, had since the fourteenth century represented the actual person of the king as well as the mystical office of monarchy. Cromwell’s funeral, therefore, acknowledged and celebrated his personal position as well as his office of Protector, belying Milton’s praise of a man who had taken office as service and a trust, rather than for personal or familial aggrandizement. So how did Milton regard it? We have no direct evidence. That he joined the procession is hardly surprising given that, as Latin Secretary, he was a civil servant and member of the extended household; his participation cannot be taken, as some have assumed, as documenting compliance.147 We know that the funeral appalled men Milton admired such as Edmund Ludlow who claimed the ‘folly and profusion’ of the ceremonies ‘provoked the people’.148 It seems inconceivable that it would not have provoked Milton who, again in Paradise Lost decried ‘servile pomp’ and asked: Who can in reason then or right assume Monarchy over such as live by right

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His Equals, if in power and splendour less.149 The attempts to pin down and define Milton’s republicanism have ended in disagreement and uncertainty. That, I would suggest, is because Milton’s republicanism was not a matter of exact constitutions. It was a spiritual, a moral and most importantly, I would add, an aesthetic sensibility: an antagonism to any arts of mystification or superstition that claimed to surpass the reason of citizens and served to enthral and enslave them. That was why Milton regarded monarchy as the polity for base people, republics that for the free. He regarded it as the charge of leaders most of all to nurture freedom and to inculcate in the people the virtues that fitted them for it. Milton clearly believed that the English had embarked on a noble course in 1649. When Cromwell emerged in 1653, Milton was ready  – as were others like George Wither  – to herald him as the leader who might lead the people’s journey from thraldom to freedom. He praised Oliver but also counselled and admonished him: to resist ambition, titles and pomp, claims to grandeur and hereditary or sacred rule. Cromwell failed the, ‘arduous tasks’, the test and trial he was warned he faced. The man Milton praised for having in 1653 spurned the title of king became a king and worshipped the (false) gods he (and the nation) had conquered. And the consequence was indeed fatal not only to Cromwell, ‘fatal not only to liberty itself but to the cause of all virtue and piety’.150 ‘A deeper wound than this after that first wound’, Milton had prophesied, ‘can never be inflicted on the human race.’151 It was inflicted. No wonder then that, as in despair he witnessed Cromwell succumb to pomp, wealth and power, and in doing so damn a nation, Milton was drawn to ‘that first wound’ and to write on the Fall of man.

11 Restoration and reconstitution: Politics, society and culture in the England of Charles II

Restoration is a simplistic, even a deceptive, term to describe what happened in England in and after 1660. Though the monarchy, the Stuart dynasty, the Church of England and the House of Lords were all restored, the nation’s clock could not simply be turned back to 1641. Nor could the ensuing events of bloody Civil War, regicide, republic and Protectorate, or the social and personal upheavals of revolution, be forgotten. Yet, in 1660, English men and women so strongly desired a return to the old forms and ways that they repeatedly insisted that such a restoration had indeed taken place. And, for a time, at least on the surface of their consciousness, many believed it. If others discerned, albeit reluctantly, that the old world order would not so simply be reinstated, King Charles II was almost certainly among them. While he appealed to tradition and history, he personified, and helped to institutionalize, a new style of government and politics. During his reign, the rise of scepticism and the new Royal Society’s experimental philosophy eroded the certainties of faith and the authority of the Church. Commercial success and colonial expansion forged not only a new class of wealthy merchant adventurers, but new social relations and values which vied with traditional hierarchies and codes. More even than in its early Stuart days, London became an international capital, a metropolis of empire and fashion, novelty and flux. And more than ever before a new class of citizens rose to prominence in that commonwealth – women. Like other later revolutions, the English Revolution loosened the old hierarchies and relations of gender, and women emerged on the stage, literally in the reopened theatres and metaphorically in arenas of public life from which they had hitherto been excluded.

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Whatever the desire for a return to old times, the facts of novelty and change were inescapable. Moreover, as old political problems resurfaced and crisis loomed again, some new political arrangements and solutions increasingly appeared to be an attractive and necessary alternative to renewed conflict. Over the course of the late seventeenth century, Englishmen learned to differ instead of to fight over political issues and so gave birth to those institutions of civilized difference – political parties and clubs. As politics became central to fashionable society, political issues pervaded cultural forms and texts, the literary and visual arts. In turn, literature and art not only reflected but helped to fashion a new world in which, for all the persistence of traditional beliefs, many things once held sacred were opened to interrogation and dispute.

Contrary interests: England in 1660 It was a fine day  – ‘the sun shined gloriously’  – when Charles II, having disembarked and kissed the ground at Dover, proceeded to Deptford, where a hundred virgins in white were drawn up in line to welcome him.1 All those present queued to touch the crown on the king’s head; at dinner, nobles, bishops and judges, sitting in their ranks, symbolized the restoration of church, law and social order, as well as monarchy. On 29 May, his birthday, the king made his triumphal entry into London in an elaborately orchestrated pageant devised by John Ogilby and based on the festival prepared by the Flemish artist and diplomat Peter Paul Rubens in 1635 for Ferdinand of Austria (Figure 15). It was hoped that by means of such an extravagant display, ‘new inventions with which the kingdom had been so much intoxicated . . . might be discountenanced and discredited’.2 Charles was presented to his subjects as Jupiter triumphing over his foes, as the imperial Augustus, as the biblical King David returning to his throne, and as St George rescuing his people from the dragon of sedition. The triumphal arches erected in the streets staged an elaborate series of tableaux celebrating Truth, Peace, Plenty and Concord as the fruits of monarchy, the ‘best’ of governments. Statues of James I and Charles I, resurrected in the Strand, underlined the legitimacy of Stuart lineage just as images of the Royal Oak, the tree in which Charles II had hidden after his defeat at the battle of Worcester in 1651, stood as a sign of God’s protection of his chosen king. Stuart monarchy – British, imperial, sacred, divine monarchy – was restored, the pageants proclaimed, and rebellion and anarchy were banished by the king, just as the sun dispersed the dark clouds of a storm (Figure 16). A flood of panegyrical verses from across the country reprised and glossed the themes of the triumphal entry into London. Charles was heralded as ‘our Joshua’, the Caesar to restore a golden age, as a god who ‘spread those rays which the long darkness had clouded’.3 ‘Toucht by his healing’, England returned from sickness to health, the dramatist and poet Thomas Forde

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proclaimed; ‘in viewing [the king]’, added Henry Oxenden, ‘thou viewest a deity’.4 The many accounts of the king’s escape after the battle of Worcester made the same claim in the more popular form of an adventure story. The ‘romantic history’ of Charles’s flight and tribulations, with all its tense drama of risky encounters and near discovery, witnessed ‘that miracle of our . . . king’s strange preservation’ for the nation.5 Within a few years people had stripped bare the oak (sacred to Jove) that had sheltered the king, for what were the nearest a Protestant culture could approximate to holy relics. Pulpit orators, verse panegyrists and a grateful populace seemed to sing the same song of welcome. Yet only months before, after the coup against Oliver Cromwell’s son and successor Richard, a commonwealth had been reinstated and army factions had vied to seize the reins of government. Some who watched the ritual exhumation of Oliver Cromwell’s body and the grisly dispersal of his remains around Whitehall had, passively or actively, served under the Lord Protector. Not surprisingly, then, for all the effort to suppress them, memories of those dark days, and fears that they had not been entirely eclipsed, were audible beneath the rapturous joy of restoration. In his sermon on David’s restitution, Simon Ford confessed his fear that the old troubles were not ‘totally extinguished’.6 In his verse panegyric, England’s Beauty, Thomas Reeve suspected that there was still a generation ‘apt to asperse the most meriting prince’.7 There are hints, too, that writers had some sense that things had changed and might be different: for a while, after all, the nation had wondered whether ‘kings and princes might be men’, not gods; and majesty had appeared but a ‘painted sun’, an illusion.8 With prescience, John Patersone observed that ‘never a king had greater variety and tempers of spirit to deal with’, and suggested that the art of government would be that of reconciling so many ‘contrary interests’.9 Those ‘contrary interests’ were, of course, the legacy as well as cause of Civil War. And, whatever the attempt at cultural amnesia, the English Civil War could not be erased from the national memory. Indeed from 1660 there was evident ambiguity about whether memories of the war should be suppressed in the cause of peace and reconciliation, or highlighted as a warning against the danger of resistance and as a lesson on the necessity of obedience. While Arthur Brett urged that ‘what has been done is gone and past’ and John Dryden praised Charles II for his ‘perfection to forget’, others felt that the national sins of revolution and regicide required public atonement and expiation.10 The sacred virtues of Charles I and the wickedness done against him could not be forgotten, not least because Charles II carefully presented himself as the heir to the martyr and author of Eikon Basilike, allegedly Charles I’s last testament. The memory of the Civil War, however, was not a simple story of shared national repentance. Some, after all, had welcomed a republic and more had come to respect its achievements in military triumph, naval victory and commerce. Though Cromwell was lampooned, even critics acknowledged that he was respected as ‘bold and resolute’ and that men were ‘apt to admire him as a great and

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eminent person’.11 As the Civil War and Commonwealth had divided the nation in the 1640s and 1650s, so differing memories and perceptions of those events were contested throughout Restoration culture. Where David Lloyd believed that an official history of the Civil War might unite the nation in obedience and loyalty, the author of The History of the Common Warre predicted a ‘diversity of relations’ of that conflict, ‘framed by the passions of different parties’.12 From the beginning, the story and memory of Civil War served to divide as much as to unite the realm and to sustain as much as to suppress the critics of monarchy and advocates of commonwealth. In his History of the Royal Society, which is one of the best documents of the mark the war left on the Restoration imagination, Thomas Sprat reflected on how ‘the late times of Civil War . . . stirred up men’s minds . . . and made them active, industrious and inquisitive.’13 The stirred minds of inquisitive and active men, and now women, were to construct, from top to bottom, a different society and polity, and a changed national consciousness and culture.

A new politics The monarchy restored in 1660 almost exactly resembled the early Stuart institution. Legislation restricting royal authority, passed after 1641 without Charles I’s or the Lords’ consent, was rescinded; Charles II dated his succession from the day of his father’s execution on 30 January 1649; and, as his subjects were happy to see, returned to his throne by right, not invitation, and with no conditions or terms imposed. The king was greeted, just like his early Stuart predecessors, as a god, a father to the people, a husband to the realm. As Thomas Reeve put it in England’s Beauty, ‘a king in a commonwealth is like the heart in the body, the root in the tree . . . the sun in the firmament’.14 Yet it is the insistent repetition of such traditional conceits that gives pause for thought. For, over the past 20 years, the divinity and authority of monarchy had been questioned and for a decade the realm had been governed without a king. Restoration loyalists clearly felt the need to tackle these problems while attempting to claim that there were no problems. Though in The Dignity of Monarchy Asserted, Gilbert Sheldon maintained that kingship did not ‘need vindication’, he went to some lengths to answer John Milton’s anti-monarchical treatises and even to argue that Roman commonwealths had been ‘really monarchical’.15 The argument that monarchy was divine and natural now had to be made, rather than assumed. Moreover, in one vital respect, the monarchy was changed in 1660. The 1641 act abolishing feudal tenures that had bound all landowners to the king was not repealed at the Restoration and in consequence, as some astute observers discerned, monarchical government was transformed. As Fabian Phillips argued, ‘the exchanging of the tenures in capite and by

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knight service for a constant yearly payment . . . will level the regality and turn the sovereignty into a slavish popularity.’16 Though his prophecy that the end of homage would bring about ‘a democratical way of government’ proved wrong, Phillips was right to suspect that the end of feudal allegiance effected subtle but significant changes in the relations between the monarch and his subjects.17 The first king to be voted an annual sum for peacetime government, Charles II needed to work with parliaments that met annually until the last years of his reign. For some years after Restoration, as before the Civil War, the language of divine, absolute monarchy melded harmoniously with the celebration of England’s mixed government  – ‘a kingdom’, as Richard Blume described Britannia, ‘of a perfect and happy composition’.18 But, as political tensions revived over the king’s declarations of indulgence offering religious toleration, the ‘harmony of government which renders it sweet’ came under strain.19 During the 1670s, apologies for monarchy began to sound more nervous and more assertive, as critics of Charles’s use of his prerogative deployed arguments that echoed the rhetoric of the 1640s and revived claims for the sovereignty of parliaments. As crisis loomed again with the attempt to exclude from the succession the Catholic James, Duke of York, and the so-called Popish Plot to seize the government and crown, arguments resurfaced that sovereignty lay with the people, that government was of human, not divine, constitution. Even some of the loyalists defended monarchy in the new language of interest and utilitarianism, as the guarantee of industry, liberty and happiness. The threat of renewed Civil War sparked a revival of apologia for sacred kingship, sovereignty and non-resistance, rather than mixed monarchy. Charles II’s victory over his Whig opponents evidences the persistent force of belief in divine kingship. But it was a victory for a different kind of monarchy – a monarchy embroiled in the processes and negotiations of politics – and for a new kind of monarch. Charles II is an enigmatic and contradictory figure.20 Very much his father’s son in his firm belief in his god-given right to rule, his character and ideas were also formed by his more earthly experiences of flight, exile and intrigue during the 1640s and 1650s. On the one hand he advertised the sacred nature of kingship – no monarch touched more subjects to cure the ‘king’s evil’, the form of scrofula believed to be healed by the magical royal touch. On the other, he could be remarkably informal, exhibiting ‘a sweetness and familiarity that at once gained love’.21 One commentator after his death even described him as ‘cast of the same mould with those of a lower species’.22 And certainly the king’s public profligacy with his mistresses compromised the sanctity of the mystical royal body, prompting his friend and Gentleman of the Bedchamber, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, to quip: ‘his sceptre and his prick are of a length’.23 The returning David blessed by providence, the patron of the Royal Society who took an active interest in its experiments, a king who acted the most ceremonious of state entries into his capital but who rolled his sleeves up with his subjects to man a pump during the

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Great Fire of London, Charles personified the ambiguities of a Restoration political world that held on to old ideas and values while new vocabularies were transforming them. Perhaps it was those very contradictions in his own person that enabled Charles II to rule successfully and die in his bed, loved by his subjects. For though he proclaimed his divine right and sovereignty, as above the still disreputable manoeuvrings of faction, Charles skilfully formed alliances and forged, with his ministers, the first political parties. In a world in which Machiavelli was still demonized, Charles deployed the arts of feint and disguise and the strategy of divide and rule. Indeed, he deployed them so skilfully alongside the traditional rhetoric of monarchy that many did not have to confront the realities of a changed world. The deposition of his successor, who did not embrace, or perhaps appreciate, those contradictions is a testament to both Charles’s achievements and to the changes that had taken place. For, again, though it was some time before it became evident, the Restoration had ushered in a new politics. Most obvious, for all the articulations of ideas of unity and harmony, was the reality of difference and division. Simon Ford hoped that all English subjects might ‘love and live as friends together’ but feared ‘as much discord and distraction as ever’.24 While references to ‘the Royal party’ or ‘the Covenanting party’ were still made, Dryden’s assertion that ‘the hateful names of Parties cease’ remained but wishful thinking.25 Charles II himself, though he endeavoured, as a contemporary biographer put it, ‘that we should reconcile and embrace like brethren’, knew that he had ‘great variety and tempers to deal with’.26 Over the course of the next two decades, the ideal of unity was exposed as a fiction that only thinly veiled the fact of increasingly bitter political divisions. Several preachers bemoaned the strife; the author of England’s Present Interest (1675) lamented that ‘there are few kingdoms in the world more divided.’27 Though still castigated as factious, however, political differences and contests had become an inescapable daily experience. Increasingly such divisions and contests were publicized and spread from the circles of the elites, beyond the dinner tables of the Restoration chattering classes, into the tavern talk of common folk. The principal medium of publication of what had once been arcana imperii was that legacy of Civil War polemics, the political pamphlet. After 1660, in recognition that revolution had been fuelled by thousands of radical broadsides, efforts were made to re-establish censorship. When that secured only limited success, the government entered the fray with its own official organ, The Current Intelligence, first issued in 1666. Print, however, could neither be regulated nor dominated by authorized pamphlets; and as the euphoria of Restoration cooled, ‘weekly pamphlets’, as John Nalson protested, became ‘foul mouthed against his majesty’.28 The implications of free, critical debate became increasingly obvious: as John Price put it in a sermon of 1683, ‘when froward men do take a liberty to speak, write and print what they please . . . ’tis plain that they would be governors themselves.’29

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Price’s coupling of print and talk leads us into that new mart of Restoration gossip, sociability and politics, the coffee-house. From their beginning, coffee-houses were associated as much with politics as potables. The Dean of Westminster in 1665 referred to ‘those who frame commonwealths in coffee’; the deviser of London’s city pageants thought that no affairs ‘from monarch to mouse’ escaped the coffee-house wits; and in 1677 it was claimed that their ears were ‘itching’ for the ‘talk . . . about the Test’ – that is the Test Act against Catholics holding office, which had been passed in 1673.30 Nor were coffee-houses only metropolitan centres of political news. Those in the provinces paid for intelligence from London, making coffee-houses akin to an internet of gossip, scandal and political news. Like print, coffee-houses helped to forge a broader public sphere of citizens informed about politics and ready to formulate and express their own views on affairs of state. As the anonymous author of Huntington Divertisement wrote, ‘everyman there [in the coffee-house] thinks himself a statesman, and able to govern a kingdom.’31 Some observers asserted hysterically that coffee-houses were ‘become nurseries of rebellion’ and would bring in a ‘democratic state’.32 What they in fact did was open what had been state secrets to full, rational debate and critique, making political issues the business of almost all men and, more radically, women. There by the fire with their companions and cup, men and women assumed ‘a liberty of arguing pro and con, making it a case whether monarchy be the government that God approves’; there ‘every man pretends to be a politician and meddles with the secrets of government and thinks it his birthright to censure those at the helm.’33 ‘Everyone’, Thomas Heyricke lamented, ‘hath an empire in his own mind’, a consciousness of himself as citizen as well as subject.34 Though the government remained suspicious of such open public debate, what print and coffee-houses served to effect was a translation of political division from the battlefield to the club, salon and, ultimately, party. Though passions ran high in the 1670s, and many predicted another war, the violence of party diatribe did not escalate to armed conflict. If the memory of Civil War helps to explain this, it was because that memory powerfully contributed to the civilization of political contest and to a gradual acceptance and acculturation of political difference. As early as 1660, Bishop Matthew Wren, in an audaciously precocious phrase, had maintained that his disagreement over monarchy with the republican James Harrington was ‘no more a wonder than that two men viewing the same object by various lights should judge it to be of various colours’.35 The willingness to accept disagreement, to pacify it in the language of taste, was what gradually transmuted disreputable factions into at least semi-respectable parties, and what gave birth to social gatherings, clubs and cultural affiliations defined by political sympathies and allegiances. By the 1680s, when the crisis had subsided, the author of a dialogue between Whig and Tory was sure that it had been ‘better far to decide the difference with a pen’.36 While the party labels, once anathematized, were now accepted, the pamphlet dialogue

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presented a civilized exchange between men who could respect each other’s position. England was at the brink of an age in which political difference was becoming fully integrated into polite society.

Toleration and a more secular spirit? After the experience of religious radicalism and revolution it is not surprising that in 1660 the initial impulse was to denounce zeal and fanaticism along with rebellion, and to re-establish the authority of the church as the mainstay of order and unity in the state. Any prospect, however, of religious unity was scotched by the Anglican gentry’s insistence that their old enemies, the Presbyterians, be excluded from a Church of England which they regarded as the guarantor of privilege and hierarchy. As a consequence, from the moment of Restoration, the problem of different religious sects and how to deal with them became central and sensitive religious and political issues. It was not least because, as his contemporary biographer put it, Charles II was ‘convinced by his experience that consciences are not to be forced’ that the king aroused early suspicion in parliament.37 Disagreements over religion ran from top to bottom of society. During the 1670s, still more in 1680, they were to explode into violent diatribes. But if England in 1680 avoided another ‘war of religion’, it was in large part due to a shift in sensibility which alarmed all churchmen: the rise of more secular, sceptical attitudes to matters of spirit and faith that lowered the temperature of religious conflict. Unquestionably the religious excesses of the 1650s had fostered a sceptical spirit; in the early years of Restoration it became the fashion of the beau monde, Joseph Glanville complaining in 1667 that it was held ‘a kind of wit to be an atheist’.38 Though atheists were probably more feared than numerous, there is little doubt that many shared a belief in the need for a more ‘rational religion’.39 Though the bishops denounced atheists and sceptics, they remained antagonistic to signs of ‘superstition’ or ‘zeal’ and so, unintentionally, fostered a more lukewarm spirituality, which ultimately weakened the Church. Along with fear of revived sectarian clashes, it was this more tepid religious climate that fostered arguments like that of Matthew Clifford that there was no ‘so mild and peaceable a doctrine as that which permits difference in belief’.40 Unity, he argued, was best maintained by accepting differences. In 1675, William Penn was not alone in believing that nothing was more ‘senseless’ than ‘uncharitable and mutinous clamours . . . about religion’. Radically, Penn argued that ‘church government is no real part of old English government’, that religious issues should not be permitted to impede trade or rule.41 Though the Popish Plot and reign of James II were to refocus attention on the politics of faith, men had begun to show a willingness to subordinate matters of spirit to other interests; in their dialogue of 1682, Whig and Tory, for all their other differences, were united against the pretensions of the cleric.42 The political culture of late

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seventeenth-century England was one in which faith itself was for some becoming the subject of rational, often civilized debate. Scepticism, secularism and tolerance owed much, of course, to broader intellectual and cultural changes, especially to the new science promoted by the Royal Society. Our best evidence of this comes as much from contemporary apologists for the church who defended its precepts as ‘like a mathematical principle’ as from those who tried to counter the threat of science to faith by exposing the contradictions of mathematics.43 The Royal Society had an importance far beyond the communities of academic science. It stimulated the cult of the virtuosi, the amateur gentlemen scientists; and, more broadly, it emphasized and validated a new language of rational analysis and explanation that permeated society and state. Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society discloses on every page the wider ideological remit of the new learning. Against the ‘enchantments of enthusiasm’, it posited reason; in place of contentious words, it offered ‘mathematical plainness’ and a language for the ‘clearing of . . . our modern differences’. Most of all, the examination of nature, Spratt argued, ‘draws our minds off from past . . . misfortunes’ and ‘gives us room to differ without animosity and permits us to raise contrary imaginations . . . without any danger of civil war’. In the Royal Society, Spratt boasted, ‘men of disagreeing parties . . . have forgotten to hate’. In the nation, he suggested, science might unify and civilize by teaching ‘a bearing of each others’ opinions’ – a toleration of difference.44

The woman as good as the man Society, too, was transformed by the Civil War and Interregnum in ways that may not have been obvious in 1660. The Restoration was above all a triumph of the aristocracy and gentry who sought, and secured, the re-establishment of social hierarchy and local order. The 1660s saw a flood of books on aristocratic ranks, titles and creations  – on the Garter, on heraldry and on manners – as the old families and the newly ennobled endeavoured to recover or forge their social position and identity. Late seventeenth-century England, like early seventeenth-century England, was a country governed and led by the nobility and gentry. Yet the Interregnum, during which the House of Lords had been abolished, during which army officers had supplanted ancient families in local government, and during which loyal peers and gentry had suffered heavy fines when their estates were sequestered, had left its mark on the fortunes and culture of nobility and gentry. Not least, the codes of chivalry that bound the nobility had been compromised by breaches of allegiance to an anointed sovereign and by divided loyalties and it is not clear that they ever recovered their hold. While Restoration plays of love and honour struggled with the issue of fractured aristocratic values, even those who penned works on heraldry began to fear that ‘these marks of honour called arms are now by most people grown of

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little esteem’, as, to paraphrase John Logan, the codes of chivalry gave way to the validation of interest.45 Unlike their counterparts on the Continent, the English nobility had never become a rigid caste, cut off from the other ranks of society: English nobles could and did participate in, and marry into, trade and commerce. After the Restoration, financial exigency and the expansion of trade may have led impoverished noble families to pursue commercial wealth and perhaps even to find in the colonial enterprise something of a new crusading mission. In 1681, Nicholas Crouch reflected that Civil War had delayed England’s historic imperial mission, until Charles II became known through ‘the utmost rounds of the earth’.46 While by no means all were happy with the changes  – the Remembrancer of the Exchequer Fabian Phillips castigated ‘the oppression of the markets’ – nobles as well as merchants led the colonial enterprise that, as they proudly vaunted, ‘gave the law to Africa and Europe’.47 If commerce and colonialism further loosened the boundaries of class and rank, the emergence of fashionable London society, and progressively of fashionable provincial capitals and spa towns, came close to dissolving them. In the coffee-houses, squares and parks, as Rochester’s poem ‘A Ramble in St. James’s Park’ makes clear, nobles and gentlefolk quaffed with wits, promenaded with serving men and dallied with whores. London society witnessed, in every sense, a promiscuous intercourse of social classes. In imitation of a monarch who elevated his mistresses to the highest ranks of nobility and influence, lords and ladies were satirized for their ‘conversation’ with serving wenches and grooms. Sex was the solvent of the boundaries of class and of the moral proprieties that had once, at least ideally, distinguished the aristocrats (the word literally means ‘the most virtuous’) from lesser mortals who were slaves to their passions. From the top down, Restoration culture was rakish, bawdy and pornographic. And if this was in part, as it was, a conscious rejection of Puritan austerity, it also served to demystify a king and nobility who were now seen, no less than their inferiors, to succumb to the common temptations of the flesh. Moreover, the public display of, and disputes over, Charles II’s bastards (chief among them the Duke of Monmouth) and squibs against cuckolded lords who unknowingly raised a groom’s progeny could not but shake the social as well as moral codes of a society in which lineage and legitimacy were the fundamentals of property and power. The most striking of social changes were those in the constitution and relations of gender. In early modem England, the traditional injunctions that women be chaste, silent and obedient had often been breached in practice by assertive noblewomen, precocious female poets, shrewish wives and even transvestite female rakes. But the Interregnum systematically disrupted traditional gender roles as women wrote, prophesied, preached (sometimes naked) and petitioned parliaments. In 1661, Dryden may have hoped again for a world in which ‘every Father govern’d as a King’, but the changes in gender relations were not to be reversed.48 Not only did female actors

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appear for the first time in the theatres in the 1660s, Charles was greeted by female panegyrists such as Aphra Behn, who became the first woman to make a living as a professional writer. The fact of female participation in public life – and through the royal bedchamber notoriously in political life – began to make its mark on courtesy literature and even give rise to treatises that deserve to be called proto-feminist. In 1669, for example, a funeral sermon proclaimed ‘the equality of the woman’s merits and rights with the man’, and argued that only custom (rather than nature) excluded women from office.49 In The Gentleman’s Companion, William Ramsay insisted that women were wittier, potentially better governors than men, and should therefore be educated to fulfil their potential.50 The author of The Woman as Good as the Man believed that, though social rhetoric privileged masculinity, in practice ‘husbands resign the government to their wives’.51 The conventional, or vituperatively misogynistic, literature makes the same point. John Hall’s distaste for a world in which men wielded the spindle and women the sword, disgust that women ‘should rival [men] in government’, or remarks that ‘imperious woman reigns’, graphically document the changes he perceived to be taking place.52 Though a stock in trade of early modem misogyny, the repeated references to women whose ‘lust is bottomless’, and who used men ‘like stallions’, draw attention to the ways in which changes in sexual morality reflected and refigured gender relations.53 To put it simply, Restoration culture was the first in England to publicize, and in some cases to celebrate, female sexuality. For all his ambivalence about them, Rochester’s women are sexual and social agents, often in command of their bodies and social milieu. The many portraits of Restoration ladies offer the very best testimony to the new social, political and sexual power of women in late seventeenth-century England.

Party lines: Politics and literary culture The literature of Restoration England echoed the ambiguities and uncertainties of a society and state poised between tradition and change, and it helped to construct and validate the shifts that we have identified – towards a politics of difference and party and a society of looser social arrangements. Looking back at the time of the king’s death, the author of Titus Britannicus concluded of Charles II, ‘we may say that wit did first reign here and appeared upon the stage as on a throne’ (Figure 17).54 Certainly, many in 1660 heralded the restoration of monarchy as the revival of the arts, especially of the theatres; some even argued the role of theatre in sustaining kingship and claimed ‘True Monarchy’s supported by our Play’.55 While during the Commonwealth and Protectorate plays had been widely read, and perhaps performed in private houses more than critics have allowed, the Restoration completed the full commercialization and institutionalization of

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theatre which was fully implicated in fashionable London society and close to the court. Charles II made frequent visits to the public theatres, while some of his mistresses were among the first actresses to perform on stage.56 Initially the Restoration itself was described as a theatre of celebration; as Arthur Brett put it, with the king returned, ‘Comedy’s now on the Stage / And Tragedy has ceased to rage.’57 However, his association of the comic genre with royalty was too simple. The anxieties we have identified beneath the euphoria of Restoration were evident in the drama’s engagement with the facts of recent disobedience and disloyalty and the divisions they had bequeathed. The genre that the Restoration playwrights fashioned and favoured was the mixed form of tragicomedy, which embraced ambivalence, enabling theatre to accommodate different voices within a conventional moral narrative. But the differences that needed to be accommodated were not merely those of past civil conflict. By the later 1660s, voices critical of king and court were heard in the theatres, as outside them. Indeed new genres of satire emerged, excoriating the corruptions of courtiers and of a king so weakened by debauchery that he could not defend his realm against Dutch invasion. As dramatists and poets began to point up their failings, Charles’s government saw the need to recruit loyal pens to answer them in kind. Official organs like The Current Intelligence included loyalist and royalist verse, while Dryden made a career, as translator, playwright and poet, as a semi-official laureate supporting the Stuart and Anglican cause. Civil War and revolution had thoroughly politicized all the literary forms and genres and, after the initial celebrations, Restoration literary culture helped to trace the contours of political divisions and draw the lines of political parties. By 1678, with political tensions at their height, all the literary genres – translation, history and travel writing as well as drama and verse – became sites of party conflict. As the preface to Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel has it, ‘he who draws his pen for one party must expect to make enemies of the other. For Wit and Fool are consequents of Whig and Tory.’58 Not only were writers identified by party labels, Whig and Tory were, as the title of a pamphlet described them, ‘Scribbling Duellists’.59 Loyal panegyrists may have tried to reassure Charles II that ‘the poets are your own’, but the reality was that, along with all other literary genres, verse was the medium of conflict, the property of all ‘scribbling factions’, of the ‘saucy’, ‘base rebels’ as well as loyalists.60 One of the fashionable new genres of literary satire, the series of ‘Advice to a Painter’ poems, hints at another important cultural development of the late seventeenth century: the enhanced status and growing popularity of the visual arts. Towards the end of Charles’s reign, the author of Painting Illustrated recalled that with the king’s succession ‘all arts seemed to return from their exile’, and painting chief among them.61 He exaggerated – for all his protestations, Cromwell as Lord Protector had emulated regal representations on canvas and coin – but he had a point. The Restoration moment was itself a visual extravaganza. While Dryden claimed that

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‘Pencils can by one slight touch restore / Smiles to that . . . face that wept before’, the visual traces of Restoration were heavy and ubiquitous, as the monarchy was painted back onto the cultural canvas of England.62 The triumphal arches built for Charles’s entry into London were not only rich and elaborate, they were skilfully engraved and sold in book form to provide a permanent visual memento and record of Restoration. In 1660, all the visual arts were brought into the service of reconstituting monarchy and aristocratic society. A treatise translated by the diarist John Evelyn was one of many that argued the role of architecture in constructing order and civility; Walter Charleton reinterpreted Stonehenge as a site for the inauguration of kings; and, of course, hundreds of paintings of Charles II, many in Garter robes, by Peter Lely, John Riley, Godfrey Kneller and others, figured the king at the centre of the frame of government.63 No less, the many portraits of Garter knights, of aristocrats and office holders, of bishops and deans, served to reconstitute and display order, privilege and hierarchy in church, state and society. Carefully considered portrayals of figures of authority were, then as they are now, intended as ‘silent instructions’, underpinning the naturalness of the social order and the innate authority of rulers and governors.64 Yet, the Restoration saw changes in the visual arts which complicated the social and political performance of these representations. Again, the commercialization and commodification of the arts was fundamental. A mounting interest in, and market for, paintings is an obvious feature and development of the late seventeenth century. As well as the increasing numbers of commissions, of portraits of women as well as men, of merchants and mayors as well as nobles, books on sculpture, painting and etching abound, addressed to both budding connoisseurs and amateur painters and engravers. Catalogues of pictures, maps and prints – of Civil War battles and the new royal family – bear witness to a thriving art market. The market was expanded and extended by an increased interest in the engraved print and, from the 1670s, a new fashionable genre – the mezzotint. Copperplate engraving had made a slow start in sixteenth-century England, and before the Civil War had been almost entirely dominated by foreign craftsmen. But the market for engravings of royal and public figures grew from Elizabeth’s reign to the point where, during the war, the engraver Peter Stent was able to run a successful shop selling his own, and others’, work. The emergence of new figures of authority during the Commonwealth and at the Restoration further fed the market for relatively inexpensive portraits, making the art of engraving and etching, as a principal practitioner William Faithorne put it in 1662, ‘arrive to such a height in these our . . . times’.65 The fashion for making and collecting engravings took off over the following decades, as producers responded to patterns of consumption and social change by selling groups of portraits – of bishops, for example – in uniform style for display. While elaborate, large engravings remained expensive, they were, of course, but a small fraction of the cost of a canvas; the cheapest

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were not beyond those of quite modest means; and even the poorest viewed them on tavern walls. Increasingly in late seventeenth-century England the arts, which had been a sacred mystery, a mimesis of divine nature, became a widespread commodity, produced, owned, distributed and discussed by many. Though scholars have yet to address the broader social and political implications of this development, contemporaries clearly grasped its import. Evelyn, for one, thought it regrettable that images of his king could be produced and perpetrated by ‘bunglers’ or hung in alehouses.66 Others noted that common folk began to judge paintings and comment on ‘cutts’ (engravings).67 Moreover, those who had engravings of kings and lords at home had, in some measure, come to possess representations of authority which had formerly been displayed only in privileged spaces, making not only the image but the figure of authority a part of domestic experience. In turn, by the very end of the century, the images of sacral kingship gave way to more domestic portraits of the monarch, less removed from, and more ‘at home’ with, his or her subjects. What was more immediately obvious was the place of visual forms, and especially engravings, in the new culture and politics of party. As party conflict intensified, satirical engravings and cartoons were deployed alongside squibs and lampoons to denigrate rivals. As if countering the official engravings of Charles II enthroned, in armour, touching for the king’s evil or as Garter sovereign, we find satirical images of Catholic processions and plots, and cartoons such as that of an emasculated England presented as a lion without a tail (Figure 18). Though Charles remained popular and his own image escaped the satirical cartoonists’ pen, sacrilegious engravings of his mistresses and bastards graphically turned attention from the sacred to the fleshly body of the king. His less popular successor James was, from the beginning, pilloried in cartoons and comic strips that unquestionably undermined his authority. By the time of the Hanoverians, the once mystical royal body was the subject of the most scatological cartoons.

Tradition and innovation It is tempting to use the word ‘demystification’ to describe the changes that took place or were initiated during the reign of Charles II. Though in 1660 the monarchy was greeted in the language of providence and auguries and the king was heralded for the ‘magic of his excellent name’, another quite different discourse  – of interest  – was audible.68 The Church of England which had once been the church of a nation became the religion of a party and the mysteries of faith were debated and questioned by scientists and sceptics. In the family, the role of fathers as natural governors was opened to dispute, as women sprang into public life and view: as actors, writers, polemicists, and at court, perhaps most importantly as agents who celebrated rather than veiled their sexual bodies. The arts that helped to effect this

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demystification were themselves demystified, fully embedded, as we have seen, in a burgeoning commodity culture. What such a view risks is simplification and anachronism. The historian who detects new languages and beliefs must always take care not to discount the continuing force of old words and codes. Belief in the king, the church and the male as divine and natural authorities survived the challenges of science and scepticism, not to mention the reign of a monarch who did not entirely embody these ideals. And traditional beliefs and discourses were reinforced and revalidated by political crisis. As, in the late 1670s, England teetered on the brink of Civil War, claims that the king was ‘God’s vicar on earth’, that ‘not only Nature but God himself affects monarchy’, that ‘majesty’ scatters tumults as the sun does the clouds, again became common utterance.69 Old prophecies were reprinted and new ones published, questioning any narrative we may be tempted to posit of the triumph of reason over superstition. Men and women in 1680 and 1681 testified to portents of doom – pikemen fighting in the sky over Carmarthen, for example – and their accounts of visions were purchased by a readily credulous public.70 What was different was a greater willingness, and in an overtly partisan culture, greater need, to question and contest such visions. The author of Heraclitus Ridens mocked the stories of ‘ships and castles in the air’ and suspected that they were invented to ‘fright people’ from criticism of the government.71 The lawyer Thomas Hunt insisted that ‘every form of government is of our creation and not God’s’, and so was open to rational scrutiny.72 Thomas Rymer, the Whig chronicler, asserted what he wished to see: that in ‘an age of history and human reason, the blind traditions go hardly down with us, so that iure divino makes but a very litigious title’.73 Others claimed, with approval or disapproval according to their sympathies, that divine rule was held to be mere ‘poetical and rhetorical flourishes’, that many considered sacred government ‘only merry table talk’.74 The truth is that none had the whole truth on their side. Old mysteries and traditional vocabularies contested with rational scrutiny and new discourses of state. The new art of government involved a willingness to recognize this doubleness and an agility in deploying different conceits in altered circumstances. Through all the joyous acclamations that greeted his restoration, Charles II never forgot that many of his subjects had not held monarchy sacred. He triumphed over his Whig enemies during the Popish Plot crisis because he not only rehearsed the pieties of divine kingship before the faithful, he also argued the utilitarian case for monarchy, order and stability to those for whom it was not a given. After 25 years of rule, Charles II, still loved by his subjects, died peacefully in his bed. The beneficiary of Charles’s rhetorical flexibility and political acumen was his brother James, Duke of York. In 1682, secure as successor to the throne despite his open Catholicism, James re-entered London in triumph. Panegyrists lauded the ‘miraculous delivery’ of the future king and the victory of loyalty over dissent.75 James was showered with love and praise, as the

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future king ‘born to retrieve the . . . glory of the English nation’.76 Preachers told him that ‘ye [kings] are Gods’ and foresaw a nation united ‘to God’s glory’, its old divisions healed.77 James watched the joyful celebrations and listened to the loyal praise. But he chose to forget the clamour of Popish Plot and Exclusion and seemed deaf to the warnings that ‘old incendiaries’ might again kindle the ‘coals of sedition’.78 He opted to believe that the traditional rhetoric of a party was still the common voice of the nation. Three years after his accession, he was forced to flee his throne.

12 ‘Thy longing country’s darling and desire’: Aesthetics, sex and politics in the England of Charles II

I want to begin by returning to the paintings, principally the portraits by Peter Lely that were the centre of the exhibition that inspired the volume, Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II (see Figure 19). And I want to ask a simple question: as we peruse these canvases, what do we see? As a historian my instinct is to ask, too, what did contemporaries see and how did these paintings perform, convey meaning, in the environment of the court and, through copies and engravings, beyond in Restoration England? More particularly, as a scholar engaged in a study of images of power in early modern England, I want to explore the ways in which these portraits, some of which hung at Whitehall, represented, and were seen to represent, the court and the monarchy: how they contributed to the royal image and responses to the royal image in Charles II’s reign. The question ‘what do we see?’ takes us to the essential characteristic of the Restoration: its ambiguity, its evocation of tradition and convention, and yet its radical novelty and difference from the past. When, as a historian of politics, I walked through the Painted Ladies exhibition rooms at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, my first impression was of a familiar group of princes and aristocrats, a display of dynasty and privilege.1 That sense of familiarity, however, though deliberate – indeed, strategic – is superficial, if not illusory. In the first place, most of the canvases are portraits of women; although ladies were, of course, the chosen focus of the exhibition, it remains the case that Lely’s female portraits are his best work and eclipse any picture of the

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king. Second, several are of royal mistresses, a class of women never before so publicly represented and displayed – and not only aristocratic mistresses but, in the cases of Moll Davis and Nell Gwyn, common actresses who were often taken in seventeenth-century England to be common whores. Third, the children in these canvases are not the usual subjects of the royal publicizing of dynasty and succession; they are bastards, the illegitimate offspring of a monarch who had a barren marriage and no legitimate heir. Again, with names like Fitzroy (son of the king) and ducal titles (reserved for those of the royal blood) as well as their representation by Lely, these bastards are, novelly, publicized as royal – as representations of the king. Fourth, and to me strikingly, the female portraits, for all their gestures to Sir Anthony Van Dyck’s, exhibit a revolutionary sexuality. The exhibition catalogue is surely guilty of coy understatement in describing Lely as moving away from the ‘delicate lyricism’ of earlier portraits.2 His Restoration females are, in their settings and dishabille, with their languid poses and direct gaze towards the viewer, sexual women. Rather than complex Neoplatonic conceits alluding to the beauties of the mind, it is the female sexual body these paintings figure and advertise, and it is the newly sexualized female body to which contemporaries, most famously Samuel Pepys, so readily (if at times guiltily) responded.3 Indeed, as we look again, even the conventions and traditions to which these paintings gesture no longer carry their original symbolic freight. Rather than again presenting Neoplatonic and Christian conceits, these portraits play with them, and in the process they signal a dissociation from an older world of ideas and forms, and a scepticism about their authority. In Lely’s portraits of court whores with the symbolic attributes of chastity, conventional meaning gives way to mere witty playfulness, while the figuring of mistresses as saints  – or, in the notorious case of Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine (later Duchess of Cleveland), with her son Charles Fitzroy (later second Duke of Cleveland and first Duke of Southampton), as Madonna and Child (Figure 20)  – entirely disrupts the association between the sacred symbol and the sitter. As with much of the literature and political discourse of the Restoration, these texts discover and negotiate the disruption of traditional symbols and codes that was one of the (as yet unstudied) legacies of Civil War and revolution. Dynasty, family, lineage, the sacred, sex and the body are not only the motifs and subjects of these paintings; they were also the principal political sites and discourses of early modern England. My purpose in this essay is to sketch the early modern history of these languages, the radical transformation of them effected by Civil War, and their very different ideological performances after 1660. I want to suggest that the images displayed in Painted Ladies belong to a specific and brief period when the discourses of gender and sex, religion and dynasty, politics and power, were being renegotiated and rewritten, along with the script of monarchy itself; and that the paintings, as well as responding, contribute to that refashioning of social and political arrangements. For a decade or so after Restoration, I will argue,

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revolutionary representations loosened traditional codes and transgressed conventional boundaries, before changed political circumstances dictated a return to moral as well as political norms. Most of all, pleasure – sexual pleasure – for a brief moment became a novel mode of royal representation: of a king who was, in the wake of revolution, feeling his way towards a new relationship with subjects and a new monarchical style. ‘The Merry Monarchy’, we must come to see, was serious political business. Family and patriarchy had been the dominant languages of royal representation and formed some of the most powerful images of early modern rulers.4 Not least because his tenure was new and precarious, Henry VIII commissioned from Hans Holbein a mural of the Tudor royal family – his father, Henry VII; his mother, Elizabeth of York; himself; and his third wife and only mother of a son, Jane Seymour  – and patronized him and other artists for family portraits that initiated a new style of royal representation.5 In Holbein’s mural and the portraits of the king based on it, Henry – full face, standing akimbo, and with a large codpiece – is, as well as the sire of a dynasty, the patriarch of the realm (Figure 21). So important were this image and the language of patriarchal sway that, for all their very different circumstances, Henry’s successors felt the need to redeploy them. Even at age 9 (probably just before his succession), Prince Edward was painted very much in the style of his father;6 later, Edward VI’s sister Elizabeth ubiquitously used the language of nursing father as well as mother to represent her relationship with and care for her people.7 Succession, family, was the central political issue – and anxiety – in Tudor England. Although the Stuarts did not initially face the problem that beset all Henry’s children – lack of an heir – family and paternity remained dominant motifs of royal discourse. James I persistently used the language of the father, famously calling himself ‘dear dad’ when addressing George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, making his favourite a part of an affective royal family.8 In the case of Charles I, as I have argued elsewhere, family was the principal conceit of the king’s representation of his monarchy.9 Van Dyck’s paintings of Charles with his children, or of the royal children together, transforming the royal family portrait, figure the king as loving father of his people – an image he also bequeathed to the realm in the pages of the Eikon Basilike, with his final address to his son. If the Civil War strained the discourse of polity as affective family, regicide killed the father as well as the ruler of the nation. Many of the elegies on Charles speak of a nation orphaned.10 Yet, the transference to Oliver Cromwell, especially after he became Lord Protector, of these tropes of the father figure underpins the embeddedness of this language as much as it suggests a psychology of power.11 To royalists, however, Cromwell could be nothing other than a stepfather; it is in 1660 that a flood of panegyrics greeted the restored Charles II as the fertile future father of dynasty and nation who could reunite the fractured family of the realm.12 Despite its promise, Charles’s marriage to Catherine of Braganza was barren. But unlike

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Henry VIII, Charles did not divorce his queen and marry a mistress to secure a legitimate heir. He paraded his mistresses as mistresses and publicized his fertility not, for the most part, within a conventional representation of family but through his illegitimate offspring – the first in England elevated to form a ducal caste like that in France.13 Was Charles seeking to lay the blame for the failure of issue publicly on the queen, or did his expansion through representation of what constituted a royal family (a monarchy) signal a broader political move? Certainly the king’s critics sought to counter his attempt to abnegate responsibility for failure to provide an heir, claiming that it was Charles’s sexual profligacy which had wasted a national as well as personal bodily resource. In the lines of John Lacy’s poem on Nell Gwyn: How poorly squander’st thou thy seed away which should get kings for nations to obey!14 And John Milton, using a term with regal as well as familial freight, praised ‘household society’ and, in his critique of Restoration promiscuity in Paradise Lost, celebrated marital union.15 Charles’s supporters responded, however, by claiming patriarchal language for the king, in one case in a revealing new way. At the height of the political crisis of the Popish Plot, when once again the nation teetered on the brink of Civil War, Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha; or the Natural Power of Kings was published, with an engraved portrait of Charles II. The next year, famously, in Absalom and Achitophel, John Dryden presented the king as an Old Testament patriarch in an age of polygamy, ‘scatter[ing] his Maker’s image through the land’.16 It may be that Dryden, like Charles himself, was making the best of a difficult situation. But if there is something in our sense that Charles was rewriting patriarchy (as I will argue he was to rewrite desire), as a public representation in changed circumstances, Lely’s canvases are important documents of that new presentation of a royal family larger than the traditional understanding. Central to the conventional Christian family was marriage, another vital discourse and symbol of early modern monarchy. At the coronation service, the placing of the ring on the monarch’s finger symbolized not only the sovereign’s faith and priestly function (bishops wore a ring), but also marriage to the realm.17 Henry attributed so much importance to holy matrimony that he married six times, not least out of conviction that God had not favoured or sanctified his earlier unions. Although she was ‘the Virgin Queen’, Elizabeth made much of her politic marriage with her people, on one occasion dramatically breaking off a speech to hold out to parliament her ring, as she told them, ‘I am married already to the realm of England when I was crowned [sic] with this ring, which I bear continually in token thereof.’18 James I, in words that were echoed in several other speeches, told his Commons: ‘I am the husband and the whole isle is my lawful wife.’19 It was Charles I and Henrietta Maria, however, who, not least on account

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of enjoying the first happy royal marriage in early modern England, made their marital union the central motif of monarchical representation. On canvases, as in masques (in Coelum Britanicum they were figured as one, ‘Carlomaria’), the royal marriage was represented as a platonic union of higher rational souls, a symbol of the king’s qualification to rule and of the mystical union with his people.20 Civil War and regicide ruptured that union. Poets and pamphleteers wrote of a nation ‘widdowed’ by the death of the king;21 and it may be no mere coincidence that both advocacy of divorce and the Civil Marriage Act of 1653 followed soon after civil conflict and the death of a sacred king.22 In 1660, then, the royal marriage in the narrower and larger, personal and political, senses – as Charles II himself recognized when he acknowledged public desire for his early betrothal – was part of the process of resettling the kingdom.23 Yet, whatever its popularity in the public eye, Charles’s marriage turned out to be a personal failure. Although – and his reasons for this require exploration – Charles never seriously entertained divorcing Catherine, and on occasion stood by her at some political risk to himself, the couple were not close.24 Describing her as looking more like a bat than a woman, Charles almost immediately separated himself from his wife and publicly distanced himself from his marriage.25 Literally, the king spent most of his evenings apart from Catherine, provocatively appointed his mistress the Countess of Castlemaine to a post in the queen’s bedchamber, and set her up – and later Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, as well – in apartments more lavish than the queen’s, where Charles dined and spent most of his leisure time.26 Not only did Portsmouth become, in many respects, an ‘alternative queen’, but Charles was rumoured to have undergone a mock marriage with her  – a mockery indeed of the sacred bonds of his lawful union.27 Marriage, then, was no easy discourse of representation for Charles  II, and it is notable that his speeches do not deploy it. Marriage remained central to Restoration politics: Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon, was charged with arranging a barren marriage to advance his daughter Anne to the throne as the Duchess of York, and the question of whether the king had married Lucy Walter, the Duke of Monmouth’s mother, became vital to the politics of Exclusion.28 But Charles’s self-presentation was less that of the husband than of the lover, the man not confined by conventional codes or boundaries, the monarch who reconstituted the royal household by instituting the mistress as a recognized figure. While in so doing the king, as we shall see, surrendered the discourse of marriage to his critics and opponents, he appears to have willingly publicized different amorous – and therefore political – relationships. In early modern England the most common analogue (a contemporary term of more force than our metaphor) for the state was the body. As Ernst Kantorowicz expounded in his classic study, the theory, or political theology as he termed it, of the king’s natural and politic bodies was devised to reconcile the humanity and mystery of kingship, to conjoin the man and

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the polity.29 In the case of Henry VIII we are again led back to Holbein, whose portraits render the royal body as the body of the realm, no less than Reformation apologia depict Henry as head of the Church as well as the state. In an age of dynastic politics, disputed successions and foreign threats, the royal body needed to be strong, fertile and procreative; by contrast, the female royal body needed to be a marital and maternal body. Two childless queens therefore added to their difficulties as women a major problem of representation as well as rule. In the case of Elizabeth, while remaining, and persistently proclaiming herself, a virgin, the queen endeavoured to make her public body the body of the realm. The ‘Ditchley’ portrait (Figure 22) literally superimposes the queen’s body on a map of Britain on which she stands, while another engraving shapes the very coastline of the realm to the figure of the queen.30 Elizabeth erased her personal sexual body – she is nearly always alone in portraits – but successfully represented her iconicized body as the body politic. As is infamous, James I’s sexual body was at the core of his problems and especially undermined the image of monarchy. Effeminate and homosexual, the king’s body signified not the strong Protestant nation but corruption and Catholicism, sodomy being long associated with monks and Jesuits. Revealingly it was the martial body of James’s son Prince Henry that came to embody the hopes of the realm, but these hopes would be dashed by Henry’s untimely death in 1612.31 After the damage done by his father to the representation of the king’s two bodies, it would seem as though Charles I sought consciously to resacralize the royal body. Although in his case the body was fertile and procreative, Charles mystified his person through distance and ritual, while on canvas Van Dyck reconstituted the king’s body personal as the body politic.32 Ironically, Charles’s success in conjoining the king’s two bodies necessitated republic as well as regicide. I have remarked elsewhere – and it remains striking – that, even in death, the royal body of Charles I was not cartooned; it retained its mystery.33 The same could not be said of the republic or even the Lord Protector, both ubiquitously represented in doggerel verse, ballads and woodcuts as grotesque and deformed: as not a body politic at all but in Cromwell’s case a nose, in that of the Commonwealth a stinking part, a rump.34 In 1660, then, there was ‘an unresolved relationship between the king’s body and the body politic’.35 While the mystical body of Charles I offered the most recent model, the republic and Hobbesian political theory had refigured the state as a monster, as artificial and anatomized. Charles II’s body had already been represented to his subjects before he returned to his throne: narratives of his flight after the battle of Worcester described him as dirty and disguised, and tales spread of his sexual escapades.36 As has recently been brilliantly argued, an early series of paintings that he probably commissioned depict Charles as anything but mystical, rather as a humble figure of folklore (see, for example, Figure 23).37 Here again I would suggest that Charles skilfully accommodated and embodied the ambiguities

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of Restoration. No monarch touched more people to cure what was called the king’s evil (scrofula) – the ultimate expression of sacred kingship. On the other hand, Charles rejected the extravagances of his father’s ceremonial: in contrast to the towel the king had touched being raised aloft as a sacred object, he laughed at the court customs of Spain (often the model for his father’s) where, as he put it, the king could not piss without someone holding the pot.38 Charles II made his body public: he walked in St James’s Park, often with no attendants; he stood grimy amid the flames of the Great Fire of London, manning a water pump. As several commentators from Pepys onward observed, Charles appeared as much an ordinary man as a monarch.39 Most of all he revolutionized the representation of the royal sexual body. Charles openly conducted his sexual affairs and publicly fondled his mistresses; his sexual life and even his genitalia were the subjects of public interest and conversation.40 In every sense, Charles’s reign rendered the royal body a public sight as well as site. In so doing it may be that, as critics have argued, he demystified monarchy and damaged royal authority. Yet, this publicizing of his affairs (his brother was far more discreet) was partly a royal choice and possibly a strategy. Rachel Weil suggests, and I will return to the suggestion, that his sexual body was Charles II’s blazon.41 Did he recognize that, for all the sacred discourse and ritual of state, the regicide had destroyed for all time the sacred body of the king? Was the representation of his public sexual body a refiguring, a humanizing, of a trope for changed times? John Dryden, for one, was doubting the valence of the old political theology; ‘if’, he prefaced Absalom and Achitophel, ‘the body politic have any analogy to the natural’.42 A few decades later Bernard Mandeville, accepting the demise of the theory and the legacy of Hobbesian atomism, replaced the king’s two bodies with the hive as the analogy for the state.43 If there is something in my suggestion that Charles’s sexual body was refigured to represent the body of the people, then along with diaries, newsletters and verse, along with (as I will argue elsewhere) portraits of the king that owe a debt to Holbein, these canvases of mistresses and bastards perform in that process – even though they do not directly depict Charles himself.44 Discussion of the royal body leads us swiftly to the subject of intimacy, significantly a word with both sexual and political meaning, especially in the personal monarchy of early modern England. The king’s body servants were those closest to him, his intimates, who, as David Starkey has shown, could often wield more influence than major officers of state.45 Henry VIII’s minions and Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber were suspected and feared by powerful ministers. Under Mary and Elizabeth, courtiers were wary of the potential influence that might be exercised by the queen’s female body servants; they coveted the seemingly unimportant positions, such as Master of the Horse, because such posts licensed close and frequent personal attendance on the queen – not coincidentally were there rumours about Elizabeth’s sexual affairs with the Earls of Leicester and Essex, both

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Masters of the Horse. Intimacy was inseparable from that cynosure of early modern monarchy: counsel. That is why James I’s personal favourites led him into such political trouble. By transgressing the normal rules of intimacy – by having male lovers – James was open to the charge of being improperly advised and corruptly influenced, indeed (given the signification of homosexuality) popishly counselled. Key, therefore, to Charles I’s reform of monarchy was a reconstitution of the politics of intimacy. Charles had no favourite; he took advice from his Privy Council; he kept a distance from his ministers and officers. Although his wife was increasingly suspected of exercising inappropriate (in other words, Catholic) influence through intimacy, at least her place in his bed was legitimate and his expulsion of the Ganymedes who had attended his father was welcomed.46 Once again Charles II fundamentally transformed the politics of intimacy. Those closest to the king were not, for the most part, men but women: mistresses with whom, away from public affairs, Charles spent most of his time. Not only was intimacy again dangerously connected with illicit sex (John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, shared Jane Roberts with Charles), but Charles’s behaviour raised the spectre of influential, powerful women.47 Although Sonya Wynne and others have rightly downplayed the women’s actual influence over policy as out of all proportion to what was feared, Charles’s mistresses were widely suspected of corrupt influence and Portsmouth was directly blamed for the dissolution of parliament and a pro-French foreign policy.48 Revealingly Nell Gwyn escaped most of the opprobrium, not just because she was Protestant (and of low birth) but because she showed little interest in politics or power: She hath got a trick to handle his p[rick], But never lays hands on his sceptre. All matters of state from her soul she does hate, And leave to the politic bitches.49 For all their differences, Charles followed his father in keeping a personal distance from his ministers and withholding real power from his intimates who were not only women but sometimes commoners. Moreover, his relationships with his mistresses were fickle and founded more on fancy and lust than any enduring bond of love. After the fall of the Earl of Clarendon, Charles had no obvious close political confidant. Amid the circles of his ministers and his mistresses, he was free to take all counsels and ultimately to follow his own. Whatever the extent of their influence, the appearance of women at court who had the place and potential to influence the king should not pass unremarked. For much of the early modern period the powerful woman was but a contradiction in terms. Countless courtesy manuals, prescribing that they remain chaste, silent and obedient, sought to confine women to housewifery and the household and to deny them a place in the public

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sphere.50 If right authority was founded on reason, it was argued, women could not rule; governed by appetite, their leaky, lusty bodies symbolized their sex’s failure at self-regulation, that quality essential for government over others. Female power was, in this society, illegitimate, illicit and demonized as witchcraft or seduction. Although such prescriptions were by no means uncontested – their repetition betrays nervous anxiety that they were not heeded – women rarely performed on the public stage of theatre or state. The Civil War, however, transformed the role of women and the discourse of gender, that is to say, of politics. During the 1640s and 1650s women emerged as petitioners and lobbyists to parliament, as fighters and preachers.51 Although such transgressions continued to be condemned, they slowly effected a change in attitudes that may be reflected in the decline of witchcraft trials from mid-century on, as well as in a mounting literature advocating female spiritual equality. An important legacy of Civil War and revolution was the emergence in 1660 of women in a myriad of public places and roles: among other things, as writers, actresses and as mistresses at court. The virulent misogyny of some Restoration texts offers testimony enough of a male ambivalence regarding such changes, and there is a debate about whether a new libertinism further confined or emancipated women.52 Yet, what is unquestionable is that such literature acknowledged female sexual desire and the force that female sexuality – what the poet and playwright George Etherege graphically terms ‘the powerful cunt’ – could exert.53 More positively, women also published and publicized their sexuality. Where female publishing had been regarded as akin to prostitution, Aphra Behn not only made a career in letters but legitimized female sexual desire and wrote a female heroic not scripted by chastity.54 The royalist Katherine Philips even valorized same-sex female relations.55 Milton intuited these important social changes. Uncoupling female virtue from what in Comus he had described as ‘the sage and serious doctrine of virginity’, at the close of Paradise Lost, in James Turner’s words, Milton ‘promotes the female as a paradigm of the new heroism’.56 Paradise Lost, as we have come to see, is an intensely political poem, and the new representation of women had important political implications for a commonwealth structured around gender norms, one that Andrew Marvell was now calling ‘our Lady State’.57 To many ‘the powerful cunt’ represented the subversion of politics as well as gender politics. Castlemaine’s desire to be publicly recognized as royal mistress en titre epitomized the dangers of a new female sexual presence.58 Those who criticized Charles II for advancing these women to title and place presented him as effeminized, weakened by them. The Whig theorist John Locke, in his treatises on government, was to reinscribe the household and family as the fittest domains of female agency and restate chastity and fidelity as the vital feminine virtues, not least because they guaranteed the legitimate patrimonial descent of property. The king himself, however, celebrated and licensed female sexuality and in so

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doing transformed a gendered discourse of state. It may be that, often more swiftly than his subjects, he sensed the changes effected during his exile, and he recognized the new role of women in the public sphere and, though not without ambivalence, the benefits of acknowledging, not contesting, it. The royal mistresses of Lely’s canvases have an agency as well as a sexuality that is part of a changed social and political world, one in which the business of kingship would be conducted and reconstituted. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England the tropes of gender and sex were inseparable from religious language and polemic. As I have noted, in Reformation literature, sodomy is most often associated with monks, and of course the biblical Whore of Babylon was identified by Protestant exegetes as the papacy. Represented as the Virgin, one of the few positive female symbols, Elizabeth I was often contrasted with the Whore, her Catholic cousin Mary Queen of Scots  – whose own sexual relations, it has to be said, did nothing to discountenance the association. In sixteenth-century England, whoredom was figured as popish. On the other hand, and again from the Reformation, the charge of sexual promiscuity was levelled also against the radical Protestant sects, in particular the Anabaptists, who threatened all social order. Sexual slander, then, was frequently deployed to vilify religious opponents (i.e. also political opponents); in the British Civil Wars religio-sexual languages wrote the pamphlet polemics of charge and countercharge.59 It has long been argued, even if latterly it has been disputed, that after the religious conflicts of Civil War, the Restoration witnessed a greater reluctance to speak and write the scripts of state in the language of the sacred.60 For all his invocation of providence in 1660, the languages, speeches and ceremonies of Charles II’s early years often sound novelly secular. Less often observed, however, is the blatant uncoupling of religion, morality and sex. Of course, the church courts, which had endeavoured to regulate lay sexual behaviour, were restored in 1660, but the story of the following years was one of their ‘declining business and shrinking authority’ in a more Erastian Church.61 In that story, the role of the head of the Church played no small part. Whatever Charles’s private religious faith, his behaviour was perceived as unsettling not just the moral authority but the authority of the Church of England. Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, was later to claim that Charles, without conscience, went straight from his mistresses to church.62 And contemporary verse connects the king’s immorality with possible irreligion. As ‘The King’s Vows’ satirized him in 1670: I will have a religion then all my own, Where Papist from Protestant shall not be known, But if it grow troublesome, I will have none.. . . But whatever it cost I will have a fine whore.63 Worse in the eyes of some, Rochester, a poet close to the king, portrayed not love but sex itself – fucking – in sacral language, as if mocking the Church’s

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teaching on sin, in the same manner that some of Lely’s canvases audaciously toyed with sacred conceits (see Figure 20). The established religion and church were, of course, central in the politics of Charles II’s reign, and from the 1670s opponents of the king, not least Marvell in the Growth of Popery, directly associated royal lust with debauchery and Catholicism.64 Charles’s position, however, may not have simply been dictated by his sexual urges. In the first place, the king was anxious to signal the end of Puritanism, with its unpopular agenda of policing lay morality. Even in the late 1670s, long after the memories of those ayatollahs of moral behaviour, the Cromwellian major generals, Rochester told Burnet that strict moral regulation smacked of ‘enthusiasm or canting’.65 In addition, Charles’s embrace of a more secular approach to sex, like his plans for toleration, was an ‘indulgence’, an appropriation by a Protestant ruler of a remission of punishment and a grant of ‘freedom’. In Some Passages of the Life and Death of . . . Rochester, Burnet related how the poet, using loaded political language, described the restraint of men from women as ‘unreasonable impositions on the freedom of mankind’.66 Charles II wished to dissociate himself from Puritanism and to free himself from an Anglican stranglehold. When he gambled on indulgence being popular, albeit not to the liking of the Church, he may have been thinking of a laity freed from a variety of strictures. In disrupting the conventional discourses of family, marriage and gender, and of morality and religion, Charles II represented and personified what I want to call a new politics of pleasure. As well as a religious matter, in a Christian commonwealth sex had been a social and political concern and an analogue for social and political arrangements. Sex was a matter for, and a symbol of, regulation. The sexual impulse stood for the appetites, and control of the passions was what distinguished men – and it was only men – from beasts, and equipped them for rational self-governance. Those who could not govern themselves had to be ruled by others: women by men, the libidinous rabble by virtuous governors.67 The regulation of sexual behaviour was inseparable from the foundations and principles of government itself. Indeed, during the interregnum, the most often cited sign of an entire world turned upside down was unbridled sexual activity: free love signalled not only the rejection of religious authority but political anarchy. It was not least the alleged promiscuity of the radical sects that led the gentry to the restoration of old political forms. Ironically, however, Charles II himself overturned the traditional paradigm through what amounted to an official sanctioning of sex and promiscuity. Given the ties between sexual regulation and sound government, we must endeavour to understand why. The king’s own appetites scarcely begin to solve the puzzle. As we have seen, Charles did little to keep his promiscuous behaviour or that of his court from the public eye; on the contrary, he paraded it. Rachel Weil suggestively describes the public sexual display as a parodic ‘form of royal ceremonial’, and she is supported by John Oldham’s satirizing a monarch with arms ‘Priapus Rampant’ – perhaps another reference to the well-publicized size

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of the royal penis.68 Sexual indulgence and pleasure were, and were seen to be, new forms of royal representation. Again, this representation may have been intended as an antidote to an unpopular Puritanism and as the replacement of a repressive and sterile regime by a monarchy of liberality and abundance. But the priapic was also a mode of assertion, and Rochester may have been right to discern in Charles’s sexual self-proclamation a broader assertion of royal will. Directly associating sexual appetite with unbridled royal prerogative, the poet wrote of his master: For though religion, liberty, life lay on’t He’d break through all to come to Cunt69 There had long been an identification made, not least from observation of the Turkish polity, between libertinism and tyranny; many less well disposed towards the king than Rochester would deploy it against Charles. But the attacks, I think, also manifest a nervousness that the pleasure the king embodied might, too, be the pleasure of the nation, and that their indulgence might form an affective bond between the king and his subjects. During the 1690s the Whigs were to accuse Charles II of using debauchery as a means of gaining popularity. In 1694, for example, The Portraicture of . . . King Charles II presents the king as articulating that ‘debauchees . . . will never be enemies to a reign that allows them in it’, and that debauchery would assist his quest to restore arbitrary government and popery.70 Such concerns were not only articulated from hindsight. Milton, for one, did not allow the court to claim a monopoly on sexual pleasure. Paradise Lost, unlike Comus, is a text that celebrates, in Adam and Eve, the erotic and sensual, even borrowing in the process from Cavalier lyric.71 To be sure, it is marital sex, but the change of tone is striking. And the larger cultural change that it may reflect may be witnessed in a very different way by the behaviour of Pepys. As a good civil servant of the interregnum regime, Pepys could be critical of Restoration extravagance and indecency, but he was obsessively drawn to the royal mistresses, especially Castlemaine (whose picture he acquired and fetishized); one might say that he was vicariously involved in the king’s sex life, which his own replicated in some ways.72 As today, the sexual lives of great figures attracted and repelled; they made authority itself a site of desire as well as disgust; and in the post Hobbesian universe in which Charles ruled, desire may have been a crucial bond now that chivalry and platonic love had fallen victim to civil conflict. Charles admired his old tutor Thomas Hobbes, whom he protected at the Restoration, while the king’s friend Rochester, in his defence of sexual freedom, reprised a Hobbesian theory of the appetites.73 It is Rochester, famously, who connected the royal prick and sceptre, Charles’s sexuality and government; but he is not alone. Charles is the Stuart most fondly remembered in popular histories, in which his nickname ‘Old Rowley’, after his racing stud at Newmarket, preserves an image of the king that had currency at the time. As often it may be the poets who best discerned a

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transition in the cultures of sex and power. In his ‘Instructions to a Painter’, Edmund Waller describes the beauties of the court inspiring sailors to great deeds.74 More interestingly, Dryden figures the might of Charles II in overtly sexual language, drawing attention to his ‘new cast canons’ and ‘big corned powder’.75 Already in 1672, Dryden is figuring sexual power as power, and presenting Charles as what he was to call ‘Thy longing country’s darling and desire’.76 That the enduring popular image of Charles II, as Ronald Hutton points out, is at odds with the academic evaluations of the king and man may helpfully direct us to the issue of class.77 In early modern England, pleasure, festivity and promiscuity were associated with popular culture. Puritanism, it has long been argued, appealed to the middling sort, not least as a movement for regulation of the unruly festivities (and costly illegitimate offspring) of the lower orders.78 In the reigns of James I and Charles I, though by no means condoning immorality, the monarchs had sanctioned popular games and festivities in their Books of Sports of 1618 and 1633 that had alienated Puritan magistrates. Not only were popular games celebrated in the verse of Robert Herrick and the Cavalier poets, but the sensual and erotic charge of May dances and festivities was fully embraced too. Timothy Raylor and James Loxley have persuasively argued a closer link between court poets and popular culture, by tracing the participation of poets such as William Davenant and Sir John Suckling in the taverns and revelry of Stuart London.79 For all the remote hauteur of Charles I, the court reached into popular culture, and there can be no doubt that the abolition of the monarchy was deeply unpopular. During the interregnum, the closure of the theatres and the prohibition on the celebration of Christmas and other festivals drew stark attention to a connection between monarchy and popular pleasure – not the least of the reasons the Restoration was heralded with popular joy. With the restoration of kingship many hoped for the return of festival culture; in this regard at least, Charles II did not disappoint. The king’s public entry into his capital on his birthday, the 29th of May, was perhaps the most dazzling spectacle staged for an early modern sovereign, and Charles did not fail to mark other state occasions with stunning fireworks displays for the people.80 The royal style was also more accessible and popular; as we have seen, Charles walked so freely in St James’s Park that it was possible for a humble commoner to accost him.81 But what I most wish to remark is the relationship of Restoration sex to class – or, more exactly, the transgression of class lines by Restoration courtiers and even the king himself. In ‘A Ramble in St. James’s Park’, Rochester paints a graphic portrait of the sexual as well as social miscegenation of the classes, describing a mistress as Full gorged at another time With a vast Meal of Nasty slime Which your devouring Cunt had drawn From Porters’ Backs and Footmen’s-Brawn.82

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A host of other verses, some hardly less graphic, make the same point. Indeed, their language radically breaks from courtly sensibilities and refashions them to the style of the street. Sex is indeed a leveller. The ‘poor whores’ who petitioned Castlemaine in a pamphlet address her as one of them, ‘concerned with us’, a gesture the countess reciprocates in her supposed response to her ‘sisterhood in Dog and Bitch Yard’.83 In the cases of Moll Davis and Nell Gwyn, of course, Charles took as mistresses commoners of dubious reputation, the latter already a prostitute and perhaps one of the many Charles patronized casually alongside his more established affairs. Not only was Charles’s sex life common knowledge; some of his women were common subjects. At a time when novels about Henry VIII sitting down to drink with a humble cobbler were being published, this may have contributed to Charles’s popularity.84 Nell certainly seems to have been popular – and perhaps for her humble origins as well as her Protestantism. Although respectable society, including the London apprentices in 1668, manifested their disapproval of immorality, to humble folk the down-to-earth Charles with his orange seller may have had an appeal that predominantly middle-class historians have missed.85 When one rereads G. M. Trevelyan’s famous description of a king with ‘thick sensuous lips, dark hair and a face of the type more common in Southern Europe’, one can almost see the net curtains twitching.86 At several points in his reign, however, Charles appealed to his people over the heads of his parliament; in 1680 he gambled on popular loyalty – and won. During the last years of his reign, Old Rowley helped to take the Stuart monarchy to its height of popularity and power. Although it is the subject of another, more expert, essay, in my discussion of sex and politics I must glance briefly at the Restoration stage.87 After the closure of the theatres in 1642, following a long Puritan antipathy to the stage, the monarchy was regarded as the champion of the players  – and, reciprocally, some argued, monarchy was supported by play.88 If not always uncritically supported by theatre, the monarchy was certainly represented in and by it. The impresarios and managers of the Restoration stage, William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew, for example, had long-standing connections with the Stuart court and cause, and in 1660 they received a patent to erect a new playhouse, performances in which were to be independent of the censorship of the Master of the Revels. If the Restoration stage represented the monarchy, its most common subject was sex. For all the treatment of sex and commodification in Jacobean city comedies, it was on the Restoration stage where sex outside marriage was ubiquitously staged and stripped of moral opprobrium.89 Moreover, Restoration drama introduced a popular new character antagonistic towards marriage and any social restraint on his appetites: the rake. As Harold Weber, Susan Owen, and others have observed, the rake was a Hobbesian figure who represented a new world of loosened social bonds and obligations.90 As other critics have argued, the Restoration theatre was engaged in generic experimentation, as with broader social and political changes: with the legacy of Civil War to honour,

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allegiance and community, and with its consequences for the nature of monarchy itself.91 Plays about marriage and sex were part of that process of negotiation with change. The rake, writes Susan Owen, ‘is a Machiavellian and Hobbesian figure’; in The Country Wife, the predatory deceiver Horner describes himself as ‘a Machiavel in love’.92 The new, unrestrained sexuality figured the new politics of interest, calculation and guile, just as platonic love had symbolized Renaissance ideals of social and political relations. On the stage of the Restoration years, love was a politic universe; no less the new polity, and ‘politics’ (a term slowly emerging from opprobrium) was negotiated, represented, and perhaps even valorized through a new discourse of sex and love.93 Quite simply, the affection of subjects could no longer be assumed; it had to be won. The bonds of love, in the state as on the stage, were giving way to more fickle interest and desire. In his rerendering of the carpe diem genre in at times provocatively brutal lines, as well as in his less often cited tender love lyrics, Rochester seems to be experimenting with a new politics of love, sex and state. Poems on Affairs of State are dominated by just that – sexual affairs that were also matters of state. And, I would suggest, Charles II was, as well as indulging his appetites, experimenting with a new monarchy founded not on the old assumptions of patriarchy and love, but on calculation, interest and desire. The suggestion that Charles II’s novel sexual representation was also a political representation gains support, I believe, from the discourses and modes of opposition to the regime. The charges of promiscuity and debauchery had been common oppositionist languages in early modern England, in the village as well as at court. In James I’s reign, the Overbury affair prompted libels vilifying a court that was politically as well as morally bankrupt;94 during the interregnum the republican Henry Marten was the object of coruscating verse about his libertinism, which was taken as a manifestation of his politics.95 In 1660, promiscuity appeared to be officially licensed and validated  – not unequivocally (not even in Rochester’s case), but validated nonetheless. While this radical move might have exposed Charles to a powerful language of opposition, however, for all the mutterings, the king’s sexual activities – public from soon after his restoration – did not immediately draw public attack. It appears to have been a series of events, following in rapid succession, that revived sexual slander as a dominant trope of opposition. The plague, the Great Fire of London and the Dutch invasion of the Medway all could be, and in some circles were, read as signs of God’s hand of judgement on Sodom, on an England mired in debauchery. We cannot know when Milton, who published Paradise Lost in the wake of these disasters, composed particular lines, but the poem’s celebration of ‘wedded love’ as ‘mysterious law’ and condemnation of ‘the bought smile of harlots’ redeploy familiar conceits in highly topical circumstances.96 ‘Wedded love’, once a predominant motif of royal representation, was now turned against a king who had publicly flouted its mysteries.

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Topicality and specific sexual reference were combined in the devastating critique that initiated a new stage and form in the literature of opposition to Charles II. Andrew Marvell’s The Last Instructions to a Painter not only appropriates for opposition a genre Waller had created for royal encomium; it totally subverts the new representation of royal sexuality as liberality, abundance and national desire. In Marvell’s poem it is the republican Dutch, not the king, who, while invading, appear to woo and caress a willing people. Painting a languid pastoral vision (pastoral was a conventional genre of anti-court literature), Marvell describes how the ‘Belgic navy glides / And at Sheerness unloads its stormy sides.’97 Once the feeble chain across the Medway is easily broken (as easily as virginity is lost at court?), the passage is open and the fleet penetrates the realm. While England is taken, the courtly gallants, weak and effeminate, ‘a race of drunkards, pimps and fools’, look on helpless.98 As for the king, in his bedroom, he has a dream of a helpless, naked, blindfolded and bound Britannia (the medallic figure for which his desired Frances Teresa Stuart had sat as a model; Figure 24) standing before him. Rather than performing a chivalric rescue, he dreams of raping her. Here is a king whose subversion of traditional sexual codes is not a reconstitution of kingship, but an abnegation of it. The longing details of Marvell’s description of the royal mistress parodies royal duties diverted to pleasures, as it also satirizes courtly sacrilege. Charles II is figured here not with mighty cannons but as unmanned, as much as unkinged, by sex: ‘He only thunders when he lies in bed’; and even there, the poem hints, the action may be onanistic, an impotent self-pleasuring.99 Although sexual–political critique could hardly come sharper than that, Marvell’s poem opened the way to other satires that turned the royal image against the king. In ‘The Fourth Advice to a Painter’, the anonymous author starkly contrasts kingly duties and sex, portraying Charles, in an allusion to Nero, as fornicating while the English ships burned. The verse continues: So kind was he in our extremest need, He would those flames extinguish with his seed But against Fate all human aid is vain: His pr – then prov’d as useless as his chain.100 Here not only are profligacy (and its pretension to kindness) exposed, but it is itself a sham – impotent and flaccid. Rather than the roistering rake or Old Rowley, in opposition satires Charles is depicted as feminized and dominated by women. ‘The Fifth Advice to a Painter’ posits that women have ‘snared the wisest prince’.101 In ‘The Haymarket Hector’ the Duchess of Cleveland is ‘the prerogative whore’.102 When the French Catholic Duchess of Portsmouth replaced her as Charles’s favourite, ‘The Royal Buss’ has the French mistress effecting

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the dissolution of parliament.103 Not the manly sexual philanderer, the rake on the throne, Charles in opposition satires may think only of fucking the nation, but he does not even have the parts for that. In attacking Charles’s government, these texts revive traditional sexual tropes of opposition, and they also invert the king’s own public representation to reveal the failures of both prick and sceptre. Those who sought to defend Charles from such critiques were faced with the difficulty that it was the king’s own radical refashioning of these languages that had provided the opposition with such an opportunity. One tactic was to divert attention from Charles II and revert to more suitable models of propriety. In his play The Conspiracy, the Tory dramatist William Whitaker portrays an exemplary married couple who resemble Charles I and Henrietta Maria.104 The late 1670s and 1680s saw a big revival of literature on Charles I, presenting him as husband and father as well as martyr; it may be that the engravings of the royal family sold by Moses Pitt from 1682 to 1684 were an attempt at rebranding Charles II as his father’s son and as a husband more than a libertine.105 The publication in 1680 of Patriarcha – a text written in the reign of Charles I  – with Charles II’s portrait image may have been part of the same strategy.106 Dryden pursued a very different course. Where others erased Charles II or again presented him traditionally, he took up the king’s reputation for promiscuity and sought, daringly, to sacralize it. In Absalom and Achitophel, there is no place or sympathy for Queen Catherine; her infertility licenses the king’s promiscuity, which in this poem becomes the performance of kingly duty as well as sacred rite. Charles, like the biblical King David, ‘scatter’d his Maker’s image through the land’, and in so doing, like ‘Israel’s monarch’, he ‘his vigorous warmth did variously impart . . . wide as his command’.107 Let us return to Dryden’s eroticizing of Charles’s relations with his subjects – to the king as ‘thy longing country’s darling and desire’. Even in the crisis of 1680 Dryden, like Charles, intuiting a new psychology of authority in a post Hobbesian world, boldly endeavours to render promiscuity, as do so many of Lely’s female portraits, as a new family romance of the nation. It was not, however, to become a new script of state. Charles triumphed over his Whig enemies, but he did so by returning to the fold of the Tories and the Church of England. Already by 1680, too, despite Dryden’s daring, the old moral codes, and with them traditional modes of royal representation, had regained the ascendancy. If Rochester can be taken as the poet of the new sexuality and politics, his biography and the posthumous fate of his works reveal much about shifting values. In 1680, the year of his death, the first edition of Rochester’s poems was published, purportedly in Antwerp but in fact in London, with a prefatory epistolary essay anticipating a critical reception.108 The same year, as if to neutralize the effects of the poems’ public circulation, Bishop Burnet published his Some Passages of the Life and Death of . . . Rochester, in which he presented the poet as a deathbed penitent. Burnet’s Rochester is a talented, brave nobleman (Burnet narrates Rochester’s

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service in the fleets in 1665 and 1666) whose ‘natural propensities to . . . virtue’ were corrupted by the court.109 In his account of his discussions with Rochester, Burnet argues powerfully against the poet’s philosophy, scepticism and morality. Accordingly, Rochester’s final conversion reads as a full acceptance of those arguments, as well as a conversion to belief in God. Burnet’s concern to assert that Wilmot was not deranged but converted of his own free will demonstrates the bishop’s wider purpose and the importance he attached to Rochester as a representative of court, and royal, morality. The year 1685 saw another deathbed conversion, or at least the public announcement by Charles  II of his Catholicism as he called upon Father Huddleston to administer the last rites – although one story, that his last words were ‘Let not poor Nellie starve’, evokes more ungodly priorities.110 In 1685, too, a second edition of Rochester’s verse was published. This time, Poems on Several Occasions. Written by a Late Person of Honour was publicly printed in London and ‘to be sold by most booksellers’.111 The edition was a sanitized version of the 1680 text, with the more obscene poems omitted and indecent passages revised.112 Perhaps not coincidentally, as Rochester was being cleansed and newly presented, James II – though he continued to conduct affairs as king – took pains, after succeeding to the throne, to keep his extramarital relations discreet and to present himself very much as a monarch in a loving marriage to Mary of Modena. As even Burnet, his leading critic, was to acknowledge, at James’s court promiscuous sex was not condoned, or at least not practiced with an ‘open avowing’.113 It was, however, William III who proclaimed himself a champion of not only Protestantism but what contemporaries related to it, moral reformation. From 1688, William and Mary set out to promote an image of their marriage and their court as models of godly union and royal virtue, in contrast to the debauched popery of their Stuart relatives and predecessors.114 In 1691, a third edition of Rochester was published by Jacob Tonson. A preface to the reader explained that Rochester had entered a court characterized by ‘ribaldry and debauch’ in which poetry had no ‘good aspect’.115 But Rochester, it continued, was at least a poet of ‘manly vigour’, in contrast to his French contemporaries, now the enemies of England, and he was a talent worthy of national preservation. The publisher presented the poet in this edition having ‘taken exceeding care that every block of offence should be removed’. Tonson, secretary of the Whig Kit Cat Club, who also purchased the rights to Milton’s Paradise Lost, gave Whig England a Rochester collection of ‘such pieces only as may be received in a virtuous court and not unbecome the cabinet of the severest matron’.116 It was an edition from which the irreligious as well as the indecent verses were excised. While Rochester was being repackaged as, at heart, a good Englishman, in sermons and tracts the Stuart monarchy was being vilified for its debauchery, popery and tyranny. The poet’s relations with his king, never

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properly explored, were complicated and by no means unambiguous; but the two were close. In 1670, in his published ‘Advice to the Painter’s Adviser’, Rochester viciously attacked the king’s critics and presented Charles as not just ‘tender of his subjects good’ but as Christlike, a ‘Vice God’. ‘King’s failings’, he argued, ‘ought not lie / An open prospect for the Vulgar Eye.’117 As opposition to Charles had grown, the easy going atmosphere in which Rochester himself had satirized the king was passing. From the later 1670s we sense from the poet’s correspondence with Henry Savile that an age of free sexual pleasure was passing too.118 The editor of Poems on Affairs of State sees the decade as one in which the king was increasingly the target of satiric fire.119 A decade before Rochester’s death, a more sober mood had overtaken the nation – one we may also sense from Lely’s later style as well as the work of other artists.120 For all the rhetoric of restoral, the Restoration was a period of novel experimentation  – and not only in science, the arts and social customs. After experiences very different from those of his predecessors, Charles II experimented with a new style of kingship and self-representation: a style less sacralized, more familiar, more open.121 The indulgence of pleasure was a powerful antidote to Puritanism: it acknowledged a new world of appetite and interest; it had popular appeal. And a new acceptance of sexual pleasure responded to changed gender relations and the new place of women in society. If the 1660s, not least Lely’s canvases, suggest a demystifying of the female sex, the same was true (though not in either case simply so) of Charles’s monarchy  – and, some feared, of religion itself. Like the female bodies of the actresses newly set, often in undress, on the stage, the royal body was a site of public voyeurism.122 Charles promiscuously mingled with his citizens as well as his mistresses. After the disasters of the 1660s, the fall of Clarendon, and then the crisis over the king’s declaration of toleration, much changed. Indeed, this declaration was not the only royal indulgence rescinded. As Charles’s relations with his parliaments deteriorated and he drew closer to France, the subjects’ ardour for the king cooled. Charles’s withdrawal and planned retreat away from London, at Winchester, signalled the end of a happy liaison.123 Even after his triumph over the Whigs, he spent the last years of his reign in greater seclusion, while panegyrists  – quite unlike Rochester – reclothed his monarchy in mystery. Rewedded to the Church and the Tories, Charles ended his promiscuous flirtations with Presbyterians and Dissenters. By Charles II’s death, a new aesthetic in literature and the arts was beginning the process that would condemn Lely’s ‘painted ladies’, along with the king’s court, as decadent. Lely’s portraits capture many of the ambiguities of Restoration: though they reprise traditional subjects, they subvert them; though they figure the holy, they come close to the sacrilegious; though their subjects are dynasty and lineage, they are portraits of women; though the king is not figured, he is, in some respects, the subject of them all – he is

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the sire, yet not the legitimate father. And though the head and reason of the realm, it is his body and his appetites that are here implicitly represented. Lely depicted Charles as a monarch of sex and pleasure, and in doing so he exposed his paintings not only to differences of sensibility and taste, but also to party conflict and ultimately Whig disapproval. As the exhibition gave us an opportunity to view them again free of that moral judgment, we should also take the occasion to study these paintings as testimonies to the artist’s brilliance and, like Rochester’s and Dryden’s poems, as texts of a new politics of pleasure.

13 Whose life is it anyway? Writing early modern monarchs and the ‘Life’ of James II

I What is a life? What are the materials of a life? And how do we approach the study and writing of past lives? Given the longevity and huge popularity of biography it may seem perverse to raise now such fundamental questions. But both the subject of biography – the life – and the genre of life writing have changed significantly through time. During the Renaissance, for example, lives, like histories, were published usually as moral lessons and patterns of virtue and vice. Drawing on classical models and texts, early modern lives were a predominant genre for the instruction by exempla which was fundamental to the humanist pedagogic and social programme. During the course of the seventeenth century in England we may discern a new approach to life writing that focused more attention on capturing the peculiar character of the individual. Following the writing of new kinds of lives by Clarendon, Walton and Aubrey, the first known use in 1683 of the term biography by John Dryden seems to acknowledge a shift in the conception of, and the writing of, a life: to signal a new, more secular sense of self, to posit the idea of self-property and to view the self as an agent, a character and personality. Enlightenment modernity, we might suggest, fashioned a stable, rational self along with a new narrative genre for writing it that has dominated our thinking and writing about lives to our own times. The biography, or life narrative, has been a literary (and historical) genre that has outlived many other literary fashions and forms. Indeed, biographers have largely ignored the critical moves of the past two or three decades that have transformed literary studies by challenging

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the stability of texts, notions of fixed meaning and the very idea of the author or authored self. Recently, however, the biographer of Ben Jonson, Ian Donaldson, has insisted that, far from being engaged in different enterprises, the scholars of lives and texts, ‘biographers and critics’ – here I would add historians – ‘face similar and intimately related problems of interpretation which need to be pondered together’. ‘Lives’, he continues, ‘must be read with the same subtlety that in recent years has been shown in the interpretation of texts’.1 As his own experience must have demonstrated, Donaldson’s injunction seems particularly appropriate both for the study and the writing of early modern lives. For, though contemporaries were increasingly invested in the notion of a self and the narrative of a life, in the humanist culture of early modernity selves and lives were by no means the property or script of a sole author. Ancient and contemporary lives were edited, translated, copied into commonplace books and appropriated and quoted for use by readers: that is rendered in a myriad of textual and discursive forms by a variety of readers and writers. The texts of early modern lives, we might say, were inseparable from the lives of texts and from the multiple authorship, commerce and free interpretation that was the culture and condition of texts in early modern England. As the case of Jonson so obviously demonstrates, the theatre of early modern England emerged from a new interest in, a new concern with, characters and lives; but theatre also artfully staged and represented lives – including the lives of kings  – not as a stable single-authored narrative, but as a series of personations and performances. In the theatre and the meta-theatre of early modern England, lives were not simply fashioned by selves but endlessly constructed, represented and reconstituted through textual exchanges and by different actors in various forms. As John Guy recently argued, in a historical life that departed from the traditional biographical form, the humanist scholar and martyr Thomas More was not just a man for all seasons; his life was one of many different and contradictory performances and of many representations and stories. Far from trying to resolve them into one account, Guy insists that these multiple representations are not just pertinent to  – they are  – the life of Thomas More.2 It is both Donaldson’s urging of a more textual subtlety and Guy’s embracing of multiplicity that I wish to apply to a particular subgenre of life writing where, I maintain, traditional biography has served us ill – the lives of early modern monarchs. Despite all the obvious rewritings of early modern royal lives for our own purposes – the transformation of Elizabeth I, for example, from figure of male fantasy to inept prevaricator to feminist role model  – historians, claiming objectivity, have remained reluctant to acknowledge the problems involved in their claims to find the ‘real figure’.3 Though new sensibilities have opened historical biography to dimensions of a life once ignored or repressed, such as James I’s homosexuality, few royal biographies venture

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into the interior lives of rulers.4 Most disappointing, traditional royal biographies (that is virtually all I know of) have taken a narrow view of what constitutes the evidence, the materials, of a royal life. In particular, they have tended to ignore royal writings and other representations except when they have the most obvious ‘political’ import; and even then they are read as simple statements of personal and public authority rather than as complex texts of a multiple, variable, vulnerable, and sometimes fractured, subjectivity.5 One of the prevalent discourses of pre-modern monarchy was the language and concept of the king’s two bodies: a recognition of the human and personal as well as the public and sacred aspects of royalty. While historians have been familiar with the conceit at least since Ernst Kantorowicz’s seminal study, the full implications of it  – and of early modern changes in its ideological performance – for royal biography have been little explored.6 In early modern theatre, as Kantorowicz appreciated, we have rich contemporary meditations not only of a society working out new notions of identity but of a culture also newly fascinated by figures of power: in the state as on the stage. Theatre was a laboratory in which early modernity posed and pondered questions about authority, regality and identity – what if a king goes mad or is a machiavel or heretic? – questions that we seldom find confronted in the usual materials of the biographer or historian. Such representations on the stage both reflected and fostered a theatricalization of regality that developed over the course of the sixteenth century and reached its apogee in Elizabeth’s reign. While scholars readily cite Elizabeth and her successor James I comparing monarchs and actors, historians have been slow to study their royal subjects as literally that: as actors and performers who self-consciously performed on the stage of state, who for all their (and our) insistence on their integrity and transparency, recognized the tension between their private and public selves and the need to adopt personae and to perform roles. Performance on the stage is no simple act of an authorial self. The actor’s lines, albeit delivered and inflected by him or herself, are scripted usually by others and subject to revision in the context of the changing circumstances of performance – not least different audiences. It is not inappropriate to think of early modern royal performances in a similar way. Over the course of the sixteenth century, as I argue elsewhere at length, English monarchs, faced with the threat of religious war and rebellion, went to great lengths to sacralize and publicize their authority.7 The popularity of plays about kings and courts is only one testament to their success. A growing market for copies of royal speeches and accounts of royal progresses, for royal portraits and souvenir objects evidences how regality was not only represented but increasingly observed and consumed by an audience.8 Royal performances, as other authorial performances in early modern England, were increasingly involved in a number of dialogues, exchanges and negotiations that complicate, to say the least, any idea either of sovereign authority – or of a sovereign self.

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This was nowhere more evident than in what we once readily took to be the uncomplicated authorial acts of speaking and writing – especially by rulers. Royal authority had always been heavily invested in the ‘word’ and Henry VIII and his successors seized the opportunity presented by print to publish the royal word and will. But print was not the preserve of sovereignty. In the divided Europe of Reformation, Henry VIII found his attack on Luther answered with excoriating wit. Increasingly too, in a humanist rhetorical culture which trained the educated laity in arguing in utrimque partes, all royal locutions and writings were read, debated and answered critically. James I discovered that even his magisterial folio works were far from immune from attack. In early modern England, royal texts were not sovereign authorial acts in the sense we conceive them. As well as often being the work of more than one hand, they were, perforce, rhetorical performances scripted out of intimations of audiences and expectations of animadversion, amid the noisy contest of print.9 They await readings as rhetorical and polemical performances, as texts, as well as documents of a public life and reign. What we also need to recognize is that if these royal texts, the representations of a royal self that was the only ‘real person’ most subjects perceived, had multiple lives and afterlives, the royal life itself was no more fixed but rather constituted out of texts and representations  – locutions, writings, images and rituals  – and their receptions. To apply some critical questions and approaches to lives, as Donaldson urges us, is not to undermine but to extend and enrich the project of royal biography in a number of potentially fruitful ways. In the first place a new life of an early modern monarch might benefit from reconsidering those domains of public and private that modernism has mapped and sought to define and differentiate. If today our idea of a self as something we possess outside textual and social interactions and struggles has been exposed as a fantasy, the case of early modern rulers complicates, if it does not fully discredit, such clear distinctions. As Queen Elizabeth was not the only ruler to appreciate, the royal body was not personal or private (privatus – that is, separate from the public) but at the centre of public interest, in both the senses of curiosity and partisanship.10 And as James I and Charles I understood, their conscience (that which since Locke we have taken as our ultimate personal domain) was not just a personal conscience but also the public conscience.11 In early modern England, the languages of the body – of sex and marriage  – and conscience, what we take to be private terms, scripted public constitutions. They need to be brought, far more than they have been, to the centre of royal lives. A refiguring of the private and public and a questioning of the stability of sovereignty and selfhood also directs us to genres and kinds of texts too often neglected in royal biographies. For years historians of James VI and I’s reign have returned time and again to C. H. McIlwain’s edition of The Political Works of James I, leaving a host of other writings – biblical commentaries,

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translations and poems – unexplored, presumably because they were held to cast little light on the public life, the royal life.12 Only now are scholars, and still mainly critics, studying James’s verse and Elizabeth’s prayers and poems as processes of the construction, representation and negotiation of both royal identity and authority. A large body of other royal texts – Henry VIII’s songs and poems, Charles I’s prayers and Charles II’s romance narrative – all await editing and reading as texts of sovereignty and self. New royal biography will depend not just on the inclusion of such materials but also on different approaches to reading them. As the editors of Elizabeth’s works put it recently, historians and biographers have tended to read speeches and letters as ‘documents of policy’ and as straightforward public statements of intention and authority.13 What we need to explore further is how they were designed and how they performed in a highly rhetorical culture to fashion identity and authority. Because rulers, like all authors, knew that their words were read by resistant as well as complaisant readers, they deployed devices and tropes to temper resistance and to assuage the anxieties of authority. A critical rereading of all royal writings, proclamations as well as poems, which explored those tropes and the anxieties that still surface between and below the lines would, I suspect, write very different royal biographies and histories of Tudor and Stuart England. Finally, we might observe that traditional biography, not least on account of its commitment to the biological narrative of birth to death, has paid little attention to afterlives. In early modern England, however, royal lives lived on after death in a myriad of texts, monuments and memories that reveal much about regality, the royal subject and his or her reign and representation. Let us again take the case of Elizabeth I whose life, contested for in her lifetime, was, over the course of the next century, appropriated by godly advocates of religious reform, critics of the Stuarts, colonizers, royalists and republicans, Whigs and Tories, before providing a motto for Queen Anne  – ironically Semper Eadem, always the same.14 The history of Charles I’s afterlife, as tyrant, martyr, loving husband and father, or ungodly reprobate virtually wrote the history of polemical and party conflict in the late seventeenth century and beyond.15 The issue here is not just the polemics of memory but the openness of royal lives to such multiple deployments, the instability of the meaning of the sovereign life and reign. We need to take the opportunity that contemporaries’ recognition of that instability offers to reconsider the royal life as a series of responses and readings, as receptions as well as representations. What I propose by the application of some critical questions and perspectives is a historicizing of early modern royal lives. For address to the instabilities and multiplicities of lives as much as texts, and to the constructed nature of identity and authority; study of all the texts in and through which monarchs represented their bodies and conscience; of the rhetorics by which they sought to control how they were perceived; and the contested readings of their lives and reigns restores those lives and reigns

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to their early modern circumstances, which, in many ways, the traditional biographical and historical projects continue to obscure.

II The life and Life of James II present a revealing case of how a different approach can richly refigure our understanding of the man and monarch. James II is perhaps the best example of an early modern ruler whose life and history have largely been written by his enemies. After he was supplanted in 1688 by William of Orange, Whig polemicists began a determined programme to persuade English subjects that James II was a bigoted Catholic tyrant who had sought to overthrow Protestantism, liberty and property. Their relentless propaganda campaign, conducted in writing, portraits, medals and engraved cartoons, church services and state rituals, far from suggesting the weakness of James’s position and representation, evidences the anxieties of an illegitimate ruler and regime, which remained vulnerable for years after the Revolution.16 Yet almost ever since 1688 historians have, with few exceptions, favoured Whig polemic over James’s self-presentation as a believer in toleration and a custodian of the laws. And while some biographers have shown greater readiness to mute the more vitriolic denunciations, they too have painted James as a failed ruler and flawed man, indeed one who permitted his misguided personal convictions to determine public policy, with disastrous consequences. There is an irony in the fact that the pens of James’s critics and enemies have largely scripted his life and afterlife. For, here unlike his Catholic predecessor Mary Tudor who suffered a similar fate, James II took pains to present and re-present himself to his people: indeed almost uniquely to construct the narrative of his life and to determine his reputation after death. As Duke of York and then king, James, as I shall explore fully elsewhere, showed great concern over his image as a person, as a Stuart and a ruler, in all the media and genres of early modern royal representation: in portraits, on medals and coins, in rituals and ceremonies.17 Here I concentrate on writing – not least because it is hard to think of another monarch (other than possibly James I) who wrote so much at every point of his reign; and because no other ruler so self-consciously set out to write his own life. As well as numerous carefully crafted letters, speeches and declarations (James made frequent use of these and they deserve careful study), papers of devotion and a treatise of advice to his son, James wrote at least nine volumes of memoirs that were evidently intended, as his latest biographer writes, as ‘a record for future generations of his thoughts, words and deeds’  – that is of the interior as well as public life.18 Though they were mostly not published in his lifetime, there are several indications in James’s writings from the earliest that they were intended for circulation and publication – and probably for contemporary audiences as well as for ‘future generations’. A mixture of

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memoir, history and autobiography, James’s life writings convey – and were surely meant to communicate  – an image, or rather over half a century of fundamental changes in personal and public circumstances images, of the king. Occasionally plundered for data, these have yet to receive serious critical attention as texts and acts of representation, as acts and texts of self-fashioning and self-publicization rather than as source material. A problem that immediately arises is that James’s ‘original’ memoirs have been lost and are believed to have been burned during the French Revolution by Madame Charpentier, wife of an emissary of the Benedictine Order of Paris, who feared that the volumes would incriminate her with the republic.19 However, as with other acts of royal authorship in early modern England, the simple story of loss is in fact more complicated. In the century or more before their destruction, these memoirs were seen by a variety of actors (as well as James II and his son) some of whom claimed to reproduce the king’s own original words. Even that notion is problematic. It appears that from the beginning of keeping a journal, James used editorial assistants, among them his first wife, Anne Hyde, daughter of Clarendon, and one ‘Dryden’, sometimes thought to be the poet’s son Charles but more likely the laureate himself.20 These were employed to help to turn notes hastily taken on available scraps of paper, perhaps in the midst of battle or business, into a personal and official narrative or memoir. Even in its ‘original’ form, then, James’s Life was cowritten by others who – literally – helped to shape it. In 1686, having assumed the throne, it seems that James intended to prepare for publication ‘his’ memoir and it may have been around that time that his papers began to be arranged and bound with the royal arms in readiness for such a purpose.21 However, probably on account of the troubles which drove him from his throne soon after, the memoir was not published and probably not completed. Near death in exile James was concerned that his wife, Mary of Modena, write to ‘put [his secretary] in mind of his memoirs’ and was assured that John Caryll, a court poet and Jacobite conspirator, was ‘hard at work about them’.22 James himself was checking translations and the whereabouts of documents he had entrusted to others but the cherished project remained unfinished. Careful recent examination of new evidence suggests that Caryll, aided by David Nairne, clerk of the foreign office at St Germain, compiled a life based on James’s original papers to 1677, which was seen and approved by the king before he died.23 After his father’s death in 1701, his son and heir commissioned a formal life to be prepared, and, perhaps because Caryll was in his mid-seventies, James Francis Edward commissioned one William Dicconson, Queen Mary’s Treasurer, to write it.24 From early in the eighteenth century, therefore, there were perhaps four versions of parts of James’s memoirs – that is of his life: the originals which, though many were James’s own, were themselves the work of several authors and a mix of notes, disconnected jottings and continuous narrative; the neat copies of some at least made by assistants and especially John Dryden; the hard work done by Caryll, with the assistance of David Nairne, towards an

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ordered life up to 1677; and Dicconson’s Life, likely based on them all but supplemented and turned into a history by use of other records, including public speeches and declarations of the late king. James’s Life, even soon after he was laid in his grave, was a complex, multiple text but it was not always taken as such. We know that the antiquary and biographer of the Duke of Ormonde, Thomas Carte, and possibly the Whig politician Charles James Fox, used James’s memoirs up to 1660, or at least a fair copy of them, and Dicconson’s Life and evidently felt no need to distinguish them.25 The confusion about the manuscripts, that is about the text and meaning of James II’s life, was translated into print in 1775. In that year James Macpherson published his Original Papers Containing the Secret History of Great Britain from the Restoration to the Accession of the House of Hanover to Which Are Prefixed Extracts from the Life of James II as Written by Himself. As his title indicates, Macpherson edited, selected and folded James’s life into a larger political narrative that traced the end of Stuart rule. He may have taken large liberties with the materials he consulted. Macpherson was a figure of dubious repute who had in 1760 fraudulently claimed to discover fragments of epic poetry relating to the legendary Ossian. Understandably therefore, his claims to have used James’s original memoirs, in whatever form they were available to him, though they were at the time accepted, have since been treated with scepticism: Winston Churchill, for one, in his life of Marlborough, asserted that Macpherson had used only Dicconson’s Life.26 (Though Churchill’s work was itself marred by bias and inaccuracies, on this point subsequent scholarship has supported the charge. Though he was fairly faithful to Nairne and Dicconson, Macpherson, despite his claim, never saw James’s original memoirs.) The discredited reputation of their first publisher has undoubtedly discredited the first publication of James’s account of himself. Early in the next century, the text of Dicconson’s Life returned to royal hands. During the Napoleonic wars, the Prince Regent, later George IV, bought from the estate of the Duchess of Albany, a descendant of the Stuarts, a copy of Dicconson’s manuscript that had belonged to the Young Pretender. The Prince Regent commissioned an edition of the text and appointed as editor the naval chaplain and biographer of Horatio Nelson, James Clarke.27 Unlike earlier scholars or users, Clarke for the first time concentrated on the text itself and endeavoured to check Dicconson’s account and its provenance. When he published, though he based his Life on Dicconson, Clarke printed marginal references to what he believed from studying the notes of Carte and Fox were the (now destroyed) ‘original’ papers. His edition makes clear the extent to which Dicconson’s Life was cobbled together from many different hands and materials produced for different purposes. But it cannot finally resolve the uncomfortable question: what exactly of James’s underlines the narrative of his life? How far did he write himself and how far did others, both authorized by him and not, script him? To show how difficult it is even to begin to unravel authorship, we might here note that even the

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shifting first- and third-person pronouns which we might be tempted to take as evidence are problematic. For Thomas Innes himself states that ‘in the original memoirs His Majesty speaks always of himself in the third person’ and that it was only in the ‘copy of Mr Dryden he is made to speak in the first person’.28 All these uncertainties about authorship and the texts of James’s life, as we shall see, have fostered doubts about his authenticity as a man and his authority as a king. It seems likely indeed that problems about the reliability of James’s Life have discouraged historians from using it other than as a record, to be checked against others, of the king’s public actions and the history of the events of the reign. Further careful comparison of Clarke, Macpherson, Fox and Carte may yet ameliorate, if not remove, some of the problems. But even as things stand we may open the texts to different readings of James’s inner life and thoughts and the king’s intended representations of his conscience and his meditations to his subjects. For James’s own actions indicate his intense conviction that his memoirs – his represented life – were as vital to his authority and person as his actual life. Twice indeed he risked his life to save his papers. On the first occasion, in 1682, James made good his claim to a friend that ‘he would hazard his life’ rather than lose his papers when his frigate ran aground off the Norfolk coast and he ensured that the strongbox containing them (we note he had them with him) was secured before he abandoned ship.29 Then, when at short notice he resolved to flee his kingdom in 1688, ‘there was nothing his majesty was more in pain for than to save his papers or memoirs.’ Though he had, the account runs, only time to gather loose papers and ‘thrust them confusedly’ into a box, reunited with them in France, he carefully bound them with the royal arms – a sign perhaps of a psychological connection as well as proprietal ownership.30 And several references to the reader in parts we can ascribe to him attest that James had intended the memoirs not merely for himself but for a public audience.31 To follow his desire and to present James in his own preferred terms, even if not (or not necessarily) his true colours, would be to fundamentally revise our understanding of this king. But there may be more, too, in the memoirs for us than the king intended to publicize. As we read in the spirit of recent criticism we discern, for example, James’s evident boyhood deep trauma during the early stages of Civil War, when his captors even denied him his dwarf;32 his lasting anxiety about republicans and ‘sectaries’ whom, like many others, he could not always differentiate;33 his complex relationship with his very different brother and other members of his family;34 his struggles with sin and faith;35 and his combination of confidence and insecurity. All deserve a greater prominence in biographies and histories than they have received. Though the whole of James’s life deserves re-examination, in the remainder of this short chapter I want to focus on two periods for which we have accounts, both significantly written in exile, that override some of the textual problems we have encountered, and which we can confidently

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assign to royal authorship. The first is a military memoir of James’s service in the armies of first France, then Spain, between 1652 and 1660. In 1695, Cardinal Bouillon, meeting with James at St Germain, asked the king if he would provide him with a record of his service in the French armies under the command of the Cardinal’s uncle, the Vicomte de Turenne. James replied that he had already written his memoirs of those experiences and offered to make extracts and have them translated. On 27 January the next year he delivered the promised manuscript. Though James had originally thought of translating only those parts of his own memoirs that concerned Turenne, there was found in Bouillon’s manuscript, which was rediscovered in 1954, a certificate signed by five members of the Scots College at Paris affirming that ‘these memoirs . . . conform to the original English memoirs written in His Majesty’s own hand.’36 Since there is no reason to question the statement, it would seem that they thus provide an authentic account by James himself, and one we can use to examine language and style as well as content as authorial decisions. The Bouillon manuscript, though edited in 1962, has not been used as a text of James’s self-representation, perhaps because campaign memoirs seemed to promise few insights into James’s person or royal image. In fact, the memoirs, which almost certainly form the first volume of James’s life writing project, reveal much about both the prince and how he sought to present himself to other rulers and to the subjects of the English Commonwealth from which he had escaped into exile. Moreover, since comparison of the Bouillon manuscript with Dicconson’s Life reveals no major discrepancies, we might conclude that much later, in 1695, James was willing to endorse this youthful account as a record he was ready to prepare for publication. For though in 1696 James urged, out of respect to Turenne, that the memoirs not be published until after his death, all the signs of a publication intended and imminent are scattered through the relation.37 James deploys the techniques of storytelling and offers tragic scenes of fraternal duels, graphic descriptions of battles and casualties, and thumbnail sketches of the leading characters to enliven the story.38 Throughout phrases such as ‘before I proceed further’, ‘I remember an odd incident’ or ‘I shall say more in its proper place’ indicate a carefully planned narrative devised to hold the reader’s attention.39 Specific references and guides to the ‘reader’ leave no doubt that James wrote with a broad audience in mind.40 It appears that at one point he intended to insert a sketch to more clearly demonstrate the movements of troops.41 James’s war memoirs are, as well as the record of a soldier, the text of a prince, the son of a king. We must recall that in France, James was enlisted in the royal army of a king who was fighting a war against rebel Frondeurs in which the monarchy was threatened, just as it had been recently destroyed in England. Though, therefore, his relation dwells, with little emotion, on military casualties and prisoners, sieges and tactics, deeds of daring and cowardice, it is also a political memoir of a prince who suspected that he would have to fight for Stuart rights. James’s contempt for rebels is not

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disguised. While he showed a soldier’s respect for enemies who fought for their country, those who rose against their anointed monarch deserved only odium: it was, he doubted not, the hand of God that slayed more Frondeurs than loyalists in battle.42 When James depicts his commander as the hero who saved the French crown, we cannot but hear how the prince too dreamed that he might emulate the Turenne who ‘acquired immortal fame through saving the monarchy by his counsel, his conduct and his valour’.43 Turenne’s service, of course, lay most in his military brilliance. But in James’s memoir, Turenne’s army is figured as a little commonwealth and the commander’s role is seen as not dissimilar to that of a prince. Division and disobedience, James discerned, were the principal threats to success, which usually followed on resolute courses.44 Turenne, however, is also presented as understanding his duty always ‘to consider but the public good’; to care for his men; and, while being ready to take decisions and responsibility, to heed counsel.45 James made special note of his commander’s ‘familiar conversation with several officers’ whereby ‘the General does not only instruct them much better . . . but is ready . . . to answer any of their objections and to clear any doubt that may arise.’46 Effective leadership, care for charges, taking counsel and an ability to persuade by explaining courses, were, of course, the qualities of a good king as well as captain. James makes clear his pride in serving such a master and cause and draws attention to his own royal status which, unlike the English rebels, even enemies respected.47 In these military memoirs, James represents himself as a great warrior and a virtuous prince: one who, though he now fought to save a Bourbon king, was qualified by experience and character to champion the Stuart cause. England and the fate of his royal brother, Charles II, to whom Turenne was to offer military aid, are not ostensibly the main subject of these memoirs. But in the 1650s – and again in the 1680s and 1690s when they were edited and translated  – their advocacy of determined leadership and resolution with consideration represented James, as he wished to be seen, as a prince fit for rule. Indeed, the repetition in the Life for the period after 1660 of the need for bravery and resolution in dealing with rebels hints that not only did James regard military leadership and the conduct of rule as similar skills, but that he often felt that he would make a better king than his brother to whom he nevertheless declared an unerring loyalty and obedience.48 The second text I want to examine briefly was written after James had lost his throne: was written, that is, in very different circumstances and, though incorporated into the Life, is of a very different genre of writing to either military relation or narrative memoir. Like the military memoir, however, we can be confident that James’s devotional papers, written in exile in St Germain, are his own words. For in this case, though the papers also form part of Dicconson’s Life, the manuscript escaped the destruction of the French Revolution. Preserved by James’s grandson, Cardinal Henry Stuart, the papers were purchased in 1842 by a priest from Drogheda and were edited for the Roxburgh Club by the Stuart historian Godfrey Davies

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in 1925.49 The largely holograph manuscript, a raw mix of reflections, prayers and meditations, contains blank pages and unfinished sentences as well as full, even eloquent, passages.50 Even though authentic, the bound volume is not without problems: there is some indication of another’s involvement and a smaller volume appears to have been broken up and inserted into a larger.51 But James’s Devotions, as well as helping to ‘unravel the psychological enigma presented by his character’, present us with the opportunity to observe James in the act of composing his life as, by the 1690s, he wished to recall, construct and represent it, and of preparing for death, the afterlife and the judgement of memory.52 Again, though it is unfinished and repetitive, passages such as ‘I would say if I had more time’ suggest that it was conceived and written for an audience, while the address to converts indicates planned publication.53 It seems that it was by his Devotions that James wished his person and his kingship to be finally remembered. The life past, present and after death are the subjects of these meditations. James, the military man of youth, makes his reappearance as he records: ‘I came from seeing the camp at Compiegne, a sight that was more worth seeing than any of that kind of our age.’ Now, however, the commander gives way to the devout Christian who quickly moves to ‘the melancholy reflection how very few amongst this great and formidable army thinks of his duty to the king of kings’.54 James the monarch is also very present on the page of the Devotions. He writes of the duty owed to king and country; he presents himself as chosen by God to rule; he thanks God for restoring Stuart kingship and for protecting him to inherit the title; he prays that his son will succeed.55 But kingship now takes second place to salvation and James comes close to the belief that only the loss of his kingdoms secured his eternal life by awakening him ‘out of the lethargy of sin’.56 The providence that had so often protected him from the enemy bullet and the rebel’s plot now gave him the chance for a heavenly triumph and crown. James explains his conversion and faith in Catholic doctrine and liturgy. In these papers we virtually eavesdrop on a pious Christian as he prays and confesses to God, takes the sacrament, reads devotional works, meditates and fasts. He repeats his admiration for the simple piety of the monks of La Trappe to which he retreated annually from ‘the vanity of . . . worldly greatness’.57 The intensely pious and personal nature of these devotions, however, should not lead us, as they did their editor, to conclude that James in exile retreated from public presentation to private meditation. The purpose in writing is avowedly public: ‘my chief design of writing this paper is to give some advice to new converts.’58 As his grandfather had written exegeses of Scripture, so James II wrote an instructional manual for the Catholic life. As his self-instruction becomes an example to others of the way to salvation, the devotions, we see, figure this exiled king as a priest. As well as general, the spiritual advice is also specifically addressed to his children and in particular his son and heir, the claimant to the British thrones of William III. James instructs his son to avoid pleasure, to repair

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his faults and find God while young so as to be a good Catholic and fit ruler of three kingdoms  – which he is certain he will be. For, he counsels him, while the fate of princes lay with God, it was right for his son to ‘make use of all lawful means to preserve what one has or to recover what has unjustly been taken from me’.59 As that last sentence implies, James’s Devotions are not a text of resignation or defeat. Though he admired monks, he was not persuaded ‘to think one may not work out his salvation in the world’.60 James prepared his son to work out his salvation as a prince and a king. For himself he hoped by a good death and advertisement of faith to advance his son’s cause and to have the prospect of joining the ranks of those kings who were regarded as saints – as, of course, his father already was.61 Indeed reading James’s Devotions, first published in 1704 as The Pious Sentiments of the Late King James II of Blessed Memory, we cannot but be reminded of, as we are surely meant to recall, the Eikon Basilike of Charles I, written on the very eve of a martyr’s death. Like the Eikon, James’s devotions are silent on most of the matters that alarmed his subjects; the account of things is very much one from the king’s perspective; and defeat is represented as a magnificent personal and godly triumph which deprives enemies of their more mundane victory on the battlefield. In 1692, as James was writing his Devotions, an edition of the Eikon Basilike was republished, leading to a flurry of pamphlets disputing its authorship – a sign of its continued and immediate potency.62 The same year, Imago Regis: Or the Sacred Image of His Majesty Written During His Retirement in France appropriated the Eikon to present James as also a Christian martyr, the frontispiece engraving depicting him as a patient bearer of affliction meditating on a heavenly crown, with an earthly crown on a cushion by his side. The volume, which reproduces several of James’s speeches and writings, bears on its title page a quotation from Psalm 132: ‘O remember David in all his afflictions’. In his Devotions, James similarly wrote and represented himself as another David, another holy martyr and saint whose afterlife, like that of his father, might perform as a powerful political as well as devotional text – to advance the Stuarts’ cause. Whether in military memoirs written during the English republic or devotions penned in exile from his throne, James wrote to represent himself as a devout Christian, equipped by virtue, experience and piety for the throne to which God had called the Stuarts. Even with all the difficulties surrounding their authorship, we may read them as texts of a royal person, private and public, and as a polemic for self, dynasty and regal sovereignty. Indeed, even though the genres of military memoir and devotion appear not to suggest polemic, we must read them as artfully crafted principally to construct and underpin identity and authority. It would seem that at each stage of his life James was concerned to represent his life as a text  – of different genres, changing narratives, private reflections, and public decrees and actions. In his own way, he represented his martial body (as had Henry VIII and Prince Henry) and his conscience (as had James I and Charles I) to his subjects

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whose real affection for him is often reiterated and apparently genuinely not doubted. Scholars have regretted that James’s life is not a complete, authoritative and original text written throughout by the king himself. Because it is the work of imported texts, diverse hands, different genres, variant forms and shifting pronouns they have made only the most cautious and limited use of it. In consequence they have neglected not only a prime text of an early modern monarch, his inner thoughts and faith (at least as he chose to present them) and his hopes and fears, they have failed to engage with a king who strove  – though history has deemed he failed  – to construct and control his representation, image and memory. More than any other early modern monarch, James rendered his life as text. Far more than the conventional biography, a full critical examination of the texts and tropes of James’s Life, and a reconsideration of his life as texts, promises a different life and history – one which may further our understanding not only of the man and monarch but of Whig and Tory polemic; and even explain why, still in the 1790s, the texts of James’s life were seen to exercise such a dangerous influence.

NOTES

Chapter 1  I am grateful to Ann Hughes and Steve Zwicker for their helpful comments on this introduction. 1 K. Sharpe, ‘Remapping Early Modern England: From Revisionism to the Culture of Politics’, in Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 3–37. 2 Ibid., p. 23. 3 See reviews by Brian Cowan, History of European Ideas, 29 (2003), pp. 475– 89; L. Knoppers, Renaissance Quarterly, 54 (2001), pp. 1685–6; G. De Krey, Journal of Modern History, 74 (2002), pp. 401–3; B. Kumin, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 32 (2001), pp. 815–16; R. C. Richardson, Times Higher, 30 March 2001. 4 B. Cowan, ‘Refiguring Revisionisms’, History of European Ideas, 29 (2003), pp. 475–89; cf. C. Herrup, ‘Re-reading Politics’, Shakespeare Studies, 31 (2003), pp. 288–95. 5 See K. Sharpe, ‘Representing Rule: Terms, Premises, Approaches’, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009); Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010). 6 See, for example, P. Lake and S. Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in early Modern England’, in Lake and Pincus, eds, The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 1–30, esp. pp. 1–2; on the public sphere, see pp. 125–31 in this volume. Ann Hughes has pointed out to me that I am optimistic in thinking the quarrels between revisionist and anti-revisionists are over, but I remain struck how little the terms are used now except in reviews of an older historiography. 7 I spent years at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the Stanford Humanities Centre, the Humanities Research Centre, Canberra, the Huntington Library and the Max Planck Institute for History, Göttingen. I recall vividly lively and heated debates at Stanford over new approaches to texts.

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8 See Q. Skinner, ed., The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). History was – and remains – the discipline least affected, some might say infected, by theory. 9 On my thoughts on documents as texts, see K. Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 25–7 and ch. 1 passim; on faultlines, see A. Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 10 Louis A. Montrose, ‘Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture’, in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 15–36, quotations p. 20. 11 For some criticism of new historicism, Jean E. Howard, ‘The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies’, English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), pp. 13–43; E. Pechter, ‘The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 102 (1989), pp. 292–309; J. Newton, ‘History as Usual?: Feminism and the “New Historicism”’, Cultural Critique, 9 (1988), pp. 87–121; B. Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton, 1991). Cf. H. Veeser, ed., The New Historicism Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994). 12 See J. Prown, Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002). I am grateful to Jules Prown for a very helpful discussion. I was also much influenced by the work and approach of Michael Baxandall. See The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980); Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985). 13 Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, p. 19. 14 Review by Jean-Pierre Caviallé, Annales, 55 (2000), pp. 1126–8; Herrup, ‘Re-reading Politics’, p. 289; Mercurius Politicus (http://mercuriuspoliticus. wordpress.com/2008/12/16/a-year-in-reading/). 15 De Krey, Journal of Modern History, 74 (2002); Herrup, ‘Re-reading Politics’, pp. 289–90. 16 Notably Cowan, ‘Refiguring Revisionisms’. 17 Cf. Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy, pp. 39, 57. 18 R. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997); M. Levinson, ‘What Is New Formalism?’, Proceedings of Modern Language Association, 122 (2007), pp. 558–69. 19 The classic example here is Sussex University which pioneered interdisciplinary education in schools but which after 2003 reverted to departments and a visibly more conservative pedagogy. 20 A. Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain, 1603–1689 (London: British Museum, 1998); T. Clayton, The English Print 1688–1802 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997). This is not to denigrate the important T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 21 See M. Knights, ‘Possessing the Visual: The Materiality of Visual Print Culture in Later Stuart Britain?’, in J. Daybell and P. Hinds, eds, Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580–1730 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 85–122; for British Printed Images, see

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www.bpi1700.org.uk/index.html. See also for good examples of work, A. Bellany, ‘“Naught but Illusion”? Buckingham’s Painted Selves’, in K. Sharpe and S. Zwicker, eds, Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 127–60; Bellany, ‘Buckingham Engraved: Politics, Print Images and the Royal Favourite in the 1620s’, in M. Hunter, ed., Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 215–35; J. Champion, ‘Decoding the Leviathan: Doing the History of Ideas through Images 1651–1714’, in Hunter, Printed Images, pp. 255–75; A. McShane, ‘“Rime and Reason”: The Political World of the English Broadside Ballad, 1640–1689’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Warwick, 2004); A. Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 22 On the Reformation, see, for example, Susan Foister, Holbein and England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004) and Foister, Holbein in England (Tate exhibition and catalogue, 2006); T. Hamling and R. Williams, eds, Art Re-Formed: Re-Assessing the Impact of the Reformation on the Visual Arts (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007); T. Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010); see K. Sharpe, ‘Reformed Arts? Reformation and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century England’, Art History, 33 (2010), pp. 915–23. For recent work on Tudor and Stuart portraiture, see K. Hearn, ed., Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630 (London: Tate Gallery, 1995); T. String, Art and Communication in the Reign of Henry VIII (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); K. Hearn, ed., Van Dyck and Britain (London: Tate Gallery, 2009); T. Cooper, ‘The Enchantment of the Familiar Face: Portraits as Domestic Objects in Elizabethan and Jacobean England’, in T. Hamling and C. Richardson, eds, Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and Its Meanings (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 157–78. On early modern statues, see N. Smith, The Royal Image and the English People (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); on tapestries, T. Campbell, Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007); on textiles, M. Hayward, Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII (Leeds: Maney, 2007); on silver, see B. Abramova, Britannia and Muscovy: English Silver at the Court of the Tsars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006); on gardens, see P. Henderson, The Tudor House and Garden: Architecture and Landscape in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). 23 As well as art reformed and decorating the godly household, see M. Snodin and J. Styles, Design & the Decorative Arts: Tudor and Stuart Britain 1500– 1714 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2004). On women and early modern art see, for example, S. James, The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485–1603: Women as Consumers, Patrons and Painters (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009); J. Maricari Alexander, ‘Painting a Life: The Case of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland’, in Sharpe and Zwicker, Writing Lives, pp. 161–84. 24 Obvious examples include Bellany, ‘“Naught but Illusion”?’ and ‘Buckingham Engraved’; A. Keay, The Magnificent Monarch: Charles II and the Ceremonies of Power (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2008); H. Pierce, Unseemly

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28

29

30

31

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Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008); Knights, ‘Possessing the Visual’. See Chapter 2, ‘Reading James Writing’. One of the few literary scholars who have looked at the narratives is H. Weber, ‘Representations of the King: Charles II and His Escape from Worcester’, Studies in Philology, 85:4 (1988), pp. 489–509. See M. Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); D. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); M. Van Gelderen and Q. Skinner, eds, Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage: Vol. 1. Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe; Vol. II: The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); J. Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); A. Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Q. Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also, J. Macdiarmid, ed., The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). On the Eikon Basilike, see E. Skerpan Wheeler, ‘Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation’, in T. Corns, ed., The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Sharpe, Image Wars, pp. 391–400; Sharpe, ‘So Hard a Text’, Chapter 9. L. Marcus, J. Mueller and M. B. Rose, eds, Elizabeth I: Collected Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); J. Mueller and J. Scodel, eds, Translations: Elizabeth I 1554–1589 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009); Mueller and Scodel, eds, Elizabeth I: Translations 1592–1598 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009). For obvious feminist biographies, see P. Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989); S. Bassnett, Elizabeth I: A Feminist Perspective (Oxford: Berg, 1998); C. Levin, J. Carney and D. Barrett-Graves, eds, Elizabeth I: Always Her Own Free Woman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). P. Herman, ed., Reading Monarch’s Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002); Herman, Royal Poetrie: Monarchic Verse and the Political Imaginary of Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); D. Fischlin and M. Fortier, eds, Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002); see Chapter 2, Sharpe, ‘Reading James Writing’; J. Rickard, Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). J. Sommerville, ed., King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); see James VI, Some Reulis and Cautelis to Be Observit and Eschewit in Scottish Poesie, printed in The Essayes of a Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesie (STC 14373, Edinburgh, 1584). Henry VIII, A Glasse of the Truthe (STC 11918, 1532); Henry VIII, A Necessary Doctrine and Erudicion for Any Chrysten Man (STC 5176, 1543); see Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy, pp. 104–9, 193–204; Sharpe, Image Wars, pp. 145–50; Chapter 13, ‘Whose Life Is It Anyway?’

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32 Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 29–30; cf. ‘author’ OED. 33 Chapters 2, 4, 13: ‘Reading James Writing’, ‘Reading Revelations’, ‘Whose Life Is It Anyway?’ 34 See C. Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); above note 29. 35 Sharpe, Reading Revolutions. 36 Curiously even Robert Darnton questioned the value of a theoretical introduction in an otherwise very positive and generous review, ‘Extraordinary Commonplaces’, New York Review of Books, 21 December 2000; D. Norbrook, ‘Safety First in Buckinghamshire’, TLS, 28 July 2000. 37 See, for example, reviews by Michael Mendle (www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev. php?id=4295), Paul Slack, English Historical Review, 116 (2001), p. 221; Cowan, ‘Refiguring Revisionisms’; Herrup, ‘Re-reading Politics’. 38 Brian Cowan was disturbed by this broadening of the definition of politics to include reading, ‘Refiguring Revisionisms’, p. 486. 39 David Loewenstein, Modern Language Review, 97 (2002), pp. 383–5. 40 Annabel Patterson, Journal of British Studies, 41 (2002), pp. 388–401, esp. pp. 392–4; Paul Seaver, Journal of Modern History, 74 (March 2002), pp. 150–2; Michael Braddick, ‘State Formation and the Historiography of Early Modern England’, History Compass, 2 (July 2004); Brown Patterson, Sewanee Review, 109 (2001), pp. xl–xlviii. 41 See Helen Dubrow in Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 41 (2001), pp. 208–9; though Dubrow seemed suspicious of a historian advocating any theoretical perspective; Michael Brennan, Notes and Queries, 49 (2002), pp. 293–4. 42 C. Clegg, ‘History of the Book: An Undisciplined Discipline?’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54 (2001), pp. 221–45, esp. pp. 233–8. 43 See K. Sharpe and S. Zwicker, eds, Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1987); Sharpe and Zwicker, eds, Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998). 44 K. Sharpe and S. Zwicker, eds, Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 45 Ibid., pp. 1–37, quotation, p. 26. 46 See K. Sharpe, ‘Reading Revelations: Prophecy Hermeneutics and Politics in Early Modern Britain’, in Sharpe and Zwicker, Reading, Society and Politics, pp. 122–66; Chapter 4. 47 K. Sharpe, ‘Transplanting Revelation, Transferring Meaning: Reading the Apocalypse in Early Modern England, Scotland and New England’, in A. Macinnes and A. Williamson, eds, Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714: The Atlantic Connection (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 117–46; Chapter 5. 48 D. Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003); D. Katz, God’s Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004). 49 The pioneering work was C. Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 1993). For recent

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55 56

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58 59 60 61

NOTES

general histories, see G. Campbell, Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611–2011 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); L. A. Ferrell, The Bible and the People (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). Neither pay close attention to early modern reading; see W. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), ch. 4; K. Killeen, ‘Chastising With Scorpions: Reading the Old Testament in Early Modern England’, in Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010), pp. 91–506. For efforts to direct reading, see ‘The Translators to the Reader’, preface to the King James Bible, 1611. G. Cavallo and R. Chartier, eds, A History of Reading in the West (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). Indeed England does not make it into the index. J. Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, eds, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Vol. 4: 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). The classic is Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998). See also J. Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002) and Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); S. Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2005); M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). C. Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999), quotation, p. 1. E. Sanders, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); cf. E. Snook, Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). S. Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002); cf. S. Roberts, ‘Reading Shakespeare’s Tragedies of Love: Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra in Early Modern England’, in J. Howard and R. Dutton, eds, A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works (4 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1, pp. 108–33; L. Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). J. Andersen and E. Sauer, eds, Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). H. Brayman Hackle, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See pp. 25–7 in this volume. Sherman, Used Books; H. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001) and her multivolume survey of marginalia; A. Grafton and L. Jardine, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (1990), pp. 30–78; W. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); P. Jones, ‘Reading Medicine in Tudor Cambridge’, in V. Nutton and R. Porter, eds,

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63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

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72 73 74 75 76

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The History of Medical Education in Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 153–83. R. Darnton, ‘What Is the History of Books?’, Daedalus, 111 (1982), pp. 65–83; Darnton, ‘First Steps Towards a History of Reading’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 23 (1986), pp. 5–30; Grafton and Jardine, ‘“Studied for Action”’; R. Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). Clegg, ‘History of the Book’, p. 245; cf. the remarks of Clifford Davies below, p. 18. S. Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); A. Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); see p. 413. Hughes, Gangraena, pp. 15–16; Hughes alludes to W. Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). Hughes, Gangraena, pp. 279 and 222–317 passim. Ibid., p. 294. Ibid., p. 3; see, for example, the review by Ariel Hessayon, Reviews in History (www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/479. K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). See now S. J. Barnes, O. Millar, N. De Poorter and H. Vey, eds, Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003). I am grateful to the late Sir Oliver Millar and Francis Haskell for very helpful discussions of art and politics in seventeenth-century England. For two classic studies which much influenced my thinking, see J. Brown and J. Elliott, A Palace for a King: The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980); I have benefited from many stimulating discussions with Sir John Elliott since 1981; P. Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). K. Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). I refer to 1992 and the flamboyant triumphalism of Neil Kinnock, manifested most obviously at the infamous Sheffield rally and the strategically low-key and retro style of John Major exemplified by his soap box. See M. Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993). J. Granger, A Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution (4 vols, 1769). R. Wark, ‘The Gentle Pastime of Extra-Illustrating Books’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 56 (1993), pp. 151–65; cf. L. Peltz, ‘Engraved Portrait Heads and the Rise of Extra-Illustration: The Eton Correspondence of the Revd James Granger and Richard Bull, 1769–1774’, The Walpole Society, 66 (2004), pp. 1–161; James Granger, ODNB. Wark, ‘Gentle Pastime’; Ashmolean Museum, Sutherland Collection, ‘Extra Illustration’ (http://sutherland.ashmolean.museum/Grangerization.shtml).

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78 A. Globe, ed., Peter Stent, London Printseller: Circa, 1642–1665: Being a Catalogue Raisonne of His Engraved Prints and Books with an Historical and Bibliographical Introduction (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986). Examples from the early Restoration include Alex Browne at the Blue Balcony; Matthew Collins at the Three Black Birds in Cannon St; John Overton at the White Horse, Newgate; Moses Pitt at the Angel, St Pauls Churchyard; Edward Cooper at the Three Pigeons, Bedford St; W. Shrewsbury at the Bible in Duck Lane; Robert White at Bloomsbury Market; and Thomas Cross in Little Britain. 79 Heidi Brayman Hackel and Bill Sherman. 80 Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy, ch. 1; of proclamations, James I said, ‘Most of them myself dictate every word’, W. Notestein, F. H. Relf and H. Simpson, eds, Commons Debates 1621 (7 vols, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935), IV, p. 71. 81 There had been excellent work by social historians on the negotiation of authority (see M. J. Braddick and J. Walter, eds, Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy, and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle, eds, The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). However these studies said little about textual negotiations. Cf. K. Sharpe, ‘Representations and Negotiations: Texts, Images, and Authority in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), pp. 853–8. 82 Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, p. 25. 83 The fellowships were a Fletcher Jones research professorship at the Huntington (2001–2), a Humboldt prize fellowship and fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for History, Göttingen (2003–4) and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2005–8). I thank all those and especially the Leverhulme Trust for the time that enabled me to write on a scale that would otherwise not been even conceivable. 84 K. Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: Images of Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013). 85 Especially those like that by Peter Gwynn in the Times Higher, 2 July 2009; cf. C. S. L. Davies, ‘Representation, Repute, Reality’ [sic!], English Historical Review, 124 (2010), pp. 1432–47. The reference to ‘tweedy dons’ is Greg Walker, Art Newspaper, 1 September 2009. 86 John Guy, ‘Defender of the Brand’, Literary Review, 1 March 2009; Gwynn, Times Higher, 2 July 2009. 87 A. Fletcher, ‘One Rose’, TLS, 19 June 2009; S. Alford, ‘The Tudor Hard Sell’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010), pp. 131–4. 88 Davies revealingly uses the expression ‘real power’, ‘Representation, Repute, Reality’, p. 1434. 89 Ibid., p. 1477: Davies displays a breathtaking disciplinary arrogance in stating: ‘Political historians have traditionally approached their texts with a fair measure of scepticism; literary and artistic scholars, on the other hand, are inevitably led into making the most of the particular works they are studying, as they enthusiastically expound their deep meaning and explore their impact on the wider world. Metaphor and hyperbole are mistaken for profundity. Political historians, in contrast, may be better placed to ask crude questions

NOTES

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91 92 93 94

95 96 97 98

99

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about practicalities, about impact, about meaning; about reception and indeed rejection, as against projection.’ See D. Lowenstein, ‘Review of Image Wars’, Studies in English Literature, 51 (2011), p. 228. Selling the Tudor Monarchy won the CAA Historians of British Art Prize for 2010. Cf. reviews by Alford, ‘The Tudor Hard Sell’ and L. Wooding, Reviews in History (www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/852). E. Shagan, ‘Review of Selling the Tudor Monarchy’, Journal of British Studies, 49 (2010), pp. 457–8. See above note 81. In addition to Alford, Wooding and Davies, see the otherwise very positive review that made this criticism by John Morrill, BBC History Magazine, August 2010. For too long, the Cambridge school of social history was noted for ‘history with the politics left out’. Thankfully a new generation is writing a social history of the people with the politics back in, just as Harris, Knights and others have written political histories that are also social histories of crowds and the public. See especially J. Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); M. Braddick and J. Walter, eds, Negotiating Power. See also A. Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002) and P. Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). I am grateful to Ann Hughes for discussion of this point. But see also P. Fass, ‘Cultural History/Social History: Some Reflections on a Continuing Dialogue’, Journal of Social History, 37 (2003), pp. 39–46. A phrase I appropriate from mindless university administrators in a small (though doubtless futile) attempt to reassert the claims of scholarship before managerialism. I recognize this is a cautionary remark to those of us who advocate the study of language. For example the excellent classical database Perseus (www.perseus.tufts.edu). K. Thomas, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books, 30 June 2010, pp. 36–7; For collections of key methodological essays, see J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989); Pocock, Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics (3 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); J. Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Cambridge: Polity, 1988). I am thinking of here of the brilliant work of John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art, 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: The Body of the Public (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). Much of the best work on prints is also being published by scholars of English, for example, Malcolm Jones, The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010).

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100 See M. Levinson, ‘What Is New Formalism?’, Publications of Modern Language Association, 122 (2007), pp. 558–69; M. Rasmussen, ‘New Formalisms?’, in M. Rasmussen, ed., Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 1–14. Of course there is still excellent historical criticism being published in the early modern period by Sharon Achinstein, Tom Corns, David Loewenstein, David Norbrook, Michael Schoenfeldt, Nigel Smith and Steve Zwicker to name but few. 101 I am grateful for discussion of this to Steve Zwicker who runs one of the best interdisciplinary post doctoral programmes (Modelling Interdisciplinary Enquiry) funded by the Mellon Foundation at Washington University. St Louis. 102 Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain; British Printed Images; Jones, The Print in Early Modern England; J. Monteyne, The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation and Social Exchange (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); H. Pierce, Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). 103 Helmer Helmers, The Royalist Republic: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Anglo-Dutch Public Sphere, 1639–1660 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leiden, 2011). 104 Knights, ‘Possessing the Visual’. Mark Knights is preparing a study of the Sacheverell controversy focusing on engraved prints. 105 Of the seventeen essays in Hunter, Printed Images in Early Modern Britain, six are by historians. 106 There has been, other than Knights, surprisingly little work on illustrated playing cards since the survey by J. Whiting, A Handful of History (Dursley: Alan Sutton, 1978). 107 For example, Campbell, Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty; Hayward, Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII; J. Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d (Leeds: Maney, 1988); Arnold, ‘Lost from Her Majesty’s Back’: Items of Clothing and Jewels Lost or Given Away by Queen Elizabeth I between 1561–1585, Entered in One of the Day Books Kept for the Records of the Wardrobe of Robes (Wisbech: Costume Society, 1980); J. Roberts, The King’s Head: Charles I – King and Martyr (exhibition and catalogue, 1999). 108 Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy, pp. 389–91; Rebranding Rule. 109 As well as the British Museum online search catalogue, See E. Hawkins, Medallic Illustrations of the History of Great Britain (19 vols, London: British Museum, 1904–11); A. Franks and H. Grueber, Medallic Illustrations of the History of Great Britain (2 vols, 1885). For a general survey, see J. Whiting, Commemorative Medals: A Medallic History of Britain from Tudor Times to the Present Day (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1977). 110 See Sharpe, Rebranding Rule. 111 Most recently, T. Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (London: Penguin, 2005) and Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British monarchy, 1685–1720 (London: Penguin, 2007); M. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and S. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009).

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112 See the first books by T. Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and M. Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). This perspective has continued to inform their work. 113 Bangor Conference on the Restoration IV: the 1690s, July 2011; but see for a good recent study, A. Williams, Poetry and the Creation of Whig Literary Culture, 1681–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 114 For some brief essays sketching whole subjects that await study, see R. Maccubbin and M. Hamilton-Phillips, eds, The Age of William III & Mary II: Power, Politics and Patronage, 1688–1702 (Williamsburg and Washington: College of William and Mary in Virginia, 1989). 115 For the promise this holds out see S. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), chs 5 and 6. 116 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1989). 117 See D. Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); E. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 118 See E. Shagan, ‘The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Public Sphere’; P. Lake, ‘The Politics of “Popularity” and the Public Sphere: The “Monarchical Republic” of Elizabeth I Defends Itself’; R. Cust, ‘The “Public Man” in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in Lake and Pincus, eds, Politics of the Public Sphere, pp. 31–58, 59–94, 116–43 and passim. There remains an unresolved tension among the contributors and even within the introduction to this volume as to whether the public sphere predates (e.g. p. 5) the Civil War was a consequence of it (p. 9); Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy, pp. 30–4, 55–6, 177–8, 238–40, 322–4 and passim. 119 Quotation, Lake and Pincus, Politics of the Public Sphere, p. 1. 120 See K. Thomas, ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’, in G. Baumann, ed., The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 97–131. Thomas helpfully discusses forms of functional literacy, complicating the simple tests about signing one’s name. We need a broader study still of cultural literacy that embraces the ‘reading’ of all kinds of texts, non-verbal as well as written and spoken. See E. Hirsch, J. Kett and J. Trefil, Cultural Literacy (New York: Knopf, 1990). 121 J. Richards and F. Schurink, ‘The Textuality and Materiality of Reading in Early Modern England’, special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010). 122 J. S. Rubin, ‘What Is the History of Books’, Journal of American History, 90 (2003), p. 555 and pp. 555–75 passim. 123 Ibid., pp. 557–8. 124 Richards and Schurink, ‘Textuality and Materiality of Reading’, p. 346 and pp. 345–61 passim. 125 J. Scott-Warren, ‘Reading Graffiti in the Early Modern Book’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010), p. 380 and 363–81 passim. 126 Rubin, ‘What Is the History of Books’, p. 575.

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127 G. Warkentin, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 39 (2001), pp. 94–8. 128 Richards and Schurink, ‘Textuality and Materiality of Reading’, p. 359. 129 Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, p. 24. 130 See K. Sharpe and S. Zwicker, ‘Introducing Lives’ in Sharpe and Zwicker, eds, Writing Lives, pp. 1–26.

Chapter 2 This essay first appeared as the foreword to D. Fischlin and M. Fortier, eds, Royal Subjects: Essay on the Writing of James VI and I (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), pp. 15–36. I include it because the volume marked an important moment in the study of writing and reading and was connected with my two interests in royal texts and reader response. I have amended the notes on account of the original’s unusual annotating. 1 Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects. A related publication that addresses the poetry of early modern monarchs is P. Herman, Reading Monarch’s Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I and James VI/I (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002) and Herman, Royal Poetrie: Monarchic Verse and the Political Imaginary of Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). Since this volume appeared, we now have a study by Jane Rickard, Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 2 See C. H. McIlwain, Constitutionalism and the Changing World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939); McIlwain, Constitutionalism Ancient and Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1940) and McIlwain, The Growth of Political Thought in the West from the Greeks to the End of the Middle Ages (New York: Cooper Square, 1932). 3 See E. Arber, ed., The Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie (New York, 1895); J. Craigie, ed., Minor Prose Works of King James VI and I (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1982). 4 See Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, esp. ch. 1, and Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, ch. 1. 5 J. Craigie, ed., The Poems of James VI of Scotland (2 vols, Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1955–8). When I surveyed the historiography in 1993 no historian had addressed these texts and only Jonathan Goldberg had critically studied them; see J. Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989) and Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture. 6 See, for example, K. Fincham, ed., The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993). 7 J. Sommerville, ed., King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 8 For an introduction see Veeser, The New Historicism and The New Historicism Reader. 9 Goldberg, James I; J. Wormald, review of Goldberg, History, 70 (1985), pp. 128–30.

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10 On the question of authorship see M. Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); P. Kaszi and M. Woodmansee, eds, The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). 11 S. Dunnigan, ‘Discovering Desire in the Amatoria of James VI’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, pp. 149–81. 12 BL Add. Mss. 24195. 13 J. Doelman, ‘The Reception of King James’s Psalter’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, pp. 454–75. 14 See Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 27–34. 15 Fischlin and Fortier, ‘“Enregistrate Speech”: Stratagems of Monarchic Writing in the Work of James VI and I’, in Royal Subjects, p. 39 and pp. 37–58, passim. 16 C. Perry, ‘“If Proclamations Will Not Serve”: The Late Manuscript Poetry of James I and the Culture of Libel’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, p. 212. 17 See K. Sharpe, ‘Representations and Negotiations: Texts, Images and Authority in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), pp. 853–81. 18 Perry, ‘“If Proclamations Will Not Serve”’, p. 205. 19 See p. 111 in this volume. 20 P. Herman, ‘“Best of Poets, Best of Kings”: King James VI and I and the Scene of Monarchic Verse’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, p. 93; also see K. Sharpe, ‘The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern England’, in K. Sharpe and P. Lake, eds, Culture and Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke and Stanford: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 117–38. 21 M. Fleming, ‘The Amatoria of James VI: Loving by the Reulis’, Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, pp. 124–48, quotation, p. 140. 22 James VI and I, Ane Fruitfull Meditatioun Contening Ane Plane and Facill Expositioun of the 7.8.9 and 10 versis of the 20 chap. of the Reuelatioun (STC 14376, Edinburgh 1588); Ane Meditatioun upon the xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, and xxix Verses of the XV Chapt. of the First Buke of the Chronicles of the Kingis (STC 14380, Edinburgh, 1589). 23 ‘“Pairt of My Taill Is Yet Untolde”: James VI and I, the Phoenix, and the Royal Gift’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, pp. 182–204. 24 Doelman, ‘Reception of King James’s Psalter’ and S. Bell, ‘“Precious Stinke”: James I’s A Counterblaste to Tobacco’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, pp. 323–43. 25 Milton, Eikonoklastes, in F. A. Patterson, The Works of John Milton (18 vols, New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–8), V, pp. 64–5. 26 James I, The Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince, James (STC 14344, 1616); M. Corbett and R. Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title Page in England, 1550–1660 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 107–12 and 137–44. 27 D. Fischlin, ‘“To Eate the Flesh of Kings”: James VI and I, Apocalypse, Nation and Sovereignty’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, pp. 388–420. 28 Herman, ‘“Best of Poets”’, pp. 77–93. 29 See J. Wormald, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: The Scottish Context and the English Translation’, in L. Peck, The Mental World of the Stuart Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 36–54. 30 Doelman, ‘Reception of King James’s Psalter’, pp. 461–5.

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31 See P. Donald, An Uncounselled King: Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–1641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 32 E. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 33 A. Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998). 34 H. Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); cf. A. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 35 Winters Tale (4.4.260–1); H. Love and A. Marotti, ‘Manuscript Transmission and Circulation’, in D. Loewenstein and J. Mueller, eds, The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 55–80. 36 J. Marshall, ‘Reading and Misreading King James, 1622–42: Responses to the Letter and Directions Touching Preaching and Preachers’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, pp. 476–511. 37 Wormald, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law’. 38 Wortham, ‘“Pairt of My Taill”’, pp. 191–2 and passim. 39 Fischlin and Fortier, ‘“Enregistrate Speech”’, p. 50. 40 A. Bellany, ‘“Rayling Rymes and Vaunting Verse”; Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603–28’, in Sharpe and Lake, Culture and Politics, pp. 285–310. 41 Craigie, Poems, II, pp. 179–82. 42 See R. Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) and A. Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 43 W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 44 Perry, ‘“If Proclamations Will Not Serve”’, p. 212; on pastoral, see A. Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 45 Dunnigan, ‘Discovering Desire’. 46 Ibid., p. 158. 47 Ibid., p. 153. 48 Ibid., p. 157. 49 See C. H. McIlwain, ed., The Political Works of James I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), p. 272. 50 J. Craigie, ed., The Basilikon Doron of James VI (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1944–50), 1, p. 64. 51 D. Bergeron, ‘Writing King James’s Sexuality’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, p. 363 and pp. 344–70 passim. 52 D. Bergeron, King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999); E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 53 S. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 54 Sharpe, Reading Revolutions.

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55 Craigie, Basilikon Doron, ‘To the Reader’, I, p. 13. 56 Bell, ‘“Precious Stinke”’, p. 334. 57 See J. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640 (Harlow: Longman, 1986), now reissued in a second edition under the title Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640 (Harlow: Longman, 1999), which I still find crudely schematic; cf. G. Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996); P. Christianson, ‘Royal and Parliamentary Voices on the Ancient Constitution’, in Peck, Mental World, pp. 71–95. 58 M. Fortier, ‘Equity and Ideas: Coke, Ellesmere, and James VI and I’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, pp. 265–89. 59 For the best recent study of Renaissance rhetorical practices see Q. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), part 1; on the capacity of language to articulate both consensus and difference, see Sharpe, ‘A Commonwealth of Meanings: Languages, Analogues, Ideas and Politics’, in Remapping Early Modern England, pp. 38–123. 60 Fischlin, ‘“To Eate the Flesh of Kings”’, p. 405. 61 J. King, ‘James I and King David: Jacobean Iconography and Its Legacy’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, pp. 421–53; quotation, p. 423. 62 Dunnigan, ‘Discovering Desire’, p. 173. 63 Fleming, ‘The Amatoria of James VI’, p. 140. 64 P. Zagorin, Ways Of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); cf. K. Sharpe, ‘Private Conscience and Public Duty in the Writings Of James I’, in J. Morrill, P. Slack and D. Woolf, eds, Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 77–100. 65 BL Add. MS 24195, f. 7v; Craigie, Poems, II, p. 71; Dunnigan, ‘Discovering Desire’, p. 160. 66 D. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), ch. 1. 67 S. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 68 See J. Wormald, ‘James VI and I: Two Kings or One?’, History, 68 (1993), pp. 187–209; M. Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); R. Lockyer, James VI and I (Harlow: Longman, 1998). Conrad Russell contrasts the political skills of James with the political failings of Charles; see Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), ch. 8 and passim. 69 Marshall, ‘Reading and Misreading King James’, p. 498. 70 Royal Subjects, pp. 211–18, 476–502, passim. 71 Sharpe, ‘Representations and Negotiations’; see A. Fox, P. Griffiths and S. Hindle, eds, The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). 72 Professor Glenn Burgess is currently writing this for the Yale English Monarchs series.

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73 C. Ives and D. Parkinson, ‘“The Fountain and Very Being of Truth”: James VI, Poetic Invention, and National identity’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, pp. 104–23. 74 Doelman, ‘Reception of King James’s Psalter’, p. 456; the work on the union has paid little attention to James’s writings. 75 L. Knafla, ‘Britain’s Solomon: King James and the Law’; also see K. Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England (London: Pinter, 1989), pp. 283–8; above note 57. 76 See P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Collinson, Godly People: Essay on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: Hambledon Continuum, 1983); also see Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church 1570–1635’, Past and Present, 114 (1987), pp. 32–76; and K. Fincham and P. Lake, ‘Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I’ and ‘Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I’, in Fincham, Early Stuart Church, pp. 23–50. 77 See Sharpe, Politics and Ideas, ch. 4, and Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London, 1992), ch. 6. See also P. White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); J. Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); I. M. Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 78 K. Fincham and P. Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), pp. 169–207, esp. pp. 198–202. 79 R. M. Smuts, ‘The Making of Rex Pacificus: James VI and I and the Problem of Peace in an Age of Religious War’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, pp. 371–87, quotation, p. 383; I am not persuaded by Peter Lake’s view that James changed his definition of who constituted the radicals. 80 Fischlin, ‘“To Eate the Flesh of Kings”’, p. 389 and passim. 81 I suggest a greater influence than has been noticed of James’s writings on Charles I in K. Sharpe, ‘Private Conscience and Public Duty in the Writings of Charles I’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 643–65. 82 S. Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 83 See Marcus et al., Elizabeth I: Collected Works. 84 See W. Haugaard, ‘ Elizabeth Tudor’s Book of Devotions: A Neglected Clue to the Queen’s Life and Character’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 12 (1981), pp. 79–105; P. Collinson, ‘Windows in a Woman’s Soul: Questions about the Religion of Queen Elizabeth’, in Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon Continuum, 1994), pp. 87–118. 85 See A. Broadley, The Royal Miracle: A Collection of Rare Tracts, Broadsides, Letters, Prints and Ballads Concerning the Wanderings of Charles II After the Battle of Worcester (London: Stanley Paul, 1912); R. Ollard, The Escape of Charles II After the Battle of Worcester (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1966). 86 See A. Lytton Sells, ed., The Memoirs of James II: His Campaigns as Duke of York, 1652–1660 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1962); and G. Davies, ed., Papers of Devotion of James II (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1925); see Chapter 13 in this volume.

NOTES

259

87 Sharpe, ‘The King’s Writ’, pp. 131–8. 88 W. Notestein, F. Relf and H. Simpson, eds, Commons Debates, 1621 (7 vols, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935), II, p. 2. 89 After years of critical and historical neglect there is now excellent work on the Eikon Basilike. See, for example, S. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), ch. 2; Wheeler, ‘Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation’, pp. 122–40. 90 Fischlin and Fortier, ‘“Enregistrate Speech”’, p. 43. 91 See Sharpe and Zwicker, eds, Refiguring Revolutions, introduction. 92 See L. Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 68; R. Strong, Henry Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), pp. 87–8. 93 For a discussion, see Goldberg, James I, pp. 90–7, and Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain, p. 67 and fig. 23. 94 Marshall, ‘Reading and Misreading King James’, p. 479. 95 See Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, p. 15 and ch. 1 passim; above Chapter 1. 96 J. Sommerville, ‘King James VI and I and John Selden: Two Voices on History and the Constitution’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, pp. 290–322. 97 S. Bell, ‘“Precious Stinke”’, p. 326. 98 Fleming, ‘The Amatoria of James VI’, p. 144. 99 Fischlin, ‘“To Eate the Flesh of Kings”’, p. 402.

Chapter 3 This essay was prepared for an exhibition on the history of reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library and published as a contribution to the catalogue, A. Alcorn and R. Doggett, eds, The Reader Revealed (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2001), pp. 58–66. I reprint it here because it offers a brief summary of my researches for Reading Revolutions, presented for a general public and offers a reading of a controversial contemporary play. 1 Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 18. 2 Folger MS V.a.263, f. 129v. 3 Ibid., ff. 44, 85, 131; at other end, f. 6. 4 Ibid., ff. 59, 75; cf. University College, London, Bacon-Tottel (Ogden) MS 7/8, f. 162v. 5 Folger MS V.a. 263, ff. 25, 54, 73, 95. 6 Ibid., f. 12; cf. Ogden MS 7/7, ff. 2v, 77; 7/8, f. 161v; 7/9, f. 130v. 7 Folger MS V.a. 263, f. 53; cf. other end f. 31. 8 Ibid., ff. 59v, 104, 127. 9 Ibid., 41v, 65, 79v. 10 See Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 225–35, 328–31. 11 Folger MS V.a. 263 ff. 42, 64.

260

NOTES

12 See Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 262–6, and Henri, duc de Rohan, A Treatise of the Interest of Princes and States of Christendome (Wing R1868, 1641), sigs A8, A9v. 13 Rohan, Treatise, sigs A1-v, A2; Rohan, The Second Part of the Interests of the Princes and States of Christendome (Wing R1868, 1641), p. 124. 14 Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 262–3. 15 Ibid., p. 264: Rohan, Second Part, pp. 64, 68, 104. 16 Phillips sale catalogue, 18 March 1993. 17 Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, HM 55603, f. *27; Ogden MS 7/7, f. 102. 18 HM 55603, f. *25. 19 Ibid., f. *Iv. 20 Ibid., front flyleaf, f. *16v. 21 Buckinghamshire Record Office, D/DR/10/56, listed as ‘Latin maxims and epigrams’; House of Lords Record Office, Historical Collections MS 49, wrongly listed as ‘Commonplace Book of Francis Drake’. 22 Stuart Clark, ‘Wisdom Literature of the Seventeenth Century: A Guide to the Contents of the “Bacon-Tottel” Commonplace Books. Part 1’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 6 (1976), pp. 291–305, quotation, p. 298. 23 Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 158–63. 24 See Chapter 1, pp. 7–9.

Chapter 4 This essay was first published in Sharpe and Zwicker, Reading, Society and Politics, pp. 122–67. It offers a case study in how Scripture was read over a long period from the late sixteenth to early eighteenth century. I wish to thank Chris Haigh, Peter Lake and Steve Zwicker for helpful comments. 1 See C. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller (London: Routledge, 1980); R. Darnton, ‘Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity’, in R. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 209–49. 2 Quoted in Hill, The English Bible, p. 31. 3 See A. Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Viking, 1996), pp. 270–6; and G. Cavallo and R. Chartier, eds, A History of Reading in the West, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), chs 8, 9. 4 See C. Haigh, English Reformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 5 See A. C. Partridge, English Biblical Translation (London: Andre Deustsch, 1973); and B. F. Westcott, A General View of the History of the English Bible (London: Macmillan, 1905). 6 M. Betteridge, ‘The Bitter Notes: The Geneva Bible and Its Annotations’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 14 (1983), pp. 41–62, quotation p. 45. I owe this reference to the kindness of Diarmaid MacCulloch. 7 Ibid., p. 53. 8 Ibid., p. 48.

NOTES

261

9 ‘Barker’s Bible’, 1616, University of Southampton Rare Books Library. 10 Hill, The English Bible, p. 299; see also A. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1979), p. viii. 11 A. Dent, The Ruine of Rome, or An Exposition upon the Whole Revelation (STC 6640, 1603), sig. A3v; A. Marlorat, A Catholic Exposition of the Revelation of St John (STC 17408, 1574), f. 1v. 12 See M. Forey, ‘Language and Revelation: English Apocalyptic Literature, 1500– 1660’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1993), p. 65; see K. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), ch. 1; and N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), ch. 1. 13 See Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium, chs 6, 11. 14 See Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, pp. 9–10. 15 See R. K. Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), pp. 204–36; Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, passim. 16 See Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, p. 122. 17 See the Geneva Bible of 1579 and the Barker edition of 1616. 18 E. Waple, The Book of the Revelation Paraphrased (Wing B2707bA, 1693), p. 504; for Waple, see pp. 79–80 in this volume; D. Pareus, A Commentary upon the Divine Revelation of the Apostle John (Wing P353, 1644), p. 20. 19 Pareus, Commentary, pp. 20, 26; R. Bernard, A Key of Knowledge for the Opening of the Secret Mysteries of St John’s Mystical Revelation (STC 1955, 1617), p. 130; cf. J. Tillinghast’s description of Revelation as ‘doleful tragedy’, Generation Work: The Second Part (Wing T1176, 1654), p. 159. 20 W. Perkins, A Godly and Learned Commentarie upon the Three First Chapters of the Revelation (STC 19732a, 1607), sig. A4v. 21 Dent, The Ruine of Rome, p. 47. 22 Tillinghast, Generation Work, p. 264. 23 Dent, The Ruine of Rome, p. 217. 24 J. Napier, A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St John (STC 18354, Edinburgh, 1593), p. 270. 25 Marlorat, A Catholic Exposition, ff. 192–3. 26 Ibid., ff. 49v, 236. 27 Ibid., f. 1v. 28 Ibid., ff. 61v, 181v, 183, 201. 29 Ibid., f. 89. 30 Ibid., sig. q3v. 31 See B. Capp, ‘The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought’, in C. A. Patrides and J. Wittreich, eds, The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 93–124, esp. pp. 97–8). See also E. S. Richey, The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1998), p. 7. 32 See M. Forey, ‘Language and Revelation’, p. 41. 33 G. Gifford, Sermons . . . on the Whole Book of the Revelation (STC 11866, 1596). 34 Ibid., sig. A3v. 35 Ibid., sig. A8v. 36 Ibid., p. 30.

262

NOTES

37 Ibid., pp. 85, 445. 38 Ibid., p. 105. 39 James VI and I, Ane Fruitfull Meditatioun, and A Paraphrase upon the Revelation Both in the Workes of the Most High and Mighty Prince James (STC 14344, 1616). See D. Fischlin, ‘“To Eate the Flesh of Kings”’, pp. 388–420; see Chapter 2. 40 James I, Workes, p. 73. 41 See K. Sharpe, ‘The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern England’, in Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, ch. 3. 42 James I, Workes, p. 32. 43 Ibid., p. 80. 44 Ibid., p. 66. 45 Ibid., p. 40. 46 Ibid., p. 72. 47 Napier, A Plaine Discovery, sig. A6, p. 49. 48 Ibid., pp. 270–2. 49 Ibid., p. 272. 50 Dent, The Ruine of Rome, ‘The Epistle to the Christian Reader’. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., pp. 47, 74. 54 Ibid., p. 89. 55 Ibid., p. 89; cf. p. 192. 56 Ibid., p. 283. 57 For Calvinist conformists, see P. Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church, 1570–1635’, Past and Present, 114 (1987), pp. 32–76; and P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 58 Perkins, A Godly and Learned Commentarie, p. 2. 59 Ibid., p. 55. 60 Ibid., p. 18. 61 Ibid., pp. 10, 18, 48, 69. 62 Ibid., pp. 11, 18. 63 Ibid., p. 195. 64 Ibid., p. 9. 65 Ibid., pp. 127–8. 66 Ibid., p. 42. 67 Ibid., pp. 19, 42, 70. 68 Ibid., p. 181. 69 Ibid., p. 127. 70 Ibid., p. 27. 71 Ibid., p. 82; see also pp. 42–5, 51, 63. 72 Ibid., pp. 116–18. 73 Ibid., p. 3. 74 Bernard, A Key of Knowledge, sigs A5–A8v. 75 Ibid., sig. C7. 76 Ibid., pp. 16, 105. 77 Ibid., pp. 9, 79, 100, 123, 153, 155.

NOTES

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

263

Ibid., pp. 100, 103. Ibid., pp. 92, 237. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 92, 105–7. Ibid., pp. 112–13. Ibid., pp. 155, 120. J. Wilkinson, An Exposition of the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation of Jesus Christ (STC 25647, Amsterdam, 1619), verso of title page. 86 Ibid., p. 29. 87 Ibid., pp. 32, 36. 88 Ibid., p. 36. 89 Ibid., pp. 30, 31. 90 Ibid., p. 29. 91 Ibid., p. 35. 92 T. Brightman, A Revelation of the Revelation (STC 25647, Amsterdam, 1615), sig. A3. 93 See Fincham and Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I’, pp. 169–207; Fincham and Lake, ‘Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I’, pp. 23–50; and A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), part 1. 94 See Milton, Catholic and Reformed, pp. 118–27; and C. Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 37 and ch. 1, passim. 95 Milton, ‘The Church of England, Rome and the True Church: The Demise of a Jacobean Consensus’, in Fincham, ed., The Early Stuart Church, pp. 187–210, quotation p. 199. 96 See Hill, Antichrist, pp. 38–40. 97 See K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 646–7, 683–90; B. Capp, English Almanacs, 1500–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979); and D. Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London, 1637–1645 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997). 98 See Capp, ‘The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought’, pp. 107–8. In particular the circles of Lords Saye and Brooke, who wrote on Revelation, Persecutio Undecima (Wing C3785, 1648). See Chapter 5. 99 See Capp, ‘The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought’, p. 107; and Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I, pp. 813–24. 100 J. Lilburne, A Worke of the Beast (STC 15599, 1638), pp. 17–18. 101 See Zwicker, Lines of Authority. 102 Quoted in Capp, ‘The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought’, p. 113. 103 See Forey, ‘Language and Revelation’, passim. 104 See J. Raymond, ‘Irrational, Impractical and Unprofitable: Reading the News in Seventeenth-Century Britain’, in Sharpe and Zwicker, Reading, Society and Politics, pp. 185–212. 105 See S. Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 291–2.

264

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106 Napier’s Narration, or An Epitome of His Book on the Revelation (Wing N153, 1641/2), sig. C4v. 107 A Revelation of Mr Brightman’s Revelation (Thomason E164 [11], 1641), pp. 19, 34. 108 J. Mede, The Key of the Revelation (Wing M1600, 1643), p. 125; for Mede, see M. Murrin, ‘Revelation and Two Seventeenth-Century Commentators’, in Patrides and Wittreich, eds, The Apocalypse, pp. 125–46. 109 Mede, The Key of the Revelation, sig. A3, p. 20; see Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, p. 228. 110 Mede, The Key of the Revelation, p. 26. 111 J. Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Epistles and the Revelation of John the Divine (Wing T2040, 1647), pp. 512, 530. 112 Ibid., pp. 514, 553. 113 Ibid., p. 597. 114 See P. Crawford, ‘Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood’, Journal of British Studies, 16 (1977), pp. 41–61. 115 Lady E. Davies (Douglas), The Revelation Interpreted (Wing D2009, 1643), ch. 13; Davies, The Day of Judgements Modell (Wing D1983, 1646); E. Cope, Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies, Never Soe Mad a Ladie (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992); and M. Matchinske, ‘Holy Hatred: Formations of the Gendered Subject in English Apocalyptic Writing, 1625–1651’, English Literary History, 60 (1993), pp. 349–77. 116 See Hill, Antichrist, p. 107. 117 Ibid. 118 M. Cary, The Little Horns Doom and Downfall (Wing C737, 1650), title page. 119 Ibid., sig. a1v, a3. 120 Ibid., p. 179. 121 Ibid., p. 106. 122 Ibid., p. 267, sig. A8. For Cary, see C. F. Otten, ed., English Women’s Voices (Miami: University Press of Florida, 1992), pp. 100–3. 123 For the best account, see A. Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 124 Tillinghast, Generation Work, ‘To His Highness the Lord Protector’, sig. A6v. 125 Ibid., sig. a7v. 126 Ibid., sig. A8v. 127 Ibid., sig. b3v. 128 Ibid., sig. b3v. 129 Ibid., p. 215. 130 Ibid., closing address to the ‘courteous reader’. 131 J. Hall, The Revelation Unrevealed (Wing H410, 1650). Note on title page by John Downham: ‘I have perused this polemical discourse against the tenets of the millenarians and find it to be . . . learned and judicious.’ 132 Ibid., pp. 11, 49. 133 Ibid., pp. 63–4. 134 Ibid., pp. 102, 180. 135 Ibid., p. 209. 136 Ibid., p. 66, my italics. 137 Ibid., p. 273. 138 See note 131 above.

NOTES

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139 S. Hartlib, Clavis Apocalyptica, or A Prophetical Key by Which the Great Mysteries in the Revelation . . . Are Opened (Wing H979, 1651), f. 3v; Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, pp. 242–5. 140 Hartlib, Clavis Apocalyptica, p. 9. 141 Ibid., pp. 13–20; Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, p. 243. 142 Hartlib, Clavis Apocalyptica, pp. 13–15. 143 Ibid., pp. 17, 18, 22. 144 Ibid., pp. 33–4. 145 T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 378. 146 J. Durham, A Commentary upon the Book of Revelation (Wing D2805, 1658), p. 3. 147 Ibid., p. 64. 148 Ibid. 149 Ibid., p. 65. 150 Ibid., p. 100. 151 Ibid., pp. 709, 711. 152 Ibid., p. 715. 153 Ibid., p. 781. 154 Durham, A Commentary, p. 781. 155 Hill, Antichrist, p. 154; and Hill, The English Bible, p. 243 and ch. 18, passim. 156 See P. Korshin, ‘Queuing and Waiting: The Apocalypse in England, 1660– 1750’, in Patrides and Wittreich, eds, The Apocalypse, pp. 240–65. 157 See T. Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 158 J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Clark, English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology, and Politics during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 159 L. Muggleton, A True Interpretation of All the Chief Texts and Mysterious Sayings and Visions . . . of the Revelation of St John (Wing M3049, 1665), pp. 56, 200. 160 Ibid., p. 57. 161 Ibid., pp. 57, 105. 162 Ibid., pp. 91, 125. 163 Ibid., sig. A3, p. 30. 164 Ibid., pp. 199, 226. 165 Ibid., p. 230, sig. A3. 166 The Royal Society took as its motto ‘Nullius in verba’. 167 R. Hayter, The Meaning of the Revelation, or A Paraphrase with Questions on the Revelation (Wing H1225, 1675), ‘To the Reader’. 168 Ibid., p. 30. 169 Ibid., pp. 201, 243; cf. pp. 74, 200. 170 Ibid., p. 201. 171 Ibid., p. 66. 172 Ibid., p. 236. 173 Ibid., pp. 223–4, 238. 174 Ibid., p. 74.

266

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175 Ibid., pp. 95, 96–7. 176 Ibid., p. 249. 177 See M. Hunter and D. Wootton, eds, Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), ch. 8; J. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660– 1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); J. Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). 178 H. More, Apocalypsis Apocalypseosis, or The Revelation of St John the Divine Unveiled (Wing M2641, 1680), pp. ix, xvi. 179 Ibid., p. 357. 180 Ibid., pp. xvi–xvii and passim. 181 Ibid., p. 347. 182 Ibid., pp. 2.49–50. 183 Ibid., pp. xxff., 250–2, 339, 356. 184 Ibid., p. 357. 185 Henry More, A Plain and Continued Exposition (Wing M2673, 1681), p. lxxxvii. The exposition was of both Daniel and Revelation. 186 Ibid., p. lxxx. 187 For example, An Illustration out of Those Two Abstruse Books in Holy Scripture . . . Framed out of the Exposition of Dr Henry More (Wing M2662, 1685); Paralipomena Prophetica: Containing Several Supplements and Defences of Dr H. More (Wing M2669, 1685). Of course, the staunchly Protestant exegesis by Increase Mather, A Discourse upon the Day of Judgement, published in Boston in 1686, was read in England. 188 The opposition to James II awaits full study; for illustrations of cartoons against the king and Catholics, see Huntington Library, Richard Bull Granger, collection of engravings, vol. 18. 189 Claydon, William III. 190 H. Knollys, An Exposition of the Whole Book of Revelation (Wing K710, 1689). The title page indicates that the book was licensed on 12 September 1688. See J. Carswell, The Descent on England: A Study of the English Revolution of 1688 and Its European Background (New York: John Day, 1969). 191 Knollys, An Exposition, p. 106. 192 Ibid., p. 144. 193 Ibid., pp. 243–4. 194 Ibid., p. 138, for the reference to the ‘spiritual Jerusalem’. 195 W. Garrett, An Essay upon the Fourth and Fifth Chapters of the Revelation . . . Showing That the Church of England Is Particularly Described in Those Chapters (Wing G269, 1690). 196 Ibid., sig. A2. 197 Ibid., p. 3. 198 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 199 Ibid., p. 5. 200 Ibid., p. 9. 201 Ibid., p. 9, my italics.

NOTES

267

202 See K. Sharpe, ‘“So Hard a Text?”: Images of Charles I, 1616–1700’, Historical Journal, 43 (2000), pp. 395–404; see Chapter 9. 203 Garrett, An Essay, p. 11. 204 Ibid., p. 13. 205 Ibid., p. 14. 206 T. Beverley, A Sermon upon the Revel. II, II (Wing B2176, 1692.), p. 1. 207 Ibid., p. 3. 208 Ibid., pp. 6, 12. 209 Ibid., p. 13. 210 E. Waple, The Book of the Revelation Paraphrased, sig. A3v. 211 Ibid., sig. A4v. 212 Ibid., sig. A5v. 213 Ibid., sig. d3, pp. 5, 6, 453, 470. 214 Ibid., sig. b1v, p. 389. 215 Ibid., sig. b4v. 216 Ibid., pp. 194, 196. 217 Ibid., p. 196. 218 Ibid., p. 192. 219 Ibid., p. 193: ‘Even the behaviour of the Quakers may put Christians in remembrance of the duties of patience.’ 220 Waple, The Book of the Revelation, p. 194. 221 See Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, ch. 1, pp. 4–9. 222 Garrett first published on the Antichrist in 1680 and was writing commentaries on various books of Revelation until 1714. See Garrett, Of the Usefulness of the Prophecy of Revelation (ESTC T184259, 1711). 223 W. Garrett, An Exposition of Rev. VII (ESTC T190330, 1702), pp. 6–9, 20 and passim. 224 W. Garrett, An Exposition of Rev. XI (ESTC T190342, 1703), pp. 14, 26. 225 Ibid., p. 26. 226 See G. Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (2nd edn, London: Hambledon Continuum, 1987); Holmes, The Trial of Dr Sacheverell (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973). 227 See J. Lead, The Revelation of Revelations (Wing L789, 1683); Lead, The Signs of the Times (Wing L790, 1699); Korshin, ‘The Apocalypse in England’, pp. 249. 228 Korshin, ‘The Apocalypse in England’, p. 249. 229 E. Wells, An Help for the More Easy and Clear Understanding of the Holy Scriptures, Being the Revelation of St John (ESTC T112431, 1717), sig. a2. 230 Ibid., p. 83. 231 For the ideology of annotation, see A. Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (1997). 232 Steven Zwicker also makes this point about marginalia. See S. N. Zwicker, ‘Reading the Margins: Politics and the Habits of Appropriation’, in Sharpe and Zwicker, eds, Refiguring Revolutions, pp. 505–15; Zwicker, ‘The Constitution of Opinion and the pacification of Reading’, in Sharpe and Zwicker, Reading, Society and Politics, pp. 295–316. I am grateful to Steve Zwicker for discussions of his forthcoming book on marginalia.

268

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233 Zwicker, Lines of Authority, ch. 3 and passim. 234 C. Daubuz, A Perpetual Commentary on the Revelation of St John (ESTC T092070, 1720), p. 53; DNB. 235 Ibid., p. 17. 236 Ibid., p. 16. 237 Ibid., p. 17. 238 Ibid., pp. 17, 20, 24. 239 Ibid., p. 29. 240 Ibid., p. 35, my italics. 241 Ibid., p. 49. 242 Ibid., p. 50. 243 Ibid., pp. 44, 56. 244 Ibid., pp. 50, 53. 57. 245 I am grateful to Michael Mendle, who is working on collectors, for discussions of this subject. 246 Kelsey’s annotations are on the Huntington Library copy of Gifford’s Sermons (1596) and the marginal mark is on the Union Theological Seminary New York’s copy of Knollys’s An Exposition of the Whole Book of the Revelation.

Chapter 5  This essay was written for a conference on Shaping the Stuart World: The Atlantic Connection, held at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. The essay was published in A. Macinnes and A. Williamson, eds, Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714: The Atlantic Connection (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), pp. 117–47. I republish it as a development of the last essay on reading Scripture in early modern England, as a study of reading locations as well as moments – and as my only foray into either British or Atlantic studies. 1 For a study that emphasizes the instabilities of print see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998). I would like to thank Allan Macinnes, Peter Mancall and Steven Zwicker for their helpful comments on this essay. 2 See Sharpe and Zwicker, Reading, Society and Politics, introduction. 3 See, for example, P. Griffiths. A. Fox and S. Hindle, eds, The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). 4 For a fuller statement of such an argument see my Reading Revolutions. 5 See Katz, God’s Last Words and Patrides, English Biblical Translation. 6 Sharpe, ‘Reading Revelations’, pp. 122–63; above Chapter 4. Thus, the Revelation of Richard Hayter’s polite culture is a very different text to that which the Jacobean Puritan William Perkins glossed as support for his campaign for a preaching ministry. 7 Sharpe and Zwicker, Reading, Society and Politics, pp. 8–10. 8 C. Hill, ‘Puritans and the “Dark Corners of the Land”’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 13 (1963), pp. 77–102. 9 See, for example, G. H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought (New York: Harper, 1962).

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10 On Gustavus Adolphus, see A Letter from Sarient Maior Forbes from the King of Swethens Army to His Reverend Father Mr. Iohn Forbes, Minister to the Worshipful Company of Marchant Adventurers residing in Delft (STC 11128.5, 1631) where the author writes: ‘Here the Holy-ghost doth describe the joy and rejoycing of all the faithfull for the destruction of the Romish superstition’ and quotes Revelation 18.12: ‘I take it this generation doe live in that age this prophecy shall be fulfilled’, sigs A–A1v. See also, A. Gill, The New Star of the North Shining upon the Victorious King of Sweden (STC 11879.6, 1632), which relates astrology to biblical prophecy. Capp, ‘The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought’, p. 113. 11 Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, pp. 17–19. In the book of Ezekiel, Magog is described as a northern kingdom; see chapters 38 and 39. 12 See M. Betteridge, ‘The Bitter Notes: The Geneva Bible and Its Annotations’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 14 (1983), pp. 41–62. 13 Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, p. 125. 14 James VI, A Fruitful Meditation Containing a Plain and Easy Exposition or Laying Open of the VII, VIII, IX and X Verses of the 20th Chapter of the Revelation, in Form and Manner of a Sermon (STC 14376, Edinburgh, 1588). 15 Ibid., sig. Aiii. 16 Ibid., sig. Aiiiv. 17 Ibid., sig. [Aiv]. 18 Ibid., sig. Bii. 19 Ibid., sig. [Biv]. 20 Ibid., sig. [Biv]. 21 Ibid., sig. Aii. 22 In James I, The Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince, Iames (STC 14344, 1616), pp. 7–72. 23 Ibid., p. 2. 24 Ibid., p. 5. 25 Ibid., pp. 13, 35. 26 Ibid., p. 53. 27 Ibid., p. 71. 28 Ibid., p. 71. 29 See D. Fischlin, ‘“To Eat the Flesh of Kings”: James VI, Apocalypse, Nation, Sovereignty’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, pp. 388–420. 30 John Napier, A Plain Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (STC 18354, Edinburgh, 1593). 31 Ibid., sigs A3–A4. 32 Ibid., pp. 12, 154, 179, 223. 33 Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, p. 148. 34 Quoted in A. H. Williamson, ‘Britain and the Beast: The Apocalypse and the Seventeenth Century Debate about the Creation of the British State’, in J. E. Force and R. H. Popkin, eds, Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modem European Culture. Volume III: The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), pp. 15–28, quotation, p. 16. See also A. H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1979).

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35 Williamson, ‘Britain and the Beast’, p. 16. 36 Capp, ‘The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought’, p. 97. 37 W. Perkins, A Godly and Learned Exposition or Commentarie upon the Three First Chapters of the Revelation. Preached in Cambridge by That Reverend and Judicious Diuine, Maister VVilliam Perkins, Ann. Dom. 1595 (STC 19732a, 1607). 38 Ibid., epistle dedicatory to Lady Elizabeth Montagu, sigs Aiii–Av. 39 Ibid., p. 196. 40 I quote from Perkins, Godly Commentarie, 1604 edition (STC 19731), p. 310; cf. 1607 edition, p. 196. 41 James VI, ‘Lepanto’, in J. Craigie, ed., The Poems of James VI of Scotland (2 vols, Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1955–8), I, pp. 197–259. In ‘the authors preface to the reader’, James refers to the notoriety caused by his apparent praise of the ‘foreign popish bastard’, Don John, p. 198. 42 Patterson, King James VI and I, ch. 1. 43 Ibid., passim. 44 Williamson, ‘Britain and the Beast’, pp. 18–19. 45 Ibid., p. 19. 46 See K. Sharpe, ‘The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern England’, in Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, pp. 134–42; Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, foreword and introduction; above Chapter 2. 47 In the well-known adage he uttered at Hampton Court, ‘No bishop, no king’. 48 On Raleigh, see Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, pp. 180–94. 49 Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), part 1; Fincham and Lake, ‘Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I’, pp. 23–50. 50 Williamson, ‘Britain and the Beast’, pp. 17–18. 51 See W. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–60 (London: Macmillan, 1969). 52 See verses 2 and 10 and compare 3.12. 53 T. Brightman, A Revelation of the Apocalyps (STC 3754, Amsterdam, 1611); second edition. A Revelation of the Revelation (STC 3755, Amsterdam, 1615); references are to the second edition. Brightman wrote the work between 1596 and 1610, see Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, p. 166. 54 Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, p. 168. Brightman feared that, after Edward and Elizabeth, superstition was returning to the Church of England (Brightman, Revelation, pp. 390–1). 55 Ibid., p. 877. 56 Ibid., p. 710. 57 Ibid., epistle dedicatory to reformed churches, sigs A2–4. 58 Revelation 12.6. 59 Force and Popkin, Millenarian Turn, pp. viii–ix. 60 See A. Zakai, Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), ch. 3. 61 S. J. Stein, ‘Transatlantic Extensions: Apocalyptic in Early New England’, in Patrides and Wittreich, Apocalypse, p. 266. J. Mede, Clavis Apocalyptica (1627).

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62 Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, pp. 223–4; See Twisse’s preface to the 1643 translation of Mede, The Key of the Revelation, Searched and Demonstrated Out of the Naturall and Proper Characters of the Visions (STC M1600, 1643) and Sharpe, ‘Reading Revelations’, p. 139; see Chapter 4 in this volume. 63 Zakai contrasts the Exodus type of migration, based on Israel’s flight from Egypt, with the Genesis type of God’s promise to his chosen nation and its mission. See Zakai, Exile and Kingdom, pp. 9–10 and 65–8, 99–101. For a classic contemporary exposition of the sacred mission see J. Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity, written aboard The Arbella in 1630, printed in Massachusetts Historical Society Collections 3rd Series, 7 (Boston, 1838), pp. 31–48. I owe this last reference to the kindness of Peter Mancall. 64 For a life see L. Ziff, The Career of John Cotton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). 65 John Cotton, Gods Promise to His Plantation·As It Was Delivered in a Sermon, by Iohn Cotton (STC 5854, 1630), p. 15. 66 Cotton, Gods Promise, p. 18. 67 D. Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), ch. 6; quotation, p. 144. See too William Bradford, A Relation or Iournall of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Setled at Plimoth in New England (STC 20074, 1622). 68 Cressy, Coming Over, pp. 163–5. 69 J. Cotton, The Churches Resurrection, or, The Opening of the Fift and Sixt Verses of the 20th chap. of the Revelation (Wing C6419, 1642), p. 8; T. Thorowgood, Iewes in America, or, Probabilities That the Americans Are of That Race (Wing T1067, 1650). I am grateful to Claire Jowitt for bringing this work to my attention. See C. Jowitt, ‘Radical Identities? Native Americans, Jews and the English Commonwealth’, in T. Kushner, ed., Cultures of Ambivalence and Contempt (Edgware: Valentine Mitchell, 1998), pp. 153–80. 70 Cotton, Churches Resurrection, p. 4. 71 Ibid., p. 15. 72 Ibid., p. 21. 73 Ibid., pp. 9, 11. 74 Ibid., p. 21. 75 J. Cotton, The Powring out of the Seven Vials: Or An Exposition, of the 16. Chapter of the Revelation, with an Application of It to Our Times (Wing C6449, 1642), title page. 76 Ibid., ‘The Second Vial’, p. 27, ‘The Fourth Vial’, p. 5. 77 Ibid., ‘The Fifth Vial’, pp. 4–5. 78 Ibid., ‘The Sixth Vial’, pp. 22–5. 79 Ibid., ‘The Seventh Vial’, pp. 11, 16. 80 Ibid., ‘The Third Vial’, p. 24. 81 Ibid., ‘The Fifth Vial’, p. 11. 82 Ibid., ‘The Seventh Vial’, p. 17. 83 Ziff, Career of John Cotton, p. 177. See L. Ziff, ed., John Cotton on the Churches of New England (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968). Cotton’s commentaries as conveyed to London were printed for Henry Overton and sold at his shop in Pope’s Head Alley to English readers.

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84 Cotton, The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven in Ziff, John Cotton on the Churches, pp. 72–3, 107. Cotton’s, The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven, and Power Thereof, According to the Word of God (STC 6437) was published in London in 1644, again to be sold by Henry Overton at his shop in Pope’s Head alley. Cotton’s treatise carried a preface by the Puritan Thomas Goodwin, preacher to the Council of State and chaplain to Cromwell who, according to Cotton Mather, had met John Cotton just before his departure to New England and Goodwin’s own flight to Holland. 85 S. Rutherford, The Due Right of Presbyteries, or, A Peaceable Plea for the Government of the Church of Scotland (Wing R2378, 1644); J. Cotton, The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared in Two Treatises: In the Former, from the Historical Aspersions of Mr. Robert Baylie, in His Book Called, A Disswasive from the Errors of the Time, in the Latter, from Some Contradictions of Vindicae Clavium, and from Some Mis-constructions of Learned Mr. Rutherford, in His Book Intituled, The Due Right of Presbyteries (Wing C6469, 1648) in Ziff, John Cotton on the Churches, p. 184. 86 Ibid., pp. 199–200. 87 Ibid., pp. 207–8, 303. 88 Ibid., p. 304. 89 Ibid., p. 306. The text was published in London with a preface by the Independent minister and millenarian, Nathaniel Holmes. 90 John Cotton, An Exposition upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation by that Reverend and Eminent Servant of the Lord, Mr. John Cotton (Wing C6432, 1656). In the preface to the ‘Christian reader’ of this Exposition, printed for Timothy Smart at the Hand and Bible in the Old Bayly, and for Livewell Chapman at the Crown in Pope’s Head Alley, Thomas Allen pointed up the exchange between Old and New England exegetes of Scripture. Identifying the influence on Cotton of the English Puritan divines Sibbes and Preston, Allen, who attended Cotton’s sermons on Revelation, now presented him as an authority on Scripture for readers in England where, he wrote, ‘the very name of Cotton is enough to set a high price upon what ever hath that stamp’ (Cotton, Exposition, ‘To the Reader’). 91 Cotton, Exposition, p. 4. 92 Ibid., p. 20; cf. p. 18. 93 Ibid., p. 20. 94 Ibid., pp. 13, 77. 95 Ibid., p. 87. 96 Ibid., pp. 90–3. 97 Ibid., p. 111. 98 Ibid., p. 257. For all the recital of passive obedience, the implications of Cotton’s position were radical. 99 Ibid., p. 259. 100 Ibid., p. 261. 101 ‘And therefore’, he exhorted, ‘let us not leave . . . till in family, church and commonwealth we have set a pattern of holiness’, a pattern not only for England but ‘to those who shall succeed us’ (ibid., pp. 77, 242). 102 Cotton predicted that the beast would fall in 1655. 103 Sharpe, ‘Reading Revelations’, pp. 140–3. 104 Stein, ‘Transatlantic Extensions’, pp. 272–9.

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105 See, for example, R. Middlekauf, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). See too T. H. Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 106 Zakai, Exile and Kingdom, p. 158, cf. ch. 5 and passim. 107 Ibid., p. 196. 108 A lively debate about the extent to which post-Restoration England was in any measure a more secular state was initiated by J. C. D. Clark’s English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See now his revised second edition, English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 109 S. Danforth, A Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness Made in the Audience of the General Assembly of the Massachusetts Colony at Boston (Wing D175, 1671), pp. 9–10, 17, 18. 110 Ibid., p. 17. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid., Thomas Shepherd’s address to the ‘Christian Reader’, sig. A2v. 113 See S. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 114 Increase Mather, The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation, Explained and Applyed (Wing M1230A, 1669), epistle to the reader, pp. 1–2. Mather did distance himself from the discredited English millenarians. 115 Ibid., pp. 62, 65. 116 Ibid., pp. 160, 163–4. Mather argued for revelation against a rationalist or naturalist approach in The Mystery of Christ Opened and Applied in Several Sermons (Wing M1229, Boston, 1686). 117 Increase Mather, Renewal of Covenant the Great Duty Incumbent on Decaying or Distressed Churches (Wing M1244, 1677), p. 4. Two years later, praising the first American generation of ‘Abrahams’, Mather quoted Revelation 2.5 (‘Remember from whence thou art fall and repent and do the first works’) to recall a lost generation from apostasy to apocalyptic mission (A Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostasy (Wing M1199, 1679), pp. 56, 57 and passim). 118 Increase Mather, The Necessity of Reformation (Wing M1232, 1679), preface ‘To the Much Honoured General Court of the Massachussetts Colony’, no pagination; pp. 2–3. 119 Ibid., pp. 6, 9–10, 12. 120 Increase Mather, Heavens Alarm to the World (Wing M1217, 1681), p. 7. 121 Increase Mather, A Narrative of the Miseries of New-England (Wing M1231A, 1688), pp. 3–5 and passim. 122 Increase Mather, A Brief Relation of the State of New England from the Beginning of That Plantation to This Present Year, 1689 (Wing M1189, 1689), p. 18. 123 Increase Mather, The Order of the Gospel Professed and Practiced by the Churches of Christ in New-England (Wing M1235, 1700), p. 7. 124 Ibid., pp. 91, 135–8, 142. 125 Ibid., p. 142.

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126 Reiner Smolinski, ed., The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather: An Edition of ‘Triparadisus’ (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 5. See T. J. Holmes, Cotton Mather: A Bibliography of His Works (3 vols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940) and also Reiner Smolinski, ‘Authority and Interpretation: Cotton Mather’s Response to the European Spinozists’, in Macinnes and Williamson, Shaping the Stuart World, pp. 175–203. 127 Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana: Or the Ecclesiastical History of New England From 1620 unto . . . 1698 (ESTC T079039, 1702). An edition in 2 volumes was published in 1853 (Hartford, CT). The Magnalia was as important for American history and nationalism as the works of Bale, Foxe and Parker had been to the Tudor English church and state. 128 Ibid., p. 101. 129 Cotton Mather, Theopolis Americana: An Essay on the Golden Street of the Holy City (ESTC W028045, Boston, 1700), p. 43. In this work Mather declared that they were entering the time when the vials were about to be poured out, p. 4. 130 Threefold Paradise, pp. 10–18, quotation at p. 16. In Cotton Mather’s own words: ‘we have indeed a sect of metaphorists of whom I would entreat that they would not so metaphorise the holy city as utterly to evaporate it’ (ibid., p. 246). 131 Mather often cites William Whiston, author of An Essay on the Revelation of St. John (ESTC T116538, 1706) as well as several works on ‘Scripture Prophecies’ and Newton. He also refers to papers of the Royal Society (e.g. Threefold Paradise, p. 209) and even the notorious sceptic and libertine, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (ibid., p. 165). 132 Threefold Paradise, pp. 296–7. 133 Ibid., pp. 291. And, he repeated, ‘one that is an American as I am, will hardly give that of Mr Mede: that the American hemisphere will escape the conflagration; and that the people there shall not be partakers in the blessedness of the thousand years’ (ibid., p. 42). 134 Ibid., p. 247; see also p. 237. 135 Ibid., p. 172. The manuscript of his Triparadisus was sent for printing to John Wyat, a non-conformist bookseller and publisher in St Paul’s Yard, London. 136 Mather, Theopolis Americana, p. 47. 137 Stein, ‘Transatlantic Extensions’, p. 286. 138 Threefold Paradise, pp. 298, 422. Preaching on 17 January 1776, Rev. Samuel Sherwood took up the theme of The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness (ESTC W037395, New York, 1776); printed in D. R. Williams, ed., Revolutionary War Sermons (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1984), no. 8. In the very different circumstances in which he found himself, he delivered ‘observations on Scripture prophecies showing that sundry of them plainly relate to Great Britain and the American colonies and are fulfilling in the present day’. Sherwood’s text was Revelation 12.14–17, which he promised might afford ‘much support to God’s people in times of great distress’ (Church’s Flight, p. 9). Central to Revelation, Sherwood reminded readers, was the fall of the popish Antichrist. But, he now insisted, interpretation could not limit the beast simply to Rome; rather it symbolized

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more generally any ‘persecuting tyrannical power’, and in particular that of Britain under Stuart kings (ibid., pp. 14–15). Apocalyptic prophecies of trials and sufferings Sherwood now read as a description of the American colonies in their relations with England. In language with charged political freight, he spoke of New England as the safeguard of ‘civil and religious liberties’ as well as of the true church (ibid., pp. 15, 41). Sherwood argued that the floods of the dragon had been poured forth by the English governors in Boston and New York, and in actions like the Quebec Bill by which England supported France against American territorial claims (ibid., pp. 31, 33). He depicted contemporary political acts and tensions between England and the colony, that is, as part of apocalyptic history; and as he pictured the envious dragon bent on devouring the saints, he quoted Revelation 11.3–5 to argue: ‘if any man hurt them, he must . . . be killed’ (ibid., p. 45). The time was coming when Babylon the great would fall to rise no more. ‘These commotions and convulsions in the British empire’, Sherwood concluded, ‘may be leading to the fulfilment of such prophecies’ (ibid., p. 49). Sherwood’s sermon was, as he said, a text of the moment. But his apocalypse was, too, very much one read on and out of American soil, of ‘the earth [which] has ever helped the woman since her arrival to these shores’ (ibid., p. 31). Where in England, for all John Wesley’s endeavour to translate it from the America he had experienced, apocalyptic fervour was tempered and pacified by Enlightenment rationalism, in New England, Revelation had become – not for the first or last time – a call to arms. See C. Burden, The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700–1834 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 9 and passim. 139 Jacques Sys’s ‘L’Espace Apocalyptique’, Graphe, 1 (1992), pp. 79–104, quoted in Burden, Apocalypse, p. 28.

Chapter 6 This essay first appeared in J. Deploige and G. Deneckere, eds, Mystifying the Monarch: Studies on Discourse, Power and History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), pp. 99–116, 255–9. When given as a paper, it was delivered as an overview of my project to study representations of rule and images of power. I publish it as a distillation of one of the most important overarching arguments of my three studies (Selling the Tudor Monarchy, Image Wars and Rebranding Rule). 1 See, for example, M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1970) and C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). See Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 11–12. 2 See S. Greenblatt, ‘Towards a Poetics of Culture’, in M. Krieger, ed., The Aims of Representation: Subject/Text/History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) and Veeser, The New Historicism Reader. 3 For an excellent survey of Renaissance rhetorical practices, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, part I.

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4 Skinner’s important early essays are ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 8 (1969), pp. 3–53; ‘On Performing and Explaining Linguistic Actions’, Philosophical Quarterly, 21 (1971), pp. 1–21. Skinner’s seminal essays have been republished, with changes, in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics (3 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See especially vol. I, Concerning Method. See also Tully, Meaning and Context; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Verbalising a Political Act: Towards a Politics of Language’, Political Theory, 1 (1973), pp. 27–431; Pocock, Politics, Language and Time; Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History. Essays on Political Thought and History Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Pocock, ‘Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of Political Thought’, in Sharpe and Zwicker, eds, Politics of Discourse, pp. 21–34. For a review of the linguistic turn, see J. E. Toews, ‘Intellectual History after the Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience’, American Historical Review, 92 (1987), pp. 879–907. 5 Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 20–1; Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, pp. 16–17. 6 It is significant here that the editors and most of the contributors to Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects are literary scholars. See above Chapter 2. 7 Marcus et al., Elizabeth I: Collected Works; J. Craigie, ed., The Poems of James VI of Scotland (2 vols, Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1955–8). In the case of James VI and I, historical editors have omitted biblical exegeses and poems from selections of the king’s works. See Mcllwain, The Political Works of James I and J. Sommerville, ed., King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 8 I am currently writing a study of royal representations from Henry VIII to Queen Anne. See now Selling the Tudor Monarchy; Image Wars; Rebranding Rule. 9 Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, pp. 20–1. 10 See M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (1979; 2nd rev. edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). 11 David Katz, ‘The Language of Adam in Seventeenth-Century England’, in H. Lloyd Jones, V. Pearl and B. Worden, eds, History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor Roper (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp. 131–45; Sharpe, ‘Reading Revelations’, pp. 122–63; see above Chapter 4. 12 Katz, God’s Last Words. See above Chapters 4 and 5. 13 Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 27–31. 14 See J. C. Warner, Henry VIII’s Divorce: Literature and the Politics of the Printing Press (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1998); P. Neville, ‘Richard Pynson: King’s Printer’ (Ph.D. dissertation, London University, 1990). 15 Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (1968; 2nd edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 153–5. 16 Henry VIII, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum Aduersus Martin. Lutheru[m] (STC 13079, 1522), ed. F. Macnamara, in Miscellaneous Writings of Henry the Eighth (London: Golden Cockerel, 1924). See L. O’Donovan, ed., The Defense of the Seven Sacraments (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1908).

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17 The Byble in Englyshe (STC 2068, 1539); John N. King, ‘Henry VIII as David: The King’s Image and Reformation Politics’, in P. Herman, ed., Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 78–92; cf. G. Walker, Persuasive Fictions: Faction, Faith and Political Culture in the Reign of Henry VIII (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), pp. 92–5. 18 Henry VIII, A Glasse of the Truthe (STC 11918, 1532), ‘To the Readers’, sigs Aiv, A3, B2v. 19 Henry VIII, A Necessary Doctrine and Erudicion for Any Chrysten Man Set Furth by the Kynges Maiestye of Englande (STC 5176, 1543). 20 See P. L. Hughes and J. E. Larkin, eds, Tudor Royal Proclamations I: The Early Tudors (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 284–6; 34 and 35 Henry VIII cap. 1. 21 A Glasse of the Truthe, sigs E4v–E8v. 22 Warner, Henry VIII’s Divorce, pp. 113, 118; S. Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 113; H. Ellis, ed., Hall’s Chronicle (1809), pp. 754, 759, 784; G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 11, 24, 58, 137; G. W. Bernard, ‘The Fall of Anne Boleyn’, English Historical Review, 106 (1991), pp. 584–610. 23 Larkin and Hughes, Tudor Royal Proclamations, I, pp. 244–5, 26 Henry VIII, cap. 13; S. L. Jansen, Political Protest and Prophecy under Henry VIII (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1991), p. 60. 24 R. Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987); F. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975); H. Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). 25 See Marcus et al., Elizabeth I: Collected Works. There is no complete edition of Elizabeth’s translations. See C. Pemberton, ed., Queen Elizabeth’s Englishings (Early English Text Society, Original Series 113, 1899). But see now Mueller and Scodel, Translations: Elizabeth I. 26 See the frontispiece to John Day, A Booke of Christian Prayers (STC 6429, 1578). 27 Precationes Priuat[ae] Regiae E. R. (STC 7576.7, 1563). 28 Marcus et al., Elizabeth I: Collected Works, pp. 136, 139; K. Sharpe, ‘The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern England’, in K. Sharpe and P. Lake, eds, Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 119–20. 29 J. M. Walker, ed., Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 30 Walker, Dissing Elizabeth; and C. Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), ch. 4. 31 H. Betts, ‘“The Image of This Queene So Quaynt”: The Pornographic Blazon 1588–1603’, in Walker, Dissing Elizabeth, pp. 153–84.

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32 See Berry, Of Chastity and Power; and Levin, Heart and Stomach. 33 Levin, Heart and Stomach, ch. 7; A. Barton, ‘Harking Back to Elizabeth: Ben Jonson and Caroline Nostalgia’, English Library History, 48 (1981), pp. 701–31. For a broad survey of the image and appropriation of Elizabeth in history, see J. Walker, The Elizabeth Icon: 1603–2003 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003). 34 Figures from the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC) of the British Library; see J. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 163–5 and fig.1. 35 Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, I, p. 517. 36 Ibid., p. 522. 37 Raymond, Pamphlets, ch. 4. 38 Ibid., ch. 2. 39 Elizabeth’s famous Golden Speech of 1601 was one of the first parliamentary speeches to be published. See also A Letter Whearin Part of the Entertainment Untoo the Queenz Maiesty at Killingwoorth Castl in Warwiksheer in This Soomerz Progress 1575 Is Signified (STC 15190.5, 1575); B. G., The Joyfull Receyuing of the Queenes Most Excellent Maiestie into Hir Highnesse Citie of Norwich (STC 11627, 1578); Thomas Churchyard, A Discourse of the Queenes Maiesties Entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk (STC 5226, 1578); The Queenes Maiesties Entertainement at Woodstock (STC 7596, 1585); The Speeches and Honorable Entertainment Giuen to the Queenes Maiestie in Progresse, at Cowdrey in Sussex (STC 3907.7, 1591); The Honorable Entertainement Gieuen to the Queenes Maiestie in Progresse, at Eluetham in Hampshire (STC 7583, 1591). 40 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. See also C. Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). See Chapter 1, p. 25. 41 A. Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); D. Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London, 1637–1645 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997). See Lake and Pincus, Politics of the Public Sphere. I am grateful to the editors for an opportunity to see essays in advance of publication and for stimulating discussion of this subject. See Chapter 1, p. 25. 42 D. Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); J. Raymond, ‘The Newspaper, Public Opinion and the Public Sphere in the Seventeenth Century’, in J. Raymond, ed., News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1999), pp. 109–40; P. Lake, ‘The Politics of “Popularity” and the Public Sphere: The “Monarchical Republic” of Elizabeth I Defends Itself’, in Lake and Pincus, Politics of the Public Sphere, pp. 59–94. 43 A Letter Whearin Part of the Entertainment Untoo the Queenz Maiesty at Killingwoorth Castl, pp. 34–6. 44 T. F., Newes from the North. Otherwise Called the Conference Between Simon Certain, and Pierce Plowman (STC 24062, 1579). Piers doubts whether magistrates who often bought their posts were chosen by God (sigs Di–ii).

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45 J. Young, A Sermon Preached Before the Queenes Maiestie, the Second of March. An. 1575 (STC 26110, 1576), sig. Ci. 46 Ibid., sigs Civ, Ciiiv–Cviii and passim. 47 Franciscus Patricius, A Moral Methode of Ciuile Policie Contayninge a Learned and Fruictful Discourse of the Institution, State and Government of a Commonweale (STC 19475, 1576), p. 63. 48 The popular understanding of ‘counsel’ and its relation to popular politics needs full explication. 49 See, for example, J. Brewer and R. Porter, eds, Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993); A. Birmingham and J. Brewer, eds, The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (London: Routledge, 1995). 50 D. Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 51 Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, II: The Later Tudors, 1553–1587 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), no. 516, pp. 240–1. 52 See the medals in Edward Hawkins, Medallic Illustrations of the History of Great Britain and Ireland to the Death of George II (19 vols, London: British Museum, 1904–11); and Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth, p. 134. 53 Ibid., p. 10; R. Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered, 1520–1620 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1983), p. 12; Strong, The English Renaissance Miniature (London: Thames & Hudson, 1983), pp. 118–19. 54 Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth, p. 111; and A. Hind, Engraving in England in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Vol. I: The Tudor Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 182. 55 See T. Talbot, A Booke, Containing the True Portraiture of the Countenances and Attires of the Kings of England (STC 23626, 1597). 56 See above note 39. Elizabeth was the subject of voluminous verse panegyrics. See, for example, Puttenham’s Partheniades, presented to the queen in 1579 (BL, Cotton Vesp. MS E.8, ff. 169–78); C. Tichborne, Verses of Prayse and Loye Written upon Her Maiesties Preseruation (STC 7605, 1586); T. Churchyard, A Handeful of Gladsome Verses, Giuen to the Queenes Maiesty at Woodstocke (STC 5237, 1592); H. Constable., Diana The Praises of His Mistres, in Certaine Sweete Sonnets (STC 5637, 1592). 57 P. Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), ch. 11; J. Guy, ‘The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England’, in D. Hoak, ed., Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 292–310. 58 G. W. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion in Early Tudor England: Henry VIII, Wolsey and the Amicable Grant of 1525 (Brighton: Harvester, 1986). 59 P. Fideler and T. Mayer, eds, Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth: Deep Structure, Discourse and Disguise (London: Routledge, 1992); P. Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester, 69 (1987), pp. 394–424; G. Walker, Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 60 R. M. Smuts, ‘Court-Centred Politics and the Uses of Roman Historians, c.1590– 1630’, in Lake and Sharpe, Culture and Politics, pp. 21–44; Smuts, Culture and Power in England, 1585–1685 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 38–40.

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61 M. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 119–37; F. Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). 62 See K. Sharpe, ‘A Commonwealth of Meanings: Languages, Analogues, Ideas and Politics’, in Sharpe, Politics and Ideas, pp. 25–7. 63 I. Dunlop, Palaces and Progresses of Elizabeth I (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), p. 56. 64 Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, pp. 434–6. 65 Marcus et al., Elizabeth I: Collected Works, p. 189. 66 See J. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in Renaissance England (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1984); J. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994), ch. 6; D. Kastan, ‘Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986), pp. 459–75. 67 P. Ure, ed., King Richard II (The Arden Shakespeare, 1956), p. lix. 68 Hackett, Virgin Mother, p. 178; E. Pomeroy, Reading the Portraits of Queen Elizabeth (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1989), p. 62; Strong, Portraits of Elizabeth, pp. 94–5. 69 R. Ashton, ed., James I by His Contemporaries. An Account of His Career and Character as Seen by Some of His Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1969); Wormald, ‘King James VI and I’, pp. 187–209. 70 On Charles I’s sacralization of the royal body, see K. Sharpe, ‘The Image of Virtue: The Court and Household of Charles I’, in D. Starkey, ed., The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (Harlow: Longman, 1987), pp. 226–60; Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 188–92, 212–19. 71 See T. Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith and the Order of the Fancy (Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1994). 72 For an excellent study, see A. Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 73 J. Nalson, An Impartiall Collection of the Great Affairs of State (2 vols, Wing N106, N107, 1682), vol. II, p. 809. See H. Weber, Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), esp. ch. 4. 74 P. Knachel, ed., Eikon Basilike (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966); F. Madan, A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike of King Charles the First (Oxford Bibliographical Society, 3, Oxford, 1950). 75 See J. Roberts, The King’s Head: Charles I, King and Martyr (London: Royal Collection Enterprises, 1999). 76 K. Sharpe, ‘“An Image Doting Rabble”: The Failure of Republican Culture in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Sharpe and Zwicker, eds, Refiguring Revolutions, pp. 25–56. 77 E. Curran, ‘A Very Peculiar Royalist: Hobbes in the Context of His Political Contemporaries’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 10 (2002), pp. 167–208; J. Parkin, ‘Taming the Leviathan: Reading Hobbes in Seventeenth-Century Europe’, International Archives of the History of Ideas,

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78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88

89 90 91 92

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186 (2003), pp. 31–52. See also the collection of Early Responses to Hobbes, ed. G. A. J. Rogers (6 vols, London: Routledge, 1996). T. Reeve, England’s Beauty in Seeing King Charles the Second Restored to Majesty (Wing R688, 1661), p. 34. B. Calamy, A Sermon Preached Before the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Citizens of London at Bow-Church on the 29th of May 1682 (Wing C216, 1682), p. 18. P. Lathom, The Power of Kings from God: A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church of Sarum the XXIX day of June, 1683 (Wing L574, 1683), p. 16. S. Pincus, ‘“Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffee-houses and Restoration Political Culture’, Journal of Modern History, 67 (1995), pp. 807–34; Weber, Paper Bullets. E. Hickeringill, The History of Whiggism (Wing H1810, 1682), p. 6. Ronald Hutton, Charles II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 134, 403. Ibid., pp. 359, 421. Ibid., p. 234. See K. Sharpe, ‘“Thy Longing Country’s Darling and Desire”: Aesthetics, Sex and Politics in the England of Charles II’, in C. MacLeod and J. Marciari Alexander, eds, Politics, Transgression and Representation at the Court of Charles II (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 1–32. See Chapter 12. Ibid., passim. See, for example, N. Thompson, A Collection of 86 Loyal Poems (Wing T1005, 1685); N. Thompson, A Choice Collection of 120 Loyal Songs, All of Them Written Since the Two Late Plots (Wing T1004, 1684); A Choice Collection of 180 Loyal Songs All of Them Written Since the Two Late Plots (Wing T1003, 1685). J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). E. Gregg, Queen Anne (1980; 2nd edn, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 147–8; T. Bowers, ‘Queen Anne Makes Provision’, in Sharpe and Zwicker, Refiguring Revolutions, p. 67. Ibid.; see S. Schama, ‘The Domestication of Majesty: Royal Family Portraiture, 1500–1800’, in R. Rotberg and T. Rabb, eds, Art and History: Images and Their Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 155–583. See P. Gay, Freud for Historians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); B. Mazlish, The Leader, the Led and the Psyche (Hanover, MA: Wesleyan University Press, 1990). For excellent examples, see L. Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), esp. chs 1 and 2; and J. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Chapter 7 This essay was first given as a paper at a conference in Wolfenbüttel. I had then no design to publish it until I was invited to contribute it to a special edition of The History of Political Thought, where it was published in 2011. I am grateful to Martin

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van Gelderen for inviting me to participate in the Wolfenbüttel summer institute and to Frans Willem Korsten and Nikola Regent for their helpful comments. 1 The literature is too extensive and well known to be cited in full, but see for useful collections, Pocock, Politics, Language and Time; Pocock, Political Thought and History; Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics (3 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Tully, Meaning and Context. 2 I stand by this as a generalization but it needs qualification. In his Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) Skinner studied a number of minor writers and theologians as well as constitutionalists and in the 1980s wrote on the Lorenzetti frescoes (see, for example, Skinner, ‘Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Artist as Political Philosopher’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 72 (1987), pp. 1–56). His main work, however, has centred on Machiavelli and Hobbes. Pocock similarly studied a wide range of thinkers (historians and lawyers as well as political theorists) in his first monograph, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957) and included a brief discussion of lesser known writers in his The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Until recently, however, when he has turned to a large study of Barbarism and Religion (3 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2003), Pocock has also focused on canonical political thinkers: Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Hobbes, Harrington and Locke. I am grateful to Nikola Regent for a discussion of this point. 3 Skinner has not addressed religious writers since Foundations and has been interested more in Milton’s republicanism than faith; Pocock did include a brief discussion of Savonarola’s sermons in The Machiavellian Moment but in the three decades between then and Barbarism and Religion showed little interest in religious discourse. In this article I take the opportunity to revisit, I hope with more nuance, some suggestions I first made in my ‘A Commonwealth of Meanings: Languages, Analogues, Ideas and Politics’, in Sharpe, Politics and Ideas, pp. 3–71, 318–41. 4 There has been too little dialogue between the advocates of political discourse and the linguistic turn and the work on political concepts pioneered by Reinhart Koselleck. See R. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 5 M. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 273. 6 D. M. Wolfe, ed., The Complete Prose Works of John Milton (8 vols, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1953–82), II, pp. 411, 714; A. R. Waller, ed., Abraham Cowley: Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905), p. 85. 7 Milton, Paradise Lost, X, 460. 8 Owen Felltham, Resolues, Diuine, Morall, Politicall (STC 10755, 1623), p. 48. 9 J. Hall, Meditations and Vowes, Diuine and Morall (STC 12679, 1605), pp. 97–8. 10 Ibid., p. 99. 11 J. Hayward, An Answer to the First Part of a Certaine Conference, Concerning Succession (STC 12988, 1603), sig. B4.

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12 See T. Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 2. 13 J. J. O’Donnell, ed., Augustine Confessions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 168. 14 Aquinas, Summa Theologicae, 2a.2ae. 22.2, quoted in Dixon, From Passions, p. 42. See also R. Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae 22–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 15 Aquinas, Summa Theologicae, 1a.2ae.q55.a4. 16 Dixon, From Passions, p. 60. 17 Calvin’s commentary on Mark 14.39, in Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, ed. D. W. Torrance and T. F. Torrance (3 vols, Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1972), III, p. 233. 18 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. H. Beveridge (2 vols, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1957), I, p. 222. 19 Ibid., p. 248, and see ch. 3 passim. 20 See R. Graziani, ‘John Donne’s the Extasie and Ecstasy’, The Review of English Studies, 19 (1968), pp. 121–36. 21 P. E. Matheson, ed., The Discourses of Epictetus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916), p. 422; Seneca, Epistles 66, 33 in R. Gummere, ed., Seneca Ad Lucilium Epistolae Morales, II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), p. 23. 22 R. L’Estrange, Seneca Morals by Way of Abstract (Cleveland, OH, 1855), p. 133. See J. Brunschwig and M. Nussbaum, eds, Passions and Perceptions: Studies in Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 23 G. Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 24 See, for example, the review by Lionel McKenzie, Political Theory, 11 (1983), pp. 482–5. 25 R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 48–58. 26 Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, pp. 114–17. 27 See, for example, Guillaume Du Vair, The Moral Philosophie of the Stoicks (STC 7374, 1598); Epictetus His Manuall (STC 10425, 1610). See too J. Bullokar, An Englis[h] Expositor Teaching the In[ter]pretation of the Harde[st] Words in our Language (STC 4084, 1621), sig. O1. There are familiar references to Stoics in plays. 28 D. Howarth, Lord Arundel and His Circle (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 85–7. 29 W. Knowler, ed., The Earl of Strafford’s Letters and Dispatches (2 vols, 1739), II, p. 39. 30 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Q. Skinner and R. Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch. 15, p. 54. 31 Ibid., p. 54. 32 Ibid., p. 55. 33 H. Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 52. 34 Sharpe, Politics and Ideas, pp. 51–2; Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli.

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35 See A. Pacchi, ‘Hobbes and the Passions’, Topoi, 6 (1987), pp. 111–19; V. Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 2. 36 Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 6, p. 39, passim. 37 See Q. Skinner, ‘Hobbes’s Changing Conception of Civil Science’, in Visions of Politics (3 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), III, p. 66 and ch. 3 passim. 38 H. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. P. Harth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 86. For Mandeville’s rejection of the Aristotelian mean, see p. 337. 39 Ibid., p. 81. 40 Ibid., p. 82. 41 Ibid., pp. 346–7, 371. 42 Ibid., pp. 92, 369–70. 43 Ibid., p. 370. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., p. 405. See the introduction to F. B. Kaye, ed., The Fable of the Bees (2 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), I, section v; T. Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville (London: Macmillan, 1978); E. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 2. 46 Essay II, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, in T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, eds, David Hume: The Philosophical Works (4 vols, 1882), III, pp. 308–9. 47 Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies. 48 Ibid., pp. 7, 13. 49 E. Forset, A Comparatiue Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique Wherein Out of the Principles of Nature, Is Set Forth the True Forme of a Commonweale (STC11188, 1606). 50 Ibid., ¶4. 51 Ibid., pp. 6, 14, 17. 52 Ibid., p. 33. 53 Ibid., pp. 17, 42. 54 Ibid., p. 73. 55 Ibid., p. 16. 56 Ibid., p. 99. 57 Ibid., pp. 2, 85. 58 Ibid., pp. 5, 11. 59 Ibid., p. 15. 60 C. H. McIlwain, ed., The Political Works of James I (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), p. 271. 61 G. Buchanan, De Iure Regni Apud Scotos Dialogus (STC 3973, 1579); George Buchanan’s Dialogue Concerning the Rights of the Crown of Scotland Translated into English (ESTC T144784, 1799), p. 103. 62 Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, ch. 2 and p. 30. 63 Ibid., pp. 30–1. 64 For one of the few, not very satisfying, studies, see A. Rolls, The Theory of the King’s Two Bodies in the Age of Shakespeare (Lewiston, NY: E Mellen Press, 2000).

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65 See two valuable works by Gail Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 66 P. Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie (STC 24534, 1595), sig. E4. 67 Ibid., sig. D4. 68 Ibid., sig. E4. 69 I. Donaldson, ed., Ben Jonson Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 8. 70 See V. Hart and R. Tucker, ‘“Immaginacy Set Free”: Aristotelian Ethics and Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House at Whitehall’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 39 (2001), pp. 151–67; see also R. M. Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 165–6. 71 The quotation is from Time Vindicated, see S. Orgel and R. Strong, eds, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (2 vols, London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973), I, p. 350; on the masque, see ibid., introduction and S. Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). 72 D. Javitch, ed., Castigilone: The Book of the Courtier (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 55. 73 Ibid., p. 56. 74 M. Peerson, Mottects or Graue Chamber Musique (STC 19552, 1630), sig. A4. 75 T. Ravenscroft, A Briefe Discourse of the True (but Neglected) Use of Charact’ring the Degrees, by their Perfection, Imperfection, and Diminution in Measurable Musicke (STC 20756, 16140), sig. A. 76 Ibid., sigs qq3, A2v, A3v. 77 Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, II, pp. 480–1, 666. 78 Ibid., II, 243, 454. 79 Ibid., II, p. 365. 80 P. Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque, 1604–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 46 and see passim. 81 See S. Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); B. Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), esp. pp. 98–101. 82 H. S. Croft, ed., The Boke Named the Gouernour Devised by Sir Thomas Elyot (2 vols, 1883), I, pp. 204, 238–41. 83 Ibid., I, pp. 218, 245, 253. 84 Ibid., I, p. 269. 85 C. Fetherstone, A Dialogue Agaynst Light, Lewde, and Lasciuious Dauncing Wherin Are Refuted All Those Reasons, Which the Common People Use to Bring in Defence Thereof (STC 10835, 1582); T. Lovell, A Dialogue Between Custom and Veritie Concerning the Use and Abuse of Dauncing and Minstrelsie (STC 16860, 1581); J. Northbrooke, Spiritus Est Vicarius Christi in Terra. A Treatise Wherein Dicing, Dau[n]cing, Vaine Plaies or Enterludes with other Idle Pastimes, &c. Commonly Used on the Sabboth Day, Are Reprooued (STC 18671, 1579). 86 Northbrooke, Dialogue, pp. 122, 135.

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87 R. Mulcaster, Positions Wherin Those Primitiue Circumstances Be Examined, Which Are Necessarie for the Training Up of Children (STC 18253, 1581), ch. 16, pp. 71–5. 88 J. Davies, Orchestra or A Poeme of Dauncing Iudicially Proouing the True Obseruation of Time and Measure, in the Authenticall and Laudable Use of Dauncing (STC 6360, 1596). 89 Ibid., sigs A5v, A6v, B4. 90 Ibid., sigs B5, B7, C3. 91 Croft, Boke Named The Governor, I, pp. 181–2. 92 W. Liedtke, The Royal Horse and Rider (New York: Abaris, 1989), p. 43 and passim; cf. K. Raber and T. J. Tucker, The Culture of the Horse (New York: Palgrave, 2005). 93 N. Elias, The Civilizing Process (2 vols, Oxford: Blackwell, 1978–82). Elias, who published his book in German in 1939, clearly influenced Foucault. 94 T. Blundeville, A Newe Booke Containing the Arte of Ryding (STC 3158, 1561); Blundeville, The Foure Chiefest Offices Belonging to Horsemanship (STC 3152, 1566). There were five more editions by 1609. See Blundeville, ODNB. 95 C. Clifford, The Schoole of Horsemanship (STC 5415, 1585), p. 32. 96 N. Morgan, The Perfection of Horsemanship, Drawne from Nature; Arte, and Practise (STC 18105, 1609), sig. A7v, pp. 1–2. 97 Ibid. pp. 6, 10. 98 Ibid., p. 164. Morgan compares riding with playing the lute, p. 167. 99 T. de Grey, The Compleat Horseman and Expert Ferrier in Two Books (STC 12205, 1639), p. 27. 100 J. Robinson, New Essayes or, Observations Divine and Morall (STC 21114, 1638), pp. 475–6. 101 Felltham, Resolues, Diuine, Morall, Politicall, p. 108. 102 E. Dacres, Nicholas Machiavel’s Prince (STC 17168, 1640), p. 197. Dacres also, edited the Discourses in 1636, Machiavels Discourses. Upon the First Decade of T. Livius Translated out of the Italian (STC 17160). 103 Andres Almansa de Mendoza, Two Royall Entertainments, Lately Given to the Most Illustrious Prince Charles, Prince of Great Britaine, by the High and Mighty Philip the Fourth King of Spaine, &c. At the Feasts of Easter and Pentecost (STC 533, 1623), p. 27. 104 H. Wotton, A Panegyrick of King Charles (Wing W3645, 1649), p. 27. 105 K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 188–98. 106 I develop this discussion in Image Wars, pp. 199–203. 107 See the work of Keith Wrightson, for example, English Society, 1580–1680 (London: Routledge, 1993). 108 Livy, History of Rome, book xxvi, 50; B. Radice, ed., Livy: The War with Hannibal (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 420–1. 109 J. Woods, ‘Van Dyck’s Pictures for the Duke of Buckingham’, Apollo, 136 (1992), pp. 37–47; but see p. 144 in this volume; the stone frieze comes from the collection of the Earl of Arundel’s marbles. 110 The point about the flattery of Buckingham as Scipio (as well as Allucius) is well made by John Peacock, ‘Looking at Van Dyck’s Scipio in Its Contexts’, Art History, 23 (2003), pp. 262–89.

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111 Peacock, ‘Van Dyck’s Scipio’, pp. 275–6. See D. Kunzle, ‘Van Dyck’s Continence of Scipio as a Metaphor of Statecraft at the Early Stuart Court’, in J. Onians, ed., Sight & Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honour of E. H. Gombrich (London: Phaidon, 1994), pp. 169–89. 112 S. Wiseman, ‘“Adam, the Father of all Flesh”, Porno-Political Rhetoric and Political Theory in and after the English Civil War’, Prose Studies, 14 (1991), pp. 134–57; L. Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 2, 26, 48–9, 176–8. 113 Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 170–3, 222; K. Sharpe, ‘Van Dyck, the Royal Image and the Caroline Court’, in Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain, pp. 14–23; Chapter 8. 114 See, for an example of the approach that yields riches, M. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 115 Ibid., p. 17; J. Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion (trans. T. Norton, STC 4416, 1562), f. 75v. 116 E. Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man With the Severall Dignities and Corruptions thereunto Belonging (STC 20938, 1640), pp. 47–8. 117 Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, p. 164. 118 Ibid., p. 164. 119 ‘A Satire Against Reason and Mankind’, in H. Love, ed., The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 57, 59, 60 and pp. 57–63 passim. 120 Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. P. Harth, p. 186. 121 McKeon, Secret History, esp. ch. 14.1.

Chapter 8 This essay was prepared for the catalogue to the Tate exhibition Van Dyck and Britain (2009), curated by Karen Hearn and to which I acted as historical consultant. Here I tried to communicate to a broad audience the values of Charles I as represented by his court artist and the significance of Van Dyck for a true understanding of the king and court. Like chapters 11 and 12 this essay was stimulated by working close to an exhibition and the paintings and I would like to thank Stephen Deuchars, then Director of Tate Britain and Karen Hearn for inviting me to participate. I would also like to thank Karen for many stimulating discussions and comments on this essay. 1 See G. Martin, ‘The Banqueting House Ceiling: Two Newly Discovered Projects’, Apollo, 139 (1994), pp. 29–34; G. Martin, The Ceiling Decoration of the Banqueting Hall (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005). 2 Van Dyck, ODNB; D. Howarth, ‘The Arrival of Van Dyck in England’, Burlington Magazine, 132 (1990), pp. 709–10; Howarth, Lord Arundel and His Circle (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 34, 156.

288

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3 The only surviving example of a mythological canvas painted by Van Dyck in England is Cupid and Psyche (Van Dyck and Britain, no. 29, p. 82). See S. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, eds, Van Dyck: The Complete Paintings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 430–1. 4 James I, The Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince, James by the Grace of God, King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith (STC 14344, 1616). 5 For the changes effected by Charles I at court, see Sharpe, ‘Image of Virtue’, pp. 226–60. On Charles I, see K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992) and R. Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005). 6 J. Brotton, The Sale of the Late King’s Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2006), pp. 91–101; J. Brotton, ‘Buying the Renaissance: Prince Charles’s Art Purchases in Madrid, 1623’, in A. Samson, ed., The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 9–26. 7 K. Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), ch. 5. 8 See now my essay on ‘Virtues, Passions and Politics’, above ch. 7. 9 T. Carew, Coelum Britanicum: A Masque at White-Hall in the Banquetting-House, on Shrove-Tuesday-Night, the 18. of February, 1633 (STC 4618, 1634); see S. Orgel and R. Strong, eds, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (2 vols, London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973), II, p. 572, line 279. 10 William Davenant’s masque Salmacida Spolia 1639, in ibid., II, p. 734, lines 271–4. 11 Sharpe, Personal Rule of Charles I, chs 5, 6. See also Davies, Caroline Captivity of the Church. 12 Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain, fig. 22, p. 65; Barnes et al., Van Dyck, p. 433. 13 On the portrait with the sunflower, see J. Peacock, The Look of Van Dyck: The Self-Portrait with a Sunflower and the Vision of the Painter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Barnes et al., Van Dyck, IV, p. 431. For an engraving after this portrait see Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain, no. 64, p. 136. 14 Barnes et al., Van Dyck, p. 7. 15 Ibid., p. 243; F. Junius, The Painting of the Ancients in Three Bookes (STC 7302, 1637). 16 Howarth, Lord Arundel, pp. 84–5; Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State; J. Wood, ‘Van Dyck’s Pictures for the Duke of Buckingham: The Elephant in the Carpet and the Dead Tree with Ivy’, Apollo, 36 (1992), pp. 37–47; J. Peacock, ‘Looking at Van Dyck’s Scipio in Its Contexts’, Art History, 23 (2000), pp. 262–89. On Van Dyck’s Scipio, see Chapter 7, pp. 136–7 17 Barnes et al., Van Dyck, pp. 597, 599. 18 Suckling’s costume in Van Dyck’s portrait obviously owes a debt to masque. See, Barnes et al., Van Dyck, IV, 222, p. 423; M. Rogers, ‘The Meaning of Van Dyck’s Portrait of Sir John Suckling’, Burlington Magazine, 120 (1978), pp. 741–5. 19 See Sharpe, ‘Virtues, Passions and Politics in early Modern England’, above Chapter 7, passim. 20 Barnes et al., Van Dyck, plates of Gio Paolo Balbi (II, 30, p. 174) and of Anton Gulio Brignole-Sale (II, 32, p. 177).

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21 See portraits of the Prince of Arenburg and Barbancon (ibid. III, 66, p. 300), the Marques de Aytona (III, 68, p. 302) and Prince Francis Thomas of Savoy-Carignano (III, 124, p. 329). 22 Ibid., I, 101, p. 95. 23 Ibid., p. 422; Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain, fig. 2, p. 12. 24 Sharpe, Politics and Ideas, pp. 51–2; Liedtke, The Royal Horse and Rider (New York: Abaris, 1989); see Chapter 7, pp. 133–6. 25 Andres Almansa de Mendoza, Two Royall Entertainments, Lately Given to the Most Illustrious Prince Charles, Prince of Great Britaine, by the High and Mighty Philip the Fourth King of Spaine, &c. At the Feasts of Easter and Pentecost (STC 533, 1623), p. 27. 26 Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain, no. 21, p. 74; Barnes et al., Van Dyck, IV, 47, pp. 462–4. 27 Charles I’s minister, Thomas Wentworth, famously compared the royal authority to the keystone which ‘closeth up the arch of order and government’ (Sharpe, Personal Rule of Charles I, p. 135). On the Triumph of Peace, see Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment, pp. 215–22. 28 I develop this argument in Image Wars, ch. 6. 29 See O. Millar, The Tudor, Stuart and Early Georgian Paintings in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (London: Phaidon, 1963), no. 105, p. 81. Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain, no. 1, p. 42. 30 See, Barnes et al., Van Dyck, IV, 50, pp. 466–8. 31 On the theory of the king’s two bodies, see Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies. 32 Barnes et al., Van Dyck, p. 424. 33 Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain, fig. 24, p. 71. 34 Ibid., fig. 26, p. 71; Barnes et al., Van Dyck, IV, 46, pp. 460–2. 35 Barnes et al., Van Dyck, p. 519. 36 Ibid., IV, 120, 123, pp. 524–6; See also K. Hearn, Marcus Gheeraerts II (London: Tate, 2002), pp. 42–4. 37 Barnes et al., Van Dyck, IV, 118, p. 522. See A. Wheelock, ‘The Queen, the Dwarf and the Court: Van Dyck and the Ideals of the English Monarchy’, H. Vlieghe, ed., Van Dyck, 1559–1999: Conjectures and Refutations (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), pp. 151–66. 38 Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain, fig. 3, p. 13. 39 Barnes et al., Van Dyck, p. 522. 40 Ibid., IV, 3, pp. 430–1; John Milton, A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 on Michaelmasse Night (STC 17937, 1637), p. 35. 41 Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain, no. 17, p. 68; Barnes et al., Van Dyck, IV, 45, pp. 459–61. 42 Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain, fig. 23, p. 66; Barnes et al., Van Dyck, IV, 62, pp. 479–80. 43 In Dutch art grapes were often included in child portraits to signify perfect untouched innocence. I owe this observation to Karen Hearn. 44 See James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); cf. J. de Groot, Royalist Identities (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004). 45 Barnes et al., Van Dyck, IV, 55, p. 473. 46 Ibid., p. 473.

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47 Ibid., IV, 64, p. 481; Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain, no. 23, p. 77, where ‘Charles II as Prince of Wales, in Armour’ is reproduced in colour. 48 See now Image Wars, ch. 6. 49 Cf. J. Wood, ‘Van Dyck: A Catholic Artist in Protestant England’, in Vlieghe, Van Dyck, 1559–1999, pp. 167–98. 50 See Van Dyck, portraits of them, Barnes et al., Van Dyck, IV, 183, 234, pp. 571, 610. 51 Ibid., IV, 237, pp. 612–13. 52 Ibid., IV, 92, pp. 502–3; C. Brown and H. Vlieghe, Van Dyck, 1599–1641 (Antwerp and London: Rizzoli, 1999), p. 310. 53 Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain, no. 41, p. 104; Barnes et al., Van Dyck, IV, 153, p. 550. 54 W. Davenant, Salmacida Spolia: A Masque. Presented by the King and Queenes Majesties, at White-hall, on Tuesday the 21. Day of Ianuary 1639 (STC 6306, 1640); see Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment, pp. 251–6 and ch. 5 passim. 55 Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain, no. 31, p. 90; Barnes et al., Van Dyck, IV, 200, pp. 584–6. 56 See his double portrait with Mainwaring, Barnes et al., Van Dyck, IV, 218, p. 600. 57 Ibid., IV, 183, p. 571. 58 Ibid., IV, 222, pp. 603–4. 59 Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain, pp. 133–5, 137–9; Barnes et al., Van Dyck, IV, 5, 6, pp. 432–3. 60 See especially the portrait of Venetia Stanley (Barnes et al., Van Dyck, IV, 98 and pp. 507–8). 61 Ibid., p. 8. 62 Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain, nos 118, 128, pp. 215, 128. 63 Ibid., nos 125–6, pp. 222–4. 64 Ibid., nos 131–2, pp. 231–2. 65 R. Blake, Anthony Van Dyck: A Life (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), p. 355.

Chapter 9  This article was inspired by my growing interest in the afterlives and memories of rulers. It predates Andrew Lacey’s valuable book, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003) which traces how Charles I was perceived into the eighteenth century, albeit from a rather different point of view. We now also have a literature on the afterlife of Queen Elizabeth I which might provide a context for future study. 1 See especially Starkey, English Court. 2 For example, R. Ollard, The Image of the King (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1979). Tom Corns’s volume of essays on Charles I is also titled The Royal Image, though the subtitle and contents address ‘representations’ of Charles I. See T. Corns, ed., The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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291

3 Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, p. 141. 4 See my ‘Representations and Negotiations: Text, Image and Authority in Early Modern England’, in Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, ch. 12, and R. Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language and Practices (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), ch. 7. 5 See my Reading Revolutions, ch. 1. 6 R. Strong, Henry Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986). 7 James I, The Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince, Iames (STC 14344, 1616), dedication to Prince Charles. 8 R. Dallington, Aphorismes, Civill and Militarie (STC 6197, 1613), ‘To the High and Mightie Charles, Prince of Great Britaine’. 9 Huntington Library, California; Richard Bull Granger, 4/43; the Van Somer in the National Gallery of Scotland has the features of Charles but ‘the armour is that made by William Pickering of Greenwich for Prince Henry’. See the dedication to Charles in J. Bingham, The Tacticks of Aelian (STC 161, 1616). 10 See Epithalamia Oxoniensia In Auspicatissimum, Potentissimi Monarchae Caroli, Magnae Britanniae, Franciae, et Hiberniae Regis, &c. cum Henretta Maria (STC 19031, Oxford, 1625), sigs A3v, E1 and passim. 11 K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 46–52. 12 J. Raymond, ‘Popular Representations of Charles I’, in Corns, ed., Royal Image, p. 51. 13 T. Corns, ‘Duke, Prince and King’, in Corns, ed., Royal Image, p. 19. 14 Coronae Carolinae Quadratura (STC 19036, Oxford, 1636), sigs aivv, AIv; p. 132 and passim. 15 William Struther’s A Looking Glasse for Princes and People (STC 23369, 1632) was a thanksgiving sermon for the birth of a prince. See p. 2. See too Horti Carolini Rosa Altura (STC 19039, Oxford, 1640) for emphasis on fertility and lineage. 16 K. Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), ch. 6; see Chapter 7 ‘Virtues, Passions and Politics’. 17 Albion’s Triumph 11, lines 404–5, in S. Orgel and R. Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (2 vols, London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973), II, p. 457. 18 Carew, Coelum Britanicum, in ibid., II, p. 576. 19 H. Hexham, An Historicall Relation of the Famous Siege of the Busse (STC 13262, 1630), list at end. 20 S. Achinstein, ‘Milton and King Charles’, in Corns, ed., Royal Image, pp. 141–61; cf. R. Anselment, ‘Clarendon and the Caroline Myth of Peace’, Journal of British Studies, 23 (1984), pp. 33–54. 21 Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment, pp. 145–8, 173–7. I would now place more emphasis on this tension. 22 M. Butler, ‘Politics and the Masque: Salmacida Spolia’, in T. Healy and J. Sawday, eds, Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 59–74. The engraving by P. v. Gunst after Van Dyck is Bull Granger 6/13. 23 Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, II, pp. 421, 601.

292

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24 Ibid., II, p. 604. 25 Carew, Coelum, ibid., II, pp. 458, 572. 26 See Milton, Eikonoklastes, in W. H. Haller, ed., The Works of John Milton V (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 251, 305. 27 Cf. J. Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 63–7. 28 K. Sharpe, ‘The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern England’, in K. Sharpe and P. Lake, eds, Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 117–38. 29 Raymond, ‘Popular Representations of Charles I’, in Corns, ed., Royal Image, p. 54. 30 H. Parker, Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers (1642) in H. Erskine Hill and G. Storey, eds, Revolutionary Prose of the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 49. 31 A True Relation of the King’s Reception . . . at Lincoln (Thomason Collection, E108/27, 1642); cf. The King’s Entertainment at York (669f3/63, 1642); Whitehall: A Poem (E91/33, 1643), sig. B2; To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty (E90/6, 1643), pp. 1–3. See Sharpe ‘“An Image Doting Rabble”’, pp. 25–56. 32 See The King’s Cabinet Opened (E292/27, 1645), pp. A3–A3v; cf. Mercurius AntiBritannicus or Part of the King’s Cabinet Vindicated (E295/9, 1645); A Letter in Which the Arguments . . . upon Their Majesties Letters Are Examined (E296/15, 1645). 33 A Letter, p. 7. 34 His Majesties Complaint Occasioned by His Late Sufferings (E393/38, 1647), p. 4. 35 Ibid., p. 3. The ‘they’ is as vague as the Eikon was to be on the identity of persecutors and enemies. 36 E. Symmons, A Vindication of King Charles (E414/17, 1647), preface, pp. 15, 83, 92–6. This was also the year the image of Charles circulated widely in engravings and popular woodcuts. See the excellent catalogue by Jane Roberts, The King’s Head: Charles I, King and Martyr (London: Royal Collection Enterprises, 1999), p. 28, fig. 33. 37 See K. Sharpe, ‘Private Conscience and Public Duty in the Writings of Charles I’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 659–61. 38 Wheeler, ‘Eikon Basilike’, pp 122–40; Zwicker, Lines of Authority, ch. 2. 39 Milton, Eikonoklastes, pp. 68, 70, 103, 143; see Eikon Alethine: The Portraiture of Truth’s Most Sacred Majesty (E569/16, 1649). 40 Potter, ‘The Royal Martyr in the Restoration’, in Corns, ed., Royal Image, p. 243. 41 See P. Crawford, ‘“Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood”’, Journal of British Studies, 16 (1977), pp. 41–61. 42 Eikon Basilike, ch. 8. 43 The Subjects Sorrow or Lamentations upon the Death of Britain’s Josiah (E546/16, 1649). 44 An Elogie and Epitaph Consecrated to the Ever Sacred Memory of . . . Charles I (E554/1, 1649), pp. 1–3. 45 The Royal Legacies (E557/1, 1649), p. 82; Vox Veritatis (E616/6, 1650), pp. 4, 17; The Rebels Looking-Glasse (E554/23, 1649), pp. 1–4.

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46 A Miracle of Miracles Wrought by the Blood of King Charles the First (E563/2, 1649); The Confession of Richard Brandon, the Hangman (E561/14, 1649). 47 See, for example, The Downfall of Dagon (E804/20, 1652). 48 J. Milton, The Life and Reign of King Charles or the Pseudo Martyr Discovered (M2127, 1652), pp. 148–9. 49 Eikonoklastes, p. 309. 50 See Roberts, The King’s Head, p. 46, items 135–7. 51 W. Lily, Monarchy or No Monarchy in England (E638/17, 1651), pp. 118–19. 52 For example, T. Bayly, Witty Apothegms of James I and Charles I (E1892/1, 1657); The Faithful Yet Imperfect Character of a Glorious King (E1799/1, 1659); Bibliotheca Regia (E1718/1, 1659); L. Wood, The Life and Reign of King Charles (E1760/2, 1659). 53 Wheeler, ‘Eikon Basilike’, p. 136. 54 D. Lloyd, Eikon Basilike or the True Portraicture of His Sacred Majesty Charles II (E1922/2, 1660), epistle dedicatory. 55 T. F[ord], Virtus Redeviva: A Panegyrick on Our Late Charles I (E1806, I660), p. 24. 56 F. Philipps, Veritas Inconcussa or a Most Certain Truth Asserted (E1925/2, 1661), p. 237. 57 M. Dzelzainis, ‘“Incendiaries of the State”: Charles I and Tyranny’, in Corns, ed., Royal Image, p. 75; see for the trial of the regicides, The Speeches and Prayers of Major-General Harrison, Mr John Carew etc (E1053/1, 1660). 58 Potter, ‘The Royal Martyr in the Restoration’, p. 244. 59 Virtus Redeviva, p. 26. 60 There has been no systematic or satisfactory study of 30 January sermons. See H. Randell, ‘The Rise and Fall of a Martyrology: Sermons on Charles the First’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 10 (1946–7), pp. 135–67; B. S. Stewart, ‘The Cult of the Royal Martyr’, Church History, 38 (1969), pp. 175–87; G. Watson, ‘The Augustan Civil War’, Review of English Studies, 36 (1985), pp. 321–37. See too J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 240–2. The figure of 3,000 was mentioned by Francis Turner in 1685. See F. Turner, A Sermon Preached before the King . . . Jan. 30th 1685 (Wing T3285, 1685), p. 26. See now Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr, a good broad survey which still leaves a need for close study of particular periods, especially the late seventeenth century. 61 A Form of Common Prayer Used upon the Thirtieth of January (E1057/5, 1661), sig. E3. 62 H. King, A Sermon Preached the 30th January at Whitehall, 1664 (Wing K507, 1665), p. 26. 63 Ibid., p. 49. 64 J. Glanvill, A Loyal Tear Dropt on the Vault of Our Late Martyred Sovereign (Wing G813, 1667), pp. 3, 23. 65 T. Lambert., The Sad Memorials of the Royal Martyr (Wing L144, 1670), p. 5. 66 R. Meggott, A Sermon Preached before the Lord Mayor or at Guildhall Chapel Jan 30th 1673/4 (Wing M1621, 1674) p. 47. 67 Ibid., pp. 37, 42. 68 R. Conold, A Sermon Preached before the Mayor of the City of Norwich (Wing C5893, 1675), pp. 2, 3, 4. Cf. J. Nalson, The Countermine or a Short

294

69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

NOTES

but True Discovery of the Dangerous Principles of the Dissenting Party (Wing N96, 1677) which makes much of Charles I (pp. 64, 142). J. March, A Sermon Preached before the Mayor . . . of Newcastle 30th January (Wing M581, 1677), pp. 10, 27. E. Pelling, A Sermon Preached on 30th January 1678/9 (Wing P1091, 1679), pp. 3, 19 and passim. The Disloyal Forty and Forty One (Wing D1670, 1680); T. May, A Breviary of the History of the Parliament of England (Wing M1397, 1680); Rushworth published the second part of his Historical Collections (Wing R2317–19) and Trial of Strafford (Wing R2333) in 1680. The year 1681 saw the publication of, The Wars in England, Scotland, and Ireland (Wing C7357) and an edition of the Eikon Basilike, with an engraved frontispiece of Charles by R. White (Wing E311A). See too Arbitrary Government Displayed to the Life (Wing M1416A, 1682) which reprints a Civil War engraving of Charles defending religion. J. Nalson’s Impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State (2 vols, Wing N106–7) was also published in 1682, as a rebuttal of Rushworth. Its frontispiece depicts Britannia forlorn at the death of Charles I. S. Crossman, Two Sermons Preached in the Cathedral-Church of Bristol, January the 30th 1679/80 and January the 31th 1680/81 (Wing C7271, 1681), pp. 30, 39. G. Burnet, A Sermon Preached before the Aldermen of the City of London, at St. Lawrence-Church, Jan 30. 1680/1 (Wing B5875, 1681). No Popery but the Protestant Religion (Wing N1187, 1682), p. 4. Wheeler, ‘Eikon Basilike’, p. 135. G. Hickes, The Harmony of Divinity and Law in a Discourse about Non Resisting of Sovereign Princes (Wing H1850, 1684), preface. For a volume of popular ballads see Bodleian Library, Oxford, Wood 417. F. Turner, A Sermon Preached before the King on the 30/1 of January 1680/1 (Wing T3280, 1681), pp. 41–2. T. Wilson, A Sermon on the Martyrdom of King Charles I (Wing W2937, 1682), passim. H. Maurice, A Sermon Preached before the King at Whitehall January 30th 1682 (Wing M1370, 1682), pp. 34, 35. [J. Watson], Memoires of the Family of Stuarts and the Remarkable Providences of God towards Them (Wing W1081, 1683), preface. The Rebels Doom, or, An Historical Account of the Most Remarkable Rebellions from Edward the Confessor’s Reign to His present Majesties Happy Restauration (Wing R599, 1684), p. 77. T. Long, Moses and the Royal Martyr, King Charles the First, Parallel’d in a Sermon Preached on the 30th of January, 1683/4 in the Cathedral-Church of St. Peters, Exon. (Wing L2975, 1684), p. 14. M. Taubman, An Heroick Poem to His Royal Highness the Duke of York on His Return from Scotland (Wing T239, 1682), p. ii. J. Miller, James II: A Study in Kingship (London, 1977), pp. 16–17, 50–1. Sells, Memoirs of James II. Davis, Papers of Devotion of James II. James II, Imago Regis, or The True Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitude and Sufferings in Royal Tracts in Two Parts (Wing J384, 1692). E. Pelling, A Sermon Preached 30th January 1684 (Wing P1097, 1685), p. 21.

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87 B. Woodroffe, A Sermon Preached January 30th 1684/5 (Wing W3469, 1685), preface to James II and pp. 2, 23–7 and passim. 88 S. Rich, A Sermon Preached at Chard, June 21, 1685 (Wing R1365, 1685). 89 T. Manningham, A Solemn Humiliation for the Murder of King Charles I (Wing M509, 1686), pp. 10, 28 and passim. 90 See, for example, N. Thompson, A Choice Collection of 180 Loyal Songs (Wing T1003, 1685). Similar volumes appeared during the Exclusion crisis, and appealed to the memory of Charles I. 91 Pelling, A Sermon Preached 30th January 1684, p. 21. 92 Basiliká The Works of King Charles the Martyr: . . . with the History of His Life: As Also of His Tryal and Martyrdome (Wing C2076, 1687), engraved frontispiece by Hertochs of Charles I held aloft by angels. 93 J. Tutchin, The Protestant Martyrs or the Bloody Assizes . . . (T3382Aa, 1688). The tract points out how Monmouth on the scaffold avowed his allegiance to the Church of England (p. 7). 94 Though see J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). See too Watson, ‘Augustan Civil War’, pp. 325–7. 95 L. Knoppers, ‘Reviving the Martyr King: Charles I as Jacobite Icon’, in Corns, ed., Royal Image, p. 263. See too J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles, ch. 6. 96 See my Remapping Early Modern England, ch. 1. 97 See Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, ch. 1. 98 The Advantages of the Present Settlement and the Great Danger of a Relapse (Wing A601, 1689) spoke of the ‘false opinion of government being iure divino’ (p. 19) and urged obedience to the new status quo; the tract has been assigned to Defoe. G. Burnet, A Sermon Preached in the Chapel at St. James’s . . . 23 December 1688 (Wing B5884, 1689), p. 1. 99 M. Mead, The Vision of the Wheels Seen by the Prophet Ezekiel Opened and Applied . . ., on January 31, 1688/9, Being the Day of Solemn Thanksgiving to God for the Great Deliverance of This Kingdom from Popery and Slavery (Wing M1563, 1689); J. Tillotson, A Sermon Preached at Lincoln’s Inn Chapel on 31 January (Wing T1236, 1689); G. Burnet, A Sermon Preached before the House of Commons on 31 January 1688 (Wing B5886, 1689), all quotations from full titles. 100 G. Burnet, The Royal Martyr Lamented in a Sermon Preached at the Savoy (Wing B5870, 1689), pp. 6, 11–17, 32. Cf. Burnet, The Royal Martyr and the Dutiful Subject (Wing B5869, 1675, republished 1689, Bodleian Firth e.110 (1)). 101 Burnet, Royal Martyr Lamented, p. 34. 102 W. Stainforth, A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral of St. Peter, York January 30th 1689 (Wing S5173, 1689), p. 28. 103 Ibid., p. 28. The praise of Charles I is extravagant (p. 9). 104 T. May, An Epitome of English History Wherein Arbitrary Government Is Display’d to the Life (Wing M1416E, 1690), pp. 7, 40, 41 and passim. 105 Ibid., p. 207. 106 For a likely 1640s version, see Huntington Library: Bull Granger 6/25. 107 Epitome, full title and p. 3. 108 G. Tullie, A Sermon Preached October 19, 1690 (Wing T3242, 1691), pp. 4, 20.

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109 See Potter, ‘The Royal Martyr in the Restoration’, p. 254. See the pamphlet collection on this controversy, Bodleian Library Wood 363; and F. F. Madan, A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike (London, 1950), pp. 126–33. 110 T. Long, Dr. Walker’s . . . Account of the Author of the Eikon Basilike (Wing L2965, 1693), epistle dedicatory. 111 R. Hollingworth, Dr. Hollingworth’s Defence of King Charles the First’s Holy and Divine Book (Wing H2503, 1692); Hollingworth, A Defence of King Charles I (Wing H2502, 1692) was dedicated to William and Mary. 112 Hollingworth, Dr. Hollingworth’s Defence, to the reader. 113 Hollingworth, Defence of King Charles, epistle dedicated to king and queen. 114 W. Sherlock, A Sermon Preached before the House of Commons January 1692 (Wing S3350, 1692), quotations pp. 18, 22, 27, and see passim. 115 Long, Dr. Walker’s Account, pp. iii, 56–7. 116 Knoppers, ‘Reviving the Martyr King’, p. 270. 117 For an example of the tensions that persisted, compare Stephens’s extensive Whig attack on monarchy in his sermon of 30 January 1700 with Humfrey Michel’s sermon for 30 January 1702, a Tory denunciation of ‘so many republicarian notions, and justifications of rebellion’ and of Locke. I am grateful to Mark Goldie for bringing these sermons to my attention. They are published in Mark Goldie, ed., The Reception of Locke’s Politics (6 vols, London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), 1, pp. 301–18, 355–60. 118 Huntington Library, Bull Granger 23/1, 4, 5, 5v. 119 See G. Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973). The engraving is Huntington Library, Bull Granger 23/61. 120 Reliquae Sacrae Carolinae or the Works of that Great Monarch and Glorious Martyr King Charles I (Wing C2072, 1650), p. 353.

Chapter 10 This essay was prepared as a keynote lecture for the Canada Milton seminar and is published here for the first time. I am grateful to Paul Stevens and Elizabeth Harvey for inviting me and for their hospitality. I am also very grateful to Tom Corns and Steve Zwicker for their helpful comments and criticisms. 1 E. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943); A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948). See also K. Sharpe, ‘Introduction: Parliamentary History 1603–1629: In or out of Perspective?’, in K. Sharpe, ed., Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 1–42; G. Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). 2 There is need for a full study of ‘commonwealth’ ideology; see P. Fideler and T. Mayer, eds, Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth: Deep Structure, Discourse and Disguise (London: Routledge, 1992). See also

NOTES

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G. Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 3 P. Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 69 (1987), pp. 394–424. This article established a near orthodoxy; see J. McDiarmid, ed., The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) and S. Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); N. Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 1 and passim. 4 Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 416; Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse, p. 17. 5 For example, Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Van Gelderen and Skinner, Republicanism. Skinner has recently addressed Collinson’s seminal article in ‘The Monarchical Republic Enthroned’, in McDiarmid, Monarchical Republic, pp. 233–44. John Pocock traced republican ideas in early modern Europe in The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). But, as Collinson noted, he denied their existence in pre-Civil War England (Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, pp. 401–2). M. Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Peltonen, ‘Citizenship and Republicanism in Elizabethan England’, in Van Gelderen and Skinner, Republicanism, I, pp. 85–106; Peltonen, ‘Rhetoric and Citizenship in the Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in McDiarmid, Monarchical Republic, pp. 105–27. 6 For a recent exposition, see A. Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Cf. D. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984); D. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 7 See Blair Worden, ‘English Republicanism’, in J. Burns and M. Goldie, eds, The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 443–75; cf. Worden’s review of Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, TLS, 29 January 1999. 8 For a fruitful meditation, see J. Scott, Commonwealth Principles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 9 Martin Dzelzainis provides a brief overview which attempts to identify a consistency in Milton’s writings in ‘Republicanism’, in T. Corns, ed., A Companion to Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 294–308. 10 Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, ch. 10 and passim; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, chs 3, 5, 9. 11 D. Norbrook, ‘The Reformation of the Masque’, in D. Lindley, ed., The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 94–110. 12 M. Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism’, in D. Armitage, A. Himy and Q. Skinner, eds, Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 1, quotation, p. 14. 13 Ibid., p. 15; V. Kahn, ‘The Metaphorical Contract in Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’, in Armitage et al., Milton and Republicanism, ch. 5, passim.

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14 B. Worden, ‘Milton and Marchamont Nedham’, in Armitage et al., Milton and Republicanism, ch. 9; Worden, ‘Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven’, in G. Bock, Q. Skinner and M. Viroli, eds, Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 225–46; Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 15 Worden, ‘Milton and Marchamont Nedham’, p. 166; Worden, ‘English Republicanism’, pp. 456–7. 16 T. Corns, ‘Milton and the Characteristics of a Free Commonwealth’, in Armitage et al., Milton and Republicanism, pp. 25–42.; G. Campbell and T. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 195–9, 223–8. 17 Corns, ‘Milton and the Characteristics of a Free Commonwealth’, pp. 30–1, 41. Cf. C. Brown, ‘“Great Senates and Godly Education”: Politics and Cultural Renewal in Some Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Texts of Milton’, in Armitage et al., Milton and Republicanism, pp. 43–60; Worden, Literature and Politics, p. 228. 18 Corns, ‘Milton and the Characteristics of a Free Commonwealth’, p. 41. 19 P. Rahe, ‘The Classical Republicanism of John Milton’, History of Political Thought, 25 (2004), pp. 243–7. 20 My argument attempts to develop Corns’s illuminating and persuasive essay. 21 On the tradition of commonplacing, see J. M. Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces (New York: Pageant, 1962); A. Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 277–83. Curiously Campbell and Corns offer no analysis of the commonplace books. 22 Wolfe, Complete Prose Works, I, pp. 414–15, 421, 456, 459–60, 475–7, 478, 496, 498, 504, 506. 23 Ibid., I, pp. 365, 369–70, 389, 409, 435, 459, 464, 483–4, 492, 502–3. The long entries under divorce suggest that some may have been entered when Milton was writing his treatises on the subject from 1643–5. 24 Ibid., I, pp. 474, 505, 506. 25 Ibid., I, p. 477. 26 Ibid., I, p. 421. 27 Ibid., I, pp. 420, 427. 28 Ibid., I, pp. 431, 474. 29 Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, title page; Wolfe, Complete Prose Works, III, p. 189. 30 Ibid., III, p. 212. 31 J. Scott, ‘The English Republican Imagination’, in J. Morrill, ed., Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s, p. 37; cf. Kahn, ‘The Metaphorical Contract’. 32 Campbell and Corns, John Milton, pp. 195–9. 33 Hughes, Complete Works, III, pp. 335–6, quotation, p. 585; Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, pp. 149–50, 225–6, 370, 378; Sharpe, Image Wars, pp. 400–3. See also Zwicker, Lines of Authority, ch. 2. 34 For a good study, see S. Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, 1994). 35 Milton, Eikonoklastes, Complete Prose Works, III, pp. 406, 530, 601.

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36 Wolfe, Complete Prose Works, IV, pp. 285–94. See Campbell and Corns, John Milton, pp. 229–31. 37 A Defence of the People of England in Complete Prose Works, IV, pp. 303, 311. 38 Ibid., IV, pp. 316–17. 39 Ibid., IV, p. 343. 40 Ibid., IV, p. 344. 41 Ibid., IV, pp. 507, 535. 42 Ibid., IV, p. 507: ‘it would be quite useless to bring the weapons of reason or argument or example.’ 43 See Sharpe, ‘“An Image Doting Rabble”’, pp. 25–56, 302–11. 44 A Second Defence of the English People, in Wolfe, Complete Prose Works, IV, pp. 538–44; Campbell and Corns, John Milton, pp. 261–4. Blair Worden has recently argued for a different dating of the treatise; see Worden, Literature and Politics, ch. 12. See also D. Loewenstein, ‘Milton and the Poetics of Defense’, in D. Loewenstein and J. G. Turner, eds, Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 171–92. 45 Second Defence, Complete Prose Works, IV, p. 550. 46 Ibid., IV, pp. 552, 556. 47 Ibid., IV, p. 603. 48 Ibid., IV, p. 666. 49 Ibid., IV, pp. 663 and 662–5 passim. 50 Ibid., IV, pp. 556, 561. 51 Ibid., IV, p. 672. 52 Ibid., IV, p. 550. 53 See A. Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 54 Second Defence, Complete Prose Works, IV, p. 591. 55 For the narrative, see C. H. Firth, The Last Years of the Protectorate (2 vols, New York: Russell and Russell, 1964); R. Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales 1658–1667 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); R. Mayers, 1659: The Crisis of the Commonwealth (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004); Campbell and Corns, John Milton, ch. 13. 56 Wolfe, Complete Prose Works, VII, pp. 340–6; Campbell and Corns, John Milton, pp. 293–7. 57 The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, in Complete Prose Works, VII, p. 356. 58 Ibid., VII, p. 357. Laura Knoppers has described the treatise as a jeremiad, see ‘Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way and the English Jeremiad’, in Loewenstein and Turner, Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics, pp. 213–26. 59 Complete Prose Works, VII, pp. 359, 365. 60 Ibid., VII, pp. 366–8, 374–5. 61 Ibid., VII, pp. 356–7, 377–8. 62 Ibid., VII, pp. 360–1. 63 Ibid., VII, p. 387. 64 Milton explicitly states that he prefers a conciliar to single-person rule, ibid., VII, p. 362. 65 Campbell and Corns, John Milton, pp. 290–1. 66 A Letter ‘To a Friend’, October 1659, Complete Prose Works, VII, pp. 329–30.

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67 ‘Proposals of Certain Expedients for the Preventing of a Civil War’, Complete Prose Works, VII, pp. 140, 336–7. See also Milton’s late religious treatise, Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings, Complete Prose Works, VII, pp. 273–321. 68 A. Woolrych, ‘Introduction’, Complete Prose Works, VII, pp. 46–7, 67, 69, 121, 139–42 and introduction, passim. 69 Ibid., VII, pp. 396–404. 70 Ibid., VII, pp. 436, 460. 71 Ibid., VII, pp. 425–30, 445. 72 Ibid., VII, p. 430. 73 Ibid., VII, pp. 450–1. 74 Ibid., VII, pp. 464–6. The treatise has been dated 10–15 April 1660. See M. Griffith, The Fear of God and the King. Press’d in a Sermon, Preach’d at Mercers Chappell, on the 25th. of March, 1660 (Wing G2012, 1660). Griffith dedicated his sermon to Monck. See Campbell and Corns, John Milton, pp. 300–1. 75 Wolfe, Complete Prose Works, VII, p. 481. 76 Ibid., VII, p. 482 – though this follows Milton citing Scripture and Aesop against kingship. 77 Ibid., VII, p. 465. 78 R. Fallon, ‘Milton in the Anarchy, 1659–60: A Question of Consistency’, Studies in English Literature, 21 (1981), p. 123. 79 W. C. Abbott, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (4 vols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937–47), I, p. 527. 80 Cromwell’s words are reported by Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs, or, An Historical Account of What Passed from the Beginning of the Reign of King Charles the First, to King Charles the Second (Wing W1986, 1682), p. 492. 81 J. Carey and A. Fowler, eds, The Poems of John Milton (London: Longman, 1968), pp. 325–7; cf. pp. 327–9. 82 Milton, Second Defence, Complete Prose Works, IV, pp. 666, 672; see p. 179 in this volume. 83 Ibid., IV, p. 671. 84 Campbell and Corns ‘find no hint of criticism of Cromwell in this tract’ (John Milton, p. 262). My reading concurs with Blair Worden’s in ‘John Milton and Oliver Cromwell’, in I. Gentles, J. Morrill and B. Worden, eds, Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 258–9. Worden develops this in Literature and Politics, pp. 339–41, especially note 45. 85 Milton, Second Defence, Complete Prose Works, IV, p. 672. 86 Ibid., IV, p. 672. 87 Ibid., IV, p. 672. 88 Ibid., IV, p. 673. 89 Ibid., IV, p. 673. 90 Ibid., IV, p. 673. 91 Ibid., IV, p. 673. 92 Ibid., IV, p. 674. 93 Ibid., IV, pp. 638, 674–7. The list includes Whalley, Overton, Whitelocke and others.

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94 Fallon, ‘A Second Defence: Milton’s Critique of Cromwell?, Milton Studies 39 (2000), pp. 167–83; Worden, ‘John Milton and Oliver Cromwell’, p. 242; Worden, Literature and Politics, ch. 14 passim. 95 Worden, ‘John Milton and Oliver Cromwell’, pp. 247–9, 253. 96 M. Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and the Protectorate in 1658’, in Armitage et al., Milton and Republicanism, pp. 181–205: W. Raleigh, The Cabinet-Council Containing the Cheif [sic] Arts of Empire and Mysteries of State . . . by the Ever-Renowned Knight, Sir Walter Raleigh; Published by John Milton (Wing R156, 1658); Joannis Miltoni Angli Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio contra Claudii Anonymi, aliàs Salmasii, Defensionem Regiam (Wing M2170, 1658). 97 P. Stevens, ‘Milton’s “Renunciation” of Cromwell: The Problem of Raleigh’s Cabinet Council’, Modern Philology, 98 (2001), pp. 363–92; quotation, p. 364. Campbell and Corns also reject the argument about criticism (John Milton, p. 276). 98 Milton, Considerations, Complete Prose Works, VII, p. 274. For Vane describing the ‘of late . . . great interruption’ to the Good Old Cause, see H. Vane, A Healing Question Propounded and Resolved (Wing V56, 1656), p. 2. See A. Woolrych, ‘Milton and Cromwell: “A Short but Scandalous Night of Interruption”?’, in M. Lieb and J. Shawcross, eds, Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), pp. 185–218. There has been extensive debate concerning whether the phrase applies to the whole of the protectorate or to the two weeks of April and May 1659 when the Rump was out of power. For a review of the debates, see Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and the Protectorate’, pp. 183–5 and esp. n. 20; cf. p. 212 and see Campbell and Corns, John Milton, p. 288. I am inclined to follow Woolrych’s interpretation. Cf. Worden, Literature and Politics, p. 340. 99 Complete Prose Works, VII, p. 364. 100 Ibid., VII, pp. 364, 380. 101 Ibid., VII, pp. 374–5. 102 See I. S., The Picture of a New Courtier Drawn in Conference, Between Mr. Timeserver, and Mr. Plain-Heart (E875/6, 1656); Overton called Cromwell the ‘ape of a king’, cited in Blair Worden, ‘Milton and Marchamont Nedham’, in Armitage et al., Milton and Republicanism, p. 178. 103 Complete Prose Works, VII, p. 462. 104 Cal. Stat. Pap. Venetian XXXI, 1657–9, no. 217, p. 243; The True Manner of the Most Magnificent Conveyance of His Highnesse Effigies from Sommerset-House to Westminster on Tuesday November 23, 1658 (E1866/2, 1658). 105 R. Sherwood, The Court of Oliver Cromwell (London: Croom Helm, 1977); Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell: King in All but Name (Stroud: Sutton, 1997). 106 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, ch. 7; Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell. Cf. S. Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Common-Wealth, 1649–1653 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) and E. Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 107 C. Firth and R. Rait, eds, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum (3 vols, London: HMSO, 1911), I, pp. 18–20. 108 See Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, ch. 1.

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109 W. C. Abbott, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (4 vols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937–47), III, pp. 451–2. 110 Ibid., p. 452. 111 Ibid., p. 458. 112 For a fuller exposition than this lecture permitted, see now Sharpe, Image Wars, ch. 16. 113 Milton, Eikonoklastes, Complete Prose Works, III, pp. 418, 564. 114 Ibid., III, p. 324. 115 Ibid., II, p. 342. 116 Ibid., III, p. 601. 117 Sharpe, ‘“An Image Doting Rabble”’; see Image Wars, ch. 13. 118 H. W. Henfrey, Numismata Cromwelliana: Coins, Medals and Seals of Oliver Cromwell (1877), p. 3. 119 Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, p. 253. 120 L. Knoppers, ‘The Politics of Portraiture: Oliver Cromwell and the Plain Style’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51 (1998), pp. 1282–319. 121 Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, p. 80. 122 Ibid., pp. 32–4; D. Piper, ‘The Contemporary Portraits of Oliver Cromwell’, Walpole Society, 34 (1958), p. 38; Sharpe, Image Wars, pp. 494–5. 123 In Complete Prose Works, III, p. 343, VII, p. 360. 124 Samuel Cooper, ODNB. 125 See Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell, p. 105; Piper, ‘Contemporary Portraits of Oliver Cromwell’, plate XIV. 126 British Museum AN403635001. 127 British Museum AN403634001. 128 See Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, pp. 83–5, fig. 18. 129 British Museum AN150541001 and description; Piper, ‘Contemporary Portraits’, p. 29 and plate 14B. See also J. Cooper, Oliver the First: Contemporary Images of Oliver Cromwell (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1999). 130 Engraving from Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University, in Knoppers, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Plain Style’, p. 1282. For Charles II’s reappropriation of an image taken from his father, see ibid., p. 1315; Huntington Library, Richard Bull Granger, 12/45. 131 Henfrey, Numismata Cromwelliana, p. 219. 132 See, for examples, Complete Prose Works, III, pp. 350, 434, 455, 528. 133 Sherwood, Court of Oliver Cromwell, ch. 4; cf. G. Aylmer, The State’s Servants: The Civil Service of the English Republic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 47–8. 134 Sherwood, Court of Oliver Cromwell, p. 77. 135 I. S., The Picture of a New Courtier, p. 11. 136 Complete Prose Works, VII, pp. 360, 425. 137 I. S., The Picture of a New Courtier, pp. 13–14; E. S. de Beer, The Diary of John Evelyn (6 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), III, p. 166. See A. Barclay, ‘The Lord Protector and His Court’, in P. Little, ed., Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2008), pp. 195–215; and P. Hunneyball, ‘Cromwellian Style: The Architectural Trappings of the Protectorate Regime’, in P. Little, ed., The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), pp. 53–81. Barclay writes of a court

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‘plagiarised from the monarchy’ (p. 211); Hunneyball emphasizes the extravagance of Cromwell’s buildings and furnishings. 138 Sherwood, Court of Cromwell, p. 84; Sir William Davenant, The First Days Entertainment at Rutland-House, by Declamations and Musick: After the Manner of the Ancients (E1648/2, 1656); Complete Prose Works, VII, p. 360. 139 Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell, p. 18; S. Carrington, The History of the Life and Death of Protector (Wing C643, 1659) pp. 167–70. 140 Severall Proceedings, 31st August–7th September 1654 (E233/22, 1654), p. 4089. 141 The Whole Manner of the Treaty, with the Several Speeches That Passed in the Banqueting-House at White-hall, Between His Highness the Lord Protector, and the Lords Embassadors of the United Provinces of Holland (E731/14, 1654); Severall Proceedings, 23rd–30th March, 1654 (E227/3, 1654), pp. 3729–37. 142 The Unparalleld Monarch. Or, The Portraiture of a Matchless Prince, Exprest in Some Shadows of His Highness My Lord Protector (Wing U91, 1656), p. 93. 143 E. Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (6 vols, Oxford, 1888), VI, p. 32. For an account, see Mercurius Politicus, 25th June–2nd July, 1657 (E505/1, 1657). 144 Carrington, The History of the Life and Death of Oliver, p. 203. 145 Complete Prose Works, VII, pp. 362–3; Milton renounced hereditary rule in the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Complete Prose Works, III, pp. 202–4; ‘The Present Means and Brief Delineation of a Free Commmonwealth’; ibid., VII, pp. 389–95. 146 The True Manner of the Most Magnificent Conveyance of His Highnesse Effigies from Sommerset-House to Westminster on Tuesday November 23, 1658 (E1866/2, 1658), pp. 12 and 1–12 passim. 147 Campbell and Corns show that Milton received a government payment for the purchase of mourning cloth, suggesting that participation was ‘official’ (John Milton, p. 277). 148 C. H. Firth, ed., The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, Lieutenant-General of the Horse in the Army of the Commonwealth of England, 1625–1672 (2 vols, Oxford, 1894), II, pp. 47–8. For the opposition of Wither and the Quaker Edward Burroughs, see Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, pp. 355–7, 380–2. 149 Paradise Lost, book V, lines 794–6, Carey and Fowler, Poems of John Milton, pp. 724–5. 150 Complete Prose Works, IV, p. 674. 151 Ibid., IV, p. 673.

Chapter 11 This essay was written for the catalogue for a pioneering exhibition of Lely’s female portraits, Painted Ladies, shown at the National Portrait Gallery and Yale Centre for British Art in 2001 and co-curated by Julia Marciari Alexander and Catharine MacLeod. I am grateful to both Julia and Catharine for involving me in the exhibition,

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the catalogue and the colloquia and conferences associated with it (see ch. 12), which occurred as I was shifting my interests towards the later seventeenth century. 1 E. Walker, A Circumstantial Account of the Preparations for the Coronation of His Majesty Charles II (1820), pp. 18, 76, 113. 2 J. Ogilby, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majesty Charles II in His Passage through the City of London, ed. R. Knowles (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1988), p. 14 and passim. 3 Domiduca Oxoniensis (Wing O875, Oxford, 1662); J. Heath, The Glories and Magnificent Triumphs of the Coronation of . . . King Charles II and of . . . Queen Mary (Wing H1335, 1662), p. 149. 4 T. Forde, Fragmenta Poetica, in Virtus Rediviva (Wing F1550, 1660), p. 21; H. Oxenden, Charles Triumphant (Wing O840, 1660), the author to the reader. 5 S. Ford, Parallela: or The Loyal Subjects Exultation (Wing F1492, 1660), pp. 42–4; T Blount, Boscobel; Or the History of His Most Sacred Majesties Most Miraculous Preservation (Wing B3329, 1660). 6 Ford, Parallela, p. 45. 7 Reeve, England’s Beauty, p. 48. 8 Ibid., p. 35; Votium Carolo or A Welcome to His Sacred Majesty (Wing W3475, Oxford, 1660), p. 3. 9 J. Paterson, Post Nubila Phoebus (Wing P687, Aberdeen, 1660), p. 20. 10 A. Brett, The Restauration or A Poem (Wing B4397, 1660), p. 8; J. Dryden, To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyrick (Wing D2386, 1661), p. 7. 11 R. Flecknoe, Heroick Portraits (Wing F1225, 1660), sigs H–H2; A. Cowley, A Vision Concerning His Late Pretended Highnesse Cromwell (Wing C6695, 1661), ‘Advertisement’. 12 Lloyd, Eikon Basilike, epistle dedicatory; W. C., The History of the Commons Warre of England (Wing C154, 1662), epistle to Colonel Nevil. 13 T. Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London (Wing S5032, 1667), p. 152 and see passim. 14 Reeve, England’s Beauty, p. 27. 15 G. S[heldon], The Dignity of the Monarchy Asserted (Wing 3069, 1661), epistle dedicatory and p. 97. 16 F. Phillips, Tenenda non Tollenda, The Necessity of Preserving Tenures in Capite (Wing P2019, 1660), epistle dedicatory. 17 Ibid., p. 190. 18 R. Blome, Britannia or a Geographical Description of the Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland (Wing B3207, 1673), p. 12. 19 R. Flecknoe, Seventy Eight Characters (Wing F1234, 1677), p. 63. 20 The best biography is R. Hutton, Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 21 H. Anderson, A Loyal Tear Dropt on the Vault of . . . Prince Charles II (Wing A3091, 1685), p. 10. 22 Ibid., p. 17. 23 K. Walker, ed., The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 74. 24 Ford, Parallela, pp. 29, 45. 25 J. Dryden, Astraea Redux (Wing D2244, 1660), p. 15.

NOTES

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26 S. Tuke, A Character of Charles the Second (Wing T3232aA, 1660), p. 6; Paterson, Post Nubila Phoebus, p. 20. 27 W. Penn, England’s Present Interest Discover’d (Wing P1279, 1675), p. l. 28 D. Jenkins, The Kings Prerogative and the Subjects Privileges Asserted (Wing J592A, 1680), p. 6. 29 J. Price, A Sermon Preached at Petworth (Wing P3337, 1683), p. 12. 30 J. Dolben, A Sermon Preached Before the King, June 20, 1665 (Wing D1832, 1665), p. 20; T. Jordan, The Triumphs of London (Wing J1068, 1675), p. 23; J. Nalson, The Countermine or, A Short but True Discovery of the Dangerous Principles, and Secret Practices of the Dissenting Party (Wing N97, 1677), p. 284. 31 W. M., Huntington Divertisement (Wing M95, 1678), sig. D. 32 J. Harrison, A Thanksgiving Sermon (Wing H895, 1683), p. 16; Deliquium, or the Grievances of the Nation Discovered in a Dream (Wing D908, 1680). 33 P. Lathom, The Power of Kings from God: A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church of Sarum, the XXIX. Day of June, 1683 (Wing L574, 1683), p. 16. 34 T. Heyricke, A Sermon Preached at Market Harboro (Wing H1755, 1685), p. 30. 35 M. Wren, Monarchy Asserted (Wing W3678, 1660), epistle to the reader. 36 E. Hickeringill, The History of Whiggism (Wing H1809, 1682), p. 66. 37 A Character of Charles the Second, p. 8; see J. Marciari Alexander and C. MacLeod, eds, Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), no. 40, pp. 128–9. 38 Glanvill, A Loyal Tear Dropt, p. 2. 39 The phrase is Sprat’s, History of the Royal Society, p. 366. 40 M. Clifford, A Treatise of Humane Reason (Wing C4708, 1675), p. 11. 41 Penn, England’s Present Interest, pp. 55, 57. 42 The History of Whiggism, passim. 43 M. Griffith, The Fear of God and the King (Wing G2012, 1660), p. 13. 44 Sprat, History of the Royal Society, pp. 53, 55–6, 113, 421, 427. 45 W. Dugdale, The Antient Usage in Bearing of Such Ensigns of Honour as Are Commonly Call’d Arms (Wing D2477, 1682), epistle to Earl Aylesbury; J. Logan, Analogia Honorum (Wing L2834, 1677), p. 7. 46 N. Crouch, The Wars in England, Scotland and Ireland (Wing C7357, 1681), sig. A3; A. Cook, Titus Britannicus (Wing C5996, 1685), epistle dedicatory. 47 F. Phillips, The Antiquity, Legality, Reason, Duty and Necessity of . . . Purveyance (Wing P2004, 1663), p. 307; Europae Modernae Speculum (Wing E3417, 1665), p. 258. 48 Dryden, To His Sacred Majesty, p. 7. 49 A. Littleton, A Sermon at the Funeral of the Rt. Hon The Lady Jane (Wing L2568, 1669), pp. 19–20. 50 W. Ramesey, The Gentleman’s Companion (Wing R207, 1676), pp. 10–11, 13. 51 A. L. translation of Poulain de La Barre, The Woman As Good As the Man (Wing P3038, 1677), p. 54 and see passim. 52 J. Hall, Psittacorum Regio: The Land of the Parrots or the She-Lands (Wing P4148D, 1669), pp. 80 and passim; Angliae Speculum Morale (Wing P3310, 1670), p. 74; Female Excellence or Women Display’d (Wing F666B, 1679), p. 5. 53 Hall, Psittacorum Regio, pp. 73, 82, 152; Female Excellence, p. 6.

306

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

NOTES

Cook, Titus Britannicus. The Unfortunate Usurper (Wing U59, 1663), p. 71. MacLeod and Alexander, Painted Ladies, nos 56 and 67, pp. 155, 166–7. Brett, The Restauration, p. 5. J. Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel: A Poem (Wing D2215, 1681), ‘To the Reader’. Whig and Tory or The Scribbling Duellists (Wing W1646, 1681). The Poets Address to His Sacred Sovereign (Wing P2737, 1682), pp. 1–2; The Second Advice to the Painter (Wing S2255A, 1678), p. 3. W. Aglionby, Painting Illustrated in Three Dialogues; Containing Some Choice Observations upon the Art, Together with the Lives of the Most Eminent Painters (Wing A765, 1685), sig. b3 and preface, passim. Dryden, Astraea Redux, p. 10. See R. Fréart de Chambray, A Parallel of the Antient Architecture with the Modern (Wing C1923, 1664), translated by Evelyn and dedicated to Charles II; W. Charleton, Chorea Gigantum, or, The Most Famous Antiquity of Great-Britan, Vulgarly Called Stone-Heng (Wing C3666, 1663). The phrase is from Aglionby, Painting Illustrated, sig. a3v. W. Faithorne, The Art of Graveing and Etching (Wing F294, 1662), sig. A2. J. Evelyn, Sculptura, or, The History and Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper (Wing E3515, 1662), pp. 25–6. Chambray, A Parallel of the Antient Architecture, sig. A2. J. Heath, The Glories and Magnificent Triumphs of the Blessed Restitution of His Sacred Majesty K. Charles II (Wing H1335, 1662), p. 31. See J. Brydall, Jura Coronae His Majesties Royal Rights and Prerogatives Asserted (Wing B5260, 1680), p. 6; T. Bayly, The Royal Charter Granted Unto Kings by God Himself (Wing B1515, 1682), pp. 53–4. W. Sanders, The True and Wonderful Relation of the Dreadful Fighting and Groans That Were Heard and Seen in the Ayr on the Fifteenth of this Instant January, in Carmarthen, in South-Wales (Wing T2588, 1681). Heraclitus Ridens: At a Dialogue between Jest and Earnest, Concerning the Times, Numb. 7. Tuesday, March 15 1681 (Wing P1689, 1681), advertisement. T. Hunt, The Great and Weighty Considerations Relating to the Duke of York (Wing H3752, 1680), p. 9. T. Rymer, A General Draught and Prospect of Government in Europe, and Civil Policy (Wing R24262, 1681, p. 78. The History of Whiggism, p. 6; The Tryal and Conviction of John Hambden, Esq. (Wing T2160, 1684), p. 49. C. Calle, On His Royal Highness’s Miraculous Delivery, and Happy Return (Wing C299, 1682). Britanniae Speculum, or, A Short View of the Ancient and Modern State of Great Britain (Wing B4819, 1683), p. 286. J. Vesey, A Sermon Preached at Windsor before His Majesty (Wing V282, 1684), text from Psalm 82; T. Jordan, London’s Royal Triumph (Wing J1041, 1684, p. 14. T. Long, Moses and the Royal Martyr, p. 27.

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Chapter 12  This essay began as a paper presented to one of the colloquia connected with the exhibition Painted Ladies, at the Yale Center for British Art. There an audience primarily (though not exclusively) of scholars invited a more original and (perhaps) more controversial argument than was possible in my catalogue essay – with which it is here helpfully joined. I am again grateful to Julia Alexander and Catharine Macleod for inviting me to Yale and to Tim Harris, Annabel Patterson and Rachel Weil for helpful comments and discussions. 1 The different viewing experiences of the two venues are worthy of record. In London the rooms were laid out in a manner evocative of a boudoir; in New Haven the space was more generous, less intimate and more austere. 2 MacLeod and Alexander, Painted Ladies, p. 72. 3 See, for example, entry for 15 August 1665 in R. C. Latham and W. Matthews, eds, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (11 vols, London: Bell & Hyman, 1970–83), 6, p. 191, and J. G. Turner, ‘Pepys and the Private Parts of Monarchy’, in G. M. MacLean, ed., Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 95–110. 4 The classic study of patriarchy as political discourse is G. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes, Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975). 5 The mural was destroyed, but a copy was painted by Remigius van Leemput. See O. Millar, The Tudor, Stuart and Early Georgian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (2 vols, London: Phaidon, 1963), 1, p. 152, no. 216. 6 See Hearn, Dynasties: Painting in Tudor, pp. 49–50, no. 53. 7 See, for example, Marcus et al., Elizabeth I: Collected Works, pp. 72, 151, 198, 314–15, 325–6, 329, 331, 339, 342. See also H. Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Macmillan, 1995), and Levin, Heart and Stomach, esp. ch. 6. 8 See G. P. V. Akrigg, ed., Letters of King James VI and I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 374, 386–7, 418–19, 431–2, 440–1, and D. Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers: King James of England and Scotland (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991). 9 K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 184–90; see also above Chapter 8. 10 See, for example, Sharpe, ‘“An Image Doting Rabble”’, pp. 238–40. 11 Sharpe, ‘“An Image Doting Rabble”’, pp. 250–3. 12 See, for example, Martin Lluelyn, To the Kings Most Excellent Majesty (Wing L2628, 1660); Dryden, To His Sacred Majesty; and Dryden, Astraea Redux (Wing D2254, 1660). 13 I am grateful to John Adamson for this point. 14 G. de Forest Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714 (7 vols, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963–75), 1, p. 426.

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15 Quoted in J. G. Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 206. 16 ‘Absalom and Achitophel’, line 10, in S. Zwicker and D. Bywaters, eds, John Dryden: Selected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), p. 114. 17 L. G. Wickham Legg, ed., English Coronation Records (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1901), pp. xlviii–li. 18 Marcus et al., Elizabeth I: Collected Works, pp. 59, 65. 19 Mcllwain, The Political Works of James I, p. 272. 20 K. Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), ch. 5. 21 See, for example, W. Montagu, Jeremias Redivivus; or An Elegiacall Lamentation on the Death of Our English Josias, Charles the First, King of Great Britain, etc. Publiquely Murdered by His Calvino-Judaicall Subjects (Wing M2472A, 1649), p. 2. 22 See S. Staves, Players Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 115. 23 A. Bryant, ed., The Letters, Speeches and Declarations of King Charles II (London: Cassell, 1935), pp. 111–12. 24 R. Hutton, Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford, 1989), pp. 362–3, 373, 377–8, 402. 25 MacLeod and Alexander, Painted Ladies, p. 83. 26 Hutton, Charles the Second, pp. 186–7; S. Wynne, ‘“The Brightest Glories of the British Sphere”: Women at the Court of Charles II’, in MacLeod and Alexander, Painted Ladies, pp. 44–5. 27 Hutton, Charles the Second, p. 416; MacLeod and Alexander, Painted Ladies, p. 136. 28 S. Zwicker, ‘Virgins and Whores: The Politics of Sexual Misconduct in the 1660s’, in C. Condren and A. D. Cousins, eds, The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1990), pp. 85–110, esp. p. 94. 29 Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies. 30 As well as the famous ‘Ditchley’ portrait, see the engraving reproduced in Winfried Schleiner, ‘Divina Virago: Queen Elizabeth as Amazon’, Studies in Philology, 75 (1978), p. 165. I owe this reference to the kindness of Alexandra Lumbers. 31 See R. Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), esp. pp. 63–70. 32 Sharpe, ‘Image of Virtue’, pp. 226–60. 33 Sharpe, ‘“An Image Doting Rabble”’, pp. 25–57, esp. pp. 39–42. 34 On Cromwell, see Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, pp. 46–50, 87, 149, 185–7. 35 R. Weil, ‘Sometimes a Scepter Is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England’, in L. Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York: Zone, 1993), p. 152. 36 See Broadley, The Royal Miracle. 37 D. Solkin, ‘Isaac Fuller’s Escape of Charles II: A Restoration Tragicomedy’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 62 (1999), pp. 199–240. 38 Sharpe, ‘Image of Virtue’, p. 243; Paul Hammond, ‘The King’s Two Bodies: Representations of Charles II’, in J. Black and J. Gregory, eds, Culture, Politics and Society in Britain, 1660–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,

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39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48

49

50 51

52 53

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1990), p. 22. For a corrective which shows Charles II’s concern for ceremony, see now the important study by Keay, Magnificent Monarch. Again, it is the ambiguity which is striking. See, for example, entry for 25 May 1660, Pepys, Diary, 1, p. 158. In addition to the Earl of Rochester’s famous line ‘His sceptre and his prick are of a length’, there are other references to the size of the royal penis. See entry for 15 May 1663, Pepys, Diary, 4, pp. 136–8. Weil, ‘Sometimes a Scepter’, p. 130; compare with p. 136. ‘Absalom and Achitophel’, lines 78–9. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (ESTC T077573, 1714). On the debt to Holbein of John Michael Wright’s portrait of Charles, see Millar, Tudor, Stuart and Early Georgian Pictures, 1, p. 129, no. 285. I develop this point in Rebranding Rule, ch. 2. D. Starkey, ‘Representation through Intimacy’, in I. M. Lewis, ed. Symbols and Sentiments: Cross-Cultural Studies in Symbolism (London: Academic Press, 1977); Starkey, ‘Intimacy and Innovation: The Rise of the Privy Chamber, 1485–1547’, in Starkey, English Court, pp. 71–118. Sharpe, Personal Rule of Charles I, esp. pp. 131–53, 212. J. Treglown, ed., The Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 34. S. Wynne, ‘The Mistresses of Charles II and Restoration Court Politics’, in E. Cruickshanks, ed., The Stuart Courts (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), pp. 171–90; N. Klein Maguire, ‘The Duchess of Portsmouth: English Royal Consort and French Politician, 1670–85’, in R. M. Smuts, ed., The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 247–73. ‘On Nell Gwynne’, in Lord, Poems on Affairs of State, 1, p. 420. See, however, for a complicating of this contrast, J. G. Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 256–8. For a classic study of this literature, see S. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475–1640 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1982). See A. M. McEntee, ‘“The [Un]civill-Sisterhood of Oranges and Lemons”: Female Petitioners and Demonstrators, 1642–1653’, in J. Holstun, ed., Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (London: Frank Cass, 1992), pp. 92–111; A. Hughes, ‘Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature’, in S. Amussen and M. Kishlansky, eds, Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 162–88; K. Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present, 13 (April 1958), pp. 42–62; and C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972). S. Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 159; W. Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). ‘So Soft and Amorously You Write’, in J. Thorpe, ed., The Poems of Sir George Etherege (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 43.

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54 P. Gill, Interpreting Ladies: Women, Wit, and Morality in the Restoration Comedy of Manners (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994), p. 542. On Behn, see J. M. Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: André Deutsch, 1996). 55 P. Thomas, ed., The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda, Vol. I, The Poems (Essex: Stump Cross, 1990), especially poems to Lucasia. 56 Comus, lines 785–6, in G. Campbell, ed., John Milton: The Complete Poems (London: Dent, 1980); Turner, One Flesh, p. 307. 57 ‘The Last Instructions to a Painter’, line 1, in E. Donno, ed., Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 157. 58 Wynne, ‘“Brightest Glories”’, p. 44. 59 I am grateful to Alexandra Lumbers for permission to read ‘The Discourses of Whoredom in Seventeenth-Century England’ (D.Phil. dissertation, Oxford University, 2005). 60 For the challenge, see J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology Social Structure, and Political Practice during the Ancient Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 61 J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 209–19, quotation at p. 209. 62 MacLeod and Alexander, Painted Ladies, p. 222. 63 ‘The King’s Vows’, lines 7–9, 37, in Lord, Poems on Affairs of State, 1, pp. 159, 161. 64 Andrew Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (Wing M860, Amsterdam, 1677). 65 Quoted in D. Farley-Hills, ed., Earl of Rochester: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge, 1972), p. 59. 66 Farley-Hills, Earl of Rochester, p. 71. 67 See above Chapter 7. 68 Weil, ‘Sometimes a Scepter’, pp. 130–6. 69 H. Love, ed., The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 89; compare with variants, pp. 87–9. 70 Eikon Basilike Deutera, The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majesty King Charles II, with His Reasons for Turning Roman Catholick (Wing E312, 1694), p. 82. The full quotation reads: ‘Debauchery is looked upon by me as the best test of loyalty . . . for sure I am that debauchees as foolish men call those that indulge the innocent appetites of Nature, will never be enemies to a reign that allows them in it; but, on the contrary, will be my surest defence against all the attempts of the Puritanical Precisians.’ During the 1690s there was a ubiquitous literature associating royal debauchery with tyranny. See, for example, John Phillips, The Secret History of the Reigns of K. Charles II and K. James II (Wing S2339, 1690), esp. 23, 25–6, 85. Rochester was one of the first to make the connection; see Chernaik, Sexual Freedom, pp. 9–60. 71 Turner, One Flesh, esp. pp. 248–9. 72 See the excellent essay by Turner, ‘Pepys and the Private Parts of Monarchy’, pp. 95–100. 73 See Gilbert Burnet, Some Passages of the Life and Death of . . . Rochester (Wing B5922, 1680), and Chernaik, Sexual Freedom, ch. 2.

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74 E. Waller, ‘Instructions to a Painter’, lines 85–90, in Lord, Poems on Affairs of State, 1, p. 25. 75 ‘Annus Mirabilis’, lines 593–6, in Zwicker and Bywaters, John Dryden. 76 ‘Absalom and Achitophel’, line 232. 77 R. Hutton, ‘Charles II’, in Hutton, Debates in Stuart History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004), ch. 5, esp. pp. 135–42. I am most grateful to Ronald Hutton for his (typical) kindness in letting me read this valuable essay in advance of its publication and for our subsequent stimulating discussions of this subject. 78 See K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). 79 T. Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith and the Order of the Fancy (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1994), J. Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). 80 See John Ogilby, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II in His Passage through the City of London to His Coronation, ed. R. Knowles (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1988); J. Ogilby, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II, in His Passage through the City of London to His Coronation (Wing O171, 1662). A fireworks display also was staged for the 1668 investiture of the king of Sweden. See Elias Ashmole, The Institution, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (Wing A3983, 1672), p. 421. 81 Hutton, Charles the Second, pp. 134, 359. 82 ‘A Ramble in St. James’s Park’, lines 119–20, in Love, Works of John Wilmot, p. 79. 83 The Poor Whores Petition (Wing P2897, 1668); The Gracious Answer of the Most Illustrious Lady of Pleasure, the Countess of Castlem – to the Poor-Whores Petition (Wing G1472, 1668). 84 The Cobbler Turned Courtier, Being a Pleasant Humour between King Henry the Eighth and a Cobbler (Wing C4782, 1680). 85 On apprentice riots against brothels in 1668, see T. J. G. Harris, ‘The Bawdy House Riots of 1668’, Historical Journal, 2 (1986), pp. 537–56, and Turner, Libertines and Radicals, ch. 5. 86 Quoted in Hutton, ‘Charles II’, p. 136. 87 See J. Roach, ‘Celebrity Erotics: Pepys, Performance and Painted Ladies’, in C. MacLeod and J. Marciari Alexander, eds, Politics, Transgression and Representation at the Court of Charles II (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 233–52. 88 See The Unfortunate Usurper: A Tragedy (Wing U59, 1663), 71, and K. Sharpe, ‘Restoration and Reconstitution: Politics, Society and Culture in the England of Charles II’, in MacLeod and Alexander, Painted Ladies, pp. 19–20; see Chapter 11. 89 As Harold Weber observes, city comedies were more about money than sex; see Weber, The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), pp. 14–16. 90 See also D. Foxon, Libertine Literature in England, 1660–1745 (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1965).

312

NOTES

91 N. K. Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy 1660–1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Books, 1992). I am grateful for discussions with Marjorie Huntley, who wrote a Southampton University Ph.D. on concepts of honour in Restoration drama. 92 Owen, Restoration Theatre, p. 159; William Wycherly, The Country Wife, act 4, scene 3, in R. Lawrence, ed., Restoration Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 72. 93 See Sharpe and Zwicker, eds, Politics of Discourse, introduction. 94 For an excellent study, see A. Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal. 95 S. Wiseman, ‘“Adam, the Father of All Flesh”: Porno-Political Rhetoric and Political Theory in and after the English Civil War’, in Holstun, Pamphlet Wars, pp. 134–57. 96 Milton, Paradise Lost, book 4, lines 750, 765–6. 97 ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’, lines 559–60, in Donno, Andrew Marvell, p. 171. 98 Ibid., line 12, p. 157. 99 Ibid., lines 885–906, pp. 180–1. 100 ‘The Fourth Advice to a Painter’, line 136, in Lord, Poems on Affairs of State, 1:146. 101 ‘The Fifth Advice to a Painter’, line 135, in Lord, Poems on Affairs of State, 1:152. 102 ‘The Haymarket Hector’, line 53, in Lord, Poems on Affairs of State, 1:171. 103 ‘And so, red hot with wine and whore, / He kick’d the Parliament out of door’; ‘The Royal Buss’, in Lord, Poems on Affairs of State, 1, p. 265. 104 Owen, Restoration Theatre, p. 162. 105 See, for example, The Pious Politician or Remains of the Royal Martyr (Wing C2537A, 1684), and John Gauden, Aurea Dicta: The Gratious Words of King Charles I of Glorious Memory (Wing C2150A, Oxford, 1682). Lives of Charles I and of Henrietta Maria were published in 1684 and 1685 – The Life & Death of Henrietta Maria De Bourbon (Wing L1995, 1685); R. Perrinchief, The Royal Martyr, or, The life and Death of King Charles I (Wing P1602, 1684); The Famous Tragedy of King Charles I was acted and published in I680 (Wing F385). On the engravings sold by Moses Pitt, see MacLeod and Alexander, Painted Ladies, p. 195. 106 R. Filmer, Patriarcha, or, The Natural Power of Kings (Wing F922, 1680); P. Laslett, ed., Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949), introduction. 107 ‘Absalom and Achitophel’, lines 7–9. After writing this essay, I came across James Grantham Turner’s helpful phrase ‘eroticised loyalism’; see Turner, Libertines and Radicals, p. 171. 108 Poems on Several Occasions by the Right Honourable the E. of R – (Wing R1754, 1680). 109 Farley-Hills, Earl of Rochester, pp. 50, 54. 110 Hutton, Charles the Second, pp. 443–5. 111 [John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester], Poems on Several Occasions. Written by a Late Person of Honour (Wing R1755, 1685). We note the removal of Rochester’s name from the title page. 112 Love, Works of John Wilmot, p. xxxvi. 113 Quoted in Davies, Papers of Devotion of James II, p. xxv. I discuss the image of James II in Rebranding Rule.

NOTES

313

114 See Claydon, William III, and D. Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1957). 115 Earl of Rochester, Poems, etc. on Several Occasions: With Valentinian, a Tragedy (Wing R1756, 1691), sig. A3v. 116 Earl of Rochester, Poems etc., sig. B2v. 117 Advice to the Painter’s Adviser (Wing A662, 1670), assigned to Rochester in D. Wing: Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland & Ireland and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700 (New York, 1945); however, Love does not include this as Rochester’s work. 118 Treglown, Letters of . . . Rochester; J. Wilson, ed., The Rochester-Savile Letters, 1671–1680 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1941). 119 Lord, Poems on Affairs of State, I, p. xxx. 120 MacLeod and Alexander, Painted Ladies, pp. 58–9. 121 For Charles’s strategic manipulation of access and openness, see B. Weiser, Charles II and the Politics of Access (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003). 122 E. Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 123 See S. Thurley, ‘A Country Seat Fit for a King: Charles II, Greenwich and Winchester’, in Cruickshanks, Stuart Courts, pp. 214–39.

Chapter 13 This essay was written for a volume I co-edited with Steven Zwicker, Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). The essay is both methodological and monographic and offers a case study in a different way of writing the lives of early modern rulers. 1 I. Donaldson, Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 4. 2 J. Guy, Thomas More (London: Arnold, 2000); see Donaldson, Jonson’s Magic Houses, pp. 2–3. 3 See, for example, the recent essay by G. Bernard, ‘History and Postmodernism’, in Bernard, ed., Power and Politics in Tudor England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 217–30. 4 Bergeron, King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire; M. B. Young, James I and the History of Homosexuality (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). 5 Though for a pioneering approach, see Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects; see above Chapter 3. 6 Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies; Rolls, Theory of the King’s Two Bodies. 7 Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy. 8 The first books of engravings of English monarchs and of souvenir plates and other objects appear in the reign of Elizabeth I and increase rapidly thereafter. 9 Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, pp. 27–34. 10 Elizabeth’s poem to Anjou seems self-consciously to ponder this doubleness. See Marcus et al., Elizabeth I: Collected Works, pp. 302–3.

314

NOTES

11 K. Sharpe, ‘Private Conscience and Public Duty in the Writings of James VI and I’ and ‘Private Conscience and Public Duty in the Writings of Charles I’, both reprinted in Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, chs 4 and 5. 12 J. Sommerville’s edition of King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) also omits them. 13 Marcus et al., Elizabeth I: Collected Works, p. xi. 14 J. Walker, ‘Bones of Contention: Posthumous Images of Elizabeth and Stuart Politics’, in Walker, Dissing Elizabeth, pp. 252–76; Walker, The Elizabeth Icon, 1603–2003 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004); M. Dobson and N. J. Watson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 15 Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr. 16 See, for example, Claydon, William III. 17 Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, chs 5–8. 18 J. Callow, The Making of King James II (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), p. 2. 19 Callow, Making of King James II, pp. 1–2; J. S. Clarke, ed., The Life of James II (2 vols, 1816), I, pp. xvi–xviii. 20 Callow, Making of King James II, p. 306, n. 5; Clarke, Life of James II, p. xix; Sells, The Memoirs of James II, p. 19; M. Ashley, James II (London: Dent, 1977), appendix, pp. 296–301; E. Gregg, ‘New Light on the Authorship of the Life of James II’, English Historical Review, 108 (1993), pp. 947–65. Charles Dryden was but 20 and surely not the ‘famous poet’ referred to by Thomas, brother of Louis Innes (see Sells, Memoirs of James II, p. 19). 21 In 1686 James checked Dryden’s fair copy, Sells, Memoirs of James II, p. 19; on bindings, Clarke, Life of James II, p. xvii. 22 J. Callow, King in Exile: James II: Warrior, King and Saint (Stroud, 2004), p. 372. 23 Gregg, ‘New Light’, pp. 951–3. 24 Sells, Memoirs of James II, p. 28; Callow, Making of King James II, pp. 306–7, esp. n. 9; Gregg, ‘New Light’, p. 954. 25 Sells, Memoirs of James II, p. 19; Miller, James II, p. 244; Callow, Making of King James II, pp. 6, 307; Gregg, ‘New Light’, p. 955. The notes in Bodleian MS Carte 198 seem to be based entirely on Dicconson’s Life; but Carte MSS 180 and 181 contain notes from letters and memoirs in St Germain, including Caryll’s correspondence (Carte MS 181, ff. 595–636) and James’s devotions (Carte MS 180, ff. 57–87). C. J. Fox, A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James II (1808). Since Fox evidently did not begin the work until 1799 (ODNB), it would seem unlikely he saw the original memoirs, though he refers to letters. See also Miller, James II, appendix, pp. 243–5. 26 Macpherson, ODNB; Miller, James II, p. 244. 27 Clarke, Life of James II, pp. xxvi–xxvii; Callow, Making of King James II, p. 307. This, a second, copy of Dicconson, in 4 volumes, once in the possession of, and annotated by, James III is now at Windsor. Gregg, ‘New Light’, App. 1. 28 Sells, Memoirs of James II, p. 19. 29 Ashley, James II, p. 143. 30 Clarke, Life of James II, II, pp. 242–3. 31 Ibid., I, pp. 56, 225, 252. 32 Ibid., pp. 2, 29–39.

NOTES

315

33 Ibid., pp. 390, 395–6, 431, 439, 504, 632, 739; II, p. 155; J. Macpherson, Original Papers, Containing the Secret History of Great Britain from the Restoration to the Accession of the House of Hanover (1775), I, p. 20. 34 Clarke, Life of James II, I, pp. 49, 50, 51, 52, 386, 420, 430, 445, 449, 483, 492, 495, 509, 525, 541, 551, 557–8, 559, 596, 599, 614, 646, 673, 679, 680, 713, 745, 747. 35 Ibid., pp. 440–1, 452, 483–4, 539, 542, 628, 657, 701, 733. 36 Sells, Memoirs of James II, pp. 15–16, 52, 54. 37 Ibid., pp. 15, 19, 30–1. 38 Ibid., pp. 91–2, 94, 95–6, 97, 107, 138, 160, 189–90, 219–20, 248–51, 269–70, 282. 39 Ibid., pp. 143, 152, 193; cf. 206, 234, 279. 40 Ibid., pp. 184, 206. 41 Ibid., pp. 195. 42 Ibid., pp. 59, 96. 43 Ibid., p. 127. 44 Ibid., pp. 70, 86. 45 Ibid., pp. 142, 151, 168. 46 Ibid., p. 171. 47 Sells, Memoirs of James II, pp. 149, 157. 48 Ibid., pp. 63, 100, 151; Clarke, Life of James II, I, pp. 32, 47, 420, 483, 525, 541, 551, 555, 558, 560, 563, 594, 599, 614, 633, 646, 673, 680, 713, 733; II, p. 157. 49 Callow, Making of King James II, p. 311; Davies, Papers of Devotion of James II. 50 Davies, Papers of Devotion of James II, pp. 26, 96. 51 Pages 168–70 are not in James’s hand. See also Davies, Papers of Devotion of James II, Appendix II at end, n.p. 52 Ibid., p. xxiv. 53 Ibid., pp. 3, 27. 54 Ibid., p. 53. 55 Ibid., pp. 14, 54, 62, 90, 107, 126. 56 Ibid., p. 62. 57 Ibid., pp. 63, 67–8. 58 Davies, Papers of Devotion of James II, p. 3. 59 Ibid., p. 92. 60 Ibid., p. 111. 61 Ibid., pp. 83, 89. 62 See Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr, ch. 6; Knoppers, ‘Reviving the Martyr King’, pp. 263–87.

INDEX

absolutism  34, 38, 176 Achinstein, S.  12, 158, 249n. 64, 252n. 100, 263n. 105, 291n. 20, 298n. 34 Milton and the Revolutionary Reader  12, 249n. 64, 263n. 105, 291n. 20, 298n. 34 Adolphus, G.  50, 68, 87, 96, 158, 269n. 10 Aglionby, W.  306n. 61, n. 64 Painting Illustrated  204, 306n. 61, n. 64 Alexander, W.  33, 92 Andersen, J.  11, 248 Books and Readers in Early Modern England (with Sauer)  248 Andrewes, L.  64 Anglesey, Earl of  169 Anne, Queen  37, 81, 107, 120, 170, 233, 276n. 8 Antichrist, the  62, 66, 67, 70, 74, 76, 80, 88, 90, 91, 93, 96, 97, 274n. 138 disappearance of, the  74 identity of the pope with, the  68 popish  89, 274n. 138 Rome as  87 Aquinas, T.  123, 125, 283nn. 14–15 Arianism  102 Aristotle  48, 53, 56, 125, 126, 130, 148 Ethics  130 Arminianism  41 Ashmole, E.  84, 311n. 80 author, an  7 authority  106 Bacon, F.  47, 48, 50 Baillie, R.  96

Bale, J.  59, 66, 274n. 127 Bancroft, R.  92 Barker, R.  58 Battle of Worcester, the  42 Bedford, Earl of  150 Behn, A.  27, 203, 217, 310n. 54 Bell, S.  44, 255, 257, 259 Bellarmine, R.  174 Bergeron, D.  37, 40, 44, 256nn. 51–2, 307n. 8, 313n. 4 Bernard, R.  60, 66, 67, 261n. 19, 262nn. 74–7, 263nn. 78–84 Key of Knowledge for the Opening of . . . Revelation, A  66, 67, 261n. 19, 262nn. 74–7, 263nn. 78–84 Betts, H.  111, 277n. 31 Beverley, T.  79, 267nn. 206–9 Beza, T.  66, 96 Bible, the  7, 56, 57, 58, 59, 64, 72, 83, 86, 87, 108 Bishops’  58 Coverdale’s  58, 88 Geneva  57, 58, 59, 88, 91, 92, 261n. 17 Henry VIII’s  88 King James  10, 35, 58, 88 New Testament  58 Old Testament  100 translations of  86 vernacular  57, 108 Vulgate  57 Wycliffe  108 Bill, J.  129 biography  229 Blume, R.  197 Blundeville, T.  134 Bodin, J.  176

318

INDEX

Boleyn, A.  110 Book of Common Prayer, the  67 Botero, G.  137 Bouillon, Cardinal  238 Boyle, R.  27 Braddick, M.  18, 247n. 40, 251n. 94 Brett, A.  195, 204, 304n. 10, 306n. 58 Brightman, T.  68, 70, 93, 95, 96, 99, 100, 263n. 92, 270nn. 53–4 Revelation of the Revelation, A  68, 93, 263n. 92, 270nn. 53–4 Browne, R.  56 Buchanan, G.  129, 174, 176, 284n. 61 Rights of the Crown of Scotland, The  129, 284n. 61 Bull, R.  14 Bullinger, E. W.  66 Burgess, G.  38, 257n. 57, 296n. 1 Burleigh, Lord  56 Burnet, G.  164, 168, 218, 219, 225, 226, 294n. 73, 310n. 73 Royal Martyr Lamented, The  168, 295nn. 100–1 Some Passages of the Life and Death of . . . Rochester  219, 225, 310n. 73 Burnet, T.  101, 139 Bush, G. W.  106 Calamy, E.  119 Calvin, J.  59, 123, 124, 138, 283nn. 17–19, 287n. 115 Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, The (Barnard and McKenzie)  10 Cambridge Platonists  76 Camden, W.  176 Cardano, G.  48 Carew, T.  158, 288n. 9, 291n. 18, 292n. 25 Coelum Britanicum  158, 288n. 9, 291n. 18, 292n. 25 Caroline peace, the  148 Caroline period, the  13 Carte, T.  236, 237 Cartwright, T.  96, 97 Cary, M.  71, 264nn. 118–22 Caryll, J.  235 Castiglione, B.  131

Courtier, The  131 Chaderton, L.  64 Charles I  23, 33, 42, 43, 68, 71, 78, 80, 117, 118, 124, 125, 134, 135, 137, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 178, 185, 187, 188, 189, 194, 195, 196, 216, 221, 225, 232, 233, 241, 280n. 70, 287, 288n. 5, 289n. 27, 294n. 68, 295n. 90, 312n. 105 Eikon Basilike  6, 118, 155, 160, 161, 162, 165, 168, 170, 171, 177, 188, 195, 211, 241, 259n. 89, 292n. 42 authorship, the problem of  169 Charles I as Christ  161, 177 images of  153–71 liking for masques  142 Charles II  42, 75, 76, 80, 107, 119, 120, 137, 162, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 177, 193–8, 202–4, 206–7, 211, 213, 218, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224, 225, 233, 239, 306n. 63, 309n. 38 Charles III  171 Charleton, W.  205, 306n. 63 Chartier, R.  12, 248, 249, 260, 291 Churchill, W.  236 Civil Marriage Act of 1653, the  213 Civil War, the  23, 24, 25, 42, 52, 55, 62, 69, 80, 81, 95, 113, 117, 118, 120, 122, 126, 149, 150, 159, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 174, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 202, 204, 205, 207, 210, 211, 212, 217, 218, 222, 237, 253n. 118 female empowerment as a legacy of  217 Clark, J.  74 Clark, S.  52, 260n. 22 Clarke, J.  236, 237, 314nn. 30–2, 315nn. 33–5 Clegg, C.  12, 247n. 42, 249n. 63 Clifford, C.  134, 286n. 95 School of Horsemanship, The  134, 286n. 95 Clifford, M.  200, 305n. 40

INDEX

Collinson, P.  41, 115, 174, 175, 258n. 76, n. 84, 262n. 57, 279n. 59, 297n. 3 Columbus, C.  93 Comenius  73 Clavis Apocalyptica  73 Comines, P. de  48, 51 commodification  114 Commonwealth  181, 182, 185, 189, 196, 205 Confession of Richard Brandon, The  161 Conold, R.  164, 293n. 68 Cook, A.  305n. 46, 306n. 54 Titus Britannicus  203, 305n. 46, 306n. 54 Cooper, S.  187, 302n. 124 Corns, T.  157, 175, 246n. 27, 252n. 100, 290n. 2, 291n. 13, 292n. 40, 296, 297n. 9, 298nn. 16–21, n. 32, 299n. 36, n. 44, n. 56, n.65, 301n. 97, 303n. 147 Cotton, J.  94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 102, 271nn. 65–6, nn. 69–82, 272nn. 84–5, nn. 90–100, n. 102 Church’s Resurrection. . ., The  95, 271nn. 69–74 Exposition of the 13th Chapter of the Revelation  97, 272n. 90–100 Gods Promise to His Plantation  94, 271nn. 65–6 Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, The  96, 272n. 84 Pouring Out of the Seven Vials. . ., The  95 Way of Congregational Churches Cleared, The  97, 272n. 85 Cotton, R.  50 Cowley, A.  122, 304n. 11 see also liberty Craigie, J.  32, 254n. 3, n. 5, 256n. 41, n. 50, 257n. 55, n. 65, 270n. 41 Cressy, D.  95, 271nn. 67–8 Cromwell, E.  71 Cromwell, O.  71, 72, 73, 137, 150, 151, 168, 176, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 191, 195, 211, 272n. 84, 300n. 80, n. 84, 308n. 34

319

Commentary upon the Book of Revelation  73 Milton’s praise  179 Crossman, S.  164, 294n. 72 Crouch, N.  164, 202, 305n. 46 Wars in England, The  164, 305n. 46 Current Intelligence, The  198, 204 Dacres, E.  134, 286n. 102 Dallington, R.  155, 291n. 8 dancing  132–3 Mulcaster on  133 Danforth, S.  99, 273n. 109–12 Daniell, D.  10, 247n. 48 Bible in English, The  10, 247n. 48 Darnton, R.  12, 247n. 36, 249n. 62, 260n. 1 Daubuz, C.  82, 83, 267n. 234 Perpetual Commentary on the Revelation, A  82, 267n. 234 Davenant, W.  150, 221, 222, 288n. 10, 290n. 54, 303n. 138 Britannia Triumphans  132 Salmacida Spolia  150, 158, 159, 288n. 10, 290n. 54 Temple of Love, The  158 Davies, C.  18 Davies, G.  239, 258n. 86, 312n. 113, 315nn. 50–61 Davies, J.  133, 250, 258n. 77, 286n. 88–90 Orchestra  133, 286n. 88–90 De Grey, T.  134, 135, 286n. 99 Complete Horseman  134, 135, 286n. 99 Dee, J.  11 deism  102 Dent, A.  59, 61, 64, 261n. 11, n. 21, n. 23, 262n. 50–6 The Ruine of Rome  64, 261n. 21, n. 23, 262n. 50–6 D’Ewes, S.  52 Dicconson, W.  235, 236, 238, 239 Disloyal Forty and Forty One, The  164 Doelman, J.  34, 35, 41, 255n. 13, n. 24, n. 30, 258n. 74 Donaldson, I.  230, 232, 285n. 69 Donne, J.  124 Ecstasy  123

320

INDEX

Douglas, E.  71 Revelation Interpreted, The  71 Downham, J.  73, 264n. 131 Drake, W.  7, 8, 51 reading notes of  51–3 see also Folger MS V.a.263 Druy, J.  151 Dryden, J.  24, 27, 81, 195, 198, 202, 204, 212, 215, 221, 225, 228, 229, 235, 304n. 10, n. 25, 305n. 48, 306n. 58, n. 62, 307n. 12 Absalom and Achitophel  204, 212, 215, 225, 306n. 58, 311n. 76, 312n. 107 Du Plessis Mornay, P.  174 Dunnigan, S.  33, 37, 39, 255n. 11, 256n. 45–8, 257n. 62 Durham, J.  73, 74, 265nn. 46–54 Durie, J.  73 Dzelzainis, M.  175, 183, 293n. 57, 297n. 9, n. 12, 301n. 96, n. 98 Edward VI  6, 42, 90, 110, 112, 211 Edwards, T.  12 Gangraena  12 Eisenstein, E.  35, 256n. 32 Printing Press as an Agent of Change, The  35, 256n. 32 Elias, N.  134, 286n. 93 Elizabeth I  6, 13, 23, 34, 37, 42, 53, 62, 63, 78, 80, 90, 91, 97, 106, 108, 110, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 132, 133, 154, 170, 176, 205, 212, 214, 215, 218, 230, 231, 232, 233, 278, 290, 313n. 8, n. 10 Precationes Privatae  111 representation of  110–12 the subject of pornographic literature  111 as the woman in Revelation  62 Elstrack, R.  43 Elyot, T.  132, 133 Book Named the Governor, The  132 Enlightenment, the  113, 139 Epictetus  124 episcopacy  164 Erasmus  47, 59 eschatology  100

Etherege, G.  217 Evans, R.  4, 244n. 18 In Defence of History  4, 244n. 18 Evelyn, J.  27, 189, 205, 206, 306n. 66 Faithorne, W.  187, 190, 205, 306n. 65 Fallon, R.  183, 300n. 78, 301n. 94 Felltham, O.  122, 134, 282n. 8, 286n. 101 Resolves, Divine, Moral, Political  122, 282n. 8, 286n. 101 Fetherstone, C.  132, 285n. 85 Dialogue Against Light. . ., A  132, 285n. 85 Filmer, R.  212, 312n. 106 Patriarcha  212, 225, 312n. 106 Fincham, K.  41, 254n. 6, 258n. 76, n. 78, 263n. 93, 270n. 49 Firth, K.  90, 93, 261n. 14, n. 16, 265n. 139, n. 141, 269n. 11, n. 13, n. 33, 270n. 48, 271n. 54–7, 299n. 55, 301n. 107, 303n. 148 Fischlin, D.  33, 35, 39, 40, 42, 44, 246n. 29, 254n. 1, 255n. 11, n. 13, nn. 15–16, nn. 20–1, n. 23, n. 27, 256n. 36, n. 39, n. 51, 257n. 58, n. 60–1, 258n. 73, n. 79, n. 80, 259, 262, 269, 270, 276, 313 Fleming, M.  34, 39, 44, 255n. 21, 259n. 98–9 ‘Two Sonnets to Her M:tie to Show the Difference of Stiles’  39 Folger, H. C.  47 Folger MS V.a.263  47–8, 259nn. 2–9, 260n. 11 Ford, S.  195, 198, 304nn. 5–6, 24 Forde, T.  194, 304n. 4 Forset, E.  128–9, 284nn. 49–59 Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politic, A  128–9, 284nn. 49–59 Fortier, M.  33, 38, 40, 42, 246n. 29, 254n. 1, 255n. 11, n. 13, nn. 15–16, nn. 20–1, n. 23, n. 27, 256n. 36, n. 39, n. 51, 257n. 58, n. 61, 258n. 73, n. 79, 259n. 90, n. 96, 269n. 29, 270n. 46, 276n. 6, 313

INDEX

Foucault, M.  105, 275n. 1, 286n. 93 Foxe, J.  90, 91, 93, 237, 274n. 127 Frederick II  59 French Revolution, the  235, 239 Fuller, T.  58 Gainsborough, T.  151 Galloway, P.  89 Garrett, W.  78, 79, 80, 81, 266nn. 195–201, 267nn. 203–5, nn. 222–5 Gauden, J.  169, 312n. 105 Geertz, C.  105, 275n. 1 genre  38 George I  17 George IV  236 Gifford, G.  62, 84, 261nn. 33–6, 262nn. 37–8 Ginzburg, C.  55, 260n. 1 Giulio Romano  145 Glanville, J.  200, 293n. 64 Goldberg, J.  32–3, 254n.5, n. 9, 259n. 93 James I and the Politics of Literature  32–3, 254n.5, 259n. 93 Golding, A.  62 Grafton, A.  12, 248n. 61, 249n. 62, 267n. 231 Granger, J.  14, 249n. 75 Biographical History of England  14, 249n. 75 Great Fire, the  99, 119, 163, 198, 215, 223 Greenblatt, S.  40, 257n. 67, 275n. 2 Griffith, M.  181, 300n. 74, 305 Fear of God and the King, The  181, 300n. 74, 305n. 43 Griffiths, A.  5, 22, 244n. 20, 259n. 93 Print in Early Stuart England, The  5, 252n. 102, 259n. 93 Grindal, E.  58 Grotius, H.  79 Guicciardini, F.  48, 50, 51, 52, 282n. 2 Guy, J.  230, 250n. 86, 279n. 57, 313n. 2 Habermas, J.  25, 113, 253n. 116, 278n. 40 see also public sphere

321

Hackel, H. B.  11, 12, 248n. 59, 250n. 79 Reading Material in Early Modern England  11, 248n. 59 Hall, J.  72, 73, 122, 203, 264nn. 131–8, 282nn. 9–10, 305nn. 52–3 Meditations and Vows  122, 282n. 9 Hammond, P.  79, 308n. 38 Hampden, J.  51 Harrington, J.  121, 199, 282n. 2 Harris, T.  24, 252n. 111, 253n. 112, 307 Hartlib, S.  73, 265nn. 139–40, nn. 142–4 Harvey, G.  11 Hayter, R.  75, 76, 265nn. 167–74, 266nn. 175–6, 268n. 6 Meaning of the Revelation, The  75, 265nn. 167–74, 266nn. 175–6 Hayward, J.  123, 282n. 11 Hellwis, E.  91 Henrician Reformation, the  1, 17, 173 Henrietta Maria, Queen  137, 142, 146, 148, 150, 156, 157, 187, 188, 212, 225, 312n. 105 Henry IV  156 Henry V  116 Henry VII  185 Henry VIII  6, 13, 23, 34, 42, 92, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 115, 132, 146, 156, 211, 212, 214, 215, 222, 232, 233, 241, 246n. 31, 276n. 16, 277nn. 18–19 Assertio Septem Sacramentorum  42, 276n. 16 Glass of the Truth, A  6, 42, 109, 110, 246n. 31, 277n. 18 Necessay Doctrine, A  42, 109, 246n. 31, 277n. 19 Heraclitus Ridens (Thomas Flatman)  207, 306n. 71 Herbert, G.32,  138 Herman, P.  7, 34, 246n. 29, 254n. 1, 255n. 28, 277n. 17 Herrick, R.  221 Hexham, H.  158, 291n. 19 Heyricke, T.  199, 305n. 34 Hickes, G.  165, 294n. 76 Hill, C.  10, 74, 247n. 49, 260n. 2, 261n. 10, 263n. 96, 264n. 116, 265n. 155, 268n. 8, 309n. 51

322

INDEX

Hindle, S.  18, 250n. 81, 257n. 71, 268n. 3 History of Reading in the West, The (by Cavallo and Chartier)  10 History of the Common Warre. . ., The  196 Hobbes, T.  27, 49, 53, 73, 106, 118, 119, 121, 126, 127, 130, 139, 220, 265n. 145, 282n. 2 Leviathan  49, 118, 126, 265n. 145 Hollingworth, R.  169, 296nn. 111–13 Defence of King Charles I, A  169, 296n. 111, n. 113 Dr. Hollingworth’s Defence of King Charles the First’s. . .  169, 296nn. 111–12 Holy ghost, the  65, 83 horsemanship  134 Charles as a skilled rider  135 Hotham, J.  161 Hotman, J.  176 Howard, T.  136, 144 Hughes, A.  12, 26, 249nn. 65–8, 251n. 94, 309n. 51 humanism, Renaissance  106 see also new humanism Hume, D.  127 Hunt, T.  207, 306n. 72 Huntington Divertisement  199 Huntington Library  51 Huntington Library Quarterly  26 Hutton, R.  221, 281n. 83, 299n. 55, 304n. 20, 308n. 24, nn. 26–7, 311n. 77, n. 81, n. 86, 312n. 110 Hyde, E.  159, 303n. 143 Innes, T.  237 Ireton, B.  71 Isabella, Queen  93 Ives, C.  40, 44, 258n. 73 Jackson, H.  11, 248n. 61 Jagodzinski, C.  11, 248n. 55 Privacy and Print  11, 248n. 55 James I  6, 7, 14, 31, 32, 33, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 58, 64, 68, 92, 94, 106, 117, 118, 129, 136, 137, 141, 142, 145, 154, 155, 156, 194, 211, 212, 216, 221, 223, 231, 232, 233, 241, 262n. 40,

nn. 42–6, 269nn. 22–8, 288n. 4, 291n. 7 engraving of  43 sexual orientation  214, 216, 230 James II  7, 23, 42, 77, 78, 80, 100, 120, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 200, 226, 266n. 188 Devotions  241 life of, the  234–42 James VI  7, 14, 31, 32, 33, 37, 38, 40, 42, 62, 63, 64, 66, 68, 74, 88, 89, 91, 92, 108, 117, 232, 269nn. 14–21, 270n. 41 James writings  31–45 Amatoria  33, 39, 40 authorship, the problem of  33 Basilikon Doron  31, 34, 35, 36, 38, 155 Counterblast to Tobacco, A.  38, 44 Gospel of St Matthew, the treatises  41 Lepanto  35, 37, 91, 270n. 41 Letter and Directions. . .  36, 38 Lord’s Prayer, the  41 love letters, the  37–8 material form of texts, the  35 ‘Off Jacke and Tom’  37 poetry as a form of control in  34 Revelation, the paraphrase of  41 Short Reulis and Cautelis. . .  31 True Law of Free Monarchies, The  31, 36, 38 Works (1616)  35, 36, 43, 63, 91, 142 Jesus Christ  60, 62, 65, 67, 71, 80, 87, 91, 98, 99, 100, 122, 137 Joachim of Fiore  59 Johns, A.  36, 248n. 54, 256n. 33, 268n. 1 Nature of the Book, The  36, 256n. 33, 268n. 1 Jones, I.  130, 131, 143, 150 Jonson, B.  21, 34, 47, 49, 130, 131, 143, 230 Chloridia  158 Sejanus  47, 49, 53 Staple of News, The  21 Journal of American History  26 Junius, F.  58, 144, 288n. 15 De Pictura Veterum  144

INDEX

Kahn, V.  175, 297n. 13 Kantorowicz, E.  128, 129, 213, 231, 256n. 52, 289n. 31, 308n. 29, 313n. 6 see also political theology Katherine, Queen  109 Katz, D.  10, 268n. 5, 276nn. 11–12 God’s Last Words  10, 268n. 5 Kelsey, R.  84, 268n. 246 Killigrew, T.  222 King, J.  39, 257n. 61 kingship  164, 167, 168, 177, 180, 197, 213, 215, 221, 224, 227, 240 see also monarchy divine  177, 207 Meggott’s defence of  164 Knafla, L.  41, 44, 258n. 75 Kneller, G.  151, 205 Knights, M.  5, 22, 24, 244n. 21, 246n. 24, 252n. 104, n. 106 ‘Possessing the Visual. . .’  244n. 21, 246n. 24, 252n. 104 Knollys, H.  77, 78, 84, 266nn. 190–4, 268n. 246 Knoppers, L.  167, 170, 185, 187, 243n. 3, 287n. 112, 295n. 95, 296n. 116, 301n. 106, n. 108, 302nn. 120–2, n. 128, n. 130, 308n. 34, 315n. 62 Knox, J.  88, 89, 165 Korshin, P.  81, 265n. 156, 267n. 228 Lacey, J.  81, 293n. 60 Prophetical Warnings  81 Lacy, J.  212 Lake, P.  41, 113, 253nn. 118–19, 255n. 20, 256n. 40, 258n. 76, n. 78, 260, 262n. 57, 263n. 93, 270n. 49, 277n. 28, 278nn. 41–2, 279n. 60 Lambarde, W.  116 Laud, archbishop  68, 150 Lead, J.  81, 267n. 227 Lely, P.  151, 187, 205, 209, 210, 212, 218, 219, 225, 227, 228, 303 Painted Ladies  209, 210, 303 Lennox, Duchess of  150 Lennox, Duke of  150 Lerer, S.  42, 258n. 82, 277n. 22 liberty  122 Liedtke, W.  133, 135, 286n. 92

323

Lilburne, J.  69, 263n. 100 Lipsius, J.  124 De Constantia  124 Politicorum Sive Civilis Doctrinae Libri Sex  124 Lloyd, D.  162, 196, 293n. 54, 304n. 12 Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty Charles II, The  162, 293n. 54 Locke, J.  85, 106, 121, 217, 232, 282n. 2, 296n. 117 Treatises on Government  85 Loewenstein, D.  9, 247n. 39, 248n. 54, 251n. 90, 252n. 100, 256n. 35, 299n. 44, n. 58 Logan, J.  202, 305n. 45 Lombart, P.  188 Long, T.  165, 169, 170, 294n. 82, 296n. 110, n. 115, 306n. 78 Lords Masque, The (masque)  132 Louis XI  48 Love, H.  36, 153, 256nn. 34–5, 287n. 119, 291n. 3, 310n. 69, 312n. 112, 313n. 117 Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England  36, 256n. 34, 291n. 3 Lovejoy, A. P.  173, 296n. 1 Great Chain of Being, The  173, 296n. 1 Lovell, T.  132, 285n. 85 Ludlow, E.  170, 190 Luther, M.  59, 108, 109 Machiavelli, N.  7, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 106, 115, 116, 118, 121, 124, 125, 126, 174, 176, 198, 282n. 2, 283n. 30 Discourses on Livy  48, 50 Prince, The  50, 116, 125, 126, 134, 283n. 30 McIlwain, C. H.  31, 34, 232, 254n. 2, 256n. 49, 276n. 7, 284n. 60, 308n. 19 Political Works of James I, The  31, 232, 256n. 49, 276n. 7, 284n. 60, 308n. 19 McKeon, M.  121, 282n. 5 Macpherson, J.  236, 237, 314n. 26, 315n. 33 Original Papers . . .  236, 315n. 33

324

INDEX

Magna Carta, the  85 Mandeville, B.  126, 127, 130, 139, 215, 287n. 120, 309n. 43 Fable of the Bees  127, 287n. 120, 309n. 43 Manningham, T.  166, 295n. 89 Solemn Humiliation. . ., A  166, 295n. 89 Marcus Aurelius  135, 136 Meditations  135 Marlorat, A.  59, 61, 261n. 11, nn. 25–30 Catholic Exposition upon the Revelation  61, 261n. 11, nn. 25–30 Marprelate, M.  62 Marshall, J.  36, 40, 42, 43, 256n. 36 Marshall, W.  177, 188 Marten, H.  137 Martin Marprelate tracts, the  113 Marvell, A.  27, 139, 217, 219, 224, 310n. 64 Account of the Growth of Popery. . ., An  219, 310n. 64 Last Instructions to a Painter, The  224 Mary (Tudor)  110, 215, 234 Mary, Virgin  147 Mather, C.  100, 102, 272n. 84, 274nn. 127–31, n. 136 American identity of  101 Magnalia Christi Americana  101, 274n. 127 Theopolis Americana  101, 274n. 129, n. 136 Mather, I.  99, 100, 102, 266n. 187, 273nn. 114–22 Heaven’s Alarm to the World  100, 273n. 120 Mystery of Israel’s Salvation, The  99, 273n. 114 Narrative of the Miseries of New England, A  100, 273n. 121 Necessity of Reformation, The  100, 273n. 118 Order of the Gospel. . ., The  100, 273nn. 123–5 Maurice, H.  165, 294n. 79 Maxwell, J.  92

May, T.  164, 294n. 71, 295nn. 104–5 Breviary of the History of Parliament  164, 294n. 71 Epitome of English History, An  168, 295n. 104 Mede, J.  68, 69, 70, 76, 79, 82, 83, 94, 101, 264nn. 108–10, 270n. 61, 271n. 62, 274n. 133 Clavis Apocalyptica  70, 83, 94, 270n. 61 Meggott, R.  164, 293n. 66 Melville, A.  90 Mildmay, W.  62 Millar, O.  13, 146, 249n. 70, 288n. 3, 289n. 29, 307n. 5 Miller, P.  98 Milton, A.  68, 263nn. 93–5 Milton, J.  24, 27, 32, 35, 69, 75, 122, 138, 139, 147, 158, 161, 165, 169, 170, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 191, 196, 212, 217, 220, 223, 226, 255n. 25, 282n. 3, n. 7, 289n. 40, 292n. 26, n. 39, 293n. 48, 298n. 23, nn. 29–30, n. 35, 299n. 64, 300n. 67, n. 76, nn. 82–3 nn. 85–93, 302n. 113–16, 303n. 145, n. 147, n. 149, 312n. 96 Brief Notes Upon a Late Sermon  181, 184 Comus  217, 220, 310n. 56 Defence of the English People  178 Eikonoklastes  161, 169, 185, 186, 188, 255n. 25, 292n. 26, n. 39, 293n. 49, 298n. 35, 302n. 113–16 First Defence  178, 183 Letter to a Friend  175 Paradise Lost  190, 212, 217, 220, 223, 226, 282n. 7, 303n. 149, 312n. 96 Proposals of Certain Expedients  175, 180 Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, The  175, 179, 180, 181, 184, 189, 299n. 57 Second Defence  179, 180, 182, 183, 187, 300n. 82

INDEX

Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, The  175, 177, 297n. 13, 298nn. 29–30 Miracle of Miracles. . ., A  161 monarchs, early modern  229–34 monarchy  164, 167, 178, 179, 181, 196, 207, 216, 221, 223 Monck, Colonel  179–80, 181, 190, 300n. 74 More, H.  76, 77, 266nn. 178–86 Apocalypsis Apocalypseosis. . .  76, 266nn. 178–84 More, R.  70 More, T.  230 Morgan, N.  134, 286nn. 96–8 Perfection of Horsemanship, The  134, 286nn. 96–8 Muggleton, L.  75, 76, 265n. 159–65 True Interpretation of . . . the Revelation, A  75, 265n. 159–65 Mulcaster, R.  133, 286n. 87 Mytens, D.  141, 143, 146, 147 Nairne, D.  235 Nalson, J.  198, 280n. 73, 294n. 71, 305n. 30 Napier, J.  61, 63, 66, 70, 90, 261n. 24, 262n. 47, 264n. 106, 269n. 30 Napier’s Narration. . .  69–70, 264n. 106 Plaine Discovery  63, 261n. 24, 262n. 47, 269n. 30 Revelation of Mr Brightman’s Revelation, A  70 Necessary Doctrine, A  6 Nemo Separet Quae Deus Coniunxit  43 Neptune’s Triumph (masque)  132 New Criticism  32 new historicism  3, 32, 40 new humanism  107 new Prayer Book (Charles I’s)  148 new realism  18 Newcomb, L.  11, 248n. 57 Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England  11, 248n. 57 Newton, I.  74, 101 No Popery but the Protestant Religion  165

325

Norbrook, D.  8, 175, 185, 246n. 27, 247n. 36, 252n. 100, 297n. 6, 301n. 106, 303n. 148 Northbrooke, J.  132, 285nn. 85–6 Oestreich, G.  124, 283n. 23, n. 26, 288n. 16 Ogilby, J.  194, 304n. 2, 311n. 80 Oldham, J.  219 Owen, S.  222, 223, 309n. 52, 312n. 92, n. 104 Oxenden, H.  195 Paetus, T.  124 Paget, Lord  150 Painted Ladies exhibition  307n. 2, 310n. 62, 311n. 88, 312n. 105, 313n. 120 Pareus  60 Parker, H.  159, 274n. 127, 292n. 30 Parkinson, D.  40, 44, 258n. 73 Parsons, R.  174 Patersone, J.  195 Patrizi, F.  114 Moral Method of Civil Policy, A  114 Patterson, B.  9, 92 Patterson, W. B.  37 Peake, R.  145 Peerson, M.  131, 285n. 74 Mottects  131, 285n. 74 Pelling, E.  164, 166, 167, 294n. 86, 295n. 91 Peltonen, M.  174, 246n. 27, 297n. 5 Classical Humanism and Republicanism. . .  246n. 27, 297n. 5 Pembroke, Earl of  150 Penn, W.  200, 305n. 27 England’s Present Interest Discover’d  198, 305n. 27 Pepys, S.  27, 210, 215, 220, 309nn. 39–40 Perkins, W.  60, 64, 65, 66, 91, 96, 261n. 20, 262nn. 58–73, 268n. 6, 270n. 37, n. 40 Godly and Learned Commentarie. . ., A  64, 261n. 20, 262nn. 58–73, 270n. 37, n. 40

326

INDEX

Perry, C.  7, 34, 37, 247n. 34, 254n. 5, 255n. 16, n. 18, 256n. 44 Perseus (database)  20, 251n. 97 Peter, H.  71 Philipps, F.  162, 293n. 56 Most Certain Truth Asserted, A.  162, 163, 293n. 56 Philips, K.  217 Phillips, F.  196, 197, 202, 304n. 16, 305n. 47 Pincus, S.  24, 252n. 111, 278nn. 41–2, 281n. 81 Plato  124, 125 Platonic love  157, 220 Plowden, E.  128, 129 Plutarch  48 Pocock, J. G. A.  20, 106, 121, 174, 251n. 98, 276n. 4, 282nn. 1–3, 297n. 5 political theology  128 Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, The (Lake and Pincus)  25 Pope, A.  82 Dunciad  82 Popish Plot, the  120, 164, 197, 200, 207, 208, 212 postmodernism  4, 17 Potter, L.  163, 293n. 58, 296n. 109 Price, J.  198, 199, 305n. 29 Protestantism  57, 66, 74, 78, 80, 123, 138, 169, 234 public sphere  25, 26 Puritanism  132, 136, 149, 164, 219, 220, 221, 227 Pym, J.  51 Raleigh, W.  183, 270, 301n. 96 Cabinet Council  183, 301n. 96 Ramsay, W.  203, 305n. 50 Gentleman’s Companion, The  203, 305n. 50 Ramsey, A.  69 Warning Come out of Babylon, A.  69 Ravenscroft, T.  131, 285nn. 75–6 Raymond, J.  113, 157, 159, 160, 263, 278, 291n. 12, 292n. 29 reception theory  38 Reeve, T.  119, 195, 196, 281n. 78, 304n. 7, n. 14

England’s Beauty  119, 195, 196, 281n. 78, 304n. 7, n. 14 Reformation, the  5, 9, 55, 57, 59, 62, 65, 80, 93, 108, 109, 174, 218, 232 Renaissance, the  39, 130, 138, 139, 154, 223, 229 representation  43, 137, 231 Charles I’s  146 of sexual restraint  136 republicanism  174, 176, 177, 185, 191 Restoration, the  17, 23, 24, 28, 52, 53, 75, 78, 99, 109, 119, 151, 162, 163, 164, 181, 193–208, 215, 221, 223 gender in restoration culture  201–3 politics and literary culture  203–6 tradition versus novelty  206–8 Revelation  59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 73, 74, 75, 78, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 98, 100, 269n. 10, 270n. 58, 272n. 90, 273n. 116, 274n. 138 James’s paraphrase  63 scepticism about  76–7 Revolution of 1688, the  1, 17, 80, 81, 120, 167, 168, 234 Reynolds, E.  138, 287n. 116 Treatise of the Passions  138, 287n. 116 Reynolds, J.  64, 151 rhetoric  106 Richards, J.  26, 253n. 121, n. 124, 254n. 128 Rickard, J.  7, 246n. 29 Riley, J.  205 Roberts, S.  11, 248n. 57 Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England  11, 248n. 57 Robinson, J.  134, 286n. 100 Essays or Observations Divine and Moral  134, 286n. 100 Rochester, Earl of  27, 139, 203, 218, 219, 220, 221, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 309n. 40, 310n. 70, 312n. 111, 313nn. 115–17 see Wilmot ‘Advice to the Painter’s Adviser’  227

INDEX

Poems on Several Occasions  226 ‘Ramble in St. James’s Park, A’  221 Rohan, Duke of  49, 50, 260n. 12, 260n. 13, n. 15 Romanticism  55 Royal Society, the  75, 87, 101, 139, 193, 196, 197, 201, 265n. 166, 274n. 131 Royal Subjects . . . (Fischlin and Fortier)  31, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 254n. 1, 255n. 11, n. 13, nn. 15–16, n. 20, n. 21, n. 23, n. 27, 256n. 36, n. 51, 257n. 58, 258n. 61, n. 73, n. 79, 259n. 96, 269n. 29, 270n. 46, 276n. 6 Rubens, P. P.  136, 141, 144, 157, 194 Rubin, J. S.  26, 253n. 122 Rump parliament, the  179, 180, 181, 184, 186, 301n. 98 Rushworth, J.  49, 50 Historical Collections  49 Russell, C.  13, 43 Russell, Lord  150 Rutherford, S.  97, 272n. 85 Due Right of Presbyteries, The  97, 272n. 85 Rymer, T.  207, 306n. 73 Sacheverell, H.  170 St Augustine  56, 59, 123, 125 St Jerome  59 St John  63, 86, 100 Sancroft, W.  69 Sanders, E.  11, 248n. 56 Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England  11, 248n. 56 Sauer, E.  11, 248n. 58 Books and Readers in Early Modern England (with Andersen)  11, 248n. 58 Saumaise, C.  178 Savile, H.  176 Schoenfeldt, M.  138, 252n. 100, 287nn. 114–15, nn. 117–18 Schurink, F.  26, 253n. 121, n. 124, 254n. 128 Scott-Warren, J.  26, 253n. 125

327

Scripture  56–7, 58, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71–2, 74, 75, 76, 80, 83, 86, 87, 89, 98, 99, 107, 108, 132, 272n. 90 as its own interpreter  63 Second Coming, the  74, 101 Seneca  124, 138, 283n. 21 Morals  124 sex,  as a form of royal representation  220 as a symbol of regulation  219 Shagan, E.  18, 21, 251n. 91, 253nn. 117–18 Shakespeare, W.  32, 36, 49, 129, 130, 138, 149, 174 Richard II  129 Winter’s Tale, The  36, 129 Sharpe, K.  1, 33, 243nn. 1–2, n. 5, n. 7, 244n. 9, n. 13, n. 17, 245n. 21, 246n. 31, 247n. 32, n. 35, nn. 43–7, 249nn. 72–3, 250nn. 80–2, 251nn. 95–6, 252n. 108, n. 110, 253n. 118, 254n. 4, nn. 129–30, 255n. 14, n. 20, 256n. 40, n. 54, 257n. 59, n. 71, 258n. 75, n. 77, n. 81, 259 n. 10, n. 87, n. 91, n. 95, 260n. 12, nn. 14–15, n. 23, 262n. 41, 263n. 97, n. 99, nn. 104–5, 266n. 202, 267n. 221, n. 232, 268n. 2, nn. 6–7, 270n. 46, 271n. 62, 272n. 103, 275n. 1, 276n. 5, nn. 8–9, n. 11, 277n. 28, 278n. 41, 279n. 60, 280n. 62, n. 64, n. 76, 281nn. 86–7, n. 90, 282nn. 2–3, 283n. 34, 286nn. 105–6, 287n. 113, 288n. 5, n. 7, n. 11, n. 19, 289n. 24, nn. 27–8, 290n. 54, 291n. 4, n. 11, n. 16, n. 21, 292n. 28, n. 31, n. 37, 295n. 97, 296n. 1, 298nn. 20–1, n. 33, 299n. 43, 302n. 112, n. 117, n. 122, 307nn. 10–11, 308n. 20, nn. 32–3, n. 38, 309n. 44, n. 46, 310n. 59, 311n. 77, n. 88, 312n. 91, n. 93, 313n. 9, 314n. 11, 314n. 17 Image Wars  18, 246n. 31, 275, 276n. 8, 286n. 106, 289n. 28, 290n. 48, 298n. 33, 302n. 112, n. 117, n. 122

328

INDEX

Personal Rule of Charles I, The  13, 249n. 69, 258n. 77, 263n. 97, n. 99, 280n. 70, 286n. 105, 287n. 113, 288n. 5, n. 11, 289n. 27, 291n. 11, 307n. 9, 309n. 46 Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (with Zwicker)  9, 247nn. 44–6, 260, 263n. 104, 267n. 232, 268n. 2, n. 7 Reading Revolutions  7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 16, 26, 38, 244n. 9, 247n. 32, n. 35, 254n. 4, 255n. 14, 256n. 54, 259n. 10, 260n. 12, n. 14, n. 23, 263n. 105, 268n. 4, 275, 276n. 5, n. 13, 291n. 5, 295n. 97, 298n. 21, 313 Remapping Early Modern England  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 17, 24, 27, 243, 244n. 13, 250n. 82, 254n. 4, n. 129, 257n. 59, 259n. 95, 262n. 41, 267n. 221, 270n. 46, 276n. 5, n. 9, 280n. 64, 291n. 4, 295, 298n. 33, 302n. 119, 314n. 11 Selling the Tudor Monarchy  18, 244n. 17, 246n. 31, 250n. 80, 252n. 108, 253n. 118, 275, 276n. 8, 313n. 7, n. 9 Sheldon, G.  196, 304n. 15 Dignity of Monarchy Asserted, The  196, 304n. 15 Sherlock, W.  169, 296n. 114 Sherman, W.  11, 12, 248n. 61 Used Books  11, 248n. 61 Sherwood, R.  185, 188, 301n. 105, 302n. 125, nn. 133–4, 303nn. 138–9 Sidney, P.  32, 130, 285nn. 66–8 Simon, T.  188 Skinner, Q.  20, 106, 121, 174, 244n.8, 246n. 27, 251n. 98, 257n. 59, 275n. 3, 276n. 4, 282nn. 1–3, 283n. 30, 297n. 5, n. 12, 298n. 14 Return of Grand Theory. . ., The  244n. 8 Smuts, M.  41, 44, 115 Socrates  48

Sommerville, J.  32, 34, 38, 41, 43, 246n. 30, 254n. 7, 257n. 57, 259n. 96, 276n. 7, 314n. 12 Spanish armada, the  62, 77, 88, 90 Spenser, E.  32, 113, 138 Sprat, T.  196, 201, 304n. 13, 305 History of the Royal Society  201, 304n. 13, 305n. 39, n. 44 Stainforth, W.  168, 295 Starkey, D.  215, 290, 309n. 45 Stent, P.  205 Stevens, P.  183, 184, 296, 301n. 97 Stoicism  124, 125 Strong, R.  110, 114, 155, 259n. 92, 277n. 24, 279nn. 52–4, 280n. 68, 285n. 71, n. 77, 288n. 9, 291n. 6, 308n. 31 Struther, W.  157, 291n. 15 Stuart, C.  184, 188 Suckling, J.  150, 221, 288n. 18 Swift, J.  81 Symmons, E.  160, 292n. 36 Vindication of King Charles, A.  160, 292 Tacitus  48, 49, 50, 115, 124 Taubman, M.  166, 294 Textuality and Materiality of Reading, The  27 Thirty Years’ War, the  41, 49, 68, 92, 156 Thomas, K.  20, 251n. 98, 253n. 120, 309n. 51 Thomson, R.  58, 64 Thorowgood, J.  95, 271n. 69 Tillinghast, J.  60, 71, 72, 74, 261n. 19, n. 22, 264nn. 124–30 Generation Work  71, 261, 264nn. 124–30 Tillyard, E. R.  173, 296n. 1 Elizabethan World Picture, The  173, 296n. 1 Titian  136, 142, 144, 145, 146 Adoration of the Kings  146 Adoration of the Magi  136 Emperor Charles V at Muhlberg, The  145 Toleration Act of 1689, the  80 Tonson, J.  226

INDEX

Townshend, A.  157 Albion’s Triumph  132, 157 Trapp, J.  70, 264n. 111–13 Trevelyan, G. M.  222 Triumph of Peace, The (masque)  145 Tullie, G.  169, 295n. 108 Turenne, Vicomte de  238–9 Turner, F.  165, 293n. 60, 294n. 77 Turner, J. G.  217, 299n. 44, 307n. 3, 308n. 15, 309n. 49, 310nn. 71–2, 312n. 107 Twisse, W.  70, 94 Van de Passe, W.  43 Van Dyck, A.  135, 136, 137, 141–51, 170, 187, 188, 210, 211, 214, 287n. 2, 288n. 3, 288n. 18, 290n. 50, 291n. 22 ‘absence’ in Charles portraits by  146 and Charles I  149 Charles I on Horseback  135, 145, 188 Continence of Scipio, The  144 Cupid and Psyche  137, 147, 288n. 3 Rinaldo and Armida  143 royal children, portraits of the  147, 148 Scipio  136–7 Self-portrait with a Sunflower  143 Van Dyck and Britain (exhibition)  287 Van Gelderen, M.  174, 246n. 27, 282, 297n. 5 Van Mander, K.  136 Van Somer, P.  145, 155 Van Voerst, R.  188 Vane, H.  182, 183, 184, 301n. 98 Venner, T.  75 Villiers, G.  156, 211 Virgil  113, 130 virtue  122, 136, 145 Seneca on  124 Vives, J. L.  47 Walker, R.  187 Waller, E.  221, 304n. 1, 311n. 74 ‘Instructions to a Painter’  221 Walton, I.  81 Compleat Angler  81

329

Waple, E.  79, 80, 261n. 18, 267n. 210 Book of the Revelation, The  79, 261n. 18, 267n. 210 Wark, R.  14, 249n. 76–7 Warkentin, G.  26, 254n. 127 Watson, J.  165 Memoirs of the Family. . .  165 Weber, H.  222, 246n. 26, 280n. 73, 311n. 89 ‘Representations of the King. . .’  246n. 26 Weil, R.  215, 219, 307, 308n. 35, 309n. 41, 310n. 68 Wells, E.  81, 82, 267nn. 229–30 Wentworth, T.  124, 125, 289n. 27 Wharton, Lord  150 Wheeler, E. S.  160, 162, 246n. 27, 259n. 89, 292n. 38, 293n. 53, 294n. 75 Whiston, W.  101 Whitaker, W.  225 Conspiracy, The  225 Whitgift, Archbishop  58 whoredom,  as popish  218 Wilkinson, J.  67, 68, 263n. 85 Exposition of the Thirteenth Chapter. . .  67, 263n. 85 William III (of Orange )  6, 14, 17, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 100, 167, 168, 169, 170, 226, 234, 240 as a protector  74, 77 Williams, P.  115, 279n. 57 Williamson, A.  90, 92, 261n. 10, 268 Wilmot, J.  28, 197, 226, 274n. 131, 312n. 111 Wilson, T.  165, 294n. 78 Martyrdom of King Charles I, The  294n. 78 Winthrop, J.  94, 98, 271n. 63 Wither, G.  191 Woman As Good As the Man, The (Poulain de La Barre)  203 Wood, A.  84 Woodroffe, B.  166, 295n. 87 Woolrych, A.  180, 264n. 123, 299n. 53, 300n. 68, 301n. 98 Worden, B.  175, 183, 297n. 7, 298nn. 14–15, n. 17, 299n. 44, 300n. 84, 301nn. 94–5

330

Works of Charles I, The  167 Wormald, J.  33, 255n. 29, 256n. 37, 257n. 68, 280n. 69 Wortham, S.  34, 36, 256n. 38 Wotton, H.  135, 286n. 104 Wren, M.  199, 305n. 35 Wycherly, W.  312n. 92 Country Wife, The  223, 312n. 92 Zagorin, P.  39, 257n. 64 Zakai, A.  94, 98, 270n. 60, 271n. 63, 273n. 106 Zaret, D.  113, 253n. 117, 278n. 42

INDEX

Zeno  124 Zwicker, S.  9, 81, 245n. 21, 247nn. 43–6, 252nn. 100–1, 253n. 115, 254n. 130, 259n. 89, n. 91, 260, 263n. 101, n. 104, 267nn. 232–3, 268nn. 1–2, n. 7, 292n. 38, 296, 308n. 16, n. 28, 311n. 75, 312n. 93, 313 Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (with Sharpe)  9, 247n. 44, 260, 263n. 104, 267n. 232, 268n. 2, n. 7