Kevin Sharpe was best known for his writings on early Stuart history, from his magnum opus, The Personal Rule of Charles I, to his methodologically innovative Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England. Before his untimely passing in 2011, he was contemplating a shift in focus to the later Stuart period, with plans afoot for biographical studies of Charles II and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Those works, regrettably, will now never appear. His final book leaves the reader with a profound sense of what we have lost and what might have been.

This study, the culmination of an ambitious trilogy on early modern representations of monarchy, might not have appeared at all had it not been for the labors of Mark Knights, who shepherded it through the press. It was preceded into print by Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (Yale, 2009) and Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (Yale, 2010), each volume topping five hundred pages in length. The shelves of Tudor-Stuart historians already groan under the weight of Sharpe's books, but this one deserves to join them.

Sharpe's ultimate theme was the ways in which early modern English monarchs sought to justify their rule to their subjects. The theme enabled him to play to his strengths, especially his knowledge of art history, his interest in court studies, and his magpie-like sampling of genres. The last volume in his trilogy moves beyond the civil wars into the later Stuart era, with successive treatments of the reigns of Charles II, James II, William and Mary, and Anne. Its coverage is immense and far-reaching. Sharpe scrutinizes a remarkably diverse array of writings, including speeches, proclamations, poems, histories, sermons, pamphlets, newspapers, and memoirs. He brings together the textual and the visual, examining depictions of royal power in paintings, medals, coins, prints, engravings, buildings, statues, rituals, and processions. Faced with such a feast, it seems churlish to ask for more, but it must be noted that this volume tends to neglect royal speeches that are found only in manuscript and have not been printed.

Throughout the volume, Sharpe criticizes the “Whig interpretation” of later Stuart history, by which he primarily means a historiography that has tended to minimize the popular impact of royal iconography. He is especially effective in demolishing the Whig view that the propaganda campaigns of James II were unsophisticated and unimpressive. But Sharpe, despite his critical comments about Whig history, is not a revisionist in the classic mode when it comes to the later Stuart period. Rather than emphasizing consensus and continuity, he charts change over time, detailing the growing influence of the print-based public sphere and the increasing partisanship of the English populace. This is by now a familiar story, and Sharpe largely adopts the earlier interpretations of scholars such as Mark Knights, Geoffrey Holmes, Tony Claydon, and Robert Bucholz.

The most appealing feature of Rebranding Rule is its comparative dimension across time. Sharpe is keenly aware of the ways in which the choices of the later Stuart monarchs either conformed to or departed from those made by their predecessors. The synoptic breadth of his knowledge is evident in every chapter, from the parallels he draws between the speeches of Queen Anne and Queen Elizabeth I to the contrasts he charts between the personalities of James II and Charles II. At certain points, Sharpe treats the kings and queens of England as though they were pictures hung in a gallery, noting similarities and differences between their personas and reputations in the manner of an art historian discussing a series of Holbeins and Van Dycks.

The great limitation of the book is its frequent lack of attention to questions of reception. Sharpe tends to offer only general comments about readership and viewership, even when we know a great deal about how a given piece was interpreted. For example, he describes William of Orange's spurious third declaration of autumn 1688 as a work that was “received as” the prince's own writing, without noting the controversy at the time over its authenticity (321, 327). But Sharpe's focus on production rather than reception is in its own way liberating. One advantage of this book is that it gets us beyond the usual set pieces and pamphlet wars that have been referred to time and again in the literature. Just because a work's reception cannot now be traced does not mean that it was not remembered. The slow accretion of panegyrical images of monarchy had its own effect on English opinion, sustaining a royalism so pervasive that it often failed to provoke comment. Sharpe's capacious vision reminds us that it was not only controversial works that had impact.