Study “the symbolics of power,” Clifford Geertz once wrote, and “the easy distinction between the trappings of rule and its substance becomes less sharp, even less real; what counts is the manner in which, a bit like mass and energy, they are transformed into each other” (“Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology [New York, 1983], 121–46, 124). Kevin Sharpe’s epic trilogy on the Tudor-Stuart “symbolics of power” is an incredibly ambitious attempt to rewrite the history of early modern monarchical authority by exploring the cultural forms that represented, legitimated, and questioned it. It is a major achievement and compellingly realizes the promise of the new kind of political history that Geertz’s remarks endorsed. Volume 2 of the trilogy returns Sharpe to his old Early Stuart stamping ground and showcases well his scholarly virtues—a theoretically informed interdisciplinary method, creative close readings of a broad variety of sources, and a taste for bold argument and historiographical combat. The book is learned and inventive, lucidly argued and exhaustively documented, definitive in places, and helpfully speculative in others. Often controversial, it intervenes in crucial debates and opens up new areas for research. It is a volume to be pondered over, argued with, and enthusiastically welcomed.

Sharpe divides his analysis into five chronological units—on James I, Charles I to 1640, the Civil Wars, the Republic, and the Protectorate—with each unit subdivided into chapters devoted to a different media form (written, visual, and ritual) through which political authority was represented. Sharpe explores a staggering range of material. The chapters on written representations of authority survey the treatises, speeches, proclamations, and prayers issued in the ruler’s name, as well as the panegyrics of poets, preachers, and historians. The chapters on visual representation explore paintings, woodcuts, courtly buildings, coins, battle standards, and royal seals. And the chapters on ritual and ceremony consider royal entries and Lord Mayors’ shows, progresses, coronations, ambassadorial receptions, political funerals, and courtly formalities. Each chronological section concludes with a short chapter on the counterrepresentations that challenged or subverted images of authority. The structure has its drawbacks—most important, it renders impossible sustained, synchronic analysis of the interaction of images of authority in multiple media at any given point in time—but generally it works well to showcase not only Sharpe’s particular interpretations of individual kings and regimes but also his broader claims.

These claims recur throughout the study. Sharpe identifies a number of legitimating discourses at work across this period. Religion, unsurprisingly, was a crucial resource. Images of a ruler’s confessional orthodoxy, personal piety, and providential favor and representations of the ruler acting as spiritual teacher, biblical exegete, or head of the Church were crucial to the construction of authority. Blood, lineage, family, marriage, fecundity, and the performance of normative gender roles also mattered intensely. Rulers mobilized imperial motifs, both Roman and British, and laid claim to a wide range of legitimating virtues—learning, peacemaking, chivalry, justice. Perhaps the crucial goal was to craft an image that suggested distance and accessibility, that mixed mystery with popularity, and that combined awe with affection. But two inherited structural problems complicated the work of claiming, performing, and legitimating authority. A dynamic and spasmodically expanding public sphere in which images of authority were circulated, consumed, and contested made the performance of authority subject to a growing public’s critical judgment. And a legacy of unresolved religious division undermined the legitimating force of religious languages and gestures, leaving rulers’ authority endemically vulnerable to religious dissent.

Sharpe supplements these broad claims with lively interpretations of individual regimes and with arguments that link the analysis of “image wars” to long-standing debates about the origins, nature, and consequences of the midcentury revolution. Different regimes emphasized different techniques for projecting and constructing authority. James I “regarded his words … as the expression and mainstay of his authority” (17) and was, perhaps to his cost, much less interested than his predecessor or successor in using visual imagery to legitimate his power. Yet, Sharpe argues, this writer king also used ceremony and royal progress more often and more cannily than we sometimes assume. From the mid-1610s, however, James’s authority was under significant strain. Sharpe contends that libelous depictions of James’s male favorites and scandalous court tarnished the king’s image, and James’s taste for argument made him a contested disputant within the growing public sphere, rather than an uncontestable authority above it.

Sharpe’s chapters on Charles I explore whether the king’s image making compromised rather than projected his authority and thus contributed to the regime’s collapse. Other scholars have certainly thought so, diagnosing Caroline court culture as dangerously insular or escapist, too foreign or too popish. More recently, Judith Richards has argued that Charles neglected crucial public ceremonies like the royal progress and touching of the sick, costing his monarchy popular support. Sharpe takes a different approach. Deeply impressed by his experience in Spain in 1623, and deeply disturbed by the tumultuous politics of the later 1620s, Charles favored “ceremonial decorum and visual representation over discourse and debate” (142). This withdrawal from “discourse and debate” cost Charles the chance to argue for the more controversial policies of the personal rule, Sharpe suggests, and by the time the king realized the power of the printed royal word, it was too late to reestablish fully his regime’s authority. Yet Sharpe also stresses the successes of Charles’s image making. His analysis of Charles’s collaboration with Van Dyck, the artist who discovered how to “figure” the king “as the literal embodiment of the values which underpinned his kingship” (197), is particularly compelling, and he notes the circulation of royal visual imagery beyond the narrow confines of court. Sharpe also astutely shows how the loving and fertile royal marriage, represented in visual, theatrical, poetic, and ritual imagery, became a potent metaphor for good government as well as a literal guarantee of dynastic continuity. Sharpe’s critique of Richards’s thesis dominates his analysis of Caroline public ceremonial; he successfully establishes that the king “used a variety of state occasions to present and re-present himself to the people” but concedes that Charles’s failure to make an entry into London at, or soon after, his coronation was a “miscalculation” (234).

Ultimately, these chapters do a better job explaining how Charles could still muster authority in 1641–42 than how he had lost so much authority in the first place. A short chapter on “demystifying majesty” privileges Puritan critiques but ignores issues highlighted in his analysis of James I. Sharpe does not explore whether, like his father, Charles was compromised by attacks on his favorite, Buckingham, and he somewhat neglects the symbolic costs of royal uxoriousness when the royal consort was both Catholic and French. He makes a surprisingly strong case that Charles’s belated 1641 ceremonial entry into London delivered a major boost to a compromised royal authority, but he never fully explains the legitimation crisis that had turned London’s streets into arenas for mass protest. “Charles raised his standard [in 1642] because he could not command obedience to monarchy,” Sharpe writes. “His enemies fought because they could not sufficiently undermine it” (276). This is nicely put, but we need to know more about the first half of the equation.

Sharpe analyzes the Civil Wars as a partisan “battle of representation” in which “paper bullets,” visual images, rituals, and counterrituals all attempted to construct and contest political authority. His chapters develop a series of key arguments: that a radically expanded public sphere and proliferating forms of new media fractured the authority of the word, leaving the individual reader as the only “judge of opinion” (337); that nonroyal actors seeking to manufacture images of authority inevitably borrowed from (and thus depended on) traditionally royal forms and motifs; and that in 1647, the defeated king began to rebuild his authority, deploying various media to make “his own person, and his roles as husband, father and king—and finally martyr—his greatest asset” (284).

Sharpe’s readings of Charles’s trial, execution, and immediate “re-sacralization” in the pages of Eikon Basilike are among the strongest and most provocative in the book. “Power sent the king to his death,” Sharpe argues, “but his words at his trial, on the scaffold, and in print on the day of his execution, were … to wield a force … that destroyed the republic as it was born and represented monarchy as the only polity for England” (384). Charles lost his head, but monarchy won the image war. Sharpe’s bravura analysis of Eikon Basilike beautifully exposes the book’s representation of Charles as man of conscience, godly priest king, and Christlike martyr, the touchingly human husband and father. Could the new regime have countered the damage the book inflicted? Could the Republic have crafted a set of authoritative and legitimating images, scripts, and rites? Following Sean Kelsey, Sharpe acknowledges that eventually the regime did attempt to fashion its own authority. Undermined, however, not only by the dead king’s cult but also by the charismatic Cromwell, the Republic failed “to devise and disseminate discourses and symbols that established a legitimacy and erased the authority of monarchy” (460).

At times, Sharpe makes Charles’s (and monarchy’s) posthumous triumph too complete, and he might have done more with the literature that demystified monarchy and defended regicide in the early 1650s. Yet monarchy’s symbolic hegemony again dominates as Sharpe turns his focus to the Protectorate. Cromwell’s rule, Sharpe argues, was primarily represented through “regal forms,” “modes of language, visual representations and public performances that made it appear quasi-monarchical” and that “refashioned the political culture so as to make kingship once again—and not only to Royalists—acceptable; even, to many, desirable” (467). The analysis is characteristically wide-ranging and forceful, but one wonders whether a slight adjustment of approach might allow an alternative interpretation. Too insistent a focus on creeping monarchism or debt to “regal forms” may not adequately capture the complex, polyvalent image constructed by and around Cromwell. Clearly, Cromwell’s image borrowed motifs and genres from the royal repertoire, but the evolving image was a hybrid of old and new, monarchical and resolutely nonmonarchical, elements. At what point might old regal forms situated in new symbolic contexts—inaugurations, for example, without crown, anointment, sacred setting, or ecclesiastical actors—have lost their monarchical aura and become something new?

Sharpe ends this marvelous book with a glance ahead. “In 1660 the ambiguous legacies of a revolution which had seen monarchy both destroyed and raised to its most sacred heights made the art of representing regality, if more problematic, more vital than ever to survival” (543). The reader of this towering volume is left eagerly awaiting the final, post-Restoration conclusion to this fascinating cultural history of the trappings and substance of power.