Detailed analysis of the speeches, political maneuvering, and internal struggle that led Oliver Cromwell in spring 1657 to reject the title of king is long overdue and a major contribution of this book. Woodford begins with Cromwell's kingship speeches (not printed until 1660), before turning to a careful parsing of the arguments of the parliamentary committee that sought to restructure the government, including restoring an upper house to check the power of the House of Commons, whose arbitrariness and potential for repression was shown in their savage punishment of Quaker James Naylor.

Woodford then turns to the absence of a debate over kingship in printed propaganda of spring 1657, suggesting that this debate—particularly Cromwell's own resistance to it—was deliberately kept out of the printed tracts, so as not to embolden the sectarians and republicans who were opposed to Cromwell's taking the crown. Woodford then gives an account of polemicist Marchamont Nedham, who served as writer of the official government newsbook, Mercurius Politicus, and printed only a selective account of the kingship crisis.

Later chapters extend the “kingship crisis” and reactions to “the growth of Cromwell's monarchial power” back to March 1654, just after the inception of the Protectorate. Much of this material is not new, given the recent interests of both literary scholars and historians in the revolutionary public sphere, republicanism, print, propaganda, visual culture, and political theory under Cromwell. But Woodford does offer new links and juxtapositions, breaking his writers into categories. He first considers “Cromwellian writers,” that is, prose writers on the government payroll, including Marchamont Nedham and John Milton. Woodford then moves to Cromwellian poets, both in manuscript and in print, followed by a comparison of monarchists who remained loyal to the Stuarts with those who reimagined kingship under Oliver.

Woodford's ensuing examination of religious or sectarian reactions to Cromwellian power, with an emphasis on divine judgment and on conscience, demonstrates how much Cromwell shared the language and vision of radical religious writers, an overlap that made Cromwell particularly uneasy when these writers disapproved of him. A thoughtful final chapter traces the coded advice and critique of James Harrington's Oceana, as he uses a fictional account and the figure of the Lord Archon to suggest what Cromwell should do and to put forward a detailed plan of a commonwealth, based on agrarian laws, balloting, and rotation.

An examination of print culture under Cromwell, particularly as relating to the question of kingship and the crisis of spring 1657, is welcome. Woodford has read widely and thoroughly in primary sources. Among the strongest and most original sections of the book are his detailed discussions of the selective and politically motivated printing of Cromwell's speeches. His material on the working of Thurloe's intelligence office, both in monitoring dissent and in helping to produce Cromwellian propaganda, is likewise fascinating and informative. His discussion of the highly charged political prose is often insightful and informative.

Woodford's study would have been strengthened, however, if he had provided a more complex and developmental frame, rather than reiterating that these writers react to Cromwellian monarchical power. Not enough distinctions are made between 1654, 1656, and 1657, and his definition of monarchical power is vague and even tenuous, initially based on Bulstrode Whitelocke's after-the-fact claim that Cromwell considered becoming king as early as 1652. Woodford seems determined to make every text a “kingship tract,” whether for or against, but sometimes the evidence that he cites tells a different or more complicated story. Andrew Marvell's finely nuanced First Anniversary, which depicts continental monarchs puzzling over Cromwell's status (“Abroad a king he seems, and something more, / At home a subject on the equal floor”), is read as a simple advocacy of monarchical power. Milton's turning to the people themselves to warn against luxury is turned into a comment on Cromwell. The supple Nedham becomes a monarchist. Harrington's economic model is subordinated to his implicit opinions on kingship. It is clear that some writers depicted Cromwell as a king—often in mockery—from the civil wars on and that kingship questions were at their most intense in spring 1657. What is less clear is whether all of the widely divergent print and visual materials on Cromwell can most usefully be read under the rubric of reactions to Cromwellian monarchical power.

Further, by minimizing and sometimes not fully engaging earlier scholarly discussion on this lively and diverse Cromwellian literature, especially on such figures as Milton, Marvell, Harrington, Nedham, and Trapnel, Woodford to some extent limits his own valuable contribution. Some of his final conclusions—for example, the public was not passive but active in debating Cromwellian kingship; print culture and high politics must be examined together—are valid but unsurprising and could have been usefully complicated or expanded in dialogue with recent scholarship.

This book is strongest and most compelling on the hitherto little examined spring 1657 debates in which Cromwellian kingship came to the fore. And it juxtaposes Cromwellian writers throughout the 1650s in new and intriguing ways. If readers may sometimes wish for a more nuanced interpretive lens, they will nonetheless still appreciate and learn from the thoughtful discussion of diverse and multiple writings. Woodford's analysis of Cromwellian print culture is particularly timely because a long-needed scholarly edition of Oliver Cromwell's own voice in his writings is in preparation from Oxford University Press.