Loyal addresses were documents that praised authority. Subscribed by the members of a local community or corporate body, they were intended to express support for the lord protector, monarch, or parliament. They first emerged under the Cromwellian Protectorate and were subsequently produced to celebrate the accession of Stuart monarchs or to express loyalty during moments of political crisis. For obvious reasons, governments often welcomed them. They represented, at least to some extent, a means to tame subscriptional activity, which had gotten out of hand during the mass petitioning campaigns of the 1640s, and to bring it under central control. Governments often encouraged the production of loyal addresses, then publicized them as evidence of popular support.

As Edward Vallance shows in this important and wide-ranging monograph, addresses were much more interesting and ambiguous documents than they might initially seem. Although they were ostensibly intended to flatter authority, addresses could also express discontent and give unsolicited counsel. They did not always support the ruler unequivocally, but often used ambiguous language that stopped short of unconditional endorsement. Like petitions, they could make demands of the recipient as well as praising them, implying a reciprocal relationship between ruler and ruled. Although there may have been some degree of government coordination, they were never simply orchestrated by the political center. Loyalty was often a genuine and spontaneous popular sentiment. Individuals might also subscribe to addresses simply to secure peace and stability at the local level or to avoid reprisals.

The decision to subscribe or not to subscribe was often a difficult one. Addresses, like oaths, could be used to identify real or perceived opponents of the regime. At the same time, those who lavished praise on a new ruler were often mugged by history. The fact that someone had subscribed to an address expressing loyalty to Richard Cromwell could taint their reputation decades after his short-lived rule came to an end.

One of the strengths of the book is that Vallance does not limit his attention to the addresses themselves, but considers a wider range of material (including diaries, correspondence, parliamentary debates, and polemical works) to understand how they were produced and interpreted. He also examines manuscript copies of addresses to explore the social depth of subscription and the ways in which addresses changed in the process of redrafting. The range of methods Vallance employs is similarly diverse. In the final chapter, he uses computer software to analyze the language and word frequency of collections of addresses, demonstrating that Tory addresses employed a more emotional language of loyalty than did similar Whig documents.

One of the book's recurring themes is the tension between quality and quantity. Mass subscription campaigns demonstrated wide public support, but they also provoked accusations of rabble-rousing and invited unwelcome comparison with the petitioning campaigns of 1641. As a result, from 1660 onwards, loyal addresses increasingly based their claims to authority on the high social status of their subscribers, rather than sheer numbers.

Another important theme is the way in which loyal addresses created a public memory of subscriptional activity. Collections and histories of addressing undermined the authority of the genre by reminding readers that the public had seemingly supported various mutually contradictory causes in the past. The speed with which the people appeared to switch their allegiance from Richard Cromwell, who was greeted with enthusiastic addresses on his accession, to Charles II, who was the subject of even more delirious praise less than two years later, invited scorn. By fixing claims to loyalty in print, addresses demonstrated how unreliable they could be. The surprising thing is that the genre remained viable for as long as it did. In fact, as Vallance shows, individuals who addressed different rulers were not as inconsistent in their loyalties as they seemed.

One of the book's major arguments is that a substantial consensus about the parameters of legitimate subscriptional activity had emerged by the end of the seventeenth century, with both Whigs and Tories coming to believe in the basic legitimacy of petitions and addresses, and arguing that they should be properly regulated. There is a great deal to be said for this idea. Nevertheless, Vallance might have been a little clearer about the precise nature of this consensus and the timing of its emergence. For much of the period covered by this book, the differences between Whigs and Tories about the limits of legitimate subscriptional activity seem more striking than do the similarities. During the Exclusion Crisis, for instance, many Tories seem to have opposed any subscriptional activity that was not supported by the government. While Whigs supported petitions presented to Parliament, and opposed addresses presented to the king, Tories did the opposite. The major point of agreement here seems to have been that “our” petitions or addresses are good and “yours” are bad.

While both sides seem to have increasingly agreed that “tumultuous” petitioning was illegitimate, it is not clear when this was not the case. Vallance points out that the 1661 Act regulating “tumultuous” petitions followed a precedent set by an ordinance from 1648, but the leadership of the House of Commons had arguably already begun to turn against mass petitioning in February 1642, and suppressed the royalist “peace” petitioning campaign the following year. Of course, even in 1641, almost nobody advocated “tumultuous” petitioning as such. Instead, supporters of parliament often claimed that their petitions represented the views of the better sort and were presented in an orderly manner—even if this claim was not always entirely convincing. While Vallance might have adopted a slightly longer historical perspective, the book remains a stimulating and methodologically diverse contribution to the debate on “public sphere” politics in the later seventeenth century.