In his answer to Parliament's demands in the nineteen propositions in 1642, Charles I lamented that if he acceded, “We may be waited on bare-headed; We may have Our hand kist; The Style of Majestie continued to Us; And the kings Authoritie, declared by both Houses of Parliament, may be still the Style of your Commands; We may have Swords and Maces carried before Us, and please Our Self with the sight of a Crown and Scepter … but as to true and reall Power We should remain but the outside, but the Picture, but the signe of a King.”Footnote ¹ The king's answer posited a clear separation between the outward form and style of monarchy, and the substance of royal power. The former, Charles and his advisers suggested, could be maintained even while the latter was being drained away.

However, the evident fear that rituals might become an empty show was counterbalanced by the obvious importance attached to gesture in the early modern period, especially in demarcating and enforcing social and sexual hierarchy. Conduct books were preoccupied with correct bodily deportment. In more explicitly political ways, the body could be used to demonstrate and display loyalty: in the genuflections that accompanied the taking of oaths and covenants; in the kissing of hands, as a sign both of submission and of loyalty; and in the making of loyal healths.Footnote ² The significance of gesture looms particularly large during the capture of James II by Kentish fishermen in December 1688. The treatment of the king by his subjects is suggestive of the ways in which the ceremonial aspects of gesture could become problematic once there had been a very clear cleavage between the authority a gesture was supposed to represent and the substance of that authority itself.Footnote ³ This episode could be fitted into a Whiggish narrative of the desacralization of monarchy (bundled together perhaps with other ominous signs such as the moment when James II's crown slipped from his head at his coronationFootnote ⁴). However, this article will suggest instead that it offers qualified support to James C. Scott's thesis that displays of obedience and submission through both speech and gesture were often strategic and concealed a “hidden transcript” that allowed the less powerful to retain a “voice under domination.”Footnote ⁵

Gesture has been a source of interest for twentieth- and twenty-first-century sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists.Footnote ⁶ One of the leading authorities on gestural communication, Adam Kendon, has defined gesture as a “label for actions that have the features of manifest deliberate expressiveness.”Footnote ⁷ However, although there is evidence that in early modern England, observers distinguished between actions born of the will and those that were the product of habit or involuntary reflex, discussions of gesture in this period largely blurred the distinction between voluntary and involuntary motions.Footnote ⁸ For early modern writers, gesture meant the posture and deportment of the whole body, not merely specific conscious physical movements. John Bulwer, the first English author to complete a thorough study of gestural language, Chirologia: Or, The Natural Language of the Hand (1644), argued that it was vital to be able to understand the signs of the whole body: “For the lineaments of the body do disclose the disposition and inclination of the mind in general, but the motions of the countenance and parts do not only so, but do further disclose the present humour and state of the mind and will. For … as the tongue speaketh to the ear, so the gesture speaketh to the eye.”Footnote ⁹ According to Bulwer, the connection between bodily movement and the will was so strong that it was almost impossible for some gestures to be feigned. Of the lifting up of hands to God in prayer, he said, “This outward addition or adjunct of piety, the opening and lifting up of the hands is a natural manifestation of the uprightness and integrity of the heart, and of the sincerity of the affections, For deceit naturally hath no will, though hypocrisy sometimes may affect to dilate and extend the hand.”Footnote ¹⁰ For Bulwer, bodily gesture, in the case of prayer, formed a virtuous circle, at once embodying and extending the pious feelings that had prompted the action in the first place.Footnote ¹¹

Gesture, then, revealed not just the communicative intent of the actors but also their moral and emotional state. As gentility itself was regarded as a moral quality in this period, gesture was taken as a vital indicator of social status. Conduct books repeatedly contrasted the “rustical,” even “bestial,” “gesticulation” of the lower classes with the refined gesture of the upper echelons of society. In one of the earliest works on civility of this kind, Erasmus's De Civilitate (translated into English by Robert Whittington in 1554), the humanist repeatedly warned against using gestures favored by “slutish personnes”: wiping one's nose on one's sleeve was a habit of “fishmongers” best avoided, chewing bones should be left to “dogges,” and winking was a vulgar habit of mere “craftsmen.”Footnote ¹²

There was a closely observed code of gestural behavior governing the interaction of different social classes. The authors of conduct books emphasized that inferiors were to appear clean and washed before their superiors, they were not to speak unless spoken to, they were not to fidget or touch their hair or their bodies while being addressed, they were not to invade their masters’ personal space, and they were not to affront them in other ways, such as by leaning on their furniture.Footnote ¹³ These rules were to be observed not only between members of the same household but also in interactions with strangers, especially when greeting superiors. Inferiors were expected to observe “hat honour,” removing their headgear in the presence of their betters and directing their gaze to the ground, rather than insultingly looking the other person in the eye.Footnote ¹⁴ Cases brought before the Court of Chivalry in the reign of Charles I reveal that gestures as well as words could profoundly insult noble and gentle honor. The Essex gentleman George Badcock of Great Bentley brought a suit against Abraham Comyns not only for uttering “contumelious” words to Badcock but also for refusing to take his hat off in Badcock's presence and for later mockingly bowing to Badcock in church.Footnote ¹⁵ The Glastonbury alehouse keeper William Brodripp was brought before the court not only for saying he was “as good a gentleman” as Thomas Brooke but also because he “held out his face and gnashed his teeth at him.”Footnote ¹⁶ The court itself clearly felt it needed to pay close attention to whether insulting words were accompanied by offensive gestures.Footnote ¹⁷

The historiography of gesture in the early modern period has mainly concentrated on its role in defining and policing social boundaries.Footnote ¹⁸ Herman Roodenburg has noted that a crucial aspect of conduct manuals was the way in which they strengthened and crystallized “social hierarchy, engraving its codes even on the body, on its comportment and gestures.”Footnote ¹⁹ Gesture, in the broadest sense, reflected and enforced power relationships. Antoine de Courtin wrote that “all our actions in respect of other persons, are either absolute and independent, or dependant according to the difference of superiority, equality or inferiority. To the first all things are lawful, because they command the others; and having no right to censure, the inferior must be contented to suffer. The second are at liberty among themselves; but the third are more particularly obliged to the Rules of modesty.”Footnote ²⁰ As Courtin suggested, the appropriateness of a gesture was dependent upon context and audience: familiarity in demeanor displayed by an inferior to a superior was a gross insult; however, if the roles were reversed, a show of informality by a master to his servant bestowed a great honor upon the inferior while reflecting the humility of the superior.Footnote ²¹ As Anna Bryson has put it, the “superior is formally in control of the demeanour of the inferior.”Footnote ²²

However, despite its obvious importance in regulating the social order, the use of gesture as a form of political communication remains relatively unexplored. Historians working across the early modern period have picked up on the significance of seditious speech, either as evidence of the existence of a hidden transcript of plebeian resistance to authority, or as a means of accessing popular beliefs around monarchy, or as proof of the connections between the mass of the English population and early modern news networks.Footnote ²³ There has, as yet, been no equivalent work relating to gesture. To some extent, the emphasis in current historiography upon speech or the written word reflects the legal structures in place to deal with sedition in early modern England. There were laws against seditious speech and against seditious libel, but none passed specifically punishing incendiary gestures.Footnote ²⁴ Yet, although there were no obvious statutory restraints on gesture in the way that there were for speech and writing, gesture was a significant part of political communication. Sir Thomas Elyot in his Boke Named the Governor was clear that true majesty was signaled through correct bodily deportment, by an “honourable and sober demeanour,” rather than a “haughty or fierce countenance.”Footnote ²⁵ Majesty and authority could be equally insulted, challenged, and threatened by gesture as by speech or by writing. In 1549, a royal herald sent to deliver a final offer of pardon to the Norfolk rebels at their encampment on Mousehold Heath was the object of a very clear gesture of defiance. Alexander Neville's 1572 history of the rebellion described how the herald was confronted by “an ungracious boy, putting down his breeches, [who] shewed his bare buttocks, and did a filthy act: adding thereunto more filthy words.” Although the scene appears comical, the swift and fatal response to the boy's actions delivers a sobering reminder of how seriously such gestural affronts to authority were taken. Neville recorded that following the boy's actions, “at the indignity whereof, a certaine man being moved (for some of our men were on the river, which came to behold) with a bullet from a pistol, gave the boy such a blow upon the loines, that sodainely stroke him dead.”Footnote ²⁶

Such vivid examples of political insult through gesture are rare. Reconstructing the politics of gesture, however, is not an impossible task. In the early modern period, the monarch's body (mystical and corporeal) was both the hinge and hub of loyalty and allegiance.Footnote ²⁷ Actual physical contact between the monarch and the people was a vital component in sustaining the bonds of loyalty between ruler and ruled. As a consequence, “close encounters” between kings and the commonality were less unusual than is often assumed: Anna Keay has estimated that some 2 percent of the entire English population in the reign of Charles II were touched for the king's evil.Footnote ²⁸ The “captivity” of James II was, of course, an extreme and, on the king's part, unbidden instance of close physical interaction between subjects and sovereign. It nonetheless reveals how the breach of the king's personal space was not merely invasive but had overtly political ramifications, disrupting the supposed sanctity of the monarch's body.

While effectively held captive in the Kentish port of Faversham from 11 to 14 December, James suffered a series of physical indignities to his person that he seems never to have forgotten. We have five different accounts of James's first flight, mostly written by those sympathetic to the king's plight. All five accounts remained unpublished until after the Glorious Revolution. The publicly available news about the king's abortive escape, in printed and manuscript newsletters, was extremely sketchy. James's capture only became widely known on 15 December, a fact that only added to the tension of such an uncertain political situation.Footnote ²⁹ The best known of these five accounts comes from the memoirs of the Jacobite peer Thomas Bruce, second earl of Ailesbury.Footnote ³⁰ Other narratives are provided by the Kent MP Sir John Knatchbull; Captain Thomas Southouse, mayor of Faversham; and Richard Marsh, the Faversham brewer who first identified the king.Footnote ³¹ We also have an anonymous account of the king's capture, which is by far the most explicit in describing the physical insults that James was subjected to.Footnote ³² While there are some differences between the narratives, all attend to the politically loaded nature of the gestural communication between the king and his captors.

Terrified by anti-Catholic rioting in London on the night of 10 December 1688, James fled the capital, accompanied by two trusted army officers, Sir Edward Hales and Ralph Sheldon. The king's flight, and his order to his commander in chief Feversham to disband his Catholic Irish troops without disarming them first, turned public anxiety into mass hysteria. The so-called Irish Fright unleashed a wave of anti-Catholic panics across the country.Footnote ³³ In the capital, a hastily convened council of peers struggled to maintain order, leading to the appointment of William of Orange as defender of the realm, bringing the Dutch prince a step closer to the English throne. This unique political situation, with a temporary republican government holding power under the protection of a foreign head of state, undoubtedly had a significant impact on James's treatment during his brief captivity. A key argument used for giving William and Mary the throne was that James's flight had been an abdication.Footnote ³⁴ Similarly, some of the king's captors may have believed that James had, through his actions, already lost his regal authority.

The king and his companions were seized in Kent as James's escape craft was boarded by a group of seamen and musketeers who had been searching the area around Sheerness for a “prize.”Footnote ³⁵ Hales, well known and little-liked locally, was quickly recognized by the seamen. The three gentlemen were intimately searched by the sailors, with the king most closely inspected of all. (James's “breaches were undone & examined for secret treasure, so indecently as even to the discovery of his nudities.”)Footnote ³⁶ The search of the king's person was conducted by a sailor called Harry Moon, whose zeal in his task even unsettled some of his fellow seamen. Moon not only physically humiliated James but also cursed him to his face.Footnote ³⁷ At this point, it is usually accepted that the seamen did not know the king's identity, believing instead that he was a fleeing Jesuit priest. The sailors reportedly called him “old Rogue, ugly, lean-jawed hatchet-faced Jesuite, popish dog.”Footnote ³⁸

The harsh treatment continued as the boat was landed at Faversham at ten o’clock the following morning—while Hales and Sheldon, recognized for gentlemen, were carried ashore, the king was forced to wade through the shallow water to get to dry land.Footnote ³⁹ The current mayor, Captain Thomas Southouse, and several other gentlemen met them.Footnote ⁴⁰ The musketeers and seamen remained hostile to their prisoners, Sir John Knatchbull later reporting that they had pitchforks and muskets thrust in their faces, before being bundled into the carriage.Footnote ⁴¹ The three men were then taken to the Queen's Arms inn. At this point, as James disembarked from the coach, he was recognized by the brewer Richard Marsh. Marsh reported that, as soon as the king's identity was revealed, the assembled gentlemen “owned him for their sovereign,” while the mayor, Southouse, fell to his knees in order to kiss the hand of his monarch. Seeing this sign of loyalty and submission, the watching crowd reportedly cried “the King, the King.”Footnote ⁴²

Here the account of James's captivity presented by the Earl of Ailesbury and the other narratives significantly diverge. Ailesbury reported that from this moment on, the seamen acted as a loyal guard to the king, staying up all night to ensure that none “should touch so much as a hair on the king's head.”Footnote ⁴³ It must be remembered, however, that Ailesbury only arrived in Faversham late on the evening of 13 December, once the king had been moved from the inn to the mayor's house. The other accounts consistently present a different and far more negative picture of James's treatment by the seamen and commonality in Faversham, with some narratives suggesting a class divide between the gentlemen and the “rabble” in their attitudes to their monarch.

The anonymous account suggests that the revelation of James's identity only led the seamen to guard their “prize” even more closely, as they became convinced that the gentlemen of the town were attempting to hatch a plan to allow the king to escape (a contention supported by Southouse's and Knatchbull's version of events). It was reported that when the Earl of Winchelsea, who visited James on the night of the twelfth, attempted to get the king moved to the mayor's residence, “great opposition was made by the Seamen, & as the K. passed down the stairs, swords were drawn & threatening expressions used by the guards.” The seamen only allowed James to be moved to Southouse's residence when it was agreed that they could accompany him.Footnote ⁴⁴

At the mayor's house, James passed a slightly more pleasant evening, condescending to allow the gentlemen of the town to dine with him. But the next morning he faced fresh assaults upon his dignity as he sat in the window. When the East Kent gentry read out the Prince of Orange's declaration, the surrounding crowd vociferously cheered.Footnote ⁴⁵ Inside, the king was as closely guarded as ever and his personal space no more respected than it had been on board the ship; some of the seamen guarded James “so narrowly, that tis said they followed him up to his Devotions, nay were so indecent as to press near him in his retirement for nature.”Footnote ⁴⁶ When, by the evening of the thirteenth, Ailesbury had reached the king, he reported that James's room was “filled with men, women and children, and talking as if they had been at a market.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Unshaven and unwashed, James cut a pathetic figure, reminding Ailesbury of the portrait of the king's father, Charles I, made during his trial. By the following morning, 14 December, the lifeguard under the command of the Earl of Feversham, sent out to the king by the Council of Peers, had reached Rochester. After suspicions about the earl's orders were finally allayed, James left Faversham for what turned out to be his final visit to London.Footnote ⁴⁸

The memory of his captivity was clearly a painful one for the king. James excluded “all … who offered personal indignity to us at Faversham” from a royal pardon issued in exile in 1692.Footnote ⁴⁹ A pamphlet published in the same year gave an account of the king's thoughts on “being forc’d a Shore, from his Vessel near Feversham, and the Tumultuous Insolency of the Rabble, and the ill Treatment His Majesty received from them there.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Here James compared his travails with the torments suffered by Christ on Calvary: “Sometimes they furiously seize on his Person and haul and drag him along the Streets: At last they all conspire to take away his Life; and condemn him to a sharp and cruel Death. … Say now, my Soul, for when thy dearest Lord indur’d all this, and infinitely more: Canst thou complain of thy little Troubles, and Affronts by the Mobilie, when the king of Glory was thus afflicted. Canst thou complain of thy meanly furnisht House and Vessel, when the Son of God had not where to lay his Head.”Footnote ⁵¹

The obvious trauma that the king suffered during his short captivity in Faversham was not only derived from his morbid belief that there was a conspiracy to kill him but also from the disruption to the usual gestural codes of authority and loyalty while he stayed at the Queen's Arms inn and the mayor's house. The king's reduced circumstances forced changes to the bodily deportment of even those who remained loyal to him. Ailesbury, having shortly arrived at the mayor's house after a long ride, reflected that he could not kneel before the king “by reason of my jack-boots.”Footnote ⁵² The earl had already noted the inappropriate chatter of the people within the mayor's house (when they should have stood silent before their superior), and he also discussed the king's difficulties in dressing, washing, and feeding himself in the absence of his usual retinue of servants: “The King being thus destitute, and no person to serve him, Doctor St. Johns, a most worthy man and civil lawyer, came from his house near to that place and offered his service and lay in the King's room until I came, and Mr Platt [an innkeeper] … served him in the nature of Page of the Back Stairs, and he helped to dress him.”Footnote ⁵³

James's first letter from Kent, dated 12 December, called for Feversham to “speak to some of my most necessary servants to come to me, and bring with them some linen and cloaths.”Footnote ⁵⁴ This request reflected more than just James's desire for a good shave and a clean shirt. As historians of the court, especially David Starkey, have noted, the staff of the bedchamber effectively regulated access to the king's personal space, representing the barrier, both physical and mystical, between the people and the person of the monarch.Footnote ⁵⁵ In calling for the servants of the bedchamber in his first request for help, James not only wished to cleanse his physical body but also to restore the purity of his mystical body, polluted by the unseemly closeness of the “rabble.” Sir John Knatchbull's account suggests that the king's experience in Faversham brought him close to a breakdown. (Modern analysts of gesture, especially Erving Goffman, have contended that failure to respond to gestural cues is often a sign of mental instability.)Footnote ⁵⁶ Sir Basil Dixwell, accompanied by Knatchbull, tried to convince the king to demand that Feversham show his orders from the council before entering the town. Knatchbull stated that when they came in he [the king] turned from the window [where he was watching a hostile crowd build up to resist Feversham's entry into the town] and seeing Sir Bazill come towards him, I observed a smile in his face of an Extraordinary size and sort: so forced, awkward and unpleasant to look upon, that I can truly say I never saw anything like itt. He tooke not notice of me, tho I was just bending my knee to kiss his hand, and hee immediately turned to Sir Bazill; but upon Mr grimes touching his sleeve, he turned about to me and I kissed it [his hand].Footnote ⁵⁷

The gestural insults that James was forced to endure during his captivity in Kent could be incorporated into a traditional Whig narrative of the modernizing influence of 1688–89 in the political realm, as it stripped the sacral elements from kingship. After James, only the exiled Stuarts regularly exercised the thaumatological powers of British kings in “curing” scrofula. Similarly, the parallels made between kings and Christ through their Maundy Thursday ritual of cleaning and washing the feet of the poor were gradually eroded as this performance was replaced by the handing out of a cash dole.Footnote ⁵⁸

Yet James's captivity in Kent is arguably better understood in synchronic rather than diachronic terms as an example of one of those moments of “political electricity” when subordinate groups move into overt resistance.Footnote ⁵⁹ What happened in Faversham in 1688 was a public declaration of the hidden transcript of hostility to James II. However, the responses were more varied and less consistent than Scott's model of popular politics allows. The people of Faversham did not react uniformly to the presence of their king, and some, like Harry Moon, shifted from aggressive assertiveness to prostrate submissiveness.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the longer term, James II's captivity was arguably a less significant moment than Scott's interpretation would suggest. Scott likens the first public declaration of the hidden transcript to the breaching of a dam, a literal watershed that is cataclysmic and irreversible.Footnote ⁶¹ It might be more apposite to return to his electrical metaphor: such public declarations were more often like flashes of lightning—dazzling, deafening, but ultimately ephemeral. The circumstances of December 1688, the political vacuum at the center and the rapid descent into chaos and public disorder, were exceptional. Order and, along with it, elaborate royal ritual were soon restored. The actions of the fishermen of Faversham, when they were recorded in the public transcript, were noted with condemnation by Whig as well as Tory writers.Footnote ⁶² (If they were remembered more positively in the hidden transcript, it is hard to tell, given the shift in the nature of seditious word indictments post-1688, with their predominant emphasis on uncovering Jacobite sympathizers.)Footnote ⁶³

Other elements of Scott's model of popular politics, especially his perceptive comments against dismissing “naive monarchism” as a form of subaltern false consciousness, do offer revealing insights into what happened in December 1688.Footnote ⁶⁴ John Walter and Andy Wood have recently pointed to the importance of an assertive popular monarchism to the early modern English hidden transcript.Footnote ⁶⁵ The notion of the king who goes in disguise among his people was a familiar trope of broadside ballads and helps explain the appeal of royal pretenders, most notably the Duke of Monmouth.Footnote ⁶⁶ At times of open conflict between plebeian groups and local elites, as in East Anglia in 1549, direct communication between the monarch and the commons at a popular level was seen as the most effective way of addressing the ills of the commonwealth.Footnote ⁶⁷ In the popular imagination, familiarity between ruler and ruled did not necessarily breed contempt—sometimes, quite the opposite. However, popular monarchism essentially recast the relationship between ruler and ruled into a social contract confirmed by both legal and affective bonds. A king such as James II, who both failed to court popular affection and, in December 1688, patently could not fulfill his obligation to defend the commonwealth, was not due the people's loyalty.

Contrary to the opinion of John Bulwer, who saw such a strong sympathy between heart and hand, James II's experience suggests that gesture, like other parts of the public transcript, could be used strategically. Contemporaries, including that “royal actor” Charles I, recognized this fact. Back in the 1640s, the radical hermit and vegetarian Roger Crabbe had spoken of those “labouring poor Men, which in Times of scarcity pine and murmur for want of Bread, cursing the Rich behind his Back, and before his Face, Cap and Knee.”Footnote ⁶⁸ As Crabbe indicated, public observance of gestural norms depended on the people's ongoing assessment of the real, nonmystical power of the object of their loyalty: the king. The kiss of submission could quickly turn into the kiss of Judas.