Although there is still much ground to be covered, work continues apace on the linked themes of political culture, the interaction of law and society, and state formation in sixteenth-century England and, by extension, early modern England more generally. K. J. Kesselring's Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State is an important contribution to our understanding of these issues and also raises some broader questions about the public perception of the authority and legitimacy of the Tudor regime. As Kesselring makes clear, the concept of mercy was of central importance in both the political theory and the practical realities of government of the day. Political theorists were united in their insistence that the prerogative of mercy was one of the central attributes of kingship. Classical literature added its weight to observations of contemporary practice, with many writers, for example, drawing on Seneca's De Clementia as they sought to demonstrate the political as well as the judicial desirability and usefulness of mercy, the inseparability of mercy and punishment, and the status of clemency as a necessary adjunct to justice. Moreover, in an age when the divine nature of kingship was being stressed, and divine and monarchical rule were becoming conflated, the godlike quality of meting out justice and mercy was bound to attract emphasis from commentators: as scripture put it, “Mercy and truth preserve the King, and by clemency is his throne strengthened” (Prov. 20:28). The need for such clemency was especially urgent given that by the late sixteenth century, at least 600 executions for felony, and possibly twice that number, were taking place annually in England.

There can, therefore, be no doubt as to the importance of Kesselring's theme, nor to the timeliness of her study of it. She draws on a wide range of legal, administrative, and literary sources, as well as a broad selection of the works by the political commentators of the period, to construct an account of the deployment of royal clemency, and in particular of the royal pardon, in the Tudor period. In an introductory chapter she provides an analysis of the general issues of mercy and the state in sixteenth-century England. She then devotes a chapter to changing approaches to punishment and the mitigation of the law over that century, which constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of how the law relating to treason and crime operated in the period. A further chapter explores the changing approaches to the pardon under the Tudors, examining both the general pardons that were issued by monarchs to mark state occasions and also the special pardons that might be granted in the light of specific sets of circumstances. She then examines patronage, petitions, and the motives for mercy, exploring, sometimes in rich detail, how and why pardons might be granted to individuals, and what social mechanisms were in play when individual thieves, burglars, traitors, and homicidal killers were excused justice. The overall impact of this section of the book is, of course, to emphasize just how far the operation of justice in Tudor England was from the desiderata of uniformity and rationality in punishment that were to characterize Enlightenment thinking on the subject. Further chapters explore the public performances of pardon, how sometimes ceremonials of the granting and reception of pardon might add to the intensely theatrical character of political culture in sixteenth-century England, and the theme of protests and pardons, examining here how pardons operated in the sometimes more dramatic contexts of large-scale popular uprisings and their aftermath.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this study is the way in which it adds a new dimension to what is by now a familiar issue: how power was negotiated in early modern England. As Kesselring notes, a number of historians (among them, probably, myself ) have stressed the consensual nature of the operation of power in early modern England: briefly, the notion that the operation of the law-enforcement system, and by extension the whole gamut of state power, depended for its effective operation on the cooperation and participation of a sizable proportion of the governed. As Kesselring reminds us, the act of pardoning puts the power of the monarch and his or her immediate subordinates firmly back on the agenda. The granting of a pardon left the recipient, the granter, and those aware of the process in very little doubt as to where, ultimately, political power resided. But even within these realities, as Kesselring demonstrates admirably, there was considerable room for maneuvre. Those delinquent representatives of the governed who claimed pardon were aware of the micropolitical strategies and the micropolitical rhetorics that were needed to obtain it. Tudor monarchs were aware that pardons were useful in obtaining submission from criminal or rebellious subjects and also, given the rhetoric used by both those suing for pardon and the crown in granting it, in schooling subjects in the language and attitudes appropriate to their subordinate status. This approach, on Kesselring's reading of the evidence, even extended to the Tudors’ dealings with their Irish subjects.

Among the sources cited by Kesselring is a passage from Francis Bacon's History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh. In this work Bacon comments that the “variety and inequality” of that monarch's executions and pardons might lead the observer to interpret them as “a kind of lottery or chance” but that closer analysis would reveal that there was “a reason for it; much more, perhaps, than after so long a distance of time we can now discern” (202). Many aspects of the workings of pardon in the Tudor period will, indeed, remain shrouded from the modern observer, while the sense of a lottery of justice lingers. But Kesselring has demonstrated admirably that there was “a reason for it” and that royal pardon and the extension of royal mercy were of central importance, on both a practical and an ideological level, to the maintenance of the Tudor regime.