The title of this book promises more than it delivers. This is not a full-frontal assault on the culture of the Restoration court along a broad front such as would address architecture, ceremony, interior decor, music, and so on. Nor does it illuminate politics in all its manifestations, from the court in Parliament to Bedchamber intrigue. Rather, apart from the occasional knowledgeable glance toward the visual arts (Verrio’s ceiling painting) and music (Chapel Royal anthems and court odes), it concentrates on court literary production. Fortunately, that is defined broadly to include not only plays and poems but sermons, the texts of court odes, and works of philosophy. Matthew Jenkinson argues that the Restoration court never spoke in a single unified voice according to an overarching Baroque Stuart propaganda program. He identifies favored themes, such as the attempt at the beginning of the reign to associate Charles II with a restoration of law and order. But Charles II was never an unyielding champion of the law, and his courtiers knew it; other productions from inside the court queried the king’s devotion to the law, attacking his penchant for indulgence and mercy. Similarly, court sermons attacked Dissenters, Catholics, libertinism, dissimulation, and Hobbesian rationality, but the court was full of people, including the king, who embraced one or another of those beliefs and wrote in their favor. Indeed, the roster of chaplains in ordinary included a wide range of opinion from High Church to Presbyterian.

In short, the Restoration court was anything but isolated or monolithic. It was a vibrant and conflicted part of a larger public sphere whose literary productions, readily available scribally or in print for pennies on London streets and beyond, could celebrate Stuart monarchy or interrogate, subvert, and weaken it. Jenkinson makes his points with imaginative and allusive readings of a wide variety of sources, some standard (Calisto, Absolom and Achitophel) and some relatively unmined (court sermons, odes and farces). His reading of Calisto is particularly challenging: although it is usually portrayed as the epitome of courtly celebration of the sensual, Jenkinson sees in Jupiter’s assault on the title character a pointed attack on the kings’ own sexual mores and the Hobbesian redefinition of love, honor, and virtue, embraced by the wits who surrounded him, that seemed to justify all. Remarkably, Jenkinson’s Charles II rarely seems to take umbrage at such attacks. On occasion, an outspoken preacher or wit would be forbidden the court, almost always temporarily. More typically, the king is reported to have enjoyed Calisto. Often, he ordered the printing of sermons that seemed to attack his lifestyle and policies and promoted preachers and poets who had done so. The result was a court that blurred the lines between public and private, in which monarchy itself could be counseled, questioned, and even ridiculed, often with impunity.

But why? Why would the son of a deposed king, reluctant to go “on his travels again” tolerate such criticism in his own house. Jenkinson suggests that Charles II’s flexibility served him in good stead, given the fragility of the monarchy following its abolition after the Civil Wars: one only has to compare the fates of his far more rigid predecessor and successor. Moreover, allowing the court to criticize its master and be seen to do so was, perhaps, a way to screen him from more pointed criticism: by occasionally allowing himself to be called tyrant or libertine by those who ate his bread, he took some of the sting out of those words. At the same time, Jenkinson would agree with other recent historians of the Restoration court (Keay, Weiser) that, as the reign wore on, it grew less open, tolerant, and exuberant, the king withdrawing from the world (i.e., Whitehall and London) and taking a harder line on dissent from the 1680s in particular. It would be interesting to know how other arts fit in this picture: architecture, for example, was certainly a means to facilitate the king’s increasing love of privacy (the Bedchamber redesign of the 1680s, Winchester), but it fits less well with the idea of a court whose productions were often as satirical as celebratory. But the biggest lacuna in the book is the deeper motivation for the king’s earlier tolerance; Jenkinson avoids any deep analysis of his character, and so largely fails to explain the bifurcated nature of his household. As in his lifetime, Charles II remains the charismatic vacuum at the center of the dance, a riddle wrapped in a full-bottom wig inside a brocade birthday suit. Nevertheless, this book increases our understanding of the Restoration court and later Stuart public life, complicates our notion of the emerging public sphere, and offers some very interesting readings of a number of significant literary productions. It should be read by anyone with an interest in the period. One hopes that it is a down payment on something much broader.