Monarchy, Print Culture, and Reverence in Early Modern England

Picturing Royal Subjects

Stephanie E. Koscak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000038545
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This richly illustrated and interdisciplinary study examines the commercial mediation of royalism through print and visual culture from the second half of the seventeenth century. The rapidly growing marketplace of books, periodicals, pictures, and material objects brought the spectacle of monarchy to a wide audience, saturating spaces of daily life in later Stuart and early Hanoverian England. Images of the royal family, including portrait engravings, graphic satires, illustrations, medals and miniatures, urban signs, playing cards, and coronation ceramics were fundamental components of the political landscape and the emergent public sphere. Koscak considers the affective subjectivities made possible by loyalist commodities; how texts and images responded to anxieties about representation at moments of political uncertainty; and how individuals decorated, displayed, and interacted with pictures of rulers. Despite the fractious nature of party politics and the appropriation of royal representations for partisan and commercial ends, print media, images, and objects materialized emotional bonds between sovereigns and subjects as the basis of allegiance and obedience. They were read and re-read, collected and exchanged, kept in pockets and pasted to walls, and looked upon as repositories of personal memory, national history, and political reverence.

1 How to Read the King

Charles I’s Eikon Basilike and Protestant Emblematics

“A King is as one set on a skaffold,” James VI and I declared, “whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly doe behold.”¹ And it was early in the afternoon on 30 January 1649 that Charles I was led, surrounded by regiments on horse and foot and accompanied by William Juxon, then Bishop of London, to a temporary scaffold erected outside the west facade of Whitehall’s Banqueting House. Inigo Jones, architect and Surveyor of the King’s Works, had designed the Banqueting House as a towering Palladian addition to Whitehall Palace and an appropriate venue for Charles’s rituals of state, including the numerous masques in which he performed. The building’s symbolism and architectural harmony reflected the idealized order and majesty of the Stuart court, while elaborate interior ceiling paintings by Peter Paul Rubens glorified James as a British Solomon whose wisdom brought unity, peace, and wealth.² But such order had long broken down, and the theater of state shifted to the large stage in the street, which had been draped in solemn black fabric.³

Passing through the interior of the Banqueting House and mounting the scaffold by way of an exterior window, Charles addressed his subjects for the last time—declaring himself “an honest man, and a good King, and a good Christian”—in a speech that was published the same day.⁴ He then tucked his hair under a nightcap, took off his cloak and doublet, and removed his St. George medallion, handing it to Juxon to deliver to the Prince of Wales. Placing his head on the chopping block, he directed the executioner to strike only after he gave a sign of his readiness. From the moment he took the stage for his final performance, Charles conveyed control and composed self-possession, translating the regicide into a kind of “Execution Masque” that emphasized his political legitimacy, his love for the people, and his willingness to die a martyr.⁵ The king stepped out “with the same unconcernedness and motion” that he affected “on a Masque night,” Sir Philip Warick observed in his memoirs, and Charles’s eye remained “quick and lively” until the very moment of his death.⁶ With one swing of the axe the king was dead, and crowds rushed the scaffold to dip linen and wood in his blood while others bargained with Parliamentary guards to obtain locks of hair.⁷ Even those who were absent could envision the political theater of the king’s trial and execution, whether by reading published accounts disseminated through pamphlets and newsbooks or by collecting any number of commemorative objects produced in the wake of the king’s death.⁸ Although little is known about their origin, for instance, oil miniatures of Charles were painted with transparent mica overlays that allowed viewers to dress the king up in different costumes and place him in various settings to correspond with his imprisonment, trial, sentencing, execution, and ultimate triumph through death (Figure 1.1). Fashionable sets like these reflected the popularity of miniatures among aristocrats and courtiers, who adorned their bodies with petite portraits of friends and lovers or displayed them within their closets as demonstrations of affection, attachment, and intimacy.⁹ Indeed, the Lesser George that Charles passed to Juxon—exhorting the bishop to “Remember”—included its own hidden miniature of Queen Henrietta Maria, secreted inside a hinged lid on the reverse of the medallion, a testament to the bonds of conjugal love that united the pair.¹⁰ The miniatures with mica overlays were likely given or purchased as loyalist mementoes during the years of the Stuart exile; the Juxon family, for example, owned a set. These picture-objects, along with badges, mourning rings, medals, and engravings of the king that circulated during the Civil Wars and Interregnum acted as material demonstrations of allegiance to the crown, popularizing the Stuart monarchy and making the Restoration possible even as the regime collapsed.¹¹

Figure 1.1 Charles I, oil miniature on copper with transparent mica overlays, c. 1650–1700.

Source: Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

Admittedly, it is somewhat peculiar to begin a book about loyalist print, visual, and material culture with regicide and the suspension of monarchical government. But it was at the very moment of his beheading that the martyred king was in the process of becoming more popular than ever before through the media of print and the printed image. The Eikon Basilike: The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings (1649), Charles’s personal confession of conscience written in the style of spiritual autobiography and Protestant martyrology, was for the first time printed and on sale in London the day after (if not the day of) his execution (Figure 1.2). Published by Richard Royston, a key figure of the royalist press, this text became “the run-away best-seller of the seventeenth century.”¹² Thirty-nine known English editions were printed in 1649 alone to satisfy consumer demand, and the book was swiftly translated into Latin, French, Dutch, Danish, and German.¹³ Without risking hyperbole, we might understand the Eikon as the first mass-media royalist event—in one form or another, the representation of the king it offered became available at every level of the marketplace through reprints, extractions, adaptations, single-sheet engravings, and even needlework patterns that reproduced versions of the frontispiece.¹⁴ Consumer demand drove fierce praise and critical response, and the pervasiveness of the Eikon in contemporary political culture encouraged an outpouring of sympathetic and satirical imitation across the later seventeenth century, which also became the focus of critical interpretation.¹⁵ Indeed, the image of the king it produced could be termed iconic in both senses of the word: the book replaced the multiplicity of damaging representations that dogged Charles after the rapid expansion of the partisan press in the 1640s—as a ruler misled by evil counselors, a uxorious husband ruled by his Catholic wife, or a tyrant—with a permanent but mobile representation achieved through print, while critics denounced the king’s book as an attempt at idolatry.¹⁶ John Milton, commissioned by the Commonwealth to author an official response, published as Eikonoklastes (1649, expanded 1650), attacked the authenticity and authorship of the text. Infamously, he described the book with its frontispiece as a poorly executed commercial forgery that sensationalized the king’s death in order to “catch the worthless approbation of an inconstant, irrational, and Image-doting rabble.”¹⁷ The Eikon, nonetheless, created a powerful portrayal of Stuart monarchy, helping sustain royalism and royalist communities during the Interregnum.¹⁸ Its depiction of the king, Andrew Lacey argues, was fundamental to Anglican political theologies during the Restoration and beyond, emphasizing national bloodguilt, nonresistance, and the divine right of kings.¹⁹

Figure 1.2 Frontispiece to Eikon Basilike: The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings (London, 1649). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Political rituals, images, and print were important sites for the contestation of meaning surrounding the history and memory of the Civil Wars and regicide. Indeed, the revolution was fought through the press for control of the press, inciting intense reflection and debate about political authority and the politics of reading.²⁰ As a commemorative material object, the miniatures of Charles in Figure 1.1 memorialize the king through their visual symbolism and their physical properties. Remembering involves not just cognitive processes, the anthropologist Andrew Jones emphasizes, but it is participatory, produced through physical engagement and interaction with things and places that index the past.²¹ In the absence of official rituals of remembrance following Charles’s death, which were only introduced during the Restoration with the addition of 30 January to the Anglican liturgical calendar, these miniatures become a vehicle of personal ritual. Stored in a shagreen case, the mica overlays prescribe movement and manipulation: the palm of the hand—rather than a scaffold in the street—becomes the stage of exhibition, and the experience of the miniature as the images are successively replaced and decoded is one of interiority and contemplation. As Susan Stewart argues in her examination of miniature objects, images, and texts, “the reduction in scale skews the time and space relations of the everyday lifeworld, and as an object consumed, the miniature finds its ‘use value’ transformed into the infinite time of reverie.”²² This is a kind of transcendence that is mirrored by the king’s apotheosis in the final mica overlay (row three, second transparency from the left). Charles is here crowned with a laurel wreath by the disembodied hand of the divine, relying upon a popular emblematic convention also used in court masques. The transparency closely resemblances an image from George Wither’s popular emblem book, Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635), with the hand of God emerging from the right holding a laurel wreath (Figure 1.3). Wither’s emblem, which follows the traditional tripartite structure of Latin motto, pictorial illustration, and accompanying explanatory epigram, with an added English couplet at the top of the page, reveals the iconographic symbolism of the divinely bestowed wreath. It signifies “God’s arm of Grace,” honoring fortitude despite “stumbling blocke[s] in any of our Waies” on the path toward salvation.²³

Looking back at the Eikon Basilike’s foldou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Conventions and Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 How to Read the King: Charles I’s Eikon Basilike and Protestant Emblematics
• 2 Stuart Anamorphosis: Visual Illusion and Sovereign Authority
• 3 “A Masterpiece of Hocus Pocus”: Restoration Plots, Political Enchantment, and Visual Representation
• 4 Loyalism After Licensing: Print Culture, Celebrity, and Emotion
• 5 Royal Signs, Objects of Desire, and Visual Literacy in Eighteenth-Century London
• 6 Royal Pictures as Domestic Objects: Collection, Display, and Decoration
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index