The English Historical Review Advance Access originally published online on September 4, 2009
The English Historical Review 2009 CXXIV(510):1176-1178; doi:10.1093/ehr/cep240
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© Oxford University Press 2009, all rights reserved.
The Magnificent Monarch: Charles II and the Ceremonies of Power
Oxford
The Magnificent Monarch: Charles II and the Ceremonies of Power, by Anna Keay (London: Continuum, 2008; pp. xvi + 319. £25).
On 25 March 1664 Samuel Pepys went to court to hear the witty and irascible Robert Creighton preach in the Chapel Royal. Upon entering his pew, Pepys was challenged by a courtier who was unsure of the diarist's right to sit alongside him. The courtier checked ‘the orders of the chapel which hung behind upon the wall’, which indeed confirmed that Pepys, as clerk of the privy seal, could stay where he was. This brief exchange illustrates the meticulous attention that some paid to the organisation of the Restoration household-court. In this ‘ritual biography’ of Charles II, Anna Keay outlines the structure and ceremonies of the Carolean court and assesses how they were affected by, and contributed to, politics and kingship between 1630 and 1685. Keay's concern is how ‘gesture and gesticulation, symbol and ceremony’ were used by Charles as prince and king to express his ‘royal authority’ (pp. 1–2). Eschewing the traditional historiographical focus on royal mistresses, or romanticised accounts which stall at the sobriquet of ‘merry monarch’, Keay analyses day-to-day issues of access and procedure alongside the grander instances of ceremony and ritual which punctuated Charles Stuart's life: royal processions and audiences, public dining and worship, touching for scrofula, and any occasion when an encounter had to be staged between prince and prince, or prince and people. Charles II may have been more visible and accessible to his subjects than many other kings, but this did not mean that he showed ‘antipathy to the conventions of kingship’ (p. 209).
Ceremony was central to the advice-theory of William Cavendish, earl of Newcastle, who was governor and first gentleman of the bedchamber at the household constituted for Prince Charles on his eighth birthday. It was ceremony that would enhance the prince's majesty while articulating and reinforcing the status-relationships of those around him (pp. 22–4). This theory was mixed with political practice during the 1640s and 1650s. In exile Charles was forced to learn the arts of intrigue and diplomacy while ceremonially negotiating and expressing his status—from 30 January 1649 he was a king without a kingdom—in relation to the European rulers around whom he danced. Flitting between France, the Channel Islands, Holland, Scotland, Germany, and the Spanish Netherlands with such frequency that even his bed had a convenient carry-case (p. 52), Charles's exile had profound consequences for his reign after 1660. It hardened the king's resolve never to suffer such indignity again, and when his bedchamber was established at the Restoration Charles relied on those loyal servants from his travels who had learnt in exile to bypass the theoretical ‘state’ avenues of access to the king by approaching him via the backstairs (p. 86). After the Restoration the king also continued, as he had done in exile, to use nominally private areas for public affairs.
Yet Charles's reign, Keay argues, was characterised by the increasing regulation and formalisation of court life and ceremony. The lax ‘custom and practice of exile’ continued through the 1660s. The king annoyed the master of ceremonies, for instance, by meeting with diplomats in places where he was not meant to do so, and by meeting some visitors standing up and bareheaded, when he should have been sitting down with a hat on (p. 110). But this laxity ceased after the natural disasters of that decade, the humiliating destruction of the English fleet by the Dutch in the Medway, and the conversion to Catholicism of the heir to the throne. The sobering and formalisation of court life in the 1670s was combined in 1678 with an increase in security (following the alleged Popish Plot against the king's life), and then in the early 1680s with a cold formality. In response to failed attempts during the Exclusion Crisis to disrupt the hereditary Stuart succession, after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in 1681, Charles articulated his sovereignty by visibly elevating himself above his subjects. He coolly met those, especially representatives of the City of London, who had challenged his authority. And he strengthened his ‘quasi-divine’ status by touching for the King's Evil as he had done throughout his reign, but now on an ‘unprecedented scale’ (pp. 188–90).
While the ceremony of the king ‘touching’ to heal scrofula will be familiar to many readers, Keay is at her most informative and original when discussing the other activities related to the Chapel Royal. Though hardly reputed to have been the most devout of kings, Charles was keenly aware from a young age of the importance of making public—largely through ceremonies in his chapel—his commitment to the Anglican faith. He thus did so when travelling through the Channel Islands in 1646 (p. 42), and when dealing with Scottish Presbyterians in 1650/1 he was still accompanied by Anglican chaplains, though they travelled as secretaries (p. 55). When in exile in Catholic countries and at Catholic courts it was politically imperative that Charles was seen to be (literally) faithful to Anglicanism (pp. 65–7). After the Restoration, Charles and most of his court diligently continued to present their conspicuous commitment to Anglicanism in the Chapel Royal (p. 145). This was especially important after the official withdrawal of the duke of York (five years after his de facto withdrawal) from the Anglican communion in March 1676 (p. 164).
Keay makes some points which need to be qualified. The claim that ‘Charles I's devotion to his wife had been constant and unquestioned’ (p. 121) should now be tempered with reference to Charles's letters, sent from Carisbrooke Castle, to Jane Whorwood which suggest that he was not always as devoted to Henrietta Maria as was once thought. Also, Keay's argument that court sermons which ‘contained a rebuke to the ways of the king and his court were either ignored or derided’ (p. 157) overlooks the fact that dozens of court sermons, including those in which denunciation of courtly immorality was strident, were published by royal command.
Despite an initial preoccupation with the weather—the sky turns from black to blue twice within a few pages (pp. 4, 9) and there is a lot of rain and mud (pp. 3, 33, 35, 36)—Keay has an acute and vivid historical imagination. This is crucial for a study which is evidently intended to cross the boundary between academic and popular audiences. It has the extensive primary research and diligent footnotes of an academic text, one based on a University of London Ph.D. thesis. But it has the price-tag and patient historical narrative appropriate to attract and satisfy those not already conversant with the complexities of seventeenth-century politics, or those not ordinarily possessed of a taste for monographs. For both audiences, Keay accessibly and carefully delineates the theoretical and practical parameters in which Charles's ceremonial kingship operated, and she meticulously illustrates how a significant element of his reign was constructed and performed. Ceremony alone did not save the Stuart monarchy or secure York's succession. Tories’ rhetorical commitment to the rule of law, the dangers posed by ’41 coming again, the court's engagement with the print trade, and the repressive Tory reaction did that. But ceremony, and Charles II's canny manipulation of it, enhanced royal charisma and coloured the king's image as he stared down those who challenged Stuart rule while it was reconstructed during a period of profound insecurity.
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