Robert Stewart

Ride on in majesty

Governments in early modern England, having no standing army nor a civil service to speak of, required the consent of the governed.

Governments in early modern England, having no standing army nor a civil service to speak of, required the consent of the governed. Authority had to be ‘culturally constructed’. That is the starting-point for Kevin Sharpe’s monumental investigation into royal branding in the age of the Tudors and Stuarts. In the first volume of a projected trilogy, Selling the Tudor Monarchy, he argued that the Tudors made the person of the monarch more important than administrative procedures in establishing royal authority. Elizabeth, in particular, fixed in the national memory by her portraits, played down political divisions and ‘privileged her image over actions and events’, making the sovereign the sacred ‘unifying embodiment of the nation’.

England welcomed the arrival of James I on the throne with something of relief. He was descended from Margaret Tudor, he was Protestant and he had succeeded without bloodshed. But he still had a difficulty. He needed to brand a new dynasty. Image Wars provides ample evidence of the importance that the first two Stuarts gave — in published writings, royal proclamations and declarations, sermons and prayer services, court ceremonies, public spectacles and visual imagery—to the presentation of themselves to their subjects. England looked to James to provide settled, peaceful rule and it was greatly to his advantage, as it was to be to his son’s, that he had a male heir.

Each of them assiduously cultivated the image of loving husband and father. But Sharpe argues that James never quite grasped the full importance of the style and image of the English monarchy as it had developed under Henry VIII and Elizabeth. In Scotland, where the monarchy was not veiled in sacred mystery, James, the most scholarly of our kings, had been happy to embroil himself in debate. So, in England, he turned out publication after publication, on the divine right of kings, on holy scripture, on tobacco, on sport.

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