Review of Hugh Ross Williamson, Charles and Cromwell (London: Duckworth, 1946)

Wight notes that Williamson’s account of the English Civil War follows ‘the romantic view of history’ as ‘the relationship or interaction of characters’ in sometimes tragic circumstances. Williamson ‘shows a good dramatic sense’, Wight observes, in his narrative of events involving Cromwell and King Charles I of England; but the book fails to show insight on ‘the deeper dialectic of conservative and revolutionary psychology. It illuminates neither the particular clash between the Anglicanism of the King and the Independency of the Lieutenant-General, nor the general problem of political morals in a revolutionary situation.’ Cromwell and Charles were both ‘compelled to political methods which in private circumstances they would have condemned’. Owing in part to Williamson’s ‘life-long Cromwellian fervour’, the book does not attain ‘a high level of political literacy’, nor does it demonstrate deep discernment about the history of these conflicts.

Reimagining the Family of King Charles I in Nineteenth-Century British Painting

The nineteenth century represents a formative period for the development of historical consciousness in Britain, with texts and, increasingly, images shaping perceptions of the past. This article examines how Stuart history was interpreted and experienced, through a series of historical genre paintings of King Charles I and his family. It explores how Anthony van Dyck's depiction of politicized domesticity in royal portraiture was revised and reworked in these later images. Reimagining Stuart family life, they extended processes of remembering, enlisting audiences in an active, participatory engagement with the past. Probing temporal, visual, and verbal alignments and connections, the article contributes further dimensions to the understanding of historical representation. It argues that these paintings stirred the viewer's intellectual, emotional, and associative responses to encourage a sense of proximity. Establishing an episodic narrative, they initiated processes of recollection and recognition, they reflected sympathetic historiographies, and they encouraged a shared community with their pictorial protagonists. By so doing, nineteenth-century artists diminished historical distance and fashioned a familiarized past.

Pain, Penance, and Protest

In medieval England, a defendant who refused to plead to a criminal indictment was sentenced to pressing with weights as a coercive measure. Using peine forte et dure ('strong and hard punishment') as a lens through which to analyse the law and its relationship with Christianity, Butler asks: where do we draw the line between punishment and penance? And, how can pain function as a vehicle for redemption within the common law? Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this book embraces both law and literature. When Christ is on trial before Herod, he refused to plead, his silence signalling denial of the court's authority. England's discontented subjects, from hungry peasant to even King Charles I himself, stood mute before the courts in protest. Bringing together penance, pain and protest, Butler breaks down the mythology surrounding peine forte et dure and examines how it functioned within the medieval criminal justice system.

The Casebook of Sir Edward Coke

Sir Edward Coke, Jacobean Lord Chief Justice, is commonly regarded as being one of the great jurists in English legal history. In considerable part, for reason of his vigorous defence of the courts of common law against the seeming intrusions of royal prerogative, his running dispute with King James I is renowned, not least as a precursor to the civil wars which would later engulf James’s son, King Charles I. The purpose of this essay is revisit Coke and, more closely still, some of his most famous judgments, in order to trace the origins of the principle of ‘legality’. It will close in whimsical tones, by wondering what Coke might have thought of ‘legal’ regime put in place in the UK during the coronavirus pandemic.

Fatal Adulteries: Sexual Politics in the English Revolution

This article argues for a reconsideration of the origins of Restoration sexual politics through a detailed examination of the effusive sexual polemic of the English Revolution (1642–1660). During the early 1640s, unprecedented political upheaval and a novel public culture of participatory print combined to transform explicit sexual libel from a muted element of prewar English political culture into one of its preeminent features. In the process, political leaders at the highest levels of government—including Queen Henrietta Maria, Oliver Cromwell, and King Charles I—were confronted with extensive and graphic debates about their sexual histories in widely disseminated print polemic for the first time in English history. By the early 1650s, monarchical sexuality was a routine topic of scurrilous political commentary. Charles II was thus well acquainted with this novel polemical milieu by the time he assumed the throne in 1660, and his adoption of the “Merry Monarch” persona early in his reign represented a strategic attempt to turn mid-century sexual politics to his advantage, despite unprecedented levels of contemporary criticism. Restoration sexual culture was therefore largely the product of civil war polemical debate rather than the singular invention of a naturally libertine young king.

Death by Honey and Bees

Intense political and religious divisions plagued mid-seventeenth-century English society following the execution of King Charles I and the English civil war conflicts. Against this backdrop, a fringe, troublesome Puritan preacher named Samuel Clarke published a history of Protestant martyrs, A Generall Marytrologie (1651), modeled after John Foxe’s popular Book of Martyrs (1563). Clarke’s less famous but more sensational version offered a zealous, often embellished, graphic account of religious persecution designed to incite anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiment. Significantly, his rousing text was supported by eighty crude and provocative engraved images depicting grotesque scenes of abuse and brutal sexual violence repeatedly positioning women and children as victims of “Papist” torture. To modern viewers, the inflammatory visuals are startling and disturbing, but they were enabled by several factors including a censored publishing industry in lockstep with Protestant ideology; a largely illiterate population swayed by traditions of narrative storytelling and visual messaging; and a fractious political environment in which leading figures actively positioned the Irish and Catholics as a menace to English society.

Uneasy Heads

This is the second of the chapters on the writing of history in contemporary theatre. Here the focus is on Howard Brenton’s 55 Days, a play about the final weeks in the life of King Charles I, encompassing his trial and execution in January 1649. It is suggested that a number of themes in the play, most obviously those relating to the exercise of Crown prerogative, continue to resonate in our contemporary ‘age’ of constitutional reform. At the same, at the heart of Brenton’s play is the intimation that politics, however ‘high’, is something determined by individual human character. A variant on the familiar dichotomy, which underpins so much modern legal thought, between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’.

König, Königin, Königinmutter

ZusammenfassungUnder King Charles I, Queen Henrietta Maria, and the exiled French Queen Mother Maria de’ Medici, St James’s Palace in London became the scene of various cultural translation processes that were subject to different strategies and objectives. Henrietta Maria not only presented herself as the mother of the future Stuart kings, but also emphasized her Bourbon heritage with her French bedroom suite. Charles I staged himself as British emperor in the gallery and garden by translating the display context of artworks in continental European collections. Translation efforts could also have a mediating function, as can be seen in Inigo Jones’ Queen's Chapel and the apartment of Marie de’ Medici, which combined both English and French court ceremonial.