Star Kings and Merry Monarchs

Abstract

Star Kings and Merry Monarchs Matthew Jenkinson (bio) Clare Jackson Charles II: The Star King london: allen lane, 2016 ix + 130 pages; isbn: 9780141979762 Alexander Larman Restoration: The Year of the Great Fire london: head of zeus, 2016 xv + 285 pages; isbn: 9781781851333 in may 1914 The Graphic published a cartoon by E. T. Reed titled “The Restoration of Charles II.” The cartoon features a classic, statuesque image of Charles, but he is standing within some makeshift scaffolding, on which sit five gnomish figures. Two of the figures polish and buff the king’s shoes; another brushes his hat; the fourth curls Charles’s hair; while the fifth paints the finishing touches on the king’s face. It is an image reminiscent of William Makepeace Thackeray’s photogravure “Rex, Ludovicus, Ludovicus Rex,” in which the short, paunchy Louis XIV has majesty bestowed on him by a cloak, wig, and high-heeled shoes: “Thus do barbers and cobblers make the gods that we worship.” While Reed’s cartoon plays on the word restoration and may also be concerned with contemporary labor politics (it is noted that “Fortunately there were no labour disputes at the moment, so the work was able to be carried out without interruption”), it highlights what has become a historiographical norm: early modern monarchs’ images were constructed, in much the same way that we have become used to the images of modern politicians being “spun.”1 [End Page 709] Eschewing the conventional cradle-to-grave biography, Charles II: The Star King—Clare Jackson’s contribution to the Penguin Monarchs series—focuses on the creation of monarchical imagery through the visual arts, ceremony, and literature. Jackson’s use of the sobriquet “Star King” comes from the star that shone throughout the day above London on the day of Charles’s birth, May 29, 1630, and that was then incorporated in a number of cultural artifacts related to the king’s image. It is also a neat equivalent, of course, to Louis XIV’s more famous “Sun King” epithet, though Jackson rightly admits that “Charles cannot be imagined asserting personal ownership of his kingdoms in terms of ‘l’état c’est à moi’ ” (10). “Star King” is a welcome change from “Merry Monarch,” the jaunty moniker that originated in a vicious squib by John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, but has since more often been used to sanitize Charles’s complex and sometimes dark reign. Jackson’s biography offers a deft summary of this reign, and of Charles II’s life more generally, with a touch sufficiently light to navigate real complexities, but without losing a secure expert grasp or analytical rigor. The implication of Jackson’s exploration of Charles II is that sobriquets like “Merry Monarch” or even “Star King” do not do sufficient justice to a king who, for much of his reign, actively adopted dissimulation and multiple, sometimes inconsistent, images to survive in an extraordinarily difficult political landscape. Charles II was, Jackson notes, “keenly aware of the deep ideological fault-lines that divided his kingdoms” (21). The trauma of civil war and regicide, and the ignominy of exile during the Commonwealth and Protectorate, reverberated throughout the Restoration. The celebrations that marked 1660 also masked the persistent ideological fissures centering on the respective power and authority of king and Parliament and the long shadow of political republicanism. The nation was also divided religiously, with the Stuarts accused of plotting to return their kingdoms to the Catholic faith and the Anglican Church preoccupied with how to deal with a splintered Protestantism. The cries for persecution, toleration, or comprehension varied in intensity according to the changeable political and devotional climate and the perceived likelihood of ’41 coming again. Criticism of the restored king was also provoked by his penchant for multiple mistresses (one of whom was considered to be providing Charles with a hotline to French despotism), his siring of several illegitimate children, and his indulgence of a libertine court. The national disasters of plague and fire compounded these man-made troubles, as did military defeat against the Dutch. Plenty of commentators, especially fearless satirists, were willing to lay the blame for such disasters at the feet of the court, which...