Kevin Sharpe

Refiguring Revolutions Aesthetics and Politics From the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution

This text presents a reassessment of the cultural and political history of England and suggests alternative approaches to the study of 17th and 18th-century England. It sets about returning aesthetics to the centre of the master narrative of politics. Focus is on topics and moments that illuminate the connection between aesthetic issues of a private or public nature and political culture . Politics between the Puritan and Romantic Revolutions, the authors argue, was a set of social and aesthetic practices, a narrative of presentations, exchanges, and performances as much as it was a story of monarchies and ministries.

‘SO HARD A TEXT’? IMAGES OF CHARLES I, 1612–1700

Historians have tended to discuss the image (in the singular) of the monarch in early modern England. In the case of Charles I, the Eikon basilike , literally ‘the royal image’, presented a picture of the king that claimed to be stable and authoritative. This article argues rather that royal images were the product of multiple influences, and shifted through changing circumstances, rendering all images unstable and open to differing interpretations. Charles, as well as being the son of the Rex Pacificus, inherited the martial expectations associated with the image of his brother; and images of the prince and his early years as king in the 1620s continued alongside the changed representations of personal rule. Though the Eikon for a time seemed to fix Charless image, its very authority meant that it was, after 1660, even after 1688, appropriated by all – whigs and tories as well as Jacobites. Most importantly, through the 30 January sermons, Charless memory became a text which all parties needed and sought to claim, a text both shared and contested in the political culture.

PRIVATE CONSCIENCE AND PUBLIC DUTY IN THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES I

It has become orthodox to criticize Charles I for his failure as a politician. Such criticism is both accurate and anachronistic. It fails to appreciate that for Charles the business of kingship was not the art of politics but the pursuit of conscience. Charles took to heart his fathers injunctions to follow conscience and he obeyed them rigidly. Through the study of speeches, letters and royal prayers this essay examines the centrality of conscience to Charles Is kingship. It shows how the divisions of the 1640s led him temporarily to abandon conscience, and finally it studies the kings self-construction as the conscience of the commonwealth – the central stance of the Eikon Basilike .

Mobility and Migration: East Anglian Founders of New England, 1629-1640.

During the 1630s, more than 14,000 people sailed from Britain bound for New England, constituting what has come to be known as the Great Migration. This book offers an extensive study of these emigrants, revealing their personal experiences and ancestral histories.

Crown and Parliament

In 1649, Charles I lost his head on the scaffold at Whitehall, and the institution of monarchy was abolished by dictate of parliament. How had the government of England arrived at such a crisis? Were the events of 1649 the outcome of problems within the institution of monarchy itself, or had the personal actions of Charles I led to the destruction of the crown as well as his own death? The answer to such questions divides historians now as it did the men of the seventeenth century who fought the Civil War. But the explanation for the traumatic events of the 1640s undoubtedly lies both in the nature of government and in the character of the king.