Abstract

Popularity as a Principle. The Reinvention of the English Monarchy under the Reign of Charles I and Charles II

When Charles I was led on the scaffold on the 30th of January 1649, monarchy on the British Isles had been both abolished and reinvented. Long before his execution, the king had changed his public appearance; once an elitist and distant prince, he was beginning to personate a common paterfamilias, as godly as sinful, as virtuous as imperfect. Such strategies of courting the men and women in the street were meant to counter republican claims, advanced especially since the Root and Branch Petition. After the English Civil War, the Stuarts went on exploiting the very ever-growing deficit in legitimation the Putney debates and the Levellers’ petitions had revealed: The Commonwealth seemed to betray its original principle of popular sovereignty. Charles II knew to render his restoration in 1660 much of a revolution by indulging in his popularity. Amidst his weaknesses, he placed himself very next to the common man; he even accomplished to get his own cowardice – hiding in the “Royal Oak“ after his defeat at Worcester in 1651 – glorified. Instead of acting the traditional part of a decent and virtuous king, Charles II preferred to embody a merry and voluptuous one. His manner of life consisted, as it were, in having no manners at all: He presented himself just as an ordinary man whose vulgarity culminated in his anything but discreet enjoyments. The king appealed to public support, thus founding monarchy on a new and stable base. Acrimonious masterpieces of restoration satire, actually encouraged by the Stuarts, tended to support such a reign rather than undermining it: a reign of Hobbesian self-interest and widespread consumerism.