Cultural Projections of Royal Authority in England and Scotland, between the 1580s and the 1640s

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My thesis will combine cultural with intellectual history to offer a significant contribution to both academic and public history that innovatively incorporates attention to space, place, and change over time. It will provide the first comparative analysis of cultural projections of royal authority in England and Scotland, between the 1580s and the 1640s; i.e. from James VI's personal rule and the onset of what Guy terms Elizabeth I's 'second reign' to the Civil Wars and regicide. How differing, and at times, conflicting ideas of royal authority were projected and articulated in performance, encompassing royal progresses, entries and processions, pageants, masques, plays, tournaments and kingly rites of passage is a subject that has received little, if any, sustained comparative analysis. My thesis will investigate three key questions. Firstly, how were imperial and increasingly absolutist tendencies expressed and challenged, co-existing theories articulated and advocated, and how did royal behaviour and performance location affect ideas projected? Secondly, what was the purpose of such articulations? Were they acts of propaganda, counsel, petition, or nostalgia, and, if divergent from established orthodoxy, forms of resistance? Thirdly, how did such projections work in the context of dynastic Union? Only a comparative study can tell us the relative significance of a changing ideological climate, present or absentee monarchy, national or local traditions, and an individual ruler.Such a study is vital to historical research. England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed transformations in theories of kingship. After the Henrican Reformation, English rulers asserted secular and spiritual supremacy, but the exact nature of this imperium was debated. In Scotland, a distinctly Stuart notion of imperium came into fruition, with roots in the 1400s, and defining moments during the 1530s and James VI's personal rule. In both countries, the period also saw increasingly prominent defences of absolute royal sovereignty and divine right monarchy, and the continued existence of the Aristotelian mixed polity model, in which authority resided in equal measure in monarch, council and parliament. Analysis of such ideas to date focuses predominantly on textual political theory, the origins of these ideas, and (for England) the innate tension in the theory of imperium resulting from original Henrican ambiguity over its precise definition (for England: Guy, Russell, and Rose; for Scotland: Mason and Cramsie). Despite the cultural turn and scholarly recognition that such developments in political thought were mirrored in political culture (Anglo, Yates, Strong, Smuts and Sharpe), with early modern Tudor and Stuart monarchs increasingly fashioning themselves as Renaissance rulers and court culture and public ceremonial expanding exponentially, cultural projections of key ideas of royal authority have mostly been ignored, save for Scotland in the 1530s (Thomas, Meikle, Harikae) and the examination of the imperial crown in the years preceding my period (Scotland: Mason; England: Hoak). Given the intrinsic connection between culture and politics in this period, examining cultural projections of differing ideas of royal authority in performance is crucial to fully understanding these ideas, as well as determining who pioneered them and to what end. It is vital for comprehending connections between English and Scottish ideas and the (possible) creation of a shared 'British' monarchy. Such a study has the potential to feed into wider areas of analysis, including Anglo-Scottish relations, kingship, constitutional and parliamentary history, as well as cultural politics.