1. Sean Kelsey here attempts a revisionist rehabilitation of the English republic (1649-1653) by exploring its attempt to imagine and project a public image through icons, spectacle, codes of honour, ceremony - the theatre of socio-political life. Against the established portrait - sustained by Blair Worden, Austen Woolrych and others - of the Rump as a feckless, shallow and unconvincing makeshift, a half-hearted attempt to cast some sort of mantle over expediency, Kelsey argues that the republic had a coherent self-image, deployed in a range of 'visual and verbal discursive strategies' which were deliberate, innovative and sustained.

2. Each chapter explores an aspect of this theme, the republic's self-fashioning . Through its furnishing and equipping of Whitehall and Westminster for government the Rump created what Kelsey describes as a Court, although its resemblance to the Caroline Court of the 1630s must have looked obscure to contemporaries. In a chapter entitled 'Spectacle', Kelsey casts a passing glance at miniatures, portrait medals and prints but mainly focuses on ambassadorial receptions. Currency, seals, maces and the coat of arms of the republic are seen as establishing a distinctive republican iconography alongside more pluralistic codes of honour. In a final substantive chapter, the author analyses the 'dissolution' of the Rump as a key moment in the representation of the regime. He concludes with the claim that the quasi-republic of the gentry commonwealth, detected by Patrick Collinson and others as early as the 1580s, provided ample basis for a native 'republican' nationalism which was readily exploitable by the Rump's commonwealthsmen.

3. This is an interesting and potentially important topic. Unfortunately Kelsey's argument and exposition are dogged by difficulties. The writing is uneven. The text is often diverted by material (eg the problem of disposing of the chattels of royal palaces) which is treated in detail excessive for its bearing on the overall burden of the argument. His conclusions are often ambiguous and sometimes contradictory.

4. Contrary to his overriding argument of a republican regime refashioning Whitehall, the evidence consistently suggests that the personnel of that regime accommodated themselves to the buildings and their furnishings rather than vice versa. Royal furnishings and fittings were redeployed for republican use. It may be, as Kelsey tells us, 'tempting to speculate that, if they had had greater financial and political leeway, the regime's leaders would have used it to create grandeur ...' But a necessary frugality meant that they were 'committed to the preservation of the legacy left by monarchy'.(38) This is a far cry from the establishment of 'a kind of republican household' in Whitehall.(26) One also needs to know why, in this respect, 1648-9 should be treated as the key watershed since, from the King's quitting of London in 1642, Whitehall had ceased to have a monarchical presence. The contrast should be with the locations and trappings of parliamentary administration from 1642 to 1648. More bafflingly still, we are told that- 'in essence there was little to distinguish the attitudes of monarchs from those of the republic's governors when it came to visual display'. (45)

5. In terms of spectacle, Kelsey finds that the republic went to 'extraordinary lengths' to create a public image. Yet the single most ambitious project put to it by Peter Lely, George Geldorp and Sir Balthazar Gerbier - for a series of paintings of the members of the Long Parliament and their achievements - was eventually dropped as potentially too contentious. Healing and settling, in the aftermath of fratricidal conflict, was too important and it was a culturally sterilising priority. This is, in large part, the explanation of the Rump's conformity to earlier models, modes and representations; a disposition of which the continued employment of Sir Oliver Fleming, the late Charles Stuart's master of ceremonies was a piece. Against his conclusion that the Rump established 'its own routine, which required a big break with precedent' (68), Kelsey's evidence illustrate's the republic's willingness to ape old protocols rather than invent new ones.

6. There is certainly a case to be made for some iconographic innovation. The republic's great seal, cast in 'the First Year of Freedom by God's Blessing Restored', brings a whiff of genuine republican virtu into the story and it is matched by coats of arms, maces and coinage. But, as with the map of England and Ireland on the republican seal, there 'is no particular logic in the fine detail'. (98) Republican politicians, as Kelsey acknowledges, made scant reference to the 'inventive imagination' of their republican icons and the fact that many republican maces remained in municipal employment down to the late nineteenth century may have more to do with the iconographic myopia of the English than with any lingering republican sentiment. Kelsey believes that the republic embraced more pluralistic notions of honour (as also, it might be observed, did Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan) but the argument needs to be more systematically worked out if it is to have persuasive force. A proposal that the Rump should develop its own system of titular honours was rejected. Concepts of dignity, respect and honour must be disentangled before we can begin to discriminate what was happening let alone engage in comparisons. Kelsey touches on, but does not fully explore, the providentialist's disdain for worldly reputation - so marked a feature of, for example, public acts of the recognition of military achievement in this period. How should this be seen as meshing with more pluralistic concepts of honour allegedly cultivated by the republic. Finally, the dissolution of the Rump is presented as a coup necessary to hold the Army together but, while this is engagingly argued, its connection with the other themes of the book is never established.

7. The most powerful piece of writing in the book is the conclusion. Kelsey argues that a society through which active participation in governance was widely disseminated was already a quasi-republic. The 'great kinglessness' of 1649-1653 did not therefore necessitate recourse to classical or exotic models but could be sustained from indigenous political culture and traditions. At this point the argument has become self-cancelling. 'In some sense, the political culture of the Commonwealth was largely dispensable.'(221)

8. Though 'political culture' was not a concept available to him, James Harrington ought to be taken seriously in discussions of this kind. The culture of regulated monarchy was persistent, as he saw it, long beyond the life of its social basis. England, as Kelsey would agree with Harrington, had, by the mid-seventeenth century, the social basis for a gentry-led republic but for Oceanic stability to be achieved the rituals, ceremony and rhetoric of civic life had to be transformed. By contrast with this vision, the Rump's achievement must still be seen as fitful, half-hearted, lacking any ideological conviction and containing the seeds of its own destruction.

J. C. Davis
University of East Anglia