The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England (review)

Zaller's previous work focused on early Stuart Parliaments and, more recently, seventeenth-century radicals. His new book develops themes present in these earlier books but also ventures back into the sixteenth century to offer a survey of the period between the Reformation and the civil war. In particular, the book aims to examine the "political languages as expressed in sacred, legal, constitutional and dramatic discourse," which he sees as centering on the "crisis of legitimacy" that shook the early modern state and shaped the civil war (2–3).

The ambition is for a wide-ranging interpretation of how legitimacy was constructed and challenged. In Zaller's words, the "discourse of legitimacy will be understood, in its broadest sense, as the sum total of articulated statements from, to or about power and its instruments. Such statements may be intentional (a command, a petition), ritualised (bowing, kneeling and other forms of ceremonial address; the wearing and doffing of certain articles of clothing; the taking of oaths and the recitation of prescribed texts), representational (the likeness of a ruler on his coinage; his personification in pageantry; the depiction of his predecessors on the stage) or expressive (toasts and jest; lighting bonfires; ringing bells)" (2–3). The "sum [of these statements] is the currency of legitimacy, the form in which the daily transaction of power occurs and the shape in which it is ultimately constituted."

These modes of discourse, he argues, were "in flux, not to say turmoil," because early modern England was itself a society in transition. By the early seventeenth century, consensus had "effectively broken down" and the terms of obedience had become uncertain (3). Indeed, for many contemporaries, "political breakdown and religious disorder were entwined in the vision of a conspiracy to deprive English men and women of their civil and spiritual liberty. This was the crisis of legitimacy."

This, indeed, is an appetizing agenda. It promises a history of the cultural and ideological construction of authority at both the level of the Westminster and Whitehall elite and the modes of constructing and contesting legitimacy far beyond that world, through gestures, genres, signs, and languages. The book does contain discussions about ceremony. Zaller writes, for example, that Elizabeth refused to open Parliament in person to show her displeasure (or at least to feign it) about its treatment of Mary Queen of Scots. He also tells about the personification of monarchs on the stage (the section of the book that is most likely to appeal to readers of this journal), about royal commands recited through proclamations (specifically the debate about the constitutional role of proclamations), and about a petition (the petition of right).

But, as this summary implies, Zaller does relatively little to flesh out the wider significance of the interesting themes raised in his introduction. Focusing almost entirely on Westminster and Whitehall, Zaller seems relatively uninterested in how legitimacy was more widely constructed and disputed. The oaths that he mentions are never systematically explored for their mobilization of the nation—though they have featured in recent work as key means of constructing legitimacy; the petitions outside Parliament are rarely mentioned; the ceremonies and pageants of the boroughs and the rural parishes are absent.

If "legitimacy" is thus treated in a rather narrow way, so is "discourse." The book's title suggests a Pocockian analysis of the overlapping languages of legitimacy, and the early chapter headings seem to confirm it: "The Discourse of Monarchy," "Scared Discourse," "The Discourse of the Law," "The Discourse of the Stage," and "The Discourse of Parliament." Yet, by discourse Zaller does not mean the idioms and variety of languages in which the debates about legitimacy were spoken. Rather, Zaller usually means the discourse in and about an institution—what was said by and about the monarchy, the church, the law, the theatre, and Parliament. Readers will look mostly in vain for analysis that maps the different ways of talking.

The book's principal strength is a series of often illuminating case...