The politics of portraiture: Oliver Cromwell and the plain style.

Some time in the 1650s, an unknown engraver executed a double portrait of Oliver Cromwell and his wife, Elizabeth [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The couple face the viewer while holding a symbolic laurel wreath of victory. However, Oliver is not dressed in military attire, but simply if elegantly with a mantle over a simple shirt with plain collar and cuffs. Elizabeth is dressed in the fashion of the day, with a pearl necklace, pendant, and earrings and a dress with a low rounded neckline, short-waisted bodice, and loose elbow sleeves. In the background are elegant folds of drapery and a classical pillar.

What any student of art history recognizes, of course, is that this engraving is based on earlier paintings, not of Oliver Cromwell, but of Charles I. The composition of the dual figures with the laurel wreath was first executed c. 1630-32 by Daniel Mytens [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED] and later by Sir Anthony Van Dyck, shown here in a 1634 engraving [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED].(1) In both the Mytens and the Van Dyck on the same theme, the king and queen are shown half-length, holding symbolic tokens. Such portraits have been widely viewed as epitomizing cavalier culture, the grace and elegance of the Caroline court, and the majesty of divine right monarchy.

What then can be said of the Cromwellian imitation? Although this engraving has not, to my knowledge, been reproduced by modern scholars, similar examples have been used to dismiss Cromwellian portraiture as an inept aping of monarchical forms.(2) An influential early account by Margaret Whinney and Oliver Millar characterized Robert Walker, an early painter of Cromwell, as showing "the most slavish dependence on Van Dyck by an English painter";(3) according to the authors, Walker was original only in what was wrong with his paintings - his "dry and impersonal use of paint and his lack of any feeling for colour" and his "limp lay-figures against pedestrian backgrounds."(4) Later art historians have echoed this sentiment, viewing the portraiture as wholly derivitive of monarchical forms.(5) Although David Piper's seminal 1958 study looked at the "face itself of Cromwell, warts and all,"(6) Piper's more extended concern was with "the chase of the crown after Cromwell,"(7) ending with the apparent merging of protectoral and monarchical iconography. Since the publication of Piper's study forty years ago, Cromwellian portraiture has been almost entirely neglected by art historians, historians, and literary critics alike.(8)

Yet given the fuller range of Cromwellian portraits and engravings now available, and the extensive work that has been done on monarchical portraiture and representation more broadly, the dismissal of Cromwellian portraiture calls for reevaluation.(9) I shall argue that the differences between Cromwellian images and those of the monarchy are less inept and more purposeful than has hitherto been recognized. Rather than simply mimicking monarchical forms, Cromwellian portraiture increasingly reflected the character - and contradictions - of Cromwell's own plain style. Art and politics intermingled: appropriating and revising monarchical and, in particular, Caroline iconography, Cromwellian portraiture developed a plain-style aesthetic that reflected a new mode of piety and power.

Closer comparison of the Caroline double portraits and the Cromwellian engraving reveals not only blatant borrowing, but important revision. The clothing of the portraits is especially significant.(10) Charles and Henrietta dress in accordance with the wealth and status of the monarchy. Mytens's Charles is fashionably attired in a highly ornate doublet with wings and false hanging sleeves. The breast of the doublet is decoratively slashed to match the doublet sleeves. Charles wears a standing-falling ruff and his lesser George medallion. His long hair, brushed up moustache, and pointed beard also set the standard for fashion. Henrietta Maria (a figure over-painted on Mytens's original and modeled after a Van Dyck portrait) is similarly elegant and ornate.(11) She wears a pearl necklace and earrings, and her hair is stylishly dressed in side ringlets with ribbon ornaments at the back. Her dress has a finely-executed lace collar, large puff sleeves, a laced bodice, and a high-waisted skirt.

Van Dyck's double portrait, painted shortly after Mytens's and replacing the Mytens portrait in Somerset House, enhances the splendor of majesty. His figures are less stiffly posed, and the play of light and shadow is more effective. Charles wears a very wide, lace-fringed collar rather than the ruff, but he retains the lace cuffs; he again wears slashed sleeves and doublet, and the lesser George medallion on a broad ribbon. Mytens's blank background is replaced by a landscape with clouds framed between billowing curtains. Van Dyck makes the symbolic exchange more clear. The queen, as the daughter of the warrior-king Henri IV of France, hands her husband a laurel wreath, while he, in return, presents her with an olive branch representing the peace-making of his own father, James. Hence the symbolism of the portrait emphasizes royal lineage and presents the private union of Charles and Henrietta Maria as benefitting the entire realm, which is symbolized by the landscape behind them. Van Dyck also inserts the timeless symbols of kingly office, placing the royal regalia on a table behind the king.

Van Dyck's paintings have been seen as epitomizing the grace and majesty of the Caroline court - not only divine right rule, but the ideals of peace and harmony that lay behind this philosophy of government. Arthur Wheelock observes that in this portrait of Charles and Henrietta, their "transformation from mere mortals to romantics heroes . . . was immediate and complete."(12) Indeed, Graham Parry writes that "the gleaming regalia on a table behind Charles seem almost superfluous, such is the feeling of majesty and grace that pervades the whole painting."(13)

While drawing upon the cultural capital of Caroline portraiture, the engraving of the Cromwells largely eschews the trappings of power. The clothing and manner, especially of Oliver, show a seriousness of purpose and lack of frivolity that point to a new aesthetic: a reformed and plain style. The laurel of victory - representing Oliver's martial conquests - is the one symbolic element that remains. But this is a private, domestic portrait; the landscape is gone and symbols of office or even authority disappear.

The attire of Oliver and Elizabeth reflects both their gentry class and their "godly" religion. Elizabeth is, to some extent, a la mode. She wears her hair pulled back from the forehead and temples, with back hair coiled into a high bun and cork-screw curls falling to the shoulders - very much the fashion between 1645 and 1660. Elizabeth's short-waisted dress, with its full puffy sleeves worn well above the wrist and low-cut, rounded bodice, was also in vogue. Yet the dress has no lace edging on the sleeves or neckline, nor embroidery, ruff, or collar. She does not wear a caul or round cap, often seen trimmed with silver, gold, jewels, or lace over the twisted bun in other portraits of this period. And Elizabeth's face, interestingly enough, seems to be an almost identical mirror-image of Oliver's. Elizabeth's features are heavy and her figure shows considerably more bulk than that of the queen.

Oliver's attire is more severe than Elizabeth's, although still reflecting the gentry class. He wears a mantle over a doublet, beneath which is a shirt with a plain collar and cuffs. The figures are, of course, reversed from the Caroline portraits. As in the Van Dyck painting, both of Elizabeth's arms are visible. The hands are Van Dyck hands: elongated, elegant, slender. Yet no symbols of office or even authority remain.

The engraving of the Cromwells clearly draws upon monarchical portraiture. But it appropriates and changes rather than simply duplicates the Caroline mode. This engraving is one example of what I am terming the Cromwellian "plain style," a new aesthetic that was neither revolutionary nor conservative, but a combination of both, in art as in politics. And, as we shall now see, the plain style was firmly grounded in Cromwell's own beliefs - his mode of speech, dress, and action.

"I SHALL DEAL PLAINLY": CROMWELL'S OWN STYLE

Cromwell was typically "puritan" in his focus on plainness - that is, simplicity and honesty - of not only speech, but dress and behavior.(14) His early advocacy of "plain men" in the parliamentary army seemed to some of his contemporaries to threaten traditional class hierarchies. Early in the first civil war (August 1643), Cromwell urged a Suffolk committee to recruit "godly honest men to be captains of horse," commenting that "I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed."(15) Later, he wrote again on the same subject: "Gentlemen, it may be it provokes some spirits to see such plain men made captains of horse. It had been well that men of honour and birth had entered into these employments, but why do they not appear? Who would have hindered them? But seeing it was necessary the work must go on, better plain men than none, but best to have men patient of wants, faithful and conscientious in the employment, and such, I hope, these will approve themselves to be."(16)

But most often Cromwell's use of "plain" was less concerned with class than with religion, and therefore more or less synonymous with honest or godly. In his private family letters, Cromwell recurrently commended plainness as a manner of speech. For example, in April 1650, he wrote to his son Richard: "I take your letters kindly: I like expressions when they come plainly from the heart, and are not strained nor affected."(17) In September 1650, Cromwell added a postscript to a letter to Richard's father-in-law, Richard Mayor, asking him to "tell Doll I do not forget her nor her little brat. She writes very cunningly and complimentally to me; I expect a letter of plain dealing from her."(18) Similarly, in April 1656 he entreated his son Henry in Ireland to "cry to the Lord to give you a plain single heart."(19)

Cromwell's speeches to his protectoral parliaments, with their biblical metaphors, repetition, and heightened sense of humility and piety, also exemplified the plain style. Under pressure, Cromwell tended to reiterate his own sincerity and simplicity of heart. On September 12, 1654 he chided the first protectoral parliament for challenging the very basis of his power under the Instrument of Government: "the occasion of this meeting is plain enough. I could have wished with all my heart there had been no cause for it."(20) He gave the members a long retrospective history "to make plain" that he was not ambitious for power(21) and pledged that concerning those aspects of the government that were fundamental, not circumstantial, "I shall deal plainly with you."(22)

Two years later, again on the defensive with his second protectoral parliament, Cromwell disavowed all rhetoric and flattery, declaring that "I will tell you plainly, for it is not time for compliments nor rhetorical speeches; I have none truly but to tell you how we find things."(23) To justify the war with Spain, he characterized scriptural prophecies of the Antichrist as "sure plain things" that pointed to Spain as the enemy.(24) Defending the major generals, Cromwell asserted that "truly if any man be angry at it, I am plain and shall use an homely expression, let him turn the buckle of his girdle behind him,"(25)

In 1657, in a series of exchanges over the parliamentary offer of kingship under a new constitution known as the Humble Petition and Advice, Cromwell insisted upon his plainness of intention and simplicity of heart. He told the House of Commons on 8 April 1657 that "to speak very clearly and plainly to you, I had, and I have, my hesitations to that individual thing [the title of king]."(26) In a speech to a parliamentary committee a week later, Cromwell reiterated his hesitation: "But really and honestly and plainly considering what is fit for me to answer; the Parliament desires me to have this title, it hath stuck with me, and yet doth stick."(27) He spoke of the "religious and godly men" who opposed the kingship: "I deal plainly and faithfully with you, I cannot think that God would bless me in the undertaking of anything that would justly and with cause grieve them."(28) Repeatedly resisting the new title, Cromwell averred that "I speak in the plainness and simplicity of my heart as before Almighty God."(29) While some contemporaries saw the kingship crisis as the height of Cromwellian duplicity, Cromwell himself reiterated his own plainness.

Finally, it is worth noting that plain speech for Cromwell, as for some puritan preachers, was largely extemporaneous. To his last parliament in January 1658, Cromwell declared, "I have not prepared any such matter and rule of speech to deliver myself unto you . . . but shall only speak plainly and honestly to you out of such conceptions as it hath pleased God to set upon me."(30) He apparently wrote nothing down. Asked shortly afterward for a copy of the speech, Cromwell answered that he had spoken "honestly and plainly how things stood in matters of fact," but as to the particulars, he could not "remember four lines."(31)

That Cromwell's "plain style" speech made an impression on his contemporaries can be seen as much from his opponents as from his supporters. A Most Learned, Conscientious, and Devout-Exercise, written by one Aaron Guerdon, purported to be a sermon delivered by Cromwell before his departure for Ireland in summer 1649. A satire on the plain style, the tract showed how plain speaking (and preaching) could be self-serving or worse. In the tract, Cromwell interprets Romans 13:1 - "Let every Soule bee Subject unto the Higher Powers" - in such a way that the higher powers can mean only himself and his son-in-law Henry Ireton. Although the "wicked and ungodly" have abused the text for their own ends, Cromwell professes that he will "come closer to the words themselves, and shew you truly and plainly (without any gaudy Rhetorique) what they signifie unto us, that you bee not deceived."(32) He accepts the task with ostentatious humility: "Well then! you see who are fittest to interpret, and I presume you believe God hath aboundantly supplyed mee: I doe not boast of it, but I speake it to his glory that hath vouchsafed to take up his Lodging in so vile, contemptible, unswept, unwashed, ungarnished a Roome as is this unworthy Cottage of mine. But It was his will, and I am thankfull for it."(33) The more self-serving and outrageous Cromwell's "sermon" becomes - as he defends everything from sleeping with his landlady to gulling Fairfax - the more he insists that biblical support for his actions is plain: "Now the Words offer themselves very naturally, they are plain, not difficult, but prostrate their sense in a most perspicuous manner."(34)

Similarly, the Presbyterian minister Richard Baxter (1615-91) was, as we shall see, only one of among many contemporaries who charged that Cromwell's plain speech was in fact dissimulation: "He seemed exceeding open-hearted by a familiar Rustic affected Carriage (especially to his Soldiers in sporting with them) but he thought Secrecy a Virtue and Dissimulation no Vice and Simulation, that is, in plain English, a Lie or Perfidiousness to be a tollerable Fault in a Case of Necessity . . . Therefore he kept fair with all, saving his open and irreconcilable Enemies."(35) We shall return to the charge that the plain style was designed to deceive and conceal.

Cromwell affected a plain style not only in speech and manner but in clothing.(36) Contemporary memoirs and diaries contain several remarkably detailed descriptions of Cromwell's appearance. One such account comes from Sir Philip Warwick (1609-83), a member of Parliament and eventual royalist who served in the king's army, remained in England during the Interregnum, then held office under Charles II. Disarmingly confessing that "I [had] vainly thought my selfe a courtly young Gentleman: (for we Courtiers valued ourselves much upon our good cloaths)," Warwick later recalled his first impressions of Oliver Cromwell in the Long Parliament of 1640: "I came one morning into the house well clad, and perceived a Gentleman speaking (whom I knew not) very ordinarily apparelled; for it was a plain cloth-sure, which seemed to have bin made by an ill country-taylor; his linen was plain, and not very clean; and I remember a speck or two of blood upon his little band, which was not much larger than his collar; his hatt was without a hatt-band; his stature was of a good size, his sword stuck close to his side, his countenance swoln and reddish, his voice sharp & untunable, and his eloquence full of fervor."(37) Warwick moves, significantly, from Cromwell's clothes to his stature, countenance, and voice - all alike are "plain," to the point of being rough and rustic. Indeed, Warwick comments, "I sincerely professe it lessened much my reverence unto that great councill; for he was very much hearkened unto."(38) Warwick adds, however, that later, "having had a better taylor, and more converse among good company," Cromwell appeared "of a great and majestick deportment and comely presence."(39)

But just how much Cromwell's fashions changed is in fact unclear. On the day that he dismissed the Long Parliament in April 1653, Cromwell came into the House "clad in plain black clothes, with gray worsted stockings, and sate down as he used to do in an ordinary place."(40) At the first Protectoral installation, alongside "the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London, in their Scarlet Gownes," Cromwell appeared "in a black Suit and Cloake."(41) For other state occasions, Cromwell did appear more richly dressed, as when he wore a gold-embroidered suit for a reception given by the City at Grocer's Hall in February 1654. But far more frequently, what was most remarked upon in first-hand accounts of Cromwell's apparel was its very unremarkableness.

Contemporaries continually expected Cromwell to take on more state and majesty. The future Earl of Clarendon, Edward Hyde (1609-74), writing from exile in Paris in March 1654, acknowledged that the new protector followed a modest lifestyle: "He makes not that haste was expected into state and lustre." Hyde, not surprisingly, read the worst possible motives into Cromwellian restraint, alleging that army opposition deterred Cromwell from claiming the crown, and "yett [he] will steale into it by degrees, and I believe is not more puzzled with any considerations then whether he shall assume the style and title of Kinge before he calls a Parliament, or hope to assemble such a Parliament as would take upon them to beseech him to accept that office."(42)

James Fraser, an Anglican Scot who spent time in London in 1657, wrote a vivid eyewitness account of Cromwell in his manuscript diary.(43) Having described Cromwell's "tall & Statly" stature, his "Constitution Sanguin a reed in his face, a high Roman nose & a fierce & Sparkling eye," Fraser turned to Cromwell's manner of dress: "as to his habit & cloaths, he was no friend to falshows, nor the prodigall vaingloriousnes of Garbs, he went plain and grave in his habit, more like a Senatore than a Souldiour"(44) According to Fraser, court fashion began to imitate Cromwell's self-conscious lack of fashion: "in Imitation of him, gaudy fashions & costly garbs were laid asid in England."(45) Always, Fraser comments, Cromwell dressed in black: "I never saw him alter one Collour of Cloath it was darke [nearest] black and commonely calld the Protectors collor."(46)

Finally, the royalist Sir John Reresby (1634-89) provided in his Memoirs a description from 1658, the last year of Cromwell's life. Reresby, who had been abroad since 1654, returned to London for a time in 1658-59. His reaction after Cromwell's death was decidedly mixed: "This year . . . died the Protector Oliver Cromwell, one of the greatest and bravest Men, had his Cause been good, the World ever saw."(47) While maintaining that "his Actions I leave to the Historian," Reresby does relate Cromwell's appearance: "Having been very near his Person but once, at an Audience of an Ambassador at Whitehall, I can only say that his Figure did not come up to his Character; he was indeed a likely Person, but not handsom, nor had he a very bold look with him. He was plain in his Apparel and rather negligent than not. Tears he had at will, and was, doubtless, the deepest Dissembler on Earth,"(48) What is noteworthy about this prose portrait is the disjunction between moral interpretation and physical description. Moral qualities are grafted onto physical appearance. Or rather, Cromwell's plain and apparently transparent appearance leads Reresby to point to its opposite - that he is a great dissembler. Here and elsewhere, the plain style was seen as at best artful and contrived, at worst downright deceptive.

PORTRAITS OF CROMWELL IN THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE 

That the plain style was, in fact, a kind of iconoclastic mode limited the extent to which Cromwell's own self-representation shaped the representations of others. Unlike the monarchs who preceded and followed him, Cromwell did not attempt to coordinate a unified image of the protectoral court. His interest in visual and verbal representations of himself was largely limited to countering the negative. In contrast to the unified and majestic image of the Caroline court in the works of Daniel Mytens and Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Cromwell had no official court painter; five different artists painted five different portraits over eight years, from 1649-57. Cromwell's collected writings and private letters make no comment on the commissioning, display, reception, or circulation of his portraits. From this we can conclude that Cromwell did not tightly control the production of his own image.

Yet Cromwell's own plain style, as we have traced it in his own speeches and in the accounts of his contemporaries, did have an impact. Royal portraiture of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs was idealized and iconic, legitimating and enhancing the court. Recent scholarship has shown that with the English Reformation, Henry VIII and Elizabeth did not so much abolish as appropriate icons, replacing the rejected Catholic images of the saints and the Virgin Mary with Tudor arms, Holbein's magnificent Henry VIII, and various images of Elizabeth, the virgin queen.(49)

Charles I was a connoisseur in the fullest sense, collecting sculpture, coins, and paintings of Italian artists, bringing Rubens to England to paint the apotheosis of James I on the ceiling of Whitehall, and finally persuading Rubens's protege, Anthony Van Dyck, to reside in England and paint a series of elegant portraits by which the Caroline court was immortalized.(50) While Van Dyck's style was more naturalistic than Rubens's, it was no less idealized than earlier court painters; after meeting Henrietta Maria, Sophia of Bohemia wrote that "Van Dyck's portraits had so accustomed me to thinking that all English women are beautiful that I was amazed to find a small creature with skinny arms and teeth like defense works sticking out of her mouth."(51) As Roy Strong has influentially argued in Van Dyck: Charles I on Horseback, Van Dyck represented Charles I as an absolute king or imperator, with a magnificence that legitimated monarchical power.

The Cromwellian plain style both drew upon and challenged monarchical iconography. The earliest known portrait of Cromwell was probably produced during the Commonwealth in or around 1649. Robert Walker (d. 1658) painted a three-quarters length portrait of Cromwell [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED]. The viewer looks up from below at a gracefully elongated martial figure, whose body is turned at an angle and counterpoised (in some versions) by a young page tying on his sash, both symbols of rank. Cromwell holds a baton of authority and wears a full suit of black plate cuirassier armor of a style normally associated with the early sixteenth century. The armor itself was an artistic prop; during the civil wars, only a cuirass, with detachable breast and back plates, was normally worn with a buff-coat and light helmet.

The graceful and naturalistic pose of the Walker portrait not only evokes the aristocratic portraiture of Anthony Van Dyck, who died in 1641 just before the outbreak of the first civil war, but quite literally borrows a body. The Walker portrait is fashioned on Van Dyck's portraits of Sir Kenelm Digby and Sir Edmund Verney (both c. 1640). These portraits, furthermore, were based on an earlier Van Dyck portrait of Charles himself in full armor, three-quarters length, holding a baton of authority, wearing his lesser George medallion, and with his crown on a table behind him.(52)

The lineage of the Walker Cromwell adds to its cultural weight. Van Dyck portraits derived from the Italian Renaissance, particularly the works of Titian, many of whose works Charles had in fact purchased and displayed in Whitehall. Van Dyck's paintings of Digby, Verney, and Charles I in armor are quite similar to Rubens's Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (1629 or 1630), which closely resembles Titian's Alfonso d' Avalos, Marchese del Vesto, with Page (1533), and the Allucution of Alfonso d' Avalos, Marchese del Vesto (1539-41), but whose ultimate source is Titian's own lost Salvius Otho.(53)

Walker drew upon the cultural capital of Van Dyck portraiture, invoking its long artistic lineage. There is irony, of course, in Cromwellian appropriations of images deriving from a Europe of the Counter-Reformation Church Triumphant, of the Roi Soleil, and belief in divine right monarchy. Taken to task for his blatant imitation of Van Dyck, Walker responded with blunt honesty worthy of his subject: asked "why he did [not] make some of his own Postures, says he if I could get better I would not do Vandikes. He [Walker] would not bend his mind to make any Postures of his own."(54)

Yet Walker's frank answer should not be taken as proof that he simply duplicated royalist forms. There are significant differences as well as links between the Walker portrait and Van Dyck portraits of Charles. Although Charles himself was sober and retiring and did not provoke the criticisms of extravagance that his father James I had, the Van Dyck portraiture displays luxurious and elegant apparel, a concomitant of Stuart majesty.(55) The portraiture displayed and authorized the high ideals of chivalric kingship. No such splendor appears in Walker's portrait of Cromwell. Although Walker attached Cromwell's head to an elegantly apparelled body, the head itself is plain, the hair uneven, the chin spotted with tufts of hair. Cromwell's head contrasts to the bland, idealized visage of the page tying his sash. And the very fact of the borrowing challenges the exclusionary claims of the Caroline court to images of power and authority.

The Walker portrait was by far the most widely reproduced of the Cromwell portraits, appearing in engravings and reproduced in such panegyrics as A Perfect List of all the Victories obtained by the Lord General Cromwell (1651) and Payne Fisher's Irenodia Gratulatoria (1652). But the image was also reinterpreted and used against Cromwell. As early as 1649, a satiric engraving of Cromwell appeared in a work by Clement Walker, a parliamentarian who had been accused of fomenting apprentice riots during the Army revolts of 1647 and who was ousted at Pride's Purge in December 1648. Clement Walker lashed out bitterly at Cromwell and the Independents in his History of Independency; the engraving, entitled The Royall Oake of Brittayne [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED] appeared in the second part, Anarchia Anglicana (1649).

In this engraving, Cromwell has been transposed from a martial setting or a neutral frame to an incongruous civil scene in which he attacks not a military opponent but a tree - the sacred Royal Oak of Britain. The engraving is complex and elaborate. Cromwell, dressed in the Van Dyck/Walker armor and sash of the Walker portrait, is shown full-length, revealing that his feet stand on a globe, "locus lubricus," (slippery place), over the mouth of hell. Inspired by hell ("Inspiratio Diabolica"), he creates anarchy in order to take possession of the crown for himself.

This engraving turns Cromwell's piety and biblicism against him. Cromwell is linked with biblical figures: here, the wicked king Ahab and the husbandmen of Christ's parable of the householder and his vineyard. Cromwell's "Kill and take possession" echoes the word of the Lord to the prophet Elijah in 1 Kings 21:18-19: "Arise, go down to meet Ahab king of Israel, which is in Samaria: behold he is in the vineyard of Naboth, whither he is gone down to possess it. And thou shalt speak unto him, saying, Thus saith the Lord, Hast thou killed, and also taken possession? And thou shalt speak unto him, saying, Thus saith the Lord, In the place where the dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood, even thine." After he had refused to sell his vineyard - the inheritance of his fathers - to King Ahab, Naboth was murdered at the instigation of Ahab's notorious wife, Queen Jezebel. Cromwell, going beyond Ahab's sin, has no Jezebel, but himself orders the destruction of the sacred oak, giving the order to three men armed with axes.

The second biblical quote (by the tree), "Let us kill him and seyse his inheritance" (Matt. 21:38), links Cromwell with the evil husbandmen who are left in charge of the vineyard in Christ's parable of the winepress. The husbandmen kill first the householder's servants and then his own son, saying, "This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance." Christ's parable, obviously foreshadowing the crucifixion, here links Charles I with Christ and Cromwell with Christ's crucifiers. As with Ahab, dire punishment is predicted, for the master of the vineyard "will miserably destroy those wicked men" (Matt. 21:41).

Cromwell's martial figure is in itself neither distorted nor grotesque in this engraving: his appearance is meant to be deceptively appealing. His position to the left of the centrally-placed royal oak, however, indicates the illegitimacy of his actions. The engraving reveals Cromwell to be a hypocrite, motivated by ambition and greed; written alongside his head and shoulders are the words "Quod utile honestum" (how profitable honesty is!). Clement Walker indicates that the plain style is a machiavellian ruse, designed to conceal and deceive.

Clement Walker's inclusion of visual satire in his printed attack on Cromwell was the exception in England during the Commonwealth and Protectorate, although many satiric engravings of Cromwell were produced on the continent, especially in Holland. And indeed, Walker's fate served as an exemplary warning: he was arrested for Anarchia Anglicana and charged with high treason, although his case never came to trial and he died in the Tower in 1651.

Later examples of Cromwellian portraiture became less and not more courtly than the Robert Walker painting parodied in The Royall Oake of Brittayne. In a second painting by or after Robert Walker, Cromwell's head was itself borrowed, set upon a different body of a horseman, which is much less courtly in apparel and stance [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 6 OMITTED]. Cromwell is dressed as a calvary man, in padded trousers, oxhide jacket, spurs, pull-up boots, and fringed gauntlets. He wears a cuirass and sword and holds a martial baton and hat. Yet this is a noticeably plain pose: the figure stands in a limp posture with shoulders inactive, arms hanging lifelessly, and a severe expression; the background too is unadorned. The dash of Van Dyck's figures, who show grace, sprezzatura, a readiness to move, contrasts with this dully posed Cromwell. Is Walker's style, then, aesthetically flawed - simply "pedestrian," as Millar and Whinney claim? I would argue, rather, that the unassuming stance deliberately counters what Wilton has termed the "swagger" court portraiture after Van Dyck. In the stance and posture alone, this is the beginning of a plain style portraiture.

Sometime around 1650, the miniaturist Samuel Cooper (1609-72) made an unfinished oval watercolor of Cromwell, the master-copy for many future reproductions [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 7 OMITTED].(56) Cooper's Cromwell wears a buff-coat over a shirt with a simple white collar; he is looking away, preoccupied, even other-worldly. Cooper, like Walker, was widely admired; writing some years later, on 2 January 1662, Samuel Pepys called him "the great Limner in little."(57) Again there was influence from the court of Charles I: Horace Walpole later wrote that Cooper "owed great part of his merit to the works of Van Dyke, and yet may be called an original genius, as he was the first who gave the strength and freedom of oil to miniature . . . [If] his portrait of Cromwell could be so enlarged, I don't know but Van Dyke appear less great by the comparion."(58) Most immediately striking about the Cooper miniature, however, is its visual realism. Cromwell's hair is receding; his face is lined, and his cheeks are blotched and paunchy. In contrast, even to Van Dyck's naturalistic if aristocratic portraiture, this is a startlingly honest and plain depiction.

After Cromwell assumed the office of Lord Protector in December 1653, there was apparently no attempt to create a new mode of Protectoral portraiture. Reproductions of Walker's first portrait and of Cooper's miniature continued to be made. The Commonwealth mode of synthesizing and reforming Caroline forms also continued in a new portrait by Sir Peter Lely (1618-80). Lely painted his head and shoulders oval portrait of Cromwell [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 8 OMITTED] just after the inauguration of the Protectorate.(59) The portrait is in the round, but without a coat of arms or any decoration. The body is again closely modeled on Van Dyck. Lely returns Cromwell's image to the martial, while retaining a plain style of collar and black armor. Unusually, his eyes do not meet ours or even look up. Instead they look down and to Cromwell's left, giving the portrait a somewhat distant, contemplative tone.

It was to Sir Peter Lely that the (now) well-known advice of Cromwell regarding his portraiture was given: "Mr. Lilly I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me & not Flatter me at all. But (pointing to his own face) remark all these ruffness, pimples warts & everything as you see me. Otherwise I never will pay a farthing for it."(60) The anecdote was first recorded by George Vertue early in the eighteenth century and is thought by some to refer not to Lely but to Cooper, whose watercolor miniature evinces Cromwell's warts even more prominently. Although its authenticity cannot be proved, the account of Cromwell urging that his portrait be "truly like me," without flattery and even with "ruffness, pimples [and] warts," coheres with Cromwell's own professed plainness and his disavowal of compliment and rhetoric. In the event, the portraiture was never wholly warts and all; while eschewing the gaudy trappings of power, Lely elongates Cromwell's face, smooths over some of the roughnesses, and adds the cultural prestige of the cuirassier armor.

The most courtly and idealized portrait of Cromwell was the first: the painting in armor by Robert Walker. Walker's second painting and those by Cooper and Lely that followed moved further away from Caroline forms. The same is true for an anonymous equestrian painting of Cromwell [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 9 OMITTED], probably executed during the early Protectorate. The painting, not done from life, resembles continental engravings, often satiric, of the late 1640s and the 1650s. Cromwell wears the clothes of a well-to-do merchant: matching velvet jacket and breeches, the jacket with a long row of many buttons. The only military item in his costume is the gorget around his neck, over which peeks his characteristic plain falling collar. He wears an understated gold chain and medal about his neck, carries a cane in his right hand, and wears a lavishly-plumed sugar-loaf hat atop his head. He sits astride a barb stallion, a pistol in a saddle-hoster near his left knee. He carries a long crop or stick in his right hand and wears high cavalry boots with spurs. Behind him is a copy of Hollar's engraving of the cityscape of London. Cromwell looks more like a prosperous burgher than a monarch, and even the trappings on the horse are simple and spare.

The plain style process culminated in a final portrait which was the least monarchical of all. The last portrait for which Cromwell must have sat, since the facial features change considerably from the Walker, Cooper, and Lely, was painted by Edward Mascall (1627-75) in the last year of Cromwell's life. Given the increased regality of the Protectoral court after 1657 and the suggestions both by Cromwell's contemporaries and by such modern scholars as Roy Sherwood that Cromwell had in fact become a de facto monarch, the portrait is a important artifact of late Cromwellian representation. Had he abandoned the plain style?

Significantly, then, the Mascall portrait [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 10 OMITTED] depicts the sharply delineated features of an older Cromwell, wearing a plain collar, dark fur, and a simple if elegant cloak. Cromwell's hair has thinned and his cheeks are sagging. Unlike the timeless and unchanging sphere of monarchical iconography, mythologized and remote, the effects of time and age upon Cromwell are clear. Only Cromwell's hand remains an idealized Van Dyck hand - elongated, slender, and graceful - with no signs of aging.

This final portrait is as striking, even startling, for what is absent as for what is represented. No external symbols of office, authority, or power frame the starkly posed single figure. No memorials of martial and imperial achievements and renown appear. No rich and ornate clothing attests to Cromwell's enhanced status. No written inscription guides the viewer and elevates the subject. Not even a Cromwellian coat of arms, often seen in engravings of the period, appears. Given that 1657 was the year of the kingship crisis, which culminated in Cromwell's rejection of a direct offer of the crown and his more ceremonial reinstallation as Protector under a revised constitution - the Humble Petition and Advice - this is a remarkably private depiction, eschewing all public reference. In this late portrait we find no signs of royalty, nor indeed of pomp. Although Cromwell was given a funeral befitting a monarch, in life he rejected the crown. His final portrait was the most "puritan" and plain style of all.

UNMASKING THE PLAIN STYLE IN RESTORATION ENGLAND

After the fall of the Cromwellian Protectorate under Oliver's son Richard and the subsequent restoration of the Stuart monarchy, visual satire of Cromwell such as we saw in The Royall Oake of Brittayne resumed. Indeed, at the Restoration such attacks seemed necessary to destroy any lingering appeal that Cromwell may have had. In the demonizing of Cromwell that followed the return of Charles II, the portrait in cuirassier armor by Robert Walker elicited the fiercest attacks. The plain style was about to be unmasked.

One satiric print [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 11 OMITTED] was published in 1660 in Cromwell's Bloody Slaughter-house, probably written shortly after the king's death by John Gauden (1605-62), a Presbyterian clergyman and eventual Anglican bishop now better known as the ghost-writer of Eikon Basilike. While Eikon Basilike constructed an image of Charles as pious martyr-king, Cromwell's Bloody Slaughter-house did the obverse, vilifying Charles's opponents as "cursed Cains," "murtherers of the Father of your Countrey," "impudent Ravishers both of Church and State," "Monsters of Men," "putid Apostates," "execrable Saints," "shameless Sinners," and "trayterous Tyrants:"(61) and all this in only one of over one hundred impassioned pages!

Cromwell in fact does not feature by name in the written text of Cromwell's Bloody Slaughter-house, although the title and engraving of its published form focus the attack on him alone. The engraving radically appropriates the Walker image of Cromwell in full armor. It is again important that Cromwell appears in his familiar form, as a military conqueror who had received so much praise. But here his body is strikingly turned, with his back to the viewer and his head at a noticeably odd angle. The stealth of this position is appropriate to Cromwell's theft of the ornate crown. At the same time, he tramples a Bible beneath his feet, underscoring the sacrilegious nature of his actions.

This engraving, like The Royall Oake of Brittayne, links Cromwell with Ahab and the murder of Naboth for his vineyard ("Let's kill and take possession"). Finally, in the background is the execution of Charles himself, with a clergyman (Juxon) protesting from the scaffold - "O horrible murder" - and a masked executioner with axe raised. The background scene makes clear the contemporary application of the biblical allusion: "kill and take possession." Cromwell grasps the crown with his hands at the precise moment that the king is beheaded.

An even more elaborate frontispiece of Cromwell [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 12 OMITTED] is found in The Subjects Joy for the Kings Restoration, a masque published in 1660 by clergyman Anthony Sadler (1630-80). In the 1650s, Sadler had been rejected by Cromwell's Triers; even after the Restoration, he was no model clergyman but was charged variously with libel, disorderly practice, failure to hold divine services, and debauchery. But Sadler put his biblical knowledge to good use in this (almost certainly unacted) masque that celebrated the return of Charles II in part by constructing Cromwell as an arch-traitor and villain.

The engraved frontispiece of The Subjects Joy is particularly striking. The figure of Cromwell beneath the word "Jeroboam" immediately recalls the Walker portrait and its subsequent imitations, although Cromwell is presented full-length and we see his left side, not his right. Cromwell holds the Wheel of Fortune (upon which is inscribed the traditional "Regno, Regnabo, Sis Sine regno, Regna[vi]sti") with another figure. This figure is a chimera, a synthesis of Dame Fortune (the traditional bearer of the Wheel) and a devil. The resulting monstrosity retains the gender (indicated by the drooping right breast) and fabled forelock of Dame Fortune, but grafted onto a demon that sports a cat's head, bat's wings, and goat's legs and tail. Psalms 52:7 is written upon the oval frame that encloses this unholy pair: "Loe this is the man that tooke not god for his strength but trusted unto the multitude of his riches and strengthen'd himselfe in his wickedness." The verse is the scornful mockery of the righteous for the wicked, and specifically for the hypocrite: "Thou lovest evil more than good; and lying rather than to speak righteousness. Thou lovest all devouring words, O thou deceitful tongue. God shall likewise destroy thee for ever, he shall take thee away, and pluck thee out of thy dwelling place, and root thee out of the land of the living" (Psalms 52:3-5). Such a condemnation of the once-mighty Cromwell would have seemed quite appropriate in 1660.

It is significant that Cromwell is labelled "Jeroboam" - an allusion that is elaborated upon in the text. Jeroboam was much used in printed satires on Cromwell, especially in 1658-60. As a biblical king who had rebelled against the Davidic line and a military figure who was also an idolator (he introduced the worship of the golden calves), Jeroboam was a powerful figure by which Cromwell could be attacked, thus legitimating both Charles I and Charles II, the true Davidite who was at last restored.

In the text of The Subjects Joy, Jeroboam (the Cromwell figure) meets a dire and unbiblical end when, after he has confessed his misdeeds, "the Devil tares him in pieces and throwes him into Hell."(62) For good measure - and important in our context - a "picture of Jeroboam, in a frame of Gold" is also held up, as the Levites sing this song: "The Person, and his Power's gone:/ What's worth your Contemplation?/ This Picture? or this fairer Frame?/ (Deserving better then its Name)/ No, no th' memory, the Sight;/ Each Part, and Faculty, that's right;/ Abhors the Shadow of the fairest Paint,/ Which makes the foulest Devil seem a Saint."(63) During the song, according to a marginal direction, "He throws the picture down and breaks it."(64) It is interesting to speculate about the appearance of this picture. Would it have been, as in the frontispiece, a familiar portrait of Cromwell himself? The shattering of the picture both attacks Cromwellian iconography and attests to its dangerous power, the power to make "the foulest Devil seem a Saint."

Finally; an engraving based on Walker's cuirassier portrait of Cromwell served as the frontispiece to the 1663 edition of James Heath's Flagellum [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 13 OMITTED]. Heath (1629-64), who had been at the Hague at the court of Charles II, compiled this long derogatory biography of Cromwell as well as A Briefe Chronicle of the civil wars and Interregnum. Heath uses a familiar engraving, but with additions that reveal the true nature of Cromwell's seemingly transparent martial figure. Cromwell is shown three-quarter's length in full armor. But now a cloud overhead turns threatening and dark and a rope descends from the cloud to wind around Cromwell's neck, indicating his eventual fate. Furthermore, the caption underneath the engraving reveals Cromwell to be a moral monster by linking him with the ambitious, traitorous, and cruel Roman, Sejanus.

The Latin text underneath the portrait is taken from the famous tenth satire of Juvenal, a graphic description of the downfall of Sejanus. Only the names are changed: "Cromwellus ducitur Unco/ Spectandus, gaudent omnes quae labra quis Illi/ Vultus erat - nunquam mihi credis amavi/ Hunc Hominem - Inv[isus] sat[is]." ("Cromwell is dragged by a hook, to be viewed as a spectacle. Everyone rejoices: what lips, what a gaze he had! Trust me - never did I love this man. He was hated enough.")(65)

Sejanus had risen to power under the Roman emperor Tiberius, in part by murdering Tiberius's own son, Drusus. Having encouraged Tiberius himself to withdraw to the island of Capri, Sejanus grew cruel and tremendously powerful until Tiberius, alerted by his sister-in-law Antonia, accused Sejanus of treason and ordered his execution. The destruction of Sejanus was swift and remarkable, followed by a bloodbath of his adherents. According to Juvenal, statues of Sejanus were torn down, with the heads melted to make pipkins, pitchers, frying pans, and slop-pails. After his execution, Sejanus's corpse was drawn through the streets on a hook and then thrown into the Tiber. Hence, the link with Cromwell, who in the exhuming was likewise mocked and punished posthumously for his alleged pride and ambition.

The simple clarity of the martial portrait was thus shown, by the caption and by the written text, to be utterly deceptive. In his preface to the reader, Heath explains that he writes to expose "the poyson of Asps under [Cromwell's] Lips" as an "Antidote" to those "suck'd in by that Pestilent Air of his pious pretences."(66) Cromwell's very success, Heath argues, discloses his evil: "Now the destructivenesse of these Chymeras and Whimsies of Piety, that austere Sanctimony under which we laboured, could never better be discovered, then by the divine permission of this mans arrival and ascent to the Supreme power, thereby giving the world a Specimen of the deep mischief of pretended and morose Holynesse."(67) Although the text is full of Cromwell's alleged moral monstrosities, ranging from his apple stealing as a child to his sacrilegious theft of the crown, Heath insists that there is no corresponding physical monstrosity to reveal Cromwell's evil. No outward signs give away the "close Treasons and dissembled Treacheries" of this "bold and perjurious politique."(68) For Heath, the plain style was the opposite of what it seemed.

The Cromwellian plain style also had a lingering effect on the portraiture of Charles II. In response to Cromwell, and no doubt to years of exile and penury, Charles II heightened the trappings of monarchy, largely eschewing both the military mode and the plain style. The new manners and luxury of the court of Charles II ushered in a more lavish portraiture style. Yet, as with the transition from Caroline to Cromwellian iconography, the portraiture of Charles II showed both continuity and change. It is worth noting, for instance, that both Peter Lely and Samuel Cooper thrived under the new regime. Lely painted lavish portraits of Charles in state robes and became famous for painting the court beauties in various stages of undress, far removed from his sober portrait of the martial Cromwell.

I want to conclude, however, by turning to an engraving, not a portrait, of Charles II. In 1662 Peter Williamson depicted Charles II and Catherine of Braganza around the time of their marriage [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 14 OMITTED], by drawing yet again on the Mytens/Van Dyck portraits of Charles I and Henrietta Maria that had been appropriated for Cromwell. As in the engraving of the Cromwells, Charles II and Catherine look directly at the viewer, and there is only one symbolic token - an elaborate, fruit-laden wreath. But for the most part variations are more striking than similarities and they point to essential differences between the Lord Protector and the court of Charles II.

The Williamson engraving restores an iconic representation of the monarch, legitimating and celebrating the crown as well as the successful marriage treaty with Portugal, which included the richest dowry any bride had ever brought to England: more than 800,000 in cash and the colonial possessions of Bombay and Tangiers. The tone is positive and assured; Charles II appears in state robes, evincing the grandeur and majesty of kingship. As in the Van Dyck painting of Charles I, the Stuart regalia appears on a table behind Charles II, and, as with Van Dyck's idealized paintings of Charles I - who was in reality short of stature and refined of feature - this engraving flatters the tall, dark, and coarse-featured king. The clothing of both Charles II and Catherine is splendid and ornate. Charles II has elaborate cuffs, for instance, and a broad collar. Catherine's hair, dressed in deep side ringlets, exemplifies the fashion of the day, and she wears pearl earrings and a pearl necklace; her gown has a deeply scooped neckline with a large brooch, and her bodice is elaborately tucked and jeweled. Much attention has been given to the folds of the rich material.

Hovering at the top of the engraving, a herald angel sounds a trumpet of peace over a pastoral landscape. Two Latin inscriptions supplement the visual emblems of regality while twin cornucopiae, symbolizing the (hoped-for) fecundity of the union, flank the royal arms of Portugal, which are displayed upon a heart-shaped device. Art is again a means of enhancing and lauding the monarchy. In its return to, even elaboration upon the splendor of the Mytens/Van Dyck composition, this Carolean image stands in marked contrast to the domestic, private, and demythologized image of the Cromwells with which we began.

One final effect of the Cromwellian sobriety can thus be seen in the reactions of early Restoration portraiture, in the cool beauties and opulent majesty of the court of Charles II. And yet that very reaction, like the satires that sought to unmask the plain style, attested to Cromwell's ongoing influence. Samuel Pepys's observation in 1667 is revealing: "It is strange how . . . everybody doth nowadays reflect upon Oliver and commend him, so brave things he did and made all the neighbour princes fear him; while here a prince, come in with all the love and prayers and good liking of his people, and have given greater signs of loyalty and willingness to serve him with their estates than ever was done by any people, hath lost all so soon."(69) If the martyr-king Charles I haunted the Protectorate, Cromwell's plain manner and visage and his appealing military success haunted Charles II, dependent upon Louis XIV and embarrassed by the disasters of the second Dutch war. Through the reign of Charles II and beyond, the plain style of the Lord Protector remained available as a boldly reformed aesthetic: an alternative mode of piety and of power.

PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY 

Research for this essay was funded by a fellowship from the Pew Charitable Trusts, Evangelical Scholars Program. I want to thank Thomas Corns for his invitation to present an early version of this essay at the University of Wales, Bangor, and Amy Gohlany and Don-John Dugas for their perceptive comments on written drafts.

1 The portraits are reproduced and discussed by Millar, 1962; Parry, 220; and Wheelock in Wheelock, et al., 246-48.

2 Layard discusses perhaps the best known Cromwellian borrowing from Caroline portraiture, Pierre Lombart's equestrian engraving of Cromwell. The Lombart engraving is modelled on the equestrian painting of Charles I at Windsor Castle and shows, in various states, the heads of Cromwell, Gustavus Adolphus, Louis XIV, and Charles I.

3 Whinney and Millar, 76.

4 Ibid., 77.

5 Waterhouse, 53-54, writes that during the civil wars, parliamentary portraits showed a stronger dependence on Van Dyck than did royalist portraiture and that "there would, on grounds of style, be more reason to surmise that Walker, the much inferior counterpart to the Royalist Dobson on the Parliamentary side, may have actually been a pupil of Van Dyck." He notes that Walker imitated Van Dyck and Titian and observes that "it is a significant reflection that the official Commonwealth portraits should all echo the designs of absolutist Court painters." Gaunt, 133, describes Walker as "an artist of not more than moderate capacity but a sedulous imitator of Van Dyck," adding that "there was irony in his using the compositions of the Kings painter in the portraits of the King's enemies." In his recent study of seventeenth-century portraiture, Murdoch, 253, cautions against such simple cultural polarities as "the Roundhead, severe and self-denying, and the Cavalier, gorgeous and self-indulgent," but he does not trace how Cromwellian portraiture both drew upon and differed from monarchical iconography.

6 Piper, 30.

7 Ibid.

8 Sherwood, 151, arguing that Cromwell became a de facto monarch after the second protectoral installation, comments only briefly on the lack of protectoral court painters, as an example of offices that were not restored. Among biographers, Fraser, reproduces many contemporary illustrations of Cromwell, but follows art historians in writing of the "wholesale adaptation of Cavalier ways [in portraiture] for the Protectoral court." Of Walker, Fraser, 471, comments that "he found no necessity to have a new and Puritanical style of portraiture; on the contrary he merely adapted not only the style, but also in many cases the actual poses and details of the pictures of an earlier decade and his great forerunner Van Dyck." Despite its title, the recent collection edited by Richardson focuses not on visual images of Cromwell but on historiography and does not mention portraiture; nor do the valuable essays in Morrill's collection treat visual representations. Gaunt, in his biography of Cromwell, does address the gap in a final chapter on "The Faces of Cromwell" that includes both pen-portraits and visual images. Gaunt is brief but insightful on the paintings, in which he finds "a sense of realism and simplicity."

9 See Campbell; Peacock on Renaissance portraiture more generally. See also King; Frye on Elizabeth; Goldberg on James I; Millar (1972, 1982) and Sharpe (1987, 1992) on Charles I; Burke on Louis XIV.

10 In my comments on seventeenth-century dress, I have especially drawn upon Cunnington and Cunnington.

11 On the over-painting of the Mytens portrait and the humiliation it caused him, see Millar, 1962.

12 Wheelock, et al., 246.

13 Parry, 220.

14 Haller; and Perry Miller provide classic statements of the Puritan plain style. Although challenges to Miller have shown that he undervalued American Puritan poetics, I do not see the plain style in itself as discredited. Webber gives an important early treatment of seventeenth-century prose style, more recently discussed by Pooley regarding Bunyan (1988) and, more broadly, puritan preaching (1992). In her work on George Herbert's Anglican plain style, Marcus explores plain styles other than "Puritan" in early modern England.

15 Abbott, 1:256.

16 Ibid., 1:262.

17 Ibid., 2:236.

18 Ibid., 2:330.

19 Ibid., 4:146.

20 Ibid., 3:451.

21 Ibid., 3:458.

22 Ibid., 3:458.

23 Ibid., 4:267.

24 Ibid., 4:264.

25 Ibid., 4:269.

26 Ibid., 4:454.

27 Ibid., 4:470.

28 Ibid., 4:472.

29 Ibid., 4:481.

30 Ibid., 4:712.

31 Ibid., 4:722.

32 Guerdon, 3.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

35 Baxter, 99-100.

36 Cliffe, 43-62, discusses the Puritan plain style in clothing. For a contemporary comment on plainness in apparel, see Harley's advice to her son, Edward, to "be contented with plaine clothes . . . nor to be trubelled if you be in plane clothes and see others of your rancke in better" (16). Similarly, Hutchinson, 12, writes that her husband "would rather weare clothes absolutely plaine then pretending to gallantry," although she elsewhere indicates that Hutchinson dressed more befitting his social class, in "a scarlett cloake, very richly laced" (203).

37 Warwick, 247-48.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 Blencowe, 139.

41 Several Proceedings of State Affaires, 3499.

42 Bodl. Clarendon MS 48, fol. 38.

43 I want to thank Joad Raymond for bringing this valuable manuscript to my attention. Raymond has recently discussed Fraser's view of Cromwell in the context of the republican culture of the 1650s.

44 Fraser, fol. 33.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

47 Reresby, 1.

48 Ibid., 1-2.

49 Phillips traces the general impact of Reformation iconoclasm in England, while Margaret Aston argues that the Reformation made portraiture the preferred art form in England. Strong (1969, 1977), has written extensively on the cult of Elizabeth. King traces the appropriation of biblical images by Henry VIII and Elizabeth; while Belsey and Belsey focus on portraits of Elizabeth. In a challenge to some of this earlier work, especially Strong's, Hackett questions the extent to which sacred images of the Virgin Mary were in fact employed for Elizabeth.

50 Lightbown; and MacGregor more extensively place Charles within the tradition of European princely collecting. See also Smuts's discussion, 120-33.

51 Quoted in Waterhouse, 49.

52 The Van Dyck Charles I in armor is reproduced and discussed by Wheelock in Wheelock, et al., 294-95. Jaffe, 92, links the Van Dyck Charles with the Digby and the Verney.

53 The similarity to the Rubens painting was pointed out to me by Don-John Dugas. For reproductions of these works, see Jaffe, 90-106; Huemer, pt. 19.1, Portraits, plate 52; and Wethey, vol. 2, plates 56-57; and vol. 3, plate L-12-8. See also Jaffe's discussion of derivation, 92-93.

54 British Museum, Add. MS 22950, fol. 41v.

55 Sharpe, 1992, 205-21, describes Charles's reforms at court and his obsession with order and decorum, in contrast to James I; Cumming, 322, notes that elegant dress was in fact more to be found in the portraiture of Van Dyck than in the eclectic range of royal clothing and furs sold and acquired between 1649 and 1651 by Commonwealth officials.

56 Foskett presents a detailed overview of Cooper, including information on the reception of the miniatures and his ongoing role after the Restoration.

57 Pepys, 3:2.

58 Walpole, 3:110-11.

59 Baker, and, more recently, Millar, 1978, provide considerable background on Lely.

60 British Museum, Add MS 23069, fol. 11.

61 Gauden, 7.

62 Sadler, 35.

63 Ibid., 35-36.

64 Ibid., 36.

65 Heath, frontispiece.

66 Ibid., sig. A4.

67 Ibid., sig. A5.

68 Ibid., 2.

69 Pepys, 8:332.

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