Images of the king and royal power in accession day sermons in the english civil wars
Accession day was an important feast in the emerging political calendar of Early Modern Britain. Some of the sermons preached on these days were considered necessary to be published and contributed to shaping the royal image. In this paper I'm looking at this kind of sermons in the period of the Civil Wars (those of R. Gardiner, W. Hall, T. Fuller, J. Caryl, H. Leslie). Being one of the few traditionally acceptable ways to criticize a monarch and to steer him or her onto the right path, a sermon allowed a preacher to stress the ideal traits of the royal image while condemning the negative ones. I'm investigating the development of this image from the embodiment of the divine right theory, the God-like intercessor between the Lord and the people, to the "son of toil" doing his best to achieve peace, the martyr (even before his captivity and execution), and to the democratized version of the previous "majestic" image applied to "the magistrates" in Westminster. The main purpose of this analysis is to get the better understanding of theological and political ideal of "a ruler", in the years of one of the major crises of the British political system.