The First “Royal”: Charles I as Celebrity

Abstract

The seventeenth-century royalist bookEikon Basiliké(1649), probably the most successful political tract of the English revolution, was unlike any other royalist work published in the period. Its unique qualities suggest that it did something genuinely new. Those qualities may be best appreciated from the perspective ofcelebrity.While celebrity is ordinarily considered a modern phenomenon, the reception ofEikon Basilikéshows that the idea of celebrity arises in the early modern period, when a new relation between text and audience presented a commodified image of a famous person, an image that was consumed by its audience in a democratized marketplace. Ironically,Eikon Basilikéachieved commodification by relying on the traditional techniques of the art of memory—the fourth part of rhetoric—to create the illusion of closeness between king and subject that converted the king into a celebrity.

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