Imaging Stuart Family Politics

'Murray offers a lucid and fascinating account of the relationship between representation and dynastic politics by focussing on visual depictions of the "heirs and spares" of Stuart and Hanoverian Britain. Drawing on a very wide range of portraits, prints and documentary sources, this important study shows that historians should not dismiss the on-going political significance of the procession of "lost hopes" that the Stuart family - and the nation - endured over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Murray shows how the continuing memorialisation of lost Princes, especially Henry, Prince of Wales and Henry, Duke of Gloucester, brought them undying roles as models or "mirrors" of ideal Protestant kingship. Since none of these figures had faced the reality of rule, the uncompromised ideals that they represented were impossible to live up to; their memories served as a critique of surviving descendants and their governments, expressed in the rueful proverb that asked how things might be better "Did not Good Prince Henry die".' Angela McShane, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 'Murray's book provides a compelling account of the potent visual, ceremonial and textual representations of royal progeny - dynasty - in the Stuart period. She convincingly demonstrates how these representations were strategically crafted and deployed to promote political agendas and royal sovereignty. These were not static images made to passively record family and issue. As Murray shows, they were living images of dynastic ambition that necessitated, in varying degrees, both continuity and transformation, being re-negotiated to respond to the changing political landscape. Combining insightful iconographic analyses of portraits, vivid ceremonial accounts, relish in material display and a nuanced understanding of the complex political situation, this far-reaching book is a welcome contribution to the literature on the Stuart court.' Erin Griffey, The University of Auckland,