6 - A Taste for Flowers: Regenerating the Restoration Table

Summary

Abstract

During the Civil Wars and Restoration, royalists mobilised flowers to express the ‘politics of abundance’ of the monarch's reign. This chapter examines an unexplored arena for royalist floral display following the acclaimed cultural and agricultural dearth of the Interregnum: the table. It surveys published recipe books, plate, and paintings to discuss the ways in which flowers in food and eating spaces staged the restored king and his realms as flourishing. Charles II returned from exile in 1660 with a legitimate need to reinvest in the materials of kingship. It argues that flowers importantly reasserted royal identity, acting as sensory bearers of messages reconnecting the body of the king and state that had been severed with the execution of Charles I.

Keywords: recipes; culinary; art; senses; Stuart; Charles II

The Puritan preacher William Bridge (c. 1600–1670) cautioned ‘When you have good meat in a dish, possibly you wil lay flowers upon it … but a wise man knowes, that the meat is never the better for the flowers.’ His sermon was published in 1656, seven years after the beginning of the Interregnum and two years before the death of its Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658). In the same breath, Bridge informed his readers that the biblical king Solomon's temple was ‘a Glorious building, much Gold and Silver in it,’ yet the meaner building that housed Christ ‘was beyond the Glory of the first.’

Bridge's flowers called for simpler forms of worship. His Puritan theology jarred the established English church to the extent that when he was forced to flee to Holland in the 1630s, Charles I (1600–1649) commented, ‘we are well rid of him.’

Bridge repatriated to England in 1641, supporting Parliament in the Civil Wars that led to the king's execution. His sermon in 1656 implicitly criticised Charles's religious policies, including his penchant for the material beauty of the mass that appeared to some contemporaries dangerously close to Catholicism. Bridge's dismissal of Solomon, so soon after his mention of flowers, reads as a reference to a state that needed neither flowers nor kings.