‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And straight, unruly seas thou canst command’:: Contemporary Representations of King Charles I and the Ship Money Fleets within the Cultural Imagination of Caroline England

This essay examines the ideal of Charles I as a maritime ruler through an exploration of literary representations of the ship money fleets, embodied by the flagship, Sovereign of the Seas. This trope spanned genres from Edmund Waller’s and Thomas Beedome’s poetry to James Shirley’s and William Strode’s plays, reaching its height when Charles I appeared in seeming nautical triumph in Inigo Jones’s and William Davenant’s opulent court masque, Britannia Triumphans. As England teetered towards civil war, parliament commandeered the fleets, delivering a severe blow to the king’s image and the royalist cause. Such a sharp reversal of fortune exposes the importance of maritime Britain in defining and understanding the Caroline nation at a moment of acute political anxiety.