How did the abstract concept of power become infused into written and spoken communication, so that audiences in the Tudor period would bow to the royal message without the questioning and parrying that accompanies ordinary communication? Royal Voices answers that question with impressive thoroughness, identifying the moving parts of a linguistic machine attuned to command and control. Tudor England, emerging from competing fiefdoms into a cohesive modern nation ruled by a single monarch, needed all the majesty it could pack into its communiqués. Consent, not debate, is the rhetorical goal of royal communication. Throughout this book, the author inventories techniques of embodying power in overlooked linguistic structures—syntax, diction, salutation—to argue that royal vocalizing saturated its linguistic field with its intention, elevating royal voice decisively above ordinary or normative speech patterns. The author makes a compelling case.

Regal linguistic features in question include the eerie warmth of a greeting used by the coldly calculating Henry VIII: “Trusty and well-beloved, I greet you well.” The nearly sacramental tones of “well-beloved” (a precursor to the ministerial “dearly beloved” used at weddings?) became a signature greeting, imitated by courtiers wishing to speak in the idiom of a deity addressing mere mortals. The author refers to this widely imitated greeting among the Tudor elites as “high-frequency interpersonal bundles” (77), suggesting that royal power could manifest across the vast geographic spaces of early modern England. If one king, sitting in a palace uses the royal we, that is simply a grammatical indicator of a larger body. The inner council of royal advisers are the collective entity inscribed within the king's pluralized pronoun. A more startling show of royal power is to have the king's written persona made manifest in virtually identical language across different regions of the country. Thus writers from high-ranking nobility or gentry could use the same greeting to evince royal power far from the king's actual location. Consequently, the king's identity is reproduced here, there, and everywhere, a communicational duplication that approximates royal omnipresence. If the king is omnipresent, ordinary people, hearing his linguistic identity reproduced in their locality, may be moved to wonder if the king is also omniscient. Although Evans does not connect his linguistic analysis of power to Michael Foucault's formulation of the panopticon, this reviewer was reminded of an all-seeing surveillance state while reading Royal Voices.

I offer one reservation about this finely researched book. I was left to ponder the author's assumption that royal “enregisterment” crossed the linguistic border into audience effectiveness. Would people who heard or read a royal communication heed its directives and dictates? A literary embodiment of royal voices—the notorious royal we used by fratricidal Claudius in Hamlet—suggests that the linguistic conveyance of royal power could fall flat. For young Hamlet, the “bloat” king's royal-sounding rhetoric is cause for further disgust. The same dynamic of ethos weakening logos, of moral character compromising linguistic performance, happened in Tudor history. When commoners protested the infamous stripping of the altars, Henry VIII wrote a proclamation calling for them to disband. The threat of English infantry deployed against them, not Henry's proclamation, compelled commoners to retreat. So, too, with Edward VI, a teenage king advised by an inner council that was widely regarded as a band of rapacious adventurers. When the largest rebellion in the Tudor period arose in the summer of 1549, Edward penned a command to disperse, using the full arsenal of royal phraseology: “But as a prince reigning by almighty god's providence, most mighty, and in justice terrible, by the advice of his said dear uncle the lord Protector and the rest of his majesty's privy council” (138). The many thousands of rebels encamped outside Norfolk were contemptuous. Fearing that their eloquently penned petition to stop illegal land enclosures would be ignored if they dispersed, the poor commons dug in deeper, raiding military installations to prepare for combat against the royal army. For all of its careful stylization of regal potency, royal language could be dissolved by the frustration, anger, and moral alienation of ordinary English women and men.

Royal Voices does a great job of investigating, researching, and explaining its chosen subject. It makes an impressive contribution to linguistic history. It does not, alas, make a hoped-for analytic leap from linguistics to social history, where ordinary people, subject to laws and regulations they had no hand in making, resisted an elite class whose high self-regard bordered on king-size narcissism.