Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies

and next to it black binoculars and a money clip,

exactly the kind of thing we now prefer,

objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case.

The decoration of such a room was a public and political act: a declaration of the meaning of the ruler's kingship. Here Charles, child of the James who had constantly declared, in no blasphemous gesture, kings to be God on earth, and sustained by the iterations of the most powerful Anglican divines, might move, an image, among images, in that late Renaissance world where the relationship between image and what was imaged, sign and what was signified, was still patient of ambiguous readings, and in part powerful by very reason of that ambiguity. Here a king might move delicately but potently between fiction, representation, enaction, identification or participation.