Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars

Abstract

Several historians of the English Civil Wars have deplored the comparative absence of studies of royalists and royalism. Compared with what the editors of this volume call ‘the multitude of books and articles on the various parliamentarians and sectaries of the period’, the royalists have been neglected. The contemporary parliamentarian caricature of the ‘swearing, roaring, whoring Cavalier’ has not often been seriously challenged. Apart from some honourable exceptions, the royalists have been left to the military historians, whose vivid accounts of Prince Rupert's ill-fated march to raise the siege of York or of dashing but ill-disciplined cavalry charges have tended to reinforce the romantic and colourful but essentially inconsequential image of the Cavalier. In recent years a number of studies have done something to redress this imbalance and neglect. Valuable works on the Stuart courts, on royalist literature and popular journalism, and on the different strands within what is broadly labelled ‘royalism’ have greatly enlarged our understanding of the identity, the behaviour and the attitudes of those who were loyal to the Stuart cause. This collection of essays, which had their origin in a conference at Clare College, Cambridge, in July 2004, considerably raises this level of understanding, offering new approaches to, and drawing new conclusions on, many aspects of Civil War royalism.