Thinking about Allegiance in the English Civil War

Abstract

The opposition of the well-affected to the disaffected was a central feature of political discourse in the middle and late seventeenth century. If the disaffected did not exist, they had to be invented. Their secret machinations were held responsible for everything from military losses and fires to the presence of division in a theoretically harmonious polity. But the continuing proliferation of loyalty oaths, and debate over their wording, suggests that contemporaries wrestled with the question of how an individual's allegiance could be known. It was, moreover, an intriguing paradox of the period that 'loyalty' was held at highest value, yet the English experienced numerous changes of regime. The ways that individuals coped with the changing of sides and the ways that regimes accepted or rejected the conversions of former opponents, are crucial aspects of the seventeenth century's revolutionary legacy. Political allegiance itself, then, is a subject which deserves the close attention of historians.