Royalists And Royalism During The Interregnum

There has long been an unfortunate tendency to dismiss those who were loyal to the Stuarts as, in the immortal words of 1066 and all That, `wrong but romantic', or as the products of unthinking political and religious reaction. In recent years, scholars have begun to explore the phenomenon of royalism during the 1640s. Yet we still know very little about those who were loyal to Charles II during the 1650s. This volume brings together essays by established and emerging historians and literary scholars in Britain, Europe, the United States and Australia, sketching the difficulties, complexities, and nuances of the Royalist experience during the Commonwealth and Protectorate. It examines women, religion, print-culture, literature, the politics of exile, and the nature and extent of royalist networks in England. This ambitious and innovative book sheds important new light on the experience of those who were loyal to the Stuarts. It argues for the need to re-orientate, re-invigorate and re-invent the study of those who detested Cromwell and his `rebels'; and it forces us to examine the decade as a whole from a new perspective. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the culture, history or literature of the English Revolution.

Much ink has been spent on accounts of the English Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century, yet royalism has been largely neglected. This volume of essays by leading scholars in the field seeks to fill that significant gap in our understanding by focusing on those who took up arms for the king. The royalists described were not reactionary, absolutist extremists but pragmatic, moderate men who were not so different in temperament or background from the vast majority of those who decided to side with, or were forced by circumstances to side with, Parliament and its army. The essays force us to think beyond the simplistic dichotomy between royalist 'absolutists' and 'constitutionalists' and suggest instead that allegiances were much more fluid and contingent than has hitherto been recognized. This is a major contribution to the political and intellectual history of the Civil Wars and of early modern England more generally.

This is a major contribution to the political and intellectual history of the Civil Wars and of early modern England more generally.

This book explores the measures taken by the newly re-installed monarchy and its supporters to address the drastic events of the previous two decades. Profoundly preoccupied with - and, indeed, anxious about - the uses and representations of the nation’s recent troubled past, the returning royalist regime heavily relied upon the dissemination, in popular print, of prescribed varieties of remembering and forgetting in order to actively shape the manner in which the Civil Wars, the Regicide, and the Interregnum were to be embedded in the nation’s collective memory. This study rests on a broad foundation of documentary evidence drawn from hundreds of widely distributed and affordable pamphlets and broadsheets that were intended to shape popular memories, and interpretations, of recent events. It thus makes a substantial original contribution to the fields of early modern memory studies and the history of the English Civil Wars and early Restoration.

This dissertation examines how ordinary English men and women negotiated the social, cultural and political changes that accompanied a devastating Civil War and the execution of their King in 1649. Arguing against the dichotomy that classifies people's reactions as either 'conventional' or 'radical' based on their political allegiances, it maintains that the people supported regimes whose pretenses conformed to popular values. This study includes an investigation of the various means of resistance people exercised against government intrusion into their everyday lives. Despite officials' repressive measures to curb the expression of opinion, people continued to engage with the political culture fostered by the outbreak of pamphlet literature during the civil wars. Court records, pamphlets and manuscript accounts indicate that men and women articulated discontent through speech acts, ritualistic violence, intimidation and noncooperation with the enforcement of unpopular policies. In response to intrusive policies, people frequently focused their grievances on symbolic figures associated with the state. These despised characters, such as excise-men and soldiers, were people whose entrance into local society led to a drain on its economy and threatened its stability---with no perceivable benefit to its inhabitants. Although these manifestations of dissent cannot simply be equated with popular royalism, the fact remains that the restoration of the monarchy was largely welcomed throughout the nation. This dissertation argues that royalist propagandists redefined people's animosity toward the Interregnum state as evidence of their loyalty to the Stuarts, particularly in the months leading up to the Restoration of Charles II. In their rhetoric, royalists not only embraced traditional cultural practices, they also connected their continuation with the survival of monarchy. Analyzing the politics surrounding popular disaffection and the politics of popular disaffection reveals that people's discontent played a significant role in creating fertile soil for the Restoration in 1660.

Author of plays, love-lyrics, essays and, among other works, The Civil War, the Davideis and the Pindarique Odes, Abraham Cowley made a deep impression on seventeenth-century letters, attested by his extravagant funeral and his burial next to Chaucer and Spenser in Westminster Abbey. Ejected from Cambridge for his politics, he found refuge in royalist Oxford before seeing long service as secretary to Queen Henrietta Maria, and as a Crown agent, on the continent. In the mid-1650s he returned to England, was imprisoned and made an accommodation with the Cromwellian regime. This volume of essays provides the modern critical attention Cowley’s life and writings merit.

Original and thought-provoking, this collection sheds new light on an important yet understudied feature of seventeenth-century England's political and cultural landscape: exile. Through an essentially literary lens, exile is examined both as physical departure from England-to France, Germany, the Low Countries and America-and as inner, mental withdrawal. In the process, a strikingly wide variety of contemporary sources comes under scrutiny, including letters, diaries, plays, treatises, translations and poetry. The extent to which the richness and disparateness of these modes of writing militates against or constructs a recognisable 'rhetoric' of exile is one of the book's overriding themes. Also under consideration is the degree to which exilic writing in this period is intended for public consumption, a product of private reflection, or characterised by a coalescence of the two. Importantly, this volume extends the chronological range of the English Revolution beyond 1660 by demonstrating that exile during the Restoration formed a meaningful continuum with displacement during the civil wars of the mid-century. This in-depth and overdue study of prominent and hitherto obscure exiles, conspicuously diverse in political and religious allegiance yet inextricably bound by the shared experience of displacement, will be of interest to scholars in a range of disciplines.

Analysing the make-up and workings of the Royalist party in Scotland and Ireland during the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century, Royalists at War is the first major study to explore who Royalists were in these two countries and why they gave their support to the Stuart kings. It compares and contrasts the actions, motivations and situations of key Scottish and Irish Royalists, paying particular attention to concepts such as honour, allegiance and loyalty, as well as practical considerations such as military capability, levels of debt, religious tensions, and political geography. It also shows how and why allegiances changed over time and how this impacted on the royal war effort. Alongside this is an investigation into why the Royalist cause failed in Scotland and Ireland and the implications this had for crown strategy within a wider British context. It also examines the extent to which Royalism in Scotland and Ireland differed from their English counterpart, which in turn allows an assessment to be made as to what constituted core elements of British and Irish Royalism.

This volume ranges widely across the social, religious and political history of revolution in seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland, from contemporary responses to the outbreak of war to the critique of the post-regicidal regimes; from royalist counsels to Lilburne's politics; and across the three Stuart kingdoms. However, all the essays engage with a central issue - the ways in which individuals experienced the crises of mid seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland and what that tells us about the nature of the Revolution as a whole. Responding in particular to three influential lines of interpretation - local, religious and British - the contributors, all leading specialists in the field, demonstrate that to comprehend the causes, trajectory and consequences of the Revolution we must understand it as a human and dynamic experience, as a process. This volume reveals how an understanding of these personal experiences can provide the basis on which to build up larger frameworks of interpretation.

In 1649, Charles I was executed before Whitehall Palace in London. This event had a major impact not only in the British Isles, but also on the continent, where British exiles, diplomats and agents waged propaganda battles to conquer the minds of foreign audiences. In the Dutch Republic, above all, their efforts had a significant impact on public opinion, and succeeded in triggering violent debate. This is the first book-length study devoted to the continental backlash of the English Civil Wars. Interdisciplinary in scope and drawing on a wide range of sources, from pamphlets to paintings, Helmer Helmers shows how the royalist cause managed to triumph in one of the most unlikely places in early modern Europe. In doing so, Helmers transforms our understanding of both British and Dutch political culture, and provides new contexts for major literary works by Milton, Marvell, Huygens, and many others.