"Stubbs [has] a storyteller's gift for atmosphere and drama."--Wall Street Journal

“Stubbs [has] a storyteller’s gift for atmosphere and drama.”—Wall Street Journal From disastrous foreign forays to syphilitic poets, from political intrigues to ambitious young playwrights keen to curry favor with the king, John Stubbs brings alive the vibrant cast of characters that was at the center of the English Civil War. In Reprobates, the acclaimed biographer John Stubbs finds his new subject in England’s turbulent decades of the mid-seventeenth century. With conflict between the monarchy and Parliament threatening to explode, a group of courtiers and army officers known as the Cavaliers emerged to defend the king. They were jeeringly labeled “Cavaliers”—then a term for a gallant or a rogue—by their opponents on the streets of London. Their movement was soon memorialized by poets such as Robert Herrick, whose poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”—which begins, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”—later became a carpe diem anthem for their lost cause. Often imagined as elegant gentlemen, chivalrous and dandified, the Cavaliers were also originally to be found in the form of the gambler and poet Sir John Suckling or his syphilitic friend William Davenant. Stubbs sheds new light on this groundbreaking group of men, on their world and their journeys through it, in peace and war, from the Blackfriars Playhouse to the battlefields of King Charles’s kingdoms.

Cavaliers and Roundheads are figures who appear in hundreds of English ghost stories. In this innovative account, Charles Esdaile argues that such tales are in reality folk memories of an episode of English history that was second only to the Black Death in terms of individual and collective suffering alike, and, further, that they reveal important truths about the way in which the conflict was represented: it is no surprise, then, to find that spectral Cavaliers are often romantic figures and revenant Roundheads grim ones full of menace. Yet, the book is no mere catalogue. On the contrary, rather than being discussed in a vacuum, the tales of haunting are rather set within a detailed regional history of the conflicts of 1642-1651 of a sort that has never yet been attempted, but is, for all that, badly needed.

Writings of Exile in the English Revolution and Restoration opens a window onto exile in the years 1640-1680, as it is experienced across a broad spectrum of political and religious allegiances, and communicated through a rich variety of genres. Examining previously undiscovered and understudied as well as canonical writings, it challenges conventional paradigms which assume a neat demarcation of chronology, geography and allegiance in this seminal period of British and American history. Crossing disciplinary lines, it casts new light on how the ruptures -- and in some cases liberation -- of exile in these years both reflected and informed events in the public sphere. It also lays bare the personal, psychological and familial repercussions of exile, and their attendant literary modes, in terms of both inner, mental withdrawal and physical displacement.

'The English Civil War is a joy to behold, a thing of beauty... this will be the civil war atlas against which all others will judged and the battle maps in particular will quickly become the benchmark for all future civil war maps.' -- Professor Martyn Bennett, Department of History, Languages and Global Studies, Nottingham Trent University The English Civil Wars (1638–51) comprised the deadliest conflict ever fought on British soil, in which brother took up arms against brother, father fought against son, and towns, cities and villages fortified themselves in the cause of Royalists or Parliamentarians. Although much historical attention has focused on the events in England and the key battles of Edgehill, Marston Moor and Naseby, this was a conflict that engulfed the entirety of the Three Kingdoms and led to a trial and execution that profoundly shaped the British monarchy and Parliament. This beautifully presented atlas tells the whole story of Britain's revolutionary civil war, from the earliest skirmishes of the Bishops' Wars in 1639–40 through to 1651, when Charles II's defeat at Worcester crushed the Royalist cause, leading to a decade of Stuart exile. Each map is supported by a detailed text, providing a complete explanation of the complex and fluctuating conflict that ultimately meant that the Crown would always be answerable to Parliament.

Clarendon Reconsidered reassesses a figure of major importance in seventeenth-century British politics, constitutional history and literature. Despite his influence in these and other fields, Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon (1609–1674) remains comparatively neglected. However, the recent surge of interest in royalists and royalism, and the new theoretical strategies it has employed, make this a propitious moment to re-examine his influencecontribution. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Chancellor and author of the History of the Rebellion (1702–1704), then and for long afterwards the most sophisticated history written in English, his long career in the service of the Caroline court spanned the English Revolution and Restoration. The original essays in this interdisciplinary collection shine a torch on key aspects of Clarendon’s life and works: his role as a political propagandist, his family and friendship networks, his religious and philosophical inclinations, his history- and essay-writing, his influence on other forms of writing, and the personal, political and literary repercussions of his two long exiles. Pushing the boundaries of the new royalist scholarship, this fresh account of Clarendon reveals a multifaceted man who challenges as often as he justifies traditional characterisations of detached historian and secular statesman.