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.

Looking in detail at the work of Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn, Royalist Women Writers argues that their writings inaugurate a more assertive model of the Englishwoman as literary author, which is crucially enabled by their royalist affiliations. Chalmers reveals new political sub-texts in the three writers' work and shows how these inflect their representations of gender.