Rethinking Royalist Politics, 1642–9

The Royalists are the Cinderella of mid-seventeenth century history. They are largely overlooked by the exponents of the ‘New British History’, and look like being bypassed once again in the current rush of interest in the Civil-War ‘public sphere’. True, the Royalists remain one of the few groups in the Civil War that most of the public have actually heard of, if only as one half of the double-act of ‘Cavaliers and Roundheads’. But among historians ‘the king’s party’ is unfashionable, and royalist politics — particularly at the top end of the social scale — even more so. There have been several recent studies of royalist literature and propaganda (though few convincingly bridge the gap between political theory and practice);1 David Underdown and Mark Stoyle have injected new life into the study of popular Royalism;2 and the Sealed Knot and other battle re-enactment societies sustain a small but lively market in royalist military history.3 But virtually all we have in the way of recent published work on royalist high politics is a few articles by Ronald Hutton and James Daly in the 1970s and 1980s, occasional, though illuminating, pieces by Ian Roy, and a ten-year-old monograph by David Smith.4 One recent miscellany of essays devoted to ‘Royalism’ actually derides the study of court politics during the 1640.5