ABSTRACT
Any student new to the history of the British and Irish Civil Wars of the midseventeenth century will invariably find themselves presented with a vast array of studies concentrating on a variety of topics relating to political, social and military aspects of the period. Some of these aspects, it has to be said, remain much more widely studied than others. Traditionally, royalism has very much fallen into the less widely studied category. Whereas a vast number of works have been written over the years examining the covenanting movement in Scotland, the Catholic Confederation in Ireland, or the Parliamentarians in England, royalism has rarely attracted the same kind of attention. Scholars of English royalism have offered up a number of reasons for this. One major telling factor appears to have been the fact that the men and women who supported the king left relatively little in the way of diaries, journals and administrative records whereas much remains from the pens of their parliamentary counterparts. Royalist pamphlets were somewhat thicker on the ground, but again, this output was far outstripped by pro-Parliament printed propaganda. As such it has simply been the case that historians of the Civil Wars in England have tended to gravitate to where the bulk of the surviving evidence lies.1 Added to this was the dominance in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century of a historiography of the Civil Wars that concentrated almost exclusively on the groups deemed to have been part of a progressive movement towards beneficial social change. Thus Parliament and Puritans were thought worthy of study while royalism was seen as an archaic, conservative movement that inhibited the forward thrust of historical progress. Alongside this was traced the rise of the gentry or ‘middling sort’ at the expense of a declining nobility, the former being primarily associated with the forces of progression, and the latter with that of a stagnant status quo.2
