Politics in flux, 1664–73

Early in 1664, William Legge, MP and former active Royalist, wrote that the king’s wisest course would be to rely on ‘the old royal party’, who were more numerous than their opponents. Former Parliamentarians now in office, with a few exceptions, favoured their former allies, who were still contriving mischief. ¹ Again and again during the next decade, old Cavaliers denounced the ‘Presbyterians’, or the ‘old Parliament gang’, ² or those ‘of the old stamp of the late times’ who could be bound by neither favours nor oaths. ³ They favoured nonconformists, they were ‘anti-Church’. ⁴ References abound to individuals having been in the Parliamentarian army or the New Model. ⁵ Men still quarrelled about the past ⁶ and at Hertford sessions a man accused of being at a conventicle objected to the foreman of the jury on the grounds that he had been for the king. ⁷ Old Cavaliers like Musgrave felt threatened by the presence of some of ‘the opposing party’ in county offices and still more in the corporations. ⁸ They urged the king to rely on his ‘own party’ – even Arlington used the term in opposition to ‘the discontented party’ and the ‘suspected party’ – or ‘the loyal party’ or ‘the Cavaliers’. ⁹ Less often, the Cavaliers called themselves ‘the moderate party’. ¹⁰ Several accepted that this ‘loyal party’ included many Catholics or remarked that Presbyterians’ principles were more dangerous than papists’ or claimed that Presbyterians were again using antipopery to achieve their malevolent ends. ¹¹ A decade after the Restoration, the wounds of civil war, for many, had not healed. John Milward remarked in 1668 that he would not be ‘an informer’ against negligent JPs, but he would happily give the Commons the names of those who had been county committee men and decimators if the House would put them out of commission. In 1670 three hundred horsemen attended the Duke of Ormond near Burton on Trent, with ‘not a Roundhead among them’. ¹² Cases where old Cavaliers testified that individuals who had fought for Parliament posed no threat to the government were far less common. ¹³