Historians have paid little attention to the experiences and attitudes of the ordinary men who enlisted in the royalist armies during the English Civil War: chiefly because such individuals – most of them poor and unlettered – left no formal memoirs of their wartime service behind them. The present article suggests that the petitions for financial relief which were submitted by wounded and impoverished Cavalier veterans after the Restoration can help to bridge this evidential gap and to illuminate the mental world of the king's more humble supporters. By putting the language of the ‘maimed soldiers’ petitions’ under the microscope, it shows how the artisans, husbandmen and labourers who had fought for Charles I viewed the conflict in retrospect. The article begins by considering the strengths and limitations of the petitions themselves and the purposes for which they were initially composed. It then goes on to discuss what these documents reveal: not only about the physical suffering which the king's soldiers had undergone in the field, but also about their views of their comrades, their commanders and their enemies. The article concludes by arguing that the personal and political links which had been forged amid the fiery trials of the Civil War continued to bind together former royalists, of all ranks, for decades after the conflict came to an end.
. This review suggests that recent historiography on nationalism can help us to see that the English Civil War was, in part, a conflict about national identity and ethnic difference. It argues that, even before the war began, the supporters of the parliament were associated with a narrowly intolerant strain of Englishness, and that this helps to explain why the Celtic peoples of Wales and Cornwall rallied to the king. During -, parliament's close links with the Scots -together with the presence of many foreign mercenaries in the roundhead armies -prevented the identification of parliament's cause with that of England itself from becoming absolute. Following the creation of the New Model Army, however -an army from which ' strangers ' of all sorts were deliberately excluded -relations between the Scots and parliament rapidly deteriorated, and it became possible for the parliamentarians to make an unequivocal appeal to English patriotic sentiment. The defeat of the king -and of the Welsh and Cornish troops who had done much to sustain his cause -was the result.As the entrenched assumption that ' nationalism ' was a product of the modern age begins to break down, so whole new vistas of historical inquiry are opening up before us." The prospect is especially dazzling, perhaps, for historians of England, who are beginning to accustom themselves to the notion that England may have been not only the archetypal nation-state, but the very cradle of ' nationalism ' since as early as the tenth century. This view, brilliantly advanced in a number of recent studies,# has the potential to transform our understanding both of narrowly English and of wider British * I am most grateful to
In May 1648 a group of Cornishmen who had rebelled against Parliament in the name of Charles I met with comprehensive defeat at “the Gear,” near Helford, and were then pursued back across the Lizard peninsula to the seacoast beyond. Surrender seemed inevitable, yet a number of the fugitives refused to submit. Instead they “joyned hand-in-hand” and hurled themselves bodily into the water: “a desperate expedient on that rocky coast,” as one later writer remarked. What can have driven them to such despair? No convincing answer can be given by looking at the events of 1648 alone. The rebels' despairing plunge can be understood only if it is seen as the final act in a long-running drama, a story of repeated popular protest in West Cornwall that spanned over 150 years. It is a story that has gone largely unrecognized by previous historians, most of whom have portrayed the Cornish revolts of 1497, 1548, 1549, 1642, and 1648 as isolated events rather than as part of a continuum. Yet it is a story that deserves to be told, not only because it provides a dramatic new explanation for many of the most important rebellions of the Tudor and Stuart periods, but also because it serves as an enduring monument to a forgotten people and their struggle to preserve a separate identity for themselves in the face of overwhelming odds.A fierce sense of distinctiveness has always characterized the inhabitants of Cornwall.
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