Robert Stewart

Poetic licentiousness

Reprobates were, in the Calvinist lexicon, those unfortunates not included among God’s elect and therefore sentenced to eternal damnation.

Reprobates were, in the Calvinist lexicon, those unfortunates not included among God’s elect and therefore sentenced to eternal damnation.

Reprobates were, in the Calvinist lexicon, those unfortunates not included among God’s elect and therefore sentenced to eternal damnation. For stern English puritans it was pleasing to think that Royalist ‘cavaliers’ were among them. Alas, there was no way of knowing. Gallingly, since life everlasting could be bought neither by good works (in the Roman tradition) nor by belief alone (in the Lutheran disposition), cavaliers had an equal chance of it with anyone else. But then, confusion reigns everywhere in the entangled mesh of roundhead versus cavalier. On the field, especially among commanders, there was nothing like the marked distinctiveness of dress and hair-length displayed in modern re-enactments of Civil War battles.

The austere William Prynne denounced long hair as shamefully effeminate, just as he excoriated play-acting for encouraging lust and licentiousness. But what of Charles I himself? His moral conscientiousness and rigid court formality were not exactly cavalier (though the Presbyterian lairds of Scotland would have had him less unbending) and his consort, Henrietta Maria, sought to instruct her debauched courtiers in a new creed of Platonic love. Yet Charles was a dancing and masque-loving king, and to celebrate her new vision of a chaste paradise on stage Henrietta turned to Thomas Carew, famous for ‘A Rapture’, a long hymn to sexual abandon. Carew’s masque, Coelum Britannicum, dutifully offered up a reformed, chaste heaven, but it also, in what John Stubbs praises as ‘one of the period’s greatest solos of satirical prose’, directed arrows at royal edicts restricting the sale of tobacco and enforcing the closing of taverns at ten o’clock.

The word ‘cavalier’— a term of praise among Royalists, among Cromwellians, of abuse — has myriad connotations.

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