The greatest of gallants

John Aubrey was at his most vivacious when describing the cavaliers of his era. ‘A gallant in an age of the lewdest bawdy,’ he wrote of Lucius Carey with ill-disguised pleasure. These men were rogues like Rochester, Lovelace and Herrick – broke, drunk and invariably syphilitic. They were also royalists, a licentious contrast to their puritanical political opponents. The ’roundheads’ regarded the cavalier’s person and politics with equal loathing, convinced that both would lead to eternal damnation. Milton’s famous evocation of pandemonium in Paradise Lost has a censorious tone that was perhaps a reaction to the abandon of Restoration England. Renowned historian John Stubbs has returned to Aubrey’s fascination by rexamining the term ‘cavalier’ in his latest book, Reprobates, (reviewed recently for the Spectator by Robert Stewart). Below, Stubbs gives a racing précis of his research and conclusions.

When we think of the term ‘cavalier’, we think of a royalist soldier in the civil wars of 1641-49 that were fought between king and Parliament.