Cavaliers

Those poets who stayed loyal to King Charles were mainly drinking friends and protegés of the jovial Ben Jonson. Their verse was light, witty, and direct. Their images were simple and their sentiments were clear. Among them, Lovelace, Carew, and Suckling were wealthy young rowdies who cast their lot with the king and lost. Shirley was more serious about his verse but no luckier in his politics. After a disastrous effort to enlist Scotland in his war against Parliament, Charles was convicted of high treason and beheaded in 1649. Oliver Cromwell established a brutal Puritan regime, terrorizing royalists and Catholics— including all of Ireland and Scotland—until he died of a urinary infection after nine years in power.

Then the pendulum swung back. Parliament invited Charles II to return to the throne under a new “constitutional” monarchy which gave them much greater control over affairs of government. But the king’s men did not forget the indignity they had suffered or the power that had been taken from them. Two years later Cromwell’s body was disinterred, hanged in chains from the Tyburn gibbet, and then dismembered. His head was dipped in tar and stuck on a pike for twenty-five years. After that it was privately traded and sold for three hundred years, then finally buried on the grounds of his old college in 1960. The Cavaliers knew how to hold a grudge.

Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns