Cavalier (politics)

“ If we would understand Washington, and Jefferson, and the Lees, George Mason, and John Randolph, we must study them as the “Autocrat” tells us we should all be studied, for at least a century before birth.
The Colonial Cavalier must be painted, like a Rembrandt, with high lights and deep shadows. It is idle to ignore his weaknesses or his vices. ”

“ Much fewer of the Cavaliers had any such aim, beyond their devotion to the monarchy, and their enthusiastic determination to uphold it. They were mostly gay, rollicking fellows, with little principle, and less steadfastness, who squandered their money on folly, if nothing worse; and then helped themselves to other people’s goods without any uneasiness of conscience.
Colonel Lane was a Cavalier, and devoted to the King, and most of his tenants were Cavaliers also. A few were Roundheads—staunch adherents of the Parliament ”

“ The Cavaliers could scarcely refrain from wishing that one who had done so much to raise the fame of the nation had been a legitimate king; and the Republicans were forced to own that the tyrant suffered none but himself to wrong his country, and that, if he had robbed her of liberty, he had at least given her glory in exchange. ”

“ Cavalier's plan was to collect more men, divide, and make uprisings in several places at once, so that the king's officers could not tell in which way to turn. As he and his comrades knew the country well, and had friends to tell them of the enemy's movements, they could nearly always know when it was safe to attack, and when they must hide in the woods. ”

“ These Cavaliers were men and women of good family. They came from the great houses of England, and in their new homes they continued to lead much the same life as they had done at home. So in Virginia. there grew up a Cavalier society, a society of men and women accustomed to command, accustomed to be waited upon; who drove about in gilded coaches, and dressed in silks and velvets. Thus the plain Virginian farmer became a country squire. From these Cavalier families were descended George Washington, James Madison and other great men who helped to make America. ”

“ He 260was not a freethinker. He was not a Royalist. In his character the noblest qualities of every party were combinée! in harmonious union. From the Parliament and from the Court, from the conventicle and from the Gothic cloister, from the gloomy and sepulchral circles of the Roundheads, and from the Christmas revel of the hospitable Cavalier, his nature selected and drew to itself whatever was great and good, while it rejected all the base and pernicious ingredients by which those finer elements were defiled. Like the Puritans, he lived
“As ever in his great task-master’s eye.” ”

“ Sing Tantara rara, boys,
Tantara rara, boys,
This is the life of an Old Cavalier.
A CAVEAT TO THE ROUNDHEADS. From the Posthumous Works of Samuel Butler.
I come to charge ye
That fight the clergy,
And pull the mitre from the prelate’s head,
That you will be wary
Lest you miscarry
In all those factious humours you have bred;
But as for Brownists we’ll have none,
But take them all and hang them one by one.
Your wicked actions
Join’d in factions
Are all but aims to rob the King of his due;
p. 32Then give this reason
For your treason,
That you’ll be ruled, if he’ll be ruled by you. ”

“ These unfortunate people who are fighting here strive to create a republic where all men shall be equal! Said the sainted martyr Charles on the scaffold, ''T is no concern of the common people's how they are governed.' A common man equal to a Talbot! Fight, my son, if you must; but oh, fight for the king, even an usurper, before a republic, a mob in which so-called equality stands in very unstable equilibrium,—fight for the rightful ruler of the land, not against him. ”

“ Clean down the wind like Cavaliers.
Fill this unnatural quart with sack,
Nature all vacuums doth decline;
Ourselves will be a zodiac,
And every mouth shall be a sign.
Methinks the travels of the glass
Are circular, like Plato’s year;
Where everything is as it was
Let’s tipple round: and so ’tis here.
THE NEW COURTIER. By Alex. Brome. 1648.
Since it must be so
Then so let it go,
Let the giddy-brain’d times turn round;
Since we have no king let the goblet be crown’d,
Our monarchy thus will recover:
While the pottles are weeping
We’ll drench our sad souls
In big-bellied bowls ”

“ The point to be gained by the cabal was this; that a precedent should be established, tending to show, That the favor of the people was not so sure a road as the favor of the court even to popular honors and popular trusts. A strenuous resistance to every appearance of lawless power; a spirit of independence carried to some degree of enthusiasm; an inquisitive character to discover, and a bold one to display, every corruption and every error of government; these are the qualities which recommend a man to a seat in the House of Commons, in open and merely popular elections. ”

“ A great deal of energy has been wasted in the discussion as to how much of this Cavalier blood was found among the early settlers. It is enough that we know that, between the coming of the first adventurers and the Restoration, the number of “gentlemen” was sufficient to direct the policy of the State, and color the life of its society.
[Pg 9] When the earliest colonists left England, the Cavalier was at the height of his glory. Now he represents a lost cause, “and none so poor to do him reverence.” The sceptre of royal authority is shattered; society has grown dull and decorous. ”

“ Their initials thus arranged spell the word cabal, which was humorously used to describe them. Another far commoner expression which dates back to the Civil War is the phrase ‘the army.’ It reminds us that we had no standing army until after the foundation of the Parliamentary Forces. Cavalier and Roundhead are words which carry their history, so to speak, on their sleeves. They were both coined as terms of abuse, and among other uncivil relics of the Civil War which have found a more extended application, fanatic and Puritan were invented by the Royalists and malignant by the Roundheads. ”

“ And for such a restoration the vast majority of the nation were longing more and more. The old enmities of party and sect were forgotten in the common enmity of every party and every sect to the tyranny of the sword. A new national unity was revealing itself, as one jarring element after another came in to swell the mass of the national opposition to the system of the Protectorate. The moderate Royalist joined hands with the Cavalier, the steady Presbyterian came to join the moderate Royalist, and their ranks were swelled at last by the very founders of the Commonwealth. ”

“ Such a race produced a strong and hardy type of manhood, admirable if not always lovable.
But there was another force at work, moulding the national character, a force as persistent, a type as intense as the Puritan’s own, and its exact opposite. The men who settled the Southern Colonies, Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, were Cavaliers; not necessarily in blood, or even in loyalty to the Stuart cause, but Cavalier in sympathies, in the general view of life, in virtues and vices. ”

“ After 1688, the law of English life is a compromise between Puritan and Cavalier, between Renaissance and Reformation, which sends the extreme representatives of each type out of the country, builders of an Empire of adventurers and pilgrims—while at home the moderate Cavalier, and the moderate Puritan, the Tory and the Whig, establish a Republic with a King, and a Parliamentary feudal régime. ”

“ Thinking as we do that the cause of the king was the cause of bigotry and tyranny, we yet cannot refrain from looking with complacency on the character of the honest old Cavaliers. We feel a national pride in comparing them with the instruments which the despots of other countries are compelled to employ, with the mutes who throng their antechambers, and the Janizaries who mount guard at their gates. Our Royalist countrymen were not heartless, dangling courtiers, bowing at every step, and simpering at every word. ”

“ Being elected by the votes of civil-service reformers, there was an implied political obligation imposed upon Mr. Cleveland to respect the idea represented by the votes of these reformers. During the first part of his administration, the time in which I held office under him, the disposition on the part of the President to fulfil that obligation was quite manifest, and the feeling at the time was that we were entering upon a new era of American politics, in which there would be no removals from office on the ground of party politics. ”

“ But he who takes the oath today to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States only assumes the solemn obligation which every patriotic citizen—on the farm, in the workshop, in the busy marts of trade, and everywhere—should share with him. The Constitution which prescribes his oath, my countrymen, is yours; the Government you have chosen him to administer for a time is yours; the suffrage which executes the will of freemen is yours ”

“ The King and kingdom’s debts defray’d,
And those of honest men well pay’d,
To which their vertue them betray’d,
God send, etc.
Increase of customes to the King
May our increase of traffick bring,
’Tis that will make the people sing
Long live, etc.
London, printed for Robert Crofts, at the Crown, in Chancery Lane, 1661.
THE CAVALIER’S COMPLAINT.
This and the following ballad, from the King’s Pamphlets, British Museum, express the discontent of the Cavaliers at the ingratitude of King Charles to the old supporters of the fortunes of his family.— (March 15th, 1660.) ”

“ But if not extremely poetical, they are extremely national, and racy of the soil; and some of them are certain to live as long as the language which produced them. For the convenience of reference and consultation they have been arranged chronologically; beginning with the discontents that inaugurated the reign of Charles I., and following regularly to the final, though short-lived, triumph of the Cavalier cause, in the accession of James II. After his ill-omened advent to the throne, the Cavalier became the Jacobite. ”

“ On the partial representations of a few worthless ministerial dependents, whose constant office it has been to keep that government embroiled, and who, by their treacheries, hope to obtain the dignity of the British knighthood, without calling for a party accused, without asking a proof, without attempting a distinction between the guilty and the innocent, the whole of that antient and wealthy town is in a moment reduced from opulence to beggary. ”

“ I only wonder that, when the united Wisdom of our Nation had, in the Articles of Confederation, manifested their Dislike of establishing Ranks of Nobility, by Authority either of the Congress or of any particular State, a Number of private Persons should think proper to distinguish themselves and their Posterity, from their fellow Citizens, and form an Order of hereditary Knights, in direct Opposition to the solemnly declared Sense of their Country! ”

“ If the prince, in this contest, finds numbers to support, as well as to oppose his pretensions, the sword which was whetted against foreign enemies, may be pointed at the bosom of fellow subjects, and every interval of peace from abroad, be filled with domestic war. The sacred names of liberty, justice, and civil order, are made to resound in public assemblies; and, during the absence of other alarms, give to society, within itself, an abundant subject of ferment and animosity. ”

“ The democracy does not fail, therefore, to stigmatise the Senate as an aristocratic body, and to call it the House of Lords. [Pg 187] The mass, which in Europe bears the pack and receives the law, has here put the pack on the back of the enlightened and cultivated class, which among us on the other hand, has the upper hand. The farmer and the mechanic are the lords of the New World; public opinion is their opinion; the public will is their will; the President is their choice, their agent, their servant. ”

“ Now we hear that the election of a First Magistrate, whose views upon the subject of Slavery are not extreme, and who, in any case, can retain possession of office but for four years, is the pretext for a dissolution of that Great Confederation to which—with all its faults—the friends of liberty and human progress were accustomed to point triumphantly in proof of the capacity of men for self-government. ”

“ By an act of war, committed with the participation of a diplomatic representative of the United States and without authority of Congress, the Government of a feeble but friendly and confiding people has been overthrown. A substantial wrong has thus been done which a due regard for our national character as well as the rights of the injured people requires we should endeavor to repair. The provisional government has not assumed a republican or other constitutional form, but has remained a mere executive council or oligarchy, set up without the assent of the people. ”

“ The people have spoken for themselves, and their voices must be heard through the representatives selected by them in the halls of Congress. During the next four years, Grover Cleveland must execute the WILL OF THE PEOPLE. He has been elected by no party. The Populists will be his “natural allies,” because they represent the People, as he does. He need not remain “at sea without a chart” one day or hour, only follow the will of the people! They have placed their heels of disapprobation upon “caste” and sham aristocracy and the attempt to engraft it upon American society. ”