ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the social view of politics and offers important historiographical connections with the essays by Peck and Hughes which also focus on non-elite actors during the mid-seventeenth-century crisis. The memory of the English Civil Wars is now a burgeoning field of study, therefore – and the present book is both a product of the ongoing scholarly dialogue about how those who lived through the internecine struggle looked back upon their wartime pasts and an attempt to develop and stimulate that conversation still. Such a history was a dangerous thing following Charles II's accession, of course, and Pells' chapter provides the first scholarly exploration of the company's remarkable transformation between 1660 and 1685 into a bastion of Tory loyalism. Stoyle's chapter provides a novel perspective on the Civil War's humbler combatants by examining the petitions for financial relief submitted by maimed and indigent royalist soldiers to the Devonshire quarter sessions in the second half of the seventeenth century.
