Introduction

Describing Sir John Denham as a cavalier ought to be a matter of simple historical shorthand. The ideal is captured in Hopton's affecting letter to his opposite number and old friend Sir William Waller, as the royalists pressed the parliamentarians back towards Bath in June 1643. Civil-war historians of the past half-century in any case began to use the word 'cavalier' with extreme care in discussions of the period. The notion as such actually becomes historically useful again when we break down, even if only for the span of a discussion, the narrow equivalence between 'cavalier' and 'royalist'. Denham has no intention of passing on the blame for the vice, but such paragraphs indicate the groups who stood to profit from the sin of prodigals. To critics of Sucklingtons as impure souls, the causes of such squandering tendencies were less interesting than the character of an errant son was rhetorically convenient.