Introduction

Memoirs of a Cavalier appeared anonymously in 1720. Its subtitle was expansively detailed: A Military Journal of The Wars in Germany, And The Wars in England; From the Year 1632, to the Year 1648. Written Threescore Years Ago by an English Gentleman, who served first in the Army of Gustavus Adolphus, the glorious King of Sweden, till his Death; and after that, in the Royal Army of King Charles the First, from the Beginning of the Rebellion, to the End of that War. This is a reassuringly specific account of the occasion, provenance and nature of the text that is to follow and one that seems to promise what, in 1720, would have appeared to be a familiar kind of readerly experience. As the political nation began to settle into the shape that would define it for a century and more following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, so it began to record, construct and interpret the seventeenth-century revolutionary turmoil that had brought it into being. It did so in large part through a succession of works of autobiographical reminiscence. The publication in 1698 of the first volume of a judiciously edited version of Edmund Ludlow’s autobiographical papers as his Memoirs established memoirs as the preferred term for these historical accounts centred on personal involvement in public affairs. Indeed, it created rather a vogue for this generic label. ¹ It was followed, on the Puritan and Whig side, by the memoirs of Sir John Berkeley (1699), Denzil Lord Holles (1699) and Thomas Lord 2Fairfax (1699); and on the royalist and Tory side, by those of Sir Philip Warwick (1701) and Sir Thomas Herbert (1702). A potential purchaser browsing the bookstalls in 1720 would have thought that he (or perhaps she) knew what was being offered by the title Memoirs of a Cavalier: an individual’s informed and first-hand account of national affairs and national figures. That this was in fact a skilful piece of fiction would not at once, or perhaps even ever, have dawned on them.