Memoirs of a Cavalier eBook

2.  These risings being desperate, with vast disadvantages, and always suppressed, ruined all our friends; the remnants of the Cavaliers were lessened, the stoutest and most daring were cut off, and the king’s interest exceedingly weakened, there not being less than 30,000 of his best friends cut off in the several attempts made at Maidstone, Colchester, Lancashire, Pembroke, Pontefract, Kingston, Preston, Warrington, Worcester, and other places.  Had these men all reserved their fortunes to a conjunction with the Scots, at either of the invasions they made into this kingdom, and acted with the conduct and courage they were known masters of, perhaps neither of those Scots armies had been defeated.

But the impatience of our friends ruined all; for my part, I had as good a mind to put my hand to the ruin of the enemy as any of them, but I never saw any tolerable appearance of a force able to match the enemy, and I had no mind to be beaten and then hanged.  Had we let them alone, they would have fallen into so many parties and factions, and so effectually have torn one another to pieces, that whichsoever party had come to us, we should, with them, have been too hard for all the rest.

This was plain by the course of things afterwards; when the Independent army had ruffled the Presbyterian Parliament, the soldiery of that party made no scruple to join us, and would have restored the king with all their hearts, and many of them did join us at last.

And the consequence, though late, ended so; for they fell out so many times, army and Parliament, Parliament and army, and alternately pulled one another down so often till at last the Presbyterians who began the war, ended it, and, to be rid of their enemies, rather than for any love to the monarchy, restored King Charles the Second, and brought him in on the very day that they themselves had formerly resolved the ruin of his father’s government, being the 29th of May, the same day twenty years that the private cabal in London concluded their secret league with the Scots, to embroil his father King Charles the First.

[Footnote 1:  General Ludlow, in his Memoirs, p. 52, says their men returned from Warwick to London, not like men who had obtained a victory, but like men that had been beaten.]

NOTES.

p. 1.  The preface to the first edition, which appeared in 1720, was written by Defoe as “Editor” of the manuscript.  The second edition appeared between 1740 and 1750, after the death of Defoe. (He was probably born in 1671 and he died in 1731.) In the preface to that edition it was argued that the Cavalier was certainly a real person.

p. 2, l. 35.  “Nicely” is here used in the stricter and more uncommon sense of “minutely.”  This use of words in a slightly different sense from their common modern significance will be noticed frequently; cf. p. 8, l. 17 “passionately,” p. 18, l. 40 “refined,” p. 31, l. 18 “particular.”