The product of an international conference held in 2004 with the mission of redefining royalism, this collection has a harder task than the editors’ predecessor volume, Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars (2007). After 1649, and, still more, 1651, the Stuart cause seemed lost and the Commonwealth firmly established. It is often assumed that only die-hard aristocrats and Episcopalians, exiles or conspirators, still retained any belief in monarchy. “Cavalier” poetry gives the impression that most of its practitioners spent the years from 1645 to 1660 in an alcoholic haze, in exile or rural retirement. This is a view that these essays seek to overthrow. As Jan Broadway says in “‘The honour of this Nation’: William Dugdale and the History of St Paul’s (1658),” “a practical accommodation with political realities could be combined with a continuing, fierce support for the Royalist cause” (194). Dugdale’s History, with splendid engravings by Wenceslas Hollar, associated the English church with nostalgia for the beauty of the past.

The editors’ introduction calls 1650s royalism “a spectrum of different attitudes and beliefs” (4), and the first two essays show that it was neither necessarily High Church nor upper class. In “Episcopalian Conformity and Nonconformity, 1646–60,” Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor, drawing on their work on a database of Church of England clergy, show that some bishops went on ordaining ministers during the Interregnum, probably doing a deal with the local authorities, and that many allowed a broader range of practice than was imposed after the Restoration. Lloyd Bowen (“Seditious Speech and Popular Royalism, 1649–60”) provides evidence from legal records that a fair amount of seditious speech and writing came from the lower classes. How dangerous it was to be a professed royalist clearly depended on what else was happening in the public sphere. As Helen Pierce notes in “Artful Ambivalence? Picturing Charles I during the Interregnum,” an image that the Council of State sought to suppress in May 1649 reappeared without consequences in April 1651. Portraits of Charles I and other members of the royal family, some of them even hagiographical, went on being sold during the 1650s.

Charles the Christlike Martyr (or “Ch__,” as many royalists called him to exploit the ambiguity) is largely absent from this collection. In fact, Anthony Milton’s “‘Vailing his Crown’: Royalist Criticism of Charles I’s Kingship in the 1650s” reads Peter Heylin’s anonymously published Observations on the Historie of the Reign of King Charles (1656) as an attack on the king for being too pious and weak, a view that he finds in other writers as well. James Loxley’s “Dramatis personae: Royalism, Theatre and the Political Ontology of the Person in Post-Regicide Writing” devotes some of its attention to a preregicide poem, Cleveland’s “The King Disguised,” as part of a subtle examination of works in which both Charles I and Charles II present a double image (as in the often-quoted title A King and No King). Milton’s claim that the Presbyterians were hypocritical in mourning the king’s death, when they had effectively killed him by unkinging him, ironically endorses a view of kingship shared by Shakespeare’s Richard II.

Marcus Nevitt’s “Shakespeare for Royalists: John Quarles and The Rape of Lucrece” shows how an atrocious sequel to Shakespeare’s poem, published in 1655 by the son of Francis Quarles, acquires meaning from the knowledge that “young Tarquin” was Commonwealth journalists’ name for Charles II. A more obviously subversive publication is discussed in Jason McElligott’s “Atlantic Royalism? Polemic, Censorship and the ‘Declaration and Protestation of the Governour and Inhabitants of Virginia.’” The “Declaration,” attributed to Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia, was published in the strongly royalist and mainly frivolous newsbook The Man in the Moon, in January 1650. Despite obvious reasons for thinking that its publisher John Crouch made the whole thing up, McElligott argues that it may well be genuine since Crouch, although at the bottom of the royalist hierarchy, had connections that might have brought the document to his hands. The existence of such a network would be interesting: could Berkeley’s prewar connection with the King’s Men be part of it?

Some lively essays describe the experiences of particular royalists. Geoffrey Smith’s “Royalists in Exile: The Experience of Daniel O’Neill” focuses on a loyal and apparently likeable Protestant Irishman who made himself useful, and very much at home, in a number of courts during the 1650s. Those courts also figure in “Gender, Geography, and Exile: Royalists and the Low Countries in the 1650s,” by Ann Hughes and Julie Sanders, who recreate the richly peopled environment of the two widowed queens, Elizabeth of Bohemia and Mary Stuart, in the Low Countries. D’Maris Coffman’s study “The Earl of Southampton and the Lesson of Interregnum Finance” deals with the early Restoration, when Southampton was Lord of the Treasury ,and his examination of the accounts from the previous period enabled his successors to profit from the excise.

Apart from Southampton (apparently inactive during the Interregnum), every figure discussed in this book can be said to have contributed to the Restoration. Although the book rejects the image of them as patient fatalists waiting for the tide to turn, it is arguable that royalism is a question of temperament as much as ideology. The experience of sudden conversion to a cause is notably absent, even in the lives of those who were not attached to the Stuart family by birth or occupation; they seem always to have been royalists. As the editors note in their introduction, “popular” royalism is the hardest phenomenon to understand. Perhaps nearly any regime becomes unpopular once it has been in office for a while, and perhaps (as they speculate) republicanism might have had a chance if the regime had managed to last another “ten, twenty, or fifty years” (14).