Jason McElligott and David L. Smith in their various guises lament the scholarly neglect of the royalist cause; they deplore as well what they claim is the prevailing tendency to divide royalists into “constitutionalists” and “absolutists.” We may wonder whether the world is quite as they paint it, but there is no question that historians’ preferences—although, interestingly, not those of literary scholars—have run to parliamentarians and parliamentarianisms of various shades. These volumes may not make up the deficit, but they do demand attention.

The contributions to Royalists and Royalism fall into four clusters: two essays center on the king himself, two on the courtiers and counselors around him, two on wartime royalists more broadly, and four on what we might call written remains of royalism. The first cluster is the most arresting, not least because of Mark Kishlansky's powerful opening case for Charles I in the Short Parliament. His careful parsing of the king's appeal for loyalty, and his concessive gestures, against the parliamentary records is so astute as to make us wonder why Digby, Hyde, Seymour, and the rest did not rally to him immediately—until we register Kishlansky's silence on the problem of trust. Almost as challenging is Sean Kelsey's study of the reception of a second set of concessions, those proffered by Charles at Newport in 1648. So extensive were these, Kelsey insists, that several well-placed royalists were happy enough to see Charles I assume his martyr's crown so that they could rally instead to his son. Kelsey presents a plausible case for such alarm and for hopes of the Stuart heir, and, diverging from Kishlansky on the question of Charles's good faith, Kelsey helps us to understand the dilemma of the army and its friends that winter, apprehensive of a royalism reinvigorated by a new king, fearful of the old king manipulating the terms of any agreement.

Rather more convergent are the essays on the court: Malcolm Smuts's fine account of recovery and regrouping after the debacle of 1639–40 and David Scott's thoughtful assessment of the wartime factions around Charles. Both scholars look beyond the officeholders to the less established, to army officers, and as well to the bedchamber men, so crucial to the routines and the conversations of that reserved monarch. More novel, and more important, are their parallel claims for the cosmopolitan pragmatism, in politics and often in religion too, of men like Jermyn, Culpeper, Goring, Suckling, and Digby—all of them far readier than “constitutionalists” like Hyde to look beyond England for help. Although the editors ask, perhaps a little unkindly, whether the Tacitism Scott posits may be another name for those absolutist tastes whose attribution to the king's hotter followers they suspect, these essays add welcome flesh to figures who have long seemed insubstantial.

The scant coverage of those beyond the court marks a lost opportunity. It has become fashionable to deem the English Civil War a religious war, although we would not know it from this volume. Yet perhaps that near silence on religion is itself argument, a rebuttal of the priorities of the parliamentarian godly that have so long dominated discussion. P. R. Newman suggested such a rejection fifteen years ago (“The King's Servants,” in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth Century England, ed. John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf [Oxford, 1993]), and Barbara Donagan here duly acknowledges Newman's emphasis on honor and service in her fine assessment of characters and motivations. A cause centered not on religious conscience but on principles of honor of course had its risks, and Ian Roy offers a pointed and welcome survey of the disjuncture between the Cavalier ideal and wartime behavior.

Despite the flair of individual contributions, the collection as a whole seems old-fashioned. The editors lament what they see as a general inattention to women royalists, although it perhaps lay within their power to do something about that for the volume since scholars are working today on this theme. They similarly lament our inattention to the wartime royalist printing press, but once again we might ask how hard it would have been to address this since a good part of the output of that press is so easily available on Early English Books Online (EEBO). Instead, the volume approaches the world of the text with essays on Charles I's epistolary rhetoric (Sarah Poynting), on the polemical attempts of royalists and some in the army to cobble together a broad anti-Parliament cause in 1647 (Rachel Foxley), on the arguments for separation of powers offered and foreshadowed by that seminal work the Answer to the XIX Propositions (Michael Mendle), and on Andrew Marvell's complicated abandonment of royalism in 1650 (Blair Worden, who makes the volume's solitary gesture toward the abundant literary record). Of these, the most novel is Poynting’s, which demonstrates the care the king paid to conveying certain impressions of himself in his letters: Was Charles perhaps merely the sum of his laborious fictions? The essays by Mendle and Worden in particular are elegant and largely persuasive, but the volume would have been stronger had it broken more new ground—and broken it convincingly. For, as Poynting's essay demonstrates, the relationship between words and writerly beliefs is a fraught one. Undaunted, Foxley briskly faults one pamphlet for “insincere … use of consent theory” and elsewhere and equally briskly assumes that a strikingly royalist plea issued by an anonymous but self-declared “Independent” is actually by an Independent (170). Even as expert a practitioner as Worden can slip, as when he attributes political significance to the italicization of pronouns in Marvell's An Horatian Ode—although the autograph is lost, the woman who retrieved the (or was it a?) manuscript may or may not have been Marvell's wife, and the posthumous printed text is all that we have—and accepts Tom May's Death as echt data of 1650, although the poem was presumably revised at the Restoration.

It has to be said, though, that measured against the scholarship of the editors, that of the essayists seems impeccable. In a passage that borrows heavily from the introduction to McElligott's monograph, the editors argue that for contemporaries the words “royalist” and “loyalist” were close to synonymous. McElligott's monograph goes further, claiming that because the word “royalist” originated with William Prynne, most royalists in fact preferred to term themselves “loyalists.” If the world of print has any relation at all to the world of manuscripts, this has to be wrong and on several counts. EEBO is of course an incomplete database, yet the only print usage of “loyalist” turned up by a whole-text or a title search for the 1640s—this one dating from 1644—takes “loyalist” as synonymous not with “royalist” but in fact with “parliamentarian.” Moreover, as the most cursory consultation of EEBO would have shown, the Oxford English Dictionary's citation of Prynne, on which McElligott and Smith presumably relied, misses earlier usages going back at least to the start of the century (among the more interesting, The Cambridge Royalist Imprisoned, by “R. B.,” “scholar,” from the summer of 1643, a versified tale of awakening to partisanship under unwelcome interrogation by East Anglian officialdom). The constructions McElligott and Smith then raise—that a royalist's allegiance was to the person of the king, a loyalist's to the office—cannot stand.

There are other problems. Readers who move from Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England to the editorial introduction to the collection hear echoes beyond the one cited above. Reception of these is not eased when the recycled passages include the following declaration: “Print has always [sic] been seen as a radical, destabilizing force: an agent of social change, innovation, and revolution” (Royalism, 226, emphasis mine, and see also the book jacket; and Royalists, 10). The citation offered is to the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein, but the dismissal of the counterarguments of Adrian Johns and others is what catches attention. This is not the only place where McElligott passes by work that might seem to shadow parts of his own.

What of the matter, rather than the manner, of Royalism, Print and Censorship? McElligott provides much valuable material on the lively royalist press in the hurly-burly of the later 1640s; he certainly demonstrates the extent, and argues the sincerity, of Marchamont Nedham's royalist commitment (and thus reinforces the essayists’ collective reminder of the complexity of partisan attachment); and he offers a nuanced assessment of parliamentarian censorship, the kind of works the authorities thought worth moving against, the formal and informal resources they deployed, and their effectiveness or otherwise. Yet his overall claims are vitiated by carelessness. Within the space of one page (225–26), he tells us both that royalist news book writers “were willing and able to write in favor of any new royal policy or alliance, no matter how inconsistent with their previous arguments,” and as well that they were “not puppets,” their pamphlets “more than simply tools for politicians.” He rests part of his estimate of the capacity of parliamentarian censorship on a claim (215) that a 1659 work by Richard Watson testifies to the international reach of the fledgling Rump's censorship in 1649, although that work is patently commenting on 1657–58. And while there are as well errors of conventional scale (e.g., Hyde and Digby “initially sided with Parliament,” Anthony Ashley Cooper died in 1668), more jarring is the rhetorical and argumentative tone of so much of the work.

The winners usually get to write the histories (although not the verse?), and even Clarendon was unable to realign the historiographic steamroller. The royalists have been shortchanged ever since, and on this showing it does not seem likely that their luck will change any time soon.