This collection derives from the conference “Exile in the English Revolution and Its Aftermath, 1640–1685” held in London in 2006, which was a major milestone in the recent wave of interest in the royalist exiles of the 1640s and 1650s. As is not always the case, this is one collection in which the essays selected for inclusion are those which were in fact the stronger papers on the day.

Yet the prevailing impression is one of thematic incoherence. Some of that is deliberate. Timothy Raylor sets the tone in the first essay by arguing that “exile” is a problematic, elastic term. Moreover, the years spent abroad by some of the king’s supporters can, for him, be viewed as little more than one chapter in the much longer story of the development of the Grand Tour. Many young royalists would have gone abroad anyway, and mid-seventeenth-century Britain was less insular than has sometimes been supposed. In the same vein, James Loxley is reluctant to apply the term to Hobbes’s departure in 1640, especially as it was undertaken rather more willingly than his return twelve years later. Loxley’s main point is that Hobbes the political theorist thought of exiles as ex-subjects, so, unlike subjects who were never exiled, they might have a choice as to whether to submit to a usurping de facto ruler. What therefore remains unclear is whether Hobbes thought of himself as such when he submitted to the Rump in 1652.

Added to this, several of the essays are not so much about exile per se as the cultural interactions between the British Isles and Continental Europe. Sarah Mortimer supplies an excellent discussion of how Henry Hammond sought to rethink the intellectual underpinnings of the Church of England in the face of the challenge from European Socinianism. But Hammond himself never left England. Nigel Smith, in discussing an anonymous Dutch poem of 1650 and Andreas Gryphius’s play Ermordete Majestät oder Carolus Stuardus, not implausibly assumes that they are examples of the influence of British exiles on Continental writers. But need we necessarily assume such influence to explain why so many foreign observers watched the fall of Charles I with such appalled fascination? Likewise, Abraham Cowley’s awareness of the instability of language, as demonstrated by Christopher D’Addario, may well have been a result of his time abroad but could just as easily reflect the more general sense of disruption and dislocation also experienced by those who remained at home.

Only three of the essays can be said to deal with the practicalities of royalist exile. Ann Hughes and Julie Sanders make the important point that absences and separation disrupted conventional relations within families, from the Stuarts downward. Wives, sisters, and daughters, as well as younger sons and brothers, could find themselves better placed to defend their collective interests, while, in contrast, nominal patriarchs could be reduced to little more than mere dependents and supplicants. Their two case studies, the Cavendishes and the Carys, serve as contrasting examples of how these abnormal circumstances could bring together or come between family members. Using new archival material, Katrien Daemen-de Gelder and J. P. Vander Motten trace the financial difficulties of William Aylesbury, the brother-in-law of Sir Edward Hyde who had, until falling out with the duke in 1650, helped organize the sale of the second duke of Buckingham’s art collection. Marika Keblusek, whose monograph on book culture among the royalist exiles is eagerly awaited, suggests that book collecting was one way for those exiles to cling onto some measure of normality. More than most of the contributors, Keblusek ably conveys a sense of exile as being first and foremost about cultural deprivation and personal suffering, even if this could be offset by new friendships, experiences, and ideas.

That the collection includes two essays by Philip Major and Jason Peacey on two of the regicides, William Goffe and John Dixwell, who fled abroad at the Restoration, is no mere afterthought. Major, as editor, recognizes that these republican refugees after 1660 were as much exiles as their royalist counterparts before 1660 and that a comparison between the experiences of the two groups is entirely valid. In fact, Major and Peacey are the two contributors who address most directly the question of how their subjects coped psychologically with the actual experience of exile. But there is a crucial difference. Whereas most royalist exiles had been able to live openly in foreign lands, Goffe and Dixwell spent decades living secret lives within the Stuarts’s colonial territories in New England, knowing that exposure would probably send them to the gallows or the block. One can only suppose that they thought that their enemies’ earlier periods of exile had been altogether easier.