That Civil War royalism has been historiographically neglected – the poor cousin of Parliamentarianism and radicalism – is now widely recognised. Royalists and royalism during the Interregnum is the second of two collections edited by Jason McElligott and David Smith, arising from a conference in 2004. (This volume is published with Manchester University Press, not Cambridge University Press.) As a contribution to the burgeoning literature on royalism, it is to be welcomed. However, editorial strategy might have been fruitfully rethought.

How does royalism appear in 2010? Some emphases are expected: a reader will find lots on royalist networks and little on royalist conspiracy. Others are more striking. There is Atlantic royalism, but no ‘Three Kingdoms’ royalism. There are contributions on royalist literature, but nothing on scribal circulation. At several points the need to pursue popular, not just elite, royalism is asserted; and Lloyd Bowen's chapter manages this task well. But given the relative lack of in-depth studies of royalists, it might be premature to assume a binary division between popular and elite – an assumption which is increasingly being erased in current historiography (as the editors admit on p. 13). We know that many early modern mentalities which united and divided people cut across social divides – anti-Catholicism, anti-Puritanism, whig and tory allegiance – was royalism an exception? Furthermore, the level which counts as ‘popular’ is increasingly unclear, given the realisation that officeholding penetrated a long way down the social hierarchy, surely exacerbated by the political awareness fostered by the debates, preaching and print of the 1640s. Ignoring ‘popular’ royalism is wrong, but it would be dangerous to hunt it down independently of its ‘elite’ counterpart.

The most important theme which emerges from this book is the flexibility and adaptability of royalists under pressure. Conformity, as Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor put it, was ‘not an event so much as a protracted process, requiring constant negotiation and interpretation’ (p. 23). As they suggest, Civil War historians could learn a great deal from the historiography of Tudor conformity. How people negotiated Reformation, Counter-Reformation and renewed Reformation might tell us much about how their descendants managed Civil War, commonwealth, Cromwellian and Restoration transitions. As Jan Broadway outlines, William Dugdale managed to combine royalist antiquarianism with serving the Commonwealth. That Dugdale's contacts included moderate Parliamentarians reminds us that the values of consensus and harmony survived well into the 1650s. Another echo of Reformation upheavals is the striking loyalism and ingrained habit of obedience to the powers that be – perhaps increased by the disruption of the 1640s. Acceptance of Interregnum regimes could be combined with visceral loyalty to the Stuarts should they return: a position tentatively labelled ‘royalish’ (p. 10). There is a good thesis to be written about royalist Nicodemism.

The distinctions between royalism, loyalism and monarchism remain fudged. Struggling with the problem of how to define royalism, the editors assert the existence of a common core of royalism and yet remain reticent about what this was. Although I personally prefer this more open and fluid definition, recognising the diversity of royalists, to tighter ones, a few more explicit suggestions about what the commonalities of royalism were would be helpful. There is an unexplored tension in saying that royalists are those who identified themselves as such and were identified as such by others: divisions may have prevented the two halves coinciding. Indeed, reading the introduction felt like listening in to an esoteric discussion between the introduction to this book and to the collection on the 1640s. Combining the two volumes would have offered a solution.

In dividing papers from a single conference on royalism from 1640 to 1660 into two volumes, contributions have been multiplied. But some important questions have fallen down the cracks inbetween. How much did the regicide alter royalist attitudes? Was the experience of exile under Charles ii qualitatively different from that under his father and, if so, did this derive from a different circumstances, a new ruler, or from that ruler being proximate rather than distant? At the other end of the period, the transition from Interregnum to Restoration is only systematically dealt with in the final chapter, by D'Maris Coffman, on the earl of Southampton and finance. Hints of some answers to the question of chronological change do appear in some chapters. Fincham and Taylor imply that the only difference that the regicide made to illicit episcopal ordinations was to make it harder to take the Oath of Allegiance. Anthony Milton finds examples of absolutists who were critical of the personal abilities of Charles i before and after 1649. However, Milton might have reflected on how the fear that Charles had ceded his crown echoed in the many rejections of the Answer to the nineteen propositions by hardline Restoration monarchists. Were there signs already that the constitutional royalism so prevalent in the 1640s was shifting towards the absolutism characteristic of the Restoration? The implications of Geoffrey Smith's intriguing reconstruction of the multiple networks of Daniel O'Neill could also be drawn out for the Restoration. Did links forged across the competing networks of Hyde and Bennet continue after 1660? In describing the experience of royalists in the 1650s, this book makes no clear claims about the distinctiveness or otherwise of Interregnum royalists. There have now been at least two conferences on the transition from the 1650s to the 1660s: one (based at Hull) on republicanism; one (based at Cambridge) more generally. Organisers of future conferences and edited collections might consider deliberately crossing chronological divides: 1603, 1642, 1660 and 1688, rather than perpetuating them.

This volume undoubtedly increases our awareness of the complexities of royalists and royalism during the 1650s. Readers of this Journal will be pleased to see the high quality of discussions of episcopalians, of Heylin, and of Dugdale in chapters 1, 5 and 10. If our sense of mid-seventeenth-century royalism is gradually developing, it is to be hoped that it will stimulate understanding of royalism's neglected counterpart: the Church of England and its clergy during the Interregnum.