This is what the break down of the 107 novels looks like.



And as I suspicioned: Geoffrey Trease happened to start writing in a period (the 1930s) which seems to have been very pro Royalist (an allegory with Spain perhaps?).

In the 1940s the two pro-Royalist books are by Jane Lane, the two pro-Parliament books are by Geoffrey Trease.

I've finally started writing and if I get the chapter sketched by Monday I'll be asking for Beta readers.

As of today I have notes on 108 civil war novels, ending with the very moving Harrow and Harvest by Barbara Willard.

So far:

56 for the King
15 neutral
35 or Parliament

and a scattering of others. A more nuanced analysis to follow.

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From the author of the Parliamentarian Plain Jane. This is a lovely book.


For the King, and yet produced by the Cromwell Press, It's a beautifully packaged book but I wonder if it's self published? I found myself imaging illustrations that aren't there.

When Nicholas is a teen ager and his sister Katherine barely seven, their father surrenders his house to Parliament. When the Royalists arrive, they shoot him as a traitor. Nicholas leaves to fight for the King, leaving behind a traumatised sister.

Five years later Nicholas, his friend Giles and Giles younger brother Matthew arrive, having escaped from Worcester. Nicholas is contemptous of his sister's timidity but uses her and his cousin Hester as cover for the three of them to escape. Unfortunately Hester's cousin Mistess Barfutt conspure against them, imprisoning Kathrine. Katherine escapes to the Mill where the Miller (a Royalist officer) hides her, but because Nicholas distrusts and despises Katherine her attempts to help them all come to naught/

All is complicated because Giles resembles the description of the king (tall and dark).

Eventually Parliament troops arrive, everyone is arrested, but Katherine. Giles, Nicholas and Matthew escape. Nicholas finds his sister is more couragous than he realised and he and Katherine stay behind to keep the mill working so that if the Miller (who once executed their father) survives, he will have somewhere to come back to).

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Softly's Plain Jane
Welch's For the King
Sutcliff's Simon


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A relatively late contribution from Jane Lane and one that manages to be more skeptical than her other work.

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A very complex family saga which I will return to, pairing it with Both Sides of the Sea (also set in the Commonwealth), and also with Trumpets in the West, which, although a saga of Restoration is contemporaneous, because there are ways in which this novel is profoundly influenced by the war: the theme of factions, of the military gaining ground, of taxes, of curbs on entertainment, and of the rise of one person to immense power, are all major themes.

This is a family saga:
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Charles, E. R. (1867 (facsimile in 2006)). The Draytons and the Davenants: a story of the Civil Wars. London, Eilbron Classics facsimile of T. Nelson and Sons. Truly excellent novel in two parts of which the second is On Both Sides of the Sea. ( Read more...Collapse ) This entry was originally posted at http://treaseproject.dreamwidth.org/3284.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I think this book is as much about the US civil war as it is about the English one. It's rather fun tho.

Christopher Ferringham is a Royalist soldier by virtue that his father was a mercenary captain in the thirty years war (a second son) and joined up with the King. Christopher simply followed him. It's now the 1650s and Christopher has been hauled out of a prison by his Puritan Uncle and despatched to New England to make good and eventually to return as Heir. Instead Christopher is a scape grace, hangs out with the local trouble makers, insults his other uncle, spends his time gambling and drinking, and gets fined a lot. In one scene even funnier now than then, he obeys the instructions to get his curls cut off by having a longstrip of hair left among the super short: ie a Mohican.

Christopher has two redeeming factors: first he is generous, kind and just and rescues others from trouble often at expense to himself. Second he is in love with his cousin. She, however, won't marry him, most of all because he swears he will be good *for her*. She does not want to be his crutch and uses that phrase.

Eventually, in what is essentially a story about growing into grace, the Uncle at home disowns him as his heir (having acquired a grandson) and Christopher runs away. He accidentally takes his cousin with him, and they end up in the rapids. He rescues her but it's over night. She still won't marry him, taking a place instead as a servant girl in Boston, telling him to return only when he can take her to her home.

He ends up in various scrapes and eventually in the South where he becomes a smith. He refuses to join a friend from England on his plantation, coming to dislike the behaviour of the Cavaliers who are settling there [a link I made in an earlier post]. Eventually tho he inherits that friend's plantation, frees the slaves, rescues his cousins from the North who have been captured by Pirates, exposes his rival in love--who also usefully dies--and is able to return, redeemed, sober and conscientious, and marry his sweetheart.

 

 

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A fascinating book because Lane, although still firmly Royalist, casts as her main characters an aesthetic poet and scholar, so beloved of many Cavalier Romances, who betrays the Sealed Knot he created; and a womanising drunkard (his best friend) who rapes his sister in a fury, and proves an ineffectual spy. Broderick (the action adventure hero) is described as "He was selfish, inordinately vain, and when injured utterly remorseless" (140).

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The basic premise is that Sir Richard Willis creates the Sealed Knot to raise money for an uprising, aided and abetted by his friend, the reckless and lower class yeoman, Broderick. Sick, and desperate to keep his mistress,Willis sells them out, and ends up praying that Charles does not return. The last seen is Broderick returning for his sister Diana to marry her, and sweep her into a future in which General Monck has forced open the gates of London and welcomed back the King. The book concludes, "The King was coming home, but not through the agency of this once dear society, rather despite it." (231)

 

Willis is a romantic, who believes, "Why, when such numbers of loyal gentlemen throughout England yearn for a restoration, did they not rise for their King?"(in 1655). (3) For him money is the answer. So he is very vulnerable when Morland "made Sir Richard see hmself as a romantic dreamer" (34) It doens't help that Hythe and Villiers see it as hopeless, or that others point to the use of foreign troops as alienating Royalist supporters.

 

 

The book is impressively snobbish, sometimes in period "In an age when the closest relation if noble was addressed as 'my lord,' this yeoman accosted his betters by their surnames only" (17) or Compton's declaration that the people of London are "a parcel of mechanics. They will talk, my lord, but they will not act." (102) which is a rather odd thing to say given the previous decade. Villiers adds, 'in lofty contempt, "I suppose," remarked Villiers in lofty contempt, "that their weapons will be tailors' bodkins and butchers' cleavers." (102) which is a very typical insult from the previous decade.

 

and sometimes not at all, as when Wilis enters a company of "cits", and finds "all were ostentatiously dresses and had in their behaviour that arrogance of mere wealth... The gentlemen of the company... wore breeches for all the world like petticoats, trimmed with ribbon loops not only at the waist but down over the side-seams, and some had lace frills spilling over their knees... their long hair was carefully curled and a few of the more daring had adopted this new fashion of hair-powder...

Their female companions little City misses in their teens, were quite as ornamental...Their sleeves were slashed, their young faces smeared with paint like a whore's, their shoes had enormous roses... and while some wore huge lace collars like their gallants, others had their gowns cut so low in front that half the flattened bosom was exposed." (54-54)

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