Word: roundheads
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Britain's great civil war began in 1642. It is still being fought. Every schoolboy, guided more by his own temperament than historical fact, still takes sides as a dashing Cavalier or a solid Roundhead-which is perhaps one reason why modern Britain rests its institutions in an all-powerful Parliament but reserves its affections for a powerless monarchy. In Volume II of her great history, which carries on from The King's Peace, Historian C. V. (for Cicely Veronica) Wedgwood touches this national nerve of double loyalty and lets it enliven what would otherwise be dreary years...
...Cavaliers sang their jaunty When the King Enjoys His Own Again. But from start to finish, "the Parliamentarians encouraged a solemn godliness" that was best expressed by the Roundhead who said: "Is any merry? Let him sing psalms." The exhortation made sense to London's Protestant merchants, who saw in every Cavalier excess the worldly hand of the Papal archfiend. It found the same response in all who refused to allow Royalist glamour to blind their eyes to the King's infinite capacity for treachery, deceit and absolutism. The Roundheads' chosen poet, John Milton, sang them...
...lady's view of the time of Cromwell, and if Cromwell had been a lady, the view might have been true enough. As it is, it tells a Cinderella story of little Julia Ashley, who is encountered competing with Irish pigs for some swill left behind by the Roundhead soldiery who laid Ireland waste. She grows up to be adopted by a dashing cavalier, farmed out to a Dutch orphanage and, in the natural course of events as they happen in female historical novels, mistress of a great plantation in the Dutch East Indies. Cloves is what they grow...
...really Cromwell's head? It looks like him-to the reddish beard and mustache and the wart over the right eyebrow. Scholars who examined it at the Royal Archaeological Institute believed it to be genuine. In Canon Wilkinson's house last week the old Roundhead rested in its oaken box. No one seemed disposed to demand burial...
...Eisenhower: The Inside Story (Harper; $4-95).- On Dec. 6, 1648, when the House of Commons was to vote on bringing Charles I to trial, Colonel Thomas Pride, a Roundhead officer, posted his regiment outside Commons. Using a previously prepared purge list, Pride excluded M.P.s who were expected to vote with the King. Asked his authority, he pointed to his men with their muskets...