"Roundhead" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... complexion, with a broad, good-natured visage, which he could lengthen at will in a surprising manner. His hair was cropped close to his head, and the razor did daily duty over his cheek and chin, giving him the roundhead look, some years later, characteristic of the Puritanical party. Nicholas had taken to wife Dorothy, daughter of Richard Greenacres of Worston, and was most fortunate in his choice, which is more than can be said for his lady, for I cannot uphold the squire as a model of conjugal fidelity. ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of October, 1644, in the angry days of the Roundhead Revolt, his early years were spent in an intensely religious atmosphere that saturated his soul, but at the same time bred detestation of bigotry and persecution. If he seemed to be performing out of ...
— The Tryal of William Penn and William Mead • various
... the old struggle between the Puritan and the Cavalier; but Puritan and Cavalier types were common to the two armies. In dash and light-hearted daring, Custer and Kearney stood as conspicuous as Stuart and Morgan; and, on the other hand, no Northern general approached the Roundhead type—the type of the stern, religious warriors who fought under Cromwell—so closely as Stonewall Jackson. He was a man of intense religious conviction, who carried into every thought and deed of his daily life the precepts of the faith he cherished. He was ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... sneer? Who dare again to say we trace Our lines to a plebeian race? Roundhead and Cavalier! 265 Dreams are those names erewhile in battle loud; Forceless as is the shadow of a cloud, They live but in the ear: That is best blood that hath most iron, in 't, To edge resolve with, pouring without stint 270 For what makes ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... leaving the three elder girls and Dr. Rylance standing in the hall, listlessly contemplative of Sir Tristram's dinted breast-plate, hacked by Roundhead pikes ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... She turned her back resolutely to the window, and set to work to make up for lost time. A quaint picture she made in the low oak-panelled room, in her grey dress and white kerchief—for her father, Sir James Basset, was a staunch Roundhead, and so was Dame Deborah, his sister, who had ruled his household since the ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... see this problem solved by Mrs. Stowe. That kind of romantic interest which Scott evolved from the relations of lord and vassal, of thief and clansman, from the social more than the moral contrast of Roundhead and Cavalier, of far-descended pauper and nouveau riche which Cooper found in the clash of savagery with civilization, and the shaggy virtue bred on the border-land between the two, Indian by habit, white by tradition, Mrs. Stowe seems in her former novels to have sought in a form of society ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... four Stuart monarchs, but her weakness was exhibited only on the side of foreign politics: it being absurd to suppose that the country which could produce Hampden and Cromwell, Strafford and Falkland, and the men who formed the Cavalier and Roundhead armies, was then in a state of decay. At the worst, she was but depressed, and the removal of such dead weights from her as Charles I. and James II. was all that was necessary to enable her to vindicate her claim to a first-rate place in the European family. In 1783, at the close of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... I replied drowsily, "we pretended that yesterday; and it's not my turn to be a Roundhead, anyhow." The fact is, I was lazy, and the call to arms fell on indifferent ears. We three younger ones were stretched at length in the orchard. The sun was hot, the season merry June, and never (I thought) ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... argent, in a field azure, with its appropriate motto, SANS LACHE. 'May our name rather perish,' exclaimed Sir Everard, 'than that ancient and loyal symbol should be blended with the dishonoured insignia of a traitorous Roundhead!' ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... Unenvious, therefore, of royalty, and fully crediting that never-quoted sentiment of Shakspeare's "Uneasy," &c., my motto, within the legitimate limits of right reason, and in common with that of some ridiculed philosopher of Roundhead times, is the prudent saying, "Whoever's king, I'll be subject!"—ay, and for the masculine I place the epicene. While, however, in sober practice of right subordination, and under existing circumstances of just rule, we gladly would amplify the maxim, (as in ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... sergeant—"this comes of your serving under that canting fellow, Lieutenant Mowbray—he has no love for the service; and confound me if I don't believe he is half a Roundhead in his heart. Tie the hands of the girl, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... been conflicts, they have left no rancour, no bitterness. The winner has been modest, the loser magnanimous. The centuries of civil strife which devastated England imposed no lasting hostility. Nobody cares to-day whether his ancestor was Cavalier or Roundhead. The keenest Royalist is willing to acknowledge the noble prowess and the political genius of Cromwell. The hardiest Puritan pays an eager tribute to the exalted courage of Charles I. But the Americans have taken ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... not a Cavalier," said Adrian, "and that's why you wonder your aunt selected him, no doubt? He's decidedly of the Roundhead type, with the Puritan extracted, or inoffensive, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of many must have been very much upset. The various armies were compelled to obtain their supplies from the country, and with the lawless habits of the times plundered friend and foe alike, as Cavalier and Roundhead did afterwards; and many a farmer must have seen all his stock driven off and his grain seized to feed the combatants. For instance, it was said before the battle called Easter Day Field that all the tenants of Abbot's Ripton in Huntingdonshire were copyholders of the Abbot ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... doubtless committed, nothing could be more just or constitutional than that for those faults his advisers and tools should be called to a severe reckoning; nor did any of those advisers and tools more richly deserve punishment than the Roundhead sectaries whose adulation had encouraged him to persist in the fatal exercise of the dispensing power. It was a fundamental law of the land that the King could do no wrong, and that, if wrong were done by his authority, his counsellors and agents were ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... rather say gentleman—for he had the appearance of one, notwithstanding the somber and peculiar dress he wore, continued to read a letter which he had just opened; and Edward, who feared himself the prisoner of a Roundhead, when he only expected to meet a keeper, was further irritated by the neglect shown toward him by the party. Forgetting that he was, by his own assertion, not Edward Beverley, but the relative ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... memorable events unless we look at it in connection with those which preceded, and with those which followed it. Each of those great and ever-memorable struggles, Saxon against Norman, Villein against Lord, Protestant against Papist, Roundhead against Cavalier, Dissenter against Churchman, Manchester against Old Sarum, was, in its own order and season, a struggle, on the result of which were staked the dearest interests of the human race; ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... gipsy table facing it. The old oak buffet opposite the chimney-piece was a splendid specimen of Elizabethan carving, and made a rich background for the Squire's racing-cups, and a pair of Oliver Cromwell tankards, plain and unornamental as that illustrious Roundhead himself. ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... six-and-twenty years of age, Dryden repaired to London, "clad in homely drugget," and with more projects in his head than pence in his pocket. He was first employed by his relative, Sir Gilbert Pickering—called the "Fiery Pickering," from his Roundhead zeal—as a clerk or secretary. Here he came in contact with Cromwell; and saw very clearly those great qualities of sagacity, determination, courage, statesmanship, insight and genuine godliness, which made him, next to Alfred the Great, the first monarch who ever sat on the English throne. Two ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... he, 'but I saw his back at Preston fight. Ah, lad, proud as he looks, if he did but see old Noll coming in through the door he would not think it beneath him to climb out through the window!' The clank of steel or the sight of a buff-coat would always serve to stir up the old Roundhead ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a strong and deeply embittered sense of wrong had roused to take up arms. Prince Rupert's charge was, however, fully successful. No one even waited to cross swords with his troopers, but all the Roundhead horse galloped headlong off the field, hotly pursued by the Royalists. But the main body of the army stood firm, and for some time the battle was nearly equal, until a large troop of the enemy's cavalry who had been ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... now shall sneer? Who dare again to say we trace 330 Our lines to a plebeian race? Roundhead and Cavalier! Dumb are those names erewhile in battle loud; Dream-footed as the shadow of a cloud, They flit across the ear: That is best blood that hath most iron in 't, To edge resolve with, pouring without stint For what makes manhood dear. Tell us not of Plantagenets, Hapsburgs, and Guelfs, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... in 1643, when the Roundhead Parliament abolished the observance of saints' days and "the three grand festivals" of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, "any law, statute, custom, constitution, or canon to the contrary in any wise notwithstanding." The ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... modest." His portrait, painted in 1685, shows a vigorous, kindly face, with mustachios and imperial, and abundance of hair falling in long wavy masses about the neck and shoulders,—more Cavalier-like than Roundhead. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... was, at that time, only a child, but he still remembered how the Roundhead soldiers had lorded it there, when his father was away fighting with the army of the king; how they had seated themselves at the board, and had ordered his mother about as if she had been a scullion, jeering her with cruel words as to what ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... pride in her history spring largely from the fact that she and her institutions, in birth and growth, are purely American. She is the oldest and, so far, the best developed of all the typically American states. Neither Roundhead nor Cavalier stood sponsor at her cradle. She never wore the collar of colonial subserviency. Her churches and colleges are not endowed of King Charles or Queen Anne. Her lands are not held by grant or prescription ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... an officer by him; and then I knew I'd made a mistake. For they were all well-mounted, and in a regular trooper's uniform, and I thought I'd happened upon one of the king's regiments, instead of which they were a pack of Roundhead rabble; and I had to drive the team back with the oats to their headquarters at Dendry Town. There they made me open a sack to feed their horses; and after that I was told I was a prisoner, and that my wagon and team was taken for ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... had politics during this half-century. The roistering Cavalier of the first Charles, with his flowing locks and plumed hat, with his maypoles and morrice dances, with his stage plays and bear-baitings, with his carousals and gallantries, had given way to the Puritan Roundhead. It was a serious, sober-minded England in which the youth Dryden found himself. If the Puritan differed from the Cavalier in political principles, they were even more diametrically opposed in mode of life. ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... separate Characters, as "of a Projector" (1642); "of an Oxford Incendiary" (1645); and in 1664, "A New Anatomic, or Character of a Christian or Roundhead, expressing his Description, Excellenrie, Happiness, and Innocencie. Wherein may appear how far this blind World is mistaken in their unjust Censures of him." Several Characters were included in Lord North's "Forest of Varieties" published in ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... They had been the watchword of each party in turn whose extravagances had been the cause of all the disasters and errors of several generations. Romanists had quoted them when they condemned Protestants to the stake, Protestants when they condemned Jesuits to the block. The Roundhead had founded his wild reign of fanaticism on their authority. The Cavalier had texts ready at hand to sanction the most unconstitutional measures. 'The right divine of kings to govern wrong' had been grounded on Scriptural authority. All the strange ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... The Puritans of old, like the Nonconformists now, completely identified themselves with the folk it tells about: Cromwell's armies saw in the hands of their great captain "the sword of the Lord and of Gideon." When the Roundhead went into battle, or when the Revivalist goes to prayer meeting, he heard and hears the command of Jehovah to "go up to Ramoth Gilead and prosper"; to "smite Amalek hip and thigh." Phrases from the Old Testament are in the mouths of millions daily; and they are phrases ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... for in that he meddled not with their Dagon." (Lilly's Life.) Which opposition to Lilly's book arose from a jealousy that he was not then thoroughly in the Parliament's interest—which was true; for he frankly confesses, "that till the year 1645 he was more Cavalier than Roundhead, and so taken notice of; but after that he engaged body and soul in the cause of the Parliament."' (Life.) Lilly was succeeded successively by his assistant Henry Coley, and John Partridge, the well-known object ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... regiments showed that he had been a Puritan from the beginning. If one calls Mr. Pepys a Puritan, however, one does not do so for the love of paradox or at a guess. He tells us himself that he "was a great Roundhead when I was a boy," and that, on the day on which King Charles was beheaded, he said: "Were I to preach on him, my text should be—'the memory of the wicked shall rot.'" After the Restoration he was uneasy ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... he never passes a church without pulling off his hat: this shows he has good principles." Spain and Sicily must surely contain many pious robbers and well-principled assassins. Johnson could easily see that a Roundhead who named all his children after Solomon's singers, and talked in the House of Commons about seeking the Lord, might be an unprincipled villain whose religious mummeries only aggravated his guilt; but a man who took off his hat when he passed a church episcopally consecrated must be a good ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... NOTES.—2. Roundhead was the epithet applied to the Puritans by the Cavaliers in the time of Charles I. It arose from the practice among the Puritans of cropping ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... of beauty, walking on the height Of pure philosophy and tranquil song; Born to behold the visions that belong To those who dwell in melody and light; Milton, thou spirit delicate and bright! What drew thee down to join the Roundhead throng Of iron-sided warriors, rude and strong, Fighting for freedom in a ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... parole, was bound to take him to London for his trial, riding by easy stages as he could endure it, whilst Harry took as much care of him as if he had been his brother. On the Saturday they were to halt over the Sunday at the castle of my Lord Hartwell, who had always been a notorious Roundhead, having been one of the first to ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... one taking unto himself with the bread the form of a mastiff, another, that of a mole, another, that of an eagle, a pig or a winged serpent, and a few, ah, how few, received a ray of bright light with the bread and wine. "There," he pointed out, "is a Roundhead, who is going to be sheriff, and because the law calls upon a man to receive the sacrament in the Church before taking office he has come here rather than lose it, and although there are some here who rejoice on seeing him, we have felt no joy at his conversion, because ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... marched, mingled, and, as some might have said, motley in our personnel—sons of some of the best families in the South, men from the Carolinas and Virginia, Georgia and Louisiana, men from Pennsylvania and Ohio; Roundhead and Cavalier, Easterner and Westerner, Germans, Yankees, Scotch-Irish—all Americans. We marched, I say, under a form of government; yet each took his original marching orders from his own soul. We marched across an America not yet won. Below us lay the Spanish civilization—Mexico, ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... realised, and with the two girls still more upon the fringe, though it was true there were splendid games, such as Cavaliers and Roundheads, which could not be played by himself. For this and kindred affairs Vassie and Phoebe were of great use, though Phoebe cried if she had to be a Roundhead too often out of her turn. Still, she was a good little thing, but when the fateful date arrived which was to see the journey to St. Renny, Ishmael had no pang at leaving her or anyone else. He was not a shy boy, and felt only intense interest at the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... a noble old house. Princes of the blood royal had sat in the ponderous carved oak-chairs. A queen had slept in the state-bed, in the blue-satin chamber. Loyal Jocelyns, fighting for their king against low-born Roundhead soldiers, had hidden themselves in the spacious chimneys, or had fled for their lives along the secret passages behind the tapestry. There were old pictures and jewelled drinking-cups that dead-and-gone Jocelyns had collected ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... pointed. He listened rather than spoke, and smiled more assents than he uttered. The King was pleased with his young subject, and marked his approbation by conversing with that unrivalled affability which is gall to a Roundhead and inspiration to a Cavalier. There was a bon mot, which blazed with all the soft brilliancy of sheet lightning. What a contrast to the forky flashes of a regular wit! Then there was an anecdote of Sheridan—the royal Sheridaniana are not thrice-told tales—recounted with ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... most rudely at Richard and Charles as they gallop past, hoping that Richard will hear him shout Ho! and Charles will hear him shout Ha!, and that irritating habit of his, together with Charles's treatment of the matter, was probably the origin of the terms, 'Roundhead' and 'Cavalier.'" ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... written by Sir Robert Howard soon after the Restoration, with for its heroes two Cavalier colonels, whose estates are sequestered, and their man Teg (Teague), an honest blundering Irishman. The Cavaliers defy the Roundhead Committee, and the day may come says one of them, when those that suffer for their consciences and honour may be rewarded. Nobody who heard this from the stage in the days of Charles II. could feel that the day had come. Its comic Irishman kept the Committee on the stage, and ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... in a word first," interrupted one of the long-tailed Radishes in the same bed; "for it is of no use to go out of one extreme into another, which you are on the high road to do if you are disposed to take Mr. Roundhead's advice; who, by the way, ought to be ashamed of forcing his very peculiar views upon his neighbours. Just look at us. We always strike moderately down, so we know it's the right thing to do, and that solid round balls are the most unnatural and useless things in the world. ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... one will wonder that such behavior was exasperating to the poorer boys. I am far from defending Viggo's behavior in this instance. He was here, as everywhere, the acknowledged leader; and therefore more cordially hated than the rest. It was the Roundhead hating the Cavalier; and the Cavalier making merry at the expense of ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the enemies of the king were the Earls of Bedford, Warwick, Manchester and Essex, while many leaders of the Roundheads such as Pym, Cromwell and Hampden were of gentle blood. Thus the fact that a man was Cavalier or Roundhead proved nothing as to his social ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... sturdy frame, swarthy features, a broad, thoughtful forehead, courageous eyes gleaming from beneath shaggy eyebrows, a quadrangular breadth of jawbone, and a mouth which bespoke strong will, he stood like a sturdy Roundhead sentinel on guard before the gates of the Constitution. Holding in profound contempt what he termed spread-eagle oratory, his only gesticulations were up-and- down motions of his arm, as if he were beating out with sledge- hammers his forcible ideas. His peroration was sublime, and every ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... called, "My name is Old Hewson the Cobler." Is this a cavelier's song in ridicule of the Roundhead Colonel Hewson; and are the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... who has climbed into an adjoining tree are a good contrast; Huggins "sitting on a thorn" is another ludicrous picture of perturbation; the cit on the grass, with "cattle grazed here" on a tree, is the fifth; and Huggins being cleared of clay by two of Tom Roundhead's helpers, with mop and broom, completes the cuts and catastrophes of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... radicalism which has written itself into the history of the United States. But to the student of early American literature all such generalizations are of limited value. He is dealing with individual men, not with "Cavalier" or "Roundhead" as such. He has learned from recent historians to distrust any such facile classification of the first colonists. He knows by this time that there were aristocrats in Massachusetts and commoners in Virginia; that the Pilgrims of Plymouth were more tolerant than the Puritans of Boston, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... "are flocking to them already, and they expect a strong body of the indulged Presbyterians, headed by young Milnwood, the son of the famous old Roundhead, Colonel Silas Morton." ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... The name of Roundhead "was very ill applied to Mr, Hutchinson, who, having naturally a very fine thick sett head of hair, kept it clean and handsome, so that it was a greate ornament to him, although the godly of those dayes, ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... reported of him, that he would kill and eat the children of the opposite party. This horridly grotesque imputation has been preserved in the political ballads and poetry of the day. Cleveland ridicules it in one of his poems, where he makes a Roundhead declare— ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... proletarian suburb, its once noble domain narrowed to the bare acres of a stinted breathing ground, Aston Hall looks forth upon joyless streets and fuming chimneys, a wide welter of squalid strife. Its walls, which bear the dints of Roundhead cannonade, are blackened with ever-driving smoke; its crumbling gateway, opening aforetime upon a stately avenue of chestnuts, shakes as the steam-tram rushes by. Hilliard's imagination was both attracted and repelled by this relic of what he deemed a better age. ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... qualities which their language contains names for; and even now, on the subject on which I have to talk to-night, one has but to take up any magazine, review, newspaper, or party organ of any kind which touches on it, to see that opinion is still Whig or Tory, Cavalier or Roundhead, Protestant or Catholic, as the case may be. The unfortunate person who is neither wholly one nor wholly the other is in the position of Hamlet's 'baser nature,' 'between the incensed points of mighty opposites.' He is the Laodicean, neither cold ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... years afterwards he returned to Wythburn city and resumed his old life on the fells. There was little more for the train-bands to do. Charles had fled, peace was restored, the Long Parliament was dissolved, Cromwell was Lord Protector. Outwardly the young Roundhead was not altered by the campaign. He had passed through it unscathed. He was somewhat graver in manner; there seemed to be a little less warmth and spontaneity in his greeting; his voice had lost one or two of its cheerier notes; his laughter was less ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... civil distinctions seemed to be abolished by the lenity and equality of Charles's administration. Cavalier and roundhead were heard of no more: all men seemed to concur in submitting to the king's lawful prerogatives, and in cherishing he just privileges of the people and of parliament. Theological controversy alone still subsisted, and kept alive ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume |
