Under Two Flags

THE KING'S WAR: 1641-1647 (702 pp.) --C. V.Wedgwood--Macmillan ($7.50).

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 of incessant skirmishes intermixed with interminable diplomatic maneuverings. Only the Cavalier and Roundhead legends can give life to it all, and this because, remarkably enough, they prove to be almost as factually correct as they are fabulously colored.

Colorful Loyalty. The Cavaliers who fought for Charles I were gay, glamorous and morally unreliable. Charles Stuart was a double-dealing, handsome monarch, stoutly abetted by busy little Queen Henrietta Maria, who bore the lively title (created by herself) of "Her She Majesty Generalissima." Their outstanding general, Prince Rupert of the Rhine (Charles' nephew), combined style and audacity with grim efficiency. Parliamentarians denounced him as an ingrate; Royalists hailed him as ingenious, and his white dog was popularly ranked "Sergeant-Major-General Boy." Thus the Cavaliers held until the war's end a virtual monopoly of high spirits and colorful loyalty, plus resources of wit, satire and song.

The 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 no sparkling songs; he merely compressed their deadly earnestness into a few short lines culled from Seneca:

There can be slain

No sacrifice to God more acceptable,

Than an unjust and wicked king.

Budding Irony. With the infinite patience of a housewife unsnarling an atrocious tangle of wool, Author Wedgwood shows just how the men of Parliament, aided by the Calvinist Scots, wound up the bright Cavalier cause, captured its fugitive leader and beheaded him. Their answer to flamboyant dash was the sturdy discipline of Cromwell's and Fairfax' "New Model army"; their retort to royal deceit was tough, businesslike cunning--along with an ironhandedness that eventually gave Cromwell the very absolutism he had denied to Charles.

But in 1647, none could see the irony that lay ready to bud--namely, that having achieved all they could desire in the way of puritanical austerity, the British would endure it only for a few years before inviting the sacrificed King's unsaintly son to ascend the throne as Charles II and enjoy his own again.

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