And though today we see Whitehall
With cobwebs hung around the wall,
Yet Heaven shall make amends for all
When the King enjoys his own again.
But somehow the finer essence of the Cavalier spirit escapes us in these careless verses. Better are the recorded sayings in prose of many gallant gentlemen in the King’s service. There, for instance, was Sir Edmund Verney, the royal standard bearer who was killed at Edgehill. He was offered his life by a throng of his enemies if he would deliver the standard. He answered that his life was his own, but the standard was his and their sovereign’s and he would not deliver it while he lived. At the outbreak of the war he had said to Hyde: “I have eaten his [the King’s] bread and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him; I choose rather to lose my life—which I am sure to do—to preserve and defend those things which are against my conscience to preserve and defend; for I will deal freely with you: I have no reverence for bishops for whom this quarrel subsists.”
And there was that high-hearted nobleman, the Marquis of Winchester, whose fortress of Basing House, with its garrison of five hundred men and their families, held out for years against the Parliament. It was continuously besieged from July, 1643, to November, 1645, and at one time Sir William Waller attacked it in vain, with a force of seven thousand. At last Cromwell took it by storm, whereupon the Marquis, made prisoner, “broke out and said that if the King had no more ground in England but Basing House, he would adventure as he did, and so maintain it to the uttermost; comforting himself in this disaster that Basing House was called Loyalty.” The sack of this great stronghold yielded over 200,000 pounds, and Clarendon says that on its every windowpane was written with a diamond point “Aimez Loyauté.”
The Cavalier spirit prolonged itself down into the Jacobite songs of the eighteenth century which centre about the two attempts of the Stuarts to regain their crown—in 1715 and in “the Forty-five.”
It was a’ for our rightfu’ King
That we left fair Scotland’s strand:
It was a’ for our rightfu’ King