"For who is he ... that will not follow
These cull'd and choice-drawn Cavaliers to France?"
But it was most unquestionably used in a reproachful sense on the occasion of the tumult in the reign of Charles I., probably to connect its French origin with the un-English character of the defenders of the Queen and her French papist adherents, to whom it was chiefly applied; it was likewise bandied about in declarations alternately issued on the eve of the war by the Parliament and the King, the latter speaking of it more than once as a word much in disfavour. Charles, when the battle of Edgehill had been fought, elaborately accuses his antagonists—"pretenders to peace and charity"—of a hateful attempt "to render all persons of honour, courage, and reputation, odious to the common people under the style of Cavaliers, insomuch as the highways and villages have not been safe for gentlemen to pass through without violence or affront." Even in the very earliest popular songs on the King's side, the word has not the place it afterwards assumed, and one meets with Royalist poets of a comparatively sober vein,—
"Who neither love for fashion nor for fear,
As far from Roundhead as from Cavalier."
D'Ewes's earliest uses of the word, in his MS. journal, occur under 10th January, and March 4th, 1641-2, and 3d June, 1642. In the first he is speaking of parties who had been suspiciously entering the Tower; in the second, of the Cavaliers at Whitehall who wounded the citizens; and in the last of the King's party in Yorkshire.
Of the word Roundhead, on the other hand, and the mixed fear and hatred it represented and provoked, decidedly the most characteristic example is furnished by the ever quaint and entertaining Bishop Hacket, who tells a story of a certain worthy and honest Vicar of Hampshire who always (in such a manner as to evade the notice of one section of his hearers while he secretly pleased the other) changed one verse in the last verse of the Te Deum—"O Lord, in thee have I trusted, let me never be a Roundhead!" William Lilly, however (Monarchy or no Monarchy in England, edit. 1651), referring to tumults of which he was an eye-witness, describes Puritans to have received the nickname as follows: "In the general, they were very honest men and well-meaning: some particular fools, or others, perhaps, now and then got in amongst them, greatly to the disadvantage of the more sober. They were modest in their apparel, but not in their language; they had the hair of their heads very few of them longer than their ears; whereupon, it came to pass that those who usually with their cries attended at Westminster (Whitehall), were by a nickname called Roundheads. The Courtiers again, having long hair and locks, and always swordes, at last were called by these men Cavaliers: and so, so few of the vulgar knowing the sense of the word Cavalier."—Notes to Forster's Arrest of the Five Members.
Swift, regarding Cavalier in the reproachful sense, says: "Each party grows proud of that appellation which their adversaries at first intended as a reproach: of this sort were the Guelfs, and Ghibelines, Huguenots, and Cavaliers."
Nevertheless, Cavalier was formerly an ordinary English term for a horse-soldier. Kersey gives it as "a Sword-gentleman, a brave Warrior."
Nares gives it: "Cavalero, or Cavalier. Literally a Knight; but, as the persons of chief fashion and gaiety were knights, any gallant was so distinguished. Hence it became a term for the officers of the Court party, in Charles I.'s wars, the gaiety of whose appearance was strikingly opposed to the austerity and sourness of the opposite order." Glossary, New Edit. 1859.
In the Roundhead accounts of the period are details of the contests and assaults that were continually made between the years 1648 and 1658 upon the Roundheads abroad, for at home the Cavaliers were too weak to indulge frequently in such manifestations of party feelings.