Needed: Catholic Cavaliers

Kentish Sir Byng stood for his King,
Bidding the crop-headed Parliament swing:
And, pressing a troop unable to stoop
And see the rogues flourish and honest folk droop,
Marched them along, fifty score strong,
Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song.
God for King Charles! Pym and such carles
To the Devil that prompts ’em their treasonous parles!
Cavaliers, up! Lips from the cup,
Hands from the pasty, nor bite take nor sup
Till you’re—
(Chorus)
Marching along, fifty-score strong,
Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song.
—Robert Browning, “A Cavalier Song”

It would be hard to say that all is well in Church and State across the planet this August of 2026. Last month, I pointed out the contribution played by fatherhood in any healthy society—and imputed a great deal of our current mess to its lack. This is certainly true; but there are other aspects of masculinity we lack in our modern world—especially among Catholics. But what I will speak of here is not a hard and fast masculine identity—like those of father, king, and priest—but a spirit, of which any and all might take part to a greater or lesser degree, depending upon what God demands of them as they make their way in life. It is the spirit of the Cavalier.

Now, to be sure, no one man, save Christ Himself, can be all varieties of good at once. There are different callings. Some men are called to the priesthood, others to the religious life; some are called to be married and others are not. Yet all, in some sense, are called to be fathers, kings, and priests in various symbolic but real ways. One way or another, each could use the spirit of the Cavalier.

But what exactly is the Cavalier? In the narrowest sense, they were the men who rallied to King Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland after he raised the Royal Standard against the usurping Parliament at Nottingham on August 22, 1642. In the ensuing 13 years—until the Battle of Severn Creek in Maryland on March 25, 1655—the Wars of the Three Kingdoms were fought in those countries and the American colonies. They pitted the Catholic Recusants and Anglican High Tories who supported the king in England against his Puritan and Parliamentary oligarchical opponents. Geographically, it pitted the North and West of England, Cornwall, Wales, the Scottish Highlands, most of Ireland, Virginia, and Maryland against the Home Counties, the Scottish Lowlands, Ulster, and New England.

Oliver Cromwell, the stern, self-righteous, and occasionally genocidal leader of the Puritan or Roundhead party was as much a symbol and image of his cause as its leader. Much the same could be said for Charles I, with his easy-going manner, his deep love for his French Catholic queen, his love of the arts, and his Catholicizing and Romeward religious policies. Those who rallied to his standard reflected their leader, as did Cromwell’s men.

These Cavaliers were renowned for both their piety—Catholic or Anglican—and loyalty. As opposed to the Puritans’ general disapproval of anything pleasant, they combined a great love of wine, tobacco, and song with a willingness to stare death in the face. The Cavalier Poets demonstrated these attitudes in their works which were as often prayers or hymns as they were drinking songs or odes to beauty. Today we still use the phrase “a cavalier” attitude to describe someone with a devil-may-care attitude. Given the defeats, last stands, and utter ruin that comprised their history, they would need this as much as their storied bravery and piety.

But there was more at stake than a question of religion; two entirely different views of life were at war. A sort of prequel was the suppression of the Massachusetts colony of Merry Mount by the Puritans of Massachusetts in 1630. What Nathaniel Hawthorne says of the local situation in his short story “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” was true of all the Three Kingdoms as well:

Bright were the days at Merry Mount, when the Maypole was the banner staff of that gay colony! They who reared it, should their banner be triumphant, were to pour sunshine over New England’’s rugged hills, and scatter flower seeds throughout the soil. Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.

The Cavaliers stood for the old folkways and customs of their countries—“Father Christmas” was originally a Cavalier figure, showing the feast that the Puritans despised as a personified ally.

If that were all there were to their story, our interest in them might well end with that creek in Maryland in 1655. But a mere five years later, General Monck overthrew Cromwell’s son and brought back Charles II, son of the murdered king. But the same issues were only slumbering, not dispersed; they roared to life and pushed Charles’ Catholic brother, Servant of God James II and VII, off the English throne in 1688.

His supporters, the Jacobites, fought and lost in Scotland the following year and in Ireland from 1690 to 1691. After that, they rose again in Scotland for his son, James III and VIII in 1715 and 1719. At last, they did once more—and came the closest to victory—in 1745-1746, under James’ son, Bonnie Prince Charlie. When the prince raised his standard at Glenfinnan, having arrived with only seven men and neither arms nor money, he incarnated the very spirit of the Cavalier. As it was, they came very close to victory—and in all likelihood would have done so, had the nerves of the prince’s senior lieutenants not failed at the last.

From 1642 until 1746 the cause comprised a collection of men who, for the most part, were the most extraordinary of their respective generations. But here again, one could be excused for thinking that all of this history is interesting; but what possible interest could it have for those living outside that time and place?

Working backward, the very name “Cavalier” is an English corruption of the French Chevalier, which means knight. In truth, the Cavaliers and Jacobites were the last organic expression in the British Isles and Atlantic America of that chivalry that found its birth in the newly Christian Roman Empire with Aetius—“the Last of the Romans”—beating back Attila the Hun at Chalons. Rising among the converted Germanic tribes, it had an early blossoming with Clovis, Charles Martel, and Charlemagne. It was found with the soldiers of the East, fighting Lombards, Persians, and Saracens each in their turn.

Too often turned against other Christians, this Catholic and martial spirit was perfected with the Crusades. Liberating the Holy Land led to the birth of the great religious orders of chivalry, who in turn inspired the monarchs of Europe to start their own royal orders. They, too, looked backward for their roots and saw them in the Nine Worthies: three Pagans—Hector, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar; three Jews—Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabeus; and the Christians—Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon. Even as civil wars wasted the chivalry of Western and Central Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, a great many kept up the fight against the real foe to the East. Chaucer describes one such idea in the Prologue to his tales:

A KNIGHT there was, and that (one was) a worthy man,
Who from the time that he first began
To ride out, he loved chivalry,
Fidelity and good reputation, generosity and courtesy.
He was very worthy in his lord’s war,
And for that he had ridden, no man farther,
As well in Christendom as in heathen lands,
And (was) ever honored for his worthiness;

Even as those years saw the Muslim menace engulf the Balkans and even Constantinople, knights there were who still fought it—a good example of these was Bl. Constantine XI, last Eastern Roman Emperor, who died fighting at the head of his troops as the Turks broke into the city. The same spirit carried the Crusades onward. Well did Chesterton describe Muhammad’s comment on Don Juan of Austria in is poem “Lepanto”:

We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.

Thankfully, Don Juan won the battle with his gallant men.

But in the meantime—and although the Turkish menace would not subside until Prince Eugene of Savoy pushed them back over the Danube at the end of the 17th century, a new threat to Christendom arose: the Protestant Revolt. In those countries whose kings or princes overthrew the True Church and created new ones of their own, resistance arose, animated by the same spirit that had led their fathers to follow “the loyal gentlemen, and chiefs of ancient names” against the foes. Because of language, we remember—barely—the Pilgrimage of Grace, the Prayer Book Rebellion, and the Rising in the North in England; we do not know that the same thing occurred in every country where the new religion was forcibly implanted.  They only ended after the exhaustion of the Wars of Religion in France and the Thirty Years’ War in Central Europe. But the local versions of these struggles in the Three Kingdoms led directly to the advent of the Cavaliers.

But even with that glorious past, why should we care about something that ended on Culloden Field in 1746? The answer is that it did not. The Whig victory in the Three Kingdoms was a presage—and in some ways a catalyst—for the Age of Revolution. Starting in our country in 1775 and breaking out with particular force in Europe in 1789, the massive assault on Altar and Throne aroused as glorious a resistance as could be found in anything we have looked at so far. In the Vendee and Brittany to start with, and following in the Low Countries, Italy, and Tyrol, many other places saw the same phenomenon that the Three Kingdoms had.

Of course, even after peace came to Europe in 1815, the war against what was left of Christendom continued in the Mother Continent and Latin America. The Legitimists, Carlists, Miguelists, Papal Zouaves, Cristeros—the list seems endless. But reading their accounts and poetry and listening to their music and ballads, one hears the same spirit that the Cavaliers exhibited and which sustained them in defeat and victory alike.

But on a more peaceful note, there was a cultural resistance to the Revolution as well: the Romantic Revolt. From this came the Medieval and Neo-Gothic revivals and a fascination, once more, with chivalry. This, in turn, gave rise in France and the Anglosphere—thanks to authors like Leon Gautier and Kenelm Digby—to a desire to live out chivalry in real life. This was exemplified in the 19th-century gentleman, whom Mark Girouard has described thusly:

By the end of the nineteenth century a gentleman had to be chivalrous, brave, straightforward and honourable, loyal to his monarch, country, and friends, unfailingly true to his word, ready to take issue with anyone he saw ill-treating a woman, a child, or an animal. He was a natural leader of men, and others unhesitatingly followed his lead. He was invariably gentle to the weak; above all he was always tender, respectful and courteous to women.

This type of man is commonly thought to have died out in the trenches in 1914; certainly Bl. Karl of Austria was the acme of the type. But as various conservative resistance figures showed, the gentleman was far from dead. It took the 1960s to finally accomplish that. Or did it?

Perhaps it is an ideal that is perennial. What would a modern Cavalier be like? On the one hand, he would have a deep Catholic Faith, grounded in the Creeds and anchored by the miraculous. At the same time, he would understand and accept the frailties of human nature, judging himself most severely before he worried about the peccadilloes of others. He would strive against being petty in his own life, understanding that others might not be so inclined.

He would be flexible in tactics but never in belief. He would strive to be true to his loyalties but savvy in the ways of the world. Evangelization would be on his mind, as it was with St. Paul, but he would “temper the wind to the shorn lamb.” He would know his etiquette but be as much of an outdoorsman as he could. Moreover, he would attempt to master the skills of his occupation not simply for a wage but that—be he farmer, soldier, writer, or musician—he could use those skills if ever the standard were raised and the bugle called to defend the Altar.

Certainly, one can find many examples of such a one who have fallen far short of the ideal; but from priest to peasant, what rank is there in society that has not many such. All of us laymen—and even, within their divinely appointed limits, priests and religious—should strive to make the Cavalier spirit our own. The world’s youth do not need would-be Puritans as mentors; they need men who can lead and follow in the most glorious cause—that of Christ the King.