The Devotional Landscape of the Royalist Exile, 1649–1660

Abstract

AbstractThis study aims both to build upon and to challenge recent historiographical interest in the cultural origins and religious associations of royalism in the midseventeenth century by examining the devotional character of the exiled royalist community of the 1650s. Focusing primarily upon those royalists closely affiliated with the court of Charles II, it assesses the impact of disillusionment, dislocation, penury, and forced mobility upon the subsequent framings and reframings of religious identities. It considers the multiple venues in which these articulations appeared and were negotiated—through personal correspondence, print, diplomacy, rumor, and conversion—in order to illuminate the challenges posed to the maintenance of clear confessional boundaries and community ideals. In doing so, this article argues for the incorporation of a much broader sense of the impact of the “English Revolution” that considers the full geographical, chronological, and cultural scope of these upheavals across Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe.