Cavalier began as a Parliamentarian insult before royalists proudly adopted it
In June 1642, Parliament used the word Cavaliers to condemn the swaggering men around Charles I. The king's party turned the jibe into a badge of honour and answered by calling their opponents Roundheads. Today the word survives mostly as an adjective for a breezy, careless attitude.
The root is the same Latin word for horseman that gave Italian cavaliere, French chevalier and Spanish caballero. Before the war it already carried a whiff of swagger: Shakespeare's Justice Shallow, in Henry IV, Part 2, raises a toast to all the cavaleros about London. Parliament's petitions of June 1642 described royalist hangers-on as lawless men speaking nothing but division and war, and Charles himself admitted the term seemed to be in disfavour before his supporters reclaimed it.
The name was about politics and attitude, but popular memory fixed on clothes: flowing ringlets, lace collars and cuffs, bright fabrics and plumed hats, set against the cropped hair and plain dress of the strictest Parliamentarians. The contrast was never tidy. Most Parliamentarian generals wore their hair as long as royalist ones, Cromwell being an exception, and many of the best noble patrons of court painter Anthony van Dyck, whose portraits defined the Cavalier look, sided with Parliament. Frans Hals' famous Laughing Cavalier of 1624 portrays a man from Calvinist Haarlem.
Two images of the Cavalier competed. The king's chaplain Edward Simmons pictured a well-bred gentleman loyal out of conscience, a type embodied by Jacob Astley, whose short prayer before the Battle of Edgehill asked God not to forget him on a busy day, and who kept his word not to fight again. Roundhead propaganda painted instead a drinking, frivolous libertine, and some royalists, including Henry Wilmot and George Goring, fitted that picture well; Clarendon judged Goring's greatest talent to be deceit.
The label outlasted the war, sticking to the court party through the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis of 1678 to 1681, when Tory replaced it and Whig displaced Roundhead. Both new names, fittingly, also started out as insults. Prince Rupert, who commanded much of Charles I's cavalry, is often held up as the classic Cavalier.
Source: Cavalier
