The cannibal cavalier: Sir Thomas Lunsford and the fashioning of the royalist archetype

Abstract

This article re-examines the career of Sir Thomas Lunsford, one of the most notorious royalist officers of the English Civil War. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, it not only casts new light on the pre-war activities of Lunsford himself but also explores the ways in which his blood-thirsty reputation was exploited by parliamentarian polemicists on the eve of the conflict. The article argues that, following the death of the proto-royalist playwright and plotter Sir John Suckling in 1641, Lunsford inherited Suckling's mantle as the archetypal ‘cavalier’, and that it was in association with Sir Thomas's name, rather than Sir John's, that the hostile caricature of the royalist gentleman-at-arms was first introduced to the English population as a whole. The article concludes by exploring the persistent rumours of cannibalism which have swirled around Lunsford's name for the past 370 years – and by demonstrating that, while the claim that Sir Thomas possessed a taste for human flesh may well have originated in the parliamentarian camp, it was, rather surprisingly, royalist writers who subsequently did most to keep his anthropophagical reputation alive.

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