But every year of warfare brought a change.  On the King’s side, the raiment grew more gorgeous amid misfortunes; on the Parliament’s, it became sadder with every success.  The Royalists took up feathers and oaths, in proportion as the Puritans laid them down; and as the tresses of the Cavaliers waved more luxuriantly, the hair of the Roundheads was more scrupulously shorn.  And the same instinctive exaggeration was constantly extending into manners and morals also.  Both sides became ostentatious; the one made the most of its dissoluteness, and the other of its decorum.  The reproachful names applied derisively to the two parties became fixed distinctions.  The word “Roundhead” was first used early in 1642, though whether it originated with Henrietta Maria or with David Hyde is disputed.  And Charles, in his speech before the battle of Edgehill, in October of the same year, mentioned the name “Cavalier” as one bestowed “in a reproachful sense,” and one “which our enemies have striven to make odious.”

And all social as well as moral prejudices gradually identified themselves with this party division.  As time passed on, all that was high-born in England gravitated more and more to the royal side, while the popular cause enlisted the Londoners, the yeomanry, and those country-gentlemen whom Mrs. Hutchinson styled the “worsted-stocking members.”  The Puritans gradually found themselves excluded from the manorial halls, and the Cavaliers (a more inconvenient privation) from the blacksmiths’ shops.  Languishing at first under aristocratic leadership, the cause of the Parliament first became strong when the Self-denying Ordinance abolished all that weakness.  Thus the very sincerity of the civil conflict drew the lines deeper; had the battles been fought by mercenaries, like the contemporary Continental wars, there would have grown up a less hearty mutual antipathy, but a far more terrible demoralization.  As it was, the character of the war was, on the whole, a humane one; few towns were sacked or destroyed, the harvests were bounteous and freely gathered, and the population increased during the whole period.  But the best civil war is fearfully injurious.  In this case, virtues and vices were found on both sides; and it was only the gradual preponderance which finally stamped on each party its own historic reputation.  The Cavaliers confessed to “the vices of men,—­love of wine and women”; but they charged upon their opponents “the vices of devils,—­hypocrisy and spiritual pride.”  Accordingly, the two verdicts have been recorded in the most delicate of all registers,—­language.  For the Cavaliers added to the English vocabulary the word plunder, and the Puritans the word cant.