In April 1644 William Cavendish, Marquis (and afterwards Duke) of Newcastle, received from Charles I a letter in which the king, seeking to secure the continuing service of his Captain-General in the north of England, exhorted Newcastle not to be discouraged by the hostile criticism his military failures were attracting. “Remember,” he wrote, “all courage is not in fighting, constancy in a good cause being the chief… ingredient.” To prevent Newcastle's disaffection Charles appealed to the definitive value in loyalist ideology. Their constancy in adversity and steadfast allegiance despite all temptations to desert would be the self-justifying and self-defining themes of many a Royalist memoir written after the Restoration to promote the proper claims of their authors both upon royal gratitude and upon the respect of posterity.

This commitment to the unswerving obedience of subjects was articulated as wholeheartedly by female as by male chroniclers. It was precisely as the “short history… of the actions and sufferings of your most loyal subject” that the Duchess of Newcastle recommended to Charles II her Life of the Duke, and “the truth of your loyal actions and endeavors, for the service of your King and country” which, in her dedicatory epistle to her husband, she proposed “to set forth and declare to after ages” (C, p. xxxv).