This article explores the killing of priests by supporters of Edward VI's Protestant regime during the Western Rebellion of 1549. It begins by considering what previous historians have had to say on the subject – and by noting that they have differed quite sharply about the number of priests who died. The article then moves on to re-consider the primary evidence in depth, in order to establish what a minimum figure for clerical fatalities might reasonably be said to be – and concludes that that figure may well have been a good deal higher than has been appreciated hitherto.

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.

In May 1648 a group of Cornishmen who had rebelled against Parliament in the name of Charles I met with comprehensive defeat at “the Gear,” near Helford, and were then pursued back across the Lizard peninsula to the seacoast beyond. Surrender seemed inevitable, yet a number of the fugitives refused to submit. Instead they “joyned hand-in-hand” and hurled themselves bodily into the water: “a desperate expedient on that rocky coast,” as one later writer remarked. What can have driven them to such despair? No convincing answer can be given by looking at the events of 1648 alone. The rebels' despairing plunge can be understood only if it is seen as the final act in a long-running drama, a story of repeated popular protest in West Cornwall that spanned over 150 years. It is a story that has gone largely unrecognized by previous historians, most of whom have portrayed the Cornish revolts of 1497, 1548, 1549, 1642, and 1648 as isolated events rather than as part of a continuum. Yet it is a story that deserves to be told, not only because it provides a dramatic new explanation for many of the most important rebellions of the Tudor and Stuart periods, but also because it serves as an enduring monument to a forgotten people and their struggle to preserve a separate identity for themselves in the face of overwhelming odds.

A fierce sense of distinctiveness has always characterized the inhabitants of Cornwall.

This review suggests that recent historiography on nationalism can help us to see that the English Civil War was, in part, a conflict about national identity and ethnic difference. It argues that, even before the war began, the supporters of the parliament were associated with a narrowly intolerant strain of Englishness, and that this helps to explain why the Celtic peoples of Wales and Cornwall rallied to the king. During 1642–4, parliament's close links with the Scots – together with the presence of many foreign mercenaries in the roundhead armies – prevented the identification of parliament's cause with that of England itself from becoming absolute. Following the creation of the New Model Army, however – an army from which ‘strangers’ of all sorts were deliberately excluded – relations between the Scots and parliament rapidly deteriorated, and it became possible for the parliamentarians to make an unequivocal appeal to English patriotic sentiment. The defeat of the king – and of the Welsh and Cornish troops who had done much to sustain his cause – was the result.

In July 1648 John Bond, Master of the Savoy, delivered a thanksgiving sermon to the House of Commons, in which he praised God for the series of victories that the New Model Army had recently won in many parts of England and Wales. The tangled, multi-layered conflict known to posterity as the Second Civil War was still raging, rebel forces were holding out in Colchester and the Scottish army of the Engagement was marching south, but Bond—anxious to buoy up the Army’s allies and to cast down the spirits of its enemies—did everything he could to emphasise the universality of the recent successes. “The garment of gladnesse reacheth all over…the Land,” he declaimed, “the robe [of victory] reacheth from…Northumberland in the North, to…Sussex in the South…[and] from Dover…in the East, to Pensands, the utmost part of Cornwall, in the West.” Bond’s reference to Penzance would have struck a chord with many of his listeners, for accounts of an insurgent defeat in the little Cornish town had been read out in the House some weeks before. Yet, from that day to this, the rising at Penzance—and indeed the entire “Western dimension” of the Second Civil War have been largely forgotten.