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Roundhead   Listen
noun
Roundhead  n.  (Eng. Hist.) A nickname for a Puritan. See Roundheads, the, in the Dictionary of Noted Names in Fiction.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Roundhead" Quotes from Famous Books



... still detained in the yellow meeting-house; and while the stage-coach waited for them in the glaring fervour of noon, my Uncle Peter and I climbed down from our seats and took refuge on the grass, in the shadow of the roundhead maples that stood guard along the north wall of the Puritan sanctuary. The windows were open. We could see the rhythmic motion of the fan-drill in the pews. The pulpit was not visible; but from that unseen eminence a strident, persistent voice flowed steadily, expounding the ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke

... most rudely at Richard and Charles as they gallop past, hoping that Richard will hear him shout Ho! and Charles will hear him shout Ha!, and that irritating habit of his, together with Charles's treatment of the matter, was probably the origin of the terms, 'Roundhead' and 'Cavalier.'" ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton

... loyal sake This vagrant tale of mine, Where Cavalier and Roundhead break A reed for Right Divine, A tale it pleasured me to make, And ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... I," said Beryl Austen. "I tried to explore a little, but it looked so dim and dark I didn't dare to go alone, so I turned back. I thought I might meet a Cavalier or a Roundhead on the landing!" ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil

... Hastings; three ermines passant, argent, in a field azure, with its appropriate motto, SANS LACHE. 'May our name rather perish,' exclaimed Sir Everard, 'than that ancient and loyal symbol should be blended with the dishonoured insignia of a traitorous Roundhead!' ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... left behind him a larger per cent. of the stalwart and the strong. They were more eager to maintain the national honor than the zealots to rescue Jerusalem from the profanation of infidels. Not Frank or Hun, nor Huguenot or Roundhead, or mountaineer, Hungarian, or Pole, exceeded their sacrifices made when tardily accepted. And this is the race ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... been in the inside of a church for many years: but he never passes a church without pulling off his hat; this shows he has good principles." Spain and Sicily must surely contain many pious robbers and well-principled assassins. Johnson could easily see that a Roundhead who named all his children after Solomon's singers, and talked in the House of Commons about seeking the Lord, might be an unprincipled villain, whose religious mummeries only aggravated his guilt. But a man who ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Chavasse standing there, as stiff a Roundhead as ever upheld my Lord Protector and his Puritanic government in this remote corner of the county of Kent: dour in manner, harsh-featured and hollow-eyed, dressed in dark doublet and breeches wholly void of tags, ribands or buttons. His closely shorn ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy

... bread the form of a mastiff, another, that of a mole, another, that of an eagle, a pig or a winged serpent, and a few, ah, how few, received a ray of bright light with the bread and wine. "There," he pointed out, "is a Roundhead, who is going to be sheriff, and because the law calls upon a man to receive the sacrament in the Church before taking office he has come here rather than lose it, and although there are some here who rejoice on seeing him, we have felt no ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne

... state of mild hypnosis. That any human being could conceive and execute such a thing! A Roundhead, here in these prosaic times!—and mad as a hatter! Trying the role of St. Anthony, when God Himself had found only one man strong enough for that! McClintock shook his head violently, as if to dismiss this dream he was having. But the objects in his range of vision remained unchanged. Presently ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath

... 'sit still', as Clarendon said, but the business of many must have been very much upset. The various armies were compelled to obtain their supplies from the country, and with the lawless habits of the times plundered friend and foe alike, as Cavalier and Roundhead did afterwards; and many a farmer must have seen all his stock driven off and his grain seized to feed the combatants. For instance, it was said before the battle called Easter Day Field that all the tenants of Abbot's Ripton ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler

... Cavalier," said Adrian, "and that's why you wonder your aunt selected him, no doubt? He's decidedly of the Roundhead type, with the Puritan extracted, or ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... still more upon the fringe, though it was true there were splendid games, such as Cavaliers and Roundheads, which could not be played by himself. For this and kindred affairs Vassie and Phoebe were of great use, though Phoebe cried if she had to be a Roundhead too often out of her turn. Still, she was a good little thing, but when the fateful date arrived which was to see the journey to St. Renny, Ishmael had no pang at leaving her or anyone else. He was not a shy boy, and felt only intense interest at the thought ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... 15th of October, 1644, in the angry days of the Roundhead Revolt, his early years were spent in an intensely religious atmosphere that saturated his soul, but at the same time bred detestation of bigotry and persecution. If he seemed to be performing out of his class ...
— The Tryal of William Penn and William Mead • various

... would be proud to bear the name of Villiers and to be acknowledged as the rightful heir to the estates and title of Viscount Purbeck. As time went on, however, he became ashamed of those privileges.[104] The son of a Cavalier, he became a Roundhead, and three years after the death of his mother he married one of the daughters and co-heiresses of his relative, Sir John Danvers, subsequently one of the judges who condemned King ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville

... the finger and nose ends of sacred statues, nor in condemning as wicked the eating of mince pies, nor in having their hair cropped so that no man can get hold of it, like the ancient members of the Roundhead family; but in spiritual matters they have a distinct regard for the plain, unceremonious tenets of ancient Puritanism—for the simplicity, definitiveness, and absolutism of Calvinism. Some persons fond of spiritual christenings and mystic gossip have supposed that the Presbyterians who, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus

... politics during this half-century. The roistering Cavalier of the first Charles, with his flowing locks and plumed hat, with his maypoles and morrice dances, with his stage plays and bear-baitings, with his carousals and gallantries, had given way to the Puritan Roundhead. It was a serious, sober-minded England in which the youth Dryden found himself. If the Puritan differed from the Cavalier in political principles, they were even more diametrically opposed in mode of life. An Act of ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden

... wielded it with commanding ability and unflinching energy. The Free-soil sentiment which so largely pervaded the ranks of the Northern Democracy had no representative in the cabinet, and a man of pronounced anti-slavery views was as severely proscribed in Washington as a Roundhead was in London after ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... little better than a homily on the sins of dancing, feasting, dressing, and the like, garnished with scriptural allusions, and conveyed in a tone of sour rebuke, that would have done credit to the most canting Roundhead in Oliver Cromwell's court. The queen, far from taking exception at it, vindicates herself from the grave imputations with a degree of earnestness and simplicity, which may provoke a smile in the reader. "I am aware," she concludes, "that custom cannot make an action, ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott

... stood in strong contrast to New England. In both the population was English; but the one was Puritan with Roundhead traditions, and the other, so far as concerned its governing class, Anglican with Cavalier traditions. In the one, every man, woman, and child could read and write; in the other, Sir William Berkeley once thanked God that there were no free schools, and no prospect of any for a century. The ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... to be marched, without a moment's delay, to Amherstburg. At noon the detachment had arrived, and, the General making his appearance soon after, the expedition, composed of the strength of the two garrisons, with a few light guns, and a considerable body of Indians, under the Chief Roundhead, were pushed rapidly across the lake, and the same night occupied the only road by which ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson

... they came from widely separated parts of the kingdom and were even more effectually divided by the walls of caste. There is no positive proof that Mathew Grant (whose people probably came from Scotland) was a Roundhead, but he was a man of humble origin who would naturally have favored the Parliamentary or popular party, while Richard Lee, whose ancestors had fought at Hastings and in the Crusades, is known to have been an ardent Cavalier, devoted to the King. But whether their opinions on politics differed or ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill

... foot-boy, in a plush jerkin, plodding behind her—the reigning toast among 'the men of wit about town,' and the leading groaner in a tabernacle concert—glided alternately into the study of the trusty wizard, and poured into his attentive ear strange tales of love, or trade, or treason. The Roundhead stalked in at one door, whilst the Cavalier was ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly

... quarrels, and so had been estranged from the chief of his house; and my Lord Castlewood was at first so much enraged to think that his title (albeit little more than an empty one now) should pass to a rascally Roundhead, that he would have married again, and indeed proposed to do so to a vintner's daughter at Bruges, to whom his lordship owed a score for lodging when the king was there, but for fear of the laughter of the Court, and the anger of his daughter, of whom he stood in awe; for she was in temper ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... pays Colonel Maunsel a domiciliary visit, and an old Royalist retainer tells the redoubtable Roundhead that he looks more like a roystering Cavalier than a Puritan, to ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... Swallow, contemptuously, throwing a withering glance in the direction of his comrade. "Thou ignoramamus! Old Rowley wants naught but brave men and sober men like me to guard the law. Thou art a drunken Roundhead. One of Old Noll's vile ruffians. I can tell it by the wart on ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.

... no more a Puritan than I am, though he has learned their talk, and none at all to Captain MacKay, whom I salute, and of whose good services when he was fighting on the other side we have all heard. Nor can I, indeed, believe that he is a Roundhead, for I was always given to understand that Highland gentlemen were ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren

... must honestly compliment Mr. IRVING and Miss MIRIAM LEWES on their performance. It is true that I should never have mistaken Mr. IRVING for a fighting Roundhead, and he might well have sacrificed something of his personality for the sake of illusion. It is true, too, that he was more concerned about dramatic than poetic effects; yet, within the limitations of a very marked individuality, he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various

... during the great Civil War, when King Charles I. and his Parliament resorted to the arbitrament of the sword to decide who should have the mastery. The hero is a Roundhead, and the heroine is a charming young person, whose hand a hard-hearted guardian seeks to dispose of in a manner to which her heart consents not. The author is not carried into any excess of partisanship, though his sympathies are obvious, and we can confidently ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various

... the Roundhead soldiers smoked in circumstances that did them no credit. In the account of the trial of Charles I, written by Dr. George Bates, principal physician to his Majesty, and to Charles II also, we read that when the sentence of the Court presided over ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson

... Committee, or the Faithful Irishman, was written by Sir Robert Howard soon after the Restoration, with for its heroes two Cavalier colonels, whose estates are sequestered, and their man Teg (Teague), an honest blundering Irishman. The Cavaliers defy the Roundhead Committee, and the day may come says one of them, when those that suffer for their consciences and honour may be rewarded. Nobody who heard this from the stage in the days of Charles II. could feel that the day had come. Its comic Irishman kept the Committee on ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... Mary, and then again regranted to the Hoby family about 1559. The manor had passed, however, by 1638 to Richard Major, a miser and a tyrant, who "usurped authority over his tentant" and more especially, for he was a fanatic Roundhead, "when King Charles was put to death and Oliver Cromwell was Protector of England and Richard Major of his Privy Council, and Noll's eldest son, Richard, was married to Mr Major's Doll." Thus Merdon came into the Cromwell family, another piece of Church ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton

... considerable progress had been made before the seventeenth century towards the constitutional doctrine that the vote of the majority binds the whole community. But the process was incomplete, and the causes of strife between Roundhead and Royalist were fundamental. A victory of the Royalists would have been carried to extremes, as the victory of the Roundheads was; and the result would almost certainly have been despotic government until a still more violent outbreak precipitated the country ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... suggested by Mr. Stigma was very decided, Messrs. Roundhead, Roundhead and Lollard were not sorry to have three strings to their bow. The Detectoral Association were good clients; most of their funds went into their lawyers' pockets. It was part of their policy to be litigious. ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins

... the stone which marks the grave of Cromwell's charming daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, whose untimely death broke her father's heart. The body was left undisturbed, probably out of respect for the memory of a woman who had been a favourite with Royalist and Roundhead alike. In the reign of Queen Anne a great General, the Duke of Marlborough, was temporarily buried in the Cromwell vault, but after many years the body was removed to his own mausoleum at Blenheim. Amongst the many soldiers' memorials in the ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith

... Words added, I dare not write)—but be quiet, Moll, be at Peace, my Child, for he shall not have you back for awhile, even though he come to fetch you himself. The maddest Thing I ever did was to give you to this Roundhead. He and Roger Agnew talked me over with soe many fine Words.—What possessed me, I know not. Your Mother always said evil woulde come of it. But as long as thy Father has a Roof over his Head, ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning

... necessity of this one man became that of the whole human race for the moment. There were no walls so sacred but must go to the ground when he wanted elbow-room; and he wanted a great deal. Did Mary Powell, the cavalier's daughter, find the abode of a roundhead schoolmaster incompatible and leave it, forthwith the cry of the universe was for an easier dissolution of the marriage covenant. If he is blind, it is with excess of light, it is a divine partiality, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... It's my nose. It always was a one to bleed. Whenever that brother o' mine, who went to grief and soldiering, used to make me smell his fist, my nose always bled, and his fist was quite as hard as that hard-riding R'y'list chap's. Called me a Roundhead dog, too, he did, as he hit me. If I'd caught him, I'd ha' rounded his head ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn

... a word first," interrupted one of the long-tailed Radishes in the same bed; "for it is of no use to go out of one extreme into another, which you are on the high road to do if you are disposed to take Mr. Roundhead's advice; who, by the way, ought to be ashamed of forcing his very peculiar views upon his neighbours. Just look at us. We always strike moderately down, so we know it's the right thing to do, and that ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... faults he had doubtless committed, nothing could be more just or constitutional than that for those faults his advisers and tools should be called to a severe reckoning; nor did any of those advisers and tools more richly deserve punishment than the Roundhead sectaries whose adulation had encouraged him to persist in the fatal exercise of the dispensing power. It was a fundamental law of the land that the King could do no wrong, and that, if wrong were done by his authority, his counsellors and agents were responsible. That great rule, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... by birth and parentage, and of mixed race; but the dominant strain in their blood was that of the Presbyterian Irish—the Scotch-Irish as they were often called. Full credit has been awarded the Roundhead and the Cavalier for their leadership in our history; nor have we been altogether blind to the deeds of the Hollander and the Huguenot; but it is doubtful if we have wholly realized the importance of the part played by that stern and virile people, the Irish ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt

... that time, only a child, but he still remembered how the Roundhead soldiers had lorded it there, when his father was away fighting with the army of the king; how they had seated themselves at the board, and had ordered his mother about as if she had been a scullion, jeering her with cruel words as to what would have been the fate of her husband, if they ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty

... trouble my readers with politics; my object is to narrate the scenes I witnessed, or the events in which I took a part. I was too young, indeed, at that time to think much about the matter, but yet I was as enthusiastic a Roundhead as any of my fellow-townsmen. As we approached the little harbour we passed through a large fleet of traders, brought up in the roadstead for shelter, most of which, belonging to London merchants, dared not therefore put into any ...
— The Boy who sailed with Blake • W.H.G. Kingston

... rather say gentleman—for he had the appearance of one, notwithstanding the somber and peculiar dress he wore, continued to read a letter which he had just opened; and Edward, who feared himself the prisoner of a Roundhead, when he only expected to meet a keeper, was further irritated by the neglect shown toward him by the party. Forgetting that he was, by his own assertion, not Edward Beverley, but the relative of one Jacob Armitage, he colored up with anger as he stood at the door. Fortunately the time that ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat

... Pondicherry and Chandernagore. But what do you say, cousin? Are you man enough to join us? You have the right stuff in you, I warrant—all the Fords have. Our great-grandfather fought at Naseby, and though he was a scurvy Roundhead, I'll swear he gave ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward

... Charles abode Till all the paths were dim, And far below the Roundhead rode, And hummed a ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... warn my little lady of his sweet speecheries. Yet was I tender towards him for the sake o' by-gone days. Mayhap, moreover, his comely face had something to do with it, for, i' fecks, ne'er saw I a goodlier countenance on Roundhead or Cavalier. ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives



Words linked to "Roundhead" :   individual, protagonist, champion, friend, booster, somebody, someone, admirer, mortal, person, soul, supporter



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