Dying with Honour: Literary Propaganda and the Second English Civil War

This article discusses contemporary responses to the executions under martial law of Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle in 1648, following General Thomas Fairfax's siege of Colchester. It compares the royalist propaganda, which established these two royalist partisans as martyred heroes, to the Parliamentary and Army propaganda, which lamented the assassination of the well-known New Model Army colonel Thomas Rainsborough two months later. Analysing newsbooks, accounts by participants and observers, and literary responses (especially the elegy), it finds that popular writers used these deaths to impugn the honour of their opponents, and consequently to argue against reconciliation or compromise.