Some Puritans (but by no means all of them) wore their hair closely cropped round the head or flat. This created an obvious contrast between them and the men of
courtly fashion, who wore
long ringlets. During the war and for a time afterwards,
Roundhead was a term of derision, and in the
New Model Army it was a punishable offence to call a fellow soldier a Roundhead. This contrasted with
Cavalier, a word used to describe supporters of the Royalist cause, but which also started out as a pejorative term. The first proponents used it to compare members of the Royalist party with Spanish
Caballeros who had abused Dutch Protestants during the reign of
Elizabeth I. However, unlike Roundhead, Cavalier was later embraced by those who were the target of the epithet and used by them to describe themselves. "—
William Frederick Yeames (1878) "Roundheads" appears to have been first used as a term of derision toward the end of 1641, when the debates in Parliament in the
Clergy Act 1640 were causing riots at
Westminster. The
Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition quotes a contemporary authority's description of the crowd that gathered there: "They had the hair of their heads very few of them longer than their ears, whereupon it came to pass that those who usually with their cries attended at Westminster were by a nickname called
Roundheads". The demonstrators included London apprentices, for whom Roundhead was a term of derision, because the regulations which they had agreed to included a provision for closely cropped hair. According to
John Rushworth, the word was first used on 27 December 1641 by a disbanded officer named David Hide. During a riot, Hide is reported to have drawn his sword and said he would "cut the throat of those round-headed dogs that bawled against bishops"; however,
Richard Baxter ascribes the origin of the term to a remark made by Queen
Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I, at the trial of
Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, earlier that year. Referring to
John Pym, she asked who the roundheaded man was. The principal advisor to
Charles II,
Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, remarked on the matter, "and from those contestations the two terms of
Roundhead and
Cavalier grew to be received in discourse, ... they who were looked upon as servants to the king being then called
Cavaliers, and the other of the rabble contemned and despised under the name of
Roundheads." After the Anglican Archbishop
William Laud made a statute in 1636 instructing all clergy to wear short hair, many Puritans rebelled to show their contempt for his authority and began to grow their hair even longer (as can be seen on
their portraits) though they continued to be known as Roundheads. The longer hair was more common among the "Independent" and "high-ranking" Puritans, which included Cromwell, especially toward the end of the Protectorate, while the "Presbyterian" faction, and the military rank and file, continued to reject long hair. By the end of that period, some Independent Puritans were again derisively using the term Roundhead to refer to the Presbyterian Puritans.
Roundhead remained in use to describe those with republican tendencies until the
Exclusion Crisis of 1678–1681, when the term was superseded by "
Whig", initially another term with pejorative connotations. Likewise, during the Exclusion Bill crisis, the term
Cavalier was replaced with "
Tory", an Irish term introduced by their opponents that was also initially a pejorative term. ==Notes==