Royalist vs. Parliamentarian Views of Governing Power and Persuasive Rhetoric

        Royalists assume an elite caste of aristocrats will govern based on power transferred to them by inheritance.  Control of the prince is control of the government.  The Royalist aesthetic endures longest in the American South, where its Cavalier aesthetic and belief in government by aristocratic inheritance seems to validate the slave-based estates in their rebellion against the mercantile North.

        Parliamentarians assume a collective of equals have pooled their assets in a common cause, based on power transferred to them by elections.  Control of the assets by which state power is enforced, i.e., a city's stock of gunpowder which Hutchinson's husband protects elsewhere in the narrative, and control of popular opinion by which those assets are wielded, are control of the government. The Queen's control of the king, and the Bishops' control of the Queen, threatens to subvert all of the election-based power held by Parliament.  The Parliamentarian aesthetic, especially their belief in the "Grand Old Cause" long after the Restoration brought the Court back, lent justification to the American Northern colonists, who used the many of the same justifications used earlier to overthrow Charles I to validate their rebellion against George III a century later.

        To see these assumptions in action, look at the values presumed to be effective by speakers in Halkett's and Hutchinson's narratives.  The spoken portions of the memoirs often are the least important, a kind of very late Renaissance nod to "sprezzatura" in which things that are most important are almost unspeakable.  Often, though, they can be inferred from how speakers reason.  Notice how each narrative explicitly and implicitly claims that God favors their side, and in what ways (especially in Halkett) that favor is detected.