Prince Rupert
Aram Bakshian Jr. asserts that the impression of the Prince as a dashing cavalry commander scarcely does justice to the whole man.
Prince Rupert was long in his grave at Westminster Abbey when Ned Ward, the ‘London Spy’, strolled through St James’s Park at the turn of the seventeenth century, but memories of the Civil War and King Charles’ foremost cavalier were still alive. In the Park, amidst a ‘knot of lofty elms’, lay Rosamond’s Pond, near the present-day site of Buckingham Gate. There, Ward recorded, ‘a parcel of worn-out cavaliers were conning over the Civil Wars, and looking back into the history of their past lives, to moderate their anxiety and infirmities of age with pleasing reflections on their youthful actions’.
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