The Cavaliers, also known as the Royalists, were the supporters of the House of Stuart during the English Civil War of 1642-1652. The Cavaliers were led by the nobility of England, who benefited from their tax exemptions and government and clerical positions granted to them by King Charles I of England, and the Cavaliers dominated the countryside, the shires, the cathedral city of Oxford, and the less developed regions of northern and western England. The Cavaliers were later supported by the forces of Scotland and Ireland against the rival Parliamentarians of Oliver Cromwell, and they were defeated in 1652 after the end of the third civil war.
The Cavaliers were strong among the aristocracy and rural Englishmen, and they believed in the divine right of kings and conservatism. The aristocrats looked after the preservation of their privileges, while many rural Englishmen did not want their daily lives and traditions to be shattered by the radical Parliamentarians. Their strongholds were primarily in the rural, royalist-leaning regions of southern and western England, such as Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, and Herefordshire. As the Parliamentarians attempted to impose their own radical religious views upon the Scots and Irish, many Scots and Irish would ultimately side with the Cavaliers against Oliver Cromwell's forces. Following Cromwell's death in 1658, the Cavaliers rallied and restored the monarchy in 1660 in the person of Charles I's son, Charles II of England.