The Last Cavalier (2007) by British author Charles Spencer â?? journalist and former correspondent for NBC News, writer, broadcaster, and British peer 9th Earl Spencer and brother of the late Princess Diana, the former Princess of Wales â?? should be congratulated for writing this magnificent and comprehensive biography of Prince Rupert of the Rhine (1619-1682), a prince who packed more adventure into a single lifetime than seemed humanly possible by the standards of any age.Prince Rupert â?? The Last Cavalier by Charles Spencer
Despite this exulted royal ancestry, Prince Rupert lived a very hard and precarious life. The prince was the nephew of Charles I of England and first cousin to Charles II, and his sister, Princess Sophia, was the mother of George I, who later established the Hanoverian line of British monarchs. During the English Civil War, Prince Rupert scored numerous victories, rescuing Newark and York, but also suffering major defeats, particularly at the decisive battles of Marston Moor (1644) and Naseby (1645). Against all odds, he fought on for what many already believed was a lost cause â?? the restoration to the throne of his uncle, the Stuart King, Charles I, who had been deposed by a rebellious English Parliament, supported by the Puritan Roundheads and the incensed Scots. Prince Rupert led the gallant cavaliers, which the Parliamentarians demonized as robbers and villains. After Charles I was beheaded, Prince Rupert continued the unequal struggle, and when defeated on land, he became a royalist pirate, attacking and harassing the Parliamentarian navy on the coasts of Africa, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. His greatest loss was not in war but in losing his best and most trusted friend, his loyal brother, Prince Maurice, who was lost in a savage storm at sea in the West Indies.
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