_ now first began to be used, meaning the people who were on
the king's side. The Royalists called the men who fought for the
Parliament _Roundheads_, because of their hair being cropped short,
not hanging in ringlets, as was the fashion of the day.

The people who fought against the king were all men who had broken
away from the English Church, and become much more "Protestant." They
were very strict in many ways, especially in keeping the "Sabbath," as
they called Sunday. They dressed very plainly, and they thought the
followers of the king, with their long hair and lace and ruffles, very
frivolous people indeed. It was the men of the Parliament side who
first gave the name _Cavalier_ to the Royalists. It was meant by them
to show contempt, and came from the Italian word _cavaliere_, which
means literally "a horseman," coming from the Late Latin word
_caballus_, "a horse."

It is a curious fact that we now use the word _cavalier_ as an
adjective to mean rude and off-hand, whereas the Cavaliers of the
seventeenth century certainly had much better manners than the
Roundheads; and at the end of that century the word was sometimes used
in the general sense of gay and frank.

Both sides in the Civil War invented a good many new words with which
to abuse the enemy. Milton, who wrote on the side of the Parliament,
made a great many; but the Royalists invented more, and perhaps more
expressive, words. At any rate they have been kept and used as quite
ordinary English words. The word _cant_, for instance, which every
one understands to mean pious or sentimental words which the person
who says them does not really mean, was first used in this way by the
Royalists to describe the sayings of the Parliament men who were much
given to preaching and the singing of psalms. Before that time the
word _cant_ had meant a certain kind of singing, and also the whining
sound beggars sometimes made.

In the eighteenth century, when Parliament was divided into two great
parties, their names were given to them in the same way. The _Tories_
were so called from the name given to some very wild, almost savage,
people who lived in the bog lands of Ireland; and the name _Whigs_ was
given by the Tories, and came from a Scotch word, _Whigamore_, the
name of some very fierce Protestants in the south of Scotland. At
first these names were just words of abuse, but they came to be the
regular names of the two parties, and people forgot all about thei