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Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides in the English Civil Wars

Book reviewed by John Morrill, Professor of History, University of Cambridge in BBC History Magazine, 14:4 (April, 2013), p. 65: "By combining high-level storytelling with a thoroughness and shrewdness of judgment, it is a work that is more than the sum of its parts... The analysis of the officer corps shows more clearly than I had realised that a preponderance of desertion was by veterans of the continental wars... These chapters are driven by some fine and nuanced writing... This is a book of deep learning and bright writing, a significant addition to the literature on the evergreen as well as blood-stained civil war."

Book reviewed by R.C. Richardson, Emeritus professor of History, University of Winchester in Times Higher Education Supplement, 31 January 2013: “A painstaking exploration of social, cultural, political, chronological and regional patterns and attitudes in and to a phenomenon conditioned by the changing tides of war, opportunism and the pressing weight of external pressures. Far more common than has often been assumed, Civil War side-changing formed a prelude to the larger-scale adjustments dictated by the Restoration of 1660.”

This 115,000-word book (268 pages) is the outcome of 6 years’ research in 15 archives, including 2 in the USA, collating a highly varied source base spanning the entire seventeenth century. It represents 75% of Hopper's research time in this REF period. The analysis covers over a thousand letters, diaries, official records, printed tracts and literary sources, many used for the first time, supporting analysis of the causes, consequences, fashioning and memory of side-changing. From this lengthy data collection arises the first monograph devoted to side-changing during the English civil wars that substantially advances the historiography of allegiance.