In the devastating armed conflicts of the English civil wars, Cavaliers and Roundheads routinely justified their cause and denounced their rivals through competing conceptions and languages of gender and masculinity. Royalists condemned parliamentary soldiers as cuckolds, their rebellious posture to the King’s government mirrored by households in disorder. As one Cavalier summarised, Roundheads and their families rebel against all ten commandments, the laws of nature and society: ‘Incests, Adulteries, Rapes, deflowrings, Fornications and other venereal postures & actions … daily passe and escape uncontrolled & unpunish’d, and, as it may be conjectur’d tolerated’.