The Laughing Cavalier (novel)

The Laughing Cavalier is a historical adventure novel by Baroness Orczy, first published in 1914 by Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom and by the George H. Doran Company in the United States. It was also serialised in Adventure magazine the same year. The novel's full subtitle is The Story of the Ancestor of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

The story is set in the Dutch Republic in 1623–1624 and centres on Diogenes, a swashbuckling English mercenary whose real name is Percy Blakeney—the ancestor of Sir Percy Blakeney, the hero of Orczy's famous Scarlet Pimpernel novels set during the French Revolution. The novel incorporates Frans Hals' 1624 painting The Laughing Cavalier into its plot, with Blakeney depicted as Hals' adopted son and the subject of the famous portrait. It was the fifth published novel in the Scarlet Pimpernel series, and its sequel, The First Sir Percy (1920), continues the story of the same character.