At the end of January 1645 – just three weeks after King Charles I’s favourite prelate, Archbishop Laud, had been executed for high treason – commissioners representing monarch and Parliament met in Uxbridge, hoping to bring an end to the civil war. For more than two years the fortunes of war had inclined first to one side and then to the other, but the agony remained constant, disrupting lives indiscriminately. As one of the commissioners asked, “Whose goods, I pray, are plundered? Whose houses burnt? Whose blood stains the walls of our towns and defiles our land? Is it not all English?”
The speaker was the Parliamentarian Bulstrode Whitelocke. Also present in Uxbridge as one of the royalist delegates was his old friend Edward Hyde (the future Earl of Clarendon). Back in 1628 Whitelocke and Hyde had been fellow law-students in the Middle Temple, playing at mock-oratory together and writing each other letters that, at the end of his life, Bulstrode would copy out for his children so that they might know the “kindness that was between this gentleman and me”. By 1645 their political allegiances had divided them, but their immediate aims were alike. Hyde to King Charles I: “He desired the King to consider his ill condition… how unlike it was to be improved by the continuance of the war.” Whitelocke to his fellow-commissioners: “Let us consent to anything that is just, reasonable, and honourable, rather than in the least neglect to seek peace” (his emphasis).
The treaty of Uxbridge failed, but Whitelocke and Hyde both survived the war, and became its historians. They are the pair whose divergent but proximate paths this book follows. Minoo Dinshaw tells us that he initially planned to write “a general overview of moderate politics in the seventeenth century”. This “insanity-inducing” project became manageable when Dinshaw hit on the idea of structuring his study around the relationship between the two friends. In doing so he gave himself a story. He also made narrative sense of the fact that a large part of his text consists of comparative exegeses of their books – Hyde’s The History of the Rebellion and his autobiography; Whitelocke’s diary, his Memorials and Annals.
It is commonplace to observe that the English Civil Wars divided friends and families – fathers and sons opposing each other in battle, brother fighting against brother, daughter spying on parents, ideological conviction trumping affection and personal loyalty. Dinshaw’s more nuanced perception is that in many cases these divisions were not the result of passionately held convictions. Rather the pain was exacerbated by the fact that those who worked and fought for the opposed parties might be kindred spirits still, their political choices contingent and half-hearted, their shared values unchanged.
After the period covered by this book (it ends in Uxbridge) Whitelocke’s and Hyde’s careers were each other’s negative images. While Hyde was in exile in the 1650s, Whitelocke was Cromwell’s trusted adviser: when Hyde returned as Charles II’s right-hand man and Lord Chancellor, Whitelocke was forced into retirement. But still they thought alike. They both worked within their respective parties to temper extremism – Whitelocke steadily countering the Parliamentary “Violent Party” and Hyde restraining Prince Rupert’s equally “violent” influence over Charles I. They were both lawyers who strove for legitimacy. For both, military action might be tragic, but was always deplorable: for both, what mattered were the sober ideals of social order and just government.
Neither man was born great. Dinshaw writes that in Uxbridge Hyde might be the royalist delegation’s “most influential creator of policy and most articulate mouthpiece” but, not being from one of the old aristocratic families, his perceived status was inferior. Whitelocke, likewise, was “of the inmost councils of the Parliamentarian peace party” but so little prized by his fellows that, while the Parliamentarian Earls of Pembroke and Northumberland were grandly accommodated, he was obliged to sleep on a borrowed “field-bed” in a shared room. But written words outlive the pomp of a noble title. As authors, Whitelocke and – to a greater extent – Hyde have had an enduring influence, while those grandees who took precedence over them when it came to getting the best room at the inn, have been all but forgotten.
Both habitually wrote of themselves in the third person. The practice was conventional, and designed to make their accounts sound more objective and authoritative. Dinshaw cleverly demonstrates that it also reflects a truth – that the people who wrote their retrospective accounts were not exactly identical with the younger versions of themselves who had lived the experiences described.
Young Bulstrode Whitelocke, angry at the looting of his home by royalist troops, fearful for his children, picking his way through the minefield of war-time politics to take his part in Cromwell’s government, is not the same man as the disappointed and defeated author looking back and often, as Dinshaw astutely points out, exaggerating his own part in England’s short-lived commonwealth.
In Hyde’s case the personae even have different names. Ned Hyde, affable friend to wastrel poets, frequenter of an exuberantly free-thinking group who gathered at the home of his cultured friend, the future Lord Falkland, is not quite identical with Edward Hyde, MP, member of the King’s war-time Privy council and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Sir Edward Hyde who began writing The History of the Rebellion in exile and defeat after 1646, is yet another person. So, even more emphatically, is the Earl of Clarendon, Charles II’s Lord Chancellor after the Restoration. And that powerful statesman was in turn a man with a different perspective from that of the Clarendon who – falling from power – went into exile again, finishing his History as one who had lived through the aftermath of the “rebellion” to a bitter end.
The two men at the heart of this book, then, played significant parts in the most turbulent and consequential drama in British history. And yet Dinshaw’s book is far from being the kind of drum-and-trumpet saga that you might expect. Public history’s famous turning points – the execution of the Earl of Strafford, the Grand Remonstrance, Charles I’s failed attempt to arrest five rebel MPs, the battles that ensued – are dealt with summarily. Dinshaw’s attention is directed elsewhere. To him the civil wars – noisy, bloody and wasteful – were “an excrescence” on the social and cultural world he likes to contemplate and describe.
He begins his story in media res, in approved classical fashion, but he doesn’t care about gripping the reader. Hyde has left London. His route is deliberately meandering (he knows he will be watched and followed). Dinshaw meanders after him. Hyde passes the home of Speaker William Lenthall: Dinshaw tells us a bit about him. Lenthall bought the estate from Lord Falkland: Dinshaw tells us about the men who sponsored Falkland’s debut in Parliament. And on it goes – this, that, the other thing, emerging in a welter of reminiscences about elopements and property deals, accounts of Parliamentary clashes and character-sketches of the orators involved in them, with visits to Hyde’s friends and a snatch of song, all interspersed with Dinshaw’s leisurely genealogical musings. Here is a typical sentence: “Ayliffe may not have been identical with Hyde’s brother-in-law of the same name, but he was surely in some way related to the first Mrs Hyde, and therefore also to Lady Lee.” It is only after 17 pages of this sort of thing that Dinshaw reveals that Hyde has persuaded the Lord Keeper to flee London, sending the Great Seal on ahead by swift messenger, that Hyde himself has therefore been accused of high treason, and that he is going to throw in his fate with that of the King, who has already left the capital for York.
That lack of urgency is typical of Dinshaw’s manner. As a writer he is not a modern sprinter, pushing his story towards its end-point, more of an Augustan rambler. His elaborate syntax is baroque. His vocabulary is gorgeously arcane. In his selection of material he has less in common with Clarendon, than with another of his most-used sources, John Aubrey. Like Aubrey, he loves to digress. A minor character steps into his path, and he pauses to trace said character’s antecedents and relations.
A zest for gossip; antiquarianism; a delight in networks and family trees and piquant coincidences; a penchant for trains of thought which, rather than travelling compulsively forward like a railway train, stray about like a mule-train of hungry animals released into a field full of clover: these are unusual attributes for a chronicler of great public events. They make Dinshaw an informative and engaging historian, and an extremely idiosyncratic one.
His title is taken from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel”. After his poetic gift deserted him Coleridge continued to impress his friends with his conversation. Preserved by those who were lucky enough to hear it, Coleridge’s “table talk” is circuitous and fragmented, sometimes baffling, but full of fine linguistic flourishes and enriched by the contents of an exceptionally well-furnished mind. No wonder Dinshaw felt an affinity with him.
Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War
Minoo Dinshaw
Allen Lane, 544pp, £30
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[See also: The Pierre Bonnard renaissance]
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This article appears in the 22 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Messiah Complex