Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

always commanded them to be printed’. He rounded off the story by saying that ‘he was often wont to say, many years after, that he would be very glad he could make a collection of all those papers, which he had written occasionally at that time; which he could never do, though he got many of them’. 2 Those responsible for the Clarendon edition would have been even more glad of such a collection. There is plenty of evidence that he was at least the principal author of most of the official statements issued in the course of 1642 – though even here (as we will see) it is difficult to be precise. But identifying what else he wrote presents a much greater problem. The one attempt to provide a comprehensive list, Graham Roebuck’s bibliography of 1981, attributes to Hyde five of the royalist pamphlets that appeared in an Oxford printing in the first few months of 1643 in addition to the well-documented Pembroke/Brooke exchange. But the rationale for attributing these, and not others, to Hyde is not explained. 3 Hyde was certainly not the only royalist polemicist working in Oxford at the time, nor was he the only one to put words into the mouths of his opponents. Roebuck probably made a judgement on grounds of style and quality; but Falkland’s and the king’s tributes to Hyde’s ability at mimicry suggest that just about anything could be by Hyde; and that it would be very difficult to identify if it were, least of all on stylistic grounds. My point is not that Roebuck’s judgement is wrong. It’s just how can we tell? While identifying Hyde’s writings in 1642-3 is an editorial and bibliographical puzzle, it is also bound up with the subtleties of his political stance in the early years of the war. A significant, though secondary, figure in the original parliamentary assault on the government of Charles I, Hyde was one of the three men to whom the king turned at the very end of 1641 and the beginning of 1642 to try to manage a royal fightback in the House of Commons on the basis of commitments to rule by law. At least by the time he wrote the first version of what became the The History of the Rebellion , his close alignment with the king’s unyielding stances on the Church and royal sovereignty could be read as ultra-royalist. Yet the label of ‘constitutional

2 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The Life of Edward Hyde Earl of Clarendon (2 vols., Oxford, 1857), i. 136-7. See also i. 210 for the king’s claim that he was able to identify works by Hyde, in this case in a work of 1648. 3 Graham Roebuck, Clarendon and Cultural Continuity (New York and London, 1981). Professor Roebuck died in August 2024. Publications not included by Roebuck include Madan’s no. 1171 ( A VVhisper in the eare. Or a Discourse between the Kings Majesty and the High Court of Parliament. Concerning a Pacification, and Conditions of Peace. By a Scholler of Oxford, and a Citizen of London ); No. 1197 ( A Plea for the King ); No. 1207 ( No Parliament Without A King ); No. 1216 ( A Treatise in Justification of the King ); No. 1231 ( An Answer To a Seditious Pamphlet, Intituled Plain English ). And so on.

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