Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

PAUL SEAWARD

royalism’ attached by Macaulay which still clings to Hyde, and Brian Wormald’s insistence that Hyde was, throughout the war, a ‘parliamentarian’, and ‘enthusiast’ for the ‘constitutional revolution of 1640-1’ encourage an assumption that Hyde was keen to find avenues for peace through negotiation. 4 David Scott more recently, however, has (correctly, I think) placed Hyde ‘among the hawks’ in the king’s camp: his hesitations about provoking military action more a matter of tactics, than strategy. 5 Identifying Hyde’s official and polemical writings might help us to pin Hyde down more closely; although even then, there is always room for doubt about whether his words reflect his own opinions, for they are almost entirely in the voice of someone else – whether the king, the earl of Pembroke or Lord Brooke. The pamphlet containing the Pembroke/Brooke exchange was published under the title Two Speeches Made in the House of Peers, on Munday the 19 of December, For, and Against Accommodation . 6 It comes in the context of the intense debates both in London and Oxford in the winter of 1642/3 as the war dragged on beyond the inconclusive battle of Edgehill. In London, those who had guided parliament into its confrontation with the king split over the autumn into war and peace parties. 7 In Oxford, a similar split emerged between those in search of an ‘accommodation’ and those demanding a ‘perfect victory’. 8 In London, the division was deepened by unrest in the city. In parliament, the unrest strengthened the peace party’s hand enough to force an agreement to approach the king for an accommodation. The evolution of a set of propositions for peace, originating in the Lords and then debated in the Commons, were the central business of both Houses over the course of December and January. The London unrest also forced the Lord Mayor and Common Council to make their own approach to the king, apparently in pursuit of peace. The London message was delivered to the king on 2nd January. The king’s written answer, given on 4th January and printed in Oxford the following day and subsequently in London, was a vigorous rejection of an overture that he judged to have been presented in

4 B.H.G. Wormald, Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion 1640-1660 (Cambridge, 1951), p.151. 5 David Scott, ‘Hyde, Edward’, in The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1640-1660 , ed. Stephen K. Roberts (9 vols., Cambridge, 2023), VI. 164. 6 London, printed for Joh. Thomson, 1642[3]: Thomason E84[35]; Wing P1125. There is another version, with a differently set title page, P1125A. 7 ‘Politics and Party in the House of Commons’, in The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1640-1660 I, 270-1. 8 David Scott, ‘Rethinking Royalist Politics 1642-9’, in ed. John Adamson, The English Civil War (Basingstoke, 2009), pp.44-5.

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