Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

of state) to be tried by parliament, and for five people to be removed from about the king or the prince, including Bristol himself and the marquess of Hertford. The speeches supposedly present two different royalist approaches to the question of a ‘sudden peace’ or a ‘sudden accommodation’ . 15 Bristol’s refers to the attack on the ‘delinquents’; and argues that it was not fit ‘for a king to beg peace of his subjects’, ‘for the regall authority, the immediate figure of heaven and the Deity on earth, to descend from its supreme height, and, as it were, to derive its power from a subordinate power derived from its bounty’. Spain, with which Bristol was well acquainted through his residency there in the 1620s, had avoided civil war ‘because they are truly subjects, and their Sovereign truly a Sovereign’. It concluded by implying that victory would be followed by a suppression of dissent: the royal army ‘by force can compel that which fair words cannot effect’. The earl of Dorset’s response insisted that a peace would not disadvantage royalists in their estates and would be the best way of preserving the honour of the king and the privileges of parliament. It pointed to the weakness of the royal army compared to its opponents ‘the parliament having double our number, and surely (though our enemies) persons of as much bravery, nay, and sure to be daily supplyed when any of their number failes’. A piece purporting to be a royal response to both, His Majesties Gracious Answer to the Different Opinions of the Earles of Bristol and Dorset concerning Peace and War , appeared in London on the 26th. 16 The king is made to contradict Bristol’s insistence on continuing the war, and to support a ‘sudden accommodation’ between king and parliament. He insists that ‘our royal pleasure is that… no man shall thinke he does us a service by seeking to advise us from such an accommodation’. Who was behind these productions is deeply obscure. There is no evidence of an Oxford edition of the Gracious Answer other than the statement in the colophon that it had been published there. It seems unlikely: the Bristol/Dorset speeches and the Gracious Answer are most likely to be London productions, perhaps inspired by the peace faction there, designed to insinuate the weakness of the royal cause and to encourage negotiations.

15 ‘Printed at Oxford by Leonard Lichfield, and now reprinted at London for John Hanson 1642’: Madan 1136; Thomason E83[19]; Wing B4798. Thomason’s date is 24 December. David Smith (‘“The more posed and wise advice”: the Fourth Earl of Dorset and the English Civil Wars’, The Historical Journal 34, 4 (1991), 815 n.114) is inconclusive about the authenticity of this publication. 16 ‘First printed at Oxford by Leonard Lichfield, and now reprinted at London for John Rivers (n.d.)’, dated by Thomason to 26 December: Madan 1137; Thomason E83[21]; Wing C2319.

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