Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

In the Two Speeches Hyde imagines two contributions to the debate in the House of Lords that followed the presentation on 19th December of two petitions from London in favour of an accommodation, and which immediately preceded the completion of the Lords’ propositions and their despatch to the House of Commons. 22 In Pembroke’s speech he is made to complain that those who opposed an accommodation were using the other Members ‘to satisfie their humours or ambitions’. They would, ‘when their turns are served … despise us; and begin to laugh at us already’. The supporters of a war ‘could never have brought it to this without us, if we had not joyned with them’. Pembroke and his friends had been told that once the bishops were removed from the Lords, ‘no further attempt should be made upon the Church’; but now ‘nothing will content them, but no Bishop, no Book of Common-Prayer, and shortly it will be no Lords, no Gentlemen and no Books at all, for we have Preachers already, that can neither write nor read’. Brooke’s speech in response is designed to accentuate the brutally Machiavellian analysis of the conspirators provided by Pembroke, implying that the junto leader Lord Saye and Sele (‘a noble lord on the Viscount’s bench’) had played him for a fool – ‘if he [Saye] found he was not like to hold out to the end of the Journey, he was not to be blamed for desiring his company as far as he was willing to go; the other part would be the easier performed by those to whom the Lord hath revealed his will’. Brooke’s speech is based on the idea that he and his co conspirators were insouciant about the consequences for social hierarchies of their actions, confident that they would entrench their own power: ‘I doubt not, but when the good work in hand shall be finished, we shall be again advanced above our Brethren, according to our severall Talents, and govern them according to that rule which shall most advantage Gods cause’. Those who cherished such ‘vulgar considerations’ as ‘a sense of gratitude, of past obligations, or future hopes from His Majesty’, or ‘natural affection to their fathers and brothers, kindred, friends’, or who thought ‘that human laws can binde the conscience, and will examine the Oathes they have taken’, would fall away from him and his companions. But ‘such who religiously consider that such moral precepts are fitter for heathens then for Christians, and that we ought to lead our lives according to the Rule of Gods Word; and that the Laws of the Land (being but mans invention) must not check

22 Journal of the House of Lords , V: 498-502 (19 December 1642).

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