Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

PAUL SEAWARD

Gods children in doing the work of their heavenlie Father, will not faint in their dutie’. ‘Let us not out of any worldlie respects of Estate, Wives, Children, Honour, good Nature, Justice, Compassion, care of Trade, of Laws, grow slack and lazie in our undertakings, upon which the success of which the eyes of Christendom are fixt; but let us proceed to shed the blood of the ungodlie’. The king’s pleasure in reading the Two Speeches no doubt came from their parody of Pembroke’s country bumpkin style. But it is also notable for its brutal exposure of what Hyde would have seen as the underlying logic of the war party’s position, reducing it to a naked grab for sectarian power, a polemical technique which Hyde had already deployed to great effect in some of his declarations on behalf of the king, most notably that of 26 May 1642. 23 As with that, so the Two Speeches was designed to tease away at the consciences of parliamentary fellow-travellers by underlining the real purposes of their allies, heightening their unease at the immediate consequences and ultimate destination of the journey on which they had embarked, delicately filletting out the more queasy grandees from the real ideologues of the junto. Perhaps identifying that aim in more of the royalist polemic of the early 1640s could be part of a set of strategies that will help us to track down more of Hyde’s writings: though Falkland’s warning that Hyde could be found writing contrary to his real beliefs (as here) might give us pause; and searching for Hyde’s other works on the basis of the similarity of their argument with those we know risks trapping us into circularity and confirmation bias. And the lesson of the Two Speeches more broadly, as well as of the politics that surrounds it, is also the opacity of so much of the polemical writing of the 1640s in general. Furthermore, despite his very clear ideological personality, the anonymity or corporate status of so much of Hyde’s work will mean that collecting those occasional pieces of polemic will be peculiarly challenging for its editors. Hyde was never a shy or retiring author so there is a certain irony, as well as frustration, in the fact that so much of his writing is veiled behind the obscurity of anon-, or pseudonymity.

23 The History of the Rebellion , v. 250-79 and 280-317, especially para. 315.

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