Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War by Minoo Dinshaw
In our impatient quest to understand, with the minimum of trouble, the world and its disputes, we find it convenient to divide people into two camps, and to support the side which is in the right, while making sure we never invite the other lot to dinner.
When interpreting British politics, the division of the leading figures into Cavaliers and Roundheads offers a pleasant sense that everything has been settled, and we know where our allegiances lie.
Minoo Dinshaw shows, in this delightful book, how much is lost when we surrender to that dichotomy. He traces the friendship between Bulstrode Whitelocke (wonderful name) and Edward Hyde, two gifted young lawyers who in the 1620s became friends at the Inns of Court.
In 1634 they put on The Masque of Peace for the amusement of King Charles and his Queen, Henrietta Maria, and in the early 1640s they distinguished themselves in the House of Commons.
As dissensions grew between King and Parliament the two men were usually on the same side, and they remained friends even when, from 1642, they served on opposite sides in the Civil War.
Dinshaw brings before us a gallery of brilliant characters. King Charles “presented against the world a diminutive, fragile stalactite of faultless taste.”
The aesthetic aspect of kingship, and of politics generally, so liable to be ignored by ideological writers, here receives its due. Charles I is “a natural, hierarchical aesthete”, and so is William Laud, the man he made Archbishop of Canterbury: “At heart Laud was a bibliophile, politician, and aesthete rather than a theologian.”
We are introduced to Lord Falkland and the gifted circle he assembled in the 1630s at Great Tew, outside Oxford. In March 1641 Parliament proceeded against Strafford, the King’s much hated minister, by Act of Attainder, an ancient method of judicial murder.
Falkland, a man of small stature, rose and seized the House’s attention with a seemingly frivolous inquiry: “how many hairs’ breadths make a tall man?” He went on:
“How many makes a little man no man can well say, yet we know a tall man when we see him from a low man; so ’tis in this, how many illegal acts make a treason is not well known, but we well know it when we see it.”
Falkland advocated Strafford’s execution, and Whitelocke and Hyde joined him in voting for it. Lord Digby was one of only 59 MPs who dared vote against it, telling the House that the attainder is “but murder with the sword of justice”.
There was a widespread assumption that Charles I, who had promised to defend his faithful servant Strafford, would not abandon him by signing the Act of Attainder. Dinshaw relates that Bishop Williams, “supplest of clerical politicians”, talked the King round, persuading him that that this was the only way to protect himself, and in particular his Catholic consort, from the people’s wrath.
Strafford, speaking from the scaffold on 12 May 1641, invited the crowd to “consider seriously whether the beginnings of the people’s happiness should be written in letters of blood”.
Two years later Falkland died a hero’s death fighting for the King at Newbury. The fact that he spoke for the death of Strafford, and moderate figures like Whitelocke and Hyde voted for it, does not excuse the King’s betrayal, but does make it more explicable.
Hyde, who became a close councillor to both Charles I and Charles II and from 1660 Earl of Clarendon, observed in his great History of the Rebellion that in the autumn of 1641, when MPs were informed of the uprising in Ireland, directed against Protestant settlers,
“There was a deep silence in the House, and a kind of consternation, most men’s heads having been intoxicated…with imaginations of plots and treasonous designs through the three kingdoms.”
Many of the rumours were of Catholic support for the rebels from abroad, organised, it was said, by Charles’s French consort, who according to Clarendon was “universally” thought to have too much power. Dinshaw observes that the word “universally” indicates that Clarendon shared this opinion.
Dinshaw recalls in his acknowledgements that about 15 years ago a friend advised him to read Clarendon’s History “on the most honourable and accurate grounds that I would enjoy it”.
Enjoyment pervades the book under review. Frequent use is made of John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, vivid, penetrating, unverifiable, a marvellous guide to the gossip retailed by influential people.
Clarendon expresses horror in his History at the
“virulency and anger expressed…towards the Church and churchmen, taking all opportunities, uncharitably, to improve mistakes into crimes.”
The same might be said of the attacks in recent months on various bishops of the Church of England, whose mistakes have been improved, by pharisaical colleagues and canting broadcasters, into crimes.
One of the difficulties of writing a book of this kind is that one cannot presume one’s readers know anything about the Civil War. Dinshaw begins with 14 pages under the magnificently dull heading “Historical Background”.
They are a tour de force. Soon we are introduced to George Villiers, later Duke of Buckingham, favourite of James I, assassinated in 1628, but still by his patronage the man who helped decide which way people went in the 1640s.
Alas for all those latter-day historians with their dreary theories of history. The beautiful George Villiers long ago trumped them all.
It is possible the Villiers family still decides which way we go today. As John Maynard Keynes joked, in his short essay The Great Villiers Connection, this is “the real blood-royal of England”.
When Paul Bloomfield took up the theme in Uncommon People, published in 1955, he observed that “the confident Villiers sense of being equal to all contingencies” emerges again and again in the descendants of Sir George Villiers, the Leicestershire squire one of whose sons became Duke of Buckingham.
The family has adapted itself to the democratic age. About 16 of our Prime Ministers are descended from Sir George Villiers. Someone should write a book about them.
Dinshaw’s first book, Outlandish Knight; The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman, was garlanded with praise, and can be opened on any page with pleasure.
So too his second book, though in an attempt to convey too many shades of meaning he sometimes uses too many adverbs. One must hope he is not being excessively gloomy about the fate of Hyde, Whitelocke, Falkland and many others when he writes in his peroration:
“These men are doubly lost: in the gigantic shadow of Cromwell, soon to overtake them, their native monarch, and all their compatriots; and in the drum-and-trumpeted national saga that came to terms with the trauma of the civil wars by identifying in them, however unpleasant they were to undergo, the necessary, ultimately ‘progressive’ adolescence of a sophisticated, democratic modern British polity. For Hyde, for Whitelocke, for Falkland, for the wearily wise, unanswerably authoritative voice of John Selden and of civilisation behind all three, the civil wars were an excrescence, not an education. As these men strove, and for all their conscientious and abundant skill failed, in statecraft, they succeeded, at least, in incarnating for as long as they could, and by preserving for whoever is inclined to identify it, an attractive common world: an alternative to the ravages of party enmity and sealed-off thought.”
