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Taking sides: how the Civil War turned friends into enemies
00:31:12
Minoo Dinshaw charts the story of Bulstrode Whitelock and Ned Hyde – two friends who found themselves on opposite sides of a growing conflict during the 1640s
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- [00:01]
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Minu Dinshaw
I hope you're ready for the most.
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Minu Dinshaw
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Minu Dinshaw
Your dip is your business.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. As 17th century Britain edged ever closer to Civil War, two friends, Bulstrode Whitlock and Ned Hyde, found their relationship under increasing strain. Writer Minu Dinshaw charts how these two companions found themselves on opposite sides of a political and ideological divide in his new book, Friends and Youth, and I spoke to him to find out more. Thank you so much for joining me to discuss your book Friends in Youth. Before we go any further, could you start us off by introducing us to your two protagonists for the book?
- [02:38]
Minu Dinshaw
The friends of my title are on the one hand, the slightly older Bulstrode Whitlock and on the other, Edward, nicknamed Ned Hyde. They are from a very similar generation background. They were at the Inns of Court studying law at the same time, where they became friends. They shared a wide social literary circle of acquaintances. They were professionally and personally linked very closely in the years leading up to the English Civil War. And their friendship for some time continued in a very important manner with its impact on the war and its diplomacy, despite the Civil War itself. And that is the story that I want to tell, the story of this one. Very pivotal, at times, eerily well positioned friendship.
- [03:32]
Ellie Cawthorn
And Hyde and Whitlock are two names that I think most people are not gonna be familiar with, even if they know a little bit about this period, the Civil War period. What drew you to those two characters?
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Minu Dinshaw
Well, the first one I knew about was Hyde, because Hyde has a later incarnation after the restoration of Charles II. He becomes Charles II's chief minister for a time. And also he's an extremely important and stylish historian of the period. So he was familiar to me. Bulstrode Whitlock was only a very faint name at the back of my mind until I started to study Hyde in more depth. But in the process of looking into Hyde, I was interested in Hyde because he's a moderate politician. And I realized that he had this close, equally moderate politician friend on the other side of the Civil War, Bulstrode Whitlock. And the more I looked at how their lives intersected in sometimes uncannily poetically elegant and faithful ways, the more I realized that the story of both of them as contemporaries at the same time was a fresh and rich way of telling the narrative of an extremely important and complex period.
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Ellie Cawthorn
And before we get into that extremely important and complex period, as you say, give us a bit of a context on the title of your book, Friends and Youth. So these two figures, how did they know each other and how close were they?
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Minu Dinshaw
Well, it's a lovely question. It's a title I actually always wanted. It's a quotation from the great poem Christabel, by Coleridge, largely about lesbian vampires. But that has a wonderful passage. Alas for they Were Friends in Youth, about two estranged fathers of the two girls who are the protagonists. And this idea of a friendship of young men that gradually comes under pressure because of involuntary events around the two friends was a really haunting and powerful idea for me. That's why I chose that title. Essentially, they were both at Oxford, but they didn't really overlap there. Bulstrod Whitlock being a Much more talented, distinctive, promising young man. Whereas Edward Hyde, at that point, Ned Hyde was quite a sort of dingy younger son. But as law students they really became close friends. And I think what drew them to each other was that both of them were extrovert, sociable, bookish, intellectual, this crucial phrase, liberal minded people, liberal in politics, liberal in religion. They both drew friends to them easily. They're both the kind of people who were generally well liked by their equals, their colleagues, even some people who later became rivals. And we first see them together as close friends in what I find a very revealing moment conducting a sort of mock debate in the house of a landlady, Mrs. Percy on Fleet Street. And they're pretending to be Star Chamber lawyers, the Star Chamber being one of the courts that was being criticized at the time for over mighty corruption and its abusive employment by the Crown. So they are essentially taking the piss out of more powerful establishment government figures. I think of it in a way as a sort of almost private eye like activity or like a university debating society. They are pretending to be the kind of pompous lawyers that they disapprove of in a probably rather drunken and certainly very friendly context. That's when we both see them together. And it combines both their conscientiousness, their friendly amusingness and also their political ambition all in one moment.
- [07:08]
Ellie Cawthorn
So we have this picture there of them as friends and allies. But take us forward in time to the kind of main era that you focus on in the book, the 1640s. Where do we find them then?
- [07:22]
Minu Dinshaw
Well, I open with the moment where they very regretfully but definitively are beginning to be on different sides geographically as much as politically. A moment where Hyde has decided to leave London to join up with the King in York and Whitlock is staying in London in order to try and be a moderating influence on the Parliament. And my first chapter concerns a surprisingly dangerous journey that Hyde under Turk North, a secretive and illegal journey involving a certain amount of deception and some unexpected friends and roots, while at the same time Whitlock is still trying to keep the peace and is making very passionate speeches in Parliament about how Parliament should continue to negotiate with the king and try to avert civil war, because civil war is such a disastrous prospect. There's a wonderful moment when Whitlock invokes the French Protestant Duke de Rohan, who was actually the King Charles I's godfather. And the Duke de Rohan apparently prophesied that England is a great creature that can only be destroyed by its own hand. And Whitlock alludes to this in his speech to warn everyone against this awful thing that's about to happen. At the same time, his friend Hyde has made his choice to go with the king and is taking actions that will in fact, expedite the beginning of the civil war.
- [08:39]
Ellie Cawthorn
Well, I wonder if you could give us a bit more context on this relationship between the king, King Charles I on the one hand, and Parliament at this time, and why there were beginning to be rifts and divisions.
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Minu Dinshaw
Okay, absolutely. So basically, the relationship between Parliament and the crown had become gradually more dysfunctional in the early years of the Stuarts. That's King Charles's father, King James, and then King Charles himself. But under King James, this show was more or less kept on the road. If you like King James, Buck was worse than his bite. He talked a good game about being a divinely ordained ruler who expected to get what he wanted. But he also had a certain amount of willingness to concede. Charles was slightly different. He first conducted some disastrous military policies with the help of his father's favorite, the Duke of Buckingham. Then, when he had no option, facing defeat in war, Buckingham was assassinated. He decided to go for a path of peace and to dissolve Parliament to rule without Parliament, calculating that with peace, he wouldn't need the money for war and he wouldn't need to be advised by Parliament. Now, the extraordinary thing is that this actually worked for almost 11 years. And as a result, Hyde and Whitlock grew up in this rather otherworldly peace, which they appreciated to some extent, but were also frustrated by as coming young men, intelligent, who'd had uncles, fathers, relatives, cousins in laws, who'd in the previous generation, who'd taken part in the country's politics. These young men felt locked out of a chance to shape their nation and their nation's history. And so they saw that the country was peaceful, but they also chafed under that peace. And what then makes the difference is when Charles can no longer carry on as normal without Parliament and without taxation needed for military action. And what causes that is a rebellion initially in Scotland for which he needs money to sort the problem.
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Ellie Cawthorn
So as you said earlier, we have Hyde on the one hand moving ever closer to the King and the royalist side, and we have Whitlock on the other moving closer to the parliamentarians. Can you tell us what drew each of them to these differing positions?
- [12:42]
Minu Dinshaw
Absolutely. Well, the interesting thing is they started so completely on the same side, along with various other important figures in my book. Their close mutual friend Lord Falkland, their mutual mentor, their lawyer John Selden, the poet Edmund Waller, others. All of these people were completely on the same side. They believed in the King and the Parliament acting in harmony. They harked back in some ways to the reign of King James, in some ways earlier to the reign of Queen Elizabeth. And they believed that England was traditionally a mixed monarchy. They wanted to reform the government to make it work in a more competent way with a broader base of consent. But they were absolutely not enemies of the Crown. And they were also ambitious. They wanted to take part themselves in the reforming government that they imagined. So Hyde and Whitlock started from the same space on the board, to the extent even that Whitlock probably wouldn't have been able to obtain election to Parliament without the help of Hyde and other friends. Hyde was very firm that Whitlock should attend Parliament with him should be part of this faction. What really drew them apart was first, to some extent, disagreements about the government of the Church of England, Hyde ultimately being a little more on the sides of the episcopy, the bishops than Whitlock, but more importantly, a very important debate known as the Grand Remonstrance. The Grand Remonstrance was a sort of extended note complaining to the King, and its purpose was driven very much by the hottest leader's reform. But Hyde came to feel that the Grand Remonstrance being passed meant that there was no more hope of reconciliation, whereas Whitlock wanted to undo the damage, to keep the sides together. Essentially, Hyde despaired earlier than Whitlock did. And Hyde believed the best way to exert a positive influence would be to join the King and that the King would be in better faith than Parliament, whereas Whitlock believed the opposite, that the leaders in Parliament would still be easier to influence in a moderating direction than the King.
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Ellie Cawthorn
And so essentially, in these two figures, you really have, like, emblems of the two sides of the conflict. But how much were they able to keep personal affairs out of the political realm in this era? Were you able to have a familial affair with somebody on the other side of the divide, or did that become an impossibility?
- [15:12]
Minu Dinshaw
That is such a good question and I think in many ways continued personal intimacy in remarkable ways for a surprisingly long time. I was always thrilled and excited to see elements of this, because I think the stereotype we have of this period is very much about dichotomies. It's about the Roundhead and the Cavalier, the Catholic and the Protestant, the Royalist and the Republican. But what I found was Whitlock marrying into a partly closet Catholic and royalist aristocratic family. I found one of his aunts by marriage making a joke about his appreciation for Catholic Church Mass music, because he was known to be a musical man. I found Whitlock and Hyde meeting as friends in private and corresponding with each other long after the armies had begun to fight each other. I found Whitlock negotiating with the Royalists in Oxford, attacked by Royalist thugs in the street, but rescued by his own Royalist brother in law. I found all these evidence of personal intercourse. And indeed, when the King's army is moving towards London, the fact that there's such. Still such good personal communication between both sides really, I think, helps to shape events, because the communications between the two moderate camps are so good, everybody is still writing letters to each other, being told gossip about whether the King's army is likely to move or whether. Whether there's sympathy for the King in London. And the news simply shifts across the notional frontier of war constantly.
- [16:47]
Ellie Cawthorn
It's an interesting perspective, isn't it? Because it shows it's not black and white. It's all kind of these murky personal connections. I wonder if you had a sense from reconstructing this time period of essentially diplomacy before the war. Did those involved in the years before the war sense that war was inevitable, or were there points where it looked like this could be resolved?
- [17:11]
Minu Dinshaw
I think up to a very late stage, many people at least wanted to believe and told themselves that no real fighting would occur, and even after it clearly would occur, that it would last only for a very short time. A lot of the men involved in raising troops for Parliament, for instance, who held the title of deputy lieutenants, agreed to serve as deputy lieutenants on the informal understanding that they would not actually, in real life, have to fight against the King's troops. There was a widespread belief on the Parliament side that the King simply wouldn't be able to gather up much of an army, so the idea of fighting him wouldn't in fact arise. And, of course, the Parliament preferred to frame it in terms of, we are liberating the King from his wicked counsellors, from his Catholic wife, all that sort of thing. The famous eternal myth of the evil counselors, which is a way of criticizing the King without, well, criticizing the King.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah. But if you were to pin down some key moments in this timeline where bridges were crossed, what would you highlight?
- [18:10]
Minu Dinshaw
Well, I would most immediately return to that debate about around the Grand Remonstrance, which is an extraordinary moment. It's, I think, the moment when party politics really enters the bloodstream of our history. Before then, there was a very important tradition that the House of Commons, although in real life it was of course, often divided over questions, in theory, it spoke with one voice. And to say that the House of Commons disagreed about anything was schism was a form of almost treason. And the Grand Remonstrance was the moment where this fiction, this elegant tradition, could no longer be sustained. And the reforming party, the parliamentarian party, in utero, won by a mere 11 votes. So it was really a handful of votes. And it was also the time when Hyde emerged, had to emerge as a leader of the Royalist Church of England Episcopal Party. He had to break cover and admit that he was now committed to the status quo rather than to reform. And one extraordinary moment, which, personally, I don't see that Hyde could have made up, although we have no corroborating evidence for it, it rings extremely true. Apparently, Oliver Cromwell himself, then a rather obscure parliamentarian mp, muttered to Hyde's friend Lord Falkland, that had the vote gone the other way, he, Cromwell, would have sold everything he had and quit the country and many others with him.
- [19:29]
Ellie Cawthorn
Wow. A big definitive what if there? Well, I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about what Hyde and Whitlock were actually up to in this period. What was their specific role in these debates?
- [19:43]
Minu Dinshaw
Well before the war, Hyde in particular was part of the circle hosted by Lord Falkland in the Oxfordshire village of Great Hugh, where we see a mixture of liberal politics, liberal theology, moving away from Calvinism, but also not in general in favour of absolute rule. A lot of criticism of the King, especially via his ministers, the Earl of Strafford and Archbishop Lord of Canterbury. So it's a hotbed of differing views expressed by friends. Whitlock is more loosely associated with that group, but he's living an ambitious lawyer's life in London and he is quite a courtly man. He has no problems, for instance, with the French Catholic Queen and the culture around her. He really appreciates music, dancing. He's friends with many of the musicians, French Catholics, many of them who work for the Queen. And as I say, he's connected by his in laws to many more conventionally royalist figures. So before the war, they both occupy places in rather ambiguous circles. They're also joined up by this common mentor, John Selden, who is a great legal authority, a historical pioneer. Also happens, a great scholar of Judaism, and Selden basically believes in the truth, in the. In checking out the legal tradition. He's going to criticize the bishops if they go too far. He's going to criticize the King if he goes too far. He's also going to criticize Parliament if it goes too far. He just believes in working out what has traditionally been done and keeping to that sort of ideal balance, that ancient, traditional balance. So that's where they stand. They want the Church to stay out of politics and they want politics itself to be in a sort of ideal, traditional state of harmony. And what happens is that as the war fructifies into shape, they can no longer control or shape that future that they have dreamed of.
- [21:48]
Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah, you finished the book with the 1645 Treaty of Uxbridge. Tell us about that moment and why you thought it would be a good place to end your main narrative.
- [21:59]
Minu Dinshaw
So, yes, after some years of war, there's already been a treaty attempt at Oxford. But Uxbridge is, in a way, more interesting to my core story of Whitlock and Hyde, in that we see them so much and so intimately together at Uxbridge. It's a fascinating moment for me in terms of its sort of geography, its Human organisation. Here we have this small town in between London, where Parliament is seated, and Oxford, where the King has his capital. We have the Parliamentarian commissioners in one inn, the Royalist commissions in another, the Scots in a third, all meeting at a manor house built by a corrupt lawyer a few decades earlier. And we have parallel negotiations going on, very public, almost rather stagey, performative ones, in front of everybody in the main room, but also countless hole in the corner, sub rosa conversations by firesides. That's a wonderful line about how cold it is. These negotiations are taking place over January and February, so you have old friends turned into reluctant enemies, huddling over the fire and really sounding each out about various things. But what is happening is a real willingness to achieve peace is clashing against an impossible reality, which is that the people in charge of both parties, on the one hand, the King, often under the influence of his Queen, also under the influence of, at this point, of his successful general in Scotland, Montrose, who is winning battles and doesn't want to compromise. And on the Parliament side, the war party associated with independent religion, that is much more religious toleration and much less hierarchy. Bishops, tradition, figures like Oliver Cromwell in particular, who don't want compromise. So you have people like Whitlock and Hyde, and also like the traditional aristocracy of the country, people like the Marquis of Hertford, the Earl of Pembroke, all of whom are somewhat trapped in the middle by stronger, harsher forces, ultimately holding the power here.
- [24:04]
Ellie Cawthorn
And of course, the failure of that treaty led to a conflict that would cost many, many more lives. As a kind of epilogue, could you tell us a bit about what happened to Hyde and Whitlock over the course of the war?
- [24:16]
Minu Dinshaw
Yes. So Hyde, in a way, his leanest years lie ahead of my book. But in these years, he does have two real adventures, I would say. One is what I mentioned earlier, his trip to join the King north. And the other is he is present at the Battle of Edge Hill and at a very alarming point where the two Royal Princes, who are teenagers, children, are nearly captured. But mostly his life is quite comfortable and civilian. He lives with an old friend, the Warden of All Souls, at the Royalist capital of Oxford. He complains that the food is very expensive, but he also remarks that the venison, the game and the fish are plentiful and rather delicious. He's quite a fat man. Hyde eventually suffers most physical pain, it must be said, from gout. Now, Whitlock, I would say, has a slightly more bumpy time, partly because it is much more dangerous for him than it seems to have been for Hyde negotiating in royalist Oxford, where he often comes across very rowdy Royalist soldiers and that's even what looks to me like an attempt on his life. It's rather a suspicious moment and I even wonder if it's possible that Hyde could have had some knowledge of it. It's a very awkward moment in their friendship subsequent to the Treaty of Oxford. What really lies ahead, most importantly for them both, is a future as historians. They are politicians, as such, their lives end in failure and they have much time to brood on what went wrong to my and I hope are benefit.
- [25:47]
Ellie Cawthorn
And did they ever reconcile after the Restoration?
- [25:50]
Minu Dinshaw
They personally knew each other and were in touch, but their friendship was strained and awkward and I think they both held grudges against the other. Hyde had lived through a tough and penniless exile, while Whitlock was one of Cromwell's top lawyers and Whitlock had to pay a huge bribe essentially to Hyde, among others, to avoid being prosecuted and possibly executed after the Restoration of one moment I particularly enjoy actually where Hyde, Whitlock and Bishop Sheldon, a very royalist bishop, are engaging in a conversation about whether Whitlock has been plotting with republicans, essentially. And Hyde, warns Sheldon, something along the lines of watch out for Whitlock, he's a sharp witted fellow and in a way it's a sign of respect and continuing appreciation there. And it's also a slight joke between the two old lawyers against the blundering bishop, a sense that they probably have more brains and acumen and that the bishop doesn't really know what he's doing. But it's the ghost, a shadow of a friendship, not much more than that by that point.
- [26:59]
Ellie Cawthorn
We have seen a few more books published in the last year or so I'd say last couple of years, about the Stuart period and the Civil War. But it's a period that really doesn't loom that large in the public imagination, I think, compared to, say, for example, the Tudors before them. Why do you think that is? Why do you think we don't talk about this era more in this country?
- [27:21]
Minu Dinshaw
It's an excellent question with many answers. I hope one answer is simply that its time has come. I think that the whole Brexit debate was certainly a huge force for me in the composition of this book. And I think Brexit raised questions about whether the way in which our country has worked for a long time is still working, and therefore made us examine the time where these norms came into formation more closely. I suppose the Tudors is a more obviously personal drama at times. In fact, the drama of the Civil War is intensely personal. But it's a lot of other things, too. It's intellectual, it's theological, it's political. It's an adult time. It's about how our nation went through adolescence, although I would say adolescence is a necessary thing that we go through in order to mature. And in a way, I would say my book dissents from that view. What Hyde and Whitlock believed, and what I certainly came to believe through them, is that this war was an avoidable tragedy. But it didn't have to be this way.
- [28:32]
Ellie Cawthorn
That was the writer Minu Dinshaw, speaking to me, Ellie Cawthorn. His book Friends in Youth is out now. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.