This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
The profession of law has a lot to answer for in the annals of English history. Both Edward “Ned” Hyde and Bulstrode Whitelocke, the “Friends” of Minoo Dinshaw’s fascinating if flawed dual biography, a study of shifting allegiance in the English Civil War, were products of London’s Middle Temple. It was a site of cultivation and erudition, reaching far beyond the legal world, spreading into the proximate London of literary figures such as Ben Jonson.
The two ambitious young men were involved in putting on, in 1634, James Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace, a masque for the attention of Charles I and his Catholic Queen, Henrietta Maria. Both became habitués of Great Tew, Viscount Falkland’s Oxfordshire retreat, whose circle contained figures of profound intellectual abilities, including Thomas Hobbes. Latitudinarian, tolerant of a mild puritanism, it presaged an establishment form of Anglicanism, in which, it might be argued, Englishness itself was the religion and a providential one that would ultimately prevail: “All will be well … ”
Both friends became firm critics of Charles I’s eleven-year Personal Rule, a monarchy without a Parliament which began in 1629. Both would be eloquent, occasionally loquacious opponents of the King’s prerogative courts, which meddled in issues political and religious, matters that converged increasingly as the atmosphere hotted up. They were critical, too, of a judiciary that obstructed the Common Law, which held a quasi-mystical place in their Temple-schooled affections.
When Parliament returned, Whitelocke, MP for Great Marlow, played a combative, crucial role in the prosecution of the unpopular and authoritarian Earl of Strafford, Charles’s man in Ireland who had returned to become his principal adviser — and therefore scapegoat: he went to the block in May 1641, a fate endorsed by Hyde and Falkland.
Despite his distrust of the duplicitous Charles, Hyde saw the monarchy, though not necessarily the man, as a means to national stability; Whitelocke did not. And so the friends split along the fissures that tore the political nation apart.
Hyde was MP for Saltash when, in May 1642, he lied to the Speaker of the Long Parliament, claiming to need some rural rest when, in fact, he was heading to York, the newly established Royalist capital, where he would join Charles.
Whitelocke went the other way. He had found Charles charming but came to loathe his nephew, the sadistic, and unfathomably romanticised, cavalier Prince Rupert of the Rhine, whose forces would attack Whitelocke’s country abode, Fawley Court, in a raid notable for its savage iconoclasm, book burning and frenzied slaughter of the Whitelocke family’s animals.
Though Dinshaw portrays both friends as moderates to their bones, perhaps he overlooks the iron in their blood, especially Hyde’s, whose journey from reluctant royalist to uncompromising advocate of the King is pronounced. He was also a fierce polemicist, against, for example, the “popish” Irish, who he believed endangered the security of England.
The two men would meet again in peace negotiations, sincere attempts to end the conflict, undermined by Charles’s duplicity and obstinacy. These set pieces are amongst the best parts of Dinshaw’s study: evocative descriptions of time and place, made more moving by their ultimate failure.
Both men left accounts of their experiences. Hyde authored, in elegant, still very readable prose, a six-part epic, History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, which laid the foundations on which all subsequent studies have been constructed. Whitelock produced the much lesser-known Memorials of the English Affairs.
Dinshaw writes well, having toned down the overripe prose that marked his intermittently sparkling biography of Steven Runciman, though he retains a suitably baroque propensity to let his pen flow.
His book is full of lovely vignettes, and there is no shortage of sharp turns of phrase. Charles I, for example, “presented against the world a diminutive fragile stalactite of faultless taste”; whilst his Archbishop, William Laud, surprisingly well regarded by the Puritan-facing friends, is judged, with some acuity, to have been more an “aesthete than a theologian”.
Throughout, Dinshaw displays a dogged dislike of Oliver Cromwell, though he concedes that both Hyde and Whitelocke — the latter strongly opposed Cromwell’s expulsion of the Long Parliament in 1653 — are “doubly lost” in the Protector’s “gigantic shadow”. They are minnows in comparison.
Yet both would long outlive Cromwell, and Hyde returned from exile to play a central role in the Restoration. The problem is, Dinshaw’s book ends in 1646, before the outbreak of the Second Civil War. The book is at once too long and its chronology too short. One longs for a sequel.
