Friends fall out in the English civil war

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In April 1636, two aspiring lawyers, eager to make their way in the world, corresponded about the state of affairs in London. ‘Our best news,’ wrote Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon, ‘is that we have good wine… the worse is that the Plague is in town and no Judges dye.’ The recipient of this letter was Bulstrode Whitelocke, a fellow member of the Middle Temple, who, like Hyde, would go on to write an indispensable contemporary chronicle of the British civil wars of the mid-17th century.

What makes the intimate, wry irreverence of Hyde’s missive seem startling in retrospect is that the two men ended up on opposite sides of the revolutionary political gulf opened up by that conflict. Hyde, the author of the magisterial The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (published in 1702), was one of the most tenacious defenders of, and PR gurus for, the Stuart dynasty (as Charles I’s chancellor of the exchequer and Lord Chancellor to Charles II). Whitelocke, by contrast, became an Interregnum diplomat who was knighted by Oliver Cromwell for his services, after which he wrote a promiscuous melding of journal, memoir and political history, printed in 1681 under the unsnappy title of Memorials of the English Affairs. At the end of their vastly divergent political careers, Whitelocke still cherished his early letters from Hyde, preserving them for his children ‘to lett you see the kindness and correspondence which was between the gentlemen in these times’.