At the Battle of Edgehill in 1642 , King Charles I numbered Edward Hyde , a short, paunchy lawyer with no aptitude or appetite for military combat, among his supporters. Hyde was there because he believed that, despite his majesty’s delinquency (high taxes, no parliament), monarchical government still offered the surest guarantee of England’s long-term stability.
Three weeks later, another soft-living lawman joined the combat, this time on the opposing side. Bulstrode Whitelocke had likewise pondered the nation’s interests and concluded reluctantly that the Parliamentarians, led by Oliver Cromwell, presented the best chance for putting a fractured nation back together. The fact that Hyde and Whitelocke had once been friends was just one more sadness at this saddest of times.
The last two years have seen a flurry of scholarly books about the English civil war, propelled perhaps by Brexit, during which the nation’s political, social and economic faultlines were dramatically laid bare. While 2016 didn’t quite end up with citizens taking up arms, there were plenty of stories about families, colleagues and drinking partners sending each other to Coventry. Friends in Youth takes us back to the 1640s to explore the process by which small nudges and subtle shifts in belief and behaviour can send parallel lives veering in opposite directions.
As a young man Hyde was part of the Great Tew Circle, a proto-thinktank that valued rational thought and frank discussion, especially when it came to the thorny business of religious sectarianism. While the Tewites tolerated Puritanism, the idea of it becoming the nation’s monopolistic religious practice filled them with dread. They preferred state-run Anglicanism, on the grounds that having the king as sovereign in matters spiritual and secular offered the best conditions for people of all faiths and political persuasions to rub along together.
Whitelocke was likewise an instinctive peacekeeper, particularly once he became an MP in a House of Commons that was increasingly run by hotheads. Although he was instrumental in drawing up the charges against the hated Earl of Strafford, which led directly to the draconian nobleman’s execution in 1641, he refused to do the same when it came to the king. Indeed, on the two occasions that Whitelocke had been sent to meet the proud little man to sue for peace, each had found the other charming. Dinshaw believes that the final straw that sent Whitelocke over to Cromwell came when Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the king’s vandal nephew, made a point of attacking Whitelocke’s rural retreat, Fawley Court. The library was ransacked, the stables plundered and the deer park reduced to state of carnage. It all felt pointedly personal.
The triumph of Friends in Youth is that it doesn’t conceive of itself as a joint biography of two important men set against a background of “History”. Instead, it is History that is front and centre, not least because Hyde and Whitelocke subsequently wrote narrative accounts of their tumultuous times. Hyde – as Earl of Clarendon – was the author of a stonking six-part History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, while Bulstrode produced Memorials of the English Affairs. Dinshaw reads their texts forensically for blindspots, elisions and misdirections, demonstrating in the process how the first draft of England’s civil war got laid down in all its patchy partiality.
What Dinshaw can’t do, unfortunately, is provide us with a climactic scene in which the two former friends confront each other about their diverging lives. That’s because Hyde and Whitelocke were the sort of men who refrained from lobbing insults at anyone, let alone each other. In such fluid times, anyway, it made sense to keep your powder dry. Both lived long enough to see the monarchy restored in 1660, which only went to show that you could never be certain whether your side had truly lost or won.
Luckily, this lack of a splashy showdown doesn’t stop Dinshaw from finding fascinating human interest stories among the large cast of minor characters. There is John Hinton, an eminent apothecary on the royalist side who was born female and subsequently lived in a homosexual quasi-marriage with his medical mentor. The gossipy diarist John Aubrey is here too, agog for every smutty personal detail while England tears itself to pieces. That’s not forgetting the glamorous royalist heroine Lady D’Aubigny, who smuggles crucial documents in her magnificent curly hair. Finally, Archbishop William Laud opens his diary in 1625 to record a disturbing erotic dream in which the Duke of Buckingham, the favourite of King Charles’s father, climbed into bed and proceeded to behave “with much love towards me”. Sensibly, he kept this to himself.
• Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War by Minoo Dinshaw will be published by Allen Lane (£30) on 30 January. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
