Early in 1634, two young Middle Temple lawyers helped organise one of the costliest entertainments ever staged before the Whitehall court, a masque celebrating the reign of Charles I entitled The Triumph of Peace. The triumph it saluted proved to be short-lived. Within less than a decade, Charles’s ‘reign of peace’ had imploded and the two amateur impresarios found themselves on opposing sides in the ensuing civil war – Bulstrode Whitelocke (1605–75) as a lukewarm Parliamentarian, Edward Hyde (1609–74) as a reluctant Cavalier. 

Both men were destined for stellar careers, albeit under very different skies: Whitelocke as the senior law officer of the English Republic and a Cromwellian confidant; Hyde as Charles I’s wartime Chancellor of the Exchequer and, once he had been raised to the ermine as Earl of Clarendon, as Lord Chancellor under Charles II after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Both achieved yet greater fame as chroniclers of the momentous events they had witnessed: Whitelocke with his diaristic Memorials of the English Affairs, first published in 1681; Hyde (writing as Clarendon) with his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, first published in 1702 and a masterpiece of English Baroque prose. 

The genius of Minoo Dinshaw is to have noticed something about the two that everyone else has missed: that the parallels between their careers go back much further, to the years before the English Civil War. That the two were friends at the Middle Temple has, of course, long been known. Yet no one until now has observed quite how close this friendship was during the 1630s or how congruent were their views on the great controversies of church and state. 

Dinshaw’s scintillating new book, bulging with ideas and information, is both a double family saga and a brilliant evocation of the world of books and ideas in which these two friends moved during those antebellum halcyon days, extending from the Fleet Street taverns in which Ben Jonson held boozy court to the Oxfordshire country house of Viscount Falkland, Great Tew, meeting place of a circle of avant-garde savants, the fresh-faced Thomas Hobbes among them. All come brightly into focus in Dinshaw’s cinematic prose.

Unifying the bustle of detail is the question of allegiance in its multiple and often mutually competitive forms – professional, familial, religious, political. Elite young men making their way in the fractious world of early Stuart England faced an almost endless series of choices – quotidian siftings of the ideal and the possible, the principled and the politique.

Both men began their legal studies at a moment when their profession was being politicised to a degree unknown since the 1530s. Partly this was the result of a policy – keenly encouraged by the Duke of Buckingham, the toxic court favourite – of expanding the scope of the royal prerogative to the point where it trumped the rival claims of the common law. Even more disturbing were the regime’s efforts to make the judges acquiescent in this process of subordination. 

The inducements to acquiescence were hardly subtle. In the previous three centuries, the acme of judicial ambition had been a knighthood and appointment as Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench (the senior court of common law). In 1626, the year Whitelocke was called to the bar and Hyde began his legal studies, the office was filled by Sir Ranulph Crewe; his two predecessors had gone on to receive earldoms and been appointed to the vastly lucrative office of Lord Treasurer – levels of preferment, not to mention financial reward, that had been unimaginable to a judge even a generation before. 

Whitelocke and Hyde were beneficiaries, even as they were later to be critics, of this politicisation of their profession. Both men had their early careers turbocharged by family members who owed their preferments to Buckingham: Whitelocke’s father had been appointed to the Court of King’s Bench at Buckingham’s prompting in 1624; Hyde’s early patron, his uncle Sir Nicholas Hyde, became Lord Chief Justice in 1627, and was notorious for his multiple ‘services’ to the duke (not least his defence of Buckingham against the Commons’ impeachment charges in 1626).

In spite of, or perhaps in reaction to, this familial toadying towards the regime, Hyde and Whitelocke both came to take a highly critical view of the policies promoted by Charles I during his years of ‘personal rule’ (1629–40). They came to venerate what Dinshaw aptly describes as the ‘ineffable, organic meandering’ of the common law, ‘a system based upon precedent and adaptability’ whose ‘apparent lack of clarity protected monarch and populace’ alike. They developed a deep hostility towards the king’s ever-greater reliance on the prerogative, whether for imposing new financial exactions or introducing new ceremonial practices in the Church. 

Even so, young men have careers to make and families to feed, and Dinshaw adroitly reveals the multiple little compromises that both men made with those in power during the 1630s. They cultivated Archbishop Laud, an Oxford chum of Whitelocke’s father, even as they disliked his ‘popish innovations’ and his use of the prerogative courts to enforce compliance in the parishes. They befriended John Selden, the legal sage imprisoned in the Tower of London for resisting Parliament’s dissolution in 1629, even as they enjoyed the patronage of the judges who had sanctioned his incarceration. 

Yet the business of ‘choosing sides’ did not become any easier for Hyde and Whitelocke after the fall of Charles I’s regime in the summer of 1640. Both were early allies of the new noble-led Junto, the de facto government that effectively replaced royal rule in 1641, and offered it their support when it came to restoring the supremacy of the common law, dismantling the prerogative courts and punishing the advocates of ‘arbitrary’ rule (both voted in favour of the Earl of Strafford’s attainder). Nevertheless, that same commitment to English institutions and English law made them opponents of the Junto’s more radical plans: to weaken the role of bishops or even abolish them, and to clip the wings of monarchy so drastically that Charles would be left as a cipher king.

Both men, Dinshaw argues, were nature’s ‘moderates’, instinctively averse to ‘the ravages of party enmity’ and appalled by the descent into civil war in 1642. That they opted for opposing sides, he suggests, reflected not a fundamental disagreement about political objectives, but differing views about the least dangerous route to their attainment. Even after the shooting started, Hyde and Whitelocke were far from wholehearted in their commitment to their respective sides. The two friends wanted to keep the Civil War a conflict fought, and ultimately resolved, by the English and by them alone. Both, therefore, were hostile to their political masters’ plans to escalate the war into a conflict involving the three kingdoms. Whitelocke deplored his fellow Parliamentarians’ turning to the Scots for military support in 1643. Hyde was even more deeply alienated by the king’s readiness to do deals with the ‘papist’ Irish.

Bonds forged a decade earlier made the two men natural allies on the rare occasions when the fighting stopped and there were attempts to find a negotiated settlement. Most of the last quarter of the book consists of a minutely detailed account of two efforts to conclude a peace treaty – at Oxford in February 1643 and at Uxbridge in January 1645 – and to the prominent roles taken by Hyde and Whitelocke in both. To say that these ended in failure needs no spoiler alert. But Dinshaw is impressed by the efforts the two men made, ‘against impossible odds for peace and moderation’, and their willingness to take risks.

Dinshaw’s telling of this story is a bravura performance in historical narration. He has a novelist’s eye for place and character, and his elegantly crafted prose is bright with freshly minted phrases: he evokes the ‘pulverizing bereavement’ Hyde experienced on the death of his wife, the ‘recreational duplicity’ of Hyde’s fellow courtier Lord Digby, the ‘claustrophobic grandeur’ of the Oxford court.

Still, there were moments in the lives of these two men when the paths they were on diverged more sharply than Dinshaw allows. He portrays Hyde and Whitelocke as regarding ‘questions of church government, whether by bishops [or] presbyters … as “inessentials”’. Yet this hardly squares with Hyde’s wartime insistence that bishops were an essential part of ‘the whole frame of the government’ of the kingdom and that monarchy was unsustainable without them. 

Nor did the two friends approach the negotiating table with quite the same degree of eirenic intent. True, Whitelocke does seem to have sought a genuine via media between the two warring parties. Hyde, however, took a much steelier line. As David Scott has recently shown in an important essay for the History of Parliament project, Hyde’s unpublished archive reveals a courtier working hard ‘to stiffen the king’s resolve against compromise’. Indeed, Hyde’s main concern during the discussions at Oxford was much less with finding a middle way than with winning over key enemy grandees like the Earl of Northumberland and the Earl of Essex in the expectation that their defection to the Royalists would precipitate a Parliamentarian collapse.

If this double portrait might benefit from a little retouching, the overall picture remains impressively true to life. Dinshaw’s Friends in Youth is an exceptionally accomplished work: unfailingly eloquent, impressively researched, original in form and shrewdly alert to the mendacities in his subjects’ own accounts of events. It provides a richly detailed depiction of the brittle, brilliant world of pre-Civil War England and the forces that blew it apart.