HYDE, Edward (1609-74), of Purton, Wilts.

Education, legal career and social networks

Edward Hyde’s contributions to the history of the ‘civil wars in England’, although justly celebrated, make the task of separating fact from fiction in his own parliamentary career peculiarly difficult. Both the History of the Rebellion and Life give an account of his role as a reform-minded MP in the Long Parliament – and yet both were written years, sometimes decades, later as a serving or former minister of the crown and were exercises, conscious or otherwise, in putting a loyalist gloss upon his reformist past. It is clear even from his own writings that he was on familiar terms – to put it no more strongly – with several leading members of the ‘junto’ that spearheaded opposition to Charles I at Westminster. Harder to assess is how deeply he was involved in their counsels and to what extent he can be trusted as a guide to events in Parliament during the early 1640s.

Hyde belonged to a cadet branch of an ancient Cheshire family that had settled in Wiltshire in the mid-sixteenth century. His father, Henry Hyde†, was the third son of Lawrence Hyde† (d. 1590), who was himself a younger son of Robert Hyde of Norbury, in Cheshire.54Earwaker, E. Cheshire, ii. 44-5; Clarendon, Life, i. 1; Vis. Wilts. 97-100; VCH Lancs. iv. 315; Ollard, Clarendon and His Friends, 7. Lawrence had sat in three Elizabethan Parliaments, and Henry had represented the Buckinghamshire borough of Ludgershall in 1589 and the Wiltshire borough of Old Sarum in 1601. All three of Hyde’s uncles on his father’s side had also sat in the Commons during the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods.55HP Commons 1558-1603. The Wiltshire Hydes were notable not only as Parliament-men but also for their distinguished legal careers. Hyde’s uncle Lawrence Hyde† (d. 1642) was a Middle Temple lawyer ‘of great name and practice’, who served as retained counsel to the Seymours, earls of Hertford – a role inherited by Hyde’s cousin and fellow Middle Temple barrister, Robert Hyde*. Another of Hyde’s uncles, Sir Nicholas Hyde† (d. 1631), was a Middle Temple bencher, a serjeant-at-law and eventually chief justice of king’s bench, as well as a counsellor-at-law to the royal favourite George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham.56Infra, ‘Robert Hyde’; Clarendon, Life, i. 2-3; HP Commons 1604-29.

It was doubtless one of Hyde’s uncles or their lordly patrons who secured a royal letter to the president (master) of his father’s Oxford college, Magdalen, in 1623, recommending him for a scholarship as a young man ‘descended of very honest parents and ... well deserving in himself’. The fellowship apparently did not like being pressured in this manner, however, and Hyde – who had been studying at Magdalen since the autumn of 1622 – had to settle for the socially less exclusive Magdalen Hall, from where he had matriculated early in 1623.57SP14/148/46, f. 60; SP14/153/11, f. 12; Bodl. Clarendon 3, ff. 143, 154; Clarendon, Life, i. 6; Ollard, Clarendon and His Friends, 10; ‘Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon’, Oxford DNB. With the death of his elder brother Henry in the mid-1620s, Hyde became heir apparent to the family estate, whereupon his father ‘changed his former inclination’, which was to have him go into the church, ‘and resolved to send Edward to the inns of court’ and specifically the Middle Temple.

Hyde’s father, too, had trained as a lawyer, but he ‘had no mind to the practice of the law’, preferring a life of ‘peace and quietness’ in the country, and it was therefore left to Hyde’s uncles to advance the young man’s legal career. Early in 1626, Hyde was admitted to the Middle Temple, ‘where his two uncles [Sir Nicholas and Lawrence] were at that time benchers and in good esteem’. Hyde’s sponsors were his uncle Lawrence and the future chief justice of the king’s bench John Bramston, who later referred to himself as Hyde’s ‘chamberfellow’ at the inn. Although Hyde would be called to the bar in 1633, by his own admission ‘he could not bring himself to an industrious pursuit of the law study but rather loved polite learning and history, in which, especially in the Roman, he had been always conversant’.58Clarendon, Life, i. 3, 4, 6, 8-9, 10; MTR, ii. 703; Autobiog. of Sir John Bramston ed. R. G. Braybrooke (Cam. Soc. o.s. xxxii), 103, 254.

Hyde moved in several distinct yet overlapping worlds during his late teens and early twenties. While he was studying to become a lawyer ‘and stood at gaze ... irresolute what course of life to take’, he fell in with the company of learned and witty gentlemen that gathered in London around the celebrated poet and playwright Ben Jonson. Among Hyde’s most valued friends in this circle was the jurist and future parliamentarian John Selden* and the politician and antiquary Sir Robert Cotton†. It was probably through Jonson that Hyde, in about 1630, met and formed ‘a most entire friendship’ with the scholarly and generous-minded Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland*. Falkland’s house at Great Tew, near Oxford, became a focal point during the 1630s for a group of intellectuals, London literati and Anglican divines that, as Hyde recalled, ‘looked like the university itself, by the company that was always found there’. Falkland’s regular house-guests included John Earle (chaplain to Philip Herbert, 4th earl of Pembroke*), George Morley (chaplain to the earl’s daughter, Lady Carnarvon) and the poets Sidney Godolphin* and Edmund Waller*.59Infra, ‘Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland’; Add. 4187, ff. 33-4; Clarendon, Life, i. 28-55; Hist. iii. 178-80; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir Robert Cotton’; ‘Great Tew circle’, ‘Philip Herbert, 4th earl of Pembroke’, Oxford DNB

Yet for all Hyde’s eulogies of Falkland and the spirit of free inquiry that prevailed at Great Tew, his own studies were of a different nature and intent to those of his friend. It is revealing that after describing Falkland’s conversation as ‘one continued convivium philosophicum’, Hyde corrected himself and added ‘or convivium theologicum’.60Clarendon, Life, i. 39. For whereas Falkland and his closest friend, the theologian William Chillingworth, were interested primarily in the nature and locus of religious authority – and specifically in evaluating the relative merits of the Protestant and Catholic churches – Hyde preferred to immerse himself in works of classical history or in more modern, often Tacitean, commentaries on princely statecraft.61P. Seaward, ‘Clarendon, Tacitism and the civil wars of Europe’, HLQ lxviii. 289-312; ‘Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon’, Oxford DNB. This difference in intellectual interest between Hyde and Falkland may well have reflected a divergence between the two friends’ views of the role of the church and bishops in the state. Because Falkland put such a premium on individual conscience and learning as the sources of true piety he deprecated what he saw as the episcopate’s unhealthily close relationship with government and the levers of coercive power during the 1630s. Hyde, on the other hand, was apparently a little more tolerant of prelacy. ‘There is no question’, he wrote in 1647

the clergy will always have an extraordinary influence upon the people, and therefore ... there must be a way to govern the clergy absolutely and keep it subject to the rules and orders of state – which never was, nor ever can be, without bishops. So that in truth, civil prudence would make unanswerable arguments for that order if piety did not.

There is no reason to believe that he had thought very differently before the civil war. To weaken episcopacy as a religious or political institution would deprive the state of the spiritual support that it required and divest the laws, the constitution and perhaps the monarchy itself of the moral qualities and reverence that ensured their survival. This, to Hyde, was a more worrying prospect than the danger of the church overstepping its boundaries.62Clarendon, Hist. i. 311, 357, 406-7; Life, i. 75; Clarendon SP ii. 365-6; S. Mortimer, ‘Clarendon and the Great Tew circle’ (unpub. ppr. Clarendon conf. Oxf. 6 Mar. 2009).

Hyde the aspiring man of letters was not without a worldly and ambitious side to his character. Through his marriage in 1632 to a daughter of the Wiltshire knight Sir George Ayliffe he acquired connections not only with the locally influential St John family of Lydiard Tregoze but also with the Villiers network at court. According to Bramston, it was at about this time that Hyde penned a short work rebutting the ‘parallel’ that the provost of Eton, Sir Henry Wotton, had drawn between the characters and careers of the two royal favourites Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex and George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham. This piece was also attributed to Hyde, ‘in his younger days’, in the 1672 edition of Wotton’s works. If Hyde was indeed the author and the views expressed in it truly his own, he was markedly hostile to the ‘popular’ faction at Westminster that had assailed Buckingham in the later 1620s. Charles I was so pleased with this work, claimed Bramston, that he wished Hyde to write the duke’s authorised biography.63Reliquiae Wottonianae (1651), 37-70 (E.1254.1); Reliquiae Wottonianae (1672), 184; Bramston Autobiog. ed. Braybrooke, 255; M. W. Brownley, Clarendon and the Rhetoric of Historical Form (Philadelphia, 1985), 219. Although Hyde’s wife died in July 1632, a mere four months or so after their marriage, ‘there always continued a firm friendship in him to all her alliance [i.e. family and friends], which likewise ever manifested an equal affection to him’.64Clarendon, Life, i. 12; MTR, ii. 830.

In 1633, Hyde (still only in his early twenties) managed the Villiers interest in its quarrel with the queen’s secretary Henry Jermyn* and his supporters – an episode that brought him into close contact with ‘a great body of lords and ladies of principal relations in the court’ and ‘introduced him into another way of conversation than he had formerly been accustomed to and which ... by the acquaintance, by the friends and enemies he then made had an influence upon the whole course of his life afterwards’.65Infra, ‘Henry Jermyn’; Add. 4187, f. 28; Bodl. Clarendon 129, f. 25; Clarendon, Life, i. 12-14; Ollard, Clarendon and His Friends, 22-8. These enemies included Jermyn himself, James Hamilton, marquess (later 2nd duke) of Hamilton and possibly the queen as well. Among the firm friends that he made were Basil Lord Feilding (later the 2nd earl of Denbigh), who had been Buckingham’s brother-in-law, William Villiers, 2nd Viscount Grandison and Anne Villiers, Lady Dalkeith, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting.66Add. 4187, ff. 30-2; Bodl. Clarendon 7, f. 116; Clarendon 129, ff. 19, 21v, 81, 83, 85-6, 93; Belvoir, QZ.8, ff. 18-20v; T.H. Lister, Life of Clarendon (1838), iii. 5-6; Clarendon SP i. 747; Clarendon, Life, i. 12-13, 99; Hist. i. 362; iii. 496; Whitelocke, Diary, 96; ‘Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh’, Oxford DNB.

Hyde’s second marriage, in 1634, was to a daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, master of the mint and master of requests. So eager was Hyde for this match that he exaggerated his degree of financial independence (he was still receiving £70 a year from his father), ‘and therefore’, as he confided to a friend, ‘I would have nothing break out that might cause him [Aylesbury] to suspect me for a foul gamester’. Marriage to Aylesbury’s daughter increased Hyde’s range of court connections and brought him what he hoped would be ‘advantages ... as lasting as my life’. Not the least of these ‘advantages’ was ‘good employment’ in the court of requests – where he would indeed enjoy a steady stream of business.67Add. 4187, ff. 35-6; REQ1/117, pp. 40, 362, 403. By the mid-1630s, Hyde could count among his patrons or friends at court Henry Montagu, 1st earl of Manchester (lord privy seal and president of the court of requests), the earl of Pembroke (lord chamberlain of the king’s household), Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland (groom of the stool), Lord Coventry (the lord chancellor) ‘and other grandees, with whom his power was considerable’.68Clarendon, Life, i. 56, 64; Bramston Autobiog. ed. Braybrooke, 255; Whitelocke, Diary, 96.

Hyde’s standing at court depended partly on family connections, but it also grew out of his legal work – ‘to the which he betook himself very seriously’ from the early 1630s – and the friendships he made at the inns of court. Besides the likes of his uncles and Bramston, his social circle at the inns included Peter Ball*, James Chaloner*, Harbottle Grimston*, Robert Hyde*, John Maynard*, Geoffrey Palmer* and Bulstrode Whitelocke*. Hyde and his close friend Whitelocke, representing the Middle Temple, were formally involved in preparing a court masque, ‘The Triumph of Peace’, which the inns staged at great expense early in 1634 in response to a tract by William Prynne*, Histrio-Mastix, attacking ‘popery’ at court. The two men were entertained before the masque by the earl of Pembroke and were rewarded after it with a royal audience at which they kissed their Majesties’ hands.69Add. 37343, ff. 146v-147, 148v, 152, 162v-163; Clarendon, Life, i. 15, 26, 55-6, 61-2, 65; Whitelocke, Diary, 49, 58, 74-5, 81-2, 86, 95-6, 107, 112-13, 116, 118-19; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 53-5, 61-2.

It was as an up-and-coming lawyer that Hyde came to the attention of Archbishop William Laud at some point in 1634 or 1635. Though critical of Laud’s brusque and ‘uncourtly’ manner of proceeding, Hyde had an ‘extraordinary esteem’ for the archbishop ‘and believed him to be a man of the most [exemplary] virtue and piety of any of that age’. Laud, in turn, quickly took to Hyde and ‘ever afterwards used him very kindly ... and took particular notice of him when he came of [counsel] in any causes depending at the [privy] council board, as he did frequently’.70Bodl. Clarendon 129, f. 22; Belvoir, QZ.8, f. 26; Clarendon, Life, i. 23-5, 56-61, 65; Hist. i. 120-1, 124-5, 128, 132, 196. In the great court battle in 1635 over who should succeed Richard Weston, 1st earl of Portland, as lord treasurer, Hyde took Laud’s side against Lord Cottington (Sir Francis Cottington†), of whom he would later become a close friend. ‘Each struggles hard’, he informed his cousin Francis Hyde, ‘one [Laud] to do good, the other [Cottington] to grow rich; one passionately intends the public [good], the other, calmly and craftily, himself’. If the worse came to the worst, Hyde thought, Laud’s court ally Viscount Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future earl of Strafford) should be given the job rather than Cottington, ‘but that’s the last refuge’.71Belvoir, QZ.8, ff. 19v, 27. Hyde also took Laud’s side in his feud with Bishop John Williams, although he evidently regarded the archbishop’s legal henchman Robert Kilvert as entirely without scruple.72Add. 4187, ff. 37-8; Oxford DNB, ‘Robert Kilvert’.

Laud trusted Hyde to the extent that he allowed him to mediate in his disputes with the leading ‘country’ peers William Seymour, 1st marquess of Hertford and his brother-in-law Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex. Hyde failed in his efforts to reconcile Laud and Essex. But he did succeed in bringing Laud and Hertford ‘to a very good acquaintance and inclination to each other’. Hyde may also have had a hand in his cousin and ‘bosom friend’ Robert Hyde’s appointment in 1638 as Hertford’s retained counsellor-at-law.73Infra, ‘Robert Hyde’; Clarendon, Life, i. 57.

The Short Parliament

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Hyde was returned for both the Wiltshire borough of Wootton Bassett and the Dorset borough of Shaftesbury.74Supra, ‘Shaftesbury’; ‘Wootton Bassett’; Clarendon, Life, i. 66-7. He almost certainly owed his election at Shaftesbury to the earl of Pembroke, who was lord of the manor and the borough’s most powerful electoral patron.75Supra, ‘Shaftesbury’; V.A. Rowe, ‘The influence of the earls of Pembroke on parliamentary elections, 1625-41’, EHR l. 243, 248. Hyde was in good favour with Pembroke – as he acknowledged in a letter to Lady Carnarvon in September 1640 – and had been a recipient of his patronage since at least 1634, when the earl had secured him the office, in reversion, of custos brevium of the court of common pleas.76Bodl. Clarendon 19, f. 53; Clarendon SP ii. 145; Coventry Docquets, 190; CJ iii. 385; LJ vi. 405a, 406. Pembroke was also ‘a faithful and royal friend’ to the family of Hyde’s uncle Lawrence and his cousin Robert.77Belvoir, QZ.8, ff. 19v, 27. Hyde ‘made choice to serve for his neighbours’ at Wootton Bassett, however, which lay just a few miles south of his main country residence at Purton.78Clarendon, Life, i. 67.

Despite his inexperience as an MP, Hyde was named to seven committees in this Parliament and was a regular and apparently confident contributor to debate.79CJ ii. 4a, 8a, 8b, 9b, 10a, 12a, 17b. He seems to have opened his account as a parliamentary speaker on 18 April 1640, when he interrupted the presentation of petitions against ‘innovations in religion, vain alterations in churches ... erecting the altars’ to draw the House’s attention to one of the ‘great grievances [of] the commonwealth’ as yet unmentioned, namely, the earl marshal’s court or the court of chivalry – a prerogative court that had been revived in the early 1620s and which was particularly disliked by common lawyers, Hyde evidently included. He denounced the court’s ‘vast and unlimited power to dispose of liberties by imprisoning our persons and of our estates by fines and damages, arbitrarily and without law’. He also attacked the proceedings of ‘an appendant to this court’, the heralds. However, he was careful to absolve from any blame the earl marshal himself, Thomas Howard, 14th or 21st earl of Arundel – even though the earl was not very popular with most MPs. If Hyde’s intention in making this speech had been to divert the House from consideration of Laudian innovations he did not succeed. Nevertheless, it did win him ‘much applause’ from his fellow Parliament-men and without seriously jeopardising his standing at court, particularly with the king.80Bodl. Clarendon 18, f. 155; Procs. Short Parl. 158, 260-2; Aston’s Diary, 12; CJ ii. 6a; Clarendon, Life, i. 67-8. As Hyde was doubtless aware, the court of chivalry was a soft target and no great loss to Charles if its demise would help hasten a generous grant of supply.

Hyde’s other contributions to debate in the Short Parliament were even more circumspect and, on several occasions, tended towards advancing the king’s business.81Aston’s Diary, 27, 41, 125, 137; Clarendon, Hist. i. 180-2. Moreover, although named to several committees to investigate the proceedings of Convocation and ‘innovation in matter of religion’, he was apparently silent on the question of reforming perceived Laudian excesses in the church.82CJ ii. 8a, 9b, 10a, 12a. Indeed, on 29 April 1640, he defended the Laudian altar policy by declaring that it was ‘not contrary to the rubric that the communion table stand altar-wise’. He was followed by Falkland, who moved that the rubric should be read before the House voted on the matter. The two friends were followed by a raft of puritan Members, however, who clearly regarded Laudian altar practice, whether justified by the rubric or not, as tantamount to idolatry.83Aston’s Diary, 88-9.

In the crucial debate on 4 May 1640 on whether to accept the king’s offer to relinquish Ship Money in return for 12 subsidies, Hyde did his best to bring the House to a resolution that would sidestep the vexed question of the levy’s legality and in so doing, perhaps, provide the king with at least some form of supply – and again he was supported by Falkland, among others. His efforts were scuppered, however – or so he later claimed – by misjudged and malicious interventions by the king’s own servants, notably Sir Henry Vane I, which allowed John Hampden, Oliver St John and other critics of royal policy to kill the debate.84Aston’s Diary, 137-8; Clarendon, Hist. i. 180-2; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 119-21. It may well have been at the close of this day’s proceedings that Hyde attended Laud and urged him to move the king against the ‘desperate counsel’ of dissolving Parliament. Hyde was ‘confident the House was as well constituted and disposed as ever House of Commons was or would be [and] that the number of the disaffected to church or state was very small’. Laud had a less favourable opinion of the House’s affections – as did the king, who dissolved Parliament on 5 May.85Clarendon, Life, i. 69-70; Hist. i. 183. Hyde would continue to attend the archbishop and to socialise with him until at least February 1642.86Bodl. Clarendon 19, f. 53; Works of Laud, iii. 244, 460.

The Long Parliament and the reform of ‘abuses’, 1640-1

If Hyde chose to stand for Wootton Bassett or any other Wiltshire borough in the elections that autumn he was to be disappointed, and just one week before the Long Parliament was due to meet, early in November 1640, he was returned for the tiny Cornish borough of Saltash.87Supra, ‘Saltash’. Clearly a carpetbagger, he probably owed his election to his fellow Middle Temple lawyer George Buller (who was returned with Hyde) and his father Sir Richard Buller*, who were Saltash’s principal electoral patrons. He may also have received assistance from the Bullers’ kinsman Thomas Wise* (another Middle Templar), who enjoyed a strong interest in several Cornish boroughs.88Supra, ‘George Buller’; ‘Sir Richard Buller’; infra, ‘Thomas Wise’. Hyde was certainly not the court candidate for Saltash – that honour went to Sir Dudley Carleton, who was nominated for the borough (unsuccessfully) by the prince of Wales’s council for the duchy of Cornwall.89Duchy of Cornw. Office, Ms letters and warrants 1639-43, ff. 66v-67.

A line in the letter that Hyde’s friend and kinsman the notorious monopolist Sir Gyles Mompesson† (another member of the Villiers connection) wrote to him late in October 1640, before news had reached of Hyde’s return for Saltash, implied that Hyde had been struggling to find a seat and that there were doubts over whether he would be elected.90Bodl. Clarendon 19, f. 69. Why Hyde had not found a safe berth in Wiltshire or why Pembroke had apparently withdrawn his electoral patronage is something of a mystery – unless, that is, Hyde’s friendship with the intensely unpopular (particularly with Pembroke) Laud had become common knowledge. It is worth noting that the election of Hyde’s cousin Robert at Salisbury was contested partly because of his perceived Laudian sympathies.91Supra, ‘Salisbury’.

Hyde would later claim that his own election had been most unwelcome to the ‘governing party’ (i.e. the junto) in the Commons, ‘as a man they well knew to have a great affection for the archbishop and of unalterable devotion to the government of the church’.92Clarendon, Life, i. 70. Yet just a few days before Parliament had assembled, one of the junto’s leaders, John Pym*, had confided to Hyde about the need for ‘removing all grievances and pulling up the causes of them by the roots’.93Clarendon, Hist. i. 222. Pym, it seems, had been sounding Hyde out and evidently did not regard him as an entirely lost cause – and with good reason, for not all of Hyde’s friends in high places were of Laud’s stamp. Three of the men whom Hyde accounted among his patrons or well-wishers at court, the earls of Holland and Pembroke and Lord Feilding, were in the process of attaching themselves to the junto – and there was perhaps an expectation that Hyde would do likewise. Moreover, Hyde seems to have held one of the junto’s leaders, Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford, in high esteem, and therefore his relations with the earl’s loyal gentleman-servant, Pym, may have been amicable, at least initially.94Clarendon, Hist. i. 203, 207, 241, 245, 308-9, 327, 333, 334-5; Life, i. 83; CJ ii. 215a; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 145, 151, 411; ‘Philip Herbert, 1st earl of Montgomery and 4th earl of Pembroke’, Oxford DNB. There is no evidence in the Journal or parliamentary diaries to support Hyde’s assertion in The Life that the junto ‘laboured to find some defect in his election’ and thus to have him removed from the House.95Clarendon, Life, i. 70.

Hyde commenced his career in the Long Parliament, as he had in the Short, by taking aim at the earl marshal’s court. On 23 November 1640, he presented a petition to the Commons against the court and then made another oration denouncing its proceedings and those of the Heralds.96Procs. LP i. 248, 251, 252, 254, 258; Clarendon, Life, i. 70. According to Whitelocke, he, Hyde, John Maynard and Geoffrey Palmer (all common lawyers and MPs) had conferred beforehand about the ‘supercilious, magisterial and illegal exercise’ of the court and had ‘resolved to put it on in the House of Commons’. Hyde, related Whitelocke, ‘spake to it smartly and ingeniously’, damning the court’s proceedings as illegal and vexatious, imposing penalties, ‘many times for a hasty word, whereof the [common] law of England takes no notice, nor gives any action for them’.97Whitelocke, Mems. i. 147. A committee was set up that same day (23 Nov.), chaired by Hyde, to examine the powers and proceedings of the prerogative courts presided over by the earl marshal and the high constable.98CJ ii. 34b; Procs. LP i. 514-15. The ‘very entrance upon this inquisition’, claimed Hyde, ‘put an end to that upstart court [the earl marshall’s court], which never presumed to sit afterwards’.99Clarendon, Life, i. 71. In his report from this committee on 19 February 1641, Hyde emphasised the fact that the court first began to hear cases in the 1630s, ‘when there was no more hopes of Parliaments and when the common law was declining in its power and honour’. After some debate, the House voted the court a grievance – even though the committee itself had not done so – and Hyde ‘gained credit’ as a result of his report.100CJ ii. 89a; Procs. LP ii. 486-7, 488-90, 491; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 147.

Not content with effectively bringing down one prerogative court, Hyde opened a new and altogether broader front against the royal prerogative with his appointment on 23 December 1640 to a committee for investigating the powers and jurisdiction of the council of the north and the council of Wales and the Marches.101CJ ii. 57a. Again, Hyde chaired this committee (or those sessions that concerned the ‘court of York’), the business of which was ‘prosecuted with great passion and took up many weeks debate’.102Bodl. Clarendon 19, ff. 152-3; Clarendon 20, ff. 103-10, 116; Clarendon, Life, i. 72-3; Hist. i. 315-16. He reported on the council of the north on 24 April 1641, after which the House voted that it was grievous to the subject, unprofitable to the king and ‘illegal, both in the creation and execution’.103CJ ii. 127a; Procs. LP iv. 85-6, 89. Two days later (26 Apr.), he managed a conference with the Lords at which he expatiated at length on the ‘great and crying grievance’ of the council. The court of York, he insisted, had almost overwhelmed the northern counties ‘under a sea of arbitrary power’, which had reached its height during the presidency of the earl of Strafford ‘in a mass of new, exorbitant and intolerable power’. That the council had denied the superior jurisdiction of the courts of common law at Westminster was, in Hyde’s opinion, ‘the greatest and boldest scorn of the law and the law-make[r]s that can be imaginable ...What have the good northern people done that they only must be disfranchised of all their privileges by Magna Carta and the Petition of Right?’ The council must not merely be regulated or reformed but utterly abolished. This speech, claimed Hyde later, ‘had a wonderful approbation in both Houses, where he got great credit by it’ – although one of his friends in Yorkshire had warned him that the council’s abolition would spell instant ruin to a hundred families in York and effectively beggar the city.104Bodl. Clarendon 20, f. 90; CJ ii. 128a; Procs. LP iv. 95, 100-4; Clarendon, Hist. i. 316-17, 320. His role in the council’s abolition earned the particular gratitude of the leading ‘northern gentlemen’ in the Commons, Sir John Hotham, Sir Hugh Cholmeley and Sir Philip Stapilton, who had all incurred Strafford’s displeasure and had no wish to ‘have a new president put over them’. Hyde believed that the three men ‘observed and pursued the dictates’ of the junto, although in fact it was only Stapilton who consistently supported the parliamentary leadership.105Clarendon, Hist. i. 250, 315-16, 317-18, 393.

Between November 1640 and the September 1641 recess, Hyde was named to almost 80 ad hoc committees, helped to manage at least 23 conferences and served as messenger to the Lords on four occasions.106CJ ii. 73a, 74a, 83a, 88b, 96a, 99b, 100a, 103a, 110a, 116b, 128a, 130a, 134a, 139a, 142a, 147a, 147b, 148b, 154a, 170a, 189b, 192a, 233b, 237b, 240a, 243b; LJ iv. 229b, 293b; Procs. LP iii. 86. From these appointments alone it is clear that he was, as he later put it, ‘very much in the business of the House’ and was intimately involved in its efforts to cleanse the Augean stable of Caroline politics.107Clarendon, Life, i. 72. Many of his early appointments were to committees and conference teams for reforming the perceived abuses of the personal rule and punishing their authors.108CJ ii. 34b, 39b, 43a, 45b, 46b, 50a, 53a, 57a, 60a, 79b, 82b, 84a, 84b, 88b, 91a, 91a, 99a, 101a, 134a, 139a, 149b, 154b, 189b, 190b. He chaired the committee set up on 5 December 1640 to investigate the crown’s seizure of the books of the renowned common lawyer and one-time attorney general Sir Edward Coke†.109CJ ii. 45b; Procs. LP i. 473, 477. In addition, he chaired ‘many committees made upon private complaints’ – including one committee relating to a land dispute in which he had to take a firm hand against Oliver Cromwell* for ‘indecency and rudeness’.110Clarendon, Life, i. 73-4.

For all his later criticism of the junto’s unscrupulous methods in securing Strafford’s conviction for high treason, Hyde was named to a series of committees (often in the company of other leading Commons’ lawyers) between late November 1640 and early May 1641 relating to the earl’s prosecution.111CJ ii. 39a, 39b, 64a, 79b, 88b, 98a, 109a, 112b; Clarendon, Hist. i. 254-8, 285-8, 290, 300-6, 334. Several of his friends – notably, Maynard, Palmer, Selden and Whitelocke – were part of the legal team that presented the case against Strafford at his trial. Most revealingly, Hyde was not listed among the ‘Straffordians’ – those who voted against the earl’s act of attainder on 21 April – although he was apparently present in the House during that day’s debate on the act and therefore, presumably, voted in favour of it.112Clarendon, Hist. i. 306-7. Indeed, his reformist credentials and his hostility towards the earl were such that five days later (26 Apr.), he was entrusted by Bedford with the delicate task of trying to persuade the earl of Essex against insisting upon Strafford’s execution – for Bedford was certain that ‘the king was ready to do all they [the junto] could desire if the life of the earl of Strafford might be spared’. Hyde put the case for Strafford’s permanent removal from public office, but Essex was adamant that ‘stone dead hath no fellow’.113Clarendon, Hist. i. 318-21.

As the tangled web of intrigue and controversy surrounding Strafford reached its climax towards the end of April 1641, it was Hyde who was sent as a messenger to the Lords to warn them of a plot to spring Strafford from the Tower and spirit him away by ship.114CJ ii. 130a; LJ iv. 229b. Hyde the historian was scornful of the junto’s scaremongering talk of popish conspiracies, but his appointments at the time suggest that he attached a good deal of credence to the ‘Tower plot’ and its big brother the first army plot. Similarly, although he would later express reservations about the Protestation – which was drawn up in response to the Tower plot – he and Falkland were among those Members appointed on 4 May to report a conference for requesting the Lords to join the Commons in taking the new oath.115CJ ii. 134a, 147a, 147b, 148b; Procs. LP iv. 363; Verney, Notes, 85-6; Clarendon, Hist. i. 244-5, 327-32, 350-3, 356.

Hyde’s accounts of the Long Parliament made relatively little mention of Ship Money as a grievance, yet he had referred to it in November 1640 as a matter of ‘infinite consequence’ and in July 1641 as a ‘crime’ of ‘prodigious’ proportion.116Procs. LP i. 271; Mr Edward Hydes Speech at a Conference Betweene Both Houses (1641), 3 (E.198.36). On 5 December 1640, he was named to a committee to receive all petitions against Ship Money, and two days later (7 Dec.), following a lengthy report on the issue from Bedford’s confidant Oliver St John, he claimed that ‘all our sufferings [are] from the original of Ship Money. That [the] property of subjects [lies] not in their [the judges’] judgment but Parliament’s’. He went on to refer darkly to ‘tampering and solicitation of the judges’ by the crown, and at his suggestion a committee was set up, which he chaired, to examine the judges as to whether they had been ‘solicited or threatened to give their judgement’ in John Hampden’s 1637 ship-money trial.117CJ ii. 45b, 46b; Procs. LP i. 482-3; Northcote Note Bk. 38; Clarendon, Life, i. 72. Hyde lost no time in interviewing Sir Humphrey Davenport, chief baron of the exchequer, reporting his response to the House the following day (8 Dec.).118Procs. LP i. 512, 516, 518, 520.

At least one of Hyde’s friends and correspondents in Wiltshire shared his reformist zeal, congratulating him in mid-December 1640 on his efforts to ‘give ease to the commonwealth and kingdom in taking away that heavy burden of ship monies’ and expressing confidence that ‘if God give a blessing to your endeavours we shall have a reformation of all those impositions that are burdensome to the subjects’.119Bodl. Clarendon 20, f. 140. Another correspondent, however, having heard that Hyde had been ‘very active against the judges’, urged him to be cautious, adding ‘I cannot believe the king likes all that is done as long as he upholds those whom you call offenders’.120Bodl. Clarendon 20, f. 3. On 14 January 1641, the House thanked Hyde, Falkland, Whitelocke and St John for prosecuting ‘the business of Ship Money and the other matters concerning the liberty and property of the subject’.121CJ ii. 68a.

In a series of reports during the first half of 1641 from the 7 December committee, Hyde relayed the charges against six of the seven judges who had declared for the crown in Hampden’s case, including his old chamberfellow Sir John Bramston. He reserved his harshest criticism for Sir Robert Berkeley, whom he alleged had ‘traitorously and wickedly endeavoured to subvert the fundamental laws and established government of the realm of England and instead thereof to introduce and arbitrary and tyrannical government against law’. Hyde was also appointed a messenger to the Lords on 22 May to carry up the articles of impeachment against the barons of the exchequer.122CJ ii. 80b, 83b, 154a, 162a, 192b, 194b, 198a; Procs. LP ii. 380, 383, 429-31, 432-3; iv. 657-8, 660-1, 662-3; v. 399, 401, 403-4, 405-6, 410-12, 439-40, 441, 443-6, 449-50, 476; Clarendon, Life, i. 72. In a speech made at a conference with the Lords on 6 July at which he presented the articles of impeachment against three of the judges, Hyde launched a scathing attack on the bench’s adjudications relating to Ship Money, distraint of knighthood and several other legal controversies of the personal rule. ‘’Tis no marvel’, he argued, ‘that an irregular, extravagant, arbitrary power, like a torrent, hath broke in upon us, when our banks and our bulwarks, the laws, were in the custody of such persons’ (Hyde frequently used the image of a river overrunning its banks to describe the abuses of the personal rule). In conclusion, he insisted that if there had been ‘misrepresentations’ and ‘misunderstandings’ between the king and his subjects, whereby ‘the blessed peace of this island [has] been shaken and frighted into tumults and commotion ... these are the men, actively or passively, by doing or not doing, [who] have brought this upon us’.123Mr Edward Hydes Speech, 1-12; Clarendon, Hist. i. 372. His terrier-like pursuit of the judges – which seems to have been driven more by a desire to win approval in the House than by a balanced assessment of the judiciary’s role in the personal rule – continued into early August, when he and Sir John Culpeper managed several conferences with the Lords to expedite their prosecution.124CJ ii. 233b, 237b; C. St John-Smith, ‘The Judiciary and Political Use and Abuse of the Law by the Caroline Regime 1625-40’ (Oxford DPhil. thesis, 2016), 76-7, 79-80.

If Hyde’s Commons’ appointments are any guide, he was not at the forefront of the House’s campaign to suppress popery and idolatry.125CJ ii. 39a, 74a, 84b, 139a, 150a. The fact, therefore, that he was part of a conference reporting team on 25 January 1641 concerning the king’s reprieve of the convicted Catholic priest Thomas Goodman is perhaps further evidence that it was the political implications of Charles’s actions that particularly alarmed the Commons – for if the king could use his prerogative to save a priest from punishment, he could do the same for anyone else convicted of treason, most obviously Strafford and the judges. It was Hyde who reported this conference to the Commons the same day (25 Jan.), relaying the message the Lords had doubtless received from the king that he was ‘tender in case of blood and, according to the custom of his predecessors, was inclined to use grace [a royal reprieve] where imprisonment or banishment would satisfy the law, of which either of them [imprisonment or banishment], as the Houses desired, should be performed’.126CJ ii. 73a; Procs. LP ii. 274; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 165-6.

In general, Hyde probably favoured clemency towards Catholics and those whom some Parliament-men regarded as little better than Catholics – Laudian churchmen. Yet although he was later highly critical of what he saw as the Commons’ attempts to involve ‘the whole clergy under an arbitrary guilt’, he was repeatedly named to committees in the early months of the Long Parliament for proceeding against several Laudian bishops, punishing members of Convocation for passing the new Canons and for reforming the abuses associated with prelacy.127CJ ii. 50a, 82b, 84a, 91a, 94a, 99a, 101a, 129a, 165b; Clarendon, Hist. i. 272-4. Little wonder that some of his clerical friends adopted a sarcastic tone when they wrote to him in 1641 about the Commons encouraging opponents of ‘orthodox and obedient clergymen ... to furnish the House with arguments ... for the overthrow of the hierarchy of the church’. Behind the scenes, however, Hyde and Falkland interposed with the Committee for Scandalous Ministers* on behalf of at least one ‘orthodox’ clergyman – their friend from the Great Tew circle, Thomas Triplett – against his puritan enemies, notably George Lilburne*. And like his clerical correspondents, Hyde doubtless deplored the incendiary publications of the puritan minister – and friend of the leading junto-man Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick – Calybute Downing.128Bodl. Clarendon 19, ff. 255, 257, 274-5, 278, 279, 281; Clarendon 20, ff. 7, 13, 60, 77; H. Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (1987), 170, 171; ‘Calybute Downing’, ‘Thomas Triplett’, Oxford DNB.

Hyde the historian was guarded and selective in his references to Hyde the reformist MP – partly no doubt because the latter had proved adept at what the former scathingly referred to as ‘the womanish art of inveighing against persons, when they should be reforming things’.129Clarendon, Hist. i. 406. No question but Hyde was closely involved in the Commons’ efforts in 1640-1 to punish ‘offenders’ among the judiciary and to end the abuses associated with the prerogative courts and taxation. His long-standing friendship with other reform-minded common lawyers in the House – ‘who drove on most furiously’ with the junto – probably made his transition from friend and dining companion of Laud to parliamentary champion of ‘the commonwealth’ easier than it might otherwise have been. Moreover, his alarm at the way that some of the bishops and judges had used the royal prerogative during the 1630s to override the common law and its practitioners was undoubtedly genuine. But perhaps another factor here was his own vanity, for though he failed to live up to his own billing as ‘the greatest chairman in the committees of the greatest moment’, then he was certainly well-connected with those among the ‘governing party’ who were.130Clarendon, Life, i. 72; Hist. i. 309, 372, 405. Indeed, he was apparently proud of his familiarity with several of the junto grandees – notably, the earl of Bedford and one of the junto’s leading Scottish collaborators, John Leslie, 6th earl of Rothes. Hyde and Rothes became acquainted ‘by reason of their mutual friendship with some persons of honour’ (and apparently remained friends even though Rothes had had Triplett removed from his benefices in county Durham).131Bodl. Clarendon 19, f. 275; Clarendon, Hist. i. 252-4, 263, 368-9, 395-6; ‘John Leslie, 6th earl of Rothes’, Oxford DNB.

Hyde was convinced (with good reason) that Bedford and Rothes were not alone among the Anglo-Scottish reformist leadership in pushing for godly reformation largely as a means of keeping the English puritans and the more militant Scottish Covenanters on side. With a few notable exceptions, the junto-men and their allies ‘were pleased with the government ... of the church’ – which may help to explain why Hyde was willing to collaborate with them in the prosecution of Strafford and the judges and the abolition of Ship Money and the prerogative courts. Bedford, he averred, ‘had always lived towards my lord of Canterbury [Laud] ... with all respect and reverence and frequently visited and dined with him’ – which is perhaps where Hyde had first made the earl’s acquaintance.132Clarendon, Hist. i. 282, 308-9.

The death of Bedford, Strafford’s execution and the revelations surrounding the first army plot, in their different ways, destroyed the possibility of an accommodation that would have preserved at least some element of personal monarchy. By mid-May 1641, the junto was committed to a settlement that would leave Charles ‘the mere title of king ... stripped of all authority’. Yet though characterised, famously, as a ‘mediocre statesman’ who would not suffer the exercise of any ‘special and transcendent’ executive power above the common law, Hyde seems to have been passionately committed to retaining the royal prerogative in relation to the militia, the appointment of royal counsellors and, above all, the church.133Gardiner, Hist. of England 1603-42, x. 169-70; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 308-9. It is far from clear that he was opposed to prerogative taxation per se – as distinct from the crown’s ‘unpolitic’ levying and justifying of Ship Money ‘as a right’. Similarly, there are no sure grounds for equating his complaints against the prerogative courts for what he regarded as abuses of their authority during the 1630s with a commitment to depriving the crown permanently of the right to appoint and govern through such bodies, duly regulated. For a reform-minded common lawyer he showed remarkably little appetite for abolishing the courts of high commission and of star chamber (where Hyde had practised during the 1630s). Moreover, his acceptance of the constitutional reforms of 1641 was tempered by a feeling that in some respects they were ‘derogatory to majesty and [meant] letting the reins [of government] too loose to the people’.134Add. 37343, f. 148v; Clarendon, Hist. i. 86-7, 274, 279, 343, 371-7; ‘Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon’, Oxford DNB.

Defending episcopacy, 1641

Hyde the historian was naturally eager to play up his support for the church in the Long Parliament. Unlike Falkland, he does not seem to have distinguished himself in the great root and branch debate of 7-8 February 1641, merely declaring against having one (and by inference both) of the two main petitions calling for the abolition of episcopacy referred to a committee – in effect, laid aside. Most, but not all, of the junto-men favoured having the petitions committed but stopped short of urging the abolition of episcopacy. Most, but again not all, future royalists spoke against committal. Among those who did not was Falkland, who desired that the less radical of the two petitions should be committed.135Procs. LP ii. 390; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 180-5. Until March 1641, Hyde stated later, he and Falkland – who always sat next to each other on the Commons’ benches – ‘had been never known to differ in the House’, yet they appear to have done so on this occasion.136Clarendon, Hist. i. 310-11.

In what has all the hallmarks of a premeditated attempt to sow division among the junto-men and between them and their Scottish allies, Hyde reported on 27 February 1641 (from a committee for raising money in the City for the Scottish army) the reluctance of some men to lend because of their objections to a recent publication by the Scots commissioners re-asserting their ‘detestation’ of episcopacy. This was the cue for Culpeper, Sir John Strangways and other supporters of episcopacy to launch an attack upon the ‘Scottish paper’, obliging Hampden and his friends to mount a rather mealy-mouthed and unconvincing defence of their allies’ desire for a covenanted uniformity between the two kingdoms. Several puritan MPs criticised Hyde for bringing up the Scottish paper in the first place: according to the godly Sir Simonds D’Ewes, this ‘had raised one of the greatest distempers in the House that I ever saw’.137Procs. LP ii. 576, 577, 578, 579; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 12-13; From the Commissioners of Scotland, 24 February, 1640 (1641, 669 f.3.4); Clarendon, Hist. i. 282-4; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 197-8, 270. It was perhaps Hyde’s high profile defence of episcopacy that drew him to the king’s attention, for late in February 1641 he was told by one of his correspondents, who had been talking to a Commons’ messenger, that ‘the king greets you well’.138Bodl. Clarendon 20, f. 77.

But when the Commons came to debate a bill for removing the bishops’ votes in the House of Lords, on 10 March 1641, it was the turn of the church’s friends to have the cracks in their unity exposed to general view. Although the bill was primarily intended to give the junto a voting majority in the Lords, it was sold to MPs like Hyde – ‘who heartily desired that there might be no such diminution of their [the bishops’] honour or authority’ – as merely a guard against prelacy and a way of spiking the root-and-branchers’ guns. Falkland (claimed Hyde) fell for it and became convinced that the bill ‘was the only expedient to preserve the church’. Spearheading opposition to the bill, Hyde argued that the bishops had enjoyed the right to vote for many centuries – ‘this [was] no usurped right ...[and] in better hands it may stand’ – and that ‘five and twenty pious and learned bishops must always be of great advantage in those counsels’ in the Lords. But Falkland countered that ‘if the bishops were fit for their callings they were unfit for that place, and if fit for that place, unfit for their callings’ – an argument he continued to make until at least early June. Hyde was supported on this occasion by a number of future royalists, as, indeed, was Falkland. (The two friends may have clashed again in another debate on the bill on 30 March, although it seems likely that Hyde simply misdated their contretemps on 10 March by 20 days).139Add. 4180, f. 171v; Procs. LP ii. 702; iv. 728; Bodl. Clarendon 20, f. 98; Clarendon, Hist. i. 309-12, 357; iii. 186. On 22 March, Hyde also challenged the idea that clergymen should be removed from temporal office, insisting (with Sir Henry Vane I) ‘that this matter of their [clergymen] being privy councillors was a right vested in the king to name such and elect them as he would have of his council, and that bishops might sometimes be as fit for that employment as other men’. This speech notwithstanding , he was named to a committee on 3 June to counter the Lords’ objections to the bill for removing clergymen from temporal affairs.140CJ ii. 165b; Procs. LP iii. 51.

Hyde’s allegiance to the established church was stiffened in late April or early May 1641 by a personal interview with the king.141Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 289. Walking in Westminster Palace, he encountered the army plotter Henry Percy*, who informed him that the king required his attendance that afternoon. Hyde the historian insisted he had ‘no relation to the court’ at this time and ‘had not the honour to be known to the king’. Certainly, most of Hyde’s old friends at court were either in prison or had defected to the junto. But the king would have been well aware of who Hyde was. Indeed, the two men may have been in indirect communication for some months. On this occasion – probably their first face to face meeting since 1634 – the king thanked Hyde for his ‘affection and reverence for the church’ and urged him to keep up the good work.142Clarendon, Life, i. 76-7.

Hyde and Falkland were back in step by 17 May 1641, when they and Digby urged that a brusque response be given to the Scots commissioners’ desires for ‘conformity of church government’ between the two kingdoms – which D’Ewes interpreted as a slight not only upon the Scottish nation but also the cause of further reformation.143Procs. LP iv. 416; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 334. Predictably, when the junto introduced a bill (via Sir Edward Dering) on 27 May for the total abolition of episcopacy, Hyde moved against giving a reading to something ‘that overthrew and repealed so many acts of Parliament and changed and confounded the whole frame of the government of the kingdom’. Again, he appears to have been supported by Falkland.144Procs. LP iv. 606, 614, 615; Clarendon, Hist. i. 314-15, 358; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 328-9. Despite Hyde’s efforts to have the bill rejected, it was given a first and second reading on 27 May and then referred for further consideration to a committee of the whole House. When this committee convened on 11 June, the bill’s supporters, after a ‘very long debate’, succeeded in having Hyde made chairman in order to muzzle his opposition to it, for custom dictated that those in the chair should not take an active part in the debates over which they presided.145CJ ii. 159a, 173b; Clarendon, Hist. i. 362-3. In all, Hyde chaired 27 sessions of the committee between 11 June and 3 August and made several lengthy reports to the House of its resolutions.146CJ ii. 173b, 174a, 174b, 176a, 176b, 182a, 202a, 202b, 204a, 204b, 205b, 212b, 213a, 214a, 214b, 215a, 215b, 226a, 226b, 228b, 229a, 229b, 232a, 234b.

Hyde later claimed that he had ‘perplexed’ and retarded the bill’s progress wherever possible and that he had been instrumental in eventually having it laid aside. But although there is no doubting his opposition to the bill, its consignment to legislative limbo early in August 1641 owed more to the pressing weight of other business – notably, preparations for the king’s journey to Scotland – than to Hyde’s sharp practice as chairman (of which there is no evidence either in the Journal or parliamentary diaries).147Clarendon, Hist. i. 363-4; Lister, Life of Clarendon, i. 113; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 342-3. While serving as chairman of this committee, he was courted (or so he claimed) by the junto and ‘frequently importuned’ to dine with Pym, Hampden and their friends – an invitation he evidently accepted. After one such dinner, Nathaniel Fiennes I invited him to take the air and then proceeded to quiz him about why he was so steadfast in support of the church, to which Hyde replied that ‘he could not conceive how religion could be preserved without bishops, nor how the government of the state could well subsist if the government of the church were altered’. A few days later, another radical MP, Henry Marten, ‘with whom he [Hyde] lived very familiarly’, confessed to him that he did not think any ‘one man wise enough to govern us all’.148Clarendon, Life, i. 74-6.

Between the court and the junto, 1641

Like his fellow future royalist Sir John Culpeper, Hyde worked particularly closely with the junto in trying to sort out and improve public finances. Many of his appointments in the Long Parliament were to committees or conference-management teams for securing City loans and on legislation relating to supply. In addition, between mid-February and mid-May 1641, he chaired and regularly reported from a series of committees of the whole House to consider ‘the general occasion of monies’, the supply of the English and Scottish armies in the north, and the Scots’ financial demands in the treaty negotiations between the two kingdoms.149CJ ii. 80a, 82a, 82b, 88a, 89b, 91a, 91b, 92a, 108a, 109b-110a, 112a, 113a, 116b, 129a, 130a, 138a, 141a, 142a, 143a, 145a, 145b, 146a, 146b, 154b, 165a, 170a, 172b; Procs. LP ii. 470, 501, 665, 668, 826, 828, 832; iii. 133, 135; iv. 315, 325, 336, 350, 358, 368, Clarendon, Hist. i. 282-4. Hyde’s personal commitment to addressing the kingdom’s financial problems was such that in March 1641 he pledged £1,500 towards securing a City loan.150Procs. LP ii. 628. On 2 June, he ‘propounded that a bill [be prepared] to cause every man to bring in all his money but such as should be necessary to every man’s private occasions according to his quality’.151Procs. LP iv. 691, 693. The task of drawing up a bill for levying a poll tax was specially referred to his care on 18 June, and he spent much of the rest of that month steering this piece of legislation through Parliament and chairing another committee of the whole House for paying off and disbanding the armies.152CJ ii. 180a, 182a, 183a, 183b, 184b, 187a, 189b, 190a, 190b, 192a, 235a; LJ iv. 293b; Procs. LP v. 252, 276, 277, 287-8, 347, 367-8, 379, 383-4, 388, 389, 390.

He would later insist that his main aim in advancing these financial measures was to promote the interests of the king – specifically, by securing the withdrawal of the Scottish army from northern England – although it necessarily meant cooperating closely with Bedford, Pym and several other leading junto-men and channelling much of the proceeds through a revenue system that they largely controlled.153Clarendon, Hist. i. 281; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 206-7. Yet assuming that Hyde was working to empower the king rather than the junto, he evidently considered this a price worth paying, for not only did the Scottish army impose an intolerable burden upon the northern counties – as his own friends dolefully informed him – but its presence gave the junto-men financial leverage over the king while at the same time increasing the pressure on them to satisfy the Scots’ demands for further reformation in religion.154Bodl. Clarendon 20, ff. 16, 18; R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), 334. It was perhaps with this set of calculations in mind that Hyde was involved as a conference manager or reporter during the first half of 1641 in thrashing out the terms of Parliament’s treaty with the Scots – which included the paying off and withdrawal of their army.155CJ ii. 83a, 96a, 97a, 98a, 99b, 100a, 103a, 142a, 152a, 155a, 170a, 170b; LJ iv. 178a ; Procs. LP ii. 648, 652, 654; iii. 86. Hyde was widely identified, not least by himself, as an enemy of Scottish intervention in English affairs.156Bodl. Clarendon 19, f. 146; Clarendon, Hist. i. 254, 349-50. By the summer of 1641, the junto, too, was keen to be rid of the Covenanters, fearing that the king intended to use his journey to Scotland in August to build a party for himself among the Scottish soldiery – and again Hyde worked alongside the junto-men in disbanding the armies and preparing for Charles’s absence from the kingdom.157CJ ii. 240a, 243a, 243b, 258a.

The prospect of court office was being dangled before Hyde by late July or early August 1641, when the king’s bedchamber man John Ashburnham* informed Hyde’s friend, the future royalist grandee Edward Nicholas†, that he (Nicholas) would soon be appointed a secretary of state and that Hyde ‘is to be likewise your comrade, but it was thus expressed: that whatever come of it, his Majesty is resolved to have one of the two’. In the event, the king chose Nicholas.158Add. 78268, f. 7. After Charles’s departure for Scotland in mid-August, Nicholas sent for Hyde and showed him a letter from the king in which Charles again expressed his thanks for ‘the great zeal he [Hyde] showed to his service’.159Clarendon, Life, i. 77-8. Hyde’s reformism had never extended to the junto’s readiness from May 1641 to usurp the king’s powers in church and state and reduce him to a mere cipher. His alignment with the ‘governing party’, which had always been qualified, was never likely to outlive the completion of the limited constitutional revolution of 1640-1 – or, indeed, having his loyalty and vanity stroked by a seemingly chastened and grateful king.

That Hyde was not as active at Westminster after the autumn 1641 recess as he had been before is almost certainly a sign of the further deterioration in his relationship with the parliamentary leadership. Between late October 1641 and April 1642, when he abandoned his seat in the Commons, he was named to only 15 committees and five conference reporting teams, chaired three meetings of committees of the whole House and served as a messenger to the Lords just once.160CJ ii. 294b, 295a, 295b, 302b, 311b, 312a, 313b, 321a, 321b; D’Ewes (C), 41-2, 120, 128. Charles’s complicity in the ‘Incident’ (an attempt in October by his Scottish partisans to arrest, possibly murder, Covenanter leaders) apparently failed to dent Hyde’s confidence in his royal master or to slow his emergence as a leader of the nascent royalist interest in the Commons.161Clarendon, Hist. i. 395; Gardiner, Hist. of England 1603-42, x. 127; D’Ewes (C), pp. xxix, 47. Hyde tried, largely unsuccessfully, to prevent Pym and the other junto-men milking the Incident for political advantage at Westminster – as on 20 October, when he and Falkland moved that ‘we should leave the business of Scotland to the Parliament there and not to take up fears and suspicions without very certain and undoubted grounds’.162D’Ewes (C), 15; Clarendon, Hist. i. 395. He was similarly outspoken in defending the episcopate from the junto’s renewed campaign to exclude clergymen from temporal affairs and, most especially, to deprive the bishops of their votes in the Lords. Again, however, his argument that ‘all is well settled and constituted [in the church] if we can but keep them [the bishops] as they are’, did not persuade the majority of MPs.163D’Ewes (C), 28, 30, 32, 39, 40, 46, 151; Clarendon, Hist. i. 400-1, 403-4, 443-4. Nor, despite his objections, could he prevent the House naming him to committees on 26 and 29 October for stripping the episcopate of its voting rights in the Lords and delaying the king’s appointment of further bishops.164CJ ii. 295b, 298b; Clarendon, Hist. i. 402-3.

Perhaps the most divisive issue at Westminster after the 1641 recess was not that of further reformation in religion but who should have the last word in the choice of royal counsellors. Hyde was determined to defend the king’s right to appoint his own ‘great officers’ – although Charles had given the junto ‘unspeakable encouragement’ to deprive him of this prerogative by granting the Edinburgh Parliament a veto over the appointment of royal ministers in Scotland. When, on 28 October, William Strode I claimed that the English Parliament’s reforms were worthless unless it, too, acquired this power, Hyde remonstrated that this was a step too far. The choice of royal counsellors, he insisted, was ‘an hereditary flower of the crown’. The abolition of the prerogative courts and Ship Money were sufficient guarantees of the subjects’ liberties. ‘All particulars were in a good condition’, he argued, ‘if we could but preserve them as they were’ now.165D’Ewes (C), 45; Clarendon, Hist. i. 416; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 419. Nicholas informed the king the day after this debate that Falkland, Strangways, Waller, Hyde and Robert Holborne had ‘stood as champions in maintenance of your prerogative’.166Evelyn Diary ed. Wheatley, iv. 116.

Inevitably, much of the Commons’ time from late October 1641 was taken up with the question of how to suppress the Irish rebellion, and this is reflected in a number of Hyde’s appointments.167D’Ewes (C), 77, 78, 84, 97, 99. He was named to the 2 November bicameral standing committee for Irish affairs and to a committee set up two days later (4 Nov.) for levying soldiers to suppress the rebellion. On 11 and 12 November, he chaired and reported from a committee of the whole House to raise money ‘for the occasions of Ireland’, and he was named first to a committee on 18 November to provide security for a City loan towards the Irish war effort.168CJ ii. 302a, 305b, 311b, 313b, 319b, 321b, 324b; D’Ewes (C), 120, 128. But behind the facade of unity suggested by these appointments there was a running battle between the king’s party and the junto over the control and direction of the war in Ireland. On 5 November, the junto attempted to make funding for the Irish war conditional upon Charles granting Parliament the right to approve royal councillors, prompting Hyde to argue that such a linkage between supply and reform would allow Parliament – or, in effect, the junto – to ‘prevail [over] the king’.169D’Ewes (C), 94-5; Clarendon, Hist. i. 436-7; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 426-7.

The junto’s eagerness to divest the king of his power to choose ministers of state provided much of the impetus for the Grand Remonstrance and contributed to the bitter and prolonged quarrels it provoked. Hyde opened the debate on 22 November 1641, speaking ‘very vehemently’ against the Remonstrance as full of ‘unfit expressions’ that were likely to cause a breach with the Lords and cast odium on the king. He was also angry that the Remonstrance made no exception of the court of requests, which he thought rested on legal foundations and – though he doubtless did not say so – had been a money-spinner for himself and his father-in-law. The thrust of his argument was that Parliament’s reforms to date were sufficient to safeguard the subjects’ liberties, and therefore that the drive for further reformation in church and state was divisive and unnecessary. Nevertheless, his speech against the Remonstrance seems to have been less hard-hitting and well-argued than those of Falkland and Culpeper.170D’Ewes (C), 183; Verney, Notes, 121-2; Clarendon, Hist. i. 417-18, 427-8; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 434.

After voting narrowly in favour of the Remonstrance, MPs then debated whether it should be printed – a populist proposal that so appalled Hyde, Culpeper and their allies that they moved, apparently by pre-arrangement among themselves, for permission to ‘enter their protestations against [the] printing of it’. Hyde’s friend Geoffrey Palmer was particularly insistent on this score, but to no avail.171D’Ewes (C), 186, 320, 321, 322; Clarendon, Hist. i. 419-20, 432; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 435-6. According to Hyde, it was he himself who had angered the junto most, having been the first Member to demand the right to enter a protestation. However, his friends among the northern MPs refused to countenance any attack on him, and therefore the junto and its allies, on 24 November, picked upon Palmer as the principal offender. Once again, the debate became heated, with some Members demanding that Palmer be censured, and Hyde (‘who loved him much’), Culpeper and others speaking vehemently in his defence.172D’Ewes (C), 192-3, 195; Verney, Notes, 126-7; Clarendon, Hist. i. 423. Following two divisions in which Hyde and another future royalist Sir Frederick Cornwallis lost out to the godly pairing of Sir Thomas Barrington and Sir Martin Lumley, Palmer was ordered to answer the charge made against him, and the next day he was committed (briefly, as it turned out) to the Tower.173Infra, ‘Geoffrey Palmer’; CJ ii. 324b.

Hyde and the ‘new triumvirate’, 1641-2

Hyde’s role in the debates on the Grand Remonstrance rendered him ‘as much in their [the junto’s] detestation as any man’ – and his involvement in the Commons’ proceedings dwindled accordingly.174Clarendon, Life, i. 83. He was named to only six committees after 22 November 1641 and apparently made only two notable interventions in debate before January 1642 – on 30 November, when he complained about the anti-episcopal ‘tumults’ around Westminster Palace; and on 10 December, when he tried (unsuccessfully) to prevent or delay the removal of an armed guard that had been placed around Parliament by the king’s order.175CJ ii. 324b, 333a, 334b, 340a, 370a, 388a; D’Ewes (C), 213, 264-6; Clarendon, Hist. i. 435, 451.

By December 1641, at the very latest, Hyde had forged a close friendship with the late earl of Bedford’s son-in-law George Lord Digby*, who contrived to have a declaration that Hyde had penned, confuting the Remonstrance, presented to the king and published anonymously.176Clarendon, Life, i. 79-81; Clarendon, Hist. i. 461, 490; [Falkland], A Speech Made to the House of Commons Concerning Episcopacy (1641), 13 (E.196.36). To the extent that this declaration – the first of many drafted by Hyde in the king’s cause – reflected Hyde’s own views, it is clear that he considered the personal rule a comparatively benign era, and that despite his reverence for the Church of England he was willing to follow Falkland in urging the ‘exemption of tender consciences from punishment or prosecution for such ceremonies … which, by the judgement of men, are held to be matters indifferent and, of some [men], to be absolutely unlawful’. In other words, while preserving the Prayer Book and episcopacy, the king would agree to legislation that protected those objecting to certain ceremonies agreed on as indifferent. This was a concession that Hyde and the king would make repeatedly during 1642. Hyde used this declaration – arguably, the first concerted propaganda attempt by the king’s party to re-cast Charles as a law-abiding monarch – to emphasise that Parliament’s reforms had been ‘so large and ample that very many sober men have very little left to wish for’.177Clarendon, Hist. i. 493-6; His Majesties Declaration to All His Loving Subjects (1642, E.131.1); P.H. Hardacre, ‘Sir Edward Hyde and the idea of liberty to tender consciences’, Jnl. of Church and State, xiii. 25-6.

Through his friend Digby, who was now high in Charles’s favour and trust, Hyde urged the king to appoint Falkland secretary of state and Culpeper chancellor of the exchequer. At the same time, the king resolved to remove Oliver St John as solicitor-general and put Hyde in his place. But Hyde, at a private audience with the king and queen early in January 1642, persuaded Charles that St John would be an even more dangerous opponent if he was removed from office.178Clarendon, Hist. i. 457-60; Life, i. 81-2; Clarendon SP ii. 362. Before the king left London (10 Jan.), he instructed Hyde, Falkland and Culpeper ‘to meet constantly together and consult upon his affairs and conduct them the best way they could in the Parliament and to give him constant advice what he was to do, without which he ... would make no step in the Parliament’. The three men subsequently met every night, usually at the house of Hyde’s father-in-law in Westminster, to plan their next move, ‘there being many persons of condition and interest in the House who would follow their advice and assist in any thing they desired’.179Clarendon, Hist. i. 460-1; Life, i. 83. Not that the king’s party could influence the Commons’ proceedings to any great extent in the aftermath of Charles’s bungled attempt to arrest the Five Members (which Hyde deplored as impolitic and badly executed rather than as a violation of parliamentary privilege).

Although forged in common adversity, the ‘new triumvirate’ of Hyde, Culpeper and Falkland appears to have been a fractious one, for there was a strong personality clash between Hyde and Culpeper, ‘their natures being nothing alike’. In addition, Hyde resented Culpeper’s easy access to the king and his intimacy with the highly influential John Ashburnham, who was certainly no friend of Hyde’s. Hyde was particularly distressed at the way Culpeper ‘terrified’ the queen into forcing Charles to pass the bill excluding bishops from the Lords, in February 1642 and at his involvement in drafting His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions (c.June 1642), which advanced a classical constitutional model that excluded the episcopate from the political order.180Supra, ‘Sir John Culpeper’; Clarendon, Life, i. 85, 87-8, 93-6, 130-2; Hist. i. 565-8; P. Warwick*, Mems. Charles I (1701), 194, 196; M. Mendle, Dangerous Positions (Alabama, 1985), 6-8.

Hyde seems to have been the least active or vocal of the ‘new triumvirate’ during the early months of 1642. He is known to have made only one contribution to debate during this period – when he took issue, on 12 January, with a declaration of the House against the king’s attempted arrest of the five Members, arguing that ‘there was no privilege of Parliament in cases of treason, felony and breach of the peace’. One of the five MPs targeted by Charles – John Hampden – later confronted Hyde and remarked, ‘very snappishly “that he well knew he [Hyde] had a mind they should be all in prison”’.181PJ i. 42; Clarendon, Hist. i. 492; Life, i. 84. Hyde’s last appointment in the House was on 24 February, when he was included (against his will) on a three-man parliamentary delegation to present the two Houses’ votes to the king that he refrain from taking personal custody of the prince of Wales. Four days later (28 Feb.), Hyde reported the somewhat inconclusive results of this mission and, from that moment onwards, all but disappeared from the Journal and parliamentary diaries.182CJ ii. 451a, 459a; PJ i. 479; Clarendon, Life, i. 98.

Whitelocke’s assertion that Hyde withdrew from the House after the passing of the Militia Ordinance early in March 1642 is apparently inaccurate, for he seems to been present in the Commons on 16 March.183Clarendon, Hist. i. 592; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 171. Nevertheless, on 23 March, Falkland was required to defend Hyde against accusations in the House that he was neglecting its service. Hyde was suffering from the stone, explained Falkland, and though he still attended the odd committee he had gone into the country to see if fresh air and riding would improve his health. Several of the junto’s friends objected that Hyde had no right to take leave without permission, and it was ordered that he attend the House the next day in relation to the prosecution of one of the judges. On 29 March, the House summoned him to attend ‘forthwith ... all excuses laid aside’, at which (so he later claimed) he returned without delay to prevent a ‘sudden inquiry’.184CJ ii. 493b, 504b; PJ ii. 75; Clarendon SP ii. 141; Clarendon, Life, i. 114. His description of the junto-men’s joyful countenances on receiving news of the king’s rebuff at Hull late in April suggests that he had not yet abandoned his seat entirely – although if he was still attending the House at that time, he kept a very low profile.185Clarendon, Hist. ii. 48. At some point in mid-May, he decided to leave London altogether and to join the king at York. The king’s formal summons to this effect was dated 21 May, and Hyde arrived at court early in June.186Bodl. Clarendon 21, f. 62; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 115-16; Life, i. 113-15, 123; ‘Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon’, Oxford DNB.

Wartime consiglieri, 1642-6

Although Hyde has generally been assigned to the constitutionalist, pro-accommodation wing of the king’s party during the civil war, he seems to have worked hard from the late spring of 1642 to stiffen the king’s resolve against compromise. Whereas royal declarations during the first four months of 1642 – most of which Hyde penned – addressed Parliament and its public pronouncements directly, those he drafted in response to the parliamentary declarations of 19 and 26 May appealed over the heads of the two Houses to the king’s ‘good subjects’ and were designed to woo moderate opinion and thus to build a party for the king. In these declarations and those that followed, Hyde developed the theme of a Parliament manipulated and intimidated by a ‘faction of malignant, schismatical and ambitious persons, whose design was, and always had been, to alter the whole frame of government, both of church and state, and to subject both king and people to their own lawless, arbitrary power and government’.187Clarendon, Hist. ii. 135-64; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 478-9, 486-7, 504-5; ‘Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon’, Oxford DNB.

Among Hyde’s papers is a manuscript in his own hand, written in about June 1642 and entitled ‘at York, advices not pursued’. This may well have included many items on Hyde’s wish-list of royal preconditions for any viable settlement – i.e. that Parliament publicly renounce its declaration of 26 May and that it be torn from the Journals; that its contrivers be rendered incapable of holding any public office ever again; ‘that the pretended power of making ordinances by both Houses without the king’s consent be disavowed’; that Hull be surrendered to the king and Sir John Hotham delivered up for trial; that both Houses be adjourned to Oxford or York; that the Nineteen Propositions be likewise torn from the Journals ‘that posterity may not see the evidence of such boldness or of such dishonour offered to his Majesty’; and so on. Some of these demands featured, in milder form, in the king’s published declarations, but none were conducive to a swift negotiated settlement with Parliament – indeed, quite the opposite. Hyde never forgave the junto for the ‘damnable doctrine’ of de facto republicanism advanced in the declarations of 19 and 26 May and in the Nineteen Propositions, and he clearly preferred a civil war to an accommodation with Parliament based on such terms.188Bodl. Clarendon 21, f. 69; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 170, 173, 182-3; Life, i. 130. Hyde’s efforts to dissuade the king from aggressive steps such as the attempt to enter Hull were motivated, it seems, not by a desire to avoid war at all costs but to forestall a resort to arms until the king could defy Parliament from a position of military strength. In fact, by skillfully exposing the ‘deceitfulness and unwarrantable designs of the contrivers in Parliament’ and by winning hearts and minds to the king’s cause, Hyde did much to hasten the outbreak of civil war. His complicity in the king’s attempt late in June to wrest back control of the navy was not the action of a politician wedded to the idea of an accommodation with his enemies.189Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 197; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 181-3, 206, 212, 216, 220-2, 238, 250-1.

Hyde’s detestation of the junto and any prospect of a soft peace with Parliament is clear from a draft royal declaration dating from late August or early September 1642 among his papers – this time in the hand of his secretary William Edgeman, although the prose is unmistakably Hyde’s – in which the junto and its machinations are exhaustively and passionately denounced. Indeed, it is likely that this was Hyde’s riposte not only to Parliament’s rejection of the king’s peace offer of 25 August but also to those ‘pragmatical’ royalists such as Culpeper who had urged Charles to sue for terms in the first place. Not surprisingly, it was never published.190Bodl. Clarendon 21, ff. 124-33. Nor is it surprising that Hyde was among the first royalist MPs to be disabled from sitting (19 Aug. 1642) and that he was regularly identified by the parliamentarian press and commentators as a hardliner and ‘a man who more industriously opposed peace than any other of the king’s council’.191CJ ii. 715a, 775b, 778a; Advertisements from Yorke and Beverly, July the 20th 1642 (1642), 2 (E.107.30); The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 15 (4-11 Apr. 1643), 116-17 (E.96.4); no. 84 (3-10 Dec. 1644), 673 (E.21.11); Perfect Occurrences no. 9 (21-28 Feb. 1645), sig. I3v (E.258.28); Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 244; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 476.

What put Hyde among the hawks in the king’s wartime counsels (he was appointed a privy councillor and chancellor of the exchequer early in 1643) was his profound attachment to the rule of law and other ‘essential props and supports of the old government’ as the touchstones of political action. These constitutional fundamentals, or ‘landmarks’ as Hyde termed them, included the king’s ‘own just prerogative ... as a part of, and defence to, those laws’. Consequently, he ‘not only never consented to any diminution of the king’s authority but always wished that the king would not consent to it, with what importunity or impetuosity soever it was desired and pressed’. Hyde’s determination not to barter away any essentials of the ancient constitution – rather than helping to bridge the gap between royalists and parliamentarians – militated against the king making the kind of generous concessions necessary to create an irresistible momentum towards peace at Westminster.192Clarendon SP ii. 411; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 80; Life, i. 89; D. Scott, ‘Rethinking royalist politics, 1642-9’, in The English Civil War ed. J. Adamson (Basingstoke, 2009), 41.

Hyde’s favoured tactic for winning the war was not, as is often supposed, a negotiated settlement based on a genuine desire for compromise. Instead, he used the occasion of negotiations – as in the Oxford treaty of March-April 1643 – to force what would amount to a parliamentarian capitulation. Rejecting the idea of a settlement based on Parliament’s official peace propositions, he favoured the secret and far more lenient terms being offered to the king by Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland – one of the leaders of the peace party in the two Houses. Hyde believed that if the king conferred office and favour on the earl it would create such a majority for peace at Westminster that further parliamentarian resistance would collapse. Hyde’s tactics here were essentially a more subtle yet practical version of the plots and designs that Digby often went in for – which helps to explain why the two men remained on close terms during the war. Charles, however, was not persuaded that any concession on his part would enable Northumberland to overcome opposition from the’ fiery spirits’ at Westminster, and the negotiations came to nothing.193Clarendon, Life, i. 148-57; Scott, ‘Rethinking royalist politics’, 46, 246.

Hyde may well have used the Oxford Parliament of 1644 to advance a similar design to the one he had attempted during the Oxford treaty. He claimed that the summoning of the two Houses to Oxford had been his own idea, and there seems little reason to doubt him.194Clarendon, Hist. iii. 256, 259. However, it is unlikely that he was the key figure in selling this stratagem to the king. For this delicate task, Hyde apparently relied upon his fellow privy councillors – and above all, perhaps, on Digby, who referred to the Oxford Parliament as ‘the surest and readiest way to a re-establishment of his Majesty in his just rights and powers of any course that hath been yet attempted’.195Clarendon, Hist. iii. 260-1; LJ vi. 368. Digby’s support for Hyde’s scheme would have carried considerable weight with the king and may have helped to re-assure the queen, who rightly suspected that the Parliament would pressure Charles into making peace.

Yet although often seen as an important episode in the court moderates’ search for an accommodation, the Oxford Parliament may not have been conceived primarily as a platform for a formal treaty. There are signs that the Parliament’s letter to the earl of Essex of 27 January 1644 to broker a peace was part of a carefully orchestrated, court-sponsored plan – of which Hyde and Digby were probably the main architects – to detach Essex and the anti-Scots faction at Westminster from the fiery spirits, or at least to push conflict between these two factions to crisis point. The terms upon which the Oxford Parliament was summoned, late in 1643, were evidently designed to reassure Essex and the parliamentarian peace interest as to the king’s constitutionalist intentions, while at the same time enraging the war party by portraying Westminster’s alliance with the Covenanters as a betrayal of English honour and interests. This delicate balancing act was achieved by deliberately fudging the Oxford Parliament’s constitutional status. Hyde was able to head off calls at court for the Parliament to represent either a dissolution or an adjournment of the Long Parliament. The 1641 constitutional settlement was to be fully observed, even down to the exclusion of bishops from the Upper House.196Clarendon, Hist. iii. 261, 293-5; Life, i. 179-82; Scott, ‘Notorious Ned Hyde’ (Unpub. ppr. Clarendon conf. Oxf. 6 Mar. 2009).

Hyde and Culpeper were delegated to manage the Commons in the Oxford Parliament – and specifically, ‘to dispose the rest [of the Members] to think of the best expedient to provide present money, without which the army would not be able march in the spring ... and to prevent the running into any excesses of discourse, which so great assemblies can very hardly be kept from’.197Clarendon, Hist. iii. 293. Although any plans to use the Oxford Parliament to foment a coup at Westminster came to nothing – partly because Essex refused to play his allotted role – it was successful in raising money for the royalist cause. It is likely that Hyde’s financial expertise – little commented on by his biographers – had been acquired during his collaboration with the junto at Westminster in 1640-1.

With the failure of the Oxford Parliament to deliver a fatal blow to parliamentary unity, the king embraced the policy favoured by the queen and her circle of negotiating a military alliance with the Irish Catholic Confederates. To Hyde, Nicholas and indeed Culpeper, this seemed as fraught with danger to England’s ancient constitution as did the Westminster Parliament inviting in the Scots. The Scots’ march into England in January 1644 left the royalist grandees with only two real choices: either they must bring in foreign troops themselves – most obviously in the form of a Confederate army – or they must seek a genuine accommodation with Parliament. Hyde could not stomach either policy – and indeed, as a critic of an Irish Catholic alliance he became part of the king’s problem rather than a means to its solution.198Scott, ‘Rethinking royalist politics’, 48-9. Although he was one of the privy councillors who effectively forced Charles into negotiations at Uxbridge early in 1645, the ascendancy of the Independents and the Scots, and the king’s intransigence, meant he had no opportunity to try one last shot at dividing the Westminster Parliament to breaking point. Moreover, Hyde himself, although still willing to countenance relief for puritan tender consciences in the matter of objectionable ceremonies (not full liberty of conscience), was adamant on retaining the government and lands of the Church of England – which no one on the parliamentarian side would accept.199Clarendon, Hist. iii. 475-90, 492-501; Life, i. 184-5; Hardacre, ‘Hyde and liberty to tender consciences’, 28-30; ‘M. Dzelzainis, ‘‘Undoubted realities’: Clarendon on sacrilege’, HJ xxxiii. 518, 528-9.

Following the Uxbridge treaty’s inevitable collapse, the king renewed his overtures to the Confederates and revived a scheme mooted in 1644 for a council in the west under the prince of Wales – which was conceived in part as a means of purging the court of men such as Hyde who were thought to be ‘something rigid in the business of the Irish’.200Carte, Life of Ormond, vi. 70; Scot, ‘Rethinking royalist politics’, 49. In March 1645, the prince’s councillors were packed off to Bristol and a miserable career as second-class courtiers, which ended (in Hyde’s case) in exile first on Jersey and then on the continent.

Later career, exile and death

For the remainder of the 1640s, Hyde was largely obliged to wait upon events, and he occupied some of his time by making a start on the History of the Rebellion, which was intended ‘to present to the world [and to the king in particular] a full and clear narration of the grounds, circumstances and artifices of this rebellion’ and how such ‘mischiefs’ might be avoided for the future.201Clarendon, Hist. i. 1. If the Scots had won the battle of Preston in 1648 or Dunbar in 1650, he would doubtless have finished this great work much sooner, for it would have been the queen and her circle, the architects of a royalist-Scottish alliance – a strategy anathema to Hyde – who would have dominated the restored court. As it was, the Scots’ defeat at the battle of Worcester in September 1651 left the field clear for Hyde and other anti-foreign intervention royalists – and it was this group, and Hyde in particular, that had the greatest influence in royal counsels through to the Restoration and beyond.202LJ xii. 155a; Scot, ‘Rethinking royalist politics’, 57.

Created earl of Clarendon in 1661, Hyde was effectively Charles II’s first minister until he was toppled from power by his court rivals in 1667. He spent the remainder of his life in exile in France, completing the History and adding an autobiographical companion work, The Life. He died at Rouen on 9 December 1674, and his body was subsequently brought back to England and buried privately in Westminster Abbey on 4 January 1675.203CP; Ollard, Clarendon and His Friends, 346.

Hyde made at least three wills at various points in his life. In the first of these, dated April 1647, he declared himself a loyal son of the Church of England, ‘which I do in my soul believe to have been ... both in doctrine and discipline the most pure and perfect in the Christian world’. He asked that his children be educated in the doctrine of the church, but though himself convinced that episcopacy was more agreeable to the word of God and to the peace and happiness of England than any other form of church government, he was not certain that it was ‘so essential to the soul’s health that no other may be complied with’.204Clarendon SP ii. 358-61. In his second will, dated January 1666, he expressed the hope that his wife and children would ‘never swerve from that religion’ of the Church of England. He left the decision of whether to publish his writings, ‘which I have not for many years perused’, to his eldest son Henry Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, with the advice of his old friends from Great Tew, Gilbert Sheldon (now archbishop of Canterbury) and George Morley (bishop of Winchester), along with several others including Palmer and Orlando Bridgeman*. In addition, he bequeathed money and other gifts totalling £15,600 and a legacy of £200 a year.205Bodl. Clarendon 83, ff. 35-42; Ollard, Clarendon and His Friends, 347-51.

Hyde’s last will – the one entered in probate – was written only eight days before his death in December 1674. It was very brief and made no mention of his estate, except, that is, his ‘papers and writings’. These he bequeathed to Cornbury and his (Hyde’s) second surviving son Lawrence, ‘and leave them entire to their disposal as they shall be advised, either by suppressing or publishing’ according to the advice and approval of the overseers of his will, Sheldon and Morley. Hyde requested that the two clerics ‘be both suitors to his Majesty on my children’s behalf, who have all possible need of his Majesty’s charity, being the children of a father who never committed fault against his Majesty’.206PROB11/349, f. 132.

Assessment

The classic view of Hyde as a ‘bridge-builder’ between king and Parliament during the civil-war period, a moderate tory avant la lettre, is surely mistaken. His attitude towards concessions to Parliament did not harden after the king’s defeat in 1645-6, as has been argued – it had already ossified in the summer of 1642 in reaction to the Nineteen Propositions.207‘Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon’, Oxford DNB. In the 18 months before the framing of ‘these articles of deposition’, as Hyde termed them, it can plausibly be argued that he was following the agenda for settlement negotiated between Charles and the junto (particularly its Bedfordian wing) in the winter of 1640-1 and outlined in the king’s speech of 23 January 1641.208Clarendon, Hist. ii. 170. Here, Charles made a number of significant concessions to the reformist cause – ‘that all courts of justice may be reformed according to law’; that prerogative taxation be abolished and (by inference) royal finances entrusted to parliamentary management; that prelacy be curbed ‘according to the wisdom of former times’; that ‘innovations’ in the church be removed; and that a law be passed for frequent, although certainly not annual, Parliaments, but only ‘so that it trench neither against my honour nor against the ancient prerogative of the crown’. However, he would not countenance any fundamental alteration – as opposed to reform – of government and, in particular, any suggestion that the bishops’ votes be removed or episcopacy abolished.209Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 154-5; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 167-9. Hyde clung stubbornly to this agenda for settlement, even though Bedford’s death and the execution of Strafford rendered it a dead letter. By failing to move beyond this royally-approved programme or what he regarded as the inviolable constitutional axioms on which it rested, Hyde contributed both to the destruction of Charles I and the restoration of Charles II.