1 - Memory and Merit: The Many Incarnations of Lord Inchiquin

Summary

Ld Inchiquin … is severed from all the rest of his countrymen … I have some reason to believe that being receaved prejudice from those of his owne Country who are much believed in this Courte, and who upon the counte of his heresy will not be willinge to see him prosper, which is a madnesse no other nation under heaven but the Irish could be capable of, under so greate calumnityes …

Sir Edward Hyde to Richard Bellings, 12 June 1654, Paris

He who shall retain a memory of their carriage towards their natural prince, hath nothing for his particular to charge them with other than their sordid flattery and the too hasty growth and the extremity of their passion for him.

Richard Bellings to the Marquis of Ormond, 10 April 1651

Fearing the ‘deception of posterity’ by others and seeking the vindication of allies provided Sir Edward Hyde with the motivation to take up the pen and produce, over the course of some twenty-five years, his monumental History of the Rebellion. The History has since become more a mirror to the scars left upon Hyde by the experience of civil war and exile than an accurate historical account. At either side of the exile of the 1650s, Hyde's writing was undoubtedly intended to deceive, cloaking disillusionment and personal failures with a narrative of conflicted social orders and false loyalties.