ABSTRACT
Given the multifarious nature of their experiences, identifying a synecdoche, a case study somehow representative of royalist exiles in the English Revolution, presents a significant challenge. This chapter presents a close reading of Hyde's Contemplations and Reflections on the Psalms of David. It plots the public and private coordinates of these and other exilic reference points, and begin to assess the ways in which royalist exiles like Hyde negotiate the convergent but also competing demands imposed on them by the dyad of political disaster and personal privation. According to Hyde, the moment Arundel had felt personally threatened by the military conflagration, any sense of loyalty to the king had quickly and shamefully been subordinated to the imperative of self-preservation. However, long before the civil wars there was an established genre of Psalmic writing in England pertinent to spiritual encouragement in times of personal and political crises, to which Hyde, in Contemplations, shows himself a literary heir.
