Clarendon Press

“ To superficial observers, or observers who have convinced themselves that high lights and bright colourings are of the essence of the art of the prose writer, Clarendon may seem tame and jejune. He is in reality just the contrary. His wood is tough enough and close-grained enough, but there is plenty of sap coursing through it. In yet a third respect, which is less closely connected with the purely formal aspect of style, Clarendon stands, if not pre-eminent, very high among historians. ”

“ He had, according to Clarendon, ‘an unusual aspect, which made men think there was somewhat in him of extraordinary.’ He seems to have had long hair, a lustrous countenance, and the expression of a man looking not with, but through, his eyes. ”

“ His talents for business were as remarkable as his talents for debate. “He was,” says Clarendon, “of an industry and vigilance not to be tired out or wearied by the most laborious, and of parts not to be imposed upon by the most subtle and sharp.” Yet it was rather to his moral than to his intellectual qualities that he was indebted for the vast influence which he possessed. “When this parliament began,”—we again quote Clarendon,—“the eyes of all men were fixed upon him, as their patriae pater, and the pilot that must steer the vessel through the tempests and rocks which threatened it. ”

“ Clarendon states that ‘he understood not only the whole science and mystery of the law at least equally with any man who had ever sate in that place, but had a clear conception of the whole policy of the government both of church and state. ”

“ With the fate of Clarendon before his eyes, a witness of the injury which this mysterious mode of publishing the History of Lord Clarendon had occasioned, the son of Bishop Burnet suffered that congenial work, the “History of his own Times,” to participate in the same ill-fortune. On the publication of the first volume, this editor promised that the autograph “should be deposited in the Cottonian Library for the satisfaction of the public, as soon as the second volume should be printed.” ”

“ The value of any statement, therefore, in the published History depends chiefly on whether it is taken from the History proper or the Life. In 1671 these two manuscripts were united by Clarendon with certain alterations and modifications making Books i.-vii. of the published History, while Books viii.-xv. were written subsequently, and, being composed for the most part without materials, are generally inaccurate, with the notable exception of Book ix., made up from two narratives written at Jersey in 1646, and containing very little from the Life. ”

“ Clarendon was well aware of one cause of its superiority. 'It is not,' he says, ' a collection of records, or an admission to the view and perusal of the most secret letters and acts of state [that] can enable a man to write a history, if there be an absence of that genius and spirit and soul of an historian which is contracted by the knowledge and course and method of business, and by conversation and familiarity in the inside of courts, and [with] the most active and eminent persons in the government' (Tracts, p. 180) . ”

“ Clarendon died, as he had lived, with energy unconquered, with hope unabated, still clinging to all that made human life more noble in action, more stately in its ordering, more lofty in its ideals. Alike by temperament, by training, by all that had roused his enthusiastic devotion, and attracted his passionate loyalty, and by the moulding of a long experience of struggle and of suffering, he was apt to frame these ideals on the historic records of the past. ”

“ But I was speaking of my lord Clarendon's history.—Is it not a very discouraging consideration to all future benefactors that so great a man, as this noble author, should watch so many nights, and waste so much of his brain, only to enable one man to fare sumptuously every day ”

“ To his historic sense a place amongst the nobility of his country was attractive, and its stateliness was something which his imagination clothed with more than merely superficial allurement. It was from no selfish feeling and no vanity of personal display, that he conceived the idea of leaving to those who were to come after him an inheritance compatible with that position. It would be unjust to blame Clarendon because he gave the scanty leisure, which his absorbing business permitted him, to attaining that object. ”

“ The Civil War had left an ample crop of bravos, who were to be hired for any outrage, and whose excesses added to the restless uneasiness that prevailed, and that made men nervously apprehensive of revolution. The religious enthusiast, and the blustering cut-throat of Alsatia, were equally open to the persuasions of any turbulent faction which sought to defy the law. The forces of order which Clarendon commanded were but scanty. ”

“ A party of younger men of the king’s own age, more congenial to his temperament, and eager to drive the old chancellor from power and to succeed him in office, had for some time been endeavouring to undermine his influence by ridicule and intrigue. Surrounded by such general and violent animosity, Clarendon’s only hope could be in the support of the king. ”

“ The King's pliant humour had permitted to the various Dissenters an easy access to his person, and he was only too prone to give rise to expectations which were bound to be disappointed, and to unwary boasts on the part of the Nonconformists, which stimulated the Churchmen to an unyielding temper. The Bishops had been engaged during the vacation in revising the Book of Common Prayer, and sharp division of opinion had arisen amongst them—a division in regard to which Clarendon held strong views. ”

“ No one loathed more utterly than he the disgusting licentiousness out of which the whole sordid story grew, and no one treated with more contemptuous austerity the objects of the King's passion, and the pandars to his vices. However high his own ideal of domestic virtue, Clarendon was a man of the world, not blind to its vices, and not eager to pry into scandals or pursue the secrets of private life. It was not only the vice of Charles's courtiers, it was the sickening parade of debauchery in all its nakedness, which seemed to him to make the Court unmanly and contemptible. ”

“ Alike from the ungrudging admiration which Clarendon expresses for his life-long friend, from the captious criticism of those to whom his long tarrying on the stage was irksome, and from the irresponsible gossip of Pepys, we have a vivid picture of the veteran statesman as he appeared to his contemporaries. In outward carriage grave and distant, girt with that ample ceremony of manner which repelled familiarity; easy and prompt in debate, with that sense of self-confidence which permits a man to think on his feet, and to dispense with any niceties of diction ”

“ At the Inner Temple, where he was admitted in November 1620, called to the bar in 1630, and elected a bencher in 1660, he was inducted into law by Selden, who made him his close friend—to him is dedicated the ‘Vindiciæ Maris Clausi’—and eventually co-legatee with Sir Matthew Hale of his library, and co-executor of his will. According to Clarendon, also an early friend, his legal studies ‘disposed him to least reverence to the crown and most to popular authority, yet without inclination to any change of government’ (Life, ed. 1827, i. 37) . ”

“ Candour is no doubt a virtue, and Clarendon deserves honour for his bold words. But to tell the King that he was at once a sluggard and a debauchee; that he had lost the respect, and would probably soon forfeit the obedience of his subjects; and to scold his jocular raillery by painting him as courting the society and imitating the manners of buffoons, was scarcely a tactful way of insinuating a lesson of caution and establishing the confidence which makes a servant congenial to his master. We must honour Clarendon for his manliness ”

“ As no one, who regards with attachment the present system of the English constitution, can look upon Lord Clarendon as an excellent minister, or a friend to the soundest principles of civil and religious liberty; so no man whatever can avoid considering his incessant deviations from the great duties of an historian as a moral blemish in his character. He dares very frequently to say what is not true, and what he must have known to be otherwise; he does not dare to say what is true. ”

“ In the English language, Clarendon is the only history worthy of the attention of the student in search of an author who illustrates the science of human nature by a reference to the recorded experience of past generations. ”

“ It is no part of Clarendon's biography to linger over the revolting details of that disgraceful time. Even in Clarendon's day, the King had lamentably failed to maintain his dignity or to discharge his task. His life now outraged all decency, and his Court fell below the standard of the common bagnio. His prime favourite and his chief Minister was Buckingham, stained by every crime, at once coward and bully, haughty in his arrogant insolence, and yet stooping to intrigues that would have disgraced the veriest rogue from the hulks. ”

“ To the irritation which the country party had conceived against the Court, and to the obstinate determination that the royal prerogative should yield to the will of Parliament, there was now added a bitter fight between the two Houses; and here again Clarendon's long-cherished opinions forced him to take the unpopular side. Once more the habits of a lifetime refused to disappear before an unwarranted, and, as he thought, dangerous innovation. We may doubt whether he duly estimated the forces to which he was opposing himself, or rightly gauged the direction in which men's minds were moving. ”

“ As a statesman Clarendon had obvious limitations and failings. He brought to the consideration of political questions an essentially legal but also a narrow mind, conceiving the law, “that great and admirable mystery,” and the constitution as fixed, unchangeable and sufficient for all time, in contrast to Pym, who regarded them as living organisms capable of continual development and evolution ”

“ His income, however, as lord chancellor was very large, and Clarendon maintained considerable state, considering it due to the dignity of the monarchy that the high officers should carry the external marks of greatness. The house built by him in St James’s was one of the most magnificent ever seen in England, and was filled with a collection of portraits, chiefly those of contemporary statesmen and men of letters. ”

“ But others are evidently messages transmitted from Whitehall to the Chancellor. In all alike there is a singular lack of formality, or even of orderliness, and they might have passed between business colleagues, who were on terms of close intimacy and easy familiarity. Clarendon's tone is almost uniformly brusque and off-hand, and he must have tried the King's patience terribly by the infamous illegibility of his handwriting. Charles's writing is a schoolboy scrawl, but it is uniformly legible. ”

“ If we are to believe Clarendon, however, "The king was very melancholic, and quickly discovered that he had lost reputation at home and abroad, and those counsellors who had been most faulty, either through want of courage or wisdom, for at that time few of them wanted fidelity, never afterwards recovered spirit enough to do their duty, but gave themselves up to those who so much had outwitted them, every man shifting the fault from himself." ”

“ He obtained a rich wife about the age of three-and-twenty; an age before which few men are conspicuous much to their advantage. He was now, however, in parliament and at court; and, if he spent part of his time in privacy, it is reasonable to suppose, that he endeavoured the improvement of his mind as well as of his fortune.
That Clarendon might misjudge the motive of his retirement is the more probable, because he has evidently mistaken the commencement of his poetry, which he supposes him not to have attempted before thirty. ”

“ Only a few months before, Dryden had poured out a poetical tribute, from that mint of flattery of which his expenditure was so lavish, and had told Clarendon that he and the King bounded the horizon of the universe to their country, and had compared his wise counsels to the rich perfumes of the East. Even Louis XIV. did not think it below his dignity to solicit the Chancellor's favour, and to be jealous of his power. But Clarendon was not blind to the influences that were undermining that power. ”

“ He scarcely even recognized how utter was his contempt for the man himself, as he now was, with all his vulgar licentiousness, all his superficial good nature, all his essential selfishness and cynicism. Clarendon himself would have been surprised had he known how much of that contempt he had unconsciously revealed, by an occasional phrase, or a half-perceptible stroke of sarcasm. The effect of the letter was plain enough, and it conveyed a covert defiance from the fallen Minister, both to his faithless master and to his triumphant foes. ”

“ Charges of corruption brought against Clarendon in the lives of judges Grlyn and Jenkvns led to the expulsion of Wood from the university and the burning of his book (1693) . These and other charges are brought together in Historical Inquiries respecting the Character of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, by George Agar Ellis, 1827, and answered in Lewis's Lives of the Contemporaries of Lord Clarendon, 1852, vol. i. preface, pt. i.; and in Lister's Life, vol. ii. chap. xix. ”

“ Clarendon found himself in the position of a fairly wealthy man, and it was not unnatural that he should desire to maintain that position which was commensurate with his rank. He knew himself to be the founder of a family which must take its place in the ranks of the great nobility of England, and must hold a conspicuous place in her annals. To him, as to many men for whom the pettiness of personal position weighs for little, the maintenance of that family in worthy dignity became a legitimate object of ambition. ”

“ Clarendon has had two interviews with Graham with very full, frank, and amicable discussion on all points. Clarendon is struck with his great sagacity, and at the same time with a pusillanimity which goes far to neutralise that sagacity. I have remarked this myself, and that his judgement is often blinded by his fears. ”