Chapter 3 Clarendon.

Clarendon's History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England is made up of two works composed with different purposes and at a distance of twenty years. The first, which may be called the 'Manuscript History', belongs to 1646-8; the second, the 'Manuscript Life', to 1668-70. They were combined to form the History as we now read it in 1671, when new sections were added to give continuity and to complete the narrative.

On Clarendon's death in 1674 the manuscripts passed to his two sons, Henry Hyde, second Earl of Clarendon, and Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester; and under the supervision of the latter a transcript of the History was made for the printers. The work was published at Oxford in three handsome folio volumes in 1702, 1703, and 1704, and became the property of the University. The portions of the 'Manuscript Life' which Clarendon had not incorporated in the History as being too personal, were published by the University in 1759, under the title The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, and were likewise printed from a transcript.[1]

The original manuscripts, now also in the possession of the University of which Clarendon's family were such generous benefactors, enable us to fix the dates of composition. We know whether a part belongs originally to the 'Manuscript History' or the 'Manuscript Life', or whether it was pieced in later. More than this, Clarendon every now and again inserts the month and the day on which he began or ended a section. We can thus trace the stages by which his great work was built up, and learn how his art developed. We can also judge how closely the printed texts represent what Clarendon had written. The old controversy on the authenticity of the first edition has long been settled.[2] The original editors did their work faithfully according to the editorial standards of their day; and they were well within the latitude allowed them by the terms of Clarendon's instructions when they occasionally omitted a passage, or when they exercised their somewhat prim and cautious taste in altering and polishing phrases that Clarendon had dashed down as quickly as his pen could move.[3] Later editors have restored the omitted passages and scrupulously reproduced Clarendon's own words. But no edition has yet reproduced his spelling. In the characters printed in this volume the attempt is made, for the first time it is believed, to represent the original manuscripts accurately to the letter.[4]

On the defeat of the last Royalist army in Cornwall in February 1646 it was necessary to provide for the safety of Prince Charles, and Clarendon, in these days Sir Edward Hyde, accompanied him when on the night of March 2 he set sail for Scilly. They arrived in Scilly on March 4, and there they remained till April 16, when the danger of capture by the Parliamentary fleet compelled them to make good their escape to Jersey. It is a remarkable testimony to the vigour of Clarendon's mind that even in the midst of this crisis he should have been able to begin his History. He began it in Scilly on March 18, 1646-the date is at the head of his manuscript; and once he was settled in Jersey he immediately resumed it. But in writing his History he did not, in these days, think of himself only as an historian. He was a trusted adviser of the defeated party, and he planned his faithful narrative of what he knew so well not solely to vindicate the character and conduct of the King, but also with the immediate purpose of showing how the disasters had been brought out, and, by implication, how further disaster might be avoided. The proof of this is to be found not in the History itself, where he seems to have his eye only on 'posterity' and 'a better age', but in his correspondence. In a letter written to Sir Edward Nicholas, the King's secretary, on November 15, 1646, Clarendon spoke of his History at some length:

As soon as I found myself alone, I thought the best way to provide myself for new business against the time I should be called to it (for, Mr. Secretary, you and I must once again to business) was to look over the faults of the old; and so I resolved (which you know I threatned you with long ago) to write the history of these evil times, and of this most lovely Rebellion. Well; without any other help than a few diurnals I have wrote of longer paper than this, and in the same fine small hand, above threescore sheets of paper.... I write with all fidelity and freedom of all I know, of persons and things, and the oversights and omissions on both sides, in order to what they desired; so that you will believe it will make mad work among friends and foes, if it were published; but out of it enough may be chosen to make a perfect story, and the original kept for their perusal, who may be the wiser for knowing the most secret truths; and you know it will be an easier matter to blot out two sheets, than to write half an one. If I live to finish it (as on my conscience I shall, for I write apace), I intend to seal it up, and have it always with me. If I die, I appoint it to be delivered to you, to whose care (with a couple of good fellows more) I shall leave it; that either of you dying, you may so preserve it, that in due time somewhat by your care may be published, and the original be delivered to the King, who will not find himself flattered in it, nor irreverently handled: though, the truth will better suit a dead than a living man. Three hours a day I assign to this writing task; the rest to other study and books; so I doubt not after seven years time in this retirement, you will find me a pretty fellow.[5]

From this, as from other passages in his letters, Clarendon's first intentions are clear. The History was to be a repository of authentic information on 'this most lovely Rebellion', constructed with the specifically didactic purpose of showing the King and his advisers what lessons were to be learned from their errors; they would be 'the wiser for knowing the most secret truths'. At first he looked on his work as containing the materials of a 'perfect story', but as he proceeded his ambitions grew. He had begun to introduce characters; and when in the spring of 1647 he was about to write his first character of Lord Falkland, he had come to the view that 'the preservation of the fame and merit of persons, and deriving the same to posterity, is no less the business of history than the truth of things'.[6] He gave much thought to the character of Falkland, 'whom the next age shall be taught', he was determined, 'to value more than the present did.'[7] Concurrently with the introduction of characters he paid more attention to the literary, as distinct from the didactic, merits of his work. We find him comparing himself with other historians, and considering what Livy and Tacitus would have done in like circumstances. By the spring of 1648 he had brought down his narrative to the opening of the campaign of 1644. Earlier in the year he had been commanded by the King to be ready to rejoin Prince Charles, and shortly afterwards he received definite instructions from the Queen to attend on her and the Prince at Paris. He left Jersey in June, and with his re-entry into active politics his History was abruptly ended. The seven years of retirement which he had anticipated were cut down by the outbreak of the Second Civil War to two; and within a year the King for whose benefit he had begun this History was led to the scaffold. Not for twenty years was Clarendon again to have the leisure to be an historian. When in 1668 he once more took up his pen, it was not a continuation of the first work, but an entirely new work, that came in steady flow from the abundance of his knowledge.

Clarendon returned to England as Lord Chancellor in 1660, and for seven years enjoyed the power which he had earned by ceaseless devotion to his two royal masters. The ill success of the war with the Dutch, jealousy of his place and influence, the spiteful opposition of the King's chief mistress, and the King's own resentment at an attitude that showed too little deference and imprudently suggested the old relations of tutor and pupil, all combined to bring about his fall. He fled from England on November 30, 1667, and was never to set foot in England again. Broken in health and spirit, he sought in vain for many months a resting-place in France, and not till July 1668 did he find a new home at Montpelier. Here his health improved, and here he remained till June 1671. These were busy years of writing, and by far the greater portion of his published work, if his letters and state papers be excluded, belongs to this time. First of all he answered the charge of high treason brought against him by the House of Commons in A Discourse, by Way of Vindication of my self, begun on July 24, 1668; he wrote most of his Reflections upon Several Christian Duties, Divine and Moral, a collection of twenty-five essays, some of considerable length, on subjects largely suggested by his own circumstances; and he completed between December 1668 and February 1671 his Contemplations and Reflections upon the Psalms of David, an elaborate exposition extending to well over four hundred folio pages of print, which he had begun at Jersey in 1647. But his great work at this time was his Life, begun on July 23, 1668, and brought down to 1660 by August 1, 1670. It is by far the most elaborate autobiography that had yet been attempted in English. The manuscript consists of over six hundred pages, and each page contains on an average about a thousand words. He wrote with perfect freedom, for this work, unlike the earlier History, was not intended for the eyes of the King, and the didactic days were over. He wrote too with remarkable ease. The very appearance of the manuscript, where page follows page with hardly an erasure, and the 'fine hand' becomes finer and finer, conveys even a sense of relief and pleasure. His pen seems to move of itself and the long and elaborate sentences to evolve of their own free will. The story of his life became a loose framework into which he could fit all that he wished to tell of his own times; and the more he told, his vindication would be the more complete. 'Even unawares', he admitted, 'many things are inserted not so immediately applicable to his own person, which possibly may hereafter, in some other method, be communicated to the world.'[8] He welcomed the opportunity to tell all that he knew. There was no reason for reticence. He wrote of men as of things frankly as he knew them. More than a history of the Rebellion, his Life is also a picture of the society in which he had moved. It is the work which contains most of his characters.[9]

His early History had been left behind in England on his sudden flight. For about four years he was debarred from all intercourse with his family, but in 1671 the royal displeasure so far relaxed that his second son, Laurence, was granted a pass to visit him, and he brought the manuscript that had been left untouched for twenty years. They met in June at Moulins, which was to be Clarendon's home till April 1674. Once the old and the new work were both in his hands, he cast his great History of the Rebellion in its final form, and thus 'finished the work which his heart was most set upon'. In June 1672 he turned to the 'Continuation of his Life', which deals with his Chancellorship and his fall, and was not intended 'ever for a public view, or for more than the information of his children'. As its conclusion shows, it was his last work to be completed, but while engaged on it he found time to write much else, including his reply to Hobbes's Leviathan. 'In all this retirement', he could well say, in a passage which reads like his obituary, 'he was very seldom vacant, and then only when he was under some sharp visitation of the gout, from reading excellent books, or writing some animadversions and exercitations of his own, as appears by the papers and notes which he left.' The activity of these years of banishment is remarkable in a man who had turned sixty and had passed through about thirty years of continuous storm. His intellectual vitality was unimpaired. The old English jollity that Evelyn had remarked in him in happier if more difficult days had gone, but the even temper from which it had sprung still remained. He was at his best as a writer then; writing was never an effort to him, but in his exile it was an exercise and recreation. He could have said with Dryden that 'what judgment I had increases rather than diminishes; and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject'.

He was still in hopes that he would be allowed to return to England, to die in his own country and among his children. 'Seven years', he said, 'was a time prescribed and limited by God himself for the expiration of some of his greatest judgements.'[10] In the seventh year of his banishment he left Moulins for Rouen, so as to be nearer home. His hopes were vain. He died at Rouen on December 9, 1674.[11] His body was brought to England for burial in Westminster.

* * * * *

Clarendon had been interested in the study of character all his life. His earliest work was 'The Difference and Disparity between the Estates and Conditions of George Duke of Buckingham and Robert Earl of Essex'. Sir Henry Wotton had written observations on these statesmen 'by way of parallel', and Clarendon pointed out as a sequel wherein they differed. It is a somewhat laboured composition in comparison with his later work, a young man's careful essay that lacks the confidence that comes with experience, but it shows at an early stage the talents which knowledge and practice were to develop into mastery. The school in which he learned most was the circle of his friends. Few men can have owed more to their friends than he did, or have been more generous in acknowledging the debt. He tells us he was often heard to say that 'next the immediate blessing and providence of God Almighty, which had preserved him throughout the whole course of his life (less strict than it ought to have been) from many dangers and disadvantages, in which many other young men were lost, he owed all the little he knew, and the little good that was in him, to the friendships and conversation he had still been used to, of the most excellent men in their several kinds that lived in that age; by whose learning, and information, and instruction, he formed his studies, and mended his understanding, and by whose gentleness and sweetness of behaviour, and justice, and virtue, and example, he formed his manners, subdued that pride and suppressed that heat and passion he was naturally inclined to be transported with.' He used often to say, he continues, that 'he never was so proud, or thought himself so good a man, as when he was the worst man in the company'. He cultivated his friendships, it is true, with an eye to his advancement; but it is equally true that he had a nature which invited friendships. He enjoyed to the full the pleasure of living and seeing others live, and a great part of his pleasure consisted in observing how men differed in their habits and foibles. He tells how Ben Jonson did not understand why young Mr. Hyde should neglect the delights of his company at the call of business; how Selden, with all his stupendous learning, was never more studious of anything than his ease; how Earle gave a wrong impression by the negligence of his dress and mien, whereas no man was more wary and cultivated in his behaviour and discourse; how Chillingworth argued for the pleasure of arguing and thereby irritated his friends and at last grew confident of nothing; how Hales, great in scholarship but diminutive in stature, liked to be by himself but had a very open and pleasant conversation in congenial company; how Waller nursed his reputation for ready wit by seeming to speak on the sudden what he had thoroughly considered. In all his accounts of the friends of his youth Clarendon is in the background, but we picture him moving among them at ease, conscious of his inferiority in learning and brilliance and the gentler virtues, yet trusting to his own judgement, and convinced that every man worth knowing has a pronounced individuality. In these happy and irresponsible days, when he numbered poets among his friends, he himself wrote poetry. Little of it is preserved. He contributed introductory verses to Davenant's Albovine, and composed verses on the death of Donne. His poetry was well enough known for Dryden to allude to it during his Lord Chancellorship, in the address presented to him at the height of his power in 1662:

The Muses, who your early Courtship boast,

Though now your Flames are with their Beauty lost,

Yet watch their Time, that if you have forgot

They were your Mistresses, the world may not.

But first the law claimed him, and then politics, and then came the Civil War. As Privy Councillor and Chancellor of the Exchequer he was in the thick of the conflict. The men whom he had now to study were men of affairs. He had the clear and unimpassioned vision which often goes with a warm temperament, and could scrutinize his friends without endangering his affection for them. However deeply his feelings might be engaged, he had taken a pleasure in trying to see them exactly as they were. When he came to judge his political enemies he continued the same attitude of detachment, and studiously cultivated it. 'I am careful', he said in a private letter,[12] 'to do justice to every man who hath fallen in the quarrel, on which side soever.' 'I know myself', he said in the History,[13] 'to be very free from any of those passions which naturally transport men with prejudice towards the persons whom they are obliged to mention, and whose actions they are at liberty to censure.' It was beyond human nature for a man who had lived through what he did to be completely unprejudiced. He did not always scrupulously weigh what he knew would be to the discredit of the Parliamentary leaders, nor did he ignore mere Royalist rumour, as in the character of Pym. But his characters of them are often more favourable than might have been expected. He may show his personal dislike, or even his sense of their crime, but behind this he permits us to see the qualities which contributed to their success. There can be no reasonable objection to his characters of Hampden and Cromwell. Political partisans find them disappointing, and they are certainly not the final verdict. The worst that can be said of them is that they are drawn from a wrong point of view; but from that point of view their honesty is unquestionable. He does not distinguish men by their party. The folly of his own side is exhibited as relentlessly as the knavery of his opponents. Of no one did he write a more unfavourable character than the Earl of Arundel. He explains the failure of Laud, and he does not conceal the weakness of Charles.

There is a broad distinction between his earlier and later characters. While he was still in the midst of the conflict and hoped to influence it by stating what he knew, he depicted the individual in relation to events. When the conflict was over and he was at leisure to draw on his recollections, he made the individual to a greater degree the representative of the type. But the distinction is not clearly marked, and Clarendon may not have suspected it. His habitual detachment was assisted by his exile. The displeasure of his ungrateful master, from whom he had never been separated during seventeen difficult years, had proved the vanity of the little things of life. He looked at men from a distance that obscures what is insignificant, and shows only the essential.

All his characters are clearly defined. We never confound them; we never have any doubt of how he understood them. He sees men as a whole before he begins to describe them, and then his only difficulty, as his manuscripts show, is to make his pen move fast enough. He does not build up his characters. He does not, as many others do, start with the external features in the hope of arriving at the central facts. He starts from the centre and works outwards. This is the reason of the convincingness of his characters, their dramatic truth. The dramatic sense in him is stronger than the pictorial.

He troubles little about personal appearance, or any of the traits which would enable us to visualize his men. We understand them rather than see them. Hampden, he tells us, was 'of a most civil and affable deportment' and had 'a flowing courtesy to all men', a 'rare temper and modesty'; it is Sir Philip Warwick who speaks of the 'scurf commonly on his face'.[14] He says that the younger Vane 'had an unusual aspect', and leaves us wondering what was unusual. His Falkland is an exception, but he adopted a different scale when describing his greatest friend and only hero. Each of his two accounts of Falkland is in fact a brief biography rather than a character; the earliest of them, written shortly after Falkland's death, he once thought of making into a volume by itself. In his characters proper he confines himself more strictly than any other writer to matters of character. They are characters rather than portraits.

But portraiture was one of his passions, though he left its practice to the painters. He adorned his houses with the likenesses of his friends. It was fitting that our greatest character writer should have formed one of the great collections of pictures of 'wits, poets, philosophers, famous and learned Englishmen'.[15] To describe them on paper, and to contrive that they should look down on him from his walls, were different ways of indulging the same keen and tireless interest in the life amid which he moved.

[Footnote 1: For a detailed examination of the composition and value

of Clarendon's History see the three articles by Professor C.H.

Firth in The English Historical Review for 1904. No student of

Clarendon can ever afford to neglect them.]

[Footnote 2: See No. 33, introductory note.]

[Footnote 3: See No. 6, introductory note, and No. 36, p. 140, II. 17-22 note.]

[Footnote 4: Contractions have been expanded. The punctuation of the original is slight, and it has been found desirable occasionally to insert commas, where seventeenth century printers would have inserted them; but the run of the sentences has not been disturbed. In modernized versions Clarendon's long sentences are sometimes needlessly subdivided.]

[Footnote 5: State Papers, 1773, vol. ii, pp. 288-9.]

[Footnote 6: Letter of March 16, 1647; infra p. 275.]

[Footnote 7: Letter of January 8, 1647; T.H. Lister, Life of

Clarendon, 1837, vol. iii, p. 43.]

[Footnote 8: Ed. 1857, part 1, § 85; omitted in the edition of 1759.]

[Footnote 9: Of the thirty-seven characters by Clarendon in this volume, twenty-seven are from the 'Manuscript Life'.]

[Footnote 10: State Papers, 1786, vol. iii, supp., p. xlv.]

[Footnote 11: Clarendon's lifetime coincided almost exactly with Milton's. He was two months younger than Milton, and died one month later.]

[Footnote 12: December 14, 1647; infra p. 275.]

[Footnote 13: Book ix, ad init.; ed. Macray, vol. iv, p. 3.]

[Footnote 14: See note, p. 129, ll. 22 ff.]

[Footnote 15: Evelyn's Diary, December 20, 1668. See the account of 'The Clarendon Gallery' in Lady Theresa Lewis's Lives of the friends of Clarendon, 1852, vol. i, pp. 15* ff., and vol. iii, pp. 241 ff.]