The

proof that Sir Edward was, with all his merits as a seaman, entirely under the influence of a corrupt and unprincipled government. jealousy which existed between Sir Edward and his principal did not, however, prevent these brave officers doing their duty, nor blind them to each other's merits in the hour of battle. We find Prince Rupert, in a letter to the earl of Arlington, highly commending Sir Edward's bravery and indomitable resolution.

In the great and decisive engagement of the 11th of August, 1673, Sir Edward found himself once more opposed to his old rival, Van Tromp. Both, intent probably on encountering each other, had fallen several leagues to leeward of their own fleets. After several hours fighting, during which the two admirals twice found it necessary to go on board fresh ships, Sir Edward found it expedient-the ship in which he was then fighting, the St George, being almost a wreck-to remove on board a third ship, the Royal Charles. This was a necessary, perhaps, but a fatal resolution. The boat in which he placed himself had not rowed ten times its own length from the St George, before it was struck by a cannon shot, upon which the crew endeavoured to return to the St George again, but before they could effect their purpose, the boat went down, and Sir Edward, not being a swimmer, perished in the waves.

Edward, Earl of Clarendon.

BORN A. D. 1608.-DIED A. D. 1673.

RIGHTLY to estimate the actions, and measure the moral worth of this eminent personage, is no easy task. He has been alernately deified and defamed for party-purposes. Southey declares him to have been the wisest and most upright of statesmen. Brodie hesitates not to represent him as a miserable sycophant and canting hypocrite. Hume speaks of him with the greatest respect and admiration. Hallam is cautious and guarded in his praise. Agar Ellis unhesitatingly pronounces him an unprincipled man of talent.

The subject of these conflicting opinions was born at Dinton in Wiltshire, in February 1608. His father was a private gentleman of an ancient Cheshire family of the name of Hyde. At the early age of thirteen, young Hyde was sent to Magdalene college, Oxford, whence, at the invitation of his uncle Nicholas Hyde, afterwards chief-justice of the king's bench, he removed to London, and applied himself to the study of the law. In his twenty-first year, he married the daughter of Sir George Ayliffe, but became a widower in the brief space of six months. Three years afterwards he married the daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, master of requests. He started almost at once into notice at the bar. His good fortune in this respect was probably not a little owing to the rule which, as he himself informs us in his 'Life,' he early adopted, namely, to aim always at good company, and to select for his intimate associates none but persons considerable either for fortune, rank, or accomplishments. How well he carried this maxim into practice, appears from the list of his acquaintances, where amongst other names we find Ben Jonson, Selden, May, Sir Kenelin

Digby, Edmund Waller, Lucius Carey, Sheldon, Morley, Earles, Hales, and Chillingworth. But it was the patronage of the marquess of Hamilton, "who had at that time the most credit of any man about the court," and that of Archbishop Laud, that brought our young barrister most into repute in Westminster hall, and marked him out in the eyes of the world as a rising man. At this period, while diligent in his vocation, he appears to have occasionally indulged himself in the company of such men as the earl of Dorset, Lord Conway, and Lord Lumley, "men who excelled in gratifying their appetites," in other words, abandoned rakes. "In that very time," says Hyde in his Life of himself, "when fortune seemed to smile and to intend well towards him, and often afterwards, he was wont to say, that when he reflected upon himself, and his past actions, even from the time of his first coming to the Middle Temple, he had much more cause to be terrified upon the reflection, than the man had, who viewed Rochester-bridge in the morning that it was broken, and which he had gallopped over in the night; that he had passed over more precipices than the other had done, for many nights and days and some years together, from which nothing but the immediate hand of God could have preserved him.”

The best and brightest period in Hyde's history, is that in which he appears to us commencing his parliamentary career. In the long-parliament-in which he represented Saltash-he was active in exposing the court system, and in denouncing the illegal conduct of Strafford. At this juncture he was associated with such men as Falkland, Hales, and Chillingworth. But he had neither the integrity of purpose which distinguished these great men, nor was he comparable to any of them in talents. On the approach of direct hostilities, Hyde withdrew to the king at York, by whom he was exceedingly well received. Towards the end of the year 1642, upon the promotion of Sir John Colepepper to the rolls, Hyde succeeded him in the chancellorship of the exchequer; the same year, he was knighted, and made a privy councillor, in which latter capacity he was ever sedulous in instilling into the ear of his royal master those miserable maxims of ecclesiastical polity which cost him his crown and his life. Southampton and Falkland, would have had Charles to yield some at least of the disputed points of prerogative and church-government, but their prudent counsels were checked and rendered abortive by the influence of Hyde, who had so far won upon the king's confidence and attachment that, in a letter to his queen, written about this time, he says, "I must make Ned Hyde secretary of state, for I can trust no one else." "During his (the king's stay) at Newcastle," says Brodie, "all the entreaties of the queen and his lay advisers, to yield to the presbyterian establishment, had utterly failed, and nothing could move him to accede to the less rigorous propositions of the army; but he had now become surrounded with advisers who approved of his resolution. These were ecclesiastics (Sheldon, Hammond, and others), who, having lost their livings, were hostile to any arrangement that should for ever exclude them from power. Lord Clarendon, too, encouraged him by letters, to the same course. Exempted himself from pardon by all the propositions, he founded all his hopes of being restored to his country, and rewarded by the crown, on a steady refusal of accommodation-which, however fatal it might prove to his present master, would, he flattered himself, ultimately be

triumphant in the person of the prince. It therefore appears, by his private correspondence, that he deemed it better that the king should fall a victim to his principles than yield to his enemies. In the clash of parties he expected that the successor would be recalled unshackled; but thought that if what he supposed the best jewels of the crown were once renounced, they might never be recovered."

It was during his retirement in Jersey, that Hyde projected his two celebrated works, the History of the Rebellion,' and 'Memorials of his own Life.' These works have been published separately and under different titles, but they were originally intended to form one and the same book; we may speak of them therefore as one in this rapid sketch of their author. Hyde's historical writings are valuable as the testimony of one who was contemporary with the events he relates. Their style is in general lucid and flowing; and there is an air of liberality and high-mindedness infused into the whole which creates a very favourable impression for the author. Warburton declares that in the knowledge of human nature, "this great author excels all the Greek and Latin historians put together." This is large praise; but it is extravagant and untrue. There is little real political science in the work, and very little accurate analysis of the springs and workings of human conduct and the true motives of agents. "Clarendon's own idea of the 'genius and spirit and soul of an historian,' says an anonymous but able writer, may be gathered from one of his essays, where he speaks of those endowments as 'contracted by the knowledge and course and method of business, and by conversation and familiarity in the inside of courts, and the most active and eminent persons in the government.' Assuredly, whatever could be gained from such sources to the value of a history was combined in his; and it is difficult to resist the first impression of so dazzling and imposing an aggregate. But a closer view discovers by how very wide an interval is separated the ablest man of the world from the truly philosophical historian-how imperfectly the lore of court-intrigues and state-expedients can expound the great events of a political crisis, and how miserable a substitute for genuine candour and tolerance are the guarded phrase and tone of high society. It were vain to look to Clarendon for any thing like a rational account of the first springs of civil commotion; and his pages do not even exhibit the true interdependences and sequences of events at all more clearly than their origin. Every thing is referred to party cabals and personal influences with a truly court-like nearness and minuteness of vision; and the outward show of exemption from the passionate heats of controversy is belied by an intolerant zeal for mere names and forms, which, had it been expressed in uncouth language by uneducated men, would have been stigmatized as desperate and hopeless fanaticism. The historical merits of Clarendon have been modestly compared by his panegyrists to those of the great author of the History of Henry VII.' as his essays have in similar style been characterised by their editor as an appropriate companion to the little volume which contains the essays of Lord Bacon'-an instance of juxtaposition only allowable in reference to the size of the volumesunless the circumstance of both authors having been chancellors of England be considered to complete the resemblance. However, the former parallel is at least less extravagant, from the marked inferiority

of Bacon's historical writings to the works of his earlier manhood and maturity, and receives a plausible colour from some outward points of resemblance with Clarendon's productions in the same department. Both employ a style of decoration and diffuseness-both betray a habit of minute observation of particulars apparently trifling, and both are in a certain degree obnoxious to the charge of courtly adulation and obsequiousness. But a more minute analysis of the accidental likeness, will discover the essential contrast. Bacon is diffuse from the exhaustless overflowings of a teeming mind, and ever active fancy-Clarendon from wilful amplifications and redundancies. The fund of observation in the latter is drawn chiefly from the circle of court-intrigue and personality-in the former from that of internal national changes and popular interests, of which courts have for the most part little cognizance. The instances of compromise and courtly adulation in both writers might more fairly admit of comparison, if Bacon had, like Clarendon, been roused to public life by the spirit-stirring alarums of a social revolution-those, however, who read him worthily may judge for themselves whether, like Clarendon, he would have learned from the events of that struggle little else than a besotted predilection for the code of persecution and tyranny."

In May 1648, Sir Edward was invited by the queen to attend her majesty in Paris. He accepted of the invitation, and was continued by Charles II. in his office of the exchequer and his seat at the privycouncil. In November 1649, he was sent with Lord Cottington to the court of Madrid, for the purpose of engaging Spanish assistance for his master, but the mission was unsuccessful. From this period until the restoration, he resided mostly at Antwerp. Upon the return of Charles and his court to England, Hyde was rewarded for his many and valuable services with the chancellorship of the kingdom; and in November 1660, he was raised to the peerage with the title of Baron Hyde of Hindon, to which were added, in April following, the titles of Viscount Cornbury in Oxfordshire, and Earl of Clarendon in Wiltshire.

There is no doubt that till his fall, the public conduct of Clarendon was involved, and in a manner identified, with the general administration of the monarchy. Whatever was praiseworthy or obnoxious in the acts of Charles II. as king, originated, not with that dissolute monarch himself, but with his favourite and trusted minister. The declaration from Breda was certainly an extraordinary document viewed as coming from the pen of the man who had been the adviser of Charles I. on all subjects of ecclesiastical polity; that its terms should have been kept would have been still more surprising. A miserable attempt has been made to apologise for the perfidy of Charles and his minister in violating the spirit and letter of that declaration so soon after the restoration. It has been argued that the declaration only bore that until the subject should have been considered and determined by parliament, nobody should be molested on account of his religious principles; but that no pledge of constant toleration was either given or pretended to be given. It seems to us impossible that any man of common understanding or honesty should indulge in such a miserable sophistry as this. The sale of Dunkirk was another act of Clarendon's. Rapin

1 Westminster Review, vol. xiii. pp. 158, 159.

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affirms that it was the chancellor who proposed the bargain, negotiated it and concluded it. And D'Estrades, the French plenipotentiary, wrote to Louis XIV. that the chancellor had told him "that the thought of this treaty came from him, and did not conceal that the necessity of the English affairs had inspired him with it." The miserable conduct of the Dutch war was certainly in a great measure owing to the want of firmness and prudence on the part of the chancellor; but Mr Agar Ellis does not hesitate to accuse Clarendon of treachery as well as imbecility in the negotiation of public affairs. "Whether,' says he, "Clarendon house was erected with French or Dutch money, or with both, it is impossible for us, at this distance of time, with the slender evidence upon the subject we possess, to decide. After, however, all that has been previously brought forward with respect to the corruption of the chancellor upon the subject of Dunkirk, the question of whether he erected his house with the money so received is not or much importance in any way to either his fame or his character." Pepys, who declares that the chancellor was his particular kind friend on all occasions' does not scruple to represent him as an avaricious being whose soul was fixed upon scraping money together. And Lord Dartmouth has the following note on a passage in Burnet: "The earl of Clarendon, upon the restoration, made it his business to depress every body's merits to advance his own, and (the king having gratified his vanity with high titles) found it necessary towards making a fortune in proportion, to apply himself to other means than what the crown could afford; (though he had as much as the king could well grant :) and the people who had suffered most in the civil war were in no condition to purchase his favour. He therefore undertook the protection of those who had plundered and sequestered the others, which he very artfully contrived, by making the king believe it was necessary for his own ease and quiet to make his enemies his friends; upon which he brought in most of those who had been the main instruments and promoters of the late troubles, who were not wanting in their acknowledgments in the manner he expected, which produced the great house in the Piccadille, furnished chiefly with Cavaliers' goods, brought thither for peace-offerings, which the right owners durst not claim when they were in his possession. In my own remembrance Earl Paulett was an humble petitioner to his sons, for leave to take a copy of his grandfather's and grandmother's pictures (whole lengths, drawn by Vandike) that had been plundered from Hinton St George; which was obtained with great difficulty, because it was thought that copies might lessen the value of the originals. And whoever had a mind to see what great families had been plundered during the civil war, might find some remains either at Clarendon house, or at Cornbury."2

To these charges Mr Ellis has added some of a still graver character: They are, "his encouragement of the attempts to assassinate Cromwell; the act he passed upon the subject of the religion of Charles II.; and the blasphemous comparison he makes in his history in speaking of the execution of the first Charles. The first will tend to show how little scrupulous he was of the means he employed to compass his ends,—the second displays in full perfection the crooked policy of the thorough

⚫ Cited by Mr Agar Ellis, p. 28.