for affairs, he must be allowed to be greatly inferior to the man by whom he was supplanted.

Upon the Restoration, his services were remembered and his family was patronized. His eldest son rose to a high command in the army, and was slain fighting for King William at the battle of Aghrim. His second son was the distinguished naval officer who fought at Beachy Head, and was created Earl of Torrington. His third son became Chief Justice of the King's Bench under James II., followed him into exile, was made by that Sovereign Lord Keeper of the Great Seal in partibus, and if there had been another restoration of the Stuarts might have stood in the list of "Lord Chancellors," whose lives I have to record.'

CHAPTER LXXIV.

LIFE OF LORD CHANCELLOR CLARENDON FROM HIS BIRTH TILL THE EXECUTION OF LORD STRAFFORD.

I

NOW enter upon a task of great difficulty-embarrassed not by the scantiness, but by the superfluity of my materials.

• Inopem me copia fecit."

The subject of this memoir was personally concerned in many of the most important events which marked the thirty most interesting years to be found in our annals; by his own voluminous writings, and those of his contemporaries, we are amply informed of all he did, and said, and thought; and more praise and censure have been unduly lavished upon him than perhaps on any other public man who ever appeared in England. But striving to condense, and keeping in view the just boundaries of biography and history, I must not omit any statement or observations which I may deem necessary to convey an adequate notion of his career and of his character.

EDWARD HYDE was of a respectable gentleman's family, which for centuries had been settled in the county of Chester, and, in Scottish phrase, had been "Hydes of 1 L. L. C. 131.

that ilk," being possessed of an estate by the name of which they were designated when surnames came into fashion. Lawrence, his grandfather, a cadet of this family, migrated into the West, and established himself at Dinton, in the county of Wilts. Henry, the Chancellor's father, studied the law in the Middle Temple, but marrying a Wiltshire lady "of a good fortune, in the account of that age," he became a country squire, after having traveled through Germany and Italy. He sat in several parliaments; but having neither hope of Court preferment, nor ambition to complain of grievances, he resolved to devote the remainder of his days to country pursuits and pleasures. "From the death of Queen Elizabeth he never was in London, though he lived above thirty years after; and his wife, who was married to him above forty years, never was in London in her life; the wisdom and frugality of that time being such, that few gentlemen made journeys to London, or any other expensive journeys, but upon important business, and their wives never; by which they enjoyed and improved their estates in the country, and kept great hospitality in their houses, brought up their children well, and were beloved by their neighbors."

The Chancellor was born at Dinton, on the 18th of February, 1609. He received his early classical education under the paternal roof from the vicar of the parish, who, "though of very indifferent parts, had bred good scholars; but he was chiefly grateful to "the superintending care and conversation of his father, who was an excellent scholar, and took pleasure in conferring with him."

In his fourteenth year he was sent to the University of Oxford, and admitted of Magdalen Hall. Being then a younger son, he was intended for holy orders; but he did not make much progress in theological studies, and having taken his Bachelor's degrees in February, 1626, he quitted the University "rather with the opinion of a young man of parts and pregnancy of wit, than that he had improved it much by industry.'

About this time his elder brother died, and he was entered a student of law in the Middle Temple, under the care of his uncle, Sir Nicholas, afterwards Chief Justice of the King's Bench, then Treasurer of that Society.

Life of Clarendon, i. 5.

2 Ibid. 8.

But his studies were seriously interrupted, first, by the plague which raged for some months in London, and then by a lingering attack of ague when he had retreated into the country. It was Michaelmas term, 1626, before he was able to establish himself regularly in chambers. He confesses that he had contracted a habit of idleness and of desultory reading, and that, when he returned, "it was without great application to the study of the law for some years." He now spent most of his time with "swash bucklers" and discharged military officers who had fought in Germany and the Low Countries, accompanying them to fencing-schools, ordinaries, and theaters. But he assures us that his morals were not contaminated by these dangerous associates; and this being so, he seems rather to have reflected with satisfaction on the opportunity he then improved of acquiring a knowledge of men and manners. He says, "that since it pleased God to preserve him whilst he did keep that company, and to withdraw him so soon from it, he was not sorry he had some experience in the conversation of such men, and of the license of those times,"-adding, with considerable felicity, "that he had more cause to be terrified upon the reflection than the man who had viewed Rochester Bridge in the morning that it was broken, and which he had galloped over in the night." He was fond of literature, and he employed several hours each day in reading; but he would utterly have neglected Plowden and Coke, which then showed the newest fashions of the law, if it had not been for his uncle, Sir Nicholas, who questioned him about the "moots" he attended, and often "put cases for his opinion. But natural disposition, or the prospect of succeeding to a comfortable patrimony, still made him affect the company of the gay and the dissolute.

1

In the summer of 1628, the old Chief Justice, with a view of compelling him to mix with lawyers, appointed him to "ride" the Norfolk circuit as his Marshal. Unfortunately, at Cambridge, the first assize town, he was attacked by the smallpox, and he was so ill that his life was despaired of; but at the end of a month he was able to proceed to his father's in Wiltshire.

Life, i. 1o. In his old age he bestows this qualified commendation on this passage of his youth, that "he was desirous to preserve himself from any notable scandal of any kind, and to live cautè, if not castè."—Life. iii. 974.

Soon after the recovery of his health, a circumstance. occurred which gave a new turn to his views and his character. He fell desperately in love with a Wiltshire beauty, the daughter of Sir George Ayliffe, a young lady with no fortune, though of good family and high connections. His indulgent father consented to their union. He thus became allied to the Marquis of Hamilton, and "was introduced into another way of conversation than he had formerly been accustomed to, and which, in truth, by the acquaintance, by the friends and enemies he then made, had an influence upon the whole course of his life afterwards." But his domestic happiness came to a sudden termination. In little more than six months after his marriage, his young wife, in a journey from London into Wiltshire, caught the malignant smallpox and died. When he was sensible of the loss he had sustained, he was so overwhelmed with grief that he could hardly be restrained by his father from resigning his profession, and seeking seclusion in a foreign land.

2

He remained a widower near three years, the greater part of which time he devoted to books, but neither then, nor at any period of his life, did he attend very seriously to the study of the law,-with the technicalities of which he was never familiar. He continued to cultivate the high-born relatives of his late wife, and he made acquaintance with Ben Jonson, Cotton, Isaac Walton, May, Carew, Edmund Waller, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Chillingworth. His manners were more polished and agreeable than those of most lawyers, and he was kindly noticed, not only by Lord Keeper Coventry, but by the Earl of Manchester, Lord Privy Seal, the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlain, the Earls of Holland, Hereford and Essex, and others of great consequence about the Court. His regard for the members of his own profession he chiefly confined to Lane, Attorney General to the Prince, and afterwards Lord Keeper, Sir Jeffrey Palmer, then a rising conveyancer, afterwards Attorney General to Charles II., and Bulstrode Whitelock, then getting into the lead on the 1 Life, i. 18.

"He (Ben Jonson) had for many years an extraordinary kindness for Mr. Hyde, till he found he betook himself to business, which he believed ought never to be preferred before his company."-Life, i. 30. Hyde preferred Ben to all poets, living or dead, except Cowley, but does not seem to have been at all acquainted with the writings of Shakespeare.

Oxford Circuit, afterwards Lord Keeper to the Commonwealth, with all whom he was at this time on a footing of the most friendly intercourse, although their courses were afterwards so devious.' But the man with whom, he tells us, he had the most entire friendship, and of whom he speaks in terms of the warmest admiration and affection, was Lucius Carey, Lord Falkland,-in all whose sentiments he continued ever heartily to concur, till this bright ornament of his country fell in the battle of Newbury.

Hyde having recovered his spirits, again entered the married state, and formed a most auspicious union, which proved the great solace of his life. The lady was Frances, daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, Master of the Mint. Having been his companion in all the vicissitudes of his fortune, having lived with him in exile, sharing in his dangers and privations, and with difficulty providing food and raiment for their children,-she was preserved to see him Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor, and Prime Minister of England.

His happiness was in a few months interrupted by the sudden death of his father. Burnet relates that, walking in the fields together, the old gentleman warned him of the disposition then observable among lawyers to stretch law and prerogative to the prejudice of the subject; charged him if he ever grew to any eminence in his profession, that he should never sacrifice the laws and liberties of his country to his own interests, or to the will of a Prince; and that, having repeated this twice, he immediately fell into a fit of apoplexy, of which he died in a few hours. Clarendon himself wrote thus to a friend:"Without one minute's warning or fear, I have lost the best father in the world, the sense of which hath been so terrible to me, that I was enough inclined to think I had nothing to do but to follow him."

The shock being over, he resolved instead of renouncing the world and living in retirement on his small estate, to continue to cultivate his profession, in the hope of rising to eminence, and with the resolution to observe the dying

1 In Whitelock's Memorials we have an amusing extract of a letter addressed to him in the country, from Hyde in the Temple :-" Our best news is that we have good wine abundantly come over; and the worst, that the plague is in town, and no Judges die." 2 Burn. Times, i. 270.