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.]