Characters from the Histories & Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century

by Unknown

NOTES

1.

The History of Great Britain, Being the Life and Reign of King James
The First, Relating To what passed from his first Accesse to the
Crown, till his Death. By Arthur Wilson, Esq. London, 1653. (pp.
289-90.)

Arthur Wilson (1595-1652) was a gentleman-in-waiting to Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, during James's reign, and was afterwards in the service of Robert Rich, second Earl of Essex. The History was written towards the end of his life, and published the year after his death. He was the author also of an autobiography, Observations of God's Providence in the Tract of my Life (first printed in Francis Peck's Desiderata Curiosa, 1735, Lib. XII, pp. 6-34), and of three plays, The Swisser (performed at Blackfriars, 1633, first printed in 1904, ed. Albert Feuillerat, from the MS. in the British Museum), The Corporall (performed, 1633, but not extant), and The Inconstant Lady (first printed in 1814, ed. Philip Bliss, from the MS. in the Bodleian Library). The three plays were entered in the Registers of the Stationers' Company, September 4, 1646, and September 9, 1653. But nothing he wrote appears to have been published during his life.

Page 2, l. 24. Peace begot Plenty. An adaptation of the wellknown saying which Puttenham in his Arte of English Poesie (ed. Arber, p. 217) attributes to Jean de Meung. Puttenham gives it thus:

Peace makes plentie, plentie makes pride,
Pride breeds quarrell, and quarrell brings warre:
Warre brings spoile, and spoile pouertie,
Pouertie pacience, and pacience peace:
So peace brings warre, and warre brings peace.

It is found also in Italian and Latin. Allusions to it are frequent in the seventeenth century. Compare the beginning of Swift's Battle of the Books, and see the correspondence in The Times Literary Supplement, February 17-March 30, 1916.

2.

The Court and Character of King James. Written and taken by Sir A.W. being an eye, and eare witnesse. Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare. Published by Authority. London, MDCL.

'The Character of King James' forms a section by itself at the conclusion of the volume, pp. 177-89. The volume was reprinted in the following year, when there were added to it 'The Court of King Charles' and 'Observations (instead of a Character) upon this King, from his Childe-hood'. Both editions are carelessly printed. The second, which corrects some of the errors of the first but introduces others, has been used for the present text.

Weldon was clerk of the kitchen to James I and afterwards clerk of the Green Cloth. He was knighted in 1617, and accompanied James to Scotland in that year, but was dismissed from his place at court for his satire on the Scots. He took the side of the parliament in the Civil War. The dedication to Lady Elizabeth Sidley (first printed in the second edition) states that the work 'treads too near the heeles of truth, and these Times, to appear in publick'. According to Anthony à Wood she had suppressed the manuscript, which was stolen from her. Weldon had died before it was printed. The answer to it called Aulicus Coquinariæ describes it as 'Pretended to be penned by Sir A.W. and published since his death, 1650'.

Other works of the same kind, though of inferior value, are Sir Edward
Peyton's The Divine Catastrophe of The Kingly Family Of the House of
Stuarts, 1652, and Francis Osborne's Traditionall Memoyres on The
Raigne of King James, 1658. They were printed together by Sir Walter
Scott in 1811 under the title The Secret History of the Court of
James the First, a collection which contains the historical material
employed in The Fortunes of Nigel.

Though carelessly written, and as carelessly printed, Weldon's character of James is in parts remarkably vivid. It was reprinted by itself in Morgan's Pboenix Britannicus, 1732, pp. 54-6; and it was incorporated in the edition of Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier published in 1792: see The Retrospective Review, 1821, vol. iii, pt. ii, pp. 378-9.

There is a valuable article on Weldon's book as a whole in The
Retrospective Review, 1823, vol. vii, pt. I.

PAGE 4, l. 6. before he was born, probably an allusion to the murder of Rizzio in Mary's presence.

l. 11. The syntax is faulty: delete 'and'?

On James's capacity for strong drinks, compare Roger Coke's Detection of the Court and State of England (1694), ed. 1719, vol. i, p. 78.

l. 27. that foul poysoning busines, the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, the great scandal of the reign. Robert Ker, or Carr, created Viscount Rochester 1611 and Earl of Somerset 1613, had cast his eye on the Countess of Essex, and, after a decree of nullity of marriage with Essex had been procured, married her in December 1613. Overbury, who had been Somerset's friend, opposed the projected marriage. On a trumped up charge of disobedience to the king he was in April 1613 committed to the Tower, where he was slowly poisoned, and died in September. Somerset and the Countess were both found guilty in 1616, but ultimately pardoned; four of the accomplices were hanged. Weldon deals with the scandal at some length in the main part of his work, pp. 61 ff.

l. 30. Mountgomery, Philip Herbert, created Earl of Montgomery 1605, succeeded his brother, William Herbert, as fourth Earl of Pembroke in 1630 (see No. 7). To this 'most noble and incomparable paire of brethren' Heminge and Condell dedicated the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, 1623. Montgomery's character is given by Clarendon, History, ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 74-5; and, as fourth Earl of Pembroke, vol. ii, pp. 539-41.

Page 5, l. 22. unfortunate in the marriage of his Daughter. James's daughter Elizabeth married the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, in 1613. His election as King of Bohemia led to the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) in which James long hesitated to become involved and played at best an ineffectual part. The opinion here expressed is explained by an earlier passage in Weldon's book, pp. 82-4: 'In this Favourites (Somerset's) flourishing time, came over the Palsgrave to marry our Kings daughter, which for the present, gave much content, and with the generall applause, yet it proved a most infortunate match to him and his Posterity, and all Christendome, for all his Alliance with so many great Princes, which put on him aspiring thoughts, and was so ambitious as not to content himselfe with his hereditary patrimony of one of the greatest Princes in Germany; but must aspire to a Kingdome, beleeving that his great allyance would carry him through any enterprise, or bring him off with honour, in both which he failed; being cast out of his own Country with shame, and he and his, ever after, living upon the devotion of other Princes; but had his Father in Law spent halfe the mony in Swords he did in words, for which he was but scorned, it had kept him in his own inheritance, and saved much Christian bloud since shed; but whiles he, being wholly addicted to peace, spent much treasure, in sending stately Embassadours to treat, his Enemies (which he esteemed friends) sent Armies with a lesse charge to conquer, so that it may be concluded, that this then thought the most happy match in Christendome, was the greatest unhappinesse to Christendome, themselves, and posterity.'

l. 27. Sir Robert Mansell (1573-1656), Vice-Admiral of England under Charles I. Clarendon, writing of the year 1642, says that 'his courage and integrity were unquestionable' (ed. Macray, vol. ii, p. 219). 'Argiers' or 'Argier' was the common old form of 'Algiers': cf. The Tempest, I. ii. 261, 265.

Page 6, l. 2. Cottington, Francis Cottington (1578-1652), baronet 1623, Baron Cottington, 1631. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1629 to 1642.

Page 7, l. 5. The first edition reads 'In sending Embassadours, which were'. The printer's substitution of 'His' for 'In' and omission of 'which' do not wholly mend the syntax.

l. 10. peace with honour. An early instance of the phrase made famous by Lord Beaconsfield in his speech of July 16, 1878, after the Congress of Berlin, 'Lord Salisbury and myself have brought you back peace, but a peace I hope with honour.' Cf. Notes and Queries, 1887, Seventh Series, vol. iii, p. 96.

l. 14. Nullum tempus, &c., the law maxim Nullum tempus occurrit regi, lapse of time does not bar the crown. The Parliament which met in February 1624 passed 'An Act for the generall quiett of the Subject agaynst all pretences of Concealement' (21° Jac. I, c. 2) which declared sixty years' possession of Lands, &c., to be a good title against the Crown.

l. 18. his Tuesday Sermons, likewise explained by an earlier passage in Weldon's book, pp. 8, 9: 'the chiefe of those secrets, was that of Gowries Conspiracy, though that Nation [the Scots] gave little credit to the Story, but would speak sleightly and despitefully of it, and those of the wisest of that Nation; yet there was a weekly commemoration by the Tuesday Sermon, and an anniversary Feast, as great as it was possible, for the Kings preservation, ever on the fifth of August.' James attempted to force the Tuesday sermon on the University of Oxford; it was to be preached by members of each college in rotation. See Brodrick's Memorials of Merton College, 1885, p. 70.

Page 8, l. 1. a very wise man. Compare The Fortunes of Nigel, chap. v: 'the character bestowed upon him by Sully—that he was the wisest fool in Christendom'. Two volumes of the Mémoires of Maximilien de Béthune, Duc de Sully (1560-1641), appeared in 1638; the others after 1650. There is much about James in the second volume, but this description of him does not appear to be there.

ll. 10-12. two Treasurers, see p. 21, ll. 15-22: three
Secretaries, Sir Thomas Lake; Sir Robert Naunton; Sir George Calvert,
Baron Baltimore; Sir Edward Conway, Viscount Conway: two Lord
Keepers, Sir Francis Bacon; John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln (see
p. 18, l. 5): two Admiralls, Charles Howard of Effingham, Earl of
Nottingham; the Duke of Buckingham: three Lord chief Justices, Sir
Edward Coke; Henry Montagu, Earl of Manchester; James Ley, Earl of
Marlborough.

Weldon's statement is true of the year 1623; he might have said 'three Treasurers' and 'four Secretaries'.

3.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 7-9, 18-20; History, Bk. I, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 9-11, 26-9; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 10-13, 38-43.

This is the first of the portraits in Clarendon's great gallery, and it is drawn with great care. Clarendon was only a youth of twenty when Buckingham was assassinated, and he had therefore not the personal knowledge and contact to which the later portraits owe so much of their value. But he had throughout all his life been interested in the remarkable career of this 'very extraordinary person'. Sir Henry Wotton's 'Observations by Way of Parallel' on the Earl of Essex and Buckingham had suggested to him his first character study, 'The Difference and Disparity' between them. (It is printed after the 'Parallel' in Reliquiæ Wottonianæ, and described in the third edition, 1672, as 'written by the Earl of Clarendon in his younger dayes'.) His two studies offer an interesting comparison. Many of the ideas are the same, but there is a marked difference in the precision of drawing and the ease of style. The character here reprinted was written when Clarendon had mastered his art.

Page 11, l. 5. See p. 4, l. 27.

Page 13, l. 25. The passage here omitted deals with Buckingham's unsuccessful journey to Spain with Prince Charles, and with his assassination.

Page 16, l. 28. touched upon before, ed. Macray, vol. i, p. 38; here omitted.

4.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 27, 28; History, Bk. I, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 36-8; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 56-9.

Page 18, l. 5. the Bishopp of Lincolne, John Williams (1582-1650), afterwards Archbishop of York. He succeeded Bacon as Lord Keeper. He is sketched in Wilson's History of Great Britain, pp. 196-7, and Fuller's Church-History of Britain, 1655, Bk. XI, pp. 225-8. His life by John Hacket, Scrinia Reserata, 1693, is notorious for the 'embellishments' of its style; a shorter life, based on Hacket's, was an early work of Ambrose Philips.

l. 22. the Earle of Portlande, Sir Richard Weston: see No. 5.

l. 24. Hambleton, Clarendon's usual spelling of 'Hamilton'.

5.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 28-32; History, Bk. I, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 31-43; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 59-67.

Another and more favourable character of Weston is the matter of an undated letter which Sir Henry Wotton sent to him as 'a strange New years Gift' about 1635. 'In short, it is only an Image of your Self, drawn by memory from such discourse as I have taken up here and there of your Lordship, among the most intelligent and unmalignant men; which to pourtrait before you I thought no servile office, but ingenuous and real'. See Reliquiæ Wottonianæ, ed. 1672, pp. 333-6.

Page 21, l. 7. the white staffe. 'The Third Great Officer of the
Crown, is the Lord High Treasurer of England, who receives this High
Office by delivery of a White Staffe to him by the King, and
holds it durante bene placito Regis' (Edward Chamberlayne, Angliæ
Notitia, 1674, p. 152).

Page 23, l. 4. L'd Brooke, Sir Fulke Greville (1554-1628) the friend and biographer of Sir Philip Sidney. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1614 to 1621.

Page 28, l. 18. eclarcicement, introduced into English about this time, and in frequent use till the beginning of the nineteenth century.

l. 28. a younge, beautifull Lady, Frances, daughter of Esmé, third Duke of Lennox, married to Jerome Weston, afterwards second Earl of Portland, in 1632.

6.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 33, 34; History, Bk. I, ed. 1702, vol. i, p. 44; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 69-71.

This is one of Clarendon's most unfriendly portraits. It was seriously edited when first printed. The whole passage about the coldness and selfishness of Arundel's nature on p. 31, ll. 12-30, was omitted, as likewise the allusion to his ignorance on p. 30, ll. 25-7, 'wheras in truth he was only able to buy them, never to understande them.' Minor alterations are the new reading 'thought no part of History so considerable, as what related to his own Family' p. 30, ll. 28, 29, and the omission of 'vulgar' p. 31, l. 11. The purpose of these changes is obvious. They are extreme examples of the methods of Clarendon's first editors. In no other character did they take so great liberties with his text.

Arundel's great collection of ancient marbles is now in the Ashmolean Museum in the University of Oxford. The inscriptions were presented to the University in 1667 by Lord Henry Howard, Arundel's grandson, afterwards sixth Duke of Norfolk, and the statues were reunited to them in 1755 by the gift of Henrietta Countess of Pomfret. As Clarendon's History was an official publication of the University, it is probable that the prospect of receiving the statues induced the editors to remove or alter the passages that might be thought offensive.

As a whole this character does not show Clarendon's usual detachment. Arundel was Earl Marshal, and Clarendon in the Short Parliament of 1640 and again at the beginning of the Long Parliament had attacked the jurisdiction of the Earl Marshal's Court, which, as he says, 'never presumed to sit afterwards'. The account given in Clarendon's Life, ed. 1759, pp. 37-9, explains much in this character. Clarendon there says that Arundel 'did him the honour to detest and hate him perfectly'. There was resentment on both sides. The character was written in Clarendon's later years, but he still remembered with feeling the days when as Mr. Edward Hyde he was at cross purposes with this Earl of ancient lineage.

A different character of Arundel is given in the 'Short View' of his life written by Sir Edward Walker (1612-77), Garter King of Arms and Secretary of War to Charles I:

'He was tall of Stature, and of Shape and proportion rather goodly than neat; his Countenance was Majestical and grave, his Visage long, his Eyes large black and piercing; he had a hooked Nose, and some Warts or Moles on his Cheeks; his Countenance was brown, his Hair thin both on his Head and Beard; he was of a stately Presence and Gate, so that any Man that saw him, though in never so ordinary Habit, could not but conclude him to be a great Person, his Garb and Fashion drawing more Observation than did the rich Apparel of others; so that it was a common Saying of the late Earl of Carlisle, Here comes the Earl of Arundel in his plain Stuff and trunk Hose, and his Beard in his Teeth, that looks more like a Noble Man than any of us. He was more learned in Men and Manners than in Books, yet understood the Latin Tongue very well, and was Master of the Italian; besides he was a great Favourer of learned Men, such as Sir Robert Cotton, Sir Henry Spelman, Mr. Camden, Mr. Selden, and the like. He was a great Master of Order and Ceremony, and knew and kept greater Distance towards his Sovereign than any Person I ever observed, and expected no less from his inferiours; often complaining that the too great Affability of the King, and the French Garb of the Court would bring MAJESTY into Contempt…. He was the greatest Favourer of Arts, especially Painting, Sculpture, Designs, Carving, Building and the like, that this Age hath produced; his Collection of Designs being more than of any Person living, and his Statues equal in Number, Value and Antiquity to those in the Houses of most Princes; to gain which, he had Persons many Years employed both in Italy, Greece, and so generally in any part of Europe where Rarities were to be had. His Paintings likewise were numerous and of the most excellent Masters, having more of that exquisite Painter Hans Holben than are in the World besides…. He was a Person of great and universal Civility, but yet with that Restriction as that it forbad any to be bold or sawcy with him; though with those whom he affected, which were Lovers of State, Nobility and curious Arts, he was very free and conversible; but they being but few, the Stream of the times being otherwise, he had not many Confidents or Dependents; neither did he much affect to have them, they being unto great Persons both burthensome and dangerous. He was not popular at all, nor cared for it, as loving better by a just Hand than Flattery to let the common People to know their Distance and due Observance. Neither was he of any Faction in Court or Council, especially not of the French or Puritan…. He was in Religion no Bigot or Puritan, and professed more to affect moral Vertues than nice Questions and Controversies…. If he were defective in any thing, it was that he could not bring his Mind to his Fortune; which though great, was far too little for the Vastness of his noble Designs.'

Walker's character was written before Clarendon's. It is dated 'Iselsteyne the 7th of June 1651'. It was first published in 1705 in his Historical Discourses upon Several Occasions, pp. 221-3.

Page 30, l. 15. his wife, 'the Lady Alithea Talbot, third Daughter and Coheir of Gilbert Talbot Earl of Shrewsbury, Grandchild of George Talbot Earl of Shrewsbury and Earl Marshal of England' (Walker, Historical Discourses, p. 211).

7.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 34, 35; History, Bk. I, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 44-6; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 71-3.

This pleasing portrait of Pembroke, one of the great patrons of literature of James's reign, follows immediately after the unfriendly portrait of Arundel, the art collector. Clarendon knew the value of contrast in the arrangement of his gallery.

Pembroke is sometimes supposed to have been the patron of Shakespeare. It cannot, however, be proved that there were any personal relations, though the First Folio was dedicated to him and his brother, the Earl of Montgomery, afterwards fourth Earl of Pembroke. See note, p. 4, l. 30. He was the patron of Ben Jonson, who dedicated to him his Catiline, his favourite play, and his Epigrams, 'the ripest of my studies'; also of Samuel Daniel, Chapman, and William Browne. See Shakespeare's England, vol. ii, pp. 202-3.

Clarendon has also given a character of the fourth Earl, 'the poor
Earl of Pembroke', History, ed. Macray, vol. ii, pp. 539-41.

8.

Timber: or, Discoveries; Made Vpon Men and Matter. By Ben: Iohnson.
London, Printed M.DC.XLI. (pp. 101-2.)

This character is a remarkable testimony to the impression which Bacon's restrained eloquence made on his contemporaries. Yet it is little more than an exercise in free translation. Jonson has pieced together two passages in the Controversies of Marcus Seneca, and placed the name of 'Dominus Verulanus' in the margin. The two passages are these:

'Non est unus, quamvis præcipuus sit, imitandus: quia nunquam par fit imitator auctori. Hæc natura est rei. Semper citra veritatem est similitudo.' Lib. I, Præfatio (ed. Paris, 1607, p. 58).

'Oratio eius erat valens cultu, ingentibus plena sententiis. Nemo minus passus est aliquid in actione sua otiosi esse. Nulla pars erat, quæ non sua virtute staret. Nihil, in quo auditor sine damno aliud ageret. Omnia intenta aliquo, petentia. Nemo magis in sua potestate habuit audientium affectus. Verum est quod de illo dicit Gallio noster. Cum diceret, rerum potiebatur, adeo omnes imperata faciebant. Cum ille voluerat, irascebantur. Nemo non illo dicente timebat, ne desineret.' Epit. Declamat. Lib. III (p. 231).

From the continuation of the first passage Jonson took the words 'insolent Greece' ('insolenti Græciæ') in his verses 'To the memory of Shakespeare'.

Jonson has left a more vivid picture of Bacon as a speaker in a short sentence of his Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden: 'My Lord Chancelor of England wringeth his speeches from the strings of his band.'

9.

Reign of King James the First, 1653, pp. 158-60.

Page 36, l. 18. which the King hinted at, in the King's Speech to the Lords, 1621: 'But because the World at this time talks so much of Bribes, I have just cause to fear the whole Body of this House hath bribed him [Prince Charles] to be a good Instrument for you upon all occasions: He doth so good Offices in all his Reports to me, both for the House in generall, and every one of you in particular.' The speech is given in full by Wilson before the passage on Bacon.

Page 37, l. 25. The passage here omitted is 'The humble Submission and
Supplication of the Lord Chancellour'.

Page 38, l. 10. a good Passeover, a good passage back to Spain.
Gondomar was Spanish ambassador.

10.

The Church-History of Britain; From the Birth of Jesus Christ, Untill the Year M.DC.XLVIII. Endeavoured By Thomas Fuller. London, 1655. (Bk. x, p. 89.)

11.

Resuscitatio, Or, Bringing into Publick Light Severall Pieces, of
the Works, Civil, Historical, Philosophical, & Theological, Hitherto
Sleeping; Of the Right Honourable Francis Bacon Baron of Verulam,
Viscount Saint Alban. According to the best Corrected Coppies.
Together, With his Lordships Life. By William Rawley, Doctor in
Divinity, His Lordships First, and Last, Chapleine. Afterwards,
Chapleine, to His late Maiesty. London, 1657.

'The Life of the Honourable Author' serves as introduction to this volume of Bacon's literary remains. It runs to fourteen pages, unnumbered. The passage quoted from this life (c1v-c2v) is of the nature of a character.

Rawley's work is disfigured by pedantically heavy punctuation. He carried to absurd excess the methods which his Master adopted in the 1625 edition of his Essays. It has not been thought necessary to retain all his commas.

Page 41, l. 4. Et quod tentabam, &c. Ovid, Tristia, IV. x. 26.

12.

Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 48; Life, ed. 1759, p. 16.

Page 42, l. 23. M'r Cowly, an indication of Cowley's fame among his contemporaries. This was written in 1668, after the publication of Paradise Lost, but Clarendon ignores Milton.

l. 25. to own much of his, 'to ascribe much of this' Life 1759.

Page 43, l. 2. M'r Hyde, Clarendon himself.

13.

A New Volume of Familiar Letters, Partly Philosophicall, Politicall,
Historicall. The second Edition, with Additions. By James Howell, Esq.
London, 1650. (Letter XIII, pp. 25-6.)

This is the second volume of Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ, first published 1645 (vol. 1) and 1647 (vol. 2). The text is here printed from the copy of the second edition which Howell presented to Selden with an autograph dedication: 'Ex dono Authoris … Opusculum hoc honoris ergô mittitur, Archiuis suis reponendum. 3° non: Maij 1652.' The volume now reposes in the Selden collection in the Bodleian library. The second edition of this letter differs from the first in the insertion of the bracketed words, ll. 22, 23, and the date.

The authenticity of the letters as a whole is discussed in Joseph Jacob's edition, 1890, pp. lxxi ff. This was probably not a real letter written to his correspondent at the given date. But whenever, and in whatever circumstances, Howell wrote it, the value of the picture it gives us of Ben Jonson is not impaired.

PAGE 43, l. 9. Sir Tho. Hawk. Sir Thomas Hawkins, translator of
Horace's Odes and Epodes, 1625; hence 'your' Horace, p. 44, l. 4.

l. 17. T. Ca. Thomas Carew, the poet, one of the 'Tribe of Ben'.

PAGE 44, l. 6. Iamque opus, Ovid, Metam. xv. 871; cf. p. 202, l. 13. l. 8. Exegi monumentum, Horace, Od. iii. 30. i. l. 10. O fortunatam, preserved in Quintilian, Inst. Orat. ix. 4. 41 and xi. I. 24, and in Juvenal, Sat. x. 122.

14.

This remarkable portrait of a country gentleman of the old school is from the 'Fragment of Autobiography', written by the first Earl of Shaftesbury (see Nos. 68, 69) towards the end of his life. The manuscript is among the Shaftesbury papers in the Public Record Office, but at present (1918) has been temporarily withdrawn for greater safety, and is not available for reference. The text is therefore taken from the modernized version in W.D. Christie's Memoirs of Shaftesbury, 1859, pp. 22-5, and Life of Shaftesbury, 1871, vol. i, appendix i, pp. xv-xvii.

The character was published in Leonard Howard's Collection of Letters, from the Original Manuscripts, 1753, pp. 152-5, and was reprinted in The Gentleman's Magazine for April 1754, pp. 160-1, and again in The Connoisseur, No. 81, August 14, 1755. The Gentleman's Magazine (1754, p. 215) is responsible for the error that it is to be found in Peck's Desiderata Curiosa.

Hastings was Shaftesbury's neighbour in Dorsetshire. A full-length portrait of him in his old age, clad in green cloth and holding a pike-staff in his right hand, is at St. Giles, the seat of the Shaftesbury family. It is reproduced in Hutchins's History of Dorset, ed. 1868, vol. iii, p. 152.

PAGE 44, ll. 24-26. He was the second son of George fourth Earl of Huntingdon. Shaftesbury is describing his early associates after his marriage in 1639: 'The eastern part of Dorsetshire had a bowling-green at Hanley, where the gentlemen went constantly once a week, though neither the green nor accommodation was inviting, yet it was well placed for to continue the correspondence of the gentry of those parts. Thither resorted Mr. Hastings of Woodland,' &c.

Page 47, l. 12. 'my part lies therein-a.' As was pointed out by E.F. Rimbault in Notes and Queries, 1859, Second Series, vol. vii, p. 323, this is part of an old catch printed with the music in Pammelia. Musicks Miscellanie. Or, Mixed Varietie of Pleasant Roundelayes, and delightfull Catches, 1609:

There lies a pudding in the fire,
and my parte lies therein a:
whome should I call in,
O thy good fellowes and mine a.

Pammelia, 'the earliest collection of rounds, catches, and canons printed in England', was brought out by Thomas Ravenscroft. Another edition appeared in 1618.

15.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 383-4; History, Bk. XI, ed. 1704, vol. iii, pp. 197-9; ed. Macray, vol. iv, pp. 488-92.

The sense of Fate overhangs the portrait in which Clarendon paints for posterity the private virtues of his unhappy master. The easy dignity of the style adapts itself to the grave subject. This is one of Clarendon's greatest passages. It was written twenty years after Charles's death, but Time had not dulled his feelings. 'But ther shall be only incerted the shorte character of his person, as it was found in the papers of that person whose life is heare described, who was so nerely trusted by him, and who had the greatest love for his person, and the greatest reverence for his memory, that any faythfull servant could exspresse.' So he wrote at first in the account of his own life. On transferring the passage to the History he substituted the more impersonal sentence (p. 48, l. 27—p. 49, l. 5) which the general character of the History demanded.

Page 48, l. 15. our blessed Savyour. Compare 'The Martyrdom of King Charls I. or His Conformity with Christ in his Sufferings. In a Sermon preached at Bredah, Before his Sacred Majesty King Charls The Second, And the Princess of Orange. By the Bishop of Downe. Printed at the Hage 1649, and reprinted at London … 1660'. Clarendon probably heard this sermon.

l. 21. have bene so much, substituted in MS. for 'fitt to be more'.

treatises. E.g. Elenchus Motuum Nuperorum in Anglia (part 1), 1649, by George Bate or Bates, principal physician to Charles I and II; England's black Tribunall. Set forth in the Triall of K. Charles I, 1660; and the sermon mentioned above.

Page 51, l. 20. educated by that people. His tutor was Sir Peter
Young (1544-1628), the tutor of James. Patrick Young (1584-1652), Sir
Peter's son, was Royal Librarian.

l. 26. Hambleton. Cf. p. 18, l. 24.

16.

Mémoires Of the reigne of King Charles I. With a Continuation to the
Happy Restauration of King Charles II. By Sir Philip Warwick, Knight.
Published from the Original Manuscript. With An Alphabetical Table.
London, 1701. (pp. 64-75.)

Warwick (1609-83) was Secretary to Charles in 1647-8. 'When I think of dying', he wrote, adapting a saying of Cicero, 'it is one of my comforts, that when I part from the dunghill of this world, I shall meet King Charles, and all those faithfull spirits, that had virtue enough to be true to him, the Church, and the Laws unto the last.' (Mémoires, p. 331.) Passages in the Mémoires show that they were begun after the summer of 1676 (p. 37), and completed shortly after May 18, 1677 (p. 403).

Page 55, l. 13. Sir Henry Vane, the elder.

l. 14. dyet, allowance for expenses of living.

Page 56, l. 26. [Greek: Eikon Basilikae]. The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Maiesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings was published in February 1649. Charles's authorship was at once doubted in Milton's [Greek: EIKONOKLASTAES] and in [Greek: EIKON ALAETHINAE]. The Pourtraicture of Truths most sacred Majesty truly suffering, though not solely, and supported in [Greek: EIKON AKLASTOS], in [Greek: EIKON AE PISTAE], and in The Princely Pellican, all published in 1649. The weight of evidence is now strongly in favour of the authorship of John Gauden (1605-62), bishop of Exeter at the Restoration. Gauden said in 1661 that he had written it, and examination of his claims is generally admitted to have confirmed them. See H.J. Todd's Letter concerning the Author, 1825, and Gauden the Author, further shewn, 1829; and C.E. Doble's four letters in The Academy, May 12-June 30, 1883.

Carlyle had no doubt that Charles was not the author. 'My reading progresses with or without fixed hope. I struggled through the "Eikon Basilike" yesterday; one of the paltriest pieces of vapid, shovel-hatted, clear-starched, immaculate falsity and cant I have ever read. It is to me an amazement how any mortal could ever have taken that for a genuine book of King Charles's. Nothing but a surpliced Pharisee, sitting at his ease afar off, could have got up such a set of meditations. It got Parson Gauden a bishopric.'—Letter of November 26, 1840 (Froude's Thomas Carlyle, 1884, vol. i, p. 199).

Page 57, l. 4. Thomas Herbert (1606-82), made a baronet in 1660. Appointed by Parliament in 1647 to attend the King, he was latterly his sole attendant, and accompanied him with Juxon to the scaffold. His Threnodia Carolina, reminiscences of Charles's captivity, was published in 1702 under the title, Memoirs of the Two last Years of the Reign of that unparalleled Prince, of ever Blessed Memory, King Charles I. It was 'printed for the first time from the original MS.' (now in private possession), but in modernized spelling, in Allan Fea's Memoirs of the Martyr King, 1905, pp. 74-153.

l. 10. Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), bishop of Salisbury, 1689, the historian whose characters are given in the later part of this volume. His Mémoires of the Lives and Actions of James and William Dukes of Hamilton, 1677, his first historical work, appeared while Warwick was writing his Mémoires of Charles. It attracted great attention, as its account of recent events was furnished with authentic documents. 'It was the first political biography of the modern type, combining a narrative of a man's life with a selection from his letters' (C.H. Firth, introduction to Clarke and Foxcroft's Life of Burnet, 1907, p. xiii).

l. 15. affliction gives understanding. Compare Proverbs 29. 15, and Ecclesiasticus 4. 17 and 34. 9; the exact words are not in the Authorised Version.

l. 30. Robert Sanderson (1587-1663), Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, 1642, Bishop of Lincoln, 1660. Izaak Walton wrote his Life, 1678.

Page 58, l. 20. Sir Dudley Carleton (1573-1632), created Baron Carleton, 1626, and Viscount Dorchester, 1628; Secretary of State, 1628.

l. 21. Lord Falkland, see pp. 71-97; Secretary of State, 1642.

Page 59, ll. 11-13. Plutarch, Life of Alexander the Great; opening sentences, roughly paraphrased.

Page 60, l. 20. Venient Romani, St. John, xi. 48. See The Archbishop of Canterbury's Speech or His Funerall Sermon, Preacht by himself on the Scaffold on Tower-Hill, on Friday the 10. of Ianuary, 1644. London, 1644, p. 10: 'I but perhaps a great clamour there is, that I would have brought in Popery, I shall answer that more fully by and by, in the meane time, you know what the Pharisees said against Christ himself, in the eleventh of Iohn, If we let him alone, all men will beleeve on him, Et venient Romani, and the Romanes will come and take away both our place and the Nation. Here was a causelesse cry against Christ that the Romans would come, and see how just the Iudgement of God was, they crucified Christ for feare least the Romans should come, and his death was that that brought in the Romans upon them, God punishing them with that which they most feared: and I pray God this clamour of veniunt Romani, (of which I have given to my knowledge no just cause) helpe not to bring him in; for the Pope never had such a Harvest in England since the Reformation, as he hath now upon the Sects and divisions that are amongst us.'

ll. 22-30. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) brought out his De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres at Paris in 1625. Towards the end of the dedication to Louis XIII Grotius says: 'Pertæsos discordiarum animos excitat in hanc spem recens contracta inter te & sapientissimum pacisque illius sanctæ amantissimum Magnæ Britanniæ Regem amicitia & auspicatissimo Sororis tuæ matrimonio federata.'

17.

Clarendon, MS. History, p. 59; History, Bk. III, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 203-4; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 340-2.

Page 62, l. 23. Thomas Savile (1590-1658), created Viscount Savile, 1628, Privy Councillor, 1640, Controller and then Treasurer of the Household. 'He was', says Clarendon, 'a man of an ambitious and restless nature, of parts and wit enough, but in his disposition and inclination so false that he could never be believed or depended upon. His particular malice to the earl of Strafford, which he had sucked in with his milk, (there having always been an immortal feud between the families, and the earl had shrewdly overborne his father), had engaged him with all persons who were willing, and like to be able, to do him mischieve' (History, Bk. VI, ed. Macray, vol. ii, p. 534).

Page 63, l. 25. S'r Harry Vane. See p. 152, ll. 9 ff.

l. 26. Plutarch recordes, Life of Sylla, last sentence.

18.

Mémoires of the reigne of King Charles I, 1701, pp. 109-13.

Page 65, l. 21. Warwick was member for Radnor in the Long Parliament from 1640 to 1644. The Bill of Attainder passed the Commons on April 21, 1641, by 204 votes to 59 (Clarendon, ed. Macray, vol. i, p. 306; Rushworth, Historical Collections, third part, vol. i, 1692, p. 225). The names of the minority were posted up at Westminster, under the heading 'These are Straffordians, Betrayers of their Country' (Rushworth, id., pp. 248-9). There are 56 names, and 'Mr. Warwick' is one of them.

19.

Clarendon, MS. History, p. 398; History, Bk. VI, ed. 1703, vol. ii, pp. 115-6; ed. Macray, vol. ii, pp. 477-8.

Page 68, l. 5. Et velut æquali. The source of this quotation is not yet found.

l. 15. the Standard was sett up, at Nottingham, on August 22, 1642.

l. 17. Robert Greville (1608-43), second Baron Brooke, cousin of Sir Fulke Greville, first Baron (p. 23, l. 4). See Clarendon, ed. Macray, vol. ii, pp. 474-5.

l. 27. all his Children. Compare Warwick's account of 'that most noble and stout Lord, the Earle of Northampton', Mémoires, pp. 255-7: 'This may be said of him, that he faithfully served his Master, living and dead; for he left six eminent sons, who were all heirs of his courage, loyalty, and virtue; whereof the eldest was not then twenty.'

20.

Clarendon, MS. History, pp. 477-8; History, Bk. VII, ed. 1703, vol. ii, pp. 269-70; ed. Macray, vol. iii, pp. 177-8.

Carnarvon's character has much in common with Northampton's. Though separated in the History, they are here placed together as companion portraits of two young Royalist leaders who fell early in the Civil War.

Page 70, l. 21. Dorchester and Weymouth surrendered to Carnarvon on August 2 and 5, 1643. They were granted fair conditions, but on the arrival of the army of Prince Maurice care was not taken 'to observe those articles which had been made upon the surrender of the towns; which the earl of Carnarvon (who was full of honour and justice upon all contracts) took so ill that he quitted the command he had with those forces, and returned to the King before Gloster' (Clarendon, vol. iii, p. 158).

21.

Clarendon, MS. History, pp. 478-81; History, Bk. VII, ed. 1703, vol. ii, pp. 270-7; ed. Macray, vol. iii, pp. 178-90.

Clarendon wrote two characters of Falkland, the one in 1647 in the 'History' and the other in 1668 in the 'Life'. Both are long, and both are distinguished by sustained favour of affection and admiration as well as by wealth of detail. He was aware that the earlier character was out of scale in a history, but he would not condense it. He even thought of working it up into a book by itself, wherein he would follow the example of Tacitus who wrote the Agricola before the Annals and Histories. He corresponded about it with John Earle (see No. 50). From two of the letters the following extracts are taken:

'I would desire you (at your leisure) to send me that discourse of your own which you read to me at Dartmouth in the end of your contemplations upon the Proverbs, in memory of my Lord Falkland; of whom in its place I intend to speak largely, conceiving it to be so far from an indecorum, 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. And if you are not of another opinion, you cannot in justice deny me this assistance' (March 16, 1646-7: State Papers, 1773, vol. ii, p. 350).

'I told you long since, that when I came to speak of that unhappy battle of Newbury, I would enlarge upon the memory of our dear friend that perished there; to which I conceive myself obliged, not more by the rights of friendship, than of history, which ought to transmit the virtue of excellent persons to posterity; and therefore I am careful to do justice to every man who hath fallen in the quarrel, on which side soever, as you will find by what I have said of Mr. Hambden himself. I am now past that point; and being quickened your most elegant and political commemoration of him, and from hints there, thinking it necessary to say somewhat for his vindication in such particulars as may possibly have made impression in good men, it may be I have insisted longer upon the argument than may be agreeable to the rules to be observed in such a work; though it be not much longer than Livy is in recollecting the virtues of one of the Scipios after his death. I wish it were with you, that you might read it; for if you thought it unproportionable for the place where it is, I could be willingly diverted to make it a piece by itself, and inlarge it into the whole size of his life; and that way it would be sooner communicated to the world. And you know Tacitus published the life of Julius Agricola, before either of his annals or his history. I am contented you should laugh at me for a fop in talking of Livy or Tacitus; when all I can hope for is to side Hollingshead, and Stow, or (because he is a poor Knight too, and worse than either of them) Sir Richard Baker' (December 14, 1647, id. p. 386).

Page 71, l. 22. Turpe mori. Lucan, ix. 108.

l. 26. His mother's father, Sir Lawrence Tanfield, Chief Baron of the Exchequer. He died in May 1625. See p. 87, ll. 21 ff.

Page 72, l. 3. His education. See p. 87, ll. 6-13. His father, Henry Carey, first Viscount, was Lord Deputy of Ireland from 1622 to 1629, when he was recalled. He died in 1633.

l. 30. his owne house, at Great Tew, 16 miles NW. of Oxford; inherited from Sir Lawrence Tanfield. The house was demolished in 1790, but the gardens remain.

PAGE 74, l. 14. two large discources. See p. 94, ll. 10-15. Falkland's Of the Infallibilitie of the Church of Rome … Now first published from a Copy of his owne hand had appeared at Oxford in 1645, two years before Clarendon wrote this passage. It is a short pamphlet of eighteen quarto pages. It had been circulated in manuscript during his lifetime, and he had written a Reply to an Answer to it. The second 'large discource' may be this Reply. Or it may be his Answer to a Letter of Mr. Mountague, justifying his change of Religion, being dispersed in many Copies. Both of these were first published, along with the Infallibilitie, in 1651, under the editorship of Dr. Thomas Triplet, tutor of the third Viscount, to whom the volume is dedicated. The dedication is in effect a character of Falkland, and dwells in particular on his great virtue of friendship. A passage in it recalls Clarendon. 'And your blessed Mother', says Triplet, 'were she now alive, would say, she had the best of Friends before the best of Husbands. This was it that made Tew so valued a Mansion to us: For as when we went from Oxford thither, we found our selves never out of the Universitie: So we thought our selves never absent from our own beloved home'.

l. 25. He was Member for Newport in the Isle of Wight in The Short Parliament, and again in The Long Parliament.

Page 75, l. 5. His father was Controller of the Household before his appointment as Lord Deputy of Ireland. Cf. p. 91, ll. 3, 4.

l. 18. L'd Finch, Sir John Finch (1584-1660), Speaker, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and Lord Keeper, created Baron Finch, 1640. He was impeached in 1640 and fled to Holland. 'The Lord Falkland took notice of the business of ship-money, and very sharply mentioned the lord Finch as the principal promoter of it, and that, being then a sworn judge of the law, he had not only given his own judgement against law, but been the solicitor to corrupt all the other judges to concur with him in their opinion; and concluded that no man ought to be more severely prosecuted than he' (Clarendon, vol. i, p. 230).

Page 77, l. 26. haud semper, Tacitus, Agricola, ix.

Page 78, l. 17. in republica Platonis, Cicero, Epis. ad Atticum, ii. 1.

l. 20. it, i.e. his avoiding them.

l. 30. Sir Harry Vane, the elder, was dismissed from the Secretaryship of State in November 1641. In an earlier section of the History (vol. i, p. 458) Clarendon claims responsibility for Falkland's acceptance of the Secretaryship: 'It was a very difficult task to Mr. Hyde, who had most credit with him, to persuade him to submit to this purpose of the King cheerfully, and with a just sense of the obligation, by promising that in those parts of the office which required most drudgery he would help him the best he could, and would quickly inform him of all the necessary forms. But, above all, he prevailed with him by enforcing the ill consequence of his refusal', &c.

Page 80, l. 19. in tanto viro, Tacitus, Agricola, ix.

l. 20. Some sharpe expressions. See the quotation by Fuller, p. 105, ll. 14, 15. Clarendon refers to Falkland's speech 'Concerning Episcopacy' in the debate on the bill for depriving the bishops of their votes, introduced on March 30, 1641: 'The truth is, Master Speaker, that as some ill Ministers in our state first tooke away our mony from us, and after indeavoured to make our mony not worth the taking, by turning it into brasse by a kind of Antiphilosophers-stone: so these men used us in the point of preaching, first depressing it to their power, and next labouring to make it such, as the harme had not beene much if it had beene depressed, the most frequent subjects even in the most sacred auditories, being the Jus divinum of Bishops and tithes, the sacrednesse of the clergie, the sacriledge of impropriations, the demolishing of puritanisme and propriety, the building of the prerogative at Pauls, the introduction of such doctrines, as, admitting them true, the truth would not recompence the scandall; or of such as were so far false, that, as Sir Thomas More sayes of the Casuists, their businesse was not to keepe men from sinning, but to enforme them Quam prope ad peccatum sine peccato liceat accedere: so it seemed their worke was to try how much of a Papist might bee brought in without Popery, and to destroy as much as they could of the Gospell, without bringing themselves into danger of being destroyed by the Law.'—Speeches and Passages of This Great and Happy Parliament: From the third of November, 1640 to this instant June, 1641, p. 190. The speech is reprinted in Lady Theresa Lewis's Lives of the Friends of Clarendon, 1852, vol. i, pp. 53-62.

Page 82, ll. 23-6. See p. 90, ll. 6-13.

Page 83, l. 2. Falkland's participation in 'the Northern Expedition against the Scots', 1639, was the subject of a eulogistic poem by Cowley:

Great is thy Charge, O North; be wise and just,
England commits her Falkland to thy trust;
Return him safe: Learning would rather choose
Her Bodley, or her Vatican to loose.
All things that are but writ or printed there,
In his unbounded Breast engraven are, &c.

It was the occasion also of Waller's 'To my Lord of Falkland'.

l. 14. et in luctu, Tacitus, Agricola, xxix.

l. 15. the furious resolution, passed on November 24, 1642, after the battle at Brentford: see Clarendon, vol. ii, pp. 395-9.

Page 84, l. 9. adversus malos, Tacitus, Agricola, xxii.

ll. 11-28. The date of this incident is uncertain. Professor Firth believes it to have happened when the House resolved that Colonel Goring 'deserved very well of the Commonwealth, and of this House', for his discovery of the army plot, June 9, 1641 (Journals of the House of Commons, vol. ii, p. 172).

Page 85, l. 18. the leaguer before Gloster. The siege of Gloucester was raised by the Earl of Essex on September 8, 1643. Clarendon had described it (vol. iii, pp. 167 ff.) just before he came to the account of Falkland.

Page 86, l. 1. the battell, i.e. of Newbury, September 20, 1643. How Falkland met his death is told in Byron's narrative of the fight: 'My Lord of Falkland did me the honour to ride in my troop this day, and I would needs go along with him, the enemy had beat our foot out of the close, and was drawne up near the hedge; I went to view, and as I was giving orders for making the gap wide enough, my horse was shott in the throat with a musket bullet and his bit broken in his mouth so that I was forced to call for another horse, in the meanwhile my Lord Falkland (more gallantly than advisedly) spurred his horse through the gapp, where both he and his horse were immediately killed.' See Walter Money, The Battles of Newbury, 1884, p. 52; also p. 93.

A passage in Whitelocke's Memorials, ed. 1682, p. 70, shows that he had a presentiment of his death: 'The Lord Falkland, Secretary of State, in the morning of the fight, called for a clean shirt, and being asked the reason of it, answered, that if he were slain in the Battle, they should not find, his body in foul Linnen. Being diswaded by his friends to goe into the fight, as having no call to it, and being no Military Officer, he said he was weary of the times, and foresaw much misery to his own Countrey, and did beleive be should be out of it ere night, and could not be perswaded to the contrary, but would enter into the battle, and was there slain.'

22.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 51-4; Life, ed. 1759, pp. 19-23.

This is Falkland in his younger days, amid the hospitable pleasures of
Tew, before he was overwhelmed in politics and war.

Page 86, l. 20. he, i.e. Clarendon.

Page 88, l. 2. the two most pleasant places, Great Tew (see p. 72, l. 30) and Burford, where Falkland was born. He sold Burford in 1634 to William Lenthall, the Speaker of the Long Parliament: see p. 91, l. 5.

Page 89, l. 2. He married Lettice, daughter of Sir Richard Morrison of Tooley Park, Leicestershire. His friendship with her brother Henry is celebrated in an ode by Ben Jonson, 'To the immortall memorie, and friendship of that noble paire, Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir H. Morison' (Under-woods, 1640, p. 232).

Page 91, ll. 17-20. So in the MS. The syntax is confused, but the sense is clear.

Page 92, ll. 21, 22. Gilbert Sheldon (1598-1677), Archbishop of Canterbury, 1663; Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and builder of the Sheldonian Theatre there.

George Morley (1597-1684), Bishop of Worcester, 1660.

Henry Hammond (1605-60), chaplain to Charles I.

Clarendon has given short characters of Sheldon and Morley in his Life. For his characters of Earle and Chillingworth, see Nos. 50 and 52.

Page 94, l. 11. See note p. 74, l. 14.

Page 95, l. 3. Cf. p. 78, l. 17.

l. 17. It is notable that Clarendon nowhere suggests that Falkland was also a poet. Cowley gives his verses the highest praise in his address to him on the Northern Expedition (see p. 83, l. 2, note); and they won him a place in Suckling's Sessions of the Poets:

He was of late so gone with Divinity
That he had almost forgot his Poetry,
Though to say the truth (and Apollo did know it)
He might have been both his Priest and his Poet.

His poems were collected and edited by A.B. Grosart in 1871.

23.

Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 55; Life, ed. 1759, p. 24.

This very pleasing portrait of Godolphin serves as a pendant to the longer and more elaborate description of his friend. Clarendon wrote also a shorter character of him in the History (vol. ii, pp. 457-8).

Page 96, l. 2. so very small a body. He is the 'little Cid' (i.e.
Sidney) of Suckling's Sessions of the Poets.

PAGE 97, l. 1. He was member for Helston from 1628 to 1643.

l. 6. In the character in the History Clarendon says that he left 'the ignominy of his death upon a place which could never otherwise have had a mention to the world'. The place was Chagford.

24.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 69-70; History, Bk. I, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 69-73; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 119-25.

The three characters of Laud here given supplement each other. They convey the same idea of the man.

Page 97, l. 20. George Abbott (1562-1633), Archbishop of Canterbury, 1611. In the preceding paragraph Clarendon had written an unfavourable character of him. He 'considered Christian religion no otherwise than as it abhorred and reviled Popery, and valued those men most who did that most furiously': 'if men prudently forbore a public reviling and railing at the hierarchy and ecclesiastical government, let their opinions and private practice be what it would, they were not only secure from any inquisition of his, but acceptable to him, and at least equally preferred by him': his house was 'a sanctuary to the most eminent of that factious party'. Cf. p. 100, ll. 21-7.

Page 101, l. 2. In the omitted portion Clarendon dealt with the 'Arminianism', as it was then understood in England: 'most of the popular preachers, who had not looked into the ancient learning, took Calvin's word for it, and did all they could to propagate his opinions in those points: they who had studied more, and were better versed in the antiquities of the Church, the Fathers, the Councils, and the ecclesiastical histories, with the same heat and passion in preaching and writing, defended the contrary. But because in the late dispute in the Dutch churches, those opinions were supported by Jacobus Arminius, the divinity professor in the university of Leyden in Holland, the latter men we mentioned were called Arminians, though many of them had never read a word written by Arminius'. Arminius (the name is the Latinized form of Harmens or Hermans) died in 1609.

25.

The Church-History of Britain, 1648, Bk. XI, pp. 217-9.

Page 104, l. 15. Canterbury College was founded at Oxford in 1363 by
Simon Islip, Archbishop of Canterbury. It was incorporated in Christ
Church, Wolsey's foundation, and so 'lost its name'; but the name
survives in the Canterbury quadrangle.

Page 105, l. 13. Lord F., i.e. Lord Falkland: see p. 80, l. 20 note.

26.

Mémoires of the reigne of King Charles I, 1701, pp. 78-82, 89-93.

Page 107, l. 27. cleansed it by fire. Perhaps a reminiscence of
Dryden's Annus Mirabilis, 1667, stanza 276:

The daring Flames peep't in, and saw from far
The awful Beauties of the Sacred Quire:
But since it was prophan'd by Civil War,
Heav'n thought it fit to have it purg'd by fire.

l. 29. too too, so in the original; perhaps but not certainly a misprint.

27.

Mémoires, 1701, pp. 93-6.

Page 112, l. 9. Lord Portland, Sir Richard Weston: see No. 5.

l. 13. white staff, see p. 21, l. 7 note.

28.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 152-3; History, Bk. IV, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 332-3; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 563-5.

This is the first of three characters of Hertford in Clarendon's History. The others, in Bk. VI (MS. Life) ed. Macray, ii. 528, and Bk. VII (MS. History) iii. 128, are supplementary.

Page 114, l. 10. disobligations, on account of his secret marriage with James's cousin, Arabella Stuart, daughter of Charles Stuart, Earl of Lennox, brother of the Earl of Darnley. She died a prisoner in the Tower; he escaped to France, but after her death was allowed to return to England in 1616. He succeeded his grandfather as Earl of Hertford in 1621. He lived in retirement from the dissolution of Parliament in March 1629 to 1640, when he was made a Privy Councillor.

Page 115, l. 5. He was appointed Governor to the Prince of Wales in May 1641, in succession to the Earl of Newcastle. He was then in his fifty-third year. In the following month he was made a Marquis. See his life in Lady Theresa Lewis's Lives of the Friends of Clarendon, vol. ii, pp. 436-42.

Page 116, l. 2. attacque, an unexpected form of 'attach' at this time, and perhaps a slip, but 'attack' and 'attach' are ultimately the same word; cf. Italian attaccare. The New English Dictionary gives an instance in 1666 of 'attach' in the sense of 'attack'.

29.

Clarendon, MS. History, Transcript, vol. iv, pp. 440-2; History, Bk.
VIII, ed. 1703, vol. ii, pp. 391-3; ed. Macray, vol. iii, pp. 380-3.

The original manuscript of much of Book VIII is lost. The text is taken from the transcript that was made for the printers.

This is the portrait of a great English nobleman whose tastes lay in music and poetry and the arts of peace, but was forced by circumstances into the leadership of the Royalist army in the North. He showed little military talent, though he was far from devoid of personal courage; and he escaped from the conflict, weary and despondent, when other men were content to carry on the unequal struggle. He modelled himself on the heroes of Romance. The part he tried to play could not be adjusted to the rude events of the civil war.

His romantic cast of mind is shown in his challenge to Lord Fairfax to follow 'the Examples of our Heroick Ancestors, who used not to spend their time in scratching one another out of holes, but in pitched Fields determined their Doubts'. Fairfax replied by expressing his readiness to fight but refusing to follow 'the Rules of Amadis de Gaule, or the Knight of the Sun, which the language of the Declaration seems to affect in appointing pitch'd battles' (Rushworth, Historical Collections, third part, vol. ii, 1692, pp. 138, 141).

Warwick's short character of Newcastle resembles Clarendon's: 'He was a Gentleman of grandeur, generosity, loyalty, and steddy and forward courage; but his edge had too much of the razor in it: for he had a tincture of a Romantick spirit, and had the misfortune to have somewhat of the Poet in him; so as he chose Sir William Davenant, an eminent good Poet, and loyall Gentleman, to be Lieutenant-Generall of his Ordnance. This inclination of his own and such kind of witty society (to be modest in the expressions of it) diverted many counsels, and lost many opportunities; which the nature of that affair, this great man had now entred into, required' (Mémoires, pp. 235-6).

His life by the Duchess of Newcastle—the 'somewhat fantastical, and original-brain'd, generous Margaret Newcastle', as Charles Lamb calls her—was published in 1667. The edition by C.H. Firth, 1886, contains copious historical notes, and an introduction which points out Newcastle's place as a patron and author.

Page 116, ll. 15-22. Newcastle had been besieged at York. He was relieved by Prince Rupert, who, against Newcastle's advice, forced on the disastrous battle of Marston Moor (July 2, 1644) without waiting for reinforcements. In this battle Newcastle was not in command but fought at the head of a company of volunteers. The next day he embarked at Scarborough for the continent, where he remained till the Restoration.

l. 24. He published two books on horsemanship—La Méthode et Invention Nouvelle de Dresser les Chevaux, written originally in English, but printed in French at Antwerp in 1658, and A New Method and Extraordinary Invention to Dress Horses, 1667. The former was dedicated to Prince Charles, whom, as Governor, he had taught to ride. On his reputation as a horseman, see C.H. Firth, op. cit., pp. xx-xxii.

Page 117, l. 20. He was Governor of the Prince from 1638 to 1641: cf. note on p. 115, l. 5.

l. 29. Newcastle-upon-Tyne (from which he took his title) was 'speedily and dexterously' secured for the King at the end of June 1642 'by his lordship's great interest in those parts, the ready compliance of the best of the gentry, and the general good inclinations of the place' (Clarendon, vol. ii, p. 227).

Page 118, l. 17. Henry Clifford (1591-1643) fifth Earl of Cumberland. He had commanded the Royalist forces in Yorkshire, but was 'in his nature inactive, and utterly inexperienced'. He willingly gave up the command (Clarendon, vol. ii, pp. 282, 464-5). He died shortly afterwards.

l. 28. this last, Marston Moor.

Page 119, l. 8. unacquainted with War. Clarendon expressed himself privately on this point much more emphatically than the nature of his History would allow: 'you will find the Marquis of Newcastle a very lamentable man and as fit to be a General as a Bishop.' (Letter to Sir Edward Nicholas, dated Madrid, June 4, 1650: State Papers, 1786, vol. iii, p. 20.)

l. 10. James King (1589?-1652?), created Baron Eythin and Kerrey in the Scottish peerage in 1643. He had been a general in the army of the King of Sweden, and returned to this country in 1640. He left it with Newcastle after Marston Moor. He entirely disapproved of Rupert's plans for the battle; his comment, as reported by Clarendon, was 'By God, sir, it is very fyne in the paper, but ther is no such thinge in the Feilds' (vol. iii, p. 376).

30.

Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 136; History, Bk. IV, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 270-1; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 461-3.

The references to Digby in various parts of the History show the interest—sometimes an amused interest—that Clarendon took in his strange and erratic character. 'The temper and composition of his mind was so admirable, that he was always more pleased and delighted that he had advanced so far, which he imputed to his virtue and conduct, than broken or dejected that his success was not answerable, which he still charged upon second causes, for which he could not be accountable' (vol. iv, p. 122). 'He was a person of so rare a composition by nature and by art, (for nature alone could never have reached to it,) that he was so far from being ever dismayed by any misfortune, (and greater variety of misfortunes never befell any man,) that he quickly recollected himself so vigorously, that he did really believe his condition to be improved by that ill accident' (id., p. 175). But the interest is shown above all by the long study of Digby that he wrote at Montpelier in 1669. It was first printed in his State Papers, 1786, vol. iii, supplement, pp. li-lxxiv. The manuscript—a transcript revised by Clarendon—is in the Bodleian Library, Clarendon MS. 122, pp. 1-48.

Page 120, l. 8. the other three, Sir John Culpeper, or Colepeper;
Lord Falkland; and Clarendon.

Page 121, l. 2. sharpe reprehension. 'He was committed to the Fleet in June 1634, but released in July, for striking Mr. Crofts in Spring Garden, within the precincts of the Court. Cal. Dom. State. Papers, 1634-5 (1864), pp. 81, 129'—Macray, vol. i, p. 461.

Shaftesbury gives a brief sketch of him at this time in his fragmentary autobiography: 'The Earl of Bristoll was retired from all business and lived privately to himself; but his son the Lord Digby, a very handsome young man of great courage and learning and of a quick wit, began to show himself to the world and gave great expectations of himself, he being justly admired by all, and only gave himself disadvantage with a pedantic stiffness and affectation he had contracted.'

l. 19. As Baron Digby, during the lifetime of his father; June 9, 1641.

Page 123, l. 5. a very unhappy councell, the impeachment and attempted 'Arrest of the Five Members', January 3 and 4, 1642. Compare Clarendon, vol. i, p. 485: 'And all this was done without the least communication with any body but the Lord Digby, who advised it.'

31.

Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 389, and MS. History, p. 25 (or 597); History, Bk. XI, ed. 1704, vol. iii, pp. 210-11; ed. Macray, vol. iv, pp. 510-11.

This admirable character was not all written at the same time. The first sentence is from Clarendon's Life, and the remainder from the History, where the date, '21 Nov. 1671', is appended. 123, l. 15. Crumwells owne character,—in the debate in Parliament on carrying out the sentence of death, March 8, 1649. Clarendon had briefly described Cromwell's speech: 'Cromwell, who had known him very well, spake so much good of him, and professed to have so much kindness and respect for him, that all men thought he was now safe, when he concluded, that his affection to the public so much weighed down his private friendship, that he could not but tell them, that the question was now, whether they would preserve the most bitter and the most implacable enemy they had' (vol. iv, p. 506).

l. 22. He married in November 1626, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Charles
Morrison, of Cassiobury, Hertfordshire, and granddaughter of the first
Viscount Campden. Their daughter Theodosia was the wife of the second
Earl of Clarendon.

Page 124, l. 13. an indignity, probably a reference to Lord Hopton's command of the army in the west; see vol. iv, p. 131.

32.

Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 273; History, Bk. VIII, ed. 1703, vol. ii, pp. 427-8; ed. Macray, vol. iii, pp. 443-5.

The four generals in this group are described on various occasions in the History. In this passage Clarendon sums up shortly what he says elsewhere, and presents a parallel somewhat in the manner of Plutarch.

Page 125, l. 23. Clarendon has a great passage in Book VII (vol. iii, pp. 224-6) on the value of Councils, even when the experience and wisdom of the councillors individually may not promise the right decisions. The passage is suggested by, and immediately follows, a short character of Prince Rupert.

Page 126, ll. 15, 16. Clarendon refers to the retreat of the Parliamentary Army at Lostwithiel, on August 31, 1644, when Essex embarked the foot at Fowey and escaped by sea, and Sir William Balfour broke away with the horse. In describing it, Clarendon says that 'the notice and orders came to Goring when he was in one of his jovial exercises; which he received with mirth, and slighting those who sent them, as men who took alarms too warmly; and he continued his delights till all the enemy's horse were passed through his quarters, nor did then pursue them in any time' (vol. iii, p. 403; cf. p. 391). But Goring's horse was not so posted as to be able to check Balfour's. See the article on Goring by C.H. Firth in the Dictionary of National Biography and S.R. Gardiner's Civil War, 1893, vol. ii, pp. 13-17. Clarendon was misinformed; yet this error in detail does not impair the truth of the portrait.

33.

Clarendon, MS. History, pp. 447-8; History, Bk. VII, ed. 1704, vol. ii, pp. 204-6; ed. Macray, vol. iii, pp. 61-4.

The studied detachment that Clarendon tried to cultivate when writing about his political enemies is nowhere shown better than in the character of Hampden. 'I am careful to do justice', he claimed, 'to every man who hath fallen in the quarrel, on which side soever, as you will find by what I have said of Mr. Hambden himself' (see No. 21, note). The absence of all enthusiasm makes the description of Hampden's merits the more telling. But there is a tail with a sting in it.

The last sentence, it must be admitted, is not of a piece with the rest of the character. There was some excuse for doubting its authenticity. But doubts gave place to definite statements that it had been interpolated by the Oxford editors when seeing the History through the press. Edmund Smith, the author of Phædra and Hippolytus, started the story that while he was resident in Christ Church he was 'employ'd to interpolate and alter the Original', and specially mentioned this sentence as having been 'foisted in'; and the story was given a prominent place by Oldmixon in his History of England, during the Reigns of the Royal House of Stuart (see Letters of Thomas Burnat to George Duckett, ed. Nichol Smith, 1914, p. xx). A controversy ensued, the final contribution to which is John Burton's Genuineness of L'd Clarendon's History Vindicated, 1744. Once the original manuscript was accessible, all doubt was removed. Every word of the sentence is there to be found in Clarendon's hand. But it is written along the margin, to take the place of a deleted sentence, and is evidently later than the rest of the character. This accounts for the difference in tone.

Page 129, ll. 22 ff. Compare Warwick, Mémoires, p. 240: 'He was of a concise and significant language, and the mildest, yet subtillest, speaker of any man in the House; and had a dexterity, when a question was going to be put, which agreed not with his sense, to draw it over to it, by adding some equivocall or sly word, which would enervate the meaning of it, as first put.'

At the beginning of this short character of Hampden, Warwick says that 'his blood in its temper was acrimonious, as the scurfe commonly on his face shewed'.

Page 131, l. 4. this that was at Oxforde, i.e. the overture,
February and March 1643: Clarendon, vol. ii, pp. 497 ff.

ll. 24-6. Erat illi, &c. Cicero, Orat. in Catilinam iii. 7. 'Cinna' should be 'Catiline'.

34.

Clarendon, MS. History, pp. 525-7; History, Bk. VII, ed. 1703, vol. ii, pp. 353-5; ed. Macray, vol. iii, pp. 321-4.

The character of Pym does not show the same detachment as the character of Hampden. Clarendon has not rejected unauthenticated Royalist rumour.

Page 132, ll. 7-9. This rumour occasioned the publication of an official narrative of his disease and death, 'attested under the Hands of his Physicians, Chyrurgions, and Apothecary', from which it appears that he died of an intestinal abscess. See John Forster's John Pym ('Lives of Eminent British Statesmen', vol. iii), pp. 409-11.

l. 19. He was member for Tavistock from 1624.

Page 133, l. 26. Oliver St. John (1603-42), Solicitor-General, mortally wounded at Edgehill.

ll. 29, 30. Cf. p. 129, ll. 15-18.

Page 134, l. 3. Francis Russell (1593-1641), fourth Earl of Bedford. 'This lord was the greatest person of interest in all the popular party, being of the best estate and best understanding of the whole pack, and therefore most like to govern the rest; he was besides of great civility, and of much more good-nature than any of the others. And therefore the King, resolving to do his business with that party by him, resolved to make him Lord High Treasurer of England, in the place of the Bishop of London, who was as willing to lay down the office as any body was to take it up; and, to gratify him the more, at his desire intended to make Mr. Pimm Chancellor of the Exchequer, as he had done Mr. St. John his Solicitor-General' (Clarendon, vol. i, p. 333). The plan was frustrated by Bedford's death in 1641. The Chancellorship of the Exchequer was bestowed on Culpeper (id., p. 457).

ll. 27 ff. The authority for this story is the Mercurius Academicus for February 3, 1645-6 (pp. 74-5), a journal of the Court party published at Oxford (hence the title), and the successor of the Mercurius Aulicus. The Irishman is there reported to have made this confession on the scaffold.

Page 135, ll. 25-8. The last Summer, i.e. before Pym's death, 1643.
See Clarendon, vol. iii, pp. 116, 135, 141.

Page 136, ll. 7-10. He died on December 8, 1643, and was buried on
December 13 in Westminster Abbey, whence his body was ejected at the
Restoration.

35.

Clarendon, MS. History, Bk. X, p. 24 (or 570); History, ed. 1704, vol. iii, pp. 84-5; ed. Macray, vol. iv, pp. 305-7.

The two characters of Cromwell by Clarendon were written about the same time. Though the first is from the manuscript of the History, it belongs to a section that was added in 1671, when the matter in the original History was combined with the matter in the Life. It describes Cromwell as Clarendon remembered him before he had risen to his full power. He was then in Clarendon's eyes preeminently a dissembler—'the greatest dissembler living'. The other character views him in the light of his complete achievement. It represents him, with all his wickedness, as a man of 'great parts of courage and industry and judgement'. He is a 'bad man', but a 'brave, bad man', to whose success, remarkable talents, and even some virtues, must have contributed. The recognition of his greatness was unwilling; it was all the more sincere.

'Crumwell' is Clarendon's regular spelling.

Page 136, l. 22. Hampden's mother, Elizabeth Cromwell, was the sister of Cromwell's father.

Page 138, l. 18. the Modell, i.e. the New Model Army, raised in the
Spring of 1645. See C.H. Firth's Cromwell's Army, 1902, ch. iii.

l. 21. chaunged a Generall, the Earl of Essex. See No. 40.

36.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 549-50; History, Bk. XV, ed. 1704, vol. iii, pp. 505-6, 509; ed. Macray, vol. vi, pp. 91-2, 97.

Page 139, ll. 3, 4. quos vituperare, Cicero, Pro Fonteio, xvii. 39 'Is igitur vir, quem ne inimicus quidem satis in appellando significare poterat, nisi ante laudasset.'

ll. 19, 20. Ausum eum, Velleius Paterculus, ii. 24.

Page 140, ll. 9-12. Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. vii.

ll. 17-22. Editorial taste in 1704 transformed this sentence thus: 'In a word, as he was guilty of many Crimes against which Damnation is denounced, and for which Hell-fire is prepared, so he had some good Qualities which have caused the Memory of some Men in all Ages to be celebrated; and he will be look'd upon by Posterity as a brave wicked Man.'

37.

Mémoires Of the reigne of King Charles I, 1701, pp. 247-8.

Page 141, l. 17. a servant of Mr. Prynn's, John Lilburne (1614-57). But it is doubtful if he was Prynne's servant; see the article in the Dictionary of National Biography. Lilburne's petition was presented by Cromwell on November 9, 1640, and referred to a Committee; and on May 4, 1641, the House resolved 'That the Sentence of the Star-Chamber, given against John Lilborne, is illegal, and against the Liberty of the Subject; and also, bloody, wicked, cruel, barbarous, and tyrannical' (Journals of the House of Commons, vol. ii, pp. 24, 134).

ll. 29, 30. Warwick was imprisoned on suspicion of plotting against the Protector's Government in 1655.

38.

A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, Esq.; Edited by
Thomas Birch, 1742, vol. i, p. 766.

This passage is from a letter written to 'John Winthrop, esq; governor of the colony of Connecticut in New England', and dated 'Westminster, March 24, 1659'.

Maidston was Cromwell's servant.

39.

Reliquiæ Baxterianæ: or, Mr. Richard Baxter's Narrative of The most
Memorable Passages of his Life and Times. Faithfully Publish'd from
his own Original Manuscript, By Matthew Sylvester. London: MDCXCVI.
(Lib. I, Part I, pp. 98-100.)

The interest of this character lies largely in its Presbyterian point of view. It is a carefully balanced estimate by one who had been a chaplain in the Parliamentary army, but opposed Cromwell when, after the fall of Presbyterianism, he assumed the supreme power.

Page 144, ll. 19-24. See the article by C.H. Firth on 'The Raising of the Ironsides' in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1899, vol. xiii, and its sequel, 'The Later History of the Ironsides', 1901, vol. xv; and the articles on John Desborough (who married Cromwell's sister) and James Berry in the Dictionary of National Biography. 'Who Captain Ayres was it is difficult to say … He left the regiment about June 1644, and his troop was given to James Berry … the captain-lieutenant of Cromwell's own troop'. (R.H.S. Trans., vol. xiii, pp. 29, 30). Berry subsequently became one of Cromwell's major-generals. His character is briefly sketched by Baxter, who calls him 'my old Bosom Friend', Reliquiæ, 1696, p. 57. For Captain William Evanson, see R.H.S. Trans., vol. xv, pp. 22-3.

Page 146, l. 12. A passage from Bacon's essay 'Of Faction' (No. 51) is quoted in the margin in the edition of 1696. 'Fraction' in l. 12 is probably a misprint for 'Faction'.

Page 148, ll. 7-10. The concluding sentence of the essay 'Of Simulation and Dissimulation'. Brackets were often used at this time to mark a quotation.

40.

Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, 1696, Lib. I, Part I, p. 48.

Much the same opinion of Fairfax was held by Sir Philip Warwick and Clarendon. Warwick says he was 'a man of a military genius, undaunted courage and presence of mind in the field both in action and danger, but of a very common understanding in all other affairs, and of a worse elocution; and so a most fit tool for Mr. Cromwel to work with' (Mémoires, p. 246). Clarendon alludes to him as one 'who had no eyes, and so would be willinge to be ledd' (p. 138, l. 24). But Milton saw him in a different light when he addressed to him the sonnet on his capture of Colchester in August 1648:

Fairfax, whose name in armes through Europe rings
Filling each mouth with envy, or with praise,…
Thy firm unshak'n vertue ever brings
Victory home,…
O yet a nobler task awaites thy hand;
For what can Warr, but endless warr still breed,
Till Truth, & Right from Violence be freed,
And Public Faith cleard from the shamefull brand
Of Public Fraud. In vain doth Valour bleed
While Avarice, & Rapine share the land.

Fairfax's military capacity is certain, and his private virtues are unquestioned. Writing in 1648, Milton credited him with the power to settle the affairs of the nation. But Fairfax was not a politician. He broke with Cromwell over the execution of the king, and in July 1650 retired into private life. Baxter, Warwick, and Clarendon all wrote of him at a distance of time that showed his merits and limitations in truer perspective.

Milton addressed him again when singing the praises of Bradshaw and Cromwell and other Parliamentary leaders in his Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda, 1654. As a specimen of a contemporary Latin character, and a character by Milton, the passage is now quoted in full:

'Sed neque te fas est præterire, Fairfaxi, in quo cum summa fortitudine summam modestiam, summam vitæ sanctitatem, & natura & divinus favor conjunxit: Tu harum in partem laudum evocandus tuo jure ac merito es; quanquam in illo nunc tuo secessu, quantus olim Literni Africanus ille Scipio, abdis te quoad potes; nec hostem solum, sed ambitionem, & quæ præstantissimum quemque mortalium vincit, gloriam quoque vicisti; tuisque virtutibus & præclare factis, jucundissimum & gloriosissimum per otium frueris, quod est laborum omnium & humanarum actionum vel maximarum finis; qualique otio cum antiqui Heroes, post bella & decora tuis haud majora, fruerentur, qui eos laudare conati sunt poetæ, desperabant se posse alia ratione id quale esset digne describere, nisi eos fabularentur, coelo receptos, deorum epulis accumbere. Verum te sive valetudo, quod maxime crediderim, sive quid aliud retraxit, persuasissimum hoc habeo, nihil te a rationibus reipublicæ divellere potuisse, nisi vidisses quantum libertatis conservatorem, quam firmum atque fidum Anglicanæ rei columen ac munimentum in successore tuo relinqueres' (ed. 1654, pp. 147-8).

Page 149, l. 9. The Self-denying Ordinance, discharging members of
Parliament from all offices, civil and military, passed both Houses on
April 3, 1645.

l. 18. He succeeded his father as third Lord Fairfax in 1648.

l. 21. See p. 118, ll. 8 ff.

41.

Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 103; History, Bk. III, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 148-9; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 247-9.

Baxter has an account of Vane in his Autobiography: 'He was the Principal Man that drove on the Parliament to go too high, and act too vehemently against the King: Being of very ready Parts, and very great Subtilty, and unwearied Industry, he laboured, and not without Success, to win others in Parliament, City and Country to his Way. When the Earl of Strafford was accused, he got a Paper out of his Father's Cabinet (who was Secretary of State) which was the chief Means of his Condemnation: To most of our Changes he was that within the House, which Cromwell was without. His great Zeal to drive all into War, and to the highest, and to cherish the Sectaries, and especially in the Army, made him above all Men to be valued by that Party … When Cromwell had served himself by him as his surest Friend, as long as he could; and gone as far with him as their way lay together, (Vane being for a Fanatick Democracie, and Cromwell for Monarchy) at last there was no Remedy but they must part; and when Cromwell cast out the Rump (as disdainfully as Men do Excrements) he called Vane a Jugler' (Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, Lib. I, Part I, p. 75). This account occurs in Baxter's description of the sectaries who were named after him 'Vanists'.

Clarendon and Baxter both lay stress on the element of the fanatic in Vane's nature; and in a later section of the History Clarendon speaks of it emphatically: … 'Vane being a man not to be described by any character of religion; in which he had swallowed some of the fancies and extravagances of every sect or faction, and was become (which cannot be expressed by any other language than was peculiar to that time) a man above ordinances, unlimited and unrestrained by any rules or bounds prescribed to other men, by reason of his perfection. He was a perfect enthusiast, and without doubt did believe himself inspired' (vol. vi, p. 148).

Milton's sonnet, to Vane 'young in yeares, but in sage counsell old' gives no suggestion of the fanatic:

besides to know
Both spirituall powre & civill, what each meanes
What severs each thou 'hast learnt, which few have don.
The bounds of either sword to thee wee ow.
Therfore on thy firme hand religion leanes
In peace, & reck'ns thee her eldest son.

There was much in Vane's views about Church and State with which
Milton sympathized; and the sonnet was written in 1652, before
Cromwell broke with Vane.

See also Pepys's Diary, June 14, 1662, and Burnet's History of His
Own Time, ed. Osmund Airy, vol. i, pp. 284-6.

Page 150, ll. 13, 14. Magdalen College, a mistake for Magdalen Hall, of which Vane was a Gentleman Commoner; but he did not matriculate. See Wood's Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, vol. iii, col. 578.

l. 17. He returned to England in 1632; he had been in the train of the English ambassador at Vienna.

ll. 25 ff. He transported himself into New England in 1635. He was chosen Governor of Massachusetts in March 1636 and held the post for one year, being defeated at the next election. He retransported himself into England in August 1637.

Page 151, ll. 27-9. 'In New Hampshire and at Rhode Island. The grant by the Earl of Warwick as the Governor of the King's Plantations in America of a charter for Providence, &c., Rhode Island, is dated March 14, 164-3/4; Calendar of Colonial State Papers, 1574-1660, p. 325. The code of laws adopted there in 1647 declares "sith our charter gives us power to govern ourselves … the form of government established in Providence plantations is democratical." Collections of the Massachusetts Hist. Soc., second series, vol. vii, p. 79.'—Note by Macray.

Page 152, ll. 2, 3. He married Frances, daughter of Sir Christopher
Wray, of Ashby, Lincolnshire.

ll. 5, 6. He was made joint Treasurer of the Navy in January 1639, and was dismissed in December 1641.

ll. 10 ff. Strafford was created Baron of Raby in 1640. At the conclusion of Book VI Clarendon says that the elder Vane's 'malice to the Earl of Strafford (who had unwisely provoked him, wantonly and out of contempt) transported him to all imaginable thoughts of revenge'. Cf. p. 63, l. 25.

42.

Clarendon, MS. History, p. 486 (first paragraph) and Life, p. 249 (second paragraph); History, Bk. VII, ed. 1703, vol. ii, p. 292; ed. Macray, vol. iii, pp. 216-17.

Clarendon added the first paragraph in the margin of the manuscript of his earlier work when he dovetailed the two works to form the History in its final form.

Page 152, l. 27. this Covenant, the Solemn League and Covenant, which passed both Houses on September 18, 1643: 'the battle of Newbery being in that time likewise over (which cleared and removed more doubts than the Assembly had done), it stuck very few hours with both Houses; but being at once judged convenient and lawful, the Lords and Commons and their Assembly of Divines met together at the church, with great solemnity, to take it, on the five and twentieth day of September' (Clarendon, vol. iii, p. 205).

43.

Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, Governor of Nottingham Castle and Town … Written by His Widow Lucy, Daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, Lieutenant of the Tower, &c. Now first published from the original manuscript by the Rev. Julius Hutchinson … London: 1806. (pp. 4-6.)

The original manuscript has disappeared, and the edition of 1806 is the only authoritative text. It has been many times reprinted. It was edited with introduction, notes, and appendices by C.H. Firth in 1885 (new edition, 1906).

The Memoirs as a whole are the best picture we possess of a puritan soldier and household of the seventeenth century. They were written by his widow as a consolation to herself and for the instruction of her children. To 'such of you as have not seene him to remember his person', she leaves, by way of introduction, 'His Description.' It is this passage which is here reprinted.

44, 45, 46, 47, 48.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 212-15; History, Bk. VI, ed. 1703, vol. ii, pp. 158-62; ed. Macray, vol. ii, pp. 541-8.

These five characters of Parliamentary peers follow one another at the conclusion of Clarendon's sixth book, and are part of his 'view of those persons who were of the King's Council, and had deserted his service, and stayed in the Parliament to support the rebellion'. A short passage on the Earl of Holland, between the characters of Warwick and Manchester, is omitted.

Taken as a group, they are yet another proof of Clarendon's skill in portraiture. Each character is clearly distinguished.

Page 159, ll. 7-10. His grandfather was William Cecil (1520-98), Lord Burghley, the great minister of Elizabeth; his father was Robert Cecil (1563-1612), created Earl of Salisbury, 1605, Secretary of State at the accession of James.

Page 160, l. 9. He was member for King's Lynn in 1649, and
Hertfordshire in 1654 and 1656.

ll. 13-16. Hic egregiis, &c. Seneca, De Beneficiis, iv, cap. 30.

Page 161, ll. 3-19. 'Clarendon's view that Warwick was a jovial hypocrite is scarcely borne out by other contemporary evidence. The "jollity and good humour" which he mentions are indeed confirmed. "He was one of the most best-natured and cheerfullest persons I have in my time met with," writes his pious daughter-in-law (Autobiography of Lady Warwick, ed. Croker, p. 27). Edmund Calamy, however, in his sermon at Warwick's funeral, enlarges on his zeal for religion; and Warwick's public conduct during all the later part of his career is perfectly consistent with Calamy's account of his private life (A Pattern for All, especially for Noble Persons, &c., 1658, 410, pp. 34-9).'—C.H. Firth, in the Dictionary of National Biography.

l. 13. Randevooze (or -vouze, or -vouce, or -vowes) is a normal spelling of Rendezvous in the seventeenth century. The words had been introduced into English by the reign of Elizabeth.

ll. 20-2. The proceedings are described at some length by Clarendon, vol. ii, pp. 19-22, 216-23. Warwick was appointed Admiral by the Parliament on July 1, 1642.

l. 23. The expulsion of the Long Parliament on April 20, 1653. A thorough examination of all the authorities for the story of the expulsion will be found in two articles by C.H. Firth in History, October 1917 and January 1918.

ll. 24-5. Robert Rich, his grandson, married Frances, Cromwell's youngest daughter, in November 1657, but died in the following February, aged 23. See Thurloe's State Papers, vol. vi, p. 573.

Page 162, l. 11. in Spayne, on the occasion of the proposed Spanish match.

ll. 22-3. He resigned his generalship on April 2, 1645, the day before the Self-Denying Ordinance was passed.

ll. 24 ff. His first wife was Buckingham's cousin, their mothers being sisters. He married his second wife in 1626, before Buckingham's death. He was five times married.

Page 163, l. 11. his father, Henry Montagu (1563-1642), created Baron Montagu of Kimbolton and Viscount Mandeville, 1620, and Earl of Manchester, 1628. By the favour of Buckingham he had been made Lord Treasurer in 1620, but within a year was deprived of the office and 'reduced to the empty title of President of the Council'; see the character (on the whole favourable) by Clarendon, vol. i, pp. 67-9.

l. 12. Manchester and Warwick are described by Clarendon as 'the two pillars of the Presbyterian party' (vol. iv, p. 245).

Page 164, l. 16. He was accused with the five members of the House of
Commons, January 3, 1642. Cf. p. 123, l. 5.

l. 26. Elsewhere Clarendon says that Manchester 'was known to have all the prejudice imaginable against Cromwell' (vol. iv, p. 245). He lived in retirement during the Commonwealth, but returned to public life at the Restoration, when he was made Lord Chamberlain.

This character may be compared with Clarendon's other character of Manchester, vol. i, pp. 242-3, and with the character in Warwick's Mémoires, pp. 246-7. Burnet, speaking of him in his later years, describes him as 'A man of a soft and obliging temper, of no great depth, but universally beloved, being both a vertuous and a generous man'.

Page 165, ll. 6-9. See Clarendon, vol. i, p. 259.

l. ii. that unhappy kingdome. This was written in France.

ll. 20-5. Antony à Wood did not share Clarendon's scepticism about Say's descent, though he shared his dislike of Say himself: see Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, vol. in, col. 546.

Page 166, ll. 25 ff. See Clarendon, ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 333-5. Cf. note p. 134, l. 3. After the King's execution he took little part in public affairs, but at the Restoration he managed to be made a Privy Councillor and Lord Privy Seal.

Clarendon has another and shorter character of Say, which supplements the character here given, and deals mainly with his ecclesiastical politics (vol. i, p. 241). He was thought to be the only member of the Independent party in the House of Peers (vol. iii, p. 507).

Arthur Wilson gives short characters of Essex, Warwick, and Say: 'Saye and Seale was a seriously subtil Peece, and alwayes averse to the Court wayes, something out of pertinatiousnesse; his Temper and Constitution ballancing him altogether on that Side, which was contrary to the Wind; so that he seldome tackt about or went upright, though he kept his Course steady in his owne way a long time: yet it appeared afterwards, when the harshnesse of the humour was a little allayed by the sweet Refreshments of Court favours, that those sterne Comportments supposed naturall, might be mitigated, and that indomitable Spirits by gentle usage may be tamed and brought to obedience' (Reign of King James I, p. 162).

49.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 48-9: Life, ed. 1759, p. 16.

This and the four following characters of men of learning and letters are taken from the early section of the Life where Clarendon proudly records his friendships and conversation with '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.' The characters of Jonson, Falkland, and Godolphin which belong to the same section have already been given.

Page 167, l. 27. his conversation, fortunately represented for us in his Table-Talk, a collection of the 'excellent things that usually fell from him', made by his amanuensis Richard Milward, and published in 1689.

Page 168, l. 3. M'r Hyde, i.e. Clarendon himself.

l. 5. Seldence, a phonetic spelling, showing Clarendon's haste in composition.

l.10. Selden was member for Oxford during the Long Parliament.

ll. 15, 16. Compare Clarendon's History, vol. ii, p. 114: 'he had for many years enjoyed his ease, which he loved, was rich, and would not have made a journey to York, or have lain out of his own bed, for any preferment, which he had never affected. Compare also Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, vol. ii, p. 224: 'He was wont to say "I'le keepe myselfe warme and moyst as long as I live, for I shall be cold and dry when I am dead ".'

50.

Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 57; Life, ed. 1759, pp. 26-7.

Izaak Walton included a short character of Earle in his Life of Hooker, published in the year of Earle's death: 'Dr. Earle, now Lord Bishop of Salisbury, of whom I may justly say, (and let it not offend him, because it is such a trifle as ought not to be concealed from posterity, or those that now live, and yet know him not,) that since Mr. Hooker died, none have lived whom God hath blessed with more innocent wisdom, more sanctified learning, or a more pious, peaceable, primitive temper: so that this excellent person seems to be only like himself, and our venerable Richard Hooker.'

See also Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, vol. iii, cols. 716-9.

Page 168, l. 25. Earle of Pembroke, the fourth Earl, Lord
Chamberlain 1626-1641: see p. 4, l. 30, note.

Page 169, l. 3. Proctour, in 1631. The 'very witty and sharpe discourses' are his Micro-cosmographie, first published anonymously in 1628.

l. 23. Compare p. 72, ll. 29 ff., and p. 90, ll. 21 ff.

l. 28. He was made chaplain and tutor to Prince Charles in 1641. His 'lodginge in the court' as chaplain to the Lord Chamberlain had made him known to the king.

51.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 57-8; Life, ed. 1759, pp. 27-8.

'The Ever Memorable Mr. John Hales, of Eaton-Colledge', as he is called on the title-page of his Golden Remains, published in 1659 (second impression, 1673), is probably best known now by his remark 'That there was no subject of which any Poet ever writ, but he would produce it much better treated of in Shakespeare'. This remark was first given in print in Dryden's essay Of Dramatick Poesie, 1668, and was repeated in varying forms in Nahum Tate's Dedication to the Loyal General, 1680, Charles Gildon's Reflections on Mr. Rymer's Short View of Tragedy, 1694, and Nicholas Rowe's Account of the Life of Shakespear, 1709. But it had apparently been made somewhere between 1633 and 1637 in the company of Lord Falkland. It is the one gem that survives of this retired student's 'very open and pleasant conversation'.

Clarendon's portrait explains the honour and affection in which the 'ever memorable' but now little known scholar was held by all his friends. The best companion to it is the life by Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, vol. iv, cols. 409-15. See also John Pearson's preface to Golden Remains.

Page 170, ll. 10 ff. Hales was elected Fellow of Merton College in 1605, and Regius Professor of Greek in 1615. His thirty-two letters to Sir Dudley Carlton (cf. p. 58, l. 20) reporting the proceedings of the Synod of Dort, run from November 24, 1618, to February 7, 1619, and are included in his Golden Remains. On his return to England in 1619 he withdrew to his fellowship at Eton.

Sir Henry Savile's monumental edition of the Greek text of St. Chrysostom, in eight large folio volumes, was published at Eton, 1610-12. Savile was an imperious scholar, but when Clarendon says that Hales 'had borne all the labour' of this great edition, he can only mean that Hales had given his assistance at all stages of its production. In Brodrick's Memorials of Merton College, p. 70, it is stated that Hales was voted an allowance for the help he had given. Savile was appointed Warden of Merton in 1585 and Provost of Eton in 1596, and continued to hold both posts at the same time till his death in 1622.

Page 171, ll. 8-12. Compare the verse epistle in Suckling's Fragmenta Aurea, which was manifestly addressed to Hales, though his name is not given (ed. 1648, pp. 34-5):

Whether these lines do find you out,
Putting or clearing of a doubt;
… know 'tis decreed
You straight bestride the Colledge Steed …
And come to Town; 'tis fit you show
Your self abroad, that men may know
(What e're some learned men have guest)
That Oracles are not yet ceas't …
News in one day as much w' have here
As serves all Windsor for a year.

In Suckling's Sessions of the Poets, 'Hales set by himselfe most gravely did smile'.

ll. 14 ff. Compare the story told by Wood: 'When he was Bursar of his Coll. and had received bad money, he would lay it aside, and put good of his own in the room of it to pay to others. Insomuch that sometimes he has thrown into the River 20 and 30_l_. at a time. All which he hath stood to, to the loss of himself, rather than others of the Society should be endamaged.'

l. 19. Reduced to penury by the Civil Wars, Hales was 'forced to sell the best part of his most admirable Library (which cost him 2500_l_.) to Cornelius Bee of London, Bookseller, for 700_l_. only'. But Wood also says that he might be styled 'a walking Library'. Another account of his penury and the sale of his library is found in John Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy, 1714, Part II, p. 94.

l. 24. syded, i.e. stood by the side of, equalled, rivalled.

Page 173, ll. 1 ff. His Tract concerning Schisme and Schismaticks was published in 1642, and was frequently reissued. It was written apparently about 1636, and certainly before 1639. He was installed as canon of Windsor on June 27, 1639.

52.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 58-9; Life, ed. 1759, pp. 28-30.

Clarendon clearly enjoyed writing this character of Chillingworth. The shrewd observation is tempered by subdued humour. Looking back on his friendship at a distance of twenty years, he felt an amused pleasure in the disputatiousness which could be irritating, the intellectual vanity, the irresolution that came from too great subtlety. Chillingworth was always 'his own convert'; 'his only unhappiness proceeded from his sleeping too little and thinking too much'. But Clarendon knew the solid merits of The Religion of Protestants (History, vol. i, p. 95); and he felt bitterly the cruel circumstances of his death.

Page 174, ll. 17-19. Compare the character of Godolphin, p. 96, ll. 1 ff.

Page 176, l. 14. the Adversary, Edward Knott (1582-1656), Jesuit controversialist.

l. 29. Lugar, John Lewgar (1602-1665): see Wood's Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, vol. iii, cols. 696-7.

Page 177, l. 24. This Engine is described in the narrative of the siege of Gloucester in Rushworth's Historical Collections, ed. 1692, Part III, vol. ii, p. 290: 'The King's Forces, by the Directions of Dr. Chillingworth, had provided certain Engines, after the manner of the Roman Testudines cum Pluteis, wherewith they intended to Assault the City between the South and West Gates; They ran upon Cart-Wheels, with a Blind of Planks Musquet-proof, and holes for four Musqueteers to play out of, placed upon the Axle-tree to defend the Musqueteers and those that thrust it forwards, and carrying a Bridge before it; the Wheels were to fall into the Ditch, and the end of the Bridge to rest upon the Towns Breastworks, so making several compleat Bridges to enter the City. To prevent which, the Besieged intended to have made another Ditch out of their Works, so that the Wheels falling therein, the Bridge would have fallen too short of their Breastworks into their wet Mote, and so frustrated that Design.'

ll. 26 ff. Hopton took Arundel Castle on December 9, 1643, and was forced to surrender on January 6 (Clarendon, vol. iii, pp. 330-5). Aubrey says that Chillingworth 'dyed of the morbus castrensis after the taking of Arundel castle by the parliament: wherin he was very much blamed by the king's soldiers for his advice in military affaires there, and they curst that little priest and imputed the losse of the castle to his advice'. (Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, vol. i, p. 172). The chief actor in the final persecution was Francis Cheynell (1608-65), afterwards intruded President of St. John's College and Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford; see his Chillingworthi Novissima. Or, the Sicknesse, Heresy, Death, and Buriall of William Chillingworth (In his own phrase) Clerk of Oxford, and in the conceit of his fellow Souldiers, the Queens Arch-Engineer, and Grand-Intelligencer, 1644.

53.

Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 55; Life, ed. 1759, pp. 24, 25.

Weakness of character disguised by ready wit, pleasant discourse, and charm of manner is Clarendon's judgement on Waller. They had been friends in their early days when Waller was little more than an opulent poet who could make a good speech in parliament; but his behaviour on the discovery of 'Waller's plot', the purpose of which was to hold the city for the king, his inefficiency in any action but what was directed to his own safety and advancement, and his subsequent relations with Cromwell, definitely estranged them. To Clarendon, Waller is the time-server whose pleasing arts are transparent. 'His company was acceptable, where his spirit was odious.' The censure was the more severe because of the part which Waller had just played at Clarendon's fall. The portrait may be overdrawn; but there is ample evidence from other sources to confirm its essential truth.

Burnet says that 'Waller was the delight of the House: And even at eighty he said the liveliest things of any among them: He was only concerned to say that which should make him be applauded. But he never laid the business of the House to heart, being a vain and empty, tho' a witty, man' (History of His Own Time, ed. 1724, vol. i, p. 388). He is described by Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, vol. ii, pp. 276-7.

Clarendon's character was included by Johnson in his Life of Waller, with a few comments. Page 179, l. 1. a very rich wife, Anne, only daughter of John Bankes, mercer; married 1631, died 1634. 'The fortune which Waller inherited from his father, which must have been largely increased during his long minority, has been variously estimated at from £2,000 to £3,500 a year; adding to this the amount which he received with Miss Bankes, said to have been about £8,000, and allowing for the difference in the value of the money, it appears probable that, with the exception of Rogers, the history of English literature can show no richer poet' (Poems of Waller, ed. Thorn Drury, vol. i, p. xx).

l. 4. M'r Crofts, William Crofts (1611-77), created Baron Crofts of Saxham in 1658 at Brussels. He was captain of Queen Henrietta Maria's Guards.

l. 6. D'r Marly. See p. 92, l. 21, note.

ll. 10-14. Waller's poems were first published in 1645, when Waller was abroad. But they had been known in manuscript. They appear to have first come to the notice of Clarendon when Waller was introduced to the brilliant society of which Falkland was the centre. If the introduction took place, as is probable, about 1635, this is the explanation of Clarendon's 'neere thirty yeeres of age'. But some of his poems must have been written much earlier. What is presumably his earliest piece, on the escape of Prince Charles from shipwreck at Santander on his return from Spain in 1623, was probably written shortly after the event it describes, though like other of his early pieces it shows, as Johnson pointed out, traces of revision.

l. 21. nurced in Parliaments. He entered Parliament in 1621, at the age of sixteen, as member for Amersham. See Poems, ed. Drury, vol. i. p. xvii.

Page 180, l. 5. The great instance of his wit is his reply to Charles II, when asked why his Congratulation 'To the King, upon his Majesty's happy Return' was inferior to his Panegyric 'Upon the Death of the Lord Protector'—'Poets, Sir, succeed better in fiction than in truth' (quoted from Menagiana in Fenton's 'Observations on Waller's Poems', and given by Johnson). See Lives of the Poets, ed. G.B. Hill, vol. i, p. 271.

54.

Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and pernicious Errors to Church and State, In Mr. Hobbes's Book, Entitled Leviathan. By Edward Earl of Clarendon. Oxford, 1676. (pp. 2-3.)

It is a misfortune that Clarendon did not write a character of Hobbes, and, more than this, that there is no character of Hobbes by any one which corresponds in kind to the other characters in this collection. But in answering the Leviathan, Clarendon thought it well to state by way of introduction that he was on friendly terms with the author, and the passage here quoted from his account of their relations is in effect a character. He condemned Hobbes's political theories; 'Yet I do hope', he says, 'nothing hath fallen from my Pen, which implies the least undervaluing of Mr. Hobbes his Person, or his Parts.'

Page 181, l. 21. ha's, a common spelling at this time and earlier, on the false assumption that has was a contraction of haves.

55.

Bodleian Library, MS. Aubrey 9, foll. 34-7, 41, 42, 46-7.

The text of these notes on Hobbes is taken direct from Aubrey's manuscript, now in the Bodleian Library. The complete life is printed in Brief Lives by John Aubrey, edited by Andrew Clark, 1898, vol. i, pp. 321-403.

Aubrey collected most of his biographical notes, to which he gave the title '[Greek: Schediasmata.] Brief Lives', in order to help Anthony à Wood in the compilation of his Athenæ Oxonienses. 'I have, according to your desire', he wrote to Wood in 1680, 'putt in writing these minutes of lives tumultuarily, as they occur'd to my thoughts or as occasionally I had information of them…. 'Tis a taske that I never thought to have undertaken till you imposed it upon me.' Independently of Wood, Aubrey had collected material for a life of Hobbes, in accordance with a promise he had made to Hobbes himself. All his manuscript notes were submitted to Wood, who made good use of them. On their return Aubrey deposited them in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the library of which is now merged in the Bodleian.

The notes were written 'tumultuarily', jotted down hastily, and as hastily added to, altered, and transposed. They are a first draft for the fair copy which was never made. The difficulty of giving a true representation of them in print is increased by Aubrey's habit of inserting above the line alternatives to words or phrases without deleting the original words or even indicating his preference. In the present text the later form has, as a rule, been adopted, the other being given in a footnote.

'The Life of Mr. Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesburie' is by far the longest of Aubrey's 'Brief Lives', but it does not differ from the others in manner. The passages selected may be regarded as notes for a character.

Page 183, ll. 1 ff. Aubrey is a little more precise in his notes on Bacon. 'Mr. Thomas Hobbes told me … that he was employed in translating part of the Essayes, viz. three of them, one whereof was that of the Greatnesse of Cities, the other two I have now forgott' (ed. A. Clark, vol. i, p. 83). On the evidence of style, Aldis Wright thought that the other two essays translated by Hobbes were 'Of Simulation and Dissimulation' and 'Of Innovation': see the preface to his edition of Bacon's Essays, 1862, pp. xix, xx. The translation appeared in 1638 under the title Sermones fideles, sive interiora rerum.

l. 4. Gorhambury was Bacon's residence in Hertfordshire, near St. Alban's, inherited from his father. Aubrey described it in a long digression 'for the sake of the lovers of antiquity', ed. Clark, vol. i, pp. 79-84, and p. 19.

l. 5. Thomas Bushell (1594-1674), afterwards distinguished as a mining engineer and metallurgist: see his life in the Dictionary of National Biography.

Page 185, l. 2. (i.) or i., a common form at this time for i.e.

l. 20. Henry Lawes (1596-1662), who wrote the music for Comus, and to whom Milton addressed one of his sonnets:

Harry whose tuneful and well measur'd Song
First taught our English Musick how to span
Words with just note and accent,…
To after age thou shalt be writ the man,
That with smooth aire couldst humor best our tongue.

This sonnet was prefixed to Lawes's Choice Psalmes in 1648; his Ayres and Dialogues for One, Two, and Three Voices appeared in three books from 1653 to 1658.

56.

The Life of That Reverend Divine, and Learned Historian, Dr. Thomas
Fuller. London, 1661. (pp. 66-77.)

This work was twice reissued with new title-pages at Oxford in 1662, and was for the first time reprinted in 1845 by way of introduction to J.S. Brewer's edition of Fuller's Church History. It is the basis of all subsequent lives of Fuller. But the author is unknown.

The passage here quoted from the concluding section of this Life is the only contemporary sketch of Fuller's person and character that is now known. Aubrey's description is a mere note, and is considerably later: 'He was of a middle stature; strong sett; curled haire; a very working head, in so much that, walking and meditating before dinner, he would eate-up a penny loafe, not knowing that he did it. His naturall memorie was very great, to which he had added the art of memorie: he would repeate to you forwards and backwards all the signes from Ludgate to Charing-crosse' (ed. A. Clark, vol. i, p. 257).

Page 187, l. 20. a perfect walking Library, Compare p. 171, l. 19, note.

Page 191, ll. 3 ff. Compare Aubrey. But Fuller disclaimed the use of an art of memory. 'Artificiall memory', he said, 'is rather a trick then an art.' He condemned the 'artificiall rules which at this day are delivered by Memory-mountebanks'. His great rule was 'Marshall thy notions into a handsome method'. See his section 'Of Memory' in his Holy State, 1642, Bk. III, ch. 10; and compare J.E. Bailey, Life of Thomas Fuller, 1874, pp. 413-15.

57.

Bodleian Library, MS. Aubrey 8 foll. 63, 63 v, 68.

The text is taken direct from Aubrey's manuscript, such contractions as 'X'ts coll:' and 'da:' for daughter being expanded. For the complete life, see Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, vol. ii, pp. 62-72.

There is no character of Milton. We have again to be content with notes for a character.

Page 192, l. 7. Christ's College, Cambridge, which Milton entered in
February 1625, aged sixteen.

ll. 15-18. Milton had three daughters, by his first wife—Anne, Mary, and Deborah. Mary died unmarried. Deborah's husband, Abraham Clarke, left Dublin for London during the troubles in Ireland under James II: see Masson's Life of Milton, vol. vi, p. 751. He is described by Johnson as a 'weaver in Spitalfields': see Lives of the Poets, ed. G.B. Hill, vol. i, pp. 158-60.

Page 193, ll. 2-4. Litera Canina. See Persius, Sat. i. 109
'Sonat hic de nare canina littera'; and compare Ben Jonson, English
Grammar, 'R Is the Dogs Letter, and hurreth in the sound.'

ll. 11, 12. But the Comte de Cominges, French Ambassador to England, 1662-5, in his report to Louis XIV on the state of literature in England, spoke of 'un nommé Miltonius qui s'est rendu plus infâme par ses dangereux écrits que les bourreaux et les assassins de leur roi'. This was written in 1663, and Cominges knew only Milton's Latin works. See J.J. Jusserand, A French Ambassador at the Court of Charles the Second, 1892, p. 58, and Shakespeare en France, 1898, p. 107.

l. 19. In toto nusquam. Ovid, Amores, i. 5. 18.

Page 194, l. 4. Milton died November 8: see Masson, Life of Milton, vol. vi, p. 731.

58.

Letters of State, Written by Mr. John Milton, To most of the Sovereign Princes and Republicks of Europe. From the Year 1649 Till the Year 1659. To which is added, An Account of his Life…. London: Printed in the Year, 1694. (p. xxxvi.)

'The Life of Mr. John Milton' (pp. i-xliv) serves as introduction to this little volume of State Papers. It is the first life of Milton. Edward Phillips (1630-96) was the son of Milton's sister, and was educated by him. Unfortunately he failed to take proper advantage of his great opportunity. The Life is valuable for some of its details, but as a whole it is disappointing; and it makes no attempt at characterization. The note on Milton in his Theatrum Poetarum, or a Compleat Collection of the Poets, 1675, is also disappointing.

59.

Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton's Paradise Lost. By J.
Richardson, Father and Son. With the Life of the Author, and a
Discourse on the Poem. By J.R. Sen. London: M.DCC.XXXIV. (pp. iii-v;
xciv; c; cxiv.)

Jonathan Richardson (1665-1745) was one of the chief portrait-painters of his time. There are portraits by him of Pope, Steele, and Prior—all now in the National Portrait Gallery; and his writings on painting were standard works till the time of Reynolds. His book on Milton was an excursion late in life, with the assistance of his son, into another field of criticism. His introductory life of Milton (pp. i-cxliii) is a substantial piece of work, and is valuable as containing several anecdotes that might otherwise have been lost. Those that bear on Milton's character are here reproduced. The typographical eccentricities have been preserved.

Page 194, ll. 28 ff. Edward Millington's place of business was 'at the
Pelican in Duck Lane' in 1670; from Michaelmas, 1671, it was 'at the
Bible in Little Britain' (see Arber's Term Catalogues, vol. i, pp.
31, 93). It was about 1680 that he turned auctioneer of books, though
he did not wholly abandon publishing. 'There was usually as much
Comedy in his "Once, Twice, Thrice", as can be met with in a modern
Play.' See the Life and Errors of John Dunton, ed. 1818, pp. 235-6.
He died at Cambridge in 1703.

Page 196, l. 4. Dr. Tancred Robinson (d. 1748), physician to George I, and knighted by him.

l. 10. Henry Bendish (d. 1740), son of Bridget Ireton or Bendish, Cromwell's granddaughter: see Letters of John Hughes, ed. John Duncombe, vol. ii (1773), pp. x, xlii.

l. 14. John Thurloe (1616-68), Secretary of State under Cromwell. Compare No. 38 note.

l. 25. 'Easy my unpremeditated verse', Paradise Lost, ix. 24.

60.

The Works of M'r Abraham Cowley. Consisting of Those which were
formerly Printed: and Those which he Design'd for the Press, Now
Published out of the Authors Original Copies. London, 1668.—'Several
Discourses by way of Essays, in Verse and Prose,' No. II. (pp. 143-6.)

Cowley's Essays were written towards the close of his life. They were 'left scarce finish'd', and many others were to have been added to them. They were first published posthumously in the collected edition of 1668, under the superintendence of Thomas Sprat (see No. 61). This edition, which alone is authoritative, has been followed in the present reprint of the eleventh and last Essay, probably written at the beginning of 1667.

Page 198, l. 1. at School, Westminster.

ll. 19 ff. The concluding stanzas of 'A Vote', printed in Cowley's Sylva, 1636. Cowley was then aged eighteen. The first stanza contains three new readings, 'The unknown' for 'Th' ignote', 'I would have' for 'I would hug', and 'Not on' for 'Not from'.

Page 199, l. 15. out of Horace, Odes, iii. 29. 41-5.

Page 200, l. 4. immediately. The reading in the text of 1668 is 'irremediably', but 'immediately' is given as the correct reading in the 'Errata' (printed on a slip that is pasted in at the conclusion of Cowley's first preface). The edition of 1669 substitutes 'immediately' in the text. The alteration must be accepted on Sprat's authority, but it is questionable if it gives a better sense.

ll. 6-10. Cowley was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a Westminster scholar on June 14, 1637. He was admitted Minor Fellow in 1640, and graduated M.A. in 1643. He was ejected in the following year as a result of the Earl of Manchester's commission to enforce the solemn League and Covenant in Cambridge. See Cowley's Pure Works, ed. J.R. Lumby, pp. ix-xiii, and Johnson's Lives of the Poets, ed. G.B. Hill, vol. i, p. 5.

ll. 9, 10. Cedars … Hyssop. I Kings, iv. 33.

l. 12. one of the best Persons, Henry Jermyn, created Baron Jermyn, 1643, and Earl of St. Albans, 1660, chief officer of Henrietta Maria's household in Paris: see Clarendon, vol. iv, p. 312. As secretary to Jermyn, Cowley 'cyphcr'd and decypher'd with his own hand, the greatest part of all the Letters that passed between their Majesties, and managed a vast Intelligence in many other parts: which for some years together took up all his days, and two or three nights every week' (Sprat). He told Sprat that he intended to dedicate all his Essays to St. Albans 'as a testimony of his entire respects to him'.

Page 201, l. 10. Well then. The opening lines of 'The Wish', included in The Mistress, 1647 (ed. 1668, pp. 22-3).

ll. 14 ff. At the instance of Jermyn, Cowley had been promised by both Charles I and Charles II the mastership of the Savoy Hospital, but the post was given in 1660 to Sheldon, and in 1663, on Sheldon's promotion to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, to Henry Killigrew: see W.J. Loftie, Memorials of the Savoy, 1878, pp. 145 ff., and Wood, Fasti Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, part I, col. 494. In the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1661-2, p. 210, there is the statement of the case of Abraham Cowley, 'showing that the place may be held by a person not a divine, and that Cowley … having seen all preferments given away, and his old University companions advanced before him, is put to great shame by missing this place'. He is called 'Savoy missing Cowley' in the Restoration Session of the Poets, printed in Poems on State Affairs.

l. 21. Thou, neither. In the ode entitled 'Destinie', Pindarique Odes, 1656 (ed. 1668, p. 31, 'That neglected').

l. 28. A Corps perdu, misprinted A Corps perdi, edd. 1668, 1669, A Corpus perdi, 1672, 1674, &c.; Perdue, Errata, 1668.

Page 202, l. 1. St. Luke, xii. 16-21.

ll. 3-5. 'Out of hast to be gone away from the Tumult and Noyse of the City, he had not prepar'd so healthful a situation in the Country, as he might have done, if he had made a more leasurable choice. Of this he soon began to find the inconvenience at Barn Elms, where he was afflicted with a dangerous and lingring Fever…. Shortly after his removal to Chertsea [April 1665], he fell into another consuming Disease. Having languish'd under this for some months, he seem'd to be pretty well cur'd of its ill Symptomes. But in the heat of the last Summer [1667], by staying too long amongst his Laborers in the Medows, he was taken with a violent Defluxion, and Stoppage in his Breast, and Throat. This he at first neglected as an ordinary Cold, and refus'd to send for his usual Physicians, till it was past all remedies; and so in the end after a fortnight sickness, it prov'd mortal to him' (Sprat). In the Latin life prefixed to Cowley's Poemata Latina, 1668, Sprat is more specific: 'Initio superioris Anni, inciderat in Morbum, quem Medici Diabeten appellant.'

l. 6. Non ego. Horace, Odes, ii. 17. 9, 10.

ll. 11 ff. Nec vos. These late Latin verses may be Cowley's own, but they are not in his collected Latin poems. Compare Virgil, Georgics, ii. 485-6. 'Syluæq;' = 'Sylvæque': 'q;' was a regular contraction for que: cf. p. 44, l. 6.

61.

The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley, 1668.—'An Account of the Life and
Writings of M'r Abraham Cowley'. (pp. [18]-[20].)

Thomas Sprat (1635-1713), author of The History of the Royal-Society, 1667, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, 1684, was entrusted by Cowley's will with 'the revising of all his Works that were formerly printed, and the collecting of those Papers which he had design'd for the Press'; and as literary executor he brought out in 1668 a folio edition of the English works, and an octavo edition of the Latin works. To both he prefixed a life, one in English and the other in Latin. The more elaborate English life was written partly in the hope that 'a Character of Mr. Cowley may be of good advantage to our Nation'. Unfortunately the ethical bias has injured the biography. In Johnson's words, 'his zeal of friendship, or ambition of eloquence, has produced a funeral oration rather than a history: he has given the character, not the life of Cowley; for he writes with so little detail that scarcely any thing is distinctly known, but all is shewn confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyrick.' Similarly Coleridge asks 'What literary man has not regretted the prudery of Sprat in refusing to let his friend Cowley appear in his slippers and dressing-gown?' (Biographia Literaria, ch. iii). His method is the more to be regretted as no one knew Cowley better in his later years. His greatest error of judgement was to suppress his large collection of Cowley's letters. But with all its faults Sprat's Life of Cowley occupies an important place at the beginning of English biography of men of letters. It is the earliest substantial life of a poet whose reputation rested on his poetry. Fulke Greville's life of Sir Philip Sidney was the life of a soldier and a statesman of promise; and to Izaak Walton, Donne was not so much a poet as a great Churchman.

In the edition of 1668 the life of Cowley runs to twenty-four folio pages. The passage here selected deals directly with his character.

Page 203, ll. 25-7. It is evidently the impression of a stranger at first sight that Aubrey gives in his short note: 'A.C. discoursed very ill and with hesitation' (ed. A. Clark, vol. i, p. 190).

62.

A Character of King Charles the Second: And Political, Moral and
Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections. By George Savile, Marquis of
Halifax. London: MDCCL.

Halifax's elaborate and searching account of Charles II was first published in 1750 'from his original Manuscripts, in the Possession of his Grand-daughter Dorothy Countess of Burlington'. It consists of seven parts: I. Of his Religion; II. His Dissimulation; III. His Amours, Mistresses, &c.; IV. His Conduct to his Ministers; V. Of his Wit and Conversation; VI. His Talents, Temper, Habits, &c.; VII. Conclusion. Only the second, fifth, and sixth are given here. The complete text is reprinted in Sir Walter Raleigh's Works of Halifax, 1912, pp. 187-208.

For other characters of Charles, in addition to the two by Burnet which follow, see Evelyn's Diary, February 4, 1685; Dryden's dedication of King Arthur, 1691; 'A Short Character of King Charles the II' by John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, Duke of Buckingham, 'Printed from the Original Copy' in Miscellaneous Works Written by George, late Duke of Buckingham, ed. Tho. Brown, vol. ii, 1705, pp. 153-60, and with Pope's emendations in Works, 1723, vol. ii, pp. 57-65; and James Welwood's Memoirs Of the Most Material Transactions in England, for the Last Hundred Years, Preceding the Revolution, 1700, pp. 148-53.

For Halifax himself, see No. 72.

Page 208, l. 12. An allusion to the Quarrel of the Ancients and
Moderns, which assumed prominence in England with the publication
in 1690 of Sir William Temple's Essay upon the Ancient and Modern
Learning. Compare Burnet, p. 223, l. 11 and note.

PAGE 209, l. 29. Ruelle. Under Louis XIV it was the custom for ladies of fashion to receive morning visitors in their bedrooms; hence ruelle, the passage by the side of a bed, came to mean a ladies' chamber. Compare The Spectator, Nos. 45 and 530.

Page 211, l. 2. Tiendro cuydado, evidently an imperfect recollection of the phrase se tendrá cuydado, 'care will be taken', 'the matter will have attention': compare Cortes de Madrid, 1573, Peticion 96,… 'se tendrá cuidado de proueher en ello lo que conuiniere'.

Page 212, ll. 7, 8. Compare Pepys's Diary, May 4, 1663: 'meeting the King, we followed him into the Park, where Mr. Coventry and he talking of building a new yacht out of his private purse, he having some contrivance of his own'. Also, Evelyn's Diary, February 4, 1685: 'a lover of the sea, and skilful in shipping; not affecting other studies, yet he had a laboratory and knew of many empirical medicines, and the easier mechanical mathematics.' Also, Buckingham, ed. 1705, p. 155: 'the great and almost only pleasure of Mind he seem'd addicted to, was Shipping and Sea-Affairs; which seem'd to be so much his Talent for Knowledge, as well as Inclination, that a War of that Kind, was rather an Entertainment, than any Disturbance to his Thoughts.' Also Welwood, Memoirs, p. 151. Also, Burnet, infra, p. 219.

Page 213, l. 10. According to Pepys (Diary, December 8, 1666), the distinction between Charles Stuart and the King was drawn by Tom Killigrew in his remonstrance to Charles on the very ill state that matters were coming to: 'There is a good, honest, able man, that I could name, that if your Majesty would employ, and command to see all things well executed, all things would soon be mended; and this is one Charles Stuart, who now spends his time in employing his lips about the Court, and hath no other employment; but if you would give him this employment, he were the fittest man in the world to perform it.'

Page 217, ll. 11 ff. Compare Welwood's Memoirs, p. 149.

63.

Bishop Burnet's History of His Own Time. Vol. i. From the Restoration of King Charles II. to the Settlement of King William and Queen Mary at the Revolution. London: 1724. (pp. 93-4.)

Burnet began his History of His Own Time in 1683, after the publication of his History of the Reformation. In its original form it partook largely of the nature of Memoirs. But on the appearance of Clarendon's History in 1702 he was prompted to recast his entire narrative on a method that confined the strictly autobiographical matter to a section by itself and as a whole assured greater dignity. The part dealing with the reign of Charles II was rewritten by August 1703. The work was brought down to 1713 and completed in that year. Two years later Burnet died, leaving instructions that it was not to be printed till six years after his death.

The History was published in two folio volumes, dated 1724 and 1734. The first, which contains the reigns of Charles II and James II, came out at the end of 1723 and was edited by Burnet's second son, Gilbert Burnet, then rector of East Barnet. The second volume was edited by his third son, Thomas Burnet, afterwards a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas. The complete autograph of the History, and the transcript which was prepared for the press under the author's directions, are now both in the Bodleian Library.

The original form of the work survives in two transcripts (one of them with Burnet's autograph corrections) in the Harleian collection in the British Museum, and in a fragment of Burnet's original manuscript in the Bodleian. The portions of this original version that differ materially from the final printed version were published in 1902 by Miss H.C. Foxcroft under the title A Supplement to Burnet's History.

Much of the interest of the earlier version lies in the characters, which are generally longer than they became on revision, and sometimes contain details that were suppressed. But in a volume of representative selections, where the art of a writer is as much our concern as his matter, the preference must be given to what Burnet himself intended to be final. The extracts are reprinted from the two volumes edited by his sons. There was not the same reason to go direct to his manuscript as to Clarendon's: see notes p. 231, l. 26; p. 252, l. 10; and p. 255, l. 6.

64.

Burnet's History of His Own Time. Vol. i. (pp. 611-3.)

Burnet's two characters of Charles II are in striking agreement with the more elaborate study by Halifax.

Page 221, ll. 1 ff. Compare Halifax, p. 216, ll. 10 ff.

l. 14. his Chancellor, Clarendon.

Page 222, l. 16. he became cruel. This statement was attacked by Roger North, Lives of the Norths, ed. 1890, vol. i, p. 330: 'whereas some of our barbarous writers call this awaking of the king's genius to a sedulity in his affairs, a growing cruel, because some suffered for notorious treasons, I must interpret their meaning; which is a distaste, because his majesty was not pleased to be undone as his father was; and accordingly, since they failed to wound his person and authority, they fell to wounding his honour.' Buckingham says, 'He was an Illustrious Exception to all the Common Rules of Phisiognomy; for with a most Saturnine harsh sort of Countenance, he was both of a Merry and a Merciful Disposition' (ed. 1705, p. 159); with which compare Welwood, ed. 1700, p. 149. The judicial verdict had already been pronounced by Halifax: see p. 216, ll. 23 ff.

ll. 21-3. See Burnet, ed. Osmund Airy, vol. i, p. 539, for the particular reference. The scandal was widespread, but groundless.

Page 223, l. 9. the war of Paris, the Fronde. See Clarendon, vol. v, pp. 243-5.

ll. 11 ff. Compare Buckingham, ed. 1705, p. 157: 'Witty in all sorts of Conversation; and telling a Story so well, that, not out of Flattery, but the Pleasure of hearing it, we seem'd Ignorant of what he had repeated to us Ten Times before; as a good Comedy will bear the being often seen.' Also Halifax, p. 208, ll. 7-14.

l. 17. John Wilmot (1647-80), second Earl of Rochester, son of Henry Wilmot, first Earl (No. 32). Burnet knew him well and wrote his life, Some Passages of the Life and Death Of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester, 1680; 'which', says Johnson, 'the critick ought to read for its elegance, the philosopher for its arguments, and the saint for its piety' (Lives of the Poets, ed. G.B. Hill, vol. i, p. 222).

ll. 25 ff. The resemblance to Tiberius was first pointed out in print in Welwood's Memoirs, p. 152, which appeared twenty-four years before Burnet's History. But Welwood was indebted to Burnet. He writes as if they had talked about it; or he might have seen Burnet's early manuscript.

65.

Burnet's History of His Own Time. Vol. i. (pp. 94-5.)

The author of most of the characters in this volume himself deserves a fuller character. The main portions of Burnet's original sketch (1683) are therefore given here, partly by way of supplement, and partly to illustrate the nature of Burnet's revision (1703):

'The great man with the king was chancellor Hyde, afterwards made Earl of Clarendon. He had been in the beginning of the long parliament very high against the judges upon the account of the ship-money and became then a considerable man; he spake well, his style had no flaw in it, but had a just mixture of wit and sense, only he spoke too copiously; he had a great pleasantness in his spirit, which carried him sometimes too far into raillery, in which he sometimes shewed more wit than discretion. He went over to the court party when the war was like to break out, and was much in the late king's councils and confidence during the war, though he was always of the party that pressed the king to treat, and so was not in good terms with the queen. The late king recommended him to this king as the person on whose advices he wished him to rely most, and he was about the king all the while that he was beyond sea, except a little that he was ambassador in Spain; he managed all the king's correspondences in England, both in the little designs that the cavaliers were sometimes engaged in, and chiefly in procuring money for the king's subsistence, in which Dr. Sheldon was very active; he had nothing so much before his eyes as the king's service and doated on him beyond expression: he had been a sort of governor to him and had given him many lectures on the politics and was thought to assume and dictate too much … But to pursue Clarendon's character: he was a man that knew England well, and was lawyer good enough to be an able chancellor, and was certainly a very incorrupt man. In all the king's foreign negotiations he meddled too much, for I have been told that he had not a right notion of foreign matters, but he could not be gained to serve the interests of other princes. Mr. Fouquet sent him over a present of 10,000 pounds after the king's restoration and assured him he would renew that every year, but though both the king and the duke advised him to take it he very worthily refused it. He took too much upon him and meddled in everything, which was his greatest error. He fell under the hatred of most of the cavaliers upon two accounts. The one was the act of indemnity which cut off all their hopes of repairing themselves of the estates of those that had been in the rebellion, but he said it was the offer of the indemnity that brought in the king and it was the observing of it that must keep him in, so he would never let that be touched, and many that had been deeply engaged in the late times having expiated it by their zeal of bringing home the king were promoted by his means, such as Manchester, Anglesey, Orrery, Ashley, Holles, and several others. The other thing was that, there being an infinite number of pretenders to employments and rewards for their services and sufferings, so that the king could only satisfy some few of them, he upon that, to stand between the king and the displeasure which those disappointments had given, spoke slightly of many of them and took it upon him that their petitions were not granted; and some of them having procured several warrants from the secretaries for the same thing (the secretaries considering nothing but their fees), he who knew on whom the king intended that the grant should fall, took all upon him, so that those who were disappointed laid the blame chiefly if not wholly upon him. He was apt to talk very imperiously and unmercifully, so that his manner of dealing with people was as provoking as the hard things themselves were; but upon the whole matter he was a true Englishman and a sincere protestant, and what has passed at court since his disgrace has sufficiently vindicated him from all ill designs' (Supplement, ed. Foxcroft, pp. 53-6).

There is a short character of Clarendon in Warwick's Mémoires, pp. 196-8; compare also Pepys's Diary, October 13, 1666, and Evelyn's Diary, August 27, 1667, and September 18, 1683.

66.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 638-9; Continuation of the Life of Edward
Earl of Clarendon, ed. 1759, pp. 51-2.

Page 226, l. 8. He was released from Windsor Castle in March 1660.
Compare Burnet's character, p. 228, ll. 2-4.

l. 19. the Chancellour, i.e. Clarendon himself.

Page 227, ll. 5 ff. John Middleton (1619-74), created Earl of Middleton, 1656. He was taken prisoner at Worcester, but escaped to France. As Lord High Commissioner for Scotland and Commander-in-chief, he was mainly responsible for the unfortunate methods of forcing episcopacy on Scotland.

William Cunningham (1610-64), ninth Earl of Glencairn, Lord Chancellor of Scotland.

John Leslie (1630-81), seventh Earl and first Duke of Rothes,
President of the Council in Scotland; Lord Chancellor, 1667.

On the composition of the ministry in Scotland, compare Burnet, ed.
Osmund Airy, vol. i, pp. 199, ff.

67.

Burnet's History of His Own Time. Vol. i. (pp. 101-2.)

We are fortunate in having companion characters of Lauderdale by Clarendon and Burnet. Their point of view is different. Clarendon describes the Lauderdale of the Restoration who is climbing to power and is officially his inferior. Burnet looks back on him at the height of power and remembers how it was made to be felt. But the two characters have a strong likeness. Burnet is here seen at his best.

Page 228, ll. 14-17. Compare Roger North's Lives of the Norths, ed. 1890, vol. i, p. 231: 'the duke himself, being also learned, having a choice library, took great pleasure … in hearing him talk of languages and criticism'. Compare also Evelyn's Diary, August 27, 1678. His library was dispersed by auction—the French, Italian, and Spanish books on May 14, and the English books on May 27, 1690: copies of the sale catalogues are in the Bodleian. The catalogue of his manuscripts, 1692, is printed in the Bannatyne Miscellany, vol. ii, 1836, p. 149.

l. 30. As Professor of Theology in the University of Glasgow Burnet had enjoyed the favour of Lauderdale, and had dedicated to him, in fulsome terms, A Vindication of the Church and State of Scotland. The break came suddenly, and with no apparent cause, in 1673, when Burnet was appointed royal chaplain and was winning the ears of the King. Henceforward Lauderdale continued a 'violent enemy'. Their relations at this time are described in Clarke and Foxcroft's Life of Gilbert Burnet, 1907, pp. 109 ff., where Burnet's concluding letter of December 15, 1673, is printed in full.

Page 229, ll. 2-7. Richard Baxter delivered himself to Lauderdale in a long letter about his lapse from his former professions of piety—'so fallne from all that can be called serious religion, as that sensuality and complyance with sin is your ordinary course.' The letter (undated, but before 1672) is printed in The Landerdale Papers, ed. Osmund Airy, Camden Society, vol. iii, 1885, pp. 235-9.

ll. 8-12. 'The broad and pungent wit, and the brutal bonhomie.. probably went as far as anything else in securing Charles's favour.' Osmund Airy, Burnet's History, vol. i, p. 185.

68.

Burnet's History of His Own Time. Vol. i. (pp. 96-7.)

Page 230, l. 14. He was chosen for Tewkesbury in March 1640, but he did not sit in the Long Parliament.

l. 18, a town, Weymouth: see p. 70, l. 21 note. He had been appointed governor of it in August 1643 after some dispute, but was shortly afterwards removed (Clarendon, vol. iii, pp. 163-5, 362).

Page 231, l. 2. Shaftesbury writes about the prediction of 'Doctor Olivian, a German, a very learned physician', in his autobiographical fragment: see No. 14 note.

ll. 14, 15. Compare Burnet's first sketch of Shaftesbury, ed. Foxcroft, p. 59: 'he told some that Cromwell offered once to make him king, but he never offered to impose so gross a thing on me.'

ll. 17, 18. See the Newsletter of December 28, 1654, in The Clarke Papers, ed. C.H. Firth, Camden Society, 1899, p. 16: 'a few daies since when the House was in a Grand Committee of the whole House upon the Government, Mr. Garland mooved to have my Lord Protectour crowned, which mocion was seconded by Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, Mr. Hen. Cromwell, and others, but waved.'

l. 26. After 'party' Burnet wrote (autograph, fol. 49) 'He had no sort of virtue: for he was both a leud and corrupt man: and had no regard either to trueth or Justice.' But he struck out 'no sort … and had'. The sentence thus read in the transcript (p. 76) 'He had no regard either to Truth or Justice'. This in turn was struck out, either by Burnet himself or by the editor.

The following words are likewise struck out in the transcript, after 'manner' (l. 28): 'and was not out of countenance in owning his unsteadiness and deceitfullness.'

69.

Absalom and Achitophel. A Poem … The Second Edition; Augmented and
Revised. London, 1681. (ll. 142-227.)

The first edition was published on November 17, 1681, a few days before Shaftesbury's trial for high treason. In the second, which appeared within a month, the character of Shaftesbury was 'augmented' by twelve lines (p. 233, ll. 17-28).

Shaftesbury had been satirized by Butler in the Third Part of Hudibras, 1678, three years before the crisis in his remarkable career, and while his schemes still prospered. To Butler he is the unprincipled turn-coat who thinks only of his own interests:

So Politick, as if one eye
Upon the other were a Spye;…
H'had seen three Governments Run down,
And had a Hand in ev'ry one,
Was for 'em, and against 'em all.
But Barb'rous when they came to fall:…
By giving aim from side, to side,
He never fail'd to save his Tide,
But got the start of ev'ry State,
And at a Change, ne'r came too late….
Our State-Artificer foresaw,
Which way the World began to draw:…
He therefore wisely cast about,
All ways he could, t'insure his Throat;
And hither came t'observe, and smoke
What Courses other Riscers took:
And to the utmost do his Best
To Save himself, and Hang the Rest.

(Canto II, ll. 351-420).

Dryden's satire should be compared with Butler's. But a comparison with the prose character by Burnet, which had no immediate political purpose, will reveal even better Dryden's mastery in satirical portraiture. Another verse character is in The Review by Richard Duke, written shortly after Dryden's poem.

Absalom is Monmouth, David Charles II, Israel England, the Jews the
English, and a Jebusite a Romanist.

Page 232, l. 28. Compare Seneca, De Tranquillitate Animi, xvii. 10: 'nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiæ fuit.'

Page 233, l. 7. The humorous definition of man ascribed to Plato in Diogenes Laertius, Lib. vi. 40 (Life of Diogenes), [Greek: Platonos horisamenou, anthropos esti zoon dipoun apteron.]

The son was a handsomer man than the father, though he did not inherit his ability. His son, the third earl, was the critic and philosopher who wrote the Characteristicks.

l. 12. the Triple Bond, the alliance of England, Holland, and Sweden against France in 1667, broken by the war with France against Holland in 1672. But Shaftesbury then knew nothing of the secret Treaty of Dover, 1670.

l. 16. Usurp'd, in ed. 1 'Assum'd'.

l. 25. Abbethdin 'the president of the Jewish judicature', 'the father of the house of judgement'. Shaftesbury was Lord Chancellor, 1672-3.

Page 234, l. 4. David would have sung his praises instead of writing a psalm, and so Heaven would have had one psalm the less.

ll. 5, 6. Macaulay pointed out in his essay on Sir William Temple that these lines are a reminiscence of a couplet under the portrait of Sultan Mustapha the First in Knolles's Historie of the Turkes (ed. 1638, p. 1370):

Greatnesse, on Goodnesse loues to slide, not stand, and leaues for Fortunes ice, Vertues firm land.

l. 15. The alleged Popish Plot, invented by Titus Oates, to murder the king and put the government in the hands of the Jesuits. Shaftesbury had no share in the invention, but he believed it, and made political use of it.

Page 235, l. 4. This line reappears in The Hind and the Panther,
Part I, l. 211. As W.D. Christie pointed out, it is a reminiscence
of a couplet in Lachrymæ Musarum, 1649, the volume to which
Dryden contributed his school-boy verses 'Upon the Death of the Lord
Hastings':

It is decreed, we must be drain'd (I see)
Down to the dregs of a Democracie.

This is the opening couplet of the English poem preceding Dryden's, and signed 'M.N.' i.e. Marchamont Needham (p. 81).

70.

Burnet's History of His Own Time. Vol. i. (p. 100.)

'The portrait of this Duke has been drawn by four masterly hands: Burnet has hewn it out with his rough chissel; Count Hamilton touched it with that slight delicacy, that finishes while it seems but to sketch; Dryden catched the living likeness; Pope compleated the historical resemblance.'—Horace Walpole, Royal and Noble Authors, ed. 1759, vol. ii, p. 78.

There is also Butler's prose character of 'A Duke of Bucks', first printed in Thyer's edition of the Genuine Remains of Butler, 1759, vol. ii, pp. 72-5, but written apparently about 1667-9. And there is a verse character in Duke's Review.

Page 235, l. 11. a great liveliness of wit. In the first sketch Burnet wrote 'he has a flame in his wit that is inimitable'. It lives in The Rehearsal. His 'Miscellaneous Works' were collected in two volumes by Tom Brown, 1704-5.

Page 236, l. 12. Compare Butler: 'one that has studied the whole Body of Vice.'

l. 14. Sir Henry Percy, created Baron Percy of Alnwick in 1643. He was then general of the ordinance of the king's army. He joined the Queen's party in France in 1645.

l. 15. Hobbs. For Burnet's view of Hobbes, see p. 246, ll. 21 ff.

71.

Absalom and Achitophel. Second Edition. 1681. (ll. 543-68.)

Dryden is his own best critic: 'The Character of Zimri in my Absalom, is, in my Opinion, worth the whole Poem: 'Tis not bloody, but 'tis ridiculous enough. And he for whom it was intended, was too witty to resent it as an injury. If I had rail'd, I might have suffer'd for it justly: But I manag'd my own Work more happily, perhaps more dextrously. I avoided the mention of great Crimes and apply'd my self to the representing of Blind-sides, and little Extravagancies: To which, the wittier a Man is, he is generally the more obnoxious. It succeeded as I wish'd.' ('Discourse concerning Satire' prefixed to Dryden's Juvenal, 1693, p. xlii.)

Burnet's prose character again furnishes the best commentary.

Page 236, ll. 28 ff. Compare Butler: 'He is as inconstant as the Moon, which he lives under … His Mind entertains all Things very freely, that come and go; but, like Guests and Strangers they are not welcome, if they stay long … His Ears are perpetually drilled with a Fiddlestick. He endures Pleasures with less Patience, than other Men do their Pains.'

72.

Burnet's History of His Own Time. Vol. i. (pp. 267-8.)

This is not one of Burnet's best characters. He did not see the political wisdom that lay behind the ready wit. Halifax was too subtle for Burnet's heavy-handed grasp. To recognize the inadequacy of this short-sighted estimate, it is sufficient to have read the 'Character of King Charles II' (No. 62).

Burnet suffered from Halifax's wit: 'In the House of Lords,' says the first Earl of Dartmouth, 'he affected to conclude all his discourses with a jest, though the subject were never so serious, and if it did not meet with the applause he expected, would be extremely out of countenance and silent, till an opportunity offered to retrieve the approbation he thought he had lost; but was never better pleased than when he was turning Bishop Burnet and his politics into ridicule' (Burnet, ed. Airy, vol. i, p. 485).

Dryden understood Halifax, the Jotham of his Absalom and Achitophel:

Jotham of piercing Wit and pregnant Thought:
Endew'd by Nature, and by Learning taught
To move Assemblies, who but onely tri'd
The worse awhile, then chose the better side;
Nor chose alone, but turn'd the Balance too;
So much the weight of one brave man can do.

See also Dryden's dedication to Halifax of his King Arthur.

73.

The Life of the Right Honourable Francis North, Baron of Guilford,
Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, under King Charles II. and King James
II…. By the Honourable Roger North, Esq; London, MDCCXLII. (pp.
223-6.)

Roger North's lives of his three brothers, Lord Keeper Guilford, Sir Dudley North, and Dr. John North, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, were begun about 1710 but were not published till 1742-4, eight years after his death. The edition of the 'Lives of the Norths' by Augustus Jessopp, 3 vols., 1890, contains also his autobiography.

The Life of Lord Keeper Guilford is invaluable as a picture of the bench and bar under Charles II and James II.

Page 240, l. 6. Sir Francis Pemberton (1625-97), Lord Chief Justice, 1681, removed from the King's Bench, 1683, 'near the time that the great cause of the quo warranto against the city of London was to be brought to judgment in that court.' North had just described him as a judge.

Page 241, l. 1. Compare Scott's Monastery, ch. xiv: '"By my troggs," replied Christie, "I would have thrust my lance down his throat."' 'Troggs' is an altered form of 'Troth'. It appears to be Scottish in origin; no Southern instance is quoted in Wright's Dialect Dictionary. Saunders may have learned it from a London Scot.

l. 22. Sir John Maynard (1602-90), 'the king's eldest serjeant, but advanced no farther'. Described by North, ed. 1890, p. 149; also p. 26: 'Serjeant Maynard, the best old book-lawyer of his time, used to say that the law was ars bablativa'.

l. 30. Sir Matthew Hale (1609-76), Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench, described by North, pp. 79 ff. Burnet wrote The Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale, 1682.

Page 243, l. 5. The action taken by the Crown in 1682 contesting the charter of the city of London. Judgement was given for the Crown. See State Trials, ed. 1810, vol. viii, 1039 ff., and Burnet, ed. Airy, vol. ii, pp. 343 ff., and compare Hallam, Constitutional History, ch. xii, ed. 1863, pp. 453-4.

74.

Burnet's History of His Own Time. Vol. i. (pp. 186-91).

This passage brings together ten of the great divines of the century. It would be easy, as critics have shown, to name as many others, such as Jeremy Taylor, Sanderson, Sheldon, Cosin, Pearson, and South. But Burnet is mainly concerned with the men who in his opinion had the greatest influence during the time of which he is writing, and who were known to him personally. By way of introduction he speaks of the Cambridge Platonists under whom his great contemporaries had been formed. Incidentally he expresses his views on Hobbes's Leviathan, and he concludes with a valuable account of the reform in preaching. The passage as a whole is an excellent specimen of Burnet's method and style.

Page 246, ll. 6, 7. John Owen (1616-83), made Dean of Christ Church by Cromwell in 1651, Vice-Chancellor of the University, 1652-8, deprived of the Deanery, 1659. Thomas Goodwin (1600-80), President of Magdalen College, 1650-60, likewise one of the Commission of Visitors to the University appointed by the Parliament. Both were Independents. See H.L. Thompson, Christ Church (College Histories), 1900, pp. 69, 70; and H.A. Wilson, Magdalen College, 1899, pp. 172-4.

Page 248, l. 5. Simon Episcopius, or Bischop (1583-1643), Dutch theologian and follower of Arminius: see p. 101, l. 3, note.

Page 249, l. 12. Irenicum. A Weapon-Salve for the Churches Wounds, published 1661.

Page 252, l. 10. The following sentence is in the original manuscript (folio 98) before 'But I owed': 'and if I have arrived at any faculty of writing clear and correctly, I owe that entirely to them: for as they joined with Wilkins in that Noble tho despised attempt at an Universall Character, and a Philosophicall Language, they took great pains to observe all the common errours of language in generall, and of ours in particular: and in the drawing the tables for that work, which was Lloyds province, he had looked further into a naturall purity and simplicity of stile, than any man I ever knew: into all which he led me, and so helpt me to any measure of exactnes of writing, which may be thought to belong to me.' The sentence is deleted in the transcript that was sent to the printer; but whether it was deleted by Burnet himself, or by the editor, is uncertain. There are other minor alterations in the same page of the transcript (p. 140).

The book referred to in the omitted passage is Wilkins's Essay Towards a Real Character And a Philosophical Language, presented to the Royal Society and published in 1668. Lloyd's 'continual assistance' is acknowledged in the 'Epistle to the Reader'.

75.

Burnet's History of His Own Time. Vol. i. (pp. 168-70.)

Page 253, l. 23. He served under Turenne in four campaigns, 1652-5, latterly as Lieutenant-General. His own account of these campaigns has fortunately been preserved. It is a portion of the journal to which Burnet refers. See The Life of James the Second King of England, etc., collected out of memoirs writ of his own hand…. Published from the original Stuart manuscripts in Carlton-House, edited by James Stanier Clarke, 2 vols, 1816.

Page 254, l. 20. After the surrender at Oxford on June 24, 1646, James was given into the charge of the Earl of Northumberland and confined at St. James's. See Life, ed. J.S. Clarke, vol. i, pp. 30-1, and Clarendon, vol. iv, pp. 237, and 326-8.

Page 255, l. 3. Richard Stuart (1594-1651), 'the dean of the King's chapel, whom his majesty had recommended to his son to instruct him in all matters relating to the Church' (Clarendon, vol. iv, p. 341). See Wood's Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, vol. iii, cols. 295-8, and John Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy, Pt. II, p. 48.

ll. 6-8. The autograph reads (fol. 87): 'He said that a Nun had advised him to pray every day, that if he was not in the right way that God would set him right, did make a great impression on him.' The transcript (p. 127) agrees with the print.

ll. 27-9. James definitely joined the Roman church at the beginning of 1669: see Life, ed. J.S. Clarke, vol. i, p. 440.

Page 256, l. 3. As High Admiral he defeated the Dutch at Lowestoft, 1665, and Southwold Bay, 1672. Compare Dryden's Annus Mirabilis, ll. 73-4:

Victorious York did first, with fam'd success,
To his known valour make the Dutch give place;

also his Verses to the Duchess on the Duke's victory of June 3, 1665. He ceased to be High Admiral on the passing of the Test Act, 1673.

Page 256, l. 6. Sir William Coventry (1628-86), secretary to James, 1660-7. 'He was the man of the finest parts and the best temper that belonged to the court:' see his character by Burnet, ed. Airy, vol. i, pp. 478-9.

ll. 13 ff. Compare Pepys's Diary, November 20, 1661, June 27 and July 2, 1662, June 2, 1663, July 21, 1666, &c.

76.

Burnet's History of His Own Time. Vol. ii. (p. 292-3.)