LORD CLARENDON AND THE TUBWOMAN.
(Vol. vii., p. 133.)
The newspaper paragraph in question is quoted, in a MS. note in my possession, from the Salisbury Journal of August 29, 1828. From what source it was derived does not appear: the whole story is, however, fabulous. Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon, was twice married. His first wife was the daughter of Sir George Ayliffe, of Foxley, in the county of Wilts. He married her in 1628, when he was only twenty years old, and she died of the small-pox six months afterwards, before any child was born. In 1632 he married Frances, daughter of Sir Thomas and Lady Ailesbury, by whom he had four sons and two daughters. Anne, the eldest daughter, became, as is well known, the wife of the Duke of York, and the mother of Queen Mary and Queen Anne. Sir Thomas Ailesbury, the father of Lord Clarendon's second wife, was a person of some distinction, both social and intellectual; of his wife, Lady Ailesbury, Pepys mentions in his Diary, November 13, 1661, that the Duke of York is in mourning for his wife's grandmother, "which (he however adds) is thought a piece of fondness." In the collection of pictures at the Grove, the seat of the present Earl of Clarendon, there are portraits by Vandyke of Sir Thomas and Lady Ailesbury, and also a portrait, by an unknown artist, of Frances, the second wife of the Lord Chancellor Clarendon. (See Lady Theresa Lewis's Lives of the Friends of Lord Chancellor Clarendon, vol. iii. pp. 355, 356. 361.)
Mr. Hyde's two marriages are fully described by himself in his Life, vol. i. pp. 12. 15, ed. 8vo. 1761.
The story of the tubwoman, the grandmother of queens, seems to have been a legend invented for the purpose of exhibiting a contrast between the exalted rank of the descendants and the plebeian origin of the ancestor. Historical fiction and popular fancy delight in such contrasts. The story of date obolum Belisario, and Pope's account of the death of the second Duke of Buckingham, are more celebrated, but not more veracious, than the story of the marriage of Lord Chancellor Clarendon with the tubwoman.
L.