Here, on that winter evening, in that great and splendid hall, shone all the glitter and pageantry and poetic thought so soon to be for long years eclipsed, leaving a pathetic memory to be cherished through many weary seasons of strife and disaster by those who had seen it.[[5]]

[5]. Dictionary of National Biography, E. Hyde, 1609-1674.

Whether young Hyde at this time attracted the King’s special attention or not, we have no record, but his progress was a steady one.

As to what manner of man he was, we have his own words. In the curious sententious method of introspection and self-analysis employed by the thinkers of that age, Hyde speaks of himself as “in his nature inclined to Pride and Passion, and to a humour between Wrangling and Disputing very troublesome”[[6]]; but he certainly possessed the art of attracting the friendship of some of the finest spirits of that stormy age, which, like all periods of stress, produced many such to shine like lamps in their time. There were the poets Carew and Cotton, the elder Godolphin, Evelyn, who extols Hyde’s “great and signal merits,” and greatest and noblest of all, Lucius Carey, Lord Falkland.

[6]. “Life of the Earl of Clarendon,” by himself.

If, as has been said, a man is known by his friends, then it may surely be counted to Edward Hyde for righteousness that he had eyes to discern the shining of that “steadfast star” too early extinguished. There is nothing more inspiring in English literature than the words in which he chronicles the going out of that light, the death of his hero on the red field which gave that pure spirit the peace it craved so earnestly. “Thus,” says the historian, “fell that incomparable young man in the four and thirtieth year of his age, having so much despatched the business of life that the oldest rarely attain to that immense knowledge, and the youngest enters not into the world with more innocence, and whosoever leads such a life need not care upon how short warning it be taken from him.”[[7]]

[7]. “History of the Rebellion.” Clarendon.

Edward Hyde’s link with the great Villiers family procured for him powerful interest, and prompted him to vindicate the detested memory of the first Duke of Buckingham. This Villiers connection was due partly to Hyde’s first marriage, as there seems to have been a relationship with the Ayliffes of Gretenham, and partly to his father-in-law, Sir Thomas Aylesbury. He, being a distinguished mathematician, had been secretary first to the Earl of Nottingham, Lord High Admiral of England, and then to the latter’s successor, Buckingham. To the influence of the powerful favourite he owed his posts of Master of Requests and of the Mint. Anthony Wood says that Sir Thomas sat for a short time in Parliament in the former capacity, and as a matter of form at Oxford in 1643 after the beginning of the Rebellion.

His Cavalier sympathies procured for him the sentence of banishment from England, and he died at Breda at the age of eighty-one. His son, who at the instance of Charles I. had translated Davila’s “History of the Civil Wars in France,” was for a time tutor to the second Duke of Buckingham and his young brother Lord Francis Villiers, who in his turn merits one word at least. Nothing in the history of the great strife has been chronicled more heroic nor more pathetic than the fate of that boy—for he was no more—at Kingston-on-Thames. A true Villiers, “prodigal of his person,” he fiercely rejected quarter, and with his back against a tree fought valiantly till he went down under the swords of the Roundheads, “nine wounds in his beautiful face and body.”[[8]] Yet it was better so—better to die in the flush of chivalrous, unstained youth, than to live out such a life as his brother’s, a life blackened by degrading vice, gasped out alone, in the “worst inn’s worst room,” as Pope declared (though this has been denied), the last male of his race.

[8]. Brian Fairfax.