As regards the second of the indictments we know that Hyde was entirely innocent from first to last. The third seems to point at the often suggested plan of a divorce from Catherine. The King himself wrote privately to Ormonde that his real reason for parting with his old servant was “the Chancellor’s intolerable temper,”[[225]] but it is also said that he deeply resented the latter’s action in counteracting a divorce by bringing about the stolen marriage of “La Belle Stuart” to the Duke of Richmond, seeing that he (Charles) at one time contemplated getting rid of his wife to marry the lovely, wild, childish girl who, for the moment, imprisoned his vagrant fancy.[[226]] His covert irritation and impatience were diligently fanned by those about him, headed by Buckingham, who used his great gifts and entire want of scruple, with deadly effect, to compass the undoing of his foe. It is possible that Clarendon had at first displayed his personal influence too openly, for though Charles from sheer indolence would allow himself to be governed with fatal facility, he was nevertheless, like many people of a like temperament, very unwilling that the fact should be known. As to the charge of bribery urged so often, and with such bitter pertinacity, there is absolutely no proof of any kind of its truth. Clarendon was accused of receiving bribes right and left, of knowing that the needy spendthrift King received them from his astute cousin Louis XIV. Of all this, it must be repeated, Hyde’s enemies could bring no proof, and at any rate his fall certainly heralded the worst period of the reign of Charles II. “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” followed fast upon each other. Clarendon’s old friend, Lord Southampton, one of the best and wisest of his generation, had died not long before. In August the King sent for the Seals to be delivered up, and a few days later the faithful Evelyn came to visit the disgraced minister, and “found him in his bedchamber very sad.” “He was my particular kind friend on all occasions,” adds the diarist loyally, and one can fancy that his presence may have brought a little momentary comfort to the bruised heart. There was a yet heavier blow to fall, and the cup of sorrow to be filled to the brim. On 8th December, some months later, Pepys records that he saw the Duchess of York at Whitehall “in a fine dress of second mourning for her mother, being black edged with ermine.” To Clarendon himself the loss of the faithful wife who had shared his poverty and exile beyond the sea, as well as his short-lived prosperity, came as a crushing misfortune among all the other burdens pressing upon him on every side. A few pathetic words written in July from Clarendon House allude to this sorrow as impending: “Being in noe good disposition the last weeke, by reason of my Wife’s great Sicknesse.”[[227]]

[225]. Chalmers’ Biographical Dictionary.

[226]. “Royalty Restored.” E. F. Molloy.

[227]. Harleian MS.

We see Evelyn again visiting his friend about this time, and finding “him in his garden at his new-built palace, sitting in his gowt wheel chayre and seeing the gates setting up towards the north and the fields. He looked and spoke very disconsolately.” It was no wonder. Everything was crumbling round him like the wall of a falling house. The fortune he had built up through so many strenuous years was toppling over, honour and reputation were smitten, and he sat—alone. The “new-built palace” could yield him now but little solace, and forth from it he must go, like Wolsey, “naked to his enemies.” Truly he must have said to himself, as he looked round him in utter loneliness: “Vanity of vanities.”

Meanwhile in the ancient palace at the foot of the hill, not many hundred yards away, sorrow of another kind was brooding.

To the Duchess of York herself, this year was especially marked by grief and misfortune. In one direction there was the keen mortification caused by the Duke’s short-lived passion for Lady Denham, whose tragic and mysterious death has been already recorded; in another the blow inflicted by the disgrace and final exile of her father—and this of itself must have been a sore trouble, considering the close affection between them. Sadder still came the death of her mother and of her young children. Andrew Marvell’s unsparing pen was again busy, and surely no crueller couplet was ever written:

“Kendal is dead, and Cambridge riding post,

What fitter sacrifice for Denham’s ghost?”[[228]]

[228]. “Poems and Satires.”