It is a pitiful story. Whether Clarendon was entirely blameless of all the accusations against him, it is useless to speculate, but at least it must be conceded that from the first he had set before him high ideals, and if he fell short of these, it was no more than many—nay most—had done. It was an age, pre-eminently, when it was said that every man had his price. If so, then Edward Hyde’s was a very high one; but it is much pleasanter and indeed more reasonable to believe in his innocence, as such belief is far more consonant with his character as it is presented to us by his contemporaries. And at least he knew heavy griefs. Estranged more and more as time went on from the daughter he loved so deeply, severed altogether from her and from his sons, driven in disgrace from his country to spend in exile a lonely old age, the close of Clarendon’s story presents a very sorrowful picture, and if one were inclined to moralise, preaches an eloquent sermon on the vanity of human greatness. But it is not likely that the ex-Chancellor himself needed any such reminders. He had seen too much of the mutability of all things here, to be quite unprepared for vicissitudes, and he had at last learnt how to face with dignity the trials which he was destined to suffer. For one thing we certainly owe him a debt of gratitude, namely, for his “History of the Rebellion.” In that noble record he has painted for us, as no other hand could have done it, the actors in that great drama, perhaps the greatest ever presented on the stage of English history, and has made them live for all time to his readers.

This great and important work Clarendon wrote at a house in Swallowfield in Berkshire, which was the home of his eldest son’s second wife, Flower, the widow of Sir William Buckhouse. Lord Cornbury’s first wife had been Theodosia, the daughter of the gallant and hapless Arthur, Lord Capel, one of the most perfect heroes of a time which produced not a few such.[[238]]

[238]. Evelyn’s “Correspondence.” To Mr Sprat, Chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham, afterwards Bishop of Rochester.

As before said, if Clarendon was indeed guilty of himself receiving bribes, or of the knowledge that the King’s hands were not clean in this respect, there exists no proof of either, and if he needed or desired any revenge for his disgrace and broken fortunes, he might have found it in the decadence of the government of his country which immediately followed. He had at least one satisfaction—that his royal son-in-law had voted against his sentence of banishment, but it was probably only an aggravation of his trials that Bishop Morley, whom he had been wont to call “the best man alive,” was involved in his disgrace. On this account the bishop was removed from his post of spiritual director to the Duchess of York, an office which he had filled with little intermission since the Flemish days when he had found a shelter under Hyde’s hospitable roof.[[239]] But such a reverse was inevitable. The great tree in its fall was destined to drag down with it the lesser ones whose roots were twisted with its own. “None of us liveth to himself,” are words which hold good of more than Clarendon and his friends.

[239]. When Morley was translated to Winchester he took Izaak Walton and his son with him, and the former died there in 1683. Winchester House at Chelsea was bought by Morley, and belonged to the See until Bishop Tomlin’s day. (Dean Plumptre’s “Life of Ken.”)

So Edward Hyde passes out of the arena of his day and country, a conspicuous figure through many stormy years, and his place knows him no more. His rival, Buckingham, remains to hold the stage a little longer, and in some eyes he may be all-sufficient, since Reresby can call him “the finest gentleman of person and wit I think I ever saw”; and King Louis, against whose judgment there can surely be no appeal, pronounces him “the only English gentleman” he had ever seen. In the light of such shining attributes, the sombre colours wherein Chancellor Hyde is invested retire altogether into the shade; yet perhaps when the two figures are placed side by side in the estimation of a later age, opinions may be reversed as to which is after all the finer gentleman. The blood of the Hydes was to the full as ancient as that of the Villiers, and for the rest who can doubt which served with the stancher devotion God and the king, or lived the more blameless and unstained life? Many great names stand out from the record of the England of that day, names of which she has reason to be proud—Falkland, Hopton, Bevil Grenville, Southampton, Capel—yet to his honour it may be said that Edward Hyde is not unworthy of a place among them.

CHAPTER VII
THE TURNING-POINT

We come now, in the course of her story, to the most momentous epoch in the life of Anne Hyde, the period, namely, of her conversion to the Church of Rome. And here it must be noted that she was in no respect ignorant, nor uninstructed in the dogmas of her own Communion. It has been shown that in her early youth she was placed by her father under the teaching of Morley, during the time when he lived, an honoured guest, in Hyde’s household in the days of exile at Breda.[[240]]

[240]. Burnet’s “History of His Own Time,” ed. 1766. “She was bred to great strictness in religion.”