By foreign treaties he informed his youth,
And joined experience to his native truth.—P. [244.]
Laurence Hyde, second son to the great Earl of Clarendon, created Earl of Rochester by Charles II. Even after his father's fall, he contrived to retain the confidence of Charles, and in 1676 was employed on an embassy to Poland. He was also one of the plenipotentiaries at the treaty of Nimeguen, and for some time ambassador in Holland; to which diplomatic situations Dryden alludes in the text. He was named one of the commissioners of the treasury in 1679, and had very considerable influence, by which the poet reaped some advantage; for, notwithstanding the exhausted state of the exchequer, he acknowledges, that, contrary to the famous comparison of Cowley, Gideon's fleece had been moistened, when all the ground around was parched. Rochester was a steady opposer of the Bill of Exclusion, for which, in 1681, he was voted a public enemy by the House of Commons. Indeed, that measure must have materially affected the interests of the Duke of York's daughters, to whom Rochester stood in the relation of maternal uncle. For the same reason, as well as from political principle, he as keenly withstood the Duke of Monmouth s pretensions; for which he is stigmatised by Settle, in lines of which the following is a specimen:
Of these, than subtile Caleb none more great;
Caleb, who shines where his lost father set.
— — — — — — —
Caleb, who does that hardy pilot make,
Steering in that hereditary track,
Blind to the sea-mark of a father's wrack.
Notwithstanding the compliments bestowed by Dryden on Rochester for his management of the exchequer, he was, when in the high situation of Lord Treasurer, 1682, accused of peculation by his rival Halifax, who so far prevailed, that Rochester was removed to the more honourable but less important office, of President of the Council; on which occasion his witty adversary first applied the since well-known phrase, of "his lordship's being kicked up stairs." After the accession of King James, Rochester was again made Lord Treasurer, but soon lost the staff for his repugnance to enter into the violent measures of that monarch. He had consented to be present at a conference between some Catholic and Protestant divines, but treated the arguments of the former with a contempt which James could not forgive. At the Revolution he observed a sullen neutrality; and, though uncle to Queen Mary, never heartily acquiesced in her title to the crown, or reaped any benefit from its being occupied by so near a relation. King William never could forgive his once having passed through the Low Countries without waiting upon him.