Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon — Volume 02

by Sir Henry Craik

The fact of the Princess's religion was, no doubt, a stumbling-block which might well have caused greater anxiety to Clarendon, and which might have fretted the prejudices of the English people. But here, as on many other occasions, he seems to have forced himself, against what to a later day must seem fairly strong evidence, to discredit any idea that action on the part of Charles might be prompted by an inclination to the Church of Rome. To that Church Clarendon was as invincibly opposed as was his first master, Charles the First. He knew the earnestness of the injunctions laid on his son, by that master whose memory he so deeply revered. It is impossible to believe that doubts and anxieties were not repeatedly roused in Clarendon's mind with regard to the relations of the present King to that Church. But he seems sternly to have fought against and repressed any such suspicions. Apparently, the realization of these suspicions would have ruined his faith in the honesty and good feeling of his master, and with almost exaggerated energy he repudiates any such belief. If he suspected any danger of the kind from the Portuguese alliance, he put it firmly aside. And it is certain that whatever ill accrued from that marriage, it was not from that cause. Catherine of Braganza remained throughout a negligible quantity in English politics. Neither at Court, nor with any section of society, did she exercise any appreciable influence, either in promoting or retarding the acceptance in her adopted country of the tenets of her Church. Whatever the closeness of the King's relations to that Church, and whatever his determination to strain his prerogative in its favour, neither was influenced in the smallest degree by the religion of his wife. It is true that at a later day, the religion of the Queen, and the presence at Court of her Catholic attendants, enhanced the fury of an unthinking storm of anti-Catholic feeling. But it was only a small aggravation of an irrational outburst of religious prejudice.

The marriage treaty was arranged in time to be notified to Parliament when it met in May, 1661, and from that time the negotiations proceeded with all the customary diplomatic deliberation. The announcement was received with the same loyal acceptance as the other proposals of the Government, in an assembly much more markedly Royalist in feeling than even the Convention Parliament, which had carried out the first steps in the Restoration settlement. Its zeal might even have been deemed embarrassing, and Clarendon was chiefly urgent that a permanent settlement should be provided for, by confirming the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, before the Royalists devised new means of reaping fresh spoils of conquest. Another Act which he pressed forward was that bringing back the bishops to the House of Lords. It was, to his mind, a guarantee for the restoration of the Church, which it had been the central aim of his late master, as it was his own, to accomplish. Whatever compromise might be made as to ceremonies and articles, Clarendon could not admit that his debt to the Church had been paid until she had been re-established in her rightful position in the State. The memory of those bitter days, when what he recognized as the good work of the Long Parliament had been rudely marred by the subsequent excesses of the zealots, and when the constitution had been overturned by violence which posed as legislation, was too vividly impressed upon his mind to suffer him to rest until the prelates of the Church were placed on their former level with the temporal peers.

Here, again, he met with fractious opposition from Bristol. It is difficult to find a consistent clue to all the windings of policy devised by that mercurial brain, and to guess at the objects which inspired him. The Bill was easily passed by the House of Commons, where some opposition might have been expected. In the House of Lords its passage was less easy. Those peers, who had in the old days assented to the exclusion, were only too ready to have their former vote forgotten, and raised no voice against the Bill. It was Bristol who, to secure the support of the Catholics, put himself forward as its opponent, and contrived to impress the King with the conviction that the restoration of the bishops to the House of Lords would render impossible any Bill for modifying the penal laws against the Roman Catholics. The progress of the Bill was slow, and it was only on inquiring into the cause of this, that Clarendon found that Bristol had succeeded in conveying the idea that the King did not wish it to pass. With his usual blunt directness Clarendon asked the King for an explanation, and then heard of Bristol's machinations. His reply was prompt. He regretted that the King had been prevailed upon to obstruct a Bill on which he knew his Majesty's heart was so much set. If the reason for such obstruction were known, it would be fatal to all Roman Catholic hopes, "to which his Majesty knew that Hyde was no enemy." These last words were an intimation, as plain as could be given, that Hyde might easily be converted into an enemy to their hopes, Charles took his lesson submissively, and orders were given that the Bill should pass. Bristol attempted to bluster, and threatened "that if the Bill were passed that day he would speak against it," "To which," adds Hyde, "the Chancellor gave him an answer that did not please him; and the Bill was passed that day." Clarendon's methods could compel the consent of the King, and could silence the arrogance or the persistency of fractious opponents. They were scarcely fitted to conciliate either.

[Illustration: GEORGE DIGBY, SECOND EARL OF BRISTOL. (From the original by Sir Anthony Vandyke, in the collection of Earl Spencer.)]

Parliament had been compliant, and had passed at least two Acts which Clarendon deemed imperatively urgent. It was prorogued, after a short session, on July 30th, to meet again on November 20th. There remained still to be dealt with what were perhaps the most difficult problems of all, the questions of compromise as to the ceremonies and the doctrines of the Church, of the relation between the Nonconformists and the orthodox Churchmen, and of the degree of toleration that might be allowed to divergent forms of belief. These were three absolutely distinct branches of the religious controversy, and to confuse them leads only to prejudice and error. Clarendon had seen enough of the temper of the Parliament to perceive that time was necessary to ripen these questions for a settlement, and that the process would go on more smoothly during a recess than in the heated atmosphere of Parliamentary discussion. The discussions at the Savoy, the negotiations between the leading Nonconformists and the bishops, and the formulating of proposals on either side, had represented one phase of the discussions, and had led to little result. The matter was now one in which the Crown and its advisers must initiate a policy, and do their best to smooth its passage during the next session of Parliament. It could not be indefinitely delayed. Laxity, if too long tolerated, from however good a motive, quickly passes into anarchy.

In this matter it was inevitable that the leading part in framing a policy should fall to Clarendon. Of the old friends who would have been his chief advisers and guides in this work, many had passed away. But amongst the bishops three especially remained who were associated with old memories, and linked to him by mutual sympathy and respect. These were Brian Duppa, the former tutor of Charles II., lately Bishop of Salisbury, and now of Winchester; George Morley, now Bishop of Worcester, and soon after, successor of Duppa at Winchester; and Gilbert Sheldon, at first Bishop of London, and subsequently Archbishop of Canterbury on the death of Juxon, in 1663. Juxon's claims to the Primacy were pre-eminent; he had appeared with the Martyr-King in that memorable scene on the scaffold at Whitehall, and none other than he could fill the Archiepiscopal chair, which had been vacant since Laud had preceded his master in his death upon Tower Hill. But Juxon's tenure of the office was little more than nominal, and, even during his lifetime, Sheldon was the foremost representative of the Church.

Duppa, the Bishop of Winchester, had been the man closest in the confidence of Laud, and had been the chief agent in carrying out his reforms in the University of Oxford. This must of itself have been sufficient to earn for him the warm sympathy of Clarendon, and his subsequent career had confirmed those early ties. To Clarendon, he was not only the trusted friend of his early patron, Laud, but the man to whom his royal master had committed, in solemn words, the religious education of his son; and that duty Duppa had carried out with an unswerving devotion, with however small success. His own personal character, the gentleness of his temper, and his saintly life, had strengthened the respect which was felt for him by all loyal Churchmen, and during the short time that he survived the Restoration, he had a deserved influence on the counsels that directed the policy of the Church.

George Morley was another of the old fraternity that had gathered at Great Tew, under the hospitable roof, and in the genial company, of Hyde's early and most cherished friend, Lord Falkland. Morley's scholarship, his social gifts, his ready wit, and his unfailing tact, had secured for him a prominent place amongst that goodly fellowship. He followed a line of his own in Church politics, and in early days was not pliable enough always to win the approval and the confidence of Laud. His reply, when bored by an inconvenient questioner as to what the Arminians "held,"—"that they held all the best preferments in England,"—was pointed enough to spread quickly, and the sarcasm it implied was not agreeable to Laud. But Morley was none the less a loyal son of the Church, and gave abundant evidence of his loyalty to the good cause. He had been one of the Chaplains of Charles I., remained with him throughout the days of trouble and danger to the end, and had been an exile from his master's death to the Restoration. In Morley, Clarendon could place the trust due to an old friend, a loyal Churchman, and a man of fearless character, and of ripe judgment. Against his uprightness of life no insinuation could be made.

Gilbert Sheldon was a man of a different type from either of these two. While a stout defender of the rights of the Church, he, like Morley, had not always seen eye to eye with Laud. But he and Hyde were in closest sympathy. They had lived together at All Souls when Hyde was present at Oxford during the Civil War, and when the burden of directing the affairs of the King had rested chiefly upon him. Sheldon, in later days, had manfully resisted the encroachments of the Parliamentary Commissioners on the University, and upon All Souls, of which he was Warden; and it was only by military violence that he was expelled from his charge, under the order of these Commissioners. He had then retired to the country, and continued during the Commonwealth to lead a quiet life, in which he spent his time and his own resources in assisting the loyal adherents of the King. Just before the Restoration, the Warden appointed by the Protector had died; and Sheldon was quietly restored to his former post, at the moment when the political world was occupied with the still doubtful struggle between the contending factions. A few months later he was called to play a leading part, as Bishop of London, in the critical negotiations for the settlement of the Church. Sheldon was a new type of the ecclesiastical statesman.

He had thrown off the habits of the student for those of the administrator, and one may add, of the politician. Sound and sincere Churchman as he was, his religion was that of the man of the world, suspicious of fanaticism, more earnest in inculcating an upright life than in a show of enthusiastic fervour, regular in his religious duties, but preferring a religion which displayed itself in the cheerful activity of a regular life, rather than in any overstrained attention to devotional routine. It was only natural that his enemies should charge him with being worldly-minded, and should insinuate that with him religion was only an instrument of government, and an element in policy. It need not lessen our respect for him that his religious faith showed itself more in lavish charity, and in a cheerful energy, than in the strict pursuit of the conventional routine of religious exercises. He could be a stern moralist when necessary, and he did not scruple to rebuke the King for his licentious life, and even, as Swift tells us, refused to him the Sacrament on that account. If such a man attracts to himself little of a halo of sanctity, he perhaps compensates for this by the manliness of an upright life and conduct. [Footnote: We need give no attention to the scandalous and baseless gossip as to Sheldon's licentiousness which Pepys gathered from the irresponsible tittle-tattle of the coffee-house, and entrusts to the confidential pages of a diary which was never intended for publication. If we enjoy and profit by the vivid pictures of the day which his memoirs give us, we ought at the same time to feel ourselves bound to discredit the occasional thoughtless gossip about characters which stand too unassailable to be smudged by the mischievous sallies of Pepys's pen.] In his balanced judgment, in his unswerving honesty, and in his absolute uprightness of purpose, Hyde found just that help which was most useful at this juncture; and that both he and Sheldon suffered from some testiness of temper was no hindrance to their friendship.