Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon — Volume 02

by Sir Henry Craik

The scandals of the Court touched Clarendon through his daughter, the Duchess of York. The Duke was no model of connubial fidelity, and his lapses from virtue, if not so flagrant as those of his brother, yet gave food enough for gossiping tongues. But ostensibly his married life was fairly decorous, and against the Duchess no charges could be made. Her life, however, did not escape the gibes of those who sought to attack her father through her, and the trust which the Duke showed in her judgment roused their malice. They did their best to bring the King to listen to their sarcasm on a married life which seemed to rebuke his own; and Clarendon at the same time saw with regret that both his daughter and her husband partook in large measure of the spirit of reckless expense which prevailed at Court. Dutiful as she was in other respects, here her father's admonitions were of no effect. The Duke and she had formed their ideas of the scale of expenditure necessary in the household of the heir apparent, from the usages of the French Court. To those who saw in her only the daughter of one who, a few years ago, had been but a Wiltshire squire, her assumption of almost royal state was a cause of petty malice, and suggested the false pride of a family of obscure birth. To Clarendon it seemed but a necessary insistence upon that respect which the prevailing tone of the Court rendered necessary. In his eyes the danger lay, not in their insistence upon the usages of royal etiquette, but in their extravagance; and he incurred some ill-will from her, as well as from her husband, by his refusal to give his aid in securing for them a more ample revenue. The connection with the royal family, which had been thrust upon Clarendon to his indignation and sorely against his will, proved a new source of anxiety and dispeace.

[Illustration: ANNE HYDE, DUCHESS OF YORK (From the original by Sir Peter
Lely)]

It was on the first of September "in this dismal year of 1666," that the Great Fire burst out that in a few days consumed two-thirds of London, comprising all the repositories of her wealth. It added, to the other disasters weighing on the country, a stupendous disturbance of her commerce at its very centre, and the plunging of the nation into one of those unthinking panics, which, once indulged, so easily become habitual. The people were in no condition to face such a calamity with the coolness that comes from native energy or the confidence inspired by trust in their rulers. It seemed as if a judgment from heaven had fallen upon the nation; but it was received with all the despair of craven superstition and with no thought of benefiting by the lessons of tribulation. Angry and groundless accusations against foreigners and papists only added to the general excitement, without stirring up any of the courage which makes brave men face disaster. Public credit was shaken; commercial operations were stunned; wage-earners were thrown out of employment; the forces of crime found themselves released even from those imperfect bonds which then kept them in check. The King and his brother did, indeed, prove their courage in danger and their readiness of expedient; and they were well helped in their efforts to cope with the calamity by many of the leading nobility. But as a whole the visitation proved that the nerves of the nation were sadly relaxed. Clarendon summarizes the progress of the fire and the destruction wrought by it; but his most significant comments are those with which he closes his narrative, telling how hopeless he had grown, in this, the last stage of his laborious career:—"It was hoped and expected," he says, "that this prodigious and universal calamity, for the effects of it covered the whole kingdom, would have made impression, and produced some reformation in the licence of the Court; for as the pains the King had taken night and day during the fire and the dangers he had exposed himself to, even for the saving the citizens' goods, had been very notorious and in the mouths of all men, with good wishes and prayers for him; so his Majesty had been heard during that time to speak with great piety and devotion of the displeasure that God was provoked to. And no doubt the deep sense of it did raise many good thoughts and purposes in his royal breast. But he was narrowly watched and looked to that such melancholic thoughts might not long possess him, the consequence and effect whereof was like to be more grievous than that of the fire itself; of which that loose company that was too much cherished, even before it was extinguished, discoursed of as an argument for mirth and wit, to describe the wildness of the confusion all people were in; in which the Scripture itself was used with equal liberty when they could apply it to their profane purposes. And Mr. May [Footnote: Baptist May (born in 1629) managed to ingratiate himself with Charles II. in France, and became a favourite in the unsavoury position of "Court Pimp," as he is styled by Pepys. He secured for his base services some grants of land about St. James's, and was one of the lowest of a degraded gang. He sat occasionally in Parliament to discharge commissions which no man of honour would have undertaken. He lived a despised life down to 1698.] presumed to assure the King that this was the greatest blessing that God had ever conferred upon him, his restoration only excepted; for the walls and gates being now burned and thrown down of that rebellious city, which was always an enemy to the Crown, his Majesty would never suffer them to repair and build them up again to be a bit in his mouth and a bridle upon his neck, but would keep all open that his troops might enter upon them whenever he thought it necessary for his service, there being no way to govern that rude multitude but by force." [Footnote: Life, iii. 100.]

Such ribaldry was distasteful to the King, and for the moment he frowned upon it. But it wrought a dire effect, as it spread beyond the purlieus of the palace. Liberty of criticism was as easy to the rude multitude as to the witlings of the Court, and its effects, when it spread to that multitude, were far more deadly. The King's judgment might condemn, but his facile love of jesting made him inclined to listen to, the empty and sordid chatter of frivolity that sounded through his Court. "Meanwhile," says Clarendon, "all men of virtue and sobriety, of which there were very many in the King's family, were grieved and heartbroken with hearing what they could not choose but hear, and seeing many things which they could not avoid seeing." It is hard to say which is most worthy of contempt—the appalling cynicism that prompted such scurrilities, or the amazing folly which mistook their vulgarity for wit.

But even although Charles, out of a seeming respect for his older and sounder counsellors, might frown upon such irresponsible outbursts of bad taste, his scanty respect for the forms of the constitution continued to be a source of deep regret to Clarendon. In the view of the Chancellor, the Privy Council was the pivot of the constitution.

"By the constitution of the kingdom," he says, [Footnote: Life, iii. 103] "and the very laws and customs of the nation, as the Privy Council and every member of it is of the King's sole choice and election of him to that trust, so the body of it is the most sacred, and hath the greatest authority in the government of the State, next the person of the King himself, to whom all other powers are equally subject; and no King of England can so well secure his own just prerogative or preserve it from violation as by a strict defending and supporting the dignity of his Privy Council."

This is one of the features in Clarendon's scheme of the constitution, which essentially divide him from the modern view. But it was to be long before the Privy Councilship became, as in modern usage, little more than an honorary title; and it may be doubted whether a strict reading of the constitution is not infringed by the change which this has involved. Clarendon did not, of course, suppose that the Privy Council could place itself above Parliament, or that it could pretend to guide the national policy. Such a thing would have been as impossible in Clarendon's day as it would be now. But he did conceive that the power of the executive should receive all its authority from, and be subject to the supreme guidance of, the most ancient and august body which was nominated solely by the Crown. The prerogative of the Crown must be exercised through that body; and this view was confirmed by the fact that after the Revolution each Privy Councillor was made responsible for the decrees passed with his assent. This was, indeed, the very contrivance by which the ancient principle that the King could do no wrong was made compatible with a free constitution. Clarendon's view, however antiquated, was thus, in truth, a safeguard for liberty. A great officer of State was entrusted with the duties and powers of his office. But he was not necessarily a member of the Privy Council, and his powers were, in Clarendon's view, limited by the supreme authority of that Council. That its portals should be jealously guarded; that only men of the first weight should be admitted to it; that its proceedings should be carefully regulated and should rest upon sound legal principles—all these things made for government by the personal agency of carefully chosen Ministers of the Crown, which it was Clarendon's aim to preserve, instead of bureaucratic rule by a host of minor officials. They also served as a powerful guarantee for constitutional liberty and for immediate responsibility attaching to a well-recognized body for any infringement of it. It is hard to fix responsibility amongst the various grades of an official hierarchy. It is easy to fix it upon a small group of leading men who have the administration in their hands, who are bound to base their procedure on well-understood rules, and who cannot transgress these rules in ignorance or under the veil of obscurity.

Under the new régime the Chancellor found the Privy Council filled with Court favourites or ambitious intriguers of the type of Sir William Coventry, who scorned precedent and was never so happy as when inveighing against the trammels of the law. Clarendon was forced to submit to daily encroachments upon regularity of procedure, which found encouragement from the King. His personal dignity was injured, and his temper was daily chafed, by the insults of those who carried their insubordination and their flippancy to the Council Chamber, where he could ill brook their presence; and they did so under cover of the secret sympathy of the King. Day by day he found his own influence more surely undermined; and it was none the less irksome because he saw the work of his life undone amidst the gibes of a heartless cynicism.

It involves, however, no reflection upon the dignity or the capacity of Clarendon if we are compelled to admit that the schoolboy baiting to which he was exposed found no little encouragement from his own bluntness and his stubborn resolution to stoop to none of the arts of courtiership. There was a limit even to the patience with which Charles could listen to the oft-repeated catalogue of his own moral defects; and perhaps Clarendon's lessons might have been none the less effective had they been conveyed with something more of tact. The strange thing is that he himself saw, and faithfully recounts, the traps which were laid for him. But he seems to have thought that these could best be dealt with by roughly trampling on such devices and tearing his way headlong through such snares. The struggle was sometimes not a little comic in aspect, in spite of the background of tragedy. Upon some occasions the courtiers, with an hypocrisy which Clarendon did not fail to suspect, would lament to him the scandals of their master's life and the injury that these wrought to his reputation and authority. When he urged that they should "advertise the King what they thought and heard all others say," they professed that they dared not speak to the King "in such dialect." Clarendon gave them credit for some honesty in their refusal to condemn what they themselves encouraged; and perhaps too readily assumed himself the task which they refused. On one occasion, while he and Arlington—one would have thought no very sympathetic pair for mutual confidences—were discussing the license of the Court and the consequent injury to the Crown, their conversation was interrupted by the King. Their trouble did not escape his notice, and he asked the subject of their talk. The Chancellor candidly declared—prefacing the declaration by a confession that he was not sorry for the chance of making it—that

"they were speaking of his Majesty, and, as they did frequently, were bewailing the unhappy life he lived, both with respect to himself, who, by the excess of pleasures which he indulged to himself, was indeed without the true delight and relish of any; and in respect to his Government, which he totally neglected, and of which the kingdom was so sensible that it could not be long before he felt the ill effects of it."