Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon — Volume 02

by Sir Henry Craik

So he proceeded, pressing home the moral with all energy of denunciation, and concluded by

"beseeching him to believe, that which he had often said to him, that no prince could be more miserable, nor could have more reason to fear his own ruin, than he who hath no servants who dare contradict him in his opinions and advise him against his inclinations, how natural soever." The picture was not a flattering one, and the prognostications were not soothing. To play the part of such a Mentor is doubtless at times a duty, but it can scarcely confirm the influence of him by whom it is discharged. The King heard it "with his usual temper (for he was a patient hearer) and spake sensibly, as if he thought that much that had been said was with too much reason." Perhaps Clarendon might have chosen a better audience than a proclaimed enemy like Arlington. The secretary had no mind for such jeremiads, and was dexterous enough to turn the subject by falling into "raillery, which was his best faculty, with which he diverted the King from any further serious reflections." The King and he soon passed to merriment at Clarendon's expense, and made the old jests against the gravity of age, which made no allowance for the infirmities of youth. Clarendon tells the close of the conversation with an almost naïve candour. Their raillery, he confesses,

"increased the passion he was in, and provoked him to say that it was observed abroad, that it was a faculty very much improved of late in the Court, to laugh at those arguments they could not answer, and which could always be requited with the same mirth amongst those who were enemies to it, and therefore it was a pity that it should be so much embraced by those who pretended to be friends;" and ended with "some other, too plain, expressions, which, it may be, were not warily enough used."

Candour is no doubt a virtue, and Clarendon deserves honour for his bold words. But to tell the King that he was at once a sluggard and a debauchee; that he had lost the respect, and would probably soon forfeit the obedience of his subjects; and to scold his jocular raillery by painting him as courting the society and imitating the manners of buffoons, was scarcely a tactful way of insinuating a lesson of caution and establishing the confidence which makes a servant congenial to his master. We must honour Clarendon for his manliness; but perhaps a little less of the pedagogue might not have diminished his influence or impaired the dignity of his character.

Charles knew how to hide any irritation under a smiling demeanour. But the friction was there and it soon took plainer shape. Careless as he was, the King had his share of Stuart punctiliousness, and the habits of the French Court had taught him that royal favour ought to command respect, even for those whose conduct had forfeited it according to the usual ethics of social decorum. That respect his pride taught him to insist upon; and he resented the boldness of the lampoons upon his Court which were now circulated broadcast, not because they reflected on his morals, but because they were a breach of good manners. One whose chosen associates were men of habitual profanity and unabashed licentiousness; one who believed religion to be nothing but disguised hypocrisy, and the chastity of women nothing but a delusion artfully contrived—could not long condone plain speaking for its manliness and sincerity, and could not conceive that the profligacy of the royal courtesan deprived her of the observances of formal courtliness. It was this last point which brought upon Clarendon the King's first direct remonstrances. He told the Chancellor that "he was more severe against common infirmities than he should be, and that his wife was not courteous in returning visits and civilities to those who paid her respect." Such neglect the King chose to interpret as an insult to himself. It was clear to whom and to what it referred; Clarendon had consistently declined to allow his wife to have any intercourse with Lady Castlemaine. To the King's remonstrance

"he answered very roundly, that he might seem not to understand his meaning, and so make no reply to the discourse he had made; but that he understood it all and the meaning of every word of it; and therefore that it would not become him to suffer his Majesty to depart with an opinion that what he had said would produce any alteration in his behaviour towards him, or reformation of his manners towards any other person. He did beseech his Majesty," the Chancellor went on, "not to believe that he hath a prerogative to declare vice virtue, or to qualify any person who lives in a sin and avows it, against which God Himself hath pronounced damnation, for the company and conversation of innocent and worthy persons. Whatever low obedience, which was in truth gross flattery, some people might pay to what they believed would be grateful to his Majesty, they had in their hearts a perfect detestation of the persons they made address to; for his part, he was resolved that his wife should not be one of these courtiers."

The King could only reply "that he was wrong, and had an understanding different from all men who had experience in the world."

Clarendon's are brave words, and we may well doubt whether the like were ever addressed by a Minister of the Crown to the occupant of a throne which still retained so much of the kingly prerogative as did that of Charles. But do they leave us to seek for new grounds for Clarendon's approaching fall? Do they not, indeed, prove that, but for his thorough grasp of the essentials of sound administration, his predominant forcefulness, and the urgent need of his wise and experienced guidance, the King would have yielded to his own growing irritation, and that Clarendon's fall would have come, and the eager longings of his enemies have been gratified, far earlier than was the case?

Before we enter upon the last stage of Clarendon's ministry, so fateful for the future history of England, it may be well to turn to another aspect of his life, which is not without its use in helping us to estimate his character. We have already seen how the high office which he held, and for which his unswerving loyalty, his long service, and his ample experience had so fully designated him, had been accompanied by exalted rank in the nobility of England, which required him, according to the fashion of the time, to maintain great state, and involved heavy expenditure. He had inherited a fair estate; had married the daughter of an ancient family, with no small dowry; and, in his early days, his fortune had been increased, not only by further inheritances, but by the lucrative practice of his profession. When he first entered Parliament, he had before him the prospect of a prosperous career; and when he was induced to enter the service of Charles I. it was possible for him to do so without emolument and in full security that his own means would be ample for his requirements. During the troubled years that followed these means rapidly decreased. He could draw no revenue from his estates, and during the long years of his banishment from the country he had been reduced to the direst straits of poverty, and had been forced to subsist on the scanty grants that could be made to him, and to others, from the funds supplied to the King by those loyal supporters who could spare something from their own impaired revenues. After the Restoration, Clarendon found himself in possession of an office of which the emoluments, without any of those malpractices or extortions which were then too common, and which his enemies did not scruple to charge against him, [Footnote: Hints and gossip as to such bribes and commissions were inevitable in an age when they were only too common, and in the mouths of men whose consciences were blunted by long practice. Such gossip readily spread, as it is, in all places and in all ages, too apt to do. We may safely discard the slanderous garrulity of Pepys, and just as safely the ridiculous libel of Anthony a Wood, who tells us how one David Jenkyns, a friend of Wood's and a good Royalist, would certainly have been made a judge at the Restoration, if he "had paid money to the Lord Chancellor." Anthony a Wood had no kindly feeling to a family from whom he received such castigation as he did from the Hydes. Lies of that sort always propagate themselves, like noisome weeds; it is the part of the wise to neglect them until they are established by proof.] were still large. There is not a tittle of evidence to disprove Clarendon's assertion, that he confined himself to those revenues of his office which were strictly legal; and to suppose otherwise would be to suppose him false to all those ideals which were the foundation of his character, and to which his pride, if nothing else, compelled him. Naturally he recovered the full use of his private property, and some, at least, of the arrears due to him would undoubtedly be paid. Very soon after the King's return a grant—in no degree above his merits—of £20,000 was made to him by the King out of the present sent by the Parliament. Clarendon found himself in the position of a fairly wealthy man, and it was not unnatural that he should desire to maintain that position which was commensurate with his rank. He knew himself to be the founder of a family which must take its place in the ranks of the great nobility of England, and must hold a conspicuous place in her annals. To him, as to many men for whom the pettiness of personal position weighs for little, the maintenance of that family in worthy dignity became a legitimate object of ambition. [Footnote: Clarendon did, indeed, as he was fully justified in doing, procure for some of his relations posts for which there is no reason to judge them unsuitable. One cousin, Alexander Hyde, became Bishop of Salisbury. Another, Robert Hyde, became Chief Justice of the Common Pleas in 1661. The brother of these two, Henry Hyde, had been executed for his loyalty in 1650, and thereby had established no mean claim to loyal gratitude. Clarendon, in this, did no more than any one in his circumstances was not only entitled, but bound to do.] To his historic sense a place amongst the nobility of his country was attractive, and its stateliness was something which his imagination clothed with more than merely superficial allurement. It was from no selfish feeling and no vanity of personal display, that he conceived the idea of leaving to those who were to come after him an inheritance compatible with that position. It would be unjust to blame Clarendon because he gave the scanty leisure, which his absorbing business permitted him, to attaining that object. For years after the Restoration he had no house of his own in London, and occupied one or other of the houses either lent or hired to him by members of the great nobility who now looked upon him as their equal. After his private affairs were on a more secure basis, he began to build for himself. He chose a site near the top of St. James's Street, just where Piccadilly began to melt into the fields beyond, and there he constructed a mansion which he fondly hoped would carry on his name for many a generation. It was conceived on ample lines and with all that pride of architecture which his own cultured taste and the stately ceremonial of the day made congenial to him. As in temperament and style, so in his conception of the constitution, in his taste, and in the ordering of his life, Clarendon was essentially an aristocrat; and it was in harmony with that idea that the mansion which faced St. James's Palace, [Footnote: It was flanked by Lord Berkeley's house to the west, and by Burlington House to the east.] and was to bear the name of Clarendon House, was now rising in all the bravery of ornament and amplitude of design which were in keeping with its owner's taste; and that it should earn the praise of Evelyn as likely to be the stateliest house in London. [Footnote: "To my Lord Chancellor at Clarendon House," says Pepys, in his Diary for May 9, 1667. "Mightily pleased with the nobleness of this house, and the brave furniture and pictures, which indeed is very noble." He had been impressed with it as strongly in its early stages, and writes in January, 1666: "It is the finest pile I ever did see in my life, and will be a glorious house." The building was begun early in 1665. Evelyn is not so complimentary. He thought it "a goodly pile to see, but had many defects as to the architecture, yet placed most gracefully" (Diary, Nov. 28, 1666). A longer passage from Evelyn's Diary, of a later date, is quoted in the note on p. 324.

Pepys was greatly impressed with the view, to which he more than once returned, from the roof of the house. "It is the noblest prospect that ever I saw in my life; Greenwich being nothing to it" (Feb. 1665/6).] But envious tongues and malicious gossip soon taught its builder that his pride was vain, and that he could not indulge his fancy with the ease of one who held obscurer rank. The crowd is fickle, and Clarendon took little care to secure its lenient judgment. Already his mansion was nicknamed Dunkirk House, and the quidnuncs told how it was built out of the bribes which had made him contrive the sale of that port to France. To decorate his mansion it was his ambition to collect a gallery of portraits, which should represent all those who had foremost places in the eventful history of his time. Such a design involved an expenditure very small compared with the notions of the present day. Clarendon procured all the notable portraits which were available. It is quite possible—and Evelyn admits it—that when the statesman's foible became known; pictures were sold to him at easy prices, or even presented as a compliment to the power and position of the collector. It is absurd to suppose that Clarendon either would or could have brought any pressure to bear upon the owners. But a falling statesman is an easy aim for slander, and it was whispered that the Clarendon collection was enriched by oppressive means. [Footnote: The chief authority for this accusation against Clarendon is an ill-natured insinuation by Lord Dartmouth, in his notes on Burnet's History of His Own Times,—notes which were in MS. only, and which were not intended for publication. It carries its own refutation, and Dartmouth could not possibly have had any knowledge of the circumstances. Clarendon no doubt received certain complimentary gifts. But we know that many private collections were broken up and sold by impoverished Cavaliers, and such pictures must at that time have been procurable at easy prices. Many of the pictures were interesting as portraits, rather than as works of art, although there were good specimens of Vandyke, Jansen, Kneller, and Lely amongst the collection; and Clarendon was probably able to pursue his hobby of collecting portraits of the outstanding men in English history at no great cost.