In a letter to Pepys of August 12, 1689, Evelyn gives a list of pictures in the collection of which he himself had advised the purchase, and some of which, he admits, had been presented by those who "strove to make their court" to the Chancellor, by such timely gifts, when his design was known. They comprised portraits of all the leading men in the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I., and others were added from more remote history, and from his own later contemporaries. It is interesting to note that there were portraits of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher—"which was," adds Evelyn, "most agreeable to his Lordship's general humour."
When Clarendon House was destroyed, the collection went to his country house, at Cornbury, in Oxfordshire. On the death of Lord Rochester, in 1753, they were divided between his daughters, Jane, Countess of Essex and Catherine (the famous "Kitty" of Pope and Gay), Duchess of Queensberry. The first moiety is that now at the Grove, Watford; the second is that which descended to the Douglas family, and is now at Bothwell Castle.] If Clarendon's very natural ambition to bequeath a dignified home to his family and to make it a treasure-house of portraits which represented a great page in English history, was any weakness, it was one for which he may well be pardoned, and for which he paid heavily. He lived to regret the error into which a very human pride had led him. We must leave it to sterner moralists to deal out censure upon a weakness which he shared with other men of genius, who have found a solace in raising a stately monument which they may bequeath to posterity, and which may preserve another memory of them than that of their toils and their struggles and their own personal ambitions. But in the case of Clarendon this weakness—of which he himself clearly saw the error—had this additional disadvantage, that it spread the belief that he had acquired wealth proportionate to such architectural expenditure. Like many another man, Clarendon overbuilt himself; and his miscalculation made his contemporaries suppose him the possessor of a superfluity of ill-gotten wealth.
CHAPTER XXIV
INCREASING BITTERNESS OF HIS FOES
In the midst of thickening troubles at home and abroad, in Court, in the city, and in the provinces, Parliament met on the 2lst September, 1666. The new session was destined to bring sharply to an issue more than one of the questions in regard to which long-drawn friction had vexed the soul of Clarendon, and as it proceeded it was to reveal more clearly the designs of those who had striven so persistently to fret irritations and sow new seeds of dissension between him and the King. Their success, ignoble as it was, and little profitable either to the Crown, the kingdom, or themselves, was soon to be achieved.
Parliament met under the oppression of gloom caused by the Fire. Whitehall and Westminster were safe, but scarcely a mile distant the smoke which rose from the desolated city had hardly died away. "They saw," said the King in his opening address, "the dismal ruins the Fire had made; and nothing but a miracle of God's mercy could have preserved what was left from the same destruction." He was forced once more to apply for their assistance to meet the vast expense of the war, to which no end could be foreseen. The disasters of the kingdom had doubled the insolence of their enemies; and nothing could save the country but a vigorous effort to show the world that, in spite of these disasters, it was still equal to its own defence. It was a crisis which sorely needed all the energy of firm and united statesmanship; and very scantily was that need supplied. The interruption of credit; the bankruptcy of many of the leading citizens; the general paralysis that had fallen upon commerce—all these made it hard to say how money could be raised, and Clarendon notes, with none of the satisfaction that the truth of his prophecy might have brought, that the Appropriation Proviso had resulted in the check, rather than in the boasted increase, of the supply of funds. There was, indeed, "a faint vote procured," that they would give a supply proportionate to the wants of the Crown; but no sum was fixed, and after this first vague resolution the matter hung in suspense, and even a Parliament that was so strongly loyalist found it needful to delay and insist upon conditions before any new supply was voted. Their loyalty had now a strong vein of stubbornness. The country gentlemen could no longer blind themselves to the scandals of the Court, and the intractable mood bred by these scandals could be skilfully turned to their own purposes by Clarendon's enemies. What had at first been only dilatoriness soon developed into sharp criticism and angry remonstrance, for which Clarendon knew that there was only too good ground. It was an ill time to press for new supplies when the national resources were drained to the dregs. If the King needed more after the lavish grants of recent years, there must have been mischief afoot which should be probed to the bottom. All those through whose hands the money had passed must give a strict account of it.
A Bill was introduced for the appointment of Audit Commissioners, who were to examine all accounts and report to Parliament any defaulters, whose punishment Parliament was to determine. So strongly was the country party bent upon this financial inquest that it was difficult to withstand their zeal in the hunt for malpractices. The naval administration was chiefly in their view, and their threats caused much searching of heart amongst those whose consciences told them that their methods could hardly meet the perilous light of day. A certain amount of corruption was an ordinary incident of all administrative dealings. Pepys had no wish to be dishonest, and was, indeed, a fairly incorrupt official, according to the ideas of the day. Many times he had withstood flagrant waste, and he was vigilant in promoting sound economies. But a barefaced system of secret commissions, which he honestly records in the faithful pages of his Diary, was universally practised, and the only admitted scruple was that such commissions should not be allowed to operate so as to permit a flagrantly dishonest contract. Subject to this, he evidently thought himself neglectful of his rightful interests if he did not make the most out of every transaction, and he piously invokes the blessing of Heaven upon the unsavoury business, as, with unctuous complacency, he counts up his gains. But, however such things may be condoned by the prevailing practice they have an ugly appearance when exposed to the public gaze, and Pepys was sorely alarmed both for himself and his principals at the prospect of a strict investigation. Others besides Pepys were involved. Ashley's administration of the prize-money had been expressly set free from any auditing authority except that of the King; and under the protection of this proviso he had expended the proceeds not only with the sanction, but at the instigation of Charles, on objects which could not be made public without exposing the Crown to the contempt of the nation, and making the resistance of the country party more obstinate and more outspoken. Charles took alarm, and consulted the secret committee of the Privy Council on the subject. He was determined, he said, to defend his Ministers against an inquiry conducted on methods for which there was no precedent, and under which no man would be safe. He trusted that the Bill would receive no support in the Commons; that if it passed the Commons it would be rejected by the Lords; but in any case, he was resolved never to give it his assent. The committee appeared to assent to these bold words, and to see in the proposal a dangerous menace to the prerogative of the Crown; and Clarendon, obeying his natural dislike of such encroachments, confirmed the view of the King, hoped that he would abide by his resolution, and promised his own vigorous opposition to any such Bill in the Lords.
It is hard to find any adequate ground, either in policy or in justice, for Clarendon's resistance to this proposal. He had himself nothing to fear from it. He had no part in the details of naval administration, and those who were chiefly threatened had no claim to his protection. He had been strongly opposed to Ashley's appointment to administer the prize- money, and he could not but know that the investigation would ruin Ashley's reputation. Had he boldly placed himself at the head of the country party and made himself the foremost champion of financial purity, he might have established a firm hold upon the affections of all that was best in the nation, and he might have trusted to their loyalty and his own to prevent any serious blow to the prerogative of the Crown and the respect due to the King. As a fact, he did assent, subsequently, to the nomination by the Crown of an audit commission, and it does not seem as if a simple alteration of procedure would have seriously affected the substance of the matter. Of his failure to act thus, his increasing age, his infirmities of health, the anxieties by which he was oppressed, and the lack of powerful and confidential allies may have largely been the cause. But we must remember also the ruling principles in Clarendon's conception of the constitution, and his own deep-seated prejudices. He was unwilling to stoop to injure an enemy by a weapon which might diminish the prerogative of the Crown. He never sought the position of leader of a party, which would thus have been forced upon him, and he felt that position to be incompatible with his own loyalty as servant of the Crown. He disliked the idea of Parliamentary tactics; and all his past experience identified such tactics, in his mind, with the beginnings of rebellion. It was not given to him to see so far into the future as to conceive that an independent Minister might be the strongest buttress of the Crown.
But the tactics from which he recoiled were put into practice, with less than his honesty, but with much more skill in stratagem, by those who sought to accomplish his fall. The very courtiers whose influence was accountable for the scandals which stirred the indignation of the country party, made themselves the trusted friends of the parliamentary opposition, and carefully nursed it for their own purposes. The irresponsible and flighty genius of Buckingham made him, for the moment, the chosen patron of those who were murmuring against the abuses of the Court, stimulated him to organize and conciliate the Parliamentary faction that grumbled against the waste of the national resources, and induced him to cast aside for the time the habits of a profligate voluptuary, and throw himself with ardour into the labours of Parliamentary debate. Rivalry in debauchery had made him, for a season, the object of the King's personal dislike, and had involved him in a bitter contest with Lady Castlemaine; and this tempted him to adopt the uncongenial part of a moralist, who found it convenient to cultivate the friendship of the strictest sectaries, and to pose as the saviour of the kingdom. It was not the first, nor the only, antic by which he made himself, as Zimri, the easy butt of Dryden's satire. He became the prime favourite of the people, and his power with the mob seemed to make him the rival of the King. It added to the zest with which he pursued this new freak, that it helped him to satisfy private and personal piques. In particular the Duke of Ormonde had become the object of his almost insane jealousy. Ormonde's lofty character, his consistent loyalty, his influence in the counsels of the King, above all, his vast power as a great territorial magnate, had wounded the vanity of Buckingham; and he was able to evoke against Ormonde, as an Irish peer, the jealousy of those English nobles who thought themselves unduly eclipsed by the great possessions, and high official rank, of a peer of a lower order—that of the Irish nobility.
It was largely in obedience to this personal jealousy, that Buckingham had made himself the prominent promoter of a Bill of singular injustice to the sister kingdom. It was conceived that the importation of Irish cattle was a serious injury to the English agricultural interest, and was enriching the Irish at the expense of the English proprietors; and it was therefore proposed to forbid any such importation. That it involved practical ruin to Ireland, and promised to lay the seeds of deep-rooted hatred, mattered nothing to those who had their own selfish objects to pursue, or who had private grudges to satisfy. It was only natural that the Bill found ready assent amongst some honest men, who were earnestly desirous to relieve the agricultural interest, suffering heavily under the pressure of taxation, and who had something else than private venom to indulge. The bitter complaints of Ireland could not be expected to weigh for much. It remained to be seen whether the short-sighted selfishness, which was sedulously fostered in order to gratify personal spleen, would be allowed to inflict upon a nation, united under the same Crown, this scandalous injustice. At first it was proposed that the embargo should extend to Scotland also; but at a later stage this was dropped.