Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon — Volume 02

by Sir Henry Craik

Evelyn may best be allowed to tell of the passing of Clarendon's architectural glory. It is in the Diary for September 18, 1683.

"After dinner I walked to survey the sad demolition of Clarendon House, that costly and only sumptuous palace of the late Lord Chancellor Hyde, where I have often been so cheerful with him, and sometimes so sad; happening to make him a visit but the day before he fled from the angry Parliament, accusing him of maladministration, and being envious at his grandeur, who, from a private lawyer, came to be father-in-law to the Duke of York, and, as some would suggest, designing his Majesty's marriage with the Infanta of Portugal, not apt to breed; to this they imputed much of our unhappiness, and that he being sole Minister and favourite at his Majesty's restoration, neglected to gratify the King's suffering party, preferring those who were the cause of our troubles. But perhaps as many of those things were injuriously laid to his charge, so he kept the Government far steadier than it has since proved. I could name some who, I think, contributed greatly to his ruin, the buffoons and the misses, to whom he was an eye-sore. 'Tis true he was of a jolly temper after the old English fashion; but France had now the ascendant, and we were become quite another nation. The Chancellor gone, and dying in exile, the Earl his successor sold that which cost £50,000 building to the young Duke of Albemarle for £25,000, to pay debts which how contracted remains yet a mystery, his son being no way a prodigal…. However it were, this stately palace is decreed to ruin, to support the prodigious waste the Duke of Albemarle had made of his estate since the old man died. He sold it to the highest bidder, and it fell to certain rich bankers and mechanics, who gave for it and the ground about it £35,000; they design a new town as it were, and a most magnificent piazza…. See the vicissitudes of earthly things!"

In June of the following year Evelyn found streets and buildings—Bond Street and Albemarle Street—encroaching on the beauty of the site. The fall of Clarendon House had tempted Lady Berkeley to turn her gardens into squares, and she actually realized the then amazing amount of £1000 a year "in mere ground rents"! "To such a mad intemperance has this age come of building about a city by far too disproportionate already to the nation." If Evelyn's ghost still haunts the scene, what are its reflections now?]

At the date of his banishment, Clarendon was not an old man, as age is generally reckoned. He had not yet reached the age of sixty years, which finds many men in possession of their full powers. But ill health, anxiety, long years of hardship and incessant labour, had combined to make him prematurely old. For a time, indeed, it seemed as if he could only survive his fall by a few weeks or months, and as if his work were to finish when he left his country for the last time. But his indomitable energy, and the brave spirit that sustained him, brought back first a tolerable measure of good health; then serenity of mind; and, lastly, that industry which opened to him, in the reading and in the making of books, a new world from which all the sordid pettiness, and the infinite annoyances, of the political arena were banished. There is but little more to tell of that strenuous life, which had seen so much of storm and tempest, varied by gleams of sunshine, and, above all, illuminated by an imagination so rich, and by an historic sense so gorgeous and so inspiring to a man whose life was spent in making history. From what his pen has left us, from that incomparable history where the scenes in which he had played so great a part, and the actors amongst whom he had moved, are portrayed with such dramatic force, we can easily picture to ourselves how vivid were Clarendon's memories, and how richly the days of his retirement were peopled with the thoughts of what had been. The respect paid to him, the homage accorded to his great achievements and his great name, were not merely soothing to his personal vanity—they served to bring him closer to those historic scenes in which he had moved. He had still the invaluable treasures of industry and hope. He could still add to that which he would leave to his world; he could still hope that he might see his country, and be honoured as of old by his countrymen. We must accept Clarendon as nature made him. For him life was a large stage, on which he must act his part with dignity. Like Ulysses, he "was a part of all that he had known"; he could not rest from effort; if he could not act great deeds, he could still wield his pen in stately eloquence.

It was, he tells, the third of the retreats from a life of trouble and vexation, which Heaven had granted him, and which he reckoned amongst his choicest blessings. After the storms of the Civil War, he had one such retreat at Jersey, when the Prince had, much against his advice, left for France. In that first retreat he had gained much. He learned to know himself better, and other men more truly. His youth had been engaged in company and conversation, and in the full tide of early success at the bar, followed by absorption in the turmoil of politics, he had moved on the quick current, and had not had leisure for contemplation, or for studying the ways of men. His early life had been one "of ease and pleasure and too much idleness"; it was only the instinct of association with men whom he could respect, that preserved him from "any notable scandal," and made him live, as he naively tells us, at least "caute, if not caste." Too much idleness he had exchanged for too much business. The retreat at Jersey had come just when it was well "to compose those affections and allay those passions, which, in the warmth of perpetual actions, and chafed by continual contradictions, had need of rest, and cool and deliberate cogitations." He learned "how blind a surveyor he had been of the inclinations and affections of the heart of man," and how warily he must walk who would avoid the pitfalls of human intercourse.

The next retreat came during the two years of his Embassy in Spain. It gave him a respite from the petty, but none the less rancorous, bickerings of the exiled Court. It offered him a new period of intercourse with his books. It opened a new world to him in the intricacies of European diplomacy. Above all, it allowed him once again to renew that spirit of fervent religious devotion, which always served as the background of his busy life.

Now, in this the third of his retreats, spent and wearied, and, as it might seem, baffled, he could find consolation in the opportunity of once more adding to his intellectual stores, enriching his bequest to the world, and amplifying the proud record which should serve as his vindication to posterity. In his "Devotions on the Psalms," in his replies to Cressy and to Hobbes, in a crowd of miscellaneous essays on those general ethical topics which were suited to the taste of that day, and have proved singularly ill-adapted to the taste of our own; above all, in the completion of his great History of the Rebellion, with which he incorporated his autobiography, Clarendon found abundant employment for his crowded leisure.

He remained at Montpelier until June, 1671, and thereafter resided at Moulins, until the spring of 1674. He had the comfort of abundant friends, of frequent correspondence, and of occasional visits from his sons, Lord Cornbury, and Lawrence Hyde. [Footnote: Lawrence Hyde is always referred to as "Lory" in his father's correspondence. He became Earl of Rochester.] The management of his property, so far as he could carry it out in exile, was a source of some annoyance, but doubtless also helped to keep alive his hope of a return to his country and his home. We have no details of his life in exile. We only know enough to show that it was one of no listless indolence, no craven depression, and no vain repining. Clarendon died, as he had lived, with energy unconquered, with hope unabated, still clinging to all that made human life more noble in action, more stately in its ordering, more lofty in its ideals. Alike by temperament, by training, by all that had roused his enthusiastic devotion, and attracted his passionate loyalty, and by the moulding of a long experience of struggle and of suffering, he was apt to frame these ideals on the historic records of the past. It was not his to strike out daring enterprises or to initiate sweeping reforms. He built upon the associations that had been handed down to him. But the memory of his achievements, marred and blurred as these were by sordid surroundings, ignoble intrigues, and the disappointments that tried his loyalty, was none the less precious; nor was the inheritance of his literary accomplishment the less valuable. Can England point to one who at once filled a larger part in her history, and left a more enduring monument in the annals of her literature?

Vexations still came to him in these closing years of exile. He had the bitter mortification of learning, on evidence which he strove to think was not fully proved, that his daughter had betrayed the traditions of his house and of his teaching, and had been persuaded to accept those doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, which he held to be false to the truth, and dangerous to the welfare of his country. In dignified words, he strove to turn her from that error with all the weight of a father's authority, which her exalted position as the wife of the Heir Presumptive did not, in his view, weaken or control; but he heard of her death on March 3lst, 1671, in the thirty-fourth year of her age, as the avowed adherent of a Church of which he had all his life been a convinced opponent. In June, 1671, through his son Lawrence, then returning from a visit to Moulins, he addressed a letter to the King, beseeching him, in memory of all his tried service and his devoted loyalty, to allow that he should return to die in his own country. In August, 1674, he again addressed the King, the Queen, and the Duke of York, in words of still more earnest entreaty.

"Seven years," he wrote to the Queen, in asking her aid, "was a time prescribed and limited by God Himself for the expiration of some of his greatest judgments, and it is full that time since I have with all possible humility, sustained the insupportable weight of the King's displeasure, so that I cannot be blamed if I employ the short breath that is remaining in me, in all manner of supplication, which may contribute to the lessening this burthen that is so heavy upon me. I do not presume to hope ever to be admitted to your Majesty's presence. Though I have all imaginable duty, I have no ambition, and only pray for leave to die in my own country amongst my own children, which I hope his Majesty will at some time vouchsafe to grant."