The four generals in this group are described on various occasions in the History. In this passage Clarendon sums up shortly what he says elsewhere, and presents a parallel somewhat in the manner of Plutarch.
Page 125, l. 23. Clarendon has a great passage in Book VII (vol. iii, pp. 224-6) on the value of Councils, even when the experience and wisdom of the councillors individually may not promise the right decisions. The passage is suggested by, and immediately follows, a short character of Prince Rupert.
Page 126, ll. 15, 16. Clarendon refers to the retreat of the Parliamentary Army at Lostwithiel, on August 31, 1644, when Essex embarked the foot at Fowey and escaped by sea, and Sir William Balfour broke away with the horse. In describing it, Clarendon says that 'the notice and orders came to Goring when he was in one of his jovial exercises; which he received with mirth, and slighting those who sent them, as men who took alarms too warmly; and he continued his delights till all the enemy's horse were passed through his quarters, nor did then pursue them in any time' (vol. iii, p. 403; cf. p. 391). But Goring's horse was not so posted as to be able to check Balfour's. See the article on Goring by C.H. Firth in the Dictionary of National Biography and S.R. Gardiner's Civil War, 1893, vol. ii, pp. 13-17. Clarendon was misinformed; yet this error in detail does not impair the truth of the portrait.
33.
Clarendon, MS. History, pp. 447-8; History, Bk. VII, ed. 1704, vol. ii, pp. 204-6; ed. Macray, vol. iii, pp. 61-4.
The studied detachment that Clarendon tried to cultivate when writing about his political enemies is nowhere shown better than in the character of Hampden. 'I am careful to do justice', he claimed, 'to every man who hath fallen in the quarrel, on which side soever, as you will find by what I have said of Mr. Hambden himself' (see No. 21, note). The absence of all enthusiasm makes the description of Hampden's merits the more telling. But there is a tail with a sting in it.
The last sentence, it must be admitted, is not of a piece with the rest of the character. There was some excuse for doubting its authenticity. But doubts gave place to definite statements that it had been interpolated by the Oxford editors when seeing the History through the press. Edmund Smith, the author of Phædra and Hippolytus, started the story that while he was resident in Christ Church he was 'employ'd to interpolate and alter the Original', and specially mentioned this sentence as having been 'foisted in'; and the story was given a prominent place by Oldmixon in his History of England, during the Reigns of the Royal House of Stuart (see Letters of Thomas Burnat to George Duckett, ed. Nichol Smith, 1914, p. xx). A controversy ensued, the final contribution to which is John Burton's Genuineness of L'd Clarendon's History Vindicated, 1744. Once the original manuscript was accessible, all doubt was removed. Every word of the sentence is there to be found in Clarendon's hand. But it is written along the margin, to take the place of a deleted sentence, and is evidently later than the rest of the character. This accounts for the difference in tone.
Page 129, ll. 22 ff. Compare Warwick, Mémoires, p. 240: 'He was of a concise and significant language, and the mildest, yet subtillest, speaker of any man in the House; and had a dexterity, when a question was going to be put, which agreed not with his sense, to draw it over to it, by adding some equivocall or sly word, which would enervate the meaning of it, as first put.'
At the beginning of this short character of Hampden, Warwick says that 'his blood in its temper was acrimonious, as the scurfe commonly on his face shewed'.
Page 131, l. 4. this that was at Oxforde, i.e. the overture,
February and March 1643: Clarendon, vol. ii, pp. 497 ff.