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was lawful since authorised by them, but not necessary, since they had made no settled law about it. This took with many; but was cried out upon by others as an attempt against the Church. Yet the argument was managed with so much learning and skill, that none of either side ever undertook to answer it. After that, he wrote against infidelity, beyond any that had gone before him. And then he engaged to write against Popery, which he did with such an exactness and liveliness, that no books of controversy were so much read and valued, as his were. He was a great man in many respects. He knew the world well, and was esteemed a very wise man. The writing of his Irenicum was a great snare to him: For, to avoid the imputations which that brought upon him, he not only retracted the book, but he went into the humours of that high sort of people beyond what became him, perhaps beyond his own sense of things. He applied himself much to the study of the law and records, and the original of our constitution, and was a very extraordinary man. Patrick was a great preacher. He wrote much, and well, and chiefly on the Scriptures. He was a laborious man in his function, of great strictness of life, but a little too severe against those who differed from him. But that was, when he thought their doctrines struck at the fundamentals of religion. He became afterwards more moderate. To these I shall add another divine, who, tho' of Oxford, yet as he was formed by Bishop Wilkins, so he went into most of their principles; but went far beyond them in learning. Lloyd was a great critick in the Greek and Latin authors, but chiefly in the Scriptures; of the words and phrases of which he carried the most perfect concordance in his memory, and had it the readiest about him, of all men that ever I knew. He was an exact historian, and the most punctual in chronology of all our divines. He had read the most books, and with the best judgment, and had made the most copious abstracts out of them, of any in this age: So that Wilkins used to say, he had the most learning in ready cash of any he ever knew. He was so exact in every thing he set about, that he never gave over any part of study, till he had quite mastered it. But when that was done, he went to another subject, and did not lay out his learning with the diligence with which he laid it in. He had many volumes of materials upon all subjects laid together in so distinct a method, that he could with very little labour write on any of them. He had more life in his imagination, and a truer judgment, than may seem consistent with such a laborious course of study. Yet, as much as he was set on learning, he had never neglected his pastoral care. For several years he had the greatest cure in England, St. Martins, which he took care of with an application and diligence beyond any about him; to whom he was an example, or rather a reproach, so few following his example. He was a holy, humble, and patient man, ever ready to do good when he saw a proper opportunity: Even his love of study did not divert him from that. He did upon his promotion find a very worthy successor in his cure, Tenison, who carried on and advanced all those good methods that he had begun in the management of that great cure. He endowed schools, set up a publick library, and kept many Curates to assist him in his indefatigable labours among them. He was a very learned man, and took much pains to state the notions and practices of heathenish idolatry, and so to fasten that charge on the Church of Rome. And, Whitehall lying within that parish, he stood as in the front of the battel all King James's reign; and maintained, as well as managed, that dangerous post with great courage and much judgment, and was held in very high esteem for his whole deportment, which was ever grave and moderate. These have been the greatest divines we have had these forty years: And may we ever have a succession of such men to fill the room of those who have already gone off the stage, and of those who, being now very old, cannot hold their posts long. Of these I have writ the more fully, because I knew them well, and have lived long in great friendship with them; but most particularly with Tillotson and Lloyd. And, as I am sensible I owe a great deal of the consideration that has been had for me to my being known to be their friend, so I have really learned the best part of what I know from them. But I owed them much more on the account of those excellent principles and notions, of which they were in a particular manner communicative to me. This set of men contributed more than can be well imagined to reform the way of preaching; which among the divines of England before them was over-run with pedantry, a great mixture of quotations from fathers and ancient writers, a long opening of a text with the concordance of every word in it, and a giving all the different expositions with the grounds of them, and the entring into some parts of controversy, and all concluding in some, but very short, practical applications, according to the subject or the occasion. This was both long and heavy, when all was pye-balled, full of many sayings of different languages. The common style of sermons was either very flat and low, or swelled up with rhetorick to a false pitch of a wrong sublime. The King had little or no literature, but true and good sense; and had got a right notion of style; for he was in France at a time when they were much set on reforming their language. It soon appear'd that he had a true taste. So this help'd to raise the value of these men, when the King approved of the style their discourses generally ran in; which was clear, plain, and short. They gave a short paraphrase of their text, unless where great difficulties required a more copious enlargement: But even then they cut off unnecessary shews of learning, and applied themselves to the matter, in which they opened the nature and reasons of things so fully, and with that simplicity, that their hearers felt an instruction of another sort than had commonly been observed before. So they became very much followed: And a set of these men brought off the City in a great measure from the prejudices they had formerly to the Church.
75.
JAMES II.
Born 1633. Created Duke of York. Succeeded Charles II 1685. Fled to France 1688. Died 1701.
By BURNET.
I will digress a little to give an account of the Duke's character, whom I knew for some years so particularly, that I can say much upon my own knowledge. He was very brave in his youth, and so much magnified by Monsieur Turenne, that, till his marriage lessened him he really clouded the King, and pass'd for the superior genius. He was naturally candid and sincere, and a firm friend, till affairs and his religion wore out all his first principles and inclinations. He had a great desire to understand affairs: And in order to that he kept a constant journal of all that pass'd, of which he shewed me a great deal. The Duke of Buckingham gave me once a short but severe character of the two brothers. It was the more severe, because it was-true: The King (he said) could see things if he would, and the Duke would see things if he could. He had no true judgment, and was soon determined by those whom he trusted: But he was obstinate against all other advices. He was bred with high notions of the Kingly authority, and laid it down for a maxim, that all who opposed the King were rebels in their hearts. He was perpetually in one amour or other, without being very nice in his choice: Upon which the King said once, he believed his brother had his mistresses given him by his Priests for penance. He gave me this account of his changing his religion: When he escaped out of the hands of the Earl of Northumberland, who had the charge of his education trusted to him by the Parliament, and had used him with great respect, all due care was taken, as soon as he got beyond sea, to form him to a strict adherence to the Church of England: Among other things much was said of the authority of the Church, and of the tradition from the Apostles in support of Episcopacy: So that, when he came to observe that there was more reason to submit to the Catholick Church than to one particular Church, and that other traditions might be taken on her word, as well as Episcopacy was received among us, he thought the step was not great, but that it was very reasonable to go over to the Church of Rome: And Doctor Steward having taught him to believe a real but unconceivable presence of Christ in the Sacrament, he thought this went more than half way to transubstantiation. He said, that a Nun's advice to him to pray every day, that, if he was not in the right way, God would set him right, did make a great impression on him. But he never told me when or where he was reconciled. He suffered me to say a great deal to him on all these heads. I shewed the difference between submission and obedience in matters of order and indifferent things, and an implicite submission from the belief of infallibility. I also shewed him the difference between a speculation of a mode of Christ's presence, when it rested in an opinion, and an adoration founded on it: Tho' the opinion of such a presence was wrong, there was no great harm in that alone: But the adoration of an undue object was idolatry. He suffered me to talk much and often to him on these heads. But I plainly saw, it made no impression: And all that he seemed to intend by it was, to make use of me as an instrument to soften the aversion that people began to be possessed with to him. He was naturally eager and revengeful: And was against the taking off any that set up in an opposition to the measures of the Court, and who by that means grew popular in the House of Commons. He was for rougher methods. He continued for many years dissembling his religion, and seemed zealous for the Church of England: But it was chiefly on design to hinder all propositions that tended to unite us among our selves. He was a frugal Prince, and brought his Court into method and magnificence: For he had 100000l. a year allowed him. He was made High Admiral: And he came to understand all the concerns of the sea very particularly. He had a very able Secretary about him, Sir William Coventry; a man of great notions and eminent vertues, the best Speaker in the House of Commons, and capable of bearing the chief ministry, as it was once thought he was very near it. The Duke found, all the great seamen had a deep tincture from their education: They both hated Popery, and loved liberty: They were men of severe tempers, and kept good discipline. But in order to the putting the fleet into more confident hands, the Duke began a method of sending pages of honour, and other young persons of quality, to be bred to the sea. And these were put in command, as soon as they were capable of it, if not sooner. This discouraged many of the old seamen, when they saw in what a channel advancement was like to go; who upon that left the service, and went and commanded merchantmen. By this means the vertue and discipline of the navy is much lost. It is true, we have a breed of many gallant men, who do distinguish themselves in action. But it is thought, the Nation has suffered much by the vices and disorders of those Captains, who have risen by their quality, more than by merit or service.
76.
By BURNET.
He was a Prince that seemed made for greater things, than will be found in the course of his Life, more particularly of his Reign: He was esteemed in the former parts of his Life, a Man of great Courage, as he was quite thro' it a man of great application to business: He had no vivacity of thought, invention or expression: But he had a good judgment, where his Religion or his Education gave him not a biass, which it did very often: He was bred with strange Notions of the Obedience due to Princes, and came to take up as strange ones, of the Submission due to Priests: He was naturally a man of truth, fidelity, and justice: But his Religion was so infused in him, and he was so managed in it by his Priests, that the Principles which Nature had laid in him, had little power over him, when the concerns of his Church stood in the way: He was a gentle Master, and was very easy to all who came near him: yet he was not so apt to pardon, as one ought to be, that is the Vicegerent of that God, who is slow to anger, and ready to forgive: He had no personal Vices but of one sort: He was still wandring from one Amour to another, yet he had a real sense of Sin, and was ashamed of it: But Priests know how to engage Princes more entirely into their interests, by making them compound for their Sins, by a great zeal for Holy Church, as they call it. In a word, if it had not been for his Popery, he would have been, if not a great yet a good Prince. By what I once knew of him, and by what I saw him afterwards carried to, I grew more confirmed in the very bad opinion, which I was always apt to have, of the Intrigues of the Popish Clergy, and of the Confessors of Kings: He was undone by them, and was their Martyr, so that they ought to bear the chief load of all the errors of his inglorious Reign, and of its fatal Catastrophe. He had the Funeral which he himself had desired, private, and without any sort of Ceremony.
NOTES
1.
The History of Great Britain, Being the Life and Reign of King James The First, Relating To what passed from his first Accesse to the Crown, till his Death. By Arthur Wilson, Esq. London, 1653. (pp. 289-90.)
Arthur Wilson (1595-1652) was a gentleman-in-waiting to Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, during James's reign, and was afterwards in the service of Robert Rich, second Earl of Essex. The History was written towards the end of his life, and published the year after his death. He was the author also of an autobiography, Observations of God's Providence in the Tract of my Life (first printed in Francis Peck's Desiderata Curiosa, 1735, Lib. XII, pp. 6-34), and of three plays, The Swisser (performed at Blackfriars, 1633, first printed in 1904, ed. Albert Feuillerat, from the MS. in the British Museum), The Corporall (performed, 1633, but not extant), and The Inconstant Lady (first printed in 1814, ed. Philip Bliss, from the MS. in the Bodleian Library). The three plays were entered in the Registers of the Stationers' Company, September 4, 1646, and September 9, 1653. But nothing he wrote appears to have been published during his life.
Page 2, l. 24. Peace begot Plenty. An adaptation of the wellknown saying which Puttenham in his Arte of English Poesie (ed. Arber, p. 217) attributes to Jean de Meung. Puttenham gives it thus:
Peace makes plentie, plentie makes pride, Pride breeds quarrell, and quarrell brings warre: Warre brings spoile, and spoile pouertie, Pouertie pacience, and pacience peace: So peace brings warre, and warre brings peace.
It is found also in Italian and Latin. Allusions to it are frequent in the seventeenth century. Compare the beginning of Swift's Battle of the Books, and see the correspondence in The Times Literary Supplement, February 17-March 30, 1916.
2.
The Court and Character of King James. Written and taken by Sir A.W. being an eye, and eare witnesse. Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare. Published by Authority. London, MDCL.
'The Character of King James' forms a section by itself at the conclusion of the volume, pp. 177-89. The volume was reprinted in the following year, when there were added to it 'The Court of King Charles' and 'Observations (instead of a Character) upon this King, from his Childe-hood'. Both editions are carelessly printed. The second, which corrects some of the errors of the first but introduces others, has been used for the present text.
Weldon was clerk of the kitchen to James I and afterwards clerk of the Green Cloth. He was knighted in 1617, and accompanied James to Scotland in that year, but was dismissed from his place at court for his satire on the Scots. He took the side of the parliament in the Civil War. The dedication to Lady Elizabeth Sidley (first printed in the second edition) states that the work 'treads too near the heeles of truth, and these Times, to appear in publick'. According to Anthony a Wood she had suppressed the manuscript, which was stolen from her. Weldon had died before it was printed. The answer to it called Aulicus Coquinariae describes it as 'Pretended to be penned by Sir A.W. and published since his death, 1650'.
Other works of the same kind, though of inferior value, are Sir Edward Peyton's The Divine Catastrophe of The Kingly Family Of the House of Stuarts, 1652, and Francis Osborne's Traditionall Memoyres on The Raigne of King James, 1658. They were printed together by Sir Walter Scott in 1811 under the title The Secret History of the Court of James the First, a collection which contains the historical material employed in The Fortunes of Nigel.
Though carelessly written, and as carelessly printed, Weldon's character of James is in parts remarkably vivid. It was reprinted by itself in Morgan's Pboenix Britannicus, 1732, pp. 54-6; and it was incorporated in the edition of Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier published in 1792: see The Retrospective Review, 1821, vol. iii, pt. ii, pp. 378-9.
There is a valuable article on Weldon's book as a whole in The Retrospective Review, 1823, vol. vii, pt. I.
PAGE 4, l. 6. before he was born, probably an allusion to the murder of Rizzio in Mary's presence.
l. 11. The syntax is faulty: delete 'and'?
On James's capacity for strong drinks, compare Roger Coke's Detection of the Court and State of England (1694), ed. 1719, vol. i, p. 78.
l. 27. that foul poysoning busines, the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, the great scandal of the reign. Robert Ker, or Carr, created Viscount Rochester 1611 and Earl of Somerset 1613, had cast his eye on the Countess of Essex, and, after a decree of nullity of marriage with Essex had been procured, married her in December 1613. Overbury, who had been Somerset's friend, opposed the projected marriage. On a trumped up charge of disobedience to the king he was in April 1613 committed to the Tower, where he was slowly poisoned, and died in September. Somerset and the Countess were both found guilty in 1616, but ultimately pardoned; four of the accomplices were hanged. Weldon deals with the scandal at some length in the main part of his work, pp. 61 ff.
l. 30. Mountgomery, Philip Herbert, created Earl of Montgomery 1605, succeeded his brother, William Herbert, as fourth Earl of Pembroke in 1630 (see No. 7). To this 'most noble and incomparable paire of brethren' Heminge and Condell dedicated the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, 1623. Montgomery's character is given by Clarendon, History, ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 74-5; and, as fourth Earl of Pembroke, vol. ii, pp. 539-41.
Page 5, l. 22. unfortunate in the marriage of his Daughter. James's daughter Elizabeth married the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, in 1613. His election as King of Bohemia led to the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) in which James long hesitated to become involved and played at best an ineffectual part. The opinion here expressed is explained by an earlier passage in Weldon's book, pp. 82-4: 'In this Favourites (Somerset's) flourishing time, came over the Palsgrave to marry our Kings daughter, which for the present, gave much content, and with the generall applause, yet it proved a most infortunate match to him and his Posterity, and all Christendome, for all his Alliance with so many great Princes, which put on him aspiring thoughts, and was so ambitious as not to content himselfe with his hereditary patrimony of one of the greatest Princes in Germany; but must aspire to a Kingdome, beleeving that his great allyance would carry him through any enterprise, or bring him off with honour, in both which he failed; being cast out of his own Country with shame, and he and his, ever after, living upon the devotion of other Princes; but had his Father in Law spent halfe the mony in Swords he did in words, for which he was but scorned, it had kept him in his own inheritance, and saved much Christian bloud since shed; but whiles he, being wholly addicted to peace, spent much treasure, in sending stately Embassadours to treat, his Enemies (which he esteemed friends) sent Armies with a lesse charge to conquer, so that it may be concluded, that this then thought the most happy match in Christendome, was the greatest unhappinesse to Christendome, themselves, and posterity.'
l. 27. Sir Robert Mansell (1573-1656), Vice-Admiral of England under Charles I. Clarendon, writing of the year 1642, says that 'his courage and integrity were unquestionable' (ed. Macray, vol. ii, p. 219). 'Argiers' or 'Argier' was the common old form of 'Algiers': cf. The Tempest, I. ii. 261, 265.
Page 6, l. 2. Cottington, Francis Cottington (1578-1652), baronet 1623, Baron Cottington, 1631. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1629 to 1642.
Page 7, l. 5. The first edition reads 'In sending Embassadours, which were'. The printer's substitution of 'His' for 'In' and omission of 'which' do not wholly mend the syntax.
l. 10. peace with honour. An early instance of the phrase made famous by Lord Beaconsfield in his speech of July 16, 1878, after the Congress of Berlin, 'Lord Salisbury and myself have brought you back peace, but a peace I hope with honour.' Cf. Notes and Queries, 1887, Seventh Series, vol. iii, p. 96.
l. 14. Nullum tempus, &c., the law maxim Nullum tempus occurrit regi, lapse of time does not bar the crown. The Parliament which met in February 1624 passed 'An Act for the generall quiett of the Subject agaynst all pretences of Concealement' (21 deg. Jac. I, c. 2) which declared sixty years' possession of Lands, &c., to be a good title against the Crown.
l. 18. his Tuesday Sermons, likewise explained by an earlier passage in Weldon's book, pp. 8, 9: 'the chiefe of those secrets, was that of Gowries Conspiracy, though that Nation [the Scots] gave little credit to the Story, but would speak sleightly and despitefully of it, and those of the wisest of that Nation; yet there was a weekly commemoration by the Tuesday Sermon, and an anniversary Feast, as great as it was possible, for the Kings preservation, ever on the fifth of August.' James attempted to force the Tuesday sermon on the University of Oxford; it was to be preached by members of each college in rotation. See Brodrick's Memorials of Merton College, 1885, p. 70.
Page 8, l. 1. a very wise man. Compare The Fortunes of Nigel, chap. v: 'the character bestowed upon him by Sully—that he was the wisest fool in Christendom'. Two volumes of the Memoires of Maximilien de Bethune, Duc de Sully (1560-1641), appeared in 1638; the others after 1650. There is much about James in the second volume, but this description of him does not appear to be there.
ll. 10-12. two Treasurers, see p. 21, ll. 15-22: three Secretaries, Sir Thomas Lake; Sir Robert Naunton; Sir George Calvert, Baron Baltimore; Sir Edward Conway, Viscount Conway: two Lord Keepers, Sir Francis Bacon; John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln (see p. 18, l. 5): two Admiralls, Charles Howard of Effingham, Earl of Nottingham; the Duke of Buckingham: three Lord chief Justices, Sir Edward Coke; Henry Montagu, Earl of Manchester; James Ley, Earl of Marlborough.
Weldon's statement is true of the year 1623; he might have said 'three Treasurers' and 'four Secretaries'.
3.
Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 7-9, 18-20; History, Bk. I, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 9-11, 26-9; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 10-13, 38-43.
This is the first of the portraits in Clarendon's great gallery, and it is drawn with great care. Clarendon was only a youth of twenty when Buckingham was assassinated, and he had therefore not the personal knowledge and contact to which the later portraits owe so much of their value. But he had throughout all his life been interested in the remarkable career of this 'very extraordinary person'. Sir Henry Wotton's 'Observations by Way of Parallel' on the Earl of Essex and Buckingham had suggested to him his first character study, 'The Difference and Disparity' between them. (It is printed after the 'Parallel' in Reliquiae Wottonianae, and described in the third edition, 1672, as 'written by the Earl of Clarendon in his younger dayes'.) His two studies offer an interesting comparison. Many of the ideas are the same, but there is a marked difference in the precision of drawing and the ease of style. The character here reprinted was written when Clarendon had mastered his art.
Page 11, l. 5. See p. 4, l. 27.
Page 13, l. 25. The passage here omitted deals with Buckingham's unsuccessful journey to Spain with Prince Charles, and with his assassination.
Page 16, l. 28. touched upon before, ed. Macray, vol. i, p. 38; here omitted.
4.
Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 27, 28; History, Bk. I, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 36-8; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 56-9.
Page 18, l. 5. the Bishopp of Lincolne, John Williams (1582-1650), afterwards Archbishop of York. He succeeded Bacon as Lord Keeper. He is sketched in Wilson's History of Great Britain, pp. 196-7, and Fuller's Church-History of Britain, 1655, Bk. XI, pp. 225-8. His life by John Hacket, Scrinia Reserata, 1693, is notorious for the 'embellishments' of its style; a shorter life, based on Hacket's, was an early work of Ambrose Philips.
l. 22. the Earle of Portlande, Sir Richard Weston: see No. 5.
l. 24. Hambleton, Clarendon's usual spelling of 'Hamilton'.
5.
Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 28-32; History, Bk. I, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 31-43; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 59-67.
Another and more favourable character of Weston is the matter of an undated letter which Sir Henry Wotton sent to him as 'a strange New years Gift' about 1635. 'In short, it is only an Image of your Self, drawn by memory from such discourse as I have taken up here and there of your Lordship, among the most intelligent and unmalignant men; which to pourtrait before you I thought no servile office, but ingenuous and real'. See Reliquiae Wottonianae, ed. 1672, pp. 333-6.
Page 21, l. 7. the white staffe. 'The Third Great Officer of the Crown, is the Lord High Treasurer of England, who receives this High Office by delivery of a White Staffe to him by the King, and holds it durante bene placito Regis' (Edward Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitia, 1674, p. 152).
Page 23, l. 4. L'd Brooke, Sir Fulke Greville (1554-1628) the friend and biographer of Sir Philip Sidney. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1614 to 1621.
Page 28, l. 18. eclarcicement, introduced into English about this time, and in frequent use till the beginning of the nineteenth century.
l. 28. a younge, beautifull Lady, Frances, daughter of Esme, third Duke of Lennox, married to Jerome Weston, afterwards second Earl of Portland, in 1632.
6.
Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 33, 34; History, Bk. I, ed. 1702, vol. i, p. 44; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 69-71.
This is one of Clarendon's most unfriendly portraits. It was seriously edited when first printed. The whole passage about the coldness and selfishness of Arundel's nature on p. 31, ll. 12-30, was omitted, as likewise the allusion to his ignorance on p. 30, ll. 25-7, 'wheras in truth he was only able to buy them, never to understande them.' Minor alterations are the new reading 'thought no part of History so considerable, as what related to his own Family' p. 30, ll. 28, 29, and the omission of 'vulgar' p. 31, l. 11. The purpose of these changes is obvious. They are extreme examples of the methods of Clarendon's first editors. In no other character did they take so great liberties with his text.
Arundel's great collection of ancient marbles is now in the Ashmolean Museum in the University of Oxford. The inscriptions were presented to the University in 1667 by Lord Henry Howard, Arundel's grandson, afterwards sixth Duke of Norfolk, and the statues were reunited to them in 1755 by the gift of Henrietta Countess of Pomfret. As Clarendon's History was an official publication of the University, it is probable that the prospect of receiving the statues induced the editors to remove or alter the passages that might be thought offensive.
As a whole this character does not show Clarendon's usual detachment. Arundel was Earl Marshal, and Clarendon in the Short Parliament of 1640 and again at the beginning of the Long Parliament had attacked the jurisdiction of the Earl Marshal's Court, which, as he says, 'never presumed to sit afterwards'. The account given in Clarendon's Life, ed. 1759, pp. 37-9, explains much in this character. Clarendon there says that Arundel 'did him the honour to detest and hate him perfectly'. There was resentment on both sides. The character was written in Clarendon's later years, but he still remembered with feeling the days when as Mr. Edward Hyde he was at cross purposes with this Earl of ancient lineage.
A different character of Arundel is given in the 'Short View' of his life written by Sir Edward Walker (1612-77), Garter King of Arms and Secretary of War to Charles I:
'He was tall of Stature, and of Shape and proportion rather goodly than neat; his Countenance was Majestical and grave, his Visage long, his Eyes large black and piercing; he had a hooked Nose, and some Warts or Moles on his Cheeks; his Countenance was brown, his Hair thin both on his Head and Beard; he was of a stately Presence and Gate, so that any Man that saw him, though in never so ordinary Habit, could not but conclude him to be a great Person, his Garb and Fashion drawing more Observation than did the rich Apparel of others; so that it was a common Saying of the late Earl of Carlisle, Here comes the Earl of Arundel in his plain Stuff and trunk Hose, and his Beard in his Teeth, that looks more like a Noble Man than any of us. He was more learned in Men and Manners than in Books, yet understood the Latin Tongue very well, and was Master of the Italian; besides he was a great Favourer of learned Men, such as Sir Robert Cotton, Sir Henry Spelman, Mr. Camden, Mr. Selden, and the like. He was a great Master of Order and Ceremony, and knew and kept greater Distance towards his Sovereign than any Person I ever observed, and expected no less from his inferiours; often complaining that the too great Affability of the King, and the French Garb of the Court would bring MAJESTY into Contempt.... He was the greatest Favourer of Arts, especially Painting, Sculpture, Designs, Carving, Building and the like, that this Age hath produced; his Collection of Designs being more than of any Person living, and his Statues equal in Number, Value and Antiquity to those in the Houses of most Princes; to gain which, he had Persons many Years employed both in Italy, Greece, and so generally in any part of Europe where Rarities were to be had. His Paintings likewise were numerous and of the most excellent Masters, having more of that exquisite Painter Hans Holben than are in the World besides.... He was a Person of great and universal Civility, but yet with that Restriction as that it forbad any to be bold or sawcy with him; though with those whom he affected, which were Lovers of State, Nobility and curious Arts, he was very free and conversible; but they being but few, the Stream of the times being otherwise, he had not many Confidents or Dependents; neither did he much affect to have them, they being unto great Persons both burthensome and dangerous. He was not popular at all, nor cared for it, as loving better by a just Hand than Flattery to let the common People to know their Distance and due Observance. Neither was he of any Faction in Court or Council, especially not of the French or Puritan.... He was in Religion no Bigot or Puritan, and professed more to affect moral Vertues than nice Questions and Controversies.... If he were defective in any thing, it was that he could not bring his Mind to his Fortune; which though great, was far too little for the Vastness of his noble Designs.'
Walker's character was written before Clarendon's. It is dated 'Iselsteyne the 7th of June 1651'. It was first published in 1705 in his Historical Discourses upon Several Occasions, pp. 221-3.
Page 30, l. 15. his wife, 'the Lady Alithea Talbot, third Daughter and Coheir of Gilbert Talbot Earl of Shrewsbury, Grandchild of George Talbot Earl of Shrewsbury and Earl Marshal of England' (Walker, Historical Discourses, p. 211).
7.
Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 34, 35; History, Bk. I, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 44-6; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 71-3.
This pleasing portrait of Pembroke, one of the great patrons of literature of James's reign, follows immediately after the unfriendly portrait of Arundel, the art collector. Clarendon knew the value of contrast in the arrangement of his gallery.
Pembroke is sometimes supposed to have been the patron of Shakespeare. It cannot, however, be proved that there were any personal relations, though the First Folio was dedicated to him and his brother, the Earl of Montgomery, afterwards fourth Earl of Pembroke. See note, p. 4, l. 30. He was the patron of Ben Jonson, who dedicated to him his Catiline, his favourite play, and his Epigrams, 'the ripest of my studies'; also of Samuel Daniel, Chapman, and William Browne. See Shakespeare's England, vol. ii, pp. 202-3.
Clarendon has also given a character of the fourth Earl, 'the poor Earl of Pembroke', History, ed. Macray, vol. ii, pp. 539-41.
8.
Timber: or, Discoveries; Made Vpon Men and Matter. By Ben: Iohnson. London, Printed M.DC.XLI. (pp. 101-2.)
This character is a remarkable testimony to the impression which Bacon's restrained eloquence made on his contemporaries. Yet it is little more than an exercise in free translation. Jonson has pieced together two passages in the Controversies of Marcus Seneca, and placed the name of 'Dominus Verulanus' in the margin. The two passages are these:
'Non est unus, quamvis praecipuus sit, imitandus: quia nunquam par fit imitator auctori. Haec natura est rei. Semper citra veritatem est similitudo.' Lib. I, Praefatio (ed. Paris, 1607, p. 58).
'Oratio eius erat valens cultu, ingentibus plena sententiis. Nemo minus passus est aliquid in actione sua otiosi esse. Nulla pars erat, quae non sua virtute staret. Nihil, in quo auditor sine damno aliud ageret. Omnia intenta aliquo, petentia. Nemo magis in sua potestate habuit audientium affectus. Verum est quod de illo dicit Gallio noster. Cum diceret, rerum potiebatur, adeo omnes imperata faciebant. Cum ille voluerat, irascebantur. Nemo non illo dicente timebat, ne desineret.' Epit. Declamat. Lib. III (p. 231).
From the continuation of the first passage Jonson took the words 'insolent Greece' ('insolenti Graeciae') in his verses 'To the memory of Shakespeare'.
Jonson has left a more vivid picture of Bacon as a speaker in a short sentence of his Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden: 'My Lord Chancelor of England wringeth his speeches from the strings of his band.'
9.
Reign of King James the First, 1653, pp. 158-60.
Page 36, l. 18. which the King hinted at, in the King's Speech to the Lords, 1621: 'But because the World at this time talks so much of Bribes, I have just cause to fear the whole Body of this House hath bribed him [Prince Charles] to be a good Instrument for you upon all occasions: He doth so good Offices in all his Reports to me, both for the House in generall, and every one of you in particular.' The speech is given in full by Wilson before the passage on Bacon.
Page 37, l. 25. The passage here omitted is 'The humble Submission and Supplication of the Lord Chancellour'.
Page 38, l. 10. a good Passeover, a good passage back to Spain. Gondomar was Spanish ambassador.
10.
The Church-History of Britain; From the Birth of Jesus Christ, Untill the Year M.DC.XLVIII. Endeavoured By Thomas Fuller. London, 1655. (Bk. x, p. 89.)
11.
Resuscitatio, Or, Bringing into Publick Light Severall Pieces, of the Works, Civil, Historical, Philosophical, & Theological, Hitherto Sleeping; Of the Right Honourable Francis Bacon Baron of Verulam, Viscount Saint Alban. According to the best Corrected Coppies. Together, With his Lordships Life. By William Rawley, Doctor in Divinity, His Lordships First, and Last, Chapleine. Afterwards, Chapleine, to His late Maiesty. London, 1657.
'The Life of the Honourable Author' serves as introduction to this volume of Bacon's literary remains. It runs to fourteen pages, unnumbered. The passage quoted from this life (c1v-c2v) is of the nature of a character.
Rawley's work is disfigured by pedantically heavy punctuation. He carried to absurd excess the methods which his Master adopted in the 1625 edition of his Essays. It has not been thought necessary to retain all his commas.
Page 41, l. 4. Et quod tentabam, &c. Ovid, Tristia, IV. x. 26.
12.
Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 48; Life, ed. 1759, p. 16.
Page 42, l. 23. M'r Cowly, an indication of Cowley's fame among his contemporaries. This was written in 1668, after the publication of Paradise Lost, but Clarendon ignores Milton.
l. 25. to own much of his, 'to ascribe much of this' Life 1759.
Page 43, l. 2. M'r Hyde, Clarendon himself.
13.
A New Volume of Familiar Letters, Partly Philosophicall, Politicall, Historicall. The second Edition, with Additions. By James Howell, Esq. London, 1650. (Letter XIII, pp. 25-6.)
This is the second volume of Epistolae Ho-Elianae, first published 1645 (vol. 1) and 1647 (vol. 2). The text is here printed from the copy of the second edition which Howell presented to Selden with an autograph dedication: 'Ex dono Authoris ... Opusculum hoc honoris ergo mittitur, Archiuis suis reponendum. 3 deg. non: Maij 1652.' The volume now reposes in the Selden collection in the Bodleian library. The second edition of this letter differs from the first in the insertion of the bracketed words, ll. 22, 23, and the date.
The authenticity of the letters as a whole is discussed in Joseph Jacob's edition, 1890, pp. lxxi ff. This was probably not a real letter written to his correspondent at the given date. But whenever, and in whatever circumstances, Howell wrote it, the value of the picture it gives us of Ben Jonson is not impaired.
PAGE 43, l. 9. Sir Tho. Hawk. Sir Thomas Hawkins, translator of Horace's Odes and Epodes, 1625; hence 'your' Horace, p. 44, l. 4.
l. 17. T. Ca. Thomas Carew, the poet, one of the 'Tribe of Ben'.
PAGE 44, l. 6. Iamque opus, Ovid, Metam. xv. 871; cf. p. 202, l. 13. l. 8. Exegi monumentum, Horace, Od. iii. 30. i. l. 10. O fortunatam, preserved in Quintilian, Inst. Orat. ix. 4. 41 and xi. I. 24, and in Juvenal, Sat. x. 122.
14.
This remarkable portrait of a country gentleman of the old school is from the 'Fragment of Autobiography', written by the first Earl of Shaftesbury (see Nos. 68, 69) towards the end of his life. The manuscript is among the Shaftesbury papers in the Public Record Office, but at present (1918) has been temporarily withdrawn for greater safety, and is not available for reference. The text is therefore taken from the modernized version in W.D. Christie's Memoirs of Shaftesbury, 1859, pp. 22-5, and Life of Shaftesbury, 1871, vol. i, appendix i, pp. xv-xvii.
The character was published in Leonard Howard's Collection of Letters, from the Original Manuscripts, 1753, pp. 152-5, and was reprinted in The Gentleman's Magazine for April 1754, pp. 160-1, and again in The Connoisseur, No. 81, August 14, 1755. The Gentleman's Magazine (1754, p. 215) is responsible for the error that it is to be found in Peck's Desiderata Curiosa.
Hastings was Shaftesbury's neighbour in Dorsetshire. A full-length portrait of him in his old age, clad in green cloth and holding a pike-staff in his right hand, is at St. Giles, the seat of the Shaftesbury family. It is reproduced in Hutchins's History of Dorset, ed. 1868, vol. iii, p. 152.
PAGE 44, ll. 24-26. He was the second son of George fourth Earl of Huntingdon. Shaftesbury is describing his early associates after his marriage in 1639: 'The eastern part of Dorsetshire had a bowling-green at Hanley, where the gentlemen went constantly once a week, though neither the green nor accommodation was inviting, yet it was well placed for to continue the correspondence of the gentry of those parts. Thither resorted Mr. Hastings of Woodland,' &c.
Page 47, l. 12. 'my part lies therein-a.' As was pointed out by E.F. Rimbault in Notes and Queries, 1859, Second Series, vol. vii, p. 323, this is part of an old catch printed with the music in Pammelia. Musicks Miscellanie. Or, Mixed Varietie of Pleasant Roundelayes, and delightfull Catches, 1609:
There lies a pudding in the fire, and my parte lies therein a: whome should I call in, O thy good fellowes and mine a.
Pammelia, 'the earliest collection of rounds, catches, and canons printed in England', was brought out by Thomas Ravenscroft. Another edition appeared in 1618.
15.
Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 383-4; History, Bk. XI, ed. 1704, vol. iii, pp. 197-9; ed. Macray, vol. iv, pp. 488-92.
The sense of Fate overhangs the portrait in which Clarendon paints for posterity the private virtues of his unhappy master. The easy dignity of the style adapts itself to the grave subject. This is one of Clarendon's greatest passages. It was written twenty years after Charles's death, but Time had not dulled his feelings. 'But ther shall be only incerted the shorte character of his person, as it was found in the papers of that person whose life is heare described, who was so nerely trusted by him, and who had the greatest love for his person, and the greatest reverence for his memory, that any faythfull servant could exspresse.' So he wrote at first in the account of his own life. On transferring the passage to the History he substituted the more impersonal sentence (p. 48, l. 27—p. 49, l. 5) which the general character of the History demanded.
Page 48, l. 15. our blessed Savyour. Compare 'The Martyrdom of King Charls I. or His Conformity with Christ in his Sufferings. In a Sermon preached at Bredah, Before his Sacred Majesty King Charls The Second, And the Princess of Orange. By the Bishop of Downe. Printed at the Hage 1649, and reprinted at London ... 1660'. Clarendon probably heard this sermon.
l. 21. have bene so much, substituted in MS. for 'fitt to be more'.
treatises. E.g. Elenchus Motuum Nuperorum in Anglia (part 1), 1649, by George Bate or Bates, principal physician to Charles I and II; England's black Tribunall. Set forth in the Triall of K. Charles I, 1660; and the sermon mentioned above.
Page 51, l. 20. educated by that people. His tutor was Sir Peter Young (1544-1628), the tutor of James. Patrick Young (1584-1652), Sir Peter's son, was Royal Librarian.
l. 26. Hambleton. Cf. p. 18, l. 24.
16.
Memoires Of the reigne of King Charles I. With a Continuation to the Happy Restauration of King Charles II. By Sir Philip Warwick, Knight. Published from the Original Manuscript. With An Alphabetical Table. London, 1701. (pp. 64-75.)
Warwick (1609-83) was Secretary to Charles in 1647-8. 'When I think of dying', he wrote, adapting a saying of Cicero, 'it is one of my comforts, that when I part from the dunghill of this world, I shall meet King Charles, and all those faithfull spirits, that had virtue enough to be true to him, the Church, and the Laws unto the last.' (Memoires, p. 331.) Passages in the Memoires show that they were begun after the summer of 1676 (p. 37), and completed shortly after May 18, 1677 (p. 403).
Page 55, l. 13. Sir Henry Vane, the elder.
l. 14. dyet, allowance for expenses of living.
Page 56, l. 26. [Greek: Eikon Basilikae]. The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Maiesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings was published in February 1649. Charles's authorship was at once doubted in Milton's [Greek: EIKONOKLASTAES] and in [Greek: EIKON ALAETHINAE]. The Pourtraicture of Truths most sacred Majesty truly suffering, though not solely, and supported in [Greek: EIKON AKLASTOS], in [Greek: EIKON AE PISTAE], and in The Princely Pellican, all published in 1649. The weight of evidence is now strongly in favour of the authorship of John Gauden (1605-62), bishop of Exeter at the Restoration. Gauden said in 1661 that he had written it, and examination of his claims is generally admitted to have confirmed them. See H.J. Todd's Letter concerning the Author, 1825, and Gauden the Author, further shewn, 1829; and C.E. Doble's four letters in The Academy, May 12-June 30, 1883.
Carlyle had no doubt that Charles was not the author. 'My reading progresses with or without fixed hope. I struggled through the "Eikon Basilike" yesterday; one of the paltriest pieces of vapid, shovel-hatted, clear-starched, immaculate falsity and cant I have ever read. It is to me an amazement how any mortal could ever have taken that for a genuine book of King Charles's. Nothing but a surpliced Pharisee, sitting at his ease afar off, could have got up such a set of meditations. It got Parson Gauden a bishopric.'—Letter of November 26, 1840 (Froude's Thomas Carlyle, 1884, vol. i, p. 199).
Page 57, l. 4. Thomas Herbert (1606-82), made a baronet in 1660. Appointed by Parliament in 1647 to attend the King, he was latterly his sole attendant, and accompanied him with Juxon to the scaffold. His Threnodia Carolina, reminiscences of Charles's captivity, was published in 1702 under the title, Memoirs of the Two last Years of the Reign of that unparalleled Prince, of ever Blessed Memory, King Charles I. It was 'printed for the first time from the original MS.' (now in private possession), but in modernized spelling, in Allan Fea's Memoirs of the Martyr King, 1905, pp. 74-153.
l. 10. Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), bishop of Salisbury, 1689, the historian whose characters are given in the later part of this volume. His Memoires of the Lives and Actions of James and William Dukes of Hamilton, 1677, his first historical work, appeared while Warwick was writing his Memoires of Charles. It attracted great attention, as its account of recent events was furnished with authentic documents. 'It was the first political biography of the modern type, combining a narrative of a man's life with a selection from his letters' (C.H. Firth, introduction to Clarke and Foxcroft's Life of Burnet, 1907, p. xiii).
l. 15. affliction gives understanding. Compare Proverbs 29. 15, and Ecclesiasticus 4. 17 and 34. 9; the exact words are not in the Authorised Version.
l. 30. Robert Sanderson (1587-1663), Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, 1642, Bishop of Lincoln, 1660. Izaak Walton wrote his Life, 1678.
Page 58, l. 20. Sir Dudley Carleton (1573-1632), created Baron Carleton, 1626, and Viscount Dorchester, 1628; Secretary of State, 1628.
l. 21. Lord Falkland, see pp. 71-97; Secretary of State, 1642.
Page 59, ll. 11-13. Plutarch, Life of Alexander the Great; opening sentences, roughly paraphrased.
Page 60, l. 20. Venient Romani, St. John, xi. 48. See The Archbishop of Canterbury's Speech or His Funerall Sermon, Preacht by himself on the Scaffold on Tower-Hill, on Friday the 10. of Ianuary, 1644. London, 1644, p. 10: 'I but perhaps a great clamour there is, that I would have brought in Popery, I shall answer that more fully by and by, in the meane time, you know what the Pharisees said against Christ himself, in the eleventh of Iohn, If we let him alone, all men will beleeve on him, Et venient Romani, and the Romanes will come and take away both our place and the Nation. Here was a causelesse cry against Christ that the Romans would come, and see how just the Iudgement of God was, they crucified Christ for feare least the Romans should come, and his death was that that brought in the Romans upon them, God punishing them with that which they most feared: and I pray God this clamour of veniunt Romani, (of which I have given to my knowledge no just cause) helpe not to bring him in; for the Pope never had such a Harvest in England since the Reformation, as he hath now upon the Sects and divisions that are amongst us.'
ll. 22-30. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) brought out his De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres at Paris in 1625. Towards the end of the dedication to Louis XIII Grotius says: 'Pertaesos discordiarum animos excitat in hanc spem recens contracta inter te & sapientissimum pacisque illius sanctae amantissimum Magnae Britanniae Regem amicitia & auspicatissimo Sororis tuae matrimonio federata.'
17.
Clarendon, MS. History, p. 59; History, Bk. III, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 203-4; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 340-2.
Page 62, l. 23. Thomas Savile (1590-1658), created Viscount Savile, 1628, Privy Councillor, 1640, Controller and then Treasurer of the Household. 'He was', says Clarendon, 'a man of an ambitious and restless nature, of parts and wit enough, but in his disposition and inclination so false that he could never be believed or depended upon. His particular malice to the earl of Strafford, which he had sucked in with his milk, (there having always been an immortal feud between the families, and the earl had shrewdly overborne his father), had engaged him with all persons who were willing, and like to be able, to do him mischieve' (History, Bk. VI, ed. Macray, vol. ii, p. 534).
Page 63, l. 25. S'r Harry Vane. See p. 152, ll. 9 ff.
l. 26. Plutarch recordes, Life of Sylla, last sentence.
18.
Memoires of the reigne of King Charles I, 1701, pp. 109-13.
Page 65, l. 21. Warwick was member for Radnor in the Long Parliament from 1640 to 1644. The Bill of Attainder passed the Commons on April 21, 1641, by 204 votes to 59 (Clarendon, ed. Macray, vol. i, p. 306; Rushworth, Historical Collections, third part, vol. i, 1692, p. 225). The names of the minority were posted up at Westminster, under the heading 'These are Straffordians, Betrayers of their Country' (Rushworth, id., pp. 248-9). There are 56 names, and 'Mr. Warwick' is one of them.
19.
Clarendon, MS. History, p. 398; History, Bk. VI, ed. 1703, vol. ii, pp. 115-6; ed. Macray, vol. ii, pp. 477-8.
Page 68, l. 5. Et velut aequali. The source of this quotation is not yet found.
l. 15. the Standard was sett up, at Nottingham, on August 22, 1642.
l. 17. Robert Greville (1608-43), second Baron Brooke, cousin of Sir Fulke Greville, first Baron (p. 23, l. 4). See Clarendon, ed. Macray, vol. ii, pp. 474-5.
l. 27. all his Children. Compare Warwick's account of 'that most noble and stout Lord, the Earle of Northampton', Memoires, pp. 255-7: 'This may be said of him, that he faithfully served his Master, living and dead; for he left six eminent sons, who were all heirs of his courage, loyalty, and virtue; whereof the eldest was not then twenty.'
20.
Clarendon, MS. History, pp. 477-8; History, Bk. VII, ed. 1703, vol. ii, pp. 269-70; ed. Macray, vol. iii, pp. 177-8.
Carnarvon's character has much in common with Northampton's. Though separated in the History, they are here placed together as companion portraits of two young Royalist leaders who fell early in the Civil War.
Page 70, l. 21. Dorchester and Weymouth surrendered to Carnarvon on August 2 and 5, 1643. They were granted fair conditions, but on the arrival of the army of Prince Maurice care was not taken 'to observe those articles which had been made upon the surrender of the towns; which the earl of Carnarvon (who was full of honour and justice upon all contracts) took so ill that he quitted the command he had with those forces, and returned to the King before Gloster' (Clarendon, vol. iii, p. 158).
21.
Clarendon, MS. History, pp. 478-81; History, Bk. VII, ed. 1703, vol. ii, pp. 270-7; ed. Macray, vol. iii, pp. 178-90.
Clarendon wrote two characters of Falkland, the one in 1647 in the 'History' and the other in 1668 in the 'Life'. Both are long, and both are distinguished by sustained favour of affection and admiration as well as by wealth of detail. He was aware that the earlier character was out of scale in a history, but he would not condense it. He even thought of working it up into a book by itself, wherein he would follow the example of Tacitus who wrote the Agricola before the Annals and Histories. He corresponded about it with John Earle (see No. 50). From two of the letters the following extracts are taken:
'I would desire you (at your leisure) to send me that discourse of your own which you read to me at Dartmouth in the end of your contemplations upon the Proverbs, in memory of my Lord Falkland; of whom in its place I intend to speak largely, conceiving it to be so far from an indecorum, that the preservation of the fame and merit of persons, and deriving the same to posterity, is no less the business of history, than the truth of things. And if you are not of another opinion, you cannot in justice deny me this assistance' (March 16, 1646-7: State Papers, 1773, vol. ii, p. 350).
'I told you long since, that when I came to speak of that unhappy battle of Newbury, I would enlarge upon the memory of our dear friend that perished there; to which I conceive myself obliged, not more by the rights of friendship, than of history, which ought to transmit the virtue of excellent persons to posterity; and therefore I am careful to do justice 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. I am now past that point; and being quickened your most elegant and political commemoration of him, and from hints there, thinking it necessary to say somewhat for his vindication in such particulars as may possibly have made impression in good men, it may be I have insisted longer upon the argument than may be agreeable to the rules to be observed in such a work; though it be not much longer than Livy is in recollecting the virtues of one of the Scipios after his death. I wish it were with you, that you might read it; for if you thought it unproportionable for the place where it is, I could be willingly diverted to make it a piece by itself, and inlarge it into the whole size of his life; and that way it would be sooner communicated to the world. And you know Tacitus published the life of Julius Agricola, before either of his annals or his history. I am contented you should laugh at me for a fop in talking of Livy or Tacitus; when all I can hope for is to side Hollingshead, and Stow, or (because he is a poor Knight too, and worse than either of them) Sir Richard Baker' (December 14, 1647, id. p. 386).
Page 71, l. 22. Turpe mori. Lucan, ix. 108.
l. 26. His mother's father, Sir Lawrence Tanfield, Chief Baron of the Exchequer. He died in May 1625. See p. 87, ll. 21 ff.
Page 72, l. 3. His education. See p. 87, ll. 6-13. His father, Henry Carey, first Viscount, was Lord Deputy of Ireland from 1622 to 1629, when he was recalled. He died in 1633.
l. 30. his owne house, at Great Tew, 16 miles NW. of Oxford; inherited from Sir Lawrence Tanfield. The house was demolished in 1790, but the gardens remain.
PAGE 74, l. 14. two large discources. See p. 94, ll. 10-15. Falkland's Of the Infallibilitie of the Church of Rome ... Now first published from a Copy of his owne hand had appeared at Oxford in 1645, two years before Clarendon wrote this passage. It is a short pamphlet of eighteen quarto pages. It had been circulated in manuscript during his lifetime, and he had written a Reply to an Answer to it. The second 'large discource' may be this Reply. Or it may be his Answer to a Letter of Mr. Mountague, justifying his change of Religion, being dispersed in many Copies. Both of these were first published, along with the Infallibilitie, in 1651, under the editorship of Dr. Thomas Triplet, tutor of the third Viscount, to whom the volume is dedicated. The dedication is in effect a character of Falkland, and dwells in particular on his great virtue of friendship. A passage in it recalls Clarendon. 'And your blessed Mother', says Triplet, 'were she now alive, would say, she had the best of Friends before the best of Husbands. This was it that made Tew so valued a Mansion to us: For as when we went from Oxford thither, we found our selves never out of the Universitie: So we thought our selves never absent from our own beloved home'.
l. 25. He was Member for Newport in the Isle of Wight in The Short Parliament, and again in The Long Parliament.
Page 75, l. 5. His father was Controller of the Household before his appointment as Lord Deputy of Ireland. Cf. p. 91, ll. 3, 4.
l. 18. L'd Finch, Sir John Finch (1584-1660), Speaker, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and Lord Keeper, created Baron Finch, 1640. He was impeached in 1640 and fled to Holland. 'The Lord Falkland took notice of the business of ship-money, and very sharply mentioned the lord Finch as the principal promoter of it, and that, being then a sworn judge of the law, he had not only given his own judgement against law, but been the solicitor to corrupt all the other judges to concur with him in their opinion; and concluded that no man ought to be more severely prosecuted than he' (Clarendon, vol. i, p. 230).
Page 77, l. 26. haud semper, Tacitus, Agricola, ix.
Page 78, l. 17. in republica Platonis, Cicero, Epis. ad Atticum, ii. 1.
l. 20. it, i.e. his avoiding them.
l. 30. Sir Harry Vane, the elder, was dismissed from the Secretaryship of State in November 1641. In an earlier section of the History (vol. i, p. 458) Clarendon claims responsibility for Falkland's acceptance of the Secretaryship: 'It was a very difficult task to Mr. Hyde, who had most credit with him, to persuade him to submit to this purpose of the King cheerfully, and with a just sense of the obligation, by promising that in those parts of the office which required most drudgery he would help him the best he could, and would quickly inform him of all the necessary forms. But, above all, he prevailed with him by enforcing the ill consequence of his refusal', &c.
Page 80, l. 19. in tanto viro, Tacitus, Agricola, ix.
l. 20. Some sharpe expressions. See the quotation by Fuller, p. 105, ll. 14, 15. Clarendon refers to Falkland's speech 'Concerning Episcopacy' in the debate on the bill for depriving the bishops of their votes, introduced on March 30, 1641: 'The truth is, Master Speaker, that as some ill Ministers in our state first tooke away our mony from us, and after indeavoured to make our mony not worth the taking, by turning it into brasse by a kind of Antiphilosophers-stone: so these men used us in the point of preaching, first depressing it to their power, and next labouring to make it such, as the harme had not beene much if it had beene depressed, the most frequent subjects even in the most sacred auditories, being the Jus divinum of Bishops and tithes, the sacrednesse of the clergie, the sacriledge of impropriations, the demolishing of puritanisme and propriety, the building of the prerogative at Pauls, the introduction of such doctrines, as, admitting them true, the truth would not recompence the scandall; or of such as were so far false, that, as Sir Thomas More sayes of the Casuists, their businesse was not to keepe men from sinning, but to enforme them Quam prope ad peccatum sine peccato liceat accedere: so it seemed their worke was to try how much of a Papist might bee brought in without Popery, and to destroy as much as they could of the Gospell, without bringing themselves into danger of being destroyed by the Law.'—Speeches and Passages of This Great and Happy Parliament: From the third of November, 1640 to this instant June, 1641, p. 190. The speech is reprinted in Lady Theresa Lewis's Lives of the Friends of Clarendon, 1852, vol. i, pp. 53-62.
Page 82, ll. 23-6. See p. 90, ll. 6-13.
Page 83, l. 2. Falkland's participation in 'the Northern Expedition against the Scots', 1639, was the subject of a eulogistic poem by Cowley:
Great is thy Charge, O North; be wise and just, England commits her Falkland to thy trust; Return him safe: Learning would rather choose Her Bodley, or her Vatican to loose. All things that are but writ or printed there, In his unbounded Breast engraven are, &c.
It was the occasion also of Waller's 'To my Lord of Falkland'.
l. 14. et in luctu, Tacitus, Agricola, xxix.
l. 15. the furious resolution, passed on November 24, 1642, after the battle at Brentford: see Clarendon, vol. ii, pp. 395-9.
Page 84, l. 9. adversus malos, Tacitus, Agricola, xxii.
ll. 11-28. The date of this incident is uncertain. Professor Firth believes it to have happened when the House resolved that Colonel Goring 'deserved very well of the Commonwealth, and of this House', for his discovery of the army plot, June 9, 1641 (Journals of the House of Commons, vol. ii, p. 172).
Page 85, l. 18. the leaguer before Gloster. The siege of Gloucester was raised by the Earl of Essex on September 8, 1643. Clarendon had described it (vol. iii, pp. 167 ff.) just before he came to the account of Falkland.
Page 86, l. 1. the battell, i.e. of Newbury, September 20, 1643. How Falkland met his death is told in Byron's narrative of the fight: 'My Lord of Falkland did me the honour to ride in my troop this day, and I would needs go along with him, the enemy had beat our foot out of the close, and was drawne up near the hedge; I went to view, and as I was giving orders for making the gap wide enough, my horse was shott in the throat with a musket bullet and his bit broken in his mouth so that I was forced to call for another horse, in the meanwhile my Lord Falkland (more gallantly than advisedly) spurred his horse through the gapp, where both he and his horse were immediately killed.' See Walter Money, The Battles of Newbury, 1884, p. 52; also p. 93.
A passage in Whitelocke's Memorials, ed. 1682, p. 70, shows that he had a presentiment of his death: 'The Lord Falkland, Secretary of State, in the morning of the fight, called for a clean shirt, and being asked the reason of it, answered, that if he were slain in the Battle, they should not find, his body in foul Linnen. Being diswaded by his friends to goe into the fight, as having no call to it, and being no Military Officer, he said he was weary of the times, and foresaw much misery to his own Countrey, and did beleive be should be out of it ere night, and could not be perswaded to the contrary, but would enter into the battle, and was there slain.'
22.
Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 51-4; Life, ed. 1759, pp. 19-23.
This is Falkland in his younger days, amid the hospitable pleasures of Tew, before he was overwhelmed in politics and war.
Page 86, l. 20. he, i.e. Clarendon.
Page 88, l. 2. the two most pleasant places, Great Tew (see p. 72, l. 30) and Burford, where Falkland was born. He sold Burford in 1634 to William Lenthall, the Speaker of the Long Parliament: see p. 91, l. 5.
Page 89, l. 2. He married Lettice, daughter of Sir Richard Morrison of Tooley Park, Leicestershire. His friendship with her brother Henry is celebrated in an ode by Ben Jonson, 'To the immortall memorie, and friendship of that noble paire, Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir H. Morison' (Under-woods, 1640, p. 232).
Page 91, ll. 17-20. So in the MS. The syntax is confused, but the sense is clear.
Page 92, ll. 21, 22. Gilbert Sheldon (1598-1677), Archbishop of Canterbury, 1663; Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and builder of the Sheldonian Theatre there.
George Morley (1597-1684), Bishop of Worcester, 1660.
Henry Hammond (1605-60), chaplain to Charles I.
Clarendon has given short characters of Sheldon and Morley in his Life. For his characters of Earle and Chillingworth, see Nos. 50 and 52.
Page 94, l. 11. See note p. 74, l. 14.
Page 95, l. 3. Cf. p. 78, l. 17.
l. 17. It is notable that Clarendon nowhere suggests that Falkland was also a poet. Cowley gives his verses the highest praise in his address to him on the Northern Expedition (see p. 83, l. 2, note); and they won him a place in Suckling's Sessions of the Poets:
He was of late so gone with Divinity That he had almost forgot his Poetry, Though to say the truth (and Apollo did know it) He might have been both his Priest and his Poet.
His poems were collected and edited by A.B. Grosart in 1871.
23.
Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 55; Life, ed. 1759, p. 24.
This very pleasing portrait of Godolphin serves as a pendant to the longer and more elaborate description of his friend. Clarendon wrote also a shorter character of him in the History (vol. ii, pp. 457-8).
Page 96, l. 2. so very small a body. He is the 'little Cid' (i.e. Sidney) of Suckling's Sessions of the Poets.
PAGE 97, l. 1. He was member for Helston from 1628 to 1643.
l. 6. In the character in the History Clarendon says that he left 'the ignominy of his death upon a place which could never otherwise have had a mention to the world'. The place was Chagford.
24.
Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 69-70; History, Bk. I, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 69-73; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 119-25.
The three characters of Laud here given supplement each other. They convey the same idea of the man.
Page 97, l. 20. George Abbott (1562-1633), Archbishop of Canterbury, 1611. In the preceding paragraph Clarendon had written an unfavourable character of him. He 'considered Christian religion no otherwise than as it abhorred and reviled Popery, and valued those men most who did that most furiously': 'if men prudently forbore a public reviling and railing at the hierarchy and ecclesiastical government, let their opinions and private practice be what it would, they were not only secure from any inquisition of his, but acceptable to him, and at least equally preferred by him': his house was 'a sanctuary to the most eminent of that factious party'. Cf. p. 100, ll. 21-7.
Page 101, l. 2. In the omitted portion Clarendon dealt with the 'Arminianism', as it was then understood in England: 'most of the popular preachers, who had not looked into the ancient learning, took Calvin's word for it, and did all they could to propagate his opinions in those points: they who had studied more, and were better versed in the antiquities of the Church, the Fathers, the Councils, and the ecclesiastical histories, with the same heat and passion in preaching and writing, defended the contrary. But because in the late dispute in the Dutch churches, those opinions were supported by Jacobus Arminius, the divinity professor in the university of Leyden in Holland, the latter men we mentioned were called Arminians, though many of them had never read a word written by Arminius'. Arminius (the name is the Latinized form of Harmens or Hermans) died in 1609.
25.
The Church-History of Britain, 1648, Bk. XI, pp. 217-9.
Page 104, l. 15. Canterbury College was founded at Oxford in 1363 by Simon Islip, Archbishop of Canterbury. It was incorporated in Christ Church, Wolsey's foundation, and so 'lost its name'; but the name survives in the Canterbury quadrangle.
Page 105, l. 13. Lord F., i.e. Lord Falkland: see p. 80, l. 20 note.
26.
Memoires of the reigne of King Charles I, 1701, pp. 78-82, 89-93.
Page 107, l. 27. cleansed it by fire. Perhaps a reminiscence of Dryden's Annus Mirabilis, 1667, stanza 276:
The daring Flames peep't in, and saw from far The awful Beauties of the Sacred Quire: But since it was prophan'd by Civil War, Heav'n thought it fit to have it purg'd by fire.
l. 29. too too, so in the original; perhaps but not certainly a misprint.
27.
Memoires, 1701, pp. 93-6.
Page 112, l. 9. Lord Portland, Sir Richard Weston: see No. 5.
l. 13. white staff, see p. 21, l. 7 note.
28.
Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 152-3; History, Bk. IV, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 332-3; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 563-5.
This is the first of three characters of Hertford in Clarendon's History. The others, in Bk. VI (MS. Life) ed. Macray, ii. 528, and Bk. VII (MS. History) iii. 128, are supplementary.
Page 114, l. 10. disobligations, on account of his secret marriage with James's cousin, Arabella Stuart, daughter of Charles Stuart, Earl of Lennox, brother of the Earl of Darnley. She died a prisoner in the Tower; he escaped to France, but after her death was allowed to return to England in 1616. He succeeded his grandfather as Earl of Hertford in 1621. He lived in retirement from the dissolution of Parliament in March 1629 to 1640, when he was made a Privy Councillor.
Page 115, l. 5. He was appointed Governor to the Prince of Wales in May 1641, in succession to the Earl of Newcastle. He was then in his fifty-third year. In the following month he was made a Marquis. See his life in Lady Theresa Lewis's Lives of the Friends of Clarendon, vol. ii, pp. 436-42.
Page 116, l. 2. attacque, an unexpected form of 'attach' at this time, and perhaps a slip, but 'attack' and 'attach' are ultimately the same word; cf. Italian attaccare. The New English Dictionary gives an instance in 1666 of 'attach' in the sense of 'attack'.
29.
Clarendon, MS. History, Transcript, vol. iv, pp. 440-2; History, Bk. VIII, ed. 1703, vol. ii, pp. 391-3; ed. Macray, vol. iii, pp. 380-3.
The original manuscript of much of Book VIII is lost. The text is taken from the transcript that was made for the printers.
This is the portrait of a great English nobleman whose tastes lay in music and poetry and the arts of peace, but was forced by circumstances into the leadership of the Royalist army in the North. He showed little military talent, though he was far from devoid of personal courage; and he escaped from the conflict, weary and despondent, when other men were content to carry on the unequal struggle. He modelled himself on the heroes of Romance. The part he tried to play could not be adjusted to the rude events of the civil war.
His romantic cast of mind is shown in his challenge to Lord Fairfax to follow 'the Examples of our Heroick Ancestors, who used not to spend their time in scratching one another out of holes, but in pitched Fields determined their Doubts'. Fairfax replied by expressing his readiness to fight but refusing to follow 'the Rules of Amadis de Gaule, or the Knight of the Sun, which the language of the Declaration seems to affect in appointing pitch'd battles' (Rushworth, Historical Collections, third part, vol. ii, 1692, pp. 138, 141).
Warwick's short character of Newcastle resembles Clarendon's: 'He was a Gentleman of grandeur, generosity, loyalty, and steddy and forward courage; but his edge had too much of the razor in it: for he had a tincture of a Romantick spirit, and had the misfortune to have somewhat of the Poet in him; so as he chose Sir William Davenant, an eminent good Poet, and loyall Gentleman, to be Lieutenant-Generall of his Ordnance. This inclination of his own and such kind of witty society (to be modest in the expressions of it) diverted many counsels, and lost many opportunities; which the nature of that affair, this great man had now entred into, required' (Memoires, pp. 235-6).
His life by the Duchess of Newcastle—the 'somewhat fantastical, and original-brain'd, generous Margaret Newcastle', as Charles Lamb calls her—was published in 1667. The edition by C.H. Firth, 1886, contains copious historical notes, and an introduction which points out Newcastle's place as a patron and author.
Page 116, ll. 15-22. Newcastle had been besieged at York. He was relieved by Prince Rupert, who, against Newcastle's advice, forced on the disastrous battle of Marston Moor (July 2, 1644) without waiting for reinforcements. In this battle Newcastle was not in command but fought at the head of a company of volunteers. The next day he embarked at Scarborough for the continent, where he remained till the Restoration.
l. 24. He published two books on horsemanship—La Methode et Invention Nouvelle de Dresser les Chevaux, written originally in English, but printed in French at Antwerp in 1658, and A New Method and Extraordinary Invention to Dress Horses, 1667. The former was dedicated to Prince Charles, whom, as Governor, he had taught to ride. On his reputation as a horseman, see C.H. Firth, op. cit., pp. xx-xxii.
Page 117, l. 20. He was Governor of the Prince from 1638 to 1641: cf. note on p. 115, l. 5.
l. 29. Newcastle-upon-Tyne (from which he took his title) was 'speedily and dexterously' secured for the King at the end of June 1642 'by his lordship's great interest in those parts, the ready compliance of the best of the gentry, and the general good inclinations of the place' (Clarendon, vol. ii, p. 227).
Page 118, l. 17. Henry Clifford (1591-1643) fifth Earl of Cumberland. He had commanded the Royalist forces in Yorkshire, but was 'in his nature inactive, and utterly inexperienced'. He willingly gave up the command (Clarendon, vol. ii, pp. 282, 464-5). He died shortly afterwards.
l. 28. this last, Marston Moor.
Page 119, l. 8. unacquainted with War. Clarendon expressed himself privately on this point much more emphatically than the nature of his History would allow: 'you will find the Marquis of Newcastle a very lamentable man and as fit to be a General as a Bishop.' (Letter to Sir Edward Nicholas, dated Madrid, June 4, 1650: State Papers, 1786, vol. iii, p. 20.)
l. 10. James King (1589?-1652?), created Baron Eythin and Kerrey in the Scottish peerage in 1643. He had been a general in the army of the King of Sweden, and returned to this country in 1640. He left it with Newcastle after Marston Moor. He entirely disapproved of Rupert's plans for the battle; his comment, as reported by Clarendon, was 'By God, sir, it is very fyne in the paper, but ther is no such thinge in the Feilds' (vol. iii, p. 376).
30.
Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 136; History, Bk. IV, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 270-1; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 461-3.
The references to Digby in various parts of the History show the interest—sometimes an amused interest—that Clarendon took in his strange and erratic character. 'The temper and composition of his mind was so admirable, that he was always more pleased and delighted that he had advanced so far, which he imputed to his virtue and conduct, than broken or dejected that his success was not answerable, which he still charged upon second causes, for which he could not be accountable' (vol. iv, p. 122). 'He was a person of so rare a composition by nature and by art, (for nature alone could never have reached to it,) that he was so far from being ever dismayed by any misfortune, (and greater variety of misfortunes never befell any man,) that he quickly recollected himself so vigorously, that he did really believe his condition to be improved by that ill accident' (id., p. 175). But the interest is shown above all by the long study of Digby that he wrote at Montpelier in 1669. It was first printed in his State Papers, 1786, vol. iii, supplement, pp. li-lxxiv. The manuscript—a transcript revised by Clarendon—is in the Bodleian Library, Clarendon MS. 122, pp. 1-48.
Page 120, l. 8. the other three, Sir John Culpeper, or Colepeper; Lord Falkland; and Clarendon.
Page 121, l. 2. sharpe reprehension. 'He was committed to the Fleet in June 1634, but released in July, for striking Mr. Crofts in Spring Garden, within the precincts of the Court. Cal. Dom. State. Papers, 1634-5 (1864), pp. 81, 129'—Macray, vol. i, p. 461.
Shaftesbury gives a brief sketch of him at this time in his fragmentary autobiography: 'The Earl of Bristoll was retired from all business and lived privately to himself; but his son the Lord Digby, a very handsome young man of great courage and learning and of a quick wit, began to show himself to the world and gave great expectations of himself, he being justly admired by all, and only gave himself disadvantage with a pedantic stiffness and affectation he had contracted.'
l. 19. As Baron Digby, during the lifetime of his father; June 9, 1641.
Page 123, l. 5. a very unhappy councell, the impeachment and attempted 'Arrest of the Five Members', January 3 and 4, 1642. Compare Clarendon, vol. i, p. 485: 'And all this was done without the least communication with any body but the Lord Digby, who advised it.'
31.
Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 389, and MS. History, p. 25 (or 597); History, Bk. XI, ed. 1704, vol. iii, pp. 210-11; ed. Macray, vol. iv, pp. 510-11.
This admirable character was not all written at the same time. The first sentence is from Clarendon's Life, and the remainder from the History, where the date, '21 Nov. 1671', is appended. 123, l. 15. Crumwells owne character,—in the debate in Parliament on carrying out the sentence of death, March 8, 1649. Clarendon had briefly described Cromwell's speech: 'Cromwell, who had known him very well, spake so much good of him, and professed to have so much kindness and respect for him, that all men thought he was now safe, when he concluded, that his affection to the public so much weighed down his private friendship, that he could not but tell them, that the question was now, whether they would preserve the most bitter and the most implacable enemy they had' (vol. iv, p. 506).
l. 22. He married in November 1626, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Charles Morrison, of Cassiobury, Hertfordshire, and granddaughter of the first Viscount Campden. Their daughter Theodosia was the wife of the second Earl of Clarendon.
Page 124, l. 13. an indignity, probably a reference to Lord Hopton's command of the army in the west; see vol. iv, p. 131.
32.
Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 273; History, Bk. VIII, ed. 1703, vol. ii, pp. 427-8; ed. Macray, vol. iii, pp. 443-5.
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 Phaedra 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, Memoires, 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.
ll. 24-6. Erat illi, &c. Cicero, Orat. in Catilinam iii. 7. 'Cinna' should be 'Catiline'.
34.
Clarendon, MS. History, pp. 525-7; History, Bk. VII, ed. 1703, vol. ii, pp. 353-5; ed. Macray, vol. iii, pp. 321-4.
The character of Pym does not show the same detachment as the character of Hampden. Clarendon has not rejected unauthenticated Royalist rumour.
Page 132, ll. 7-9. This rumour occasioned the publication of an official narrative of his disease and death, 'attested under the Hands of his Physicians, Chyrurgions, and Apothecary', from which it appears that he died of an intestinal abscess. See John Forster's John Pym ('Lives of Eminent British Statesmen', vol. iii), pp. 409-11.
l. 19. He was member for Tavistock from 1624.
Page 133, l. 26. Oliver St. John (1603-42), Solicitor-General, mortally wounded at Edgehill.
ll. 29, 30. Cf. p. 129, ll. 15-18.
Page 134, l. 3. Francis Russell (1593-1641), fourth Earl of Bedford. 'This lord was the greatest person of interest in all the popular party, being of the best estate and best understanding of the whole pack, and therefore most like to govern the rest; he was besides of great civility, and of much more good-nature than any of the others. And therefore the King, resolving to do his business with that party by him, resolved to make him Lord High Treasurer of England, in the place of the Bishop of London, who was as willing to lay down the office as any body was to take it up; and, to gratify him the more, at his desire intended to make Mr. Pimm Chancellor of the Exchequer, as he had done Mr. St. John his Solicitor-General' (Clarendon, vol. i, p. 333). The plan was frustrated by Bedford's death in 1641. The Chancellorship of the Exchequer was bestowed on Culpeper (id., p. 457).
ll. 27 ff. The authority for this story is the Mercurius Academicus for February 3, 1645-6 (pp. 74-5), a journal of the Court party published at Oxford (hence the title), and the successor of the Mercurius Aulicus. The Irishman is there reported to have made this confession on the scaffold.
Page 135, ll. 25-8. The last Summer, i.e. before Pym's death, 1643. See Clarendon, vol. iii, pp. 116, 135, 141.
Page 136, ll. 7-10. He died on December 8, 1643, and was buried on December 13 in Westminster Abbey, whence his body was ejected at the Restoration.
35.
Clarendon, MS. History, Bk. X, p. 24 (or 570); History, ed. 1704, vol. iii, pp. 84-5; ed. Macray, vol. iv, pp. 305-7.
The two characters of Cromwell by Clarendon were written about the same time. Though the first is from the manuscript of the History, it belongs to a section that was added in 1671, when the matter in the original History was combined with the matter in the Life. It describes Cromwell as Clarendon remembered him before he had risen to his full power. He was then in Clarendon's eyes preeminently a dissembler—'the greatest dissembler living'. The other character views him in the light of his complete achievement. It represents him, with all his wickedness, as a man of 'great parts of courage and industry and judgement'. He is a 'bad man', but a 'brave, bad man', to whose success, remarkable talents, and even some virtues, must have contributed. The recognition of his greatness was unwilling; it was all the more sincere.
'Crumwell' is Clarendon's regular spelling.
Page 136, l. 22. Hampden's mother, Elizabeth Cromwell, was the sister of Cromwell's father.
Page 138, l. 18. the Modell, i.e. the New Model Army, raised in the Spring of 1645. See C.H. Firth's Cromwell's Army, 1902, ch. iii.
l. 21. chaunged a Generall, the Earl of Essex. See No. 40.
36.
Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 549-50; History, Bk. XV, ed. 1704, vol. iii, pp. 505-6, 509; ed. Macray, vol. vi, pp. 91-2, 97.
Page 139, ll. 3, 4. quos vituperare, Cicero, Pro Fonteio, xvii. 39 'Is igitur vir, quem ne inimicus quidem satis in appellando significare poterat, nisi ante laudasset.'
ll. 19, 20. Ausum eum, Velleius Paterculus, ii. 24.
Page 140, ll. 9-12. Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. vii.
ll. 17-22. Editorial taste in 1704 transformed this sentence thus: 'In a word, as he was guilty of many Crimes against which Damnation is denounced, and for which Hell-fire is prepared, so he had some good Qualities which have caused the Memory of some Men in all Ages to be celebrated; and he will be look'd upon by Posterity as a brave wicked Man.'
37.
Memoires Of the reigne of King Charles I, 1701, pp. 247-8.
Page 141, l. 17. a servant of Mr. Prynn's, John Lilburne (1614-57). But it is doubtful if he was Prynne's servant; see the article in the Dictionary of National Biography. Lilburne's petition was presented by Cromwell on November 9, 1640, and referred to a Committee; and on May 4, 1641, the House resolved 'That the Sentence of the Star-Chamber, given against John Lilborne, is illegal, and against the Liberty of the Subject; and also, bloody, wicked, cruel, barbarous, and tyrannical' (Journals of the House of Commons, vol. ii, pp. 24, 134).
ll. 29, 30. Warwick was imprisoned on suspicion of plotting against the Protector's Government in 1655.
38.
A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, Esq.; Edited by Thomas Birch, 1742, vol. i, p. 766.
This passage is from a letter written to 'John Winthrop, esq; governor of the colony of Connecticut in New England', and dated 'Westminster, March 24, 1659'.
Maidston was Cromwell's servant.
39.
Reliquiae Baxterianae: or, Mr. Richard Baxter's Narrative of The most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times. Faithfully Publish'd from his own Original Manuscript, By Matthew Sylvester. London: MDCXCVI. (Lib. I, Part I, pp. 98-100.)
The interest of this character lies largely in its Presbyterian point of view. It is a carefully balanced estimate by one who had been a chaplain in the Parliamentary army, but opposed Cromwell when, after the fall of Presbyterianism, he assumed the supreme power.
Page 144, ll. 19-24. See the article by C.H. Firth on 'The Raising of the Ironsides' in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1899, vol. xiii, and its sequel, 'The Later History of the Ironsides', 1901, vol. xv; and the articles on John Desborough (who married Cromwell's sister) and James Berry in the Dictionary of National Biography. 'Who Captain Ayres was it is difficult to say ... He left the regiment about June 1644, and his troop was given to James Berry ... the captain-lieutenant of Cromwell's own troop'. (R.H.S. Trans., vol. xiii, pp. 29, 30). Berry subsequently became one of Cromwell's major-generals. His character is briefly sketched by Baxter, who calls him 'my old Bosom Friend', Reliquiae, 1696, p. 57. For Captain William Evanson, see R.H.S. Trans., vol. xv, pp. 22-3.
Page 146, l. 12. A passage from Bacon's essay 'Of Faction' (No. 51) is quoted in the margin in the edition of 1696. 'Fraction' in l. 12 is probably a misprint for 'Faction'.
Page 148, ll. 7-10. The concluding sentence of the essay 'Of Simulation and Dissimulation'. Brackets were often used at this time to mark a quotation.
40.
Reliquiae Baxterianae, 1696, Lib. I, Part I, p. 48.
Much the same opinion of Fairfax was held by Sir Philip Warwick and Clarendon. Warwick says he was 'a man of a military genius, undaunted courage and presence of mind in the field both in action and danger, but of a very common understanding in all other affairs, and of a worse elocution; and so a most fit tool for Mr. Cromwel to work with' (Memoires, p. 246). Clarendon alludes to him as one 'who had no eyes, and so would be willinge to be ledd' (p. 138, l. 24). But Milton saw him in a different light when he addressed to him the sonnet on his capture of Colchester in August 1648:
Fairfax, whose name in armes through Europe rings Filling each mouth with envy, or with praise,... Thy firm unshak'n vertue ever brings Victory home,... O yet a nobler task awaites thy hand; For what can Warr, but endless warr still breed, Till Truth, & Right from Violence be freed, And Public Faith cleard from the shamefull brand Of Public Fraud. In vain doth Valour bleed While Avarice, & Rapine share the land.
Fairfax's military capacity is certain, and his private virtues are unquestioned. Writing in 1648, Milton credited him with the power to settle the affairs of the nation. But Fairfax was not a politician. He broke with Cromwell over the execution of the king, and in July 1650 retired into private life. Baxter, Warwick, and Clarendon all wrote of him at a distance of time that showed his merits and limitations in truer perspective.
Milton addressed him again when singing the praises of Bradshaw and Cromwell and other Parliamentary leaders in his Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda, 1654. As a specimen of a contemporary Latin character, and a character by Milton, the passage is now quoted in full:
'Sed neque te fas est praeterire, Fairfaxi, in quo cum summa fortitudine summam modestiam, summam vitae sanctitatem, & natura & divinus favor conjunxit: Tu harum in partem laudum evocandus tuo jure ac merito es; quanquam in illo nunc tuo secessu, quantus olim Literni Africanus ille Scipio, abdis te quoad potes; nec hostem solum, sed ambitionem, & quae praestantissimum quemque mortalium vincit, gloriam quoque vicisti; tuisque virtutibus & praeclare factis, jucundissimum & gloriosissimum per otium frueris, quod est laborum omnium & humanarum actionum vel maximarum finis; qualique otio cum antiqui Heroes, post bella & decora tuis haud majora, fruerentur, qui eos laudare conati sunt poetae, desperabant se posse alia ratione id quale esset digne describere, nisi eos fabularentur, coelo receptos, deorum epulis accumbere. Verum te sive valetudo, quod maxime crediderim, sive quid aliud retraxit, persuasissimum hoc habeo, nihil te a rationibus reipublicae divellere potuisse, nisi vidisses quantum libertatis conservatorem, quam firmum atque fidum Anglicanae rei columen ac munimentum in successore tuo relinqueres' (ed. 1654, pp. 147-8).
Page 149, l. 9. The Self-denying Ordinance, discharging members of Parliament from all offices, civil and military, passed both Houses on April 3, 1645.
l. 18. He succeeded his father as third Lord Fairfax in 1648.
l. 21. See p. 118, ll. 8 ff.
41.
Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 103; History, Bk. III, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 148-9; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 247-9.
Baxter has an account of Vane in his Autobiography: 'He was the Principal Man that drove on the Parliament to go too high, and act too vehemently against the King: Being of very ready Parts, and very great Subtilty, and unwearied Industry, he laboured, and not without Success, to win others in Parliament, City and Country to his Way. When the Earl of Strafford was accused, he got a Paper out of his Father's Cabinet (who was Secretary of State) which was the chief Means of his Condemnation: To most of our Changes he was that within the House, which Cromwell was without. His great Zeal to drive all into War, and to the highest, and to cherish the Sectaries, and especially in the Army, made him above all Men to be valued by that Party ... When Cromwell had served himself by him as his surest Friend, as long as he could; and gone as far with him as their way lay together, (Vane being for a Fanatick Democracie, and Cromwell for Monarchy) at last there was no Remedy but they must part; and when Cromwell cast out the Rump (as disdainfully as Men do Excrements) he called Vane a Jugler' (Reliquiae Baxterianae, Lib. I, Part I, p. 75). This account occurs in Baxter's description of the sectaries who were named after him 'Vanists'. |
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