This is one of the features in Clarendon's scheme of the constitution, which essentially divide him from the modern view. But it was to be long before the Privy Councilship became, as in modern usage, little more than an honorary title; and it may be doubted whether a strict reading of the constitution is not infringed by the change which this has involved. Clarendon did not, of course, suppose that the Privy Council could place itself above Parliament, or that it could pretend to guide the national policy. Such a thing would have been as impossible in Clarendon's day as it would be now. But he did conceive that the power of the executive should receive all its authority from, and be subject to the supreme guidance of, the most ancient and august body which was nominated solely by the Crown. The prerogative of the Crown must be exercised through that body; and this view was confirmed by the fact that after the Revolution each Privy Councillor was made responsible for the decrees passed with his assent. This was, indeed, the very contrivance by which the ancient principle that the King could do no wrong was made compatible with a free constitution. Clarendon's view, however antiquated, was thus, in truth, a safeguard for liberty. A great officer of State was entrusted with the duties and powers of his office. But he was not necessarily a member of the Privy Council, and his powers were, in Clarendon's view, limited by the supreme authority of that Council. That its portals should be jealously guarded; that only men of the first weight should be admitted to it; that its proceedings should be carefully regulated and should rest upon sound legal principles—all these things made for government by the personal agency of carefully chosen Ministers of the Crown, which it was Clarendon's aim to preserve, instead of bureaucratic rule by a host of minor officials. They also served as a powerful guarantee for constitutional liberty and for immediate responsibility attaching to a well-recognized body for any infringement of it. It is hard to fix responsibility amongst the various grades of an official hierarchy. It is easy to fix it upon a small group of leading men who have the administration in their hands, who are bound to base their procedure on well-understood rules, and who cannot transgress these rules in ignorance or under the veil of obscurity.

Under the new rgime the Chancellor found the Privy Council filled with Court favourites or ambitious intriguers of the type of Sir William Coventry, who scorned precedent and was never so happy as when inveighing against the trammels of the law. Clarendon was forced to submit to daily encroachments upon regularity of procedure, which found encouragement from the King. His personal dignity was injured, and his temper was daily chafed, by the insults of those who carried their insubordination and their flippancy to the Council Chamber, where he could ill brook their presence; and they did so under cover of the secret sympathy of the King. Day by day he found his own influence more surely undermined; and it was none the less irksome because he saw the work of his life undone amidst the gibes of a heartless cynicism.

It involves, however, no reflection upon the dignity or the capacity of Clarendon if we are compelled to admit that the schoolboy baiting to which he was exposed found no little encouragement from his own bluntness and his stubborn resolution to stoop to none of the arts of courtiership. There was a limit even to the patience with which Charles could listen to the oft-repeated catalogue of his own moral defects; and perhaps Clarendon's lessons might have been none the less effective had they been conveyed with something more of tact. The strange thing is that he himself saw, and faithfully recounts, the traps which were laid for him. But he seems to have thought that these could best be dealt with by roughly trampling on such devices and tearing his way headlong through such snares. The struggle was sometimes not a little comic in aspect, in spite of the background of tragedy. Upon some occasions the courtiers, with an hypocrisy which Clarendon did not fail to suspect, would lament to him the scandals of their master's life and the injury that these wrought to his reputation and authority. When he urged that they should "advertise the King what they thought and heard all others say," they professed that they dared not speak to the King "in such dialect." Clarendon gave them credit for some honesty in their refusal to condemn what they themselves encouraged; and perhaps too readily assumed himself the task which they refused. On one occasion, while he and Arlington—one would have thought no very sympathetic pair for mutual confidences—were discussing the license of the Court and the consequent injury to the Crown, their conversation was interrupted by the King. Their trouble did not escape his notice, and he asked the subject of their talk. The Chancellor candidly declared—prefacing the declaration by a confession that he was not sorry for the chance of making it—that

"they were speaking of his Majesty, and, as they did frequently, were bewailing the unhappy life he lived, both with respect to himself, who, by the excess of pleasures which he indulged to himself, was indeed without the true delight and relish of any; and in respect to his Government, which he totally neglected, and of which the kingdom was so sensible that it could not be long before he felt the ill effects of it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a letter to Pepys of August 12, 1689, Evelyn gives a list of pictures in the collection of which he himself had advised the purchase, and some of which, he admits, had been presented by those who "strove to make their court" to the Chancellor, by such timely gifts, when his design was known. They comprised portraits of all the leading men in the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I., and others were added from more remote history, and from his own later contemporaries. It is interesting to note that there were portraits of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher—"which was," adds Evelyn, "most agreeable to his Lordship's general humour."

When Clarendon House was destroyed, the collection went to his country house, at Cornbury, in Oxfordshire. On the death of Lord Rochester, in 1753, they were divided between his daughters, Jane, Countess of Essex and Catherine (the famous "Kitty" of Pope and Gay), Duchess of Queensberry. The first moiety is that now at the Grove, Watford; the second is that which descended to the Douglas family, and is now at Bothwell Castle.] If Clarendon's very natural ambition to bequeath a dignified home to his family and to make it a treasure-house of portraits which represented a great page in English history, was any weakness, it was one for which he may well be pardoned, and for which he paid heavily. He lived to regret the error into which a very human pride had led him. We must leave it to sterner moralists to deal out censure upon a weakness which he shared with other men of genius, who have found a solace in raising a stately monument which they may bequeath to posterity, and which may preserve another memory of them than that of their toils and their struggles and their own personal ambitions. But in the case of Clarendon this weakness—of which he himself clearly saw the error—had this additional disadvantage, that it spread the belief that he had acquired wealth proportionate to such architectural expenditure. Like many another man, Clarendon overbuilt himself; and his miscalculation made his contemporaries suppose him the possessor of a superfluity of ill-gotten wealth.



CHAPTER XXIV

INCREASING BITTERNESS OF HIS FOES

In the midst of thickening troubles at home and abroad, in Court, in the city, and in the provinces, Parliament met on the 2lst September, 1666. The new session was destined to bring sharply to an issue more than one of the questions in regard to which long-drawn friction had vexed the soul of Clarendon, and as it proceeded it was to reveal more clearly the designs of those who had striven so persistently to fret irritations and sow new seeds of dissension between him and the King. Their success, ignoble as it was, and little profitable either to the Crown, the kingdom, or themselves, was soon to be achieved.

Parliament met under the oppression of gloom caused by the Fire. Whitehall and Westminster were safe, but scarcely a mile distant the smoke which rose from the desolated city had hardly died away. "They saw," said the King in his opening address, "the dismal ruins the Fire had made; and nothing but a miracle of God's mercy could have preserved what was left from the same destruction." He was forced once more to apply for their assistance to meet the vast expense of the war, to which no end could be foreseen. The disasters of the kingdom had doubled the insolence of their enemies; and nothing could save the country but a vigorous effort to show the world that, in spite of these disasters, it was still equal to its own defence. It was a crisis which sorely needed all the energy of firm and united statesmanship; and very scantily was that need supplied. The interruption of credit; the bankruptcy of many of the leading citizens; the general paralysis that had fallen upon commerce—all these made it hard to say how money could be raised, and Clarendon notes, with none of the satisfaction that the truth of his prophecy might have brought, that the Appropriation Proviso had resulted in the check, rather than in the boasted increase, of the supply of funds. There was, indeed, "a faint vote procured," that they would give a supply proportionate to the wants of the Crown; but no sum was fixed, and after this first vague resolution the matter hung in suspense, and even a Parliament that was so strongly loyalist found it needful to delay and insist upon conditions before any new supply was voted. Their loyalty had now a strong vein of stubbornness. The country gentlemen could no longer blind themselves to the scandals of the Court, and the intractable mood bred by these scandals could be skilfully turned to their own purposes by Clarendon's enemies. What had at first been only dilatoriness soon developed into sharp criticism and angry remonstrance, for which Clarendon knew that there was only too good ground. It was an ill time to press for new supplies when the national resources were drained to the dregs. If the King needed more after the lavish grants of recent years, there must have been mischief afoot which should be probed to the bottom. All those through whose hands the money had passed must give a strict account of it.

A Bill was introduced for the appointment of Audit Commissioners, who were to examine all accounts and report to Parliament any defaulters, whose punishment Parliament was to determine. So strongly was the country party bent upon this financial inquest that it was difficult to withstand their zeal in the hunt for malpractices. The naval administration was chiefly in their view, and their threats caused much searching of heart amongst those whose consciences told them that their methods could hardly meet the perilous light of day. A certain amount of corruption was an ordinary incident of all administrative dealings. Pepys had no wish to be dishonest, and was, indeed, a fairly incorrupt official, according to the ideas of the day. Many times he had withstood flagrant waste, and he was vigilant in promoting sound economies. But a barefaced system of secret commissions, which he honestly records in the faithful pages of his Diary, was universally practised, and the only admitted scruple was that such commissions should not be allowed to operate so as to permit a flagrantly dishonest contract. Subject to this, he evidently thought himself neglectful of his rightful interests if he did not make the most out of every transaction, and he piously invokes the blessing of Heaven upon the unsavoury business, as, with unctuous complacency, he counts up his gains. But, however such things may be condoned by the prevailing practice they have an ugly appearance when exposed to the public gaze, and Pepys was sorely alarmed both for himself and his principals at the prospect of a strict investigation. Others besides Pepys were involved. Ashley's administration of the prize-money had been expressly set free from any auditing authority except that of the King; and under the protection of this proviso he had expended the proceeds not only with the sanction, but at the instigation of Charles, on objects which could not be made public without exposing the Crown to the contempt of the nation, and making the resistance of the country party more obstinate and more outspoken. Charles took alarm, and consulted the secret committee of the Privy Council on the subject. He was determined, he said, to defend his Ministers against an inquiry conducted on methods for which there was no precedent, and under which no man would be safe. He trusted that the Bill would receive no support in the Commons; that if it passed the Commons it would be rejected by the Lords; but in any case, he was resolved never to give it his assent. The committee appeared to assent to these bold words, and to see in the proposal a dangerous menace to the prerogative of the Crown; and Clarendon, obeying his natural dislike of such encroachments, confirmed the view of the King, hoped that he would abide by his resolution, and promised his own vigorous opposition to any such Bill in the Lords.

It is hard to find any adequate ground, either in policy or in justice, for Clarendon's resistance to this proposal. He had himself nothing to fear from it. He had no part in the details of naval administration, and those who were chiefly threatened had no claim to his protection. He had been strongly opposed to Ashley's appointment to administer the prize- money, and he could not but know that the investigation would ruin Ashley's reputation. Had he boldly placed himself at the head of the country party and made himself the foremost champion of financial purity, he might have established a firm hold upon the affections of all that was best in the nation, and he might have trusted to their loyalty and his own to prevent any serious blow to the prerogative of the Crown and the respect due to the King. As a fact, he did assent, subsequently, to the nomination by the Crown of an audit commission, and it does not seem as if a simple alteration of procedure would have seriously affected the substance of the matter. Of his failure to act thus, his increasing age, his infirmities of health, the anxieties by which he was oppressed, and the lack of powerful and confidential allies may have largely been the cause. But we must remember also the ruling principles in Clarendon's conception of the constitution, and his own deep-seated prejudices. He was unwilling to stoop to injure an enemy by a weapon which might diminish the prerogative of the Crown. He never sought the position of leader of a party, which would thus have been forced upon him, and he felt that position to be incompatible with his own loyalty as servant of the Crown. He disliked the idea of Parliamentary tactics; and all his past experience identified such tactics, in his mind, with the beginnings of rebellion. It was not given to him to see so far into the future as to conceive that an independent Minister might be the strongest buttress of the Crown.

But the tactics from which he recoiled were put into practice, with less than his honesty, but with much more skill in stratagem, by those who sought to accomplish his fall. The very courtiers whose influence was accountable for the scandals which stirred the indignation of the country party, made themselves the trusted friends of the parliamentary opposition, and carefully nursed it for their own purposes. The irresponsible and flighty genius of Buckingham made him, for the moment, the chosen patron of those who were murmuring against the abuses of the Court, stimulated him to organize and conciliate the Parliamentary faction that grumbled against the waste of the national resources, and induced him to cast aside for the time the habits of a profligate voluptuary, and throw himself with ardour into the labours of Parliamentary debate. Rivalry in debauchery had made him, for a season, the object of the King's personal dislike, and had involved him in a bitter contest with Lady Castlemaine; and this tempted him to adopt the uncongenial part of a moralist, who found it convenient to cultivate the friendship of the strictest sectaries, and to pose as the saviour of the kingdom. It was not the first, nor the only, antic by which he made himself, as Zimri, the easy butt of Dryden's satire. He became the prime favourite of the people, and his power with the mob seemed to make him the rival of the King. It added to the zest with which he pursued this new freak, that it helped him to satisfy private and personal piques. In particular the Duke of Ormonde had become the object of his almost insane jealousy. Ormonde's lofty character, his consistent loyalty, his influence in the counsels of the King, above all, his vast power as a great territorial magnate, had wounded the vanity of Buckingham; and he was able to evoke against Ormonde, as an Irish peer, the jealousy of those English nobles who thought themselves unduly eclipsed by the great possessions, and high official rank, of a peer of a lower order—that of the Irish nobility.

It was largely in obedience to this personal jealousy, that Buckingham had made himself the prominent promoter of a Bill of singular injustice to the sister kingdom. It was conceived that the importation of Irish cattle was a serious injury to the English agricultural interest, and was enriching the Irish at the expense of the English proprietors; and it was therefore proposed to forbid any such importation. That it involved practical ruin to Ireland, and promised to lay the seeds of deep-rooted hatred, mattered nothing to those who had their own selfish objects to pursue, or who had private grudges to satisfy. It was only natural that the Bill found ready assent amongst some honest men, who were earnestly desirous to relieve the agricultural interest, suffering heavily under the pressure of taxation, and who had something else than private venom to indulge. The bitter complaints of Ireland could not be expected to weigh for much. It remained to be seen whether the short-sighted selfishness, which was sedulously fostered in order to gratify personal spleen, would be allowed to inflict upon a nation, united under the same Crown, this scandalous injustice. At first it was proposed that the embargo should extend to Scotland also; but at a later stage this was dropped.



The King was not deceived as to the injustice of the Bill, and in its earliest stages he professed that his conscience would never allow him to give it his assent. He urged the Council "to give such a stop to this Bill that it might never be presented to him; for if it were, he must positively reject it." It was not the first, nor the last, pronouncement of the King that was to turn out an empty threat.

The Council did not unanimously accept the opinion of the King. Those whom he consulted took diverse views of the Bill, and some even who doubted its policy were not prepared to face the opposition of the English agricultural interest. Amongst the members of both Houses of the English Parliament there was a deeply-seated jealousy of Ireland, inherited from the days of her resistance to English power, and sharpened by fervent opposition to her Roman Catholic predilections. The promoters of the Bill soon found themselves backed up by a solid phalanx of English prejudice, which held the Commons staunch to their support of its provisions. Buckingham and Ashley learned that their championship added to their hold upon the nation, and gave them a new chance of inflicting a defeat at once upon the King, and upon his older Minister. Clarendon fully recognized the iniquity of the Bill, and welcomed the stalwart resistance which the King avowed that he would give to it. [Footnote: It is odd to remark how the incurable prejudice of Whig historians blinds them to the real bearing of the Bill, and forces them, in their desire to avoid any agreement with Clarendon, to find some excuse for it. "It is by no means clear," writes Mr. Christie, the biographer of Ashley, "that special circumstances did not counsel an exception to the general rules of political economy." So easily are fundamental principles made to bend to the exigencies of personal advocacy!] But the result was to prove to him once more how little reliance could be placed on any apparently settled conviction of the King.

The House of Commons had now become too stubborn to yield to any arguments of justice; and that the King and his Ministers opposed the Bill only added to the obstinacy with which it was pressed. There was now a deliberate opposition to the Crown, and of the two Bills—that about Irish cattle, and that for a commission of audit—the first was "driven on with more fury, and the other more passionately spoken of." Any support which the party of the Court could reckon on, rapidly diminished; and even its adherents applied to the King for permission to record their votes in favour of the Bill. [Footnote: Life, iii. 141.] Again Sir William Coventry, who, to Clarendon's mind, was the evil genius in every plot, appeared upon the scene. He persuaded the King of the strength of the supporters of the Bill, and the small prospect of any supply until the House was satisfied that it would pass. Perhaps, he added, if the friends of the Court withdrew their opposition to the Irish Bill, they might thus be able to elude the threatening provisions of the Bill for the audit of accounts. [Footnote: Ibid., p. 142.]

Under such inducements, Charles's conscientious opposition to the Bill soon disappeared. His henchmen in the House received new orders, and amidst the plaudits of Buckingham's sycophants, this iniquitous Bill passed through the House of Commons. The triumph only made the Commons insist with the more vigour upon the Bill for the audit of accounts. Again the King yielded to pressure, to the alluring prophecies of abundant supplies as the reward of surrender, and to the dire threats of exposure of Court scandals if the will of the House were thwarted. The result was a new surrender, and the Accounts Bill followed the other to the House of Lords.

The scene of the struggle was now changed, but it was evident that the persistence of opposition was in no way checked, and that a fierce struggle between Parliamentary power and the royal prerogative was threatened in the immediate future. To Clarendon, the opposition in the House of Commons centred in these two Bills. Taken together, they roused his unrelenting hostility, the one because it was founded upon no constitutional precedent, and was dangerous to the royal prerogative, the other because it was conceived in a spirit of reckless animosity, and was flagrantly unjust to Ireland. Up to a certain point, the King had cordially agreed with that view; but once more that fickle support went for nothing; a few threats and allurements disposed of Charles's conscience as well as of his judgment. For him precedent did not count; the royal prerogative meant only what secured for himself an easy life, and the prospect of supply; and as for injustice to Ireland, the burden of conscientious scruples was easily transferred to other shoulders. A strong will and a scrupulous conscience were inconvenient equipments for a Minister of Charles II.

But it was still Clarendon's duty to do his best to save the King from treacherous plotters, as well as from the consequences of his own fickle waywardness. There was one way which occurred to Clarendon, and which he seems to have urged upon the King without success. The Parliament had now sat for six years, and perhaps contact with the constituencies might prove a solvent of their irksome obstinacy, and also of those dangerous combinations which were threatening to foil all schemes of sound policy. Might it not be that the sound loyalty of the nation would send to Westminster a Parliament, not servile or subservient, but less truculent and intractable, than the present? Whatever the soundness of his opinion— and it may perhaps be doubted if a new election would have been a safe expedient for the King—it obtained scanty support. The little clique of intriguing courtiers thought that it portended danger to their own influence. Some who had proved ineffective asserters of the views of the country party were alarmed for their seats; the King was easily persuaded that many of his own most obedient placemen might disappear. Buckingham and his friends managed even to

alarm the bishops, by predicting a majority for the enemies of the Church. Clarendon never found that the ecclesiastical mind was one upon which, as a statesman, he could place any reliance. They judged now as far from the mark as usual, and yielded to the persuasions of his foes. Clarendon was fain to be content with the existing House of Commons; and the fight was now to be how far the Lords would bow to the imperious demands of that House, and allow themselves to be managed by the little band of malcontents, whose main object was to make the present administration impossible.

In the House of Lords the leading part in pushing forward the Irish Cattle Bill was taken by the Duke of Buckingham. His new-found ardour for political intrigue had changed for the moment his habits of life as a voluptuary. Under the impulse of his present irritation, his usual haunts were abandoned, and he spent laborious days in the House, the first to be present, and the last to disappear. [Footnote: The usual hour for the meeting of Parliament was early, and Clarendon complains of the laxity which, of recent years, had made the hour as late as ten o'clock A.M. The House of Lords had of late shown so little zeal for work that they frequently adjourned after a few minutes. But now, in the excitement of the discussion on the Irish Bill, they again sat early, and did not adjourn till four o'clock, or even "till the candles were brought in."] He had the eager support of Ashley, inspired like him, by jealousy of Clarendon and Ormonde, and bringing to the unholy partnership a lack of principle equal to that of Buckingham, and far greater powers of concentration, and of persistent strategy. With two such protagonists, the debates in the House of Lords lost their usual repose and dignity, and became scenes of turmoil and almost of personal violence. [Footnote: Clarendon tells us an amusing story of a fracas which occurred between Buckingham and Lord Dorchester, during a conference between the Houses. The two peers, who were avowed enemies, chanced to sit together, and each endeavoured, it would seem, to claim more space than was convenient to the other. From hustling they came to blows, and Lord Dorchester had the misfortune to lose his wig in the shuffle. But "the Marquis had much of the Duke's hair in his hands to recompense for the pulling off his periwig, which he could not reach high enough to do to the other" (Life, iii. 154). The matter was settled without bloodshed, and both peers were sent to cool their tempers by a short detention in the Tower. We are apt, on doubtful grounds, to think that the debaucheries of Charles's Court were redeemed by elegance of manners. As a fact, the morals which Dr. Johnson ascribes to Lord Chesterfield's Letters were often joined, in that Court, to manners which would have shocked the dancing master of his apothegm.] Buckingham on one occasion provoked a scene by insolently stating "that whoever was against that Bill had either an Irish interest or an Irish understanding." The remark, as well as Buckingham's habitual arrogance, aroused the wrath of Lord Ossory, Ormonde's eldest son, and a challenge was the consequence. Buckingham, who did not, to the other attributes of finished courtier, add that of personal courage, contrived to miss the rendezvous, and, with a lack of spirit which men of less bravado could hardly have equalled, and which might have made him blush before his own swashbucklers, he proceeded to lay before the House a narrative of the case. Both parties, it was held, had been to blame, and both were, as usual, to pass a short period of penance in the Tower. But Buckingham's enemies contrived, under the rules of the House, to inflict an insult upon him, which might have stirred the blood of a Quaker, not to speak of that which flowed in the veins of this model gentleman. It was unjust, they urged, that any punishment should fall upon the Duke. He had done his best to prevent the encounter, and had prudently mistaken the rendezvous. His friends, not unnaturally, thought "that it would be more for his honour to undergo the censure of the House than the penalty of such a vindication."

But apart from these comic accompaniments, the debate upon the Bill in the Lords raised grave constitutional questions. Clarendon opposed the Bill as radically unjust, and economically wrong. But he found in it also much that encroached upon the prerogative. Cases might easily occur where a remission of the Act was imperatively required in the public interest, and in special exigencies, and the usual course was to give such dispensing power to the Crown, just as it is now given under many statutes, by the machinery of an Order in Council. But the prejudices of the promoters of the Bill were too virulent to be satisfied with anything less than the strict and universal application of the embargo; nor did they scruple to suggest that new restraints were required upon the power of the Crown. All that Clarendon and his friends in the House of Lords could do, was to insist that some of the clauses most offensive to the prerogative, and most opposed to precedent, should be expunged from the Bill before it was returned to the House of Commons.

The struggle then entered upon a new phase, involving another constitutional principle. The Commons were prepared to agree to the omission of Scotland from the Bill;

but in regard to all else, they refused to accept the amendments of the Lords. The two Houses were in sharp conflict, and for a time it appeared as if the disagreement could result only in the loss of the Bill. Its friends had no wish to see this catastrophe, and a conference between the Houses was therefore arranged. The result was not such as to encourage those who wished for the settlement of a vexed question, or who hoped that prudent counsels would be brought to bear on a constitutional difficulty. To the irritation which the country party had conceived against the Court, and to the obstinate determination that the royal prerogative should yield to the will of Parliament, there was now added a bitter fight between the two Houses; and here again Clarendon's long-cherished opinions forced him to take the unpopular side. Once more the habits of a lifetime refused to disappear before an unwarranted, and, as he thought, dangerous innovation. We may doubt whether he duly estimated the forces to which he was opposing himself, or rightly gauged the direction in which men's minds were moving. We may say, with full confidence, that he chose his part with singular indifference to what was politically or personally expedient. Neither now nor at any other time did Clarendon yield to anything but his own conscientious convictions. Nature had not so framed him as to give him the faculty of making these convictions any more palatable by his methods of enforcing them. He recognized this fully himself.

"In all the debate upon this Bill, and upon the other of accounts, the Chancellor had the misfortune to lose much credit in the House of Commons, not only by a very strong and cordial opposition to what they desired, but by taking all occasions which were offered by the frequent arguments which were urged of the opinion and authority of the House of Commons, and that it was fit and necessary to concur with them, to mention them with less reverence than they expected. It is very true he had always used in such provocations to desire the Lords to be more solicitous in preserving their own unquestionable rights, and most important privileges, and less tender in restraining the excess and new encroachments of the House of Commons." [Footnote: Life, iii. 163.]

He listened with ill-concealed irritation to assertions of supreme power on the part of the Commons, which aroused echoes of the old days of the Long Parliament. His cherished hope was not for an absolute monarchy, but for such maintenance of the royal prerogative as might assure the delicate balance of the constitution; and he saw that the degradation of the Lords to a mere chamber for registering the determination of the House of Commons was a first step in throwing that delicate balance out of gear. "His opinion was that the late rebellion could never be extirpated and pulled up by the roots, till the King's regal and inherent power and prerogative should be fully awarded and vindicated;" and that prerogative to his mind was associated with the maintenance of adequate authority in the House of Lords. It was not given to him to recognize how deeply that rebellion had struck its roots, and how sure it was that from these roots would grow a strong plant of Parliamentary power, and of predominance of the Representative House, which it was now too late to extirpate. He saw that the irregularities of administration, and the proneness of irresponsible men "to meddle and interpose in matters out of their own sphere, to give their advice in matters of peace and war, to hold conferences with the King, and offer their advices to him," were inevitably breaking down that scheme of the Constitution to which his life had bound him. He was by no means inclined to flatter the House of Lords, or to exempt them from blame for much that he thought mischievous. They had neglected their business, their discharge of their functions had been careless and perfunctory, their meetings had been short, and their intervention in public affairs scanty, "while the other House sat, and drew the eyes of the kingdom upon them, as the only vigilant people for their good." Clarendon's constitutional ideals might be mistaken; but he was under no mistake as to the process by which they were being undermined. He saw how fatal was the error by which the peers insisted upon special personal privileges which lessened the esteem of their order. He protested against that claim of exemption from arrest for debt, which they sought to extend to their menial servants, and which led to such exemptions being often sold by these servants to bankrupt citizens, to the scandal of the law. It was this petty personal arrogance of the peers which gave the House of Commons their opportunity, of which they were not slow to make use, and in doing so they were encouraged even by those members of the House of Peers who found their personal aims advanced by fostering the obstinacy of the House of Commons opposition. It was his misfortune thus to offend the sticklers for privilege in the House of Lords, while the House of Commons were coming to consider him as the prime obstacle in the way of their newly asserted independence. His enemies rejoiced in such clumsy tactics, while his friends vainly desired him "to use less fervour in these argumentations." In describing these contentions, he uses of himself almost the very words which he had applied to Laud in the old days when Clarendon had urged his patron to be more careful how he gave unnecessary occasion of offence. [Footnote: Clarendon himself remarks "that he was guilty of that himself of which he used to accuse Archbishop Laud, that he was too proud of a good conscience" (Life, iii. 266).]

"He was in that, as in many things of that kind, that related to the offending other men, for his own sake un-counsellable; [Footnote: i.e. according to Clarendon's idiom, less amenable to advice than it would have been in his own interest to be.] not that he did not know that it exposed him to the censure of some men who lay in wait to do him hurt, but because he neglected those censures, nor valued the persons who promoted them."

It was a sturdy attitude no doubt; but the Court of Charles was hardly a scene in which it could be assumed with safety. In that tainted atmosphere blunt-spoken sincerity could scarcely breathe.

Clarendon had attempted to make the House of Lords a buttress to the royal prerogative. A sardonic fate taught him that the weakest support upon which he could rely was the King, for whose power he was ready to sacrifice his own popularity, and hazard his fortune and even his life. His enemies could always appeal to the King's love of ease, and to his dread of troublesome interference with his pleasures and his lavish expense. It was on these ignoble motives that they now relied. The Irish Bill must be passed, or supplies would not be forthcoming, the threatening murmurs of the people would take shape in action, and the luxuries and the debaucheries of Whitehall would no longer be left in peace. So Charles's conscientious objections again disappeared. The Lords who were in the confidence of the King were bidden to abate their opposition; the Commons had their way, the injustice to Ireland was forgotten, and the Bill was passed. Charles and his flatterers persuaded themselves that the surrender was the fruit of sagacious policy; they gave full rein to their sarcastic humour in the ridicule of Clarendon and the belated obstinacy of his loyalty to the constitution.

Charles gave his assent to the Irish Bill on January 18th, and in his Speech on that occasion he announced to Parliament their speedy prorogation, and recalled to their minds with some emphasis the forgotten business of supply. This appeal had a good effect, and for very shame the House placed the King in the position to discharge some of his seamen's arrears of pay, and to put some portion of his fleet in fighting trim. [Footnote: In the speech of thanks for this grant the Chancellor persuaded the King to express his hope that provisos like that of the Appropriation Bill would in future be dropped. It was a reflection on Sir W. Coventry's plan, and as such was taken by Coventry himself. (See Pepys, April 1, 1667.)] Parliament was prorogued on February 8th, and the King had the satisfaction of reminding the Commons that the Bill for the audit of accounts had never been presented to him, and that he proposed himself to issue a commission for the purpose. We can scarcely doubt that this last resolution was adopted by the advice of Clarendon himself. He disliked the encroachment of the Commons, but it was no part of his desire to keep the light of day from the scandals of financial administration. Such a commission, not extorted from the King as an insult, but resting upon his own authority, might perform a necessary and useful work, and care was taken in the selection of commissioners to give no suspicion of weakness or partiality. Before it could do effective work, Clarendon had ceased to guide the nation's policy.

The pressure of Parliamentary opposition was for the time removed. But the troubles of the King's Minister were by no means at an end. The war dragged on its course, our resources were nearly drained, the navy was reduced to inefficiency, our foes were encouraged to new efforts by our disasters. We have already [Footnote: Chapter XXI.] seen the insults which England was yet to undergo before the relief of a not very creditable peace was won, and to what dire necessities the Treasury was reduced for lack of funds. We have learned how, at that juncture, [Footnote: Chapter XXI.] Clarendon differed from the other advisers of the King, was adverse to convoking Parliament, and suggested the unwelcome device of a loan to tide over the emergency. Peace came at last. But it brought no satisfaction to the nation, and no recompense for her vast expenditure. It left the relations between Clarendon and the King sadly strained, and it did not soften the growing unpopularity of the Minister with the country party, or bring oblivion of his sharp passages with the House of Commons. On the contrary, it is precisely from this moment that Clarendon dated the rise of that storm that was to "destroy all his prosperity, and shipwreck all his hopes." The cloud had indeed been thickening, and the waves had been gathering new force, for months and even years. Clarendon professes his knowledge of the plots that had long been undermining his power.

All that he means by dating the storm from this period, is that the long threatened tempest now burst in its full force. But the struggle was to be maintained, not without hopes, for a few months more.

Clarendon had the satisfaction of finding that the summoning of Parliament, in the spring of 1667, to which he had been strongly opposed, and the legality of which he doubted, [Footnote: See ante, p. 206.] was after all rendered unnecessary by the near prospect of peace. But Clarendon's opposition to the proposal had increased, if possible, his unpopularity with the Commons, and suspicions had been rife that he desired to raise revenue without Parliamentary consent. The disasters which attended the last stages of the war did not allay the general discontent, and when the peace was at last signed on July 2lst, 1667, it found Court and Ministers alike under the cloud of popular jealousy. Only two months before Clarendon had lost the stay and support of that colleague, whose sympathies were closest to his own, the loyalty of whose friendship was most untainted, and upon whose character and high rank Clarendon could rely to balance the jealousy of his own promotion—too sudden not to offend the pride of the older nobility. With touching anxiety, Clarendon had sought to defend his old friend, now enfeebled by age and ill-health, from the unseemly efforts that had been made to remove him by those who sought to fill his place, but it may be doubted whether in doing so he acted in the real interests of Southampton's reputation. His desire to keep his old friend at his side was only natural. Both had passed through hard straits, and both—because Southampton was only the Chancellor's senior by a year—were now prematurely aged. Clarendon and he were the last of the old band who had rallied to the King in 1640, and a true instinct taught him that they must stand or fall together. All the most cherished memories of his life, all that was most sacred in his loyal devotion to his first master, all the vicissitudes of his fortunes, were associated in Clarendon's mind with the friendship which began when they were students together at Magdalen, and was cemented when they had been forced together, by the excesses of the party with which they had at first been in sympathy, to attach themselves to the Royalist side, at a time when that side had ceased to have any means of attracting the support of selfish ambition. They had alike been averse to the proceedings of the Court during the days when Parliamentary Government was suspended, [Footnote: Southampton had suffered severely in purse from the claims put forward by the Crown on his estates in Hampshire; and we have already seen how little Hyde sympathized with the rigour with which such claims were pressed.

This Thomas Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, was the son of the second Earl, whose name is immortalized as the patron and the friend of Shakespeare. It is interesting to remember that one of his daughters (he left no male heir) was the wife of William, Lord Russell, condemned and executed in 1683.] and had welcomed what they hoped would be a return to sounder methods when Parliament was again summoned. Both had seen much amiss in the government of Strafford, and had been glad to think that what they deemed his innovations would receive a check. Both had revolted against the proceedings of the Parliament, when these transgressed the law, and both resented the flagrant injustice which procured the judicial murder of Strafford. Southampton brought to the service of the King the prestige of high rank, the respect earned by a character which scorned intrigue, and a judgment too sound to be led astray by any violence of partisan passion. His loyalty was untainted and unswerving. [Footnote: Southampton is said to have kept watch over the body of the murdered King, during the night when it lay in Whitehall. It was he who told of the mysterious muffled figure that stole into the Hall during the night, and muttered the words, "Imperious necessity," and whom he always believed to have been Cromwell. After his master's death he compounded with the new Government for his delinquency, and lived in retirement. But he sent encouragement to Charles when a fugitive after the battle of Worcester, and continued, according to his abilities, to minister to his needs during the long exile.] Save to those who knew him intimately, his character was tinged with melancholy, and its impression was not lessened by the habitual gloom which his outward aspect wore. In the inner circle of his friends, he could indulge in a quaint humour, and was no unkindly companion. He was not the only one of Clarendon's contemporaries whose temperament was not proof against the depression born of the troubles of the time. Alike from the ungrudging admiration which Clarendon expresses for his life-long friend, from the captious criticism of those to whom his long tarrying on the stage was irksome, and from the irresponsible gossip of Pepys, we have a vivid picture of the veteran statesman as he appeared to his contemporaries. In outward carriage grave and distant, girt with that ample ceremony of manner which repelled familiarity; easy and prompt in debate, with that sense of self-confidence which permits a man to think on his feet, and to dispense with any niceties of diction; ready to rouse himself to prolonged and earnest labour, but by habit and preference indolent and a lover of his ease—they all present the same features in their portraits. He was a loyal friend, save when a nice sense of the respect due to his rank and character, provoked him to resentment against any fancied neglect; prudent and adroit in counsel, but perhaps lacking in the energy which was required to translate that counsel into action; steadfast, rather than alert, in vindicating the primary duty of sound finance. Clarendon is compelled to admit that "he was naturally lazy, and indulged over much ease to himself;" but he can tell us of the unwonted exertion of which Southampton showed himself capable during the treating at Uxbridge, when he worked continuously for twenty days on end, and curtailed his habitual ten hours of sleep to a maximum of five. His pride involved him in a passing quarrel with Prince Rupert, whose extravagant assertion of precedence provoked him, and whose challenge he accepted; but his sound judgment, and his well-tried rectitude were enough, after friends had interfered, to prevent the untoward meeting, and to bind him and the Prince in the bonds of an enduring friendship. Like Clarendon, a sound friend to the Church, he was, also like him, essentially a layman, not without distrust of the wisdom of political ecclesiastics. Because he was not disposed to underrate the force of the Presbyterian party, and was disinclined to provoke them to open revolt, the Bishops, according to Clarendon, were wont to impute to him disloyalty to the Church. Clarendon himself, confirmed enemy of Presbyterianism as he was, knew by experience on how flimsy grounds such charges might be brought. [Footnote: Pepys, in many lively passages, adds new touches to the portraiture of the Treasurer. On November 19, 1663, he is summoned to the Lord Treasurer's house, and finds him "a very ready man and certainly a brave subject to the King." Pepys is troubled only with the "long nails, which he lets grow upon a pretty short white hand." On September 9, 1665, he recounts the story of one of his gossips—how "the Lord Treasurer minds his ease, and lets things go how they will; if he can have his 8000 per annum, and a game at l'ombre, he is well." When the end comes, Pepys—while he admits that "the slowness and remissness of that great man" have done much harm—yet discerns that the prospect for the future is far gloomier by his loss. Even Coventry, when he was gone, could recall the Lord Treasurer whom he had so often thwarted as "a wise and solid though infirm man."]

Southampton was not one of those personalities that stand out strongly upon the page of history. Born to great station, he accepted and fulfilled its responsibilities; but he was without initiative, and without that secret of personal force which dominates a generation and leads a party. As in the case of many a Minister, before and since, it is to be feared that what his enemies said was true—that Sir Philip Warwick, his secretary, was Treasurer in all but name. Pepys tells us of his own long interviews with Warwick, and it is clear that it was at these interviews, and not at formal conferences with the Lord Treasurer, that the finance of the navy was arranged. He pictures [Footnote: Diary, April 12, 1665.] in a few graphic words, the scene at one of these formal conferences.

"Strange to see how they hold up their hands crying, What shall we do? Says my Lord Treasurer, 'Why, what means all this, Mr. Pepys? This is all true, you say; but what would you have me to do? I have given all I can for my life. Why will not people lend their money? Why will they not trust the King as well as Oliver?'"

It is true comedy. But the flux of Pepys's gossippy confidences is a hard ordeal even for a Minister so worthy as Southampton to pass. Perhaps Pepys also gives us the best picture of his death, quaintly as it is expressed. [Footnote: Diary, May 19, 1667.]

"Great talk of the good end that my Lord Treasurer made; closing his own eyes, and setting his mouth, and bidding adieu with the greatest content and freedom in the world, and is said to die with the cleanest hands that ever Lord Treasurer did."

It is no dishonourable epitaph. The career that closed left no brilliant mark, but in its tenor, as in its ending, it is typical of the grave and balanced dignity, the loyalty to his Church, to his sovereign, to himself, that were distinctive of that race of the English nobility who were now to give place to a newer fashion. For us, the closing of that career is chiefly interesting, as it revives in Clarendon the memory of that older order to which he was so passionately attached, and as it carried away one of the few remaining barriers between him and friendless isolation.

The question of the succession to Southampton gave new subject of difference between the Chancellor and the King. Charles was determined, as he had been when there was a talk of Southampton's resignation, to replace the Treasurership by Commissioners, and had been persuaded by the faction opposed to Clarendon no longer to have one Minister supreme in finance. Again Clarendon remonstrated, and urged that this was a scheme fitted for a republic, and incompatible with the principles of monarchy. It seemed to him one more symptom of the substitution of an official bureaucracy for personal rule. It is no reflection upon his sincerity to admit that, in this, as in many of the principles to which he so obstinately adhered in these later days, he was sometimes moved rather by prejudice than by sound reason. He knew the rottenness of the Court, and the little trust that was to be placed in those who had gained Charles's ear; and that knowledge blinded him to the fact that inveteracy in opposition to prevailing views was no safe or prudent policy for him at this juncture. Himself a man risen from the middle class, he nevertheless held that the natural custodians of the executive power were men who by hereditary rank, and by outstanding position, could acquire, if not the confidence, at least the implicit obedience, of the people. Long association with men of the highest rank, had imbued him with their feelings, and made him the champion of their privileges. Familiar with the ignoble wiles and stratagems which impelled political adventurers, he clung, like many a man before and since, to the habits and the prejudices of a lifetime, and refused to admit any change operating in the spirit of the age. Amongst the forces opposed to him, he still looked with special dislike upon the active and indomitable spirit of Sir William Coventry. Coventry's ability Clarendon was compelled to admit; but he gave him perhaps too little credit for energy and foresight, and for undoubted administrative efficiency. We need not take Coventry altogether at Clarendon's valuation. The two men were out of sympathy, and Coventry was far from sharing that ungrudging loyalty to King and Church which Clarendon reckoned as the test of a sound citizen. Coventry irritated that love of discipline which was the habit of Clarendon's life. He belonged to a new generation, and did not conceal his contempt for that careful attention to precedent which was to Clarendon a second nature. His advancement had seemed to Clarendon unduly rapid, and his impetuous self-assertion, both in Parliament and in the Privy Council, provoked Clarendon's ire. His one actuating motive, in Clarendon's eyes, was boundless ambition, and he saw him only as the confederate of those who thought to govern at once King and Parliament, by dexterous parliamentary management, and by grasping at the machinery of administration. Coventry's later life proved that he was no eager seeker after office. Only a few months after Clarendon's fall, he stoutly opposed the insolence of Buckingham, and felt the effects of royal displeasure when Buckingham had regained his hold on the facile disposition of the King. He lost all his appointments; and even though, after a short detention in the Tower, he recovered his freedom and gained the cordial support of a powerful body of friends, he refused to range himself with any party, and declined all suggestions that he should again take office. Of his personal ability, of the respect which he inspired in others than Clarendon, and of his administrative efficiency, we have abundant evidence from other authorities, including both Evelyn and Pepys. He professed himself, in confidential conversation with Pepys, as inspired by no personal prejudice against Clarendon or Southampton. Even the fullest confidence in Clarendon's rectitude cannot blind us to the fact that neither he nor the Treasurer was now in the full vigour of his prime, that more direct and personal supervision of the details of administration than they could give was needed to restore either efficiency or confidence, and that Coventry might honestly believe this. It is no reflection on the loyalty with which Clarendon clung to a thankless task, if we admit that it might have fared better with him had he recognized sooner that the accomplishment of that task, as he had conceived it, was now hopelessly impossible. The truth is that Clarendon's memory still turned to a time, not so distant, when the relinquishment of office by a Minister meant a permanent breach with the Sovereign, suspicion of treason, the downfall of his fortunes, and also the hazard of his life. The change brought about by government by party, in which a Minister might retire from office, and none the less continue to play a high and influential part in the political history of his country, was slowly but surely coming. Had Clarendon recognized it, there seems to have been nothing to prevent his retiring from office, and still continuing to exercise a potent influence in the counsels of the nation. But he found no precedent in history for such a course. Retirement to him meant defeat, disgrace, and ruin. It may be doubted whether his own dogged tenacity, brave and conscientious as it was, did not itself give his ultimate retirement that added meaning. In adhering to the service of the King, he perhaps forgot that loyalty may only be wasted on an unwilling object, and that satiety is a prolific breeder of ingratitude.

Before the storm broke, there was another Court scandal—for it is worthy of no higher name-that stirred the turbid political waters, and further complicated the difficulties of Clarendon's position. The Duke of Buckingham, that strange personality—half statesman, half buffoon—who occupied no inconsiderable part of the stage in Charles's Court, managed to embroil himself in some extraordinary escapade, or some more than usually freakish piece of mischief, which for once stirred the ordinarily phlegmatic temper of the King. To probe its details would serve no good purpose; if it did not originate in, it was no doubt aggravated by, one of those entanglements common to the life of the bagnio, which Charles's Court so faithfully reflected. Some wrangle as to the enjoyment of the facile charms of one of the royal mistresses, or the disputed paternity of some bastard, very probably was the origin of an ignoble quarrel which presently reached the dimensions of an affair of State, occupied the attention of the Privy Council for no inconsiderable period, and involved a charge of treason, formulated and then abandoned with the reckless frivolity of the comic stage. We shall probably not be far wrong in ascribing the beginning of the trouble to Lady Castlemaine, who found her hold upon the royal favour threatened by some ill-timed intrigue of Buckingham. A charge of treason was brought against Buckingham, who was known to have at his command a rascally band of bullies and charlatans, who disturbed the streets of London, and whose outrages were not kept outside the precincts even of the Court itself. An assortment of sorry evidence was brought before the Council, and Buckingham was shown to have trafficked with astrologers and cut-throats, whose designs seemed to have threatened even the life of the King. He had permitted them to address him in language which indicated that he had cherished ambitions of hair- brained folly, if not of treasonable insolence, and which flattered him with thoughts of his boundless influence with the mob. The matter was brought to Clarendon's knowledge by the King; but the Chancellor endeavoured as far as possible to hold aloof from the squalid inquiry, which was pushed forward chiefly by Arlington and his sworn ally, the Lady Castlemaine. A warrant was issued for Buckingham's apprehension; and when he withdrew from the Court, a proclamation was published that charged him with treason, and required his surrender. The sheriff's messenger that followed him to his retreat in the country was openly defied, and Buckingham managed for weeks to elude the clutches of the law. The dignity of justice was degraded, and the King's warrant was mocked, as long as Buckingham thought he might rely upon the weakness of the King, and his fears of Buckingham's being provoked to reprisals which might attach new scandal to the Court. While the warrant was out against him, the Duke was bold enough to resort to Clarendon, and to invoke his aid in securing for him an interview with the King, in which he was confident that he might allay the passing anger. Clarendon could only advise his surrender, and assure him that nothing would be allowed to interfere with the even-handed administration of justice. Clarendon refused to denounce to Buckingham those who were his enemies, and evidently had no desire to secure for himself, by so doing, the gratitude or the alliance of such a man. The Duke at length found that it was either necessary or safe to surrender himself; and, in the examination which ensued, he showed all his usual insolence, and his confidence in his hold over the King. He treated the evidence as worthless, and forced Charles himself to admit that some of the correspondence had its origin in Court intrigue. The quarrel with Lady Castlemaine was composed, and from being bitter enemies, she and the Duke became sworn allies, who joined forces in denouncing Clarendon, and found abettors in those who had lately been the Duke's accusers. A man of much less than Clarendon's pride and dignity might well have despised such intrigues; but events soon proved how fickle was the support upon which he could rely in trusting to the gratitude of the King. The incident, as lightly closed as it had been recklessly begun, resulted only in knitting more closely the designs of those who were relentlessly pursuing the object of ending his power and procuring his downfall. No scruples were likely to stay the hands of the sorry band of conspirators.



CHAPTER XXV

THE TRIUMPH OF FACTION

Just as peace had been cemented amongst his enemies, in preparation for a final attack, Clarendon was struck by a heavy blow of domestic bereavement. Throughout all the vicissitudes of his life, amidst the hardships of exile, and in the still heavier anxieties that surrounded his later years of seeming prosperity, Clarendon had ever found in his family a centre of affection, and a source of consolation—broken only for a season when his eldest daughter was raised, by her marriage with the Duke, to a position which Clarendon knew well involved danger, both for her and for himself. His wife had proved an affectionate helpmate, and it is to her credit that in these Court circles which jealousy had rendered vigilant of any trace of scandal, and keen to note any assumption of arrogance, the wife of the Chancellor provoked the attacks of no enemies, and managed to elude the wrangles and bickerings of the Palace. In the summer of 1667, after a brief illness, she who had been his life's companion was taken from him, when, deprived of all his early friends, he was most in need of the comfort of a loving heart. Belonging, by birth, to the higher grade of the squirearchy, Lady Clarendon had married in her own rank, with every promise of all the comfort and dignity of honoured station, and in the first years had enjoyed a rare felicity of happy wedded life. When the career of politics absorbed her husband, she submitted without murmur to the interruption of that happiness, and in after years, without repining, she accepted the burden of the breaking up of her home, long years of anxiety, and the trials and privations of exile. She carried her later elevation to high rank without pride or ostentation. She does not lose her right to our respect because she earned what the Greek historian pronounces to be woman's highest glory, the least noisy echo either of praise or blame. That helpmate he lost just at the moment when all the forces of factious bitterness, of meanness, and of ingratitude, were preparing to vent their venom upon him.

The loss fell upon one already sorely tried by long and painful illness, against which he fought with courageous manliness. He was well aware that the weight of ill-will was rapidly accumulating against him. He had opposed the summoning of Parliament for the purpose of securing supplies to meet the exigencies of the war, on the ground that such anticipation of the day fixed for the resumption of its business was illegal. The expedient he had contemplated was a temporary loan, and this had been easily twisted, by the perverseness of his enemies, into a suggestion of raising funds without the consent of Parliament, in order to maintain a standing army. His advice had been set aside, and Parliament had been summoned for July 25th. But peace had already been secured, and immediate supply was no longer necessary. The King prorogued Parliament on July 29th, but not before the House had passed a resolution against a standing army. This abrupt dismissal of Parliament, when its presence was no longer called for, inflamed the anger against Clarendon. Those who had hoped to find an opportunity of pressing home their attack upon him in Parliament were indignant at the loss of this opportunity. Even the moderate men desired an explanation, and wished to be relieved of suspicions that arbitrary taxation was once more to be attempted. Those who were scandalized by the proceedings of the Court were prepared to make their anger felt, and had no mind to be silenced. The country members had trooped to Westminster from all parts of England, when long journeys were no easy matter. They returned home in no pleasant humour, grudging at once the expense which they had borne, and the muzzling to which they were subjected; [Footnote: See Pepys' Diary, under July 29,1667.] and the murmuring all fell upon Clarendon's devoted head. It was just as it grew most threatening that his wife's death plunged him into mourning.

"Within a few days after his wife's death, the King vouchsafed to come to his house to condole with him, and used many gracious expressions to him." [Footnote: Life, iii. 282.] When Charles had a scheme on foot that was peculiarly shabby or selfish, he knew how to conceal his intention under a gracious manner. The limit of his patience to suffer Clarendon's scoldings, or of his power to resist the pressure of his boon companions, was nearly reached; but he could yet hope that a solution might be found that would save any vexatious upbraidings. Clarendon might surely be persuaded to retire, and the peace of the Court would not then be broken by these troublesome wranglings. Less than a fortnight afterwards, the Duke of York was made the bearer of an astounding message. The King, he told Clarendon, had asked after him, and had been told by the Duke that "he was the most disconsolate man he ever saw;" that not only was he grieved for the loss of his wife, but that he feared he had lost the favour of his master, who seemed of late to have "withdrawn his countenance from him." Charles had made an evasive answer; but on a later day he explained himself more fully to the Duke. He knew, he said, from sure information that the Chancellor was "very odious" to the Parliament, and that at its next meeting an impeachment would certainly be moved. "Not only had he opposed them in all those things upon which they had set their hearts, but he had proposed and advised their dissolution." For the good of his Majesty's service, and for his own preservation, it was imperatively necessary that he should deliver up the seal. He might choose himself what should be the manner of doing so—whether it should be done personally, or through an intermediary. The Duke did not deny the danger, but he lamented the resolution of the King.

Clarendon was profoundly astonished. That the plainness of his criticism and advice had come to irritate the King, and that a persistent plotting against his influence was on foot, could hardly have been news to him. Strong as were his reasons for distrusting Charles, he can hardly have failed to have measured the depths of his dissimulation, or to have realized his readiness to yield to pressure. But his confidence in his own rectitude made him bold. He refused to believe that the majority of the House distrusted him, or that his enemies had that commanding influence which they claimed in order to intimidate the King. He was confident that, be their malice what it might, the Parliament was not of their mind. In that belief he demanded to speak with the King, before he delivered up the seal. He could not, indeed, go to the King, as gout disabled him, and the usages of the day did not permit of his being seen abroad so soon after the death of his wife; but the Duke did not doubt that he could prevail with the King to do as he had often done before, and come to Clarendon House. That hope was not fulfilled; the King declined to visit Clarendon, but was prepared to see him at Whitehall.