Clarendon, EDWARD HYDE, EARL OF, historian and statesman, was born 18th February 1608 at Dinton, near Salisbury, the third son of a Wiltshire squire. Destined for the church, he went up to Magdalen Hall in 1622; but the death of his elder brothers left him heir to the property, so in 1625 he quitted Oxford for the Middle Temple, of which his uncle, Sir Nicholas Hyde, the chief-justice, then was treasurer. Though he rose in his profession, he loved letters better than law; for his friends he chose such brilliant spirits as Falkland, Ben Jonson, and Chillingworth, and, in his own words, 'was never so proud, or thought himself so good a man, as when he was the worst in the company.' He married twice—in 1629, Ann, daughter of Sir George Ayliffe, whose death six months afterwards 'shook all the frame of his resolutions;' next, in 1632, Frances, daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, Master of Requests and of the Mint. She bore him four sons and two daughters; and with her, till her death in 1667, he 'lived very comfortably in the most uncomfortable times, and very joyfully in those times when matter of joy was administered.'
In 1640 he was returned for Wootton-Bassett to the Short Parliament, for Saltash to the Long; and up to the summer of 1641 he acted heartily with the popular party. Then he drew back. Enough, he deemed, had been done; a victorious oligarchy might prove more formidable than a humbled king; nor could he conceive 'a religion without bishops.' Charles's answer to the Grand Remonstrance was of Hyde's composing, so were most of the subsequent able manifestoes; and though in a midnight interview with the king he declined to take St John's post of solicitor-general, thenceforward, with Falkland and Colepeper, he formed a veritable privy-council. If only they had known everything, if only their advice had always been followed! but no, the attempted arrest of the five members had neither their privity nor their approval. Still, Hyde headed the royalist opposition in the Commons, till, in May 1642, he slipped away, and followed Charles into Yorkshire. He witnessed Edgehill; in 1643 was knighted, and made Chancellor of the Exchequer; in March 1645 attended the Prince of Wales to the west of England; and with him a twelvemonth later passed on to Scilly and Jersey. In Scilly, on 18th May 1646, he commenced his history; in Jersey he tarried two whole years. From November 1649 till March 1651 he was engaged in a fruitless embassy to Spain; next for nine years he filled the office of a 'Caleb Balderstone' in the needy, greedy, factious little court of Charles II., sometimes with 'neither clothes nor fire to preserve him from the sharpness of the season, and with not three sous in the world to buy a fagot.'
Charles had made him High Chancellor in 1658, and at the Restoration he was confirmed in that dignity, in November 1660 being created Baron Hyde, and in the following April Earl of Clarendon. To this period belongs the strangest episode in all his autobiography. In November 1659 his daughter Anne (1638-71), then lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Orange, had entered into a secret marriage-contract with the king's brother, James, Duke of York; and nine months later they were privately married at her father's house. He, on learning the news, if news indeed it was, burst into a passion of the coarsest invective against her—it were more charitable to suppose he was acting a part, not really less jealous for his daughter's honour than for the dignity of the royal house. Anyhow, people fancied that in Catherine of Braganza he purposely selected a barren bride for the king, that so his own daughter might some day come to the throne. Nor as chief minister was he otherwise popular. A bigoted churchman, a thorough Conservative, and always a lawyer, he would fain have restored things to the status quo of twenty years earlier. He loved a Papist little better than a sectary, so would have nought of Charles's toleration. He looked sourly on Charles's vices, yet stooped to impose Charles's mistress on Charles's queen. He could not satisfy the Cavaliers, who contrasted his opulence with their own broken fortunes; he did more than enough to irritate the Puritans. The sale of Dunkirk, the Dutch war, the very Plague and Great Fire, all heightened his unpopularity; and though in 1663 he weathered Lord Bristol's frivolous charges against him, in August 1667 he fell an easy unlamented victim to a court cabal. The great seal was taken from him; impeachment of high-treason followed; and on 29th November, at Charles's bidding, he quitted the kingdom for France. All but murdered at Evreux by some English scamen, at last the old man settled at Montpellier, where and at Moulins he spent nearly six tranquil years. Then moving to Rouen, he sent a last piteous entreaty that Charles would permit him to 'die in his own country and among his own children;' nay, at Rouen must he die, on 9th December 1674. No monument marks his grave in Westminster Abbey.
Men's estimates of Clarendon have varied widely. Southey calls him 'the wisest, most upright of statesmen;' George Brodie, 'a miserable sycophant and canting hypocrite.' The truth lies somewhere between the two verdicts, but Southey's is much the truer of the two. The failings and merits of the statesman are mirrored in his great History of the Rebellion in England (3 vols. 1704-7), with its supplement and continuation, more faulty and less valuable—the History of the Civil War in Ireland (1721), and the Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon (3 vols. 1759). An apology more than a history, a vindication of himself and of Charles I., it is not, does not profess to be, impartial; it suppresses the truth, where the truth seemed unfavourable; and it is grossly inaccurate—the result of a fallible memory. But, Mr Green notwithstanding, it does not 'by deliberate and malignant falsehood' pervert the whole action of Clarendon's adversaries; careless and ungenerous he might be, wilfully dishonest he was not. And what though his style be prolix and redundant, though it 'suffocate us by the length of its periods,' his splendid statefulness, his anecdotic talent, his development of motives, and, above all, his marvellous skill in portraiture (shown best in the character of his dear friend Falkland), have rendered the history a classic, imperishable where dry-as-dust chronicles have perished. The best and latest edition is that by W. Dunn Macray (6 vols. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1888). We have, besides, twenty-five essays by Clarendon, his Contemplations on the Psalms (begun in 1647, and finished, like the Life, during his second exile), several controversial writings, and 3 vols. of his State Papers (1767-86; calendared, 1872-76).
See Ranke's able analysis of the History; works cited under CHARLES I. and CHARLES II.; the Hon. Agar-Ellis's Historical Inquiry respecting the Character of Clarendon (1827); Lady Theresa Lewis's Lives of the Friends and Contemporaries of Clarendon (3 vols. 1852); two articles by Mr Peter Bayne in the Contemporary Review (1876); and the Life of Clarendon, by T. H. Lister (3 vols. 1838).