Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon

English statesman

• Born: February 18, 1609
• Birthplace: Dinton, Wiltshire, England
• Died: December 9, 1674
• Place of death: Rouen, France

The adviser to two kings of England during the English Civil Wars, Clarendon laid the theoretical and the practical bases for the restoration of both the monarchy and traditional English society. He also wrote a masterpiece of historical literature, based on his experiences.

Early Life

Edward Hyde, the future first earl of Clarendon, was born February 18, 1609, the son of Henry Hyde of Dinton, Wiltshire, and his wife, Mary, daughter of Edward Langford of Trowbridge. His was a prosperous gentry family long established in Wiltshire and Cheshire. He was born a younger son but by young manhood had become his father’s heir through the deaths of his elder brothers.

Hyde attended Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and received a bachelor of arts degree in 1626. The previous year, he had become a member of Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court that formed the heart of English legal society, and he prepared for a career at the bar. He married twice, both times most advantageously. His first wife was Anne Ayliffe, a relative of the influential Villiers family, by which Hyde first attracted the notice of the late duke of Buckingham’s friend Charles I . On his first wife’s early death, Hyde married the daughter of Sir Francis Aylesbury, a master of requests, and thus strengthened his links to the court and to the legal profession.

In addition to these connections, Hyde’s uncle was Sir Nicholas Hyde, chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas, so the stage was set for his rapid advance. During his early years in London, however, Hyde was more interested in polite society and letters than in law or politics, and he was more intimate with figures such as Ben Jonson , John Selden, and especially Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland, than with his colleagues at the bar. Years later, Hyde singled out Falkland as one of the decisive influences in his life, and the effect of that early association can be seen in Hyde’s The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (wr. 1647-c. 1671, pb. 1702-1704) and his autobiography, The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon (pb. 1759). Starting about 1633-1634, though, Hyde began to apply himself with increasing seriousness to the law, and, aided by family, connections, the favor of Archbishop William Laud, and his outstanding natural abilities, he advanced rapidly. By 1640, Hyde was a leading lawyer in the capital.

Life’s Work

Hyde was elected to the Short Parliament in May, 1640, and, according to his own account, attempted to pursue a moderate and conciliatory course during that tumultuous session. He sat also in the Long Parliament in November, 1640, when his displeasure at the Crown’s manipulation of the legal system during Charles I’s period of personal rule led him at first to align himself with the anti-Royalist elements in the House of Commons.

In the House of Commons, Hyde specialized in the investigation of abuses in the legal system and was responsible for the virtual extinction of the Earl Marshal’s Court (the institution for arbitrating disputes over coats of arms). Hyde also investigated the councils of Wales and the north, key targets in Parliament’s attack on the Crown’s prerogative powers, and reviewed charges of judicial misconduct. He joined the anti-Royalist cause during the trial and impeachment of the first earl of Strafford and actually helped draft the articles of impeachment by which Strafford was convicted and executed. Hyde appears to have voted for Strafford’s execution in May, 1641. By mid-1641, Hyde was one of the most influential members of the Commons and appeared to be firmly allied with the radical wing.

Like many others, however, Hyde parted company with Parliamentary radicalism over the so-called Root and Branch Bill (1641), which called for the extinction of the episcopal system and the radical reconstruction of the Church of England. Hyde’s disaffection from the Royalist cause, it soon became clear, was specific, not general: He disapproved of the Crown’s policy toward the courts and the common law in the 1620’s and 1630’s, but he had no desire whatsoever to alter the established order in either church or state. Through skillful parliamentary and political maneuvering, Hyde managed to block the Root and Branch Bill, and by so doing he attracted the favorable notice of Charles I, who desperately needed trustworthy advice on parliamentary and legal issues.

Hyde’s alienation from the Parliamentary cause, which began when he blocked the Root and Branch Bill, was increased and then completed by Hyde’s response to two further measures: John Pym’s Irish policy would have severely curtailed the king’s military authority, and the Grand Remonstrance was, in effect, a comprehensive indictment of Stuart rule. By the fall of 1641, Hyde was firmly Royalist, though the full extent of his commitment to the king was necessarily and skillfully concealed from his colleagues in the Commons for the greater part of a year. Beginning by that fall, Hyde wrote most of Charles I’s public pronouncements on parliamentary and other public issues, and on at least one occasion the king went so far as to copy a draft proclamation by Hyde in his own hand in order to conceal the true author’s identity.

Hyde consistently recommended a cautious and circumspect policy to the king and never supported, or even knew in advance, of the king’s ill-fated plan to arrest five members of the House of Commons on January 4, 1642. Hyde was appalled by this blunder, which effectively lost for the king the City of London, but he rallied after the event and prepared the king’s official responses to the public outcry that followed. The royal family fled London on January 10, 1642; Hyde eventually left the capital and joined the king at York in June, 1642. Thereafter, he was regarded as a deadly enemy by Parliament and excluded from all proposals for amnesty.

Between 1642 and 1645, Hyde was one of Charles I’s most intimate and trusted advisers. In the Royalist councils, Hyde advocated a cautious and conservative policy, urging the king to represent himself as the defender of the common law, traditional usages, and ancient and approved practices and to embody “the old foundations in church and state.” Hyde argued, in effect, that in the rapidly worsening situation the king should stand firm, make no concessions, and wait for Parliament to discredit itself by radicalism and by innovation. With the king as the symbol of tradition and stability, Hyde said, the Royalist cause would ultimately triumph—as, indeed, it did, under Hyde’s supervision, though not until 1660. There were others in the king’s councils who thought Hyde’s policy passive, legalistic, and unrealistic and argued for vigorous military and political initiatives. Most prominent among the latter was the queen herself, Henrietta Maria , whose dislike of Hyde and resentment of his influence over Charles I, and later over Charles II as well, were fierce and unremitting.

Hyde entered the Privy Council in February, 1643, and the following month became chancellor of the exchequer; he was soon a member of the inner group of five that reviewed and discussed all matters before referral to the full Privy Council. As chancellor of the exchequer, Hyde was primarily responsible for financing the Royalist effort, for which he was obliged to maintain complex negotiations with institutions, such as Oxford University, and individuals in order to maintain even an inadequate flow of revenue. He continued to be responsible for all major Royalist policy statements and was the king’s principal strategist and negotiator in all dealings with the Scots and Parliament. The king repeatedly demonstrated his complete confidence in Hyde, though he continued to develop initiatives without Hyde’s knowledge (and did so with increasing frequency as the Royalist position worsened).

When the king’s fortunes began to deteriorate rapidly in early 1645, he sent Hyde to Bristol and gave him charge of the prince of Wales, the clearest possible sign of the royal confidence. Neither Hyde nor the prince ever saw Charles I again. When the Royalist cause collapsed in 1646, Hyde moved the prince to the Scilly Isles, then to Jersey, and finally, reluctantly, permitted his charge to rejoin his mother in France.

Hyde was retained by Charles II on his father’s death in 1649, though his influence was at first uncertain. Hyde strongly opposed the various military ventures against England that many around the young king proposed, and he was adamantly opposed to any form of negotiation or compromise with the Scots, now disillusioned with Cromwellian England. Yet Charles II decided at first on a bold and venturous policy. He made humiliating concessions to the Scots and with their help invaded England. At that point, Hyde withdrew to Spain on a mission for the better part of two years. When Charles II returned, chastened, to the Netherlands in 1651 after the debacle of the Battle of Worcester, however, he was rejoined by Hyde, whose influence was thenceforth paramount.

Hyde clearly perceived the unique role of Oliver Cromwell in the Commonwealth Protectorate regime and realized that the king’s turn would come after Cromwell had somehow been removed from the scene. Accordingly, Hyde strove consistently to keep the king free of all compromising entanglements and to represent him as a figure above faction. Thus, it was Hyde who developed the policy finally expressed in the Declaration of Breda, which paved the way for Charles II’s return to England. In particular, it was Hyde who devised the tactic of having the king, while in exile, defer all complex or potentially controversial questions to the decision of a free Parliament, thus at once deflecting danger and encouraging hope. When the king arrived at Dover in May, 1660, he came not as a conqueror or as the vindictive head of a faction, but as the traditionalist alternative to a discredited Commonwealth regime, as the symbol of conciliation, stability, and peace. In effect, after all the vicissitudes of war and exile, Hyde’s unheroic policies had triumphed at last.

Charles II named Hyde lord chancellor in January, 1658, and after the Restoration, he continued as the principal figure in the government. In 1661, he was created earl of Clarendon. In September, 1660, Hyde’s daughter Anne had married James, duke of York, younger brother and heir presumptive of Charles II, and in this manner Hyde eventually became grandfather of two queens of England, Mary II Stuart and Anne I.

Between 1660 and 1667, Clarendon’s influence extended to all branches of government. He was one of the crucial participants in the protracted negotiations about the eventual shape of the restored Church of England and in the end joined in the refusal to include Nonconformists in the reconstructed church; he generally supported the series of punitive measures against religious dissidents that came to be known as the Clarendon Code . In this, he was out of step with the king, who favored toleration, and Clarendon became a deeply hated figure among non-Anglicans.

Clarendon was also closely associated with the controversial Act of Indemnity, by which, by and large, only confiscated land was returned to Royalists and land conveyed in any other way, even as a result of punitive taxation under Cromwell, was secured to its new owners. Thus, many of the king’s most loyal and hard-pressed supporters lost heavily, and again, Clarendon was widely held responsible. Clarendon was also interested in the English colonies and began to organize bureaucratically the relationship between colonies, especially those in America.

Clarendon was clearly least successful in the conduct of foreign policy, as he was not very skilled in his dealings with France and the Netherlands. He was held to be primarily responsible for the unpopular sale of Dunkirk to France, and the magnificent residence Clarendon built for himself in London was popularly known as Dunkirk House, an allusion to alleged bribes. The Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-1667), which Clarendon had in fact opposed, was blamed on him, and its inept conduct increased opposition to him in the government and stirred up great animosity in the country at large. When Dutch ships were so bold as to sail up the Thames and burn English ships in the Medway, national anger focused on Clarendon.

Opposition mounted steadily, and it soon became clear that the beleaguered minister no longer had the confidence of the king. Charles II had grown tired of Clarendon’s tutelage, apparently saw in him a convenient whipping boy for the various failures of the regime, and abandoned him without a qualm, making it clear that he preferred Clarendon to flee rather than answer the charges against him. Clarendon fled to France in December, 1667, and spent the remainder of his life in exile. He later requested permission to return, but it does not appear that either his family or the king paid any attention. Clarendon spent these last years working on his The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, which he had begun in Jersey in 1647, and his autobiography. He suffered from rapidly worsening health, primarily gout, and died at Rouen on December 9, 1674. His body was returned to England for burial in Westminster Abbey.

The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, which Clarendon completed in exile, is a classic of historical writing. Admittedly, it has its faults: Clarendon included many documents and digressions that impede the flow of the narrative but that he thought necessary for a full explanation of events, and he attributed causation of the mighty events he had witnessed primarily to personal factors, rather than to the social and economic issues in favor today. Yet the work transcends these qualifications by its authority as the first-person account of a major participant and by the frequent magnificence of its prose. All profits from The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England were assigned to Oxford University, and Clarendon’s great-grandson left all of his other manuscripts to the university as well, the profits from which led to the building of the Clarendon Laboratory in 1868.

Significance

The first earl of Clarendon had, in effect, three careers: from 1641 to 1660, the adviser in adversity; from 1660 to 1667, the head of the Restoration government, second only to the king himself, with whom he became allied by marriage; and then from 1667 to 1674, the lonely exile, who filled up his time reviewing and writing about his previous busy life. The first and third careers were virtually unqualified successes. As adviser to Charles I and then to the prince of Wales, eventually Charles II, Hyde peaceably laid the foundations not only for the Restoration of the king himself but also for an entire traditional ruling class, without significant bloodshed. The peaceful Restoration of Charles, of the Anglican Church, of Parliament, and of the common law, all were attributable more to Hyde than to any other person. Though the years in exile were sad and weary for him, Clarendon used them to good purpose: His history of his own era is one of the classics of historical writing and is an invaluable source for the revolutionary era.

Only in his second career, as royal minister, did Clarendon falter. He failed to resolve the long-standing religious divisions in the country, although reconciliation might have been impossible for anyone at the time, and he bore the brunt of Royalist outrage over Restoration property settlements. He was, on the whole, one of those who made a great mark on seventeenth century English history, and he did it through means of peace and reconciliation.

Bibliography

Harris, Ronald W. Clarendon and the English Revolution. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983. Attempts to study Clarendon’s public life through his own writings, especially his history. Views Clarendon as the greatest Royalist statesman of the seventeenth century, but the sections dealing with Clarendon’s literary and intellectual contributions are the strongest.

Hicks, Philip Stephen. Neo-classical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. This analysis of English historical writing contains a chapter on Clarendon, whom the author describes as “the English Thucydides.”

Hyde, Edward, earl of Clarendon. The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641. Edited by W. Dunn Macray. 6 vols. 1888. Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. The standard edition of Hyde’s masterpiece.

Miller, George. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Boston: Twayne, 1983. A prominent attempt to reevaluate the traditional picture of Clarendon as a politician and to emphasize his contribution to revolutionary politics.

Ollard, Richard Lawrence. Clarendon and His Friends. New York: Atheneum, 1988. A biography of Clarendon, focusing on his relationships with Ben Jonson, Thomas Hobbes, and others.

Trevor-Roper, H. R. “Clarendon and the Practice of History.” In Milton and Clarendon: Two Papers in Seventeenth-Century English Historiography, by F. R. Fogle and H. R. Trevor-Roper. Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, 1965. A warm defense of Clarendon’s contribution to English historical literature, praising the high quality and accuracy of his historiography.

Wormald, B. H. Clarendon: Politics, Historiography, and Religion, 1640-1660. 1951. Reprint. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. An important work of reassessment.