his friends Hopton and Hyde viewed them-whether in Wales, or with the Prince in the West, or in the last cities of refuge, Scilly and Jersey. His view of his duty is the purest expression of the Royalist mind. He died, he said repeatedly before his execution in 1651, for obeying the fifth commandment. 'He had been born and bred under the government of a King whom he was bound in conscience to obey, under laws to which he had been always obedient, and in the bosom of a Church which he thought the best in the world.' He died, again, not only for God's truth, but 'for acting my duty to his servant, the King, whom He had placed here upon his terrestrial throne amongst us.' The people of England, he wrote to Cromwell, could never be manufactured into republicans. The people and the laws will always be alike. Are their laws monarchical? So will be the affections of the people. . . . The ancient constitutions and present laws of this Kingdom are my inheritance and birth-right: if any shall think to impose upon me that which is worse than death, which is the profane and dastardly parting from these laws, I will choose the less evil, which is death.' Revolution, says one of his fragmentary writings, must always be moral evil : 'know this, let the attempts to subvert established rules be successful or unsuccessful, historified they are as beacons and marks to avoid the rocks and sands that honour, duty, and conscience, indeed all the goods that human nature is fraughted with, would otherways shipwreck themselves upon.'

In this faith, and after a pipe of tobacco to compose himself, Lord Capel stoically walked on to the scaffold,' his hat cocked up', and died much after the manner of a stout Roman'. His heart, by his direction, was to be kept in a silver box till the King came back to his own, and Bishop Morley tells us how he saw the box,' with that generous and loyal heart in it', placed in the unworthy hands of King Charles II.1

Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.

It was in the hands of the Stuart kings that this great partymassing so much talent and devotion, and reaching back so far to the past-laid hearts, brains, and lives as offerings.

1 Lewis, ii. 126, 178, 252 et seq.; Clarendon, Bk. XI; Gardiner, C. and P. i. 12; Beaufort papers (Report XII, 9).

IV

THE CIVIL WAR AND THE EXILE

FORMED of such diverse elements and only just feeling its feet as a political body, it was no solid Royalist party which fought the Civil War and achieved the Restoration in any event, King Charles's tortuous mind dominated all policy till his death, and thereafter the contradictions into which he had plunged his supporters baffled them through ten years of exile.

The pilot that weathered the storm was Clarendon, who on this, as on other accounts, may be reckoned the most important single figure in the history of his party. More than any other one man, he brought to an end the reign of 'Thorough', replanted the monarchy on a more legal, if a more narrow, ✓ foundation, fixed the Anglican via media between the Catholic and the Puritan, and, finally, in a life of ceaseless political and literary construction, formed a canon of Tory doctrine which perished only with the author's granddaughter, Queen Anne.

By origin, as by outlook, he incarnated some perpetual elements in English conservatism. From his father, Henry Hyde, bred like him in Oxford and the Middle Temple and an obscure member of Elizabeth's last Parliaments, and from his mother, who had never left Wiltshire for London, he inherited those private virtues which were to be of such public importance. His family feeling was, like theirs, deep and lasting, and to this his letters to his wife, 'his dear little rogue', from Madrid in 1649-50 are sufficient testimony.1 His own sons continued the affections he so highly praised in an older generation; it was their father's example that the second Clarendon held up to Rochester in the dark days of 1686, and that Rochester in his dedications to the first edition of the History offered as guide and inspiration to the age of the 'Spectator'.

1 Bath, ii. 80 et seq.: indeed, I have no ambition but to be with thee, and to live and die with thee in any condition.'

Outside his family Hyde enjoyed, and indeed has done most to commemorate, as wide and brilliant a circle of friends | as that of which Fox was the life and Burke the prophet. In the twelve happy years before the war-' a time wherein those two unsociable adjuncts which Nerva was deified for uniting, imperium et libertas, were as well reconciled as is possible --he was the friend of many soon to be arrayed in rival armies; Selden, Maynard, and Whitelocke on one hand, on the other Sheldon, Falkland, Sidney Godolphin, and George Morley. If this shows the breadth of his private sympathies, his long correspondence with Ormonde and with Nicholas survives to prove his loyalty to political colleagues.

The friends of his youth were, it will have been noticed, usually men of an older generation, and Hyde, like the second Pitt, was never really young. In any case, it was from an older and an idealized England that a man of his temperament obtained his scheme of things. For all that I have yet seen', he wrote to his wife from exile, 'give me old England', 1 and it was the passion of his heart to restore to England the ideals he had learnt as a boy, from the Hydes who had served Queen Elizabeth. The aim of his friends, he wrote in 1646, had been to uphold the 'good old frame of government'; to keep Christmas with one's neighbours in the country is 'the good old fashion of England'. Their task, he told Parliament in 1660, was to restore the nation' to its old good manners, its old good humour, and its old good nature-good nature, a virtue so peculiar to you, that it can be translated into no other language, and hardly practised by any other people '.3 In early manhood the expression of a steady and legitimate conservatism, this temper turned in old age to unreasoning dislike of new faces or changed fashions. The picture which the old Chancellor, in his final exile, painted of Restoration England reminds one of Thucydides on Athens after the Plague, or the lament of the Piagnone Landucci for the lost age of Savonarola. Children asked not blessing of their parents; ... the daughters of noble and illustrious families bestowed

1 Bath, ii. 82.

"

• Hist. i. 430, 463.

⚫ Lister, ii. 59. Words, says the hard Bolingbroke, 'which I could never read without being moved and softened' (Works, ii. 33).

themselves upon the divines of the time, or other low and unequal matches; . . . there was a total decay, or rather a final expiration of all friendship.' 1

3

To such jeremiads had fallen 'the jolly temper after the old English fashion', which Evelyn applauded. One cannot wonder that King Charles II grew weary of those many lectures on the politics',2 and above all, perhaps, of the pressure put on him by the Chancellor to interview political personages at 8 in the morning, while Danby's bitter complaint that Clarendon would allow 'no vessel to swim without his hand at the rudder '4 illustrates the arrogance which was another cause of his fall. Yet even these faults had a reverse side, and no career in party history affords better proof than does Clarendon's of the political truth, that victory, even though it be temporary, goes to the man whose aim is single. In this lay his strength: that from 1641 to 1660 he pursued a single purpose, to restore the King and the Church on the old foundation of those admirable and incomparable laws of government' 5 bequeathed by Queen Elizabeth.

Both in private letters and in full-length historical argument, Hyde has clearly recorded the scheme of his ideal. The function of kings is a classis by itself'; 'God hath reserved them to be tried only within his own jurisdiction and before His own tribunal'. Yet is their power a trust from God; 'God hath trusted the King with a Kingdom rarely and admirably moulded and constituted '—it was 'to defend the laws and government established, against any innovation or invasion whatsoever' that arms were drawn. In this ancient frame of government the Church formed an integral part. As a good Royalist, Clarendon must say of the Puritan preachers that 'a minister of Christ's turning rebel against his prince' and his preaching rebellion to the people as the doctrine of Christ' was the sin against the Holy Ghost. As a constitutionalist, he must argue that the ecclesiastical and civil state was so wrought and interwoven together, and in truth so incorporated in each other, that like Hippocrates' twins they 1 Life (1827), i. 359, 361. 2 Burnet (Ranke, vi. 82). • Council Notes of Charles II and Clarendon (1896), p. 8. • Grey, i, 7 Nov. 1667. 5 Hist. iii. 302. • Ibid, ii 420. Hist. ii. 322.

C. S. P. ii. 326, 337.

8

cannot but laugh and cry together '.1 True, he never claims that episcopacy (or for that matter monarchy) is so iure divino 'that all other forms of government are concluded Antichristian', but yet it is as much fenced and secured by the laws, as Monarchy itself, and an entire part of the frame and constitution of the Kingdom '.2 And now we must follow the fate of this ideal, in the nineteen years from 1641, when it stood threatened but still the law, till 1660, when it returned in the blare and clashings of a legal triumph.

The negative and destructive work of the constitutional Royalists was done by August 1641. Till that date they had formed the right wing of a virtually unanimous Parliament; after that they became the left wing of a Royalist party. The most burning issue, that of religion, was at this date still undecided. The Commons, in the first week of September, published resolutions ordering the removal of altars, the cessation of bowing at the name of Jesus, and the encouragement of lectureships. The Lords retorted by commanding the performance of divine service' as it is appointed by the Acts of Parliament', and by the end of October Sir Edward Nicholas was circulating among the King's servants directions sent by Charles from Edinburgh, that he was' constant for the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England as it was established by Queen Elizabeth and my father' and resolved to 'live and die in the maintenance of it '.3

Not merely ecclesiastical lawlessness, but the whole course of events during October, in Scotland and in the Irish rebellion, brought to a head the question of sovereignty. It was a small thing, perhaps, that the Puritan Commons had to admit that their bare resolutions had no binding legality, but it was infinitely dangerous to them that a king who was ruled, as their fevered minds portrayed, by a junta of malignants, might soon dispose of an army of Highlanders, or be inevitably armed with an expeditionary force for Ireland. Hence the clear issue raised in the debates of the 28th October, the claim for the Parliamentary approval of ministers. It was on this day that Hyde and Falkland appeared definitely as champions, so C. S. P. ii. 308.

1 Ibid., i. 406.

Evelyn, Memoirs (Bray), ii, App. 37.

• Ibid., 43.