The Restoration
In the memoir he wrote around ten years after the Restoration, the earl of Clarendon surveyed the court at the moment of the king’s return to England in 1660. At that time he (then Sir Edward Hyde, lord chancellor since 1658 as well as chancellor of the exchequer) was ‘highest in place, and thought to be so in trust, because he was most in private with the king, had managed most of the secret correspondence in England, and all despatches of importance had passed through his hands.’
Envy was undoubtedly one element in the irritation that many of his contemporaries felt in his prominence, but Hyde’s determined struggle against Catholics, Scots, Presbyterians and others whom he regarded as false friends in the struggle to return the king to his dominions, the self-confidence and the sharpness with which he dismissed those who disagreed with him, as well as the constant factional tensions of the royal court of the Interregnum had left him with a trail of enemies. Many of those he knew about were closely attached either to the retinue of the queen mother (he continued to be intensely suspicious of her key adviser, Henry Jermyn, earl of St Albans) or that of the king’s brother, James Stuart, duke of York.
During April and May 1660 Hyde’s allies and agents – Allen Apsley‡, Allen Broderick‡, Henry Coventry‡, John Mordaunt, Viscount Mordaunt and others – kept a watchful eye on potential threats as the Convention Parliament assembled: they probed the attitudes of Monck’s adviser Dr Clarges and the formidable presbyterian politician Denzil Holles, later Baron Holles, though also clearer supporters of the court including George Villers, 2nd duke of Buckingham (whom Apsley concluded ‘will quite depart from any ill endeavours against you’) and Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford (disgruntled ‘because of the slights put upon him in the House of Lords in which Hyde was concerned’).
Hyde listed the central figures of the council and his political allies at the Restoration as Ormond, John Colepeper, Baron Colepeper and Sir Edward Nicholas‡, the secretary of state.
The Convention Parliament and the York affair
Hyde’s position as the fulcrum of the king’s administration in exile would translate naturally into a role as effective chief minister of the royal government as soon as the king landed, with Hyde in attendance, at Dover on 25 May. Hyde referred to a small group – involving Southampton, Ormond, Albemarle and the secretaries of state – as the ‘secret committee… which under the notion of foreign affairs, were appointed by the king to consult all his affairs before they came to a public debate’. It was often referred to by others as the ‘junto’.
Clarendon wrote that he ‘took his place in the House of Peers with a general acceptation and respect’.
After Bridgeman’s first occasion on the woolsack, the chancellor was absent for the following eight sitting days (14 to 21 June). He was present on 22 June to hear the reference back to chancery of petitioner Edmund Veale, and was then for the most part present until the middle of July (although for a few days, while Hyde is not listed in the presence list, there is no notice in the journals indicating that Bridgeman had taken over). He was present for most of the debates in committee of the whole House on the indemnity bill in early August (except 6 and 7 Aug.), and continued to represent the House at conferences with the Commons, many of them on the three cornerstone bills on indemnity, disbanding the army and confirming ministers in their livings (31 July, 9 Aug., 13 Aug., 15 Aug., 20, 21, 22, 25 Aug., 1, 8, 11 Sept.) and to convey messages to and from the king (3, 31 Aug., 3, 6, 8 Sept.). In total he was present for around 75 per cent of sitting days in the first session of the Convention.
Clarendon’s key objective for the session was the passage of the bill of indemnity. He wrote later in his memoir of the criticism he had received for his insistence on its passage with few exceptions: the indemnity, he argued, was the price for the successful disbandment of the army.
Outside Parliament, negotiating the new regime’s relationship with foreign powers was the preoccupation of the late summer and early autumn. Negotiations focused on the question of a marriage alliance for the king. French and Catholic concern about the chancellor’s attitudes to them combined with long-standing court intrigues to produce a crisis that threatened the chancellor’s position, and perhaps more. Intensely suspicious of Cardinal Mazarin, Hyde regarded as a deliberate insult his decision to reappoint Antoine de Bordeaux-Neufville, an influential envoy to the court of the lord protector, as ambassador to the king.
Hyde’s own memoir suggests that the liaison was well known at court to all except himself, and had been encouraged by the associates of the duke of York, particularly by John Berkeley, Baron Berkeley of Stratton, York’s former governor and factotum of his household, as a way of damaging the chancellor himself. According to this account, Hyde’s reaction to the news was one of extreme distress. Regarding the affair as a threat to his position, he claimed to have proposed that she be tried for treason, and tried to prevent her from seeing the duke, which the duke and she easily subverted. The king took a more level-headed view, while time, and the chancellor’s understanding that the marriage was genuine, overcame his initial horror.
However, the arrival at court of the Princess Royal (she arrived at Whitehall from France on 25 Sept.) together with a letter to York from the queen, brought about a change in the duke’s attitude to his daughter, Hyde believed. Bartet described the rumours emanating from the Queen’s circle both in France and in England that Anne Hyde had had affairs with a number of men including Sir Charles Berkeley, later earl of Falmouth, and Henry Jermyn, later Baron Dover and 3rd Baron Jermyn (the earl of St Albans’ nephew, master of the horse to the duke of York).
The meeting in Worcester House that day was the culmination of the negotiations between the Presbyterian and Church of England divines on a church settlement, attended by the king, with Hyde leading the discussion on the draft of a royal declaration on ecclesiastical affairs. The accounts of this meeting by participants Richard Baxter, George Morley and Hyde himself convey different impressions of the tone and focus of the negotiations. Baxter was particularly suspicious of a proposal for the toleration of other groups, which he said arose from the petitions of Independents and Anabaptists, but he suspected as intended to favour Catholics. Much has been read into the delegation to two laymen present, Denzil Holles and Arthur Annesley, Viscount Valentia [I], later earl of Anglesey, both inclined to Presbyterianism, to act as arbiters of the points at issue following the departure of Hyde and the king. The declaration published on 25 Oct. surprised Baxter and others in its acceptance of many Presbyterian concerns with the original draft. After the publication of the Declaration, Baxter visited Hyde, who tried to persuade him to accept a bishopric; Baxter turned it down, writing to him on 1 Nov. to explain why.
On the same day as the issue of the declaration, 25 Oct., the duke of York and the Princess Royal left London to escort the queen to the capital.
[The king] goes every morning to the chancellor. [Hyde] praises his own capacity and conduct with affectation, even to us. M. d’Aubigny told [Bartet] that he heard from the king’s mouth that the chancellor had foretold to him his Restoration a thousand times, by the same ways that it came about, excepting the death of Cromwell... it is still true that [Hyde] is deeply rooted in [the king’s] heart and mind, and that he keeps himself there by continuous work, and by the intelligence he has of the internal affairs of the three kingdoms.
Ibid. 11-18.
At the beginning of November, the consensus seemed to be that the king was content for the marriage to stand, and would be very reluctant for Parliament to get involved in an issue so close to the royal power.
By the time the Convention resumed on 6 Nov., with the issue still undecided, Hyde had already become Baron Hyde of Hindon, the honour sending a clear signal to Hyde’s enemies of the king’s favour (Hyde nevertheless claimed to have turned down the garter when that was offered to him).
Such firmness on the king’s part indicated that those hostile to the marriage would find it very difficult to overturn. Bartet reported on the 8th talk about St Albans’ proposal of a commission to determine its validity, but also that he had begun to recognize defeat.
The message seems to have got through, albeit slowly: on 22 Nov. Bartet reported a more hopeful meeting between the queen and Hyde.
While all this was going on, the chancellor was probably present every day of the autumn session of the Convention (he was not listed on 20 Nov., although it is not indicated that Bridgeman was present either). The bill uniting England’s interregnum conquests, Dunkirk and Jamaica, to the crown was one theme of the second session of the convention, possibly intended by the government as an instrument of its policy in relation to France and Spain. (The Comte de Soissons noted a remark that month by Hyde – perhaps a hint – that Dunkirk and Jamaica were very expensive to maintain and unproductive.)
Hyde continued to act as a conduit to the king (19, 21, 22 Nov.) and to the lord chief justice (26 Nov.). He was one of the 26 peers who protested on 13 Dec. at the passage of the bill to vacate the fines unduly procured to be levied by Sir Edward Powell and Dame Mary his wife.
The mood of Hyde’s speech seems to have entered the court as well, with the queen gently persuaded into a more helpful attitude to the chancellor, despite some difficulties in arranging a meeting which would serve as a formal reconciliation.
The end of the affair removed an obstacle to Anglo-French relations, also facilitated by the death of Mazarin, of whom Hyde was highly suspicious, in March 1661, and made it easier to negotiate the king’s marriage to the Portuguese infanta. Hyde claimed in his memoir that the initiative for the alliance had come from the Portuguese themselves, and that he would have preferred a Protestant, but the king’s enthusiasm had given him no opportunity to oppose the idea. He, Southampton, Ormond, Manchester and Secretary Nicholas were appointed to confer on the subject at Worcester House.
The Clarendon regime
Pepys witnessed Hyde being created earl of Clarendon in the Banqueting House on the day of the coronation, 20 April.
Despite this, Clarendon seemed positively to reject opportunities to consolidate his power using patronage. In his autobiographical writings, Clarendon claimed to be shocked by the barely disguised determination of courtiers to pursue grants and favours from the king.
Clarendon insisted that he himself took nothing other than the legitimate perquisites of his office (which were considerable) and ‘presents that could not be refused without affectation’.
The provision for Clarendon of a grant from Ireland seems to have been originally proposed by John Clotworthy, Viscount Masserene [I] in May 1661. Clarendon was made a formal grant in April 1662 of part of the Leinster portion of the half year’s profit being paid by the adventurers and soldiers of their lands in Ireland under the king’s declaration on Irish affairs of 30 Nov. 1660.
Despite the claim that Hyde made a poor patron, there were plenty of people who counted themselves as his clients – Edward Montagu, earl of Sandwich, told Pepys in 1663 that the chancellor was ‘his most sure friend and to have been his greatest’ – and there are numerous instances of him recommending individuals for office or favour, especially in the correspondence of the duke of Ormond.
Despite his profession to want to concern himself only in the business of the chancellorship, his involvement in most government business meant constant work: Clarendon wrote to Ormond in May 1664 that:
since I have been able to go out of the doors, I have been upon very hard duties, between Westm. Hall, the Parliament and the Council and it was this day, after 4 of the clock before we rose out of the House, so that if I had more to write, I should hardly recollect my self, being absolutely dazed.
Bodl. Carte 33, f. 389.
Pepys described going to see the chancellor at Worcester House in August 1660 at a sealing-day held in his great hall, ‘where wonderful how much company there was to expect him at a seal’.
The affairs of Ireland, in particular the Irish land settlement, were a preoccupation for much of the time, taking up many meetings in London and the bulk of a voluminous correspondence with Ormond. Scotland he was less concerned with, though John Middleton, earl of Middleton [S], appointed lord commissioner in 1660, was considered a close ally, and Lauderdale at least a potential enemy, though despite their very vigorous disagreement in the 1650s, Clarendon wrote to Middleton at the end of March 1661 that since the Restoration he and Lauderdale had ‘lived very civilly together’ and neither had interfered in the affairs of the other’s country. He explained that he could not interfere in Scottish business without involving Lauderdale.
Parliament was often at the centre of Clarendon’s activity. He had become a significant politician in 1640-42 largely because of his effectiveness in the House of Commons. He described his practice in parliamentary management in his Life. Up to 1663 the king left parliamentary business to Southampton and Clarendon,
who had every day conference with some select persons of the House of Commons, who had always served the king, and upon that account had great interest in that assembly, and in regard of the experience they had and their good parts were hearkened to with reverence. And with those they consulted in what method to proceed in disposing the House, sometimes to propose, sometimes to consent to what should be most necessary for the public; and by them to assign parts to other men, whom they found disposed and willing to concur in what was to be desired: and all this without any noise, or bringing many together to design, which ever was and ever will be ingrateful to parliaments, and, however it may succeed for a little time, will in the end be attended with prejudice.
Clarendon, Life (1857), i. 609.
Sir Hugh Pollard‡, the comptroller of the household, was one of the key figures concerned. The arrangements were disturbed after the appointment of Sir Henry Bennet, (later earl of Arlington) as secretary of state in late 1662, when, according to Clarendon, he, along with his friend William Coventry, began to build up his own parliamentary following, using patronage more explicitly to encourage members to serve the king.
Clarendon’s parliamentary management might have seemed over-cautious: he seemed to deprecate the numbers of courtiers who had become members of the Commons by 1663, and while he certainly was closely involved in the business of ensuring the election of key candidates – he was responsible for getting Bennet elected at Callington in 1661, for instance – he did not necessarily have the court in mind when he did so.
Clarendon was presumably able to manage the Lords in a much more personal way. An obvious ally was Sheldon, to whom he wrote in advance of the Oxford session of Parliament in 1665, asking him to ensure that a third of the bishops attend.
Clarendon’s position involved him in endless minor issues. Many of them concerned relationships between members of the peerage, and included the delicate negotiations between the earl and countess of Pembroke over their disharmonious marriage, or sorting out a dispute between Marmaduke Langdale, 2nd Baron Langdale and Algernon Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland over sewers in 1665.
His most difficult problem, though, as with all of Charles II’s ministers, was the management of the king: Matthew Wren‡ told Pepys a year after fall of Clarendon that ‘there is no way to rule the King but by briskness, which the Duke of Buckingham hath above all men.’
The first session of the Cavalier Parliament, 1661-2
The new earl of Clarendon spoke at the opening of the Cavalier Parliament on 8 May, and responded to the Speaker’s speech two days later. On 11 May he was introduced in the Lords in his new title, between Ormond and the Northumberland. On 20 May he read out a letter sent to the king from the Parliament of Scotland requesting the removal of the English army based in the northern kingdom.
Clarendon was widely blamed for ensuring the failure on the discussions of Catholic relief in July 1661. A Lords committee was appointed in June to consider the repeal of some anti-catholic legislation, and heads for a draft bill were sent to the attorney general for drafting; the bill, though, was never brought into the House. William Howard, Viscount Stafford, at his trial nearly twenty years later, strongly asserted that Clarendon was responsible.
Clarendon did not return to the House before the adjournment on 30 July, when the king responded himself to the speech of the Speaker of the House of Commons. By then, the court was deep in international negotiations. D’Estrades’ instructions assumed Clarendon was pro-Spanish, but the two soon established a good relationship. His despatch of 15 July took it as read that Clarendon and Bristol, now returned from Italy, were now enemies, and the determination of the latter to overthrow Clarendon as the dominant figure in government now became the standard theme of court gossip.
Negotiations with the French moved on from the Portuguese marriage to other matters in the later summer, though Louis XIV tried to avoid D’Estrades getting drawn into a negotiation by the chancellor, and attempted to reserve substantive discussions on his side of the channel, and became outraged by Clarendon’s negotiating positions.
Clarendon was absent when Parliament reassembled on 20 Nov.; indeed he was absent from the House continuously until 19 Dec. when he returned to inform it about intelligence of a planned uprising. He was one of the committee of 13 peers to meet as a joint committee with the Commons to consider the issue over the Christmas adjournment, with the first meeting taking place at the lord chancellor’s lodgings in Whitehall. On the first day after the recess, 7 Jan. 1662, the chancellor reported back that the committee had met several times, though as a result of ‘some imaginary jealousies abroad of the end and intent of this Committee’s meeting’, it had decided to remit the issue back to the hands of both Houses. Thereafter Clarendon was present every day the House sat except for 22 Mar. until 3 May: he missed almost all of the last two weeks of the session. The result was an overall attendance for the second part of the 1661-2 session of 69 per cent.
The plan to revive the council of the North, about which the king and Clarendon had exchanged notes on 20 Dec., may have been linked to concern about a possible rebellion.
During early February Clarendon was reporter on the conferences on the bills for the attainted persons (3 Feb.) and the bill for confirming three acts of the Convention, critically the act confirming ministers, drastically altered by the commons, which would have resulted in wholesale ejections of Presbyterian ministers (4 February). Clarendon made strenuous efforts among peers to moderate the bill (Sir William Morrice‡ reported him speaking ‘very rationally and pathetically’ against it, causing irritation in ‘some warm spirits’).
Clarendon was one of the 25 peers listed in the Journal who signed the protest against it the passage of the bill for restoring Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby to his lands on 6 February. He presided when the attainted judges of Charles I appeared before the House (7 Feb.), managed or reported conferences on the bill against Quakers (19 Feb., 1 Mar.), and conveyed messages from the king about the Book of Common Prayer (23 February). The Book had been accepted by the council on 21 Feb., following minor alterations, probably with the support of Clarendon, Southampton and Bishop Morley, and perhaps against the opposition of York and Sheldon (according to York), designed to make it more acceptable to Presbyterians.
The addition by the committee on the uniformity bill of most of the amendments made by the Commons to the ministers act was a huge blow to Clarendon’s carefully studied strategy of moderation.The bill was reported to the House on 13 Mar.; there followed a series of debates which brought to a head the tensions over both that issue and the power struggle at court. On 17 Mar. after the House formally agreed to incorporate the new Book of Common Prayer into the bill of uniformity, the chancellor brought forward a proviso with the king’s recommendation: it would allow the king to dispense with the requirement of wearing the surplice and signing with the cross in baptism. On the following day the earl of Bristol caused a sensation by claiming firstly that the recommendation of a proviso from the king was a breach of privilege, and second that, despite the recommendation, the king was ignorant of it and it did not accord with the king’s own views. Bristol’s motion to enter a salvo in the journal saving the privilege of the House was rejected, and his claim about the king’s view contradicted by Ormond and York. Clarendon, according to Sir William Morrice, responded to Bristol with ‘great moderation’, saying ‘that the earl reminded not his religion nor what the laws enacted concerning the resort of those of his profession to the king, and in prudence he ought to have concealed what intercourse he had with his majesty’; Bristol furiously asserted his rights of access to the king ‘whom he had served so faithfully, and the flame rose high and some fuelled it on either side, but few on the earl’s’.
Clarendon was one of those managing conferences with the Commons on 10, 24 and 30 April concerning the uniformity bill and the bill for paving the streets of Westminster. Taken ill on 2 May, apart from an appearance on 14 May, he did not preside again for the rest of the session. (He was said to be still ‘much in disorder’ at the death of Cornbury’s wife, Theodosia, daughter of Arthur Capell†, Baron Capell of Hadham, of smallpox, during March)
The new queen finally landed at Portsmouth on 14 May. Last minute difficulties about the form of the marriage ceremony were reported to Clarendon by frustrated and sleepless envoys Portland and Sheldon.
The affair was occupying the court at the same time as the prospect of the Act of Uniformity coming into effect was beginning to unnerve ministers. Clarendon received a petition from Presbyterian ministers asking for ‘a connivance or grace of toleration’ before 2 June.
Also in August and September discussions were continuing with the Dutch over a Treaty (concluded in September), and with the French over the sale of Dunkirk. The French envoy D’Estrades was in England in July (en route to The Hague) to conclude a treaty – the Abbé Montagu told his successor the following year that he thought that Clarendon had been able to manipulate D’Estrades, though many subsequently thought that it had been the other way around.
Certainly the coalition of court forces against Clarendon was mobilizing again in autumn 1662. The appointment of Lord Hollis to be ambassador to France, rather than Sir Henry Bennet, had been interpreted as a success for Clarendon and for France.
With the Scottish billeting controversy in September, in which his ally Middleton had sought to exclude from power former covenanters including Lauderdale, Clarendon was plainly aware of pressure on him in the autumn and early winter. Already on 24 Dec. Pepys was hearing about a potential charge against ‘some great man’ when Parliament met, which he took to mean the chancellor.
The Indulgence and the Bristol affair, 1663-4
The brewing conflict between the two ministers came to a head over the Declaration of Indulgence. Published the day after Christmas 1662, it was prepared by Bennet, and declared an intention to bring forward a bill in the next session of parliament to clarify the king’s power of dispensation with the ecclesiastical laws, as well as to attempt to secure relief for loyal catholics.
Clarendon’s objections, recorded in his Life, were to the bill to give effect to the Declaration, rather than to the Declaration itself. Clarendon referred to a reading of the bill at Worcester House, attended by Lord Robartes and Lord Ashley, its principal drafters.
The speech caused Clarendon the worst crisis of his chancellorship so far, deeply offending the king.
Between April and June there was a huge tussle for power at court. Comminges reported on 30 Mar. that the queen mother had been displaying her dislike of the chancellor, but that the earl of St Albans had now ‘brought all the interests together’, and the duke of York had been demonstrating their determined support for Clarendon.
Pepys was wrong. Instead, at the end of May strenuous efforts seem to have been made by the king to effect a reconciliation between the two key figures, Clarendon and Bennet.
Cut out of the deal, Bristol reacted with his customary impetuosity. He mounted (or continued, now more exposed) a concerted campaign in the Commons to obstruct royal business while he tried to approach the king with an offer to manage the Commons and made efforts to prepare charges against Clarendon.
There being little time left before the end of the session (the chancellor had already conveyed the king’s proposal for a recess on 2 July), Bristol, it was said, planned to do so the following day, but was prevented by the chancellor’s prompt adjournment of the House. On Thursday 9th he was in the House of Lords, talking to other peers (as was, on the other side, the duke of York), and on the 10th he came to the House early. According to one account the chancellor attempted to prevent him from speaking by introducing other business, but Bristol nevertheless succeeded in doing so, introducing his impeachment articles against Clarendon.
The debate on Bristol’s articles began with a short vindication of himself by Clarendon and a vigorous denunciation of Bristol by the duke of York; the earl of Southampton successfully proposed a commitment of the articles to the judges, for an opinion on whether they amounted to treason. At court the charges were said to be ridiculous, and more dangerous for Bristol than for the chancellor; the queen mother was said to have tried very hard to prevent Bristol taking his action.
On Monday 13 July the Lords heard a message from the king, delivered by the chancellor himself, stating that many of Bristol’s allegations were untrue, and indicating that he regarded them as ‘a libel against his person and government’. The judges’ opinion was delivered on the same day. Bristol (opposed, unsuccessfully by Southampton) called for the judges to provide their reasons, and asked for time to summon witnesses from Ireland and Scotland.
The tactics of dealing with Bristol seem to have been the subject of continuing controversy at court, and the decision to let the issue continue until the next session may have been the result of poor communication.
At the end of the session, Bristol vanished, evading a warrant out for his arrest, and amid much speculation that he planned a dramatic appearance at the beginning of the next session.
1664-5: the aftermath of the Bristol affair
Back in London in October Clarendon was again laid up with the gout, dealing with chancery business from his home. Isolated from the court, he was prone to suspicions about business being done behind his back at the beginning of November. The complexities of the Irish settlement occupied a good deal of the autumn.
Despite Bristol’s disappearance, tension at the court remained high. The French ambassador in his despatch of 25 Jan. reported a provocative reappearance of the earl of Bristol at his house in Wimbledon, and a farcical encounter in which John Belasyse, Baron Belasyse, visiting the chancellor, was mistaken by a servant for the earl and seized.
A newsletter noticed Clarendon’s first appearance out of doors for 14 weeks on 29 Feb., though he paid for it the following day.
Clarendon was still not well enough to attend the House at the beginning of the spring 1664 session (and overall attended 52 per cent of sittings), and so was not there during Bristol’s attempt to petition the king and the House. Nevertheless, he was intimately involved in the decisions made by the government on the affair. Lord Anglesey, the recipient of one of Bristol’s approaches assured Ormond on 19 Mar. that he was not ‘likely to hazard my lord chancellor’s friendship for my Lord Bristol’s compliment’, ‘though perhaps when all’s done’, he added, ‘I should rather have advised the open calling for my Lord Bristol to justice in parliament than to take the course that is now held.’
Clarendon was still absent from the House on 21 Mar. (with his cousin, the recently elevated lord chief justice Sir Robert Hyde presiding as speaker in his absence) when the countess of Bristol brought her husband’s petition to the House. The duke of York, backed by the earl of Southampton ensured in a debate the following day that the petition was not read, but directed straight to the king.
The opening of the Dutch War, 1664-66
The influence of Bristol’s charges, though, was visible in the fact that in early 1665 the new building was being referred to as ‘New Dunkirk’.
Clarendon himself was not present at the beginning of the winter 1664-5 session: the narrative of dealings with the Dutch given at the opening of Parliament on 24 Nov. was read on the king’s behalf, instead of being a presentation by the chancellor, though it was drafted by him, or under his direction.
Despite the success of the 1664-65 session, the preparations for the war and Clarendon’s continuing illness may have helped to erode his central position in the administration, in particular over attracting the support of members of the House of Commons. (William Brouncker, 2nd Viscount Brouncker [I], told Pepys in mid-December 1666 that the ‘it is the chancellors interest… to bring peace again, for in peace he can do all and command all; but in war he cannot, because he understands not the nature of the war’.
French ambassadors arrived in mid-April in an attempt to mediate between England and the republic. They felt that they were negotiating between Arlington, Lauderdale and Ashley, all advocates of war, on the one hand, and Clarendon on the other. By late June they thought the chancellor was losing his grip on the discussions: Ormond and Southampton were still very much on his side ‘but that he would rather let the war go on than admit to these two gentlemen that he needed their voices to bring the king his master to any resolution’.
The final negotiations before the outbreak of the war at sea in the summer of 1665 coincided with Clarendon’s negotiations with the earl of Burlington for marriage of his second son, Laurence Hyde, to the earl’s daughter Henrietta. The subject seems to have been first broached by the duchess of York to the countess of Burlington in Mar. 1665. The chancellor seems to have found it difficult to supply the expectations required for his second son, and the match had to be vigorously supported by the duke of York, and even the king himself, who promised that Laurence Hyde would receive preferment.
Shortly after this, the plague caused the court to move out of London. When Clarendon wrote to Sandwich on 26 July from Twickenham, he was expecting shortly to go to Salisbury, where the court had fled.
Clarendon was present at the opening of the Oxford session on 9 Oct., and delivered a speech on the following day, but for the last eleven days of the short session he failed to attend (he was present for just a 26 per cent of the total number of sittings). The court secured its supply bill very quickly, although there was considerable controversy within it over the proposal of Sir George Downing‡ for a new system of government borrowing, incorporated within the bill much to the regret of Clarendon and Southampton, and also, to Clarendon’s surprise, of Lord Ashley. Clarendon had interpreted the origins of the proposal, or at least the support for it from William Coventry and Arlington, as an attempt to replace Southampton as treasurer; his own anger at Downing for proposing it produced, in Clarendon’s own account, some annoyance in the king, the incident offering more encouragement to his enemies.
Despite success with the supply bill, the government were dismayed to encounter pressure for a total ban on the importation of Irish Cattle.
Well enough to preside as lord high steward at the trial of Lord Morley in Westminster Hall on 30 Apr., the chancellor’s speech on the occasion congratulated the peers ‘for being restored to that high and invaluable part of your privilege, birthright, that no person of your own rank how great an offender soever shall be tried but before your selves’. He warned them not to give way to compassion or to ‘indignation to see a nobleman stoop to mean and sordid actions at which nobility blushes and hides its face to see a great lord unpeer himself’.
Clarendon had moved to Berkshire House, opposite St James’s Palace and recently vacated by the French ambassadors, by October 1666, where Burlington found him on his arrival from Ireland. The move was explained as avoiding the damp of the river, but may also have been in preparation for the completion and occupation of Clarendon House, a short distance away on Piccadilly, or to get further away from the danger and devastation caused by the Fire of London in the first week of September.
The session of 1666-7
The move to Berkshire House may have improved Clarendon’s health, for the chancellor was present to preside at the beginning on 18 Sept. of the autumn/winter session 1666-7, missing only six days’ business before Christmas, and therefore present at the debates on the Irish cattle and public accounts bills and the inquiry into the Canary Company, while the government desperately sought to obtain a grant of supply to carry on the war. A month into the session, Pepys attended a meeting of the Tangier committee of the council, on 13 Oct., from which he came away ‘mad in love with my lord chancellor, for he doth comprehend and speak as well, and with the greatest easiness and authority, that ever I saw man in my life’.
The Irish cattle bill came to the Lords on 16 Oct., and took up many hours of debate in committee of the whole House in the last two weeks of October, reaching a climax after a break on 8, 9 and 10 November. Clarendon complained bitterly of the conduct of the debates, ‘so disorderly and unparliamentary that the like had never been known: no rules or orders of the house for the course and method of debate were observed’.
When the Lords debated the Commons’ rejection of the Lords’ amendments to the bill on 17 Dec., Clarendon vigorously argued that the description of the importation of Irish cattle as a ‘nuisance’, designed to prevent the exercise of the king’s discretion to override the ban, was ‘against the king’s prerogative, an affront, and diminution to him, an unreasonable, improper, unusual and nonsense word’: he was opposed, though ultimately unsuccessfully, by Buckingham, Ashley and Lucas.
The investigation into the patent for the Canary Company, launched in the Commons at the beginning of October, was seen as potentially harming Clarendon, regarded as a sponsor of the incorporation of the company, though in his memoir he had defended at length the decision to do so as a collective one and done by the assent of the Canary merchants.
The Commons’ move for an examination of government accounts by a joint committee, initiated in Nov., was rejected by the Lords on 22 November. Clarendon described the reaction to the proposal within government in his memoir, including his own determination that it should be resisted, telling the king that although he should be a defender of the privileges of parliament, he should be ‘equally solicitous to prevent the excesses in parliament, and not to suffer them to extend their jurisdiction to cases they have nothing to do with; and that to restrain them within their proper bounds and limits is as necessary as it is to preserve them from being invaded’.
The decision to adjourn only for a few days over Christmas – in the hope that a thin House might secure the supply bills – was taken against Clarendon’s advice. Clarendon’s ally, Brodrick, told Ormond how it had been counterproductive.
Clarendon recognized that the 1666-67 session had gained him many enemies in the Commons because of a number of apparently contemptuous remarks he freely made in the Lords, encouraging the latter (as he described it in his memoir) 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, which extended their jurisdiction beyond their limits’.
The 1667 crisis
By the end of the session Burlington was able to report that Clarendon was well enough to be instrumental in arranging a match for Ormond’s granddaughter, and he was also, Anglesey reported, deeply involved in discussions on averting economic crisis in Ireland as a result of the passage of the Irish Cattle Act.
In early April, Clarendon moved into Clarendon House, and was said to ‘come abroad again’ around the middle of the month.
The earl of Southampton’s death was generally expected well before it happened on 16 May, and it was commonly assumed that it would have a serious impact on the chancellor’s hold on power.
The Dutch attack on the English fleet in the Medway took place on 10-14 June. Clarendon wrote feelingly of the panic at court that ensued.
Opposition to the government was likely to come from the duke of Buckingham, whose arrest – on a dubious charge relating to fomenting rebellion – had been ordered by the king shortly after the end of the previous parliamentary session. Before giving himself up on 28 June, Buckingham (identifying Arlington as his principal antagonist) had sought support from Clarendon.
The progress towards conclusion of a peace treaty with the Dutch gave Clarendon sufficient confidence to tell Burlington not to hurry over on 13 July, expecting Parliament to disperse shortly after it met on the 25th. He claimed not to be worried about the rumours, ‘and have no apprehensions of the effects of them as to my own particular’.
Clarendon was present for the two days of the brief and abortive, but very well-attended, meeting of Parliament on 25 and 29 July, hastily prorogued following news of the peace.
The public crisis coincided with an acute personal one. In late June the countess of Clarendon had been taken seriously ill, and she died on the evening of 9 August.
Clarendon recounted a meeting between the king, York and himself on 26 Aug., at Whitehall, at which he made it clear that he was not prepared to give up his office voluntarily.
With the new parliamentary session looming, Clarendon took care to avoid being seen to be creating a cabal. Though he had been dissuaded from going into the country by the duke and duchess of York, he asked the new French ambassador in early September not to visit him.
On 30 Sept. Ruvigny understood that an impeachment was under preparation, although it was not intended to extend to capital charges. Clarendon’s offer to leave London until the beginning of the session was dismissed by the king, referring to his failure to depart when the king had wanted him to earlier.
Clarendon was absent when Parliament resumed on 10 Oct., and never sat in the House again. Neither the king nor the lord keeper referred to his dismissal in their respective speeches. The Commons’ address of thanks in response to the king’s speech, drawn up by a committee whose first member was Sir Thomas Littleton and reported to the House on the 14th, offered thanks for a series of recent measures, and particularly the chancellor’s removal.
In his memoir, Clarendon wrote that while the king had no intention to take matters further, others did, and considerable efforts were made to uncover information against him, including investigating (unsuccessfully, according to him) whether Francis Willoughby, 4th (CP 5th) Lord Willoughby of Parham, had given him a bribe for the governorship of Barbados.
Manoeuvres in the Lords too may have been preparatory to an assault against Clarendon, including the underage summons to the John Sheffield, 3rd earl of Mulgrave, later duke of Buckingham and Normanby, and the bill for regulating the trials of peers (probably the same as that presented in the 1666-7 session).
The struggle began in earnest when Buckingham on 23 Oct. proposed that the king’s response to the address should be entered into the Journal: he was opposed by York, but eventually the motion was accepted once an argument over precedent was overcome. On the same day in the Commons Sir Thomas Littleton proposed that a day be appointed to hear an accusation against Clarendon; surprisingly, it was unsuccessful and a second attempt on the 26th, only secured a committee to review precedents on impeachments.
Ruvigny’s analysis in late October suggested that the war over Clarendon was in part a proxy war over the position of York: those most vehemently calling for an impeachment were principally worried about the influence of the ex-chancellor on York. They were hoping to persuade the king that Clarendon had schemed to set up his own family in line to the throne and (according to Buckingham) was instilling in the heir to the throne ‘violent thoughts capable of overthrowing all of England; that he had to be stopped’. Buckingham was telling the king that he ‘should put himself at the head of Parliament, which had no other intention than to establish his authority and render England so powerful that she would be no less redoubtable in all Europe than she had been at the time of his usurper.’ In a running dispatch Ruvigny reflected on how powerful this group had become, with Arlington and others unable to contradict it, though he also reported that he had seen the articles of impeachment drawn up by Bridgeman, which contained ‘nothing weighty or convincing enough to bring down a man of such importance, who is supported by the bishops, by the men of justice, by the bankers, and above all, by M. the duke of York’. The drive to use the Commons to destroy Clarendon could only, in the long run, have a serious impact on the king’s authority (a point which, according to Clarendon’s memoirs, he himself made forcibly to the king).
By now, speculation was also encompassing a possible impeachment of Ormond as well: Arlington denied the rumours when asked by Lord Conway, attributing them to ‘the shop at Clarendon House’, though Conway thought the real source was Clarendon’s opponents. ‘I never knew any man as confident as [Clarendon] is of his innocence, and integrity’, Conway wrote on 5 Nov., reporting that the man himself believed that Lord Berkeley was his strongest opponent, though Conway repeated the current suspicion that behind it all was a scheme to block the duke of York from the succession, either through a divorce or a bill legitimizing Monmouth.
On the same day the king was said to have removed from Clarendon all his remaining commissions, particularly the lord lieutenancies of Wiltshire and Oxfordshire, and commanded him not to attend the council.
The situation was reversed, however, on the next sitting day, Monday 11 Nov., when the 16th article – an allegation that Clarendon had ‘deluded and betrayed’ the king in negotiations relating to the war – was amended on the floor of the House (according to Clarendon, by John Vaughan into a slightly more specific claim that he had ‘betrayed’ secrets to the king’s enemies, a claim made possible by information from the Imperial ambassador, Baron Isola, possibly when he dined with Buckingham the previous night. More details of the charge emerged later: the leaking to France of a decision to allow English troops to go into Spanish service, and a correspondence Clarendon was alleged to have had with Lionne.
On the next day an impeachment of Clarendon for treason and other high crimes and misdemeanours was carried up to Lords by Edward Seymour, accompanied by a demand that Clarendon be committed into custody, and a message that the Commons planned, ‘within a convenient time’, to bring in their specific charges.
On the 16th Pepys was told about the king’s growing animus against the chancellor, fed by Buckingham and Bristol, ‘his only cabinet council’, who were also encouraging him to quarrel with the duke of York; how Henry Coventry had gained great reputation by his refusal to obey the king’s instruction not to defend Clarendon; and how there was even speculation of an impeachment of York.
The Commons’ response to the Lords was delivered at a conference on 19 November. They claimed that the Lords had complied with their requests before in similar cases, that it was lawful for the judges to remand a person to prison on a general commitment for high treason; that if particular reasons were given ‘it would be a ready course that all complices in the treason might make their escape’. They asserted that Parliament had ‘unconfined discretion’ for the safety and preservation of parliament itself: ‘it cannot be malicious to a part of itself, nor affect more power than already it hath, which is absolute over itself and parts, and may therefore do, for preservation of itself, whatsoever is not repugnant to natural justice’. On the 20th the Lords reaffirmed their decision not to commit Clarendon to prison. There were protests from 29 peers, three of whom were bishops. Ruvigny a couple of days later referred to those who had protested as a ‘party’, with Buckingham and Albemarle at its head, who supported the king and the privilege of the Commons against a majority of the peers, and were deliberately seeking to create a political crisis. He talked also of an attempt by Lords Ashley and Anglesey to create a rival ‘moderate’ group in the Lords, headed by the earl of Northumberland and encompassing Arlington, as a counterweight.
Clarendon wrote in his memoir how he had for a long time resisted the advice of his friends to leave the country. After more than a week in which the two Houses wrangled about the proper procedure for holding conferences, his departure was widely expected although Clarendon was still reluctant to invite the assumption of his guilt by taking flight.
Eventually the Lords agreed to hold a conference on the 28th – apparently against the duke of Buckingham’s will, still set on creating a crisis between the two Houses – on the question of Clarendon’s committal.
One report suggested that Buckingham’s strategy was working and that the contest was seen in some quarters as an unjustified defence of their privileges by the House of Lords, against a supreme power in the Commons.
should the Lords yield to what the Commons would have in this matter, it were to make them worse then any Justice of the Peace (whereas they are the highest court in the Kingdom); that they cannot be judges whether an offender be to be committed or bailed, which every Justice of the Peace doth do.
Pepys Diary, viii. 559-61, 570.
Clarendon, however, had decided to leave, following a visit from the duke of York, now sufficiently recovered from the smallpox, on the morning probably of Sat. 30 November. He left that same night, though he did not reach Calais for several days. On 3 Dec., Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh, announced to the Lords that he had been asked by Lord Cornbury to present a paper to the House, which turned out to be Clarendon’s petition and vindication. It was read to the House, reported to the king, and a message sent to the Commons; on the 4th it was debated and voted to be communicated to the Commons as scandalous and seditious.
Final Exile, 1667-74
Clarendon had headed for France. He wrote to the vice-chancellor of Oxford from Calais on 7 Dec. to resign his chancellorship of the university.
The French were placed in an embarrassing dilemma. Ruvigny had consulted Charles II on 6 Dec. what they should do if Clarendon turned up in France, who responded that where he went was of no importance to him. Intitially, at the request of the earl of St Albans, English ambassador in Paris (although St Albans said he had no instructions from Charles II on the subject, and a Ruvigny letter subsequently suggested that it was at the request of the queen mother), Louis XIV issued a pass for Clarendon to travel to Rouen and remain there. But having heard from Ruvigny that the Spanish were spreading rumours about a conspiracy between France and the duke of York, he sent another message to Clarendon via an envoy, the hapless M. de la Font, on 16 Dec., telling him to leave immediately. De la Font was to accompany him to the frontier.
At Whitehall the dukes of Buckingham and Albemarle and Lord Arlington pressed the king to remove Clarendon’s allies from the court, though by 6 Jan. 1668 the king was wavering in his resolution to do so.
There were new attacks on Clarendon when Parliament met again: on 3 Mar. it was reported that the Commons had been hearing the case of Mr Lenthall and Lady Stonehouse against Clarendon for taking away an estate at Witney from them.
Clarendon remained a presence in English political life. He should have been isolated: the Act for his banishment banned correspondence with the former chancellor to anyone except his children or others licensed by the king in council ‘concerning his estate and domestic affairs’, and the Oxford don and cryptographer John Wallis was employed in deciphering his correspondence.
As in the 1640s, when he found himself in exile, Clarendon occupied himself with writing. He worked on a vindication of himself, completed on 24 July 1668, a memoir, completed up to the Restoration by August 1670, and a large devotional work. He revised the history of the Civil War that he had begun in exile in 1646, editing it together with the recently completed memoir, and then continued the memoir into the Restoration. A critique of Hobbes’s Leviathan was completed in May 1673.
The conversion to catholicism of the duchess of York marred Clarendon’s last few years, though it also was the cause of a good deal of his writing. Her move towards Rome began, according to her own account, in Nov. 1669.
Clarendon wrote in his Life of how he had told 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, which extended their jurisdiction beyond their limits’.
When any thing fell in their way, that they could draw a consequence from that might relate to their privileges, they were so jealous of an invasion, that they neither considered former precedents, nor rules of honour or justice; and were not only solicitous for that freedom which belonged to themselves and their menial servants, who ought not to be disquieted by private suits and prosecutions in law, whilst they are obliged to attend upon the service of their country in parliament, but gave their protections ‘ad libitum’, and which were commonly sold by their servants to bankrupt citizens, and to such who were able but refused to pay their just debts.
He criticized the House’s tendency to insert clauses protecting their privileges into bills, using up much time, and provoking the Commons, a provocation that was often encouraged ‘and indeed induced by those who had near relation to the king and were trusted in his service’, often ‘to compass some crooked end of their own, to the prejudice of another person who was in their disfavour’. He wrote of his opposition to the ‘over-captious insisting upon privilege’ by the peers, ‘either when in truth there was not a just ground for it, or when they would extend it further than it would regularly reach’, underlining the need to ensure that they could protect what was really necessary to protect, their greatest privileges and their highest jurisdiction.
It was a remarkably frank assessment of the shortcomings of the upper House, and one that dovetailed with his sometimes contemptuous remarks on the lower, as well as with his concern about the effective operation of the Privy Council. In his writings Clarendon would analyse the process of decision-making within court and Parliament in a more sophisticated way than any of his contemporaries and the great majority of historians for long afterwards. For all his many faults – his brusqueness, cupidity (a common fault among lawyers who achieved high office), and high opinion of his own worth – Clarendon’s commitment to the monarchy he served and to the propriety and efficient working of the institutions of government could certainly not be called into question.