HYDE, Edward (1691-1713)

Clifton succeeded to the barony underage, presumably while living in New York where his father was governor. He had returned to England by 1707, when he was entered at Christ Church and where he seems to have suffered from the family’s habitual impecuniousness. HMC Laing, ii. 150. From 1709 with his father’s inheritance of the earldom of Clarendon, he was usually styled Viscount Cornbury. A record, in which he is listed as ‘Clifeton’, including him among the peers who found Dr. Sacheverell not guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours in March 1710, must be erroneous (and is certainly at odds with other printed records of the Sacheverell vote), though it perhaps reflects his likely sympathies. G. Holmes, Trial of Dr. Sacheverell, 283-4; Add. 15574, f. 65.

Cornbury travelled abroad in 1712, where he was watched over by his father’s friend, Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford. He returned in time to take his seat in the House on 13 Jan. 1713 as Baron Clifton but sat just once more before succumbing to a fever brought on by ‘a surfeit of drinking’ in which he ‘drank as many quarts of uskquebath [whisky] as is usual to be drank of wine’. Wentworth Pprs. 314.

Unsurprisingly, Cornbury’s loss affected his family severely. His father described his premature demise as ‘a load of grief too heavy for man to bear’. Add. 70293, Clarendon to Oxford, 13 Feb. 1713. The queen was said to have taken a close interest in the young man and had intended to offer him the command of a regiment. He died ‘much lamented’ and was buried in Westminster Abbey at the queen’s expense. Wentworth Pprs. 320-1. At his death the barony of Clifton passed to his sister, Lady Theodosia Hyde, who was also the principal beneficiary of his will. Through her the barony was eventually inherited by the Bligh earls of Darnley [I].