against them, and they were ordered to leave in December 1650. Hyde arrived at Antwerp in January 1651, and in December rejoined Charles at Paris after the latter’s escape from Worcester. He now became one of his chief advisers, accompanying him in his change of residence to Cologne in October 1654 and to Bruges in 1658, and was appointed lord chancellor on the 13th of January 1658. His influence was henceforth maintained in spite of the intrigues of both Romanists and Presbyterians, as well as the violent and openly displayed hostility of the queen, and was employed unremittingly in the endeavour to keep Charles faithful to the church and constitution, and in the prevention of unwise concessions and promises which might estrange the general body of the royalists. His advice to Charles was to wait upon the turn of events, “that all his activity was to consist in carefully avoiding to do anything that might do him hurt and to expect some blessed conjuncture.”[1] In 1656, during the war between England and Spain, Charles received offers of help from the latter power provided he could gain a port in England, but Hyde discouraged small isolated attempts. He expected much from Cromwell’s death. The same year he made an alliance with the Levellers, and was informed of their plots to assassinate the protector, without apparently expressing any disapproval.[2] He was well supplied with information from England,[3] and guided the action of the royalists with great ability and wisdom during the interval between Cromwell’s death and the Restoration, urged patience, and advocated the obstruction of a settlement between the factions contending for power and the fomentation of their jealousies, rather than premature risings.
The Restoration was a complete triumph for Hyde’s policy. He lays no stress on his own great part in it, but it was owing to him that the Restoration was a national one, by the consent and invitation of parliament representing the whole people and not through the medium of one powerful faction enforcing its will upon a minority, and that it was not only a restoration of Charles but a restoration of the monarchy. By Hyde’s advice concessions to the inconvenient demands of special factions had been avoided by referring the decision to a “free parliament,” and the declaration of Breda reserved for parliament the settlement of the questions of amnesty, religious toleration and the proprietorship of forfeited lands.
Hyde entered London with the king, all attempts at effecting his fall having failed, and immediately obtained the chief place in the government, retaining the chancellorship of the exchequer till the 13th of May 1661, when he surrendered it to Lord Ashley. He took his seat as speaker of the House of Lords and in the court of chancery on the 1st of June 1660. On the 3rd of November 1660 he was made Baron Hyde of Hindon, and on the 20th of April 1661 Viscount Cornbury and earl of Clarendon, receiving a grant from the king of £20,000 and at different times of various small estates and Irish rents. The marriage of his daughter Anne to James, duke of York, celebrated in secret in September 1660, at first alarmed Clarendon on account of the public hostility he expected thereby to incur, but finding his fears unconfirmed he acquiesced in its public recognition in December, and thus became related in a special manner to the royal family and the grandfather of two English sovereigns.[4]
Clarendon’s position was one of great difficulties, but at the same time of splendid opportunities. In particular a rare occasion now offered itself of settling the religious question on a broad principle of comprehension or toleration; for the monarchy had been restored not by the supporters of the church alone but largely by the influence and aid of the nonconformists and also of the Roman Catholics, who were all united at that happy moment by a common loyalty to the throne. Clarendon appears to have approved of comprehension but not of toleration. He had already in April 1660 sent to discuss terms with the leading Presbyterians in England, and after the Restoration offered bishoprics to several, including Richard Baxter. He drew up the royal declaration of October, promising limited episcopacy and a revised prayer-book and ritual, which was subsequently thrown out by parliament, and he appears to have anticipated some kind of settlement from the Savoy Conference which sat in April 1661. The failure of the latter proved perhaps that the differences were too great for compromise, and widened the breach. The parliament immediately proceeded to pass the series of narrow and tyrannical measures against the dissenters known as the Clarendon Code. The Corporations Act, obliging members of corporations to denounce the Covenant and take the sacrament according to the Anglican usage, became law on the 20th of December 1661, the Act of Uniformity enforcing the use of the prayer-book on ministers, as well as a declaration that it was unlawful to bear arms against the sovereign, on the 19th of May 1662, and these were followed by the Conventicle Act in 1664 suppressing conventicles and by the Five-Mile Act in 1665 forbidding ministers who had refused subscription to the Act of Uniformity to teach or reside within 5 m. of a borough. Clarendon appears to have reluctantly acquiesced in these civil measures rather than to have originated them, and to have endeavoured to mitigate their injustice and severity. He supported the continuance of the tenure by presbyterian ministers of livings not held by Anglicans and an amendment in the Lords allowing a pension to those deprived, earning the gratitude of Baxter and the nonconformists. On the 17th of March 1662 he introduced into parliament a declaration enabling the king to dispense with the Act of Uniformity in the case of ministers of merit.[5] But once committed to the narrow policy of intolerance, Clarendon was inevitably involved in all its consequences. His characteristic respect for the law and constitution rendered him hostile to the general policy of indulgence, which, though the favourite project of the king, he strongly opposed in the Lords, and in the end caused its withdrawal. He declared that he could have wished the law otherwise, “but when it was passed, he thought it absolutely necessary to see obedience paid to it without any connivance.”[6] Charles was greatly angered. It was believed in May 1663 that the intrigues of Bennet and Buckingham, who seized the opportunity of ingratiating themselves with the king by zealously supporting the indulgence, had secured Clarendon’s dismissal, and in July Bristol ventured to accuse him of high treason in the parliament; but the attack, which did not receive the king’s support, failed entirely and only ended in the banishment from court of its promoter. Clarendon’s opposition to the court policy in this way acquired a personal character, and he was compelled to identify himself more completely with the intolerant measures of the House of Commons. Though not the originator of the Conventicle Act or of the Five-Mile Act, he has recorded his approval,[7] and he ended by taking alarm at plots and rumours and by regarding the great party of nonconformists, through whose co-operation the monarchy had been restored, as a danger to the state whose “faction was their religion.”[8]
Meanwhile Clarendon’s influence and direction had been predominant in nearly all departments of state. He supported the exception of the actual regicides from the Indemnity, but only ten out of the twenty-six condemned were executed, and Clarendon, with the king’s support, prevented the passing of a bill in 1661 for the execution of thirteen more. He upheld the Act of Indemnity against all the attempts of the royalists to upset it. The conflicting claims to estates were left to be decided by the law. The confiscations of the usurping government accordingly were cancelled, while the properly executed transactions
- ↑ Hist. of the Rebellion, xiii. 140.
- ↑ Clarendon State Papers, iii. 316, 325, 341, 343.
- ↑ Hist. MSS. Comm.: MSS. of F. W. Leyborne-Popham, 227.
- ↑ Anne Hyde (1637–1671), eldest daughter of the chancellor, was the mother by James of Queen Mary and Queen Anne, besides six other children, including four sons who all died in infancy. She became a Roman Catholic in 1670 shortly before her death, and was buried in the vault of Mary, queen of Scots, in Henry VII.’s chapel in Westminster Abbey.
- ↑ See Hist. MSS. Comm.: Various Collections, ii. 118, and MSS. of Duke of Somerset, 94.
- ↑ Continuation, 339.
- ↑ Ib. 511, 776.
- ↑ Lister’s Life of Clarendon, ii. 295; Hist. MSS. Comm.: Various Collections, ii. 379.
