Whatever might be the consternation of the Chancellor at his elder and favourite daughter’s stolen match, however great his anger and disappointment at the failure of the duty and confidence which he felt she owed him—and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the feeling he manifested on the disclosure—it is nevertheless evident that the affectionate terms on which father and daughter lived, suffered but a very short eclipse.

The Duke of York himself treated his father-in-law with unvarying respect and consideration, and to Anne the latter was always a welcome visitor. For a time, at least, it would seem that Clarendon was on the crest of the wave. High, and deservedly so, in his King’s favour, reconciled to his once inveterate foe, the queen-mother, his daughter established on the steps of the throne, his position appeared altogether unassailable. Still, as in the days before the marriage, the Chancellor and his daughter spent much of their time together, and at some time during those happy days, before the breaking of the storm that was to overwhelm the wisest head in England, we find the record of a pretended wager between them, a piece of very innocent fooling which no doubt served its purpose of amusement for the moment:

“Hugh May, Esq^re his award of arbitration in a jocular suit pending between Edward Earl of Clarendon and his daughter Anne Duchess of York relative to a wager between them.

“Where it was agreed between Anne Dutchess of York Plaintiffe and Edward Earl of Clarendon Defendant that the value of twenty pound lost in a wager between the parties aforesaid should be paid by that party to whom Hew May Esquire Judge of the Architects should adjudge it to be due. He the said Hew May having examined both parties and heard their severall witness doth hereby declare to all whom it may concern and doth order and decree that the said summe of twenty pound should be forth with paid by the right Honorable Edward Earl of Clarendon Defendant to the said Anne Dutchesse of York Plaintiffe and that it be paid within 8 daies after both parties shall have had a sight of this decree. It is further ordered by the said Hew May that forasmuch as the said Edward Earle of Clarendon Defendant hath put off and deferred the hearing of this cause term after term during the times of allmost 4 termes to the great dammage and cost of the said Anne Dutchesse of Yorke Plaintiffe it is therefore ordered that the said Earle of Clarendon Defendant shall pay defraye and discharge all the costs and charges whatsoever of this sute.

“Ordered that this decree be registered.”^[207]

Before very long, however, the heart for such things was wanting, even if the time was available.

It is a hard task to gauge the inveterate and bitter malignity which pursued the Chancellor to his final exile from England. Whatever were the faults in his public service and administration, it could at least be said of Edward Hyde that “he was in the Court of Charles II. almost the only man who lived chastely, drank moderately, and swore not at all,”^[208] and that with his lifelong friends, Ormonde and Southampton, he “projected into this reign” “the high-toned virtues of the old Cavalier stock.”^[209] These, and the friendship already mentioned—just as long and steadfast—with John Evelyn, should stand the memory of Clarendon in good stead, putting aside those brilliant gifts which he used so unsparingly in the service of his sovereign. Of these, Horace Walpole, no mean critic, declares that “for his comprehensive knowledge of mankind he should be styled the Chancellor of human nature.”

The dark clouds were beginning to gather about Hyde as early as 1662, though possibly only the few persons who were conversant with all State secrets were cognisant of the fact. In one of de Wiquefort’s despatches he says of the Chancellor: “He has a strong party against him who will make the King jealous, and will be favourable to the Queen in order to oppose the Duchess of York.” If the party against Clarendon was strong, it must have been a small one at that time, but it is instructive to see that already two factions were in the forming, trying to establish a rivalry between the two ladies, though they themselves were entirely innocent in the matter, but at any rate no one was so likely to suffer between the contending parties as Clarendon himself. In 1663, Digby, Earl of Bristol, whose character should not have secured any particular confidence, attacked the Chancellor, bringing against him a charge of high treason which, however, at that period fell to the ground.^[210] But as time went on the deep-laid prejudice against him spread and spread like a canker. He had unhappily tried the unsuccessful experiment of hunting with the hounds and running with the hare, for he had endeavoured to reconcile the Presbyterian malcontents by the Act of Indemnity and the Romanists by the Act of Uniformity, thereby satisfying neither party. In this way he had unfortunately succeeded in making enemies in all directions. He was “steady for the Church against Dissenters and Papists alike,”^[211] and consequently both parties hated him. His blameless life, too, was a tacit reproof of the vices of the Court, and his chief foe, Buckingham, took full advantage of the fact.^[212] He and his boon companions were accustomed to say to the King, with a sneer: “There goes your school master!”^[213] But it was above all the irrepressible Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine, beautiful, unscrupulous, evil in thought and deed, who joined with others no less guilty in hounding the Chancellor to his disgrace and so depriving the King of a minister who, if not perfect, had at any rate done him and the realm great and lasting service. Meanwhile, while all their discontent and malice were seething under the surface, but not yet openly active, Clarendon, in execution of the plan he had entertained from the time of the Restoration, set about building his new house in 1664. We have previously seen that he established himself temporarily at Worcester House in the Strand, and that it was there that both his daughter’s marriage and the birth of her elder son took place, but he had never intended to remain there, and it was not very long before he acquired a site which suited him. At the time of the public announcement of Anne’s marriage, York House at Twickenham, originally York Place, was given to her father, who was accustomed to stay there when the King was at Hampton Court, and the Duchess’ daughter Anne, afterwards queen, was born there.^[214] But it was in London itself that the Chancellor proposed to build his new house, and he received a grant from the King of certain Crown property. It lay west of Burlington House, on the site of Bond Street, Stafford Street and Albemarle Street, extending eastwards to Swallow Street, its western boundary being, however, uncertain. There, then, was built Clarendon House,^[215] facing the top of St James’s Street, and occupying the whole site of Stafford Street. It stood back from Piccadilly, then newly named, having projecting wings with a turret in the centre, and Evelyn calls it, with some probable exaggeration “the first palace in England.”^[216] It is said that 74 Piccadilly was built of a portion of the materials.

Rather later than the erection of Clarendon House, the City of London gave the Chancellor a lease of the Conduit Mead, which is now covered by New Bond Street and Brook Street, and from which Conduit Street takes its name.

The building of this magnificent palace, no doubt intended by Clarendon to be a home for his children’s children, excited a positive storm of wrath. The sale of Dunkirk had lately been completed, and the mob chose to believe that the house was built with Dutch money, though there is no proof that Clarendon ever received a penny. Pennant asserts boldly that the stones used in its erection had been intended for the rebuilding of old St Paul’s, long in a half-ruinous state, which work had been set on foot some time before the Great Fire made all such intentions abortive for the moment. Nicknames were freely bestowed. Holland House, in allusion to supposed bribes from the Dutch; Dunkirk House for the same reason; Tangier House, because the Chancellor had obtained the town of Tangier for England, and no one wanted it. His employment, during the Plague, of three hundred workmen on his building operations, though done with the best intentions, only raised another outcry.

In 1667, the unlucky year when the Dutch sailed up to Gravesend, a mob proceeded to break the windows of Clarendon House with the usual fatuous want of reason on such occasions, and setting up a gibbet before the gates, inscribed on it the words:

In fact the town was deluged with lampoons in the fashion of the day. Another couplet put it:

Andrew Marvell, too, chose to take up his parable on the subject, and dipped his mordant pen in bitterer gall than usual:

Yet again, in his “Clarendon’s House-warming” are the words:

The stately house which from the first attracted so much unfriendly attention had but a short life, and its ill luck dogged it to the end. Evelyn, who saw the first stone laid, also saw the pulling down of the whole edifice. Clarendon’s sons, Lord Cornbury and his brother Laurence, afterwards Lord Rochester, leased it to their father’s friend the Duke of Ormonde, who, by the way, was driving up St James’s Street on his way to Clarendon House when the notorious Colonel Blood made his desperate attempt to kidnap and assassinate him. Later still, after the Chancellor’s death, the house was sold to Monk’s son, the second Duke of Albemarle, who called it after himself, but subsequently sold it again to a syndicate; and it was finally demolished in 1683 by a certain Sir Thomas Bond, “to build a street of tenements to his undoing.”^[218] He, at least, vindicated his loyalty, for having been Controller of the Household to the queen-mother, he went into exile in after years in the train of King James II. His name, of course, survives in the present Bond Street, which occupies part of the site of Clarendon House, as Albemarle Street recalls the second appellation of the Chancellor’s house.

With regard to the rebuilding of St Paul’s, we find Clarendon’s name as concerned in it in a letter from Henchman, Bishop of London, to Sancroft, then Dean.

“Mr Deane,—How this evening since five a clock S^r Philip Warwick sends me frô the Archbp of Canterburie that the Lord Chancelour hath appointed that his Grace and I should come to morrow to Worcester House at ten in the morning about St Paul’s first I doubt whether you may with safety come out, next whether Mr Webb on such a sodaine warning can be convened. If you may without prejudice to your health come and Mr Webb can be met with I hope J^o Tillison hath prepared all that we are to lay before them. I intend to be there, only I seuerely charge you that unless J^o Barwick^[219] gives leave without scruple you appeare not.

“Your very affectionate friend,

“Humfr: London.”

“Fulham, March 26, 1666.”^[220]

It will be seen that this letter is dated just six months before the Great Fire made all plans for restoration and repair abortive, and also that the Chancellor was still at Worcester House, his own not being ready for him. The Bishop wrote again a month later on the same subject.

“Deare S^r,—At Worcester Howse on Thursday morning about ten the L. Pres^t will be with some other Lords about the business of St Paul’s. I desire you to be there and the Deane of Canterburie. Let not Mr Tillison fayle to attend and give notice of it to Mr Hugh May and Mr Webb: and lett him be prepared concerning objections agaynst the Account. I shall be at K. Henry 7th Chappell to morrow at nine to prorogue the Convocation.

“Your affectionate friend,

“Humfr. London.”

“Fulham, Ap. 23, 1666.”^[221]

It may be noted here that Sancroft’s appointment to the Deanery of St Paul’s coincided with the battle of Southwold, as when Edward Savage wrote his congratulations from the Cockpit on the 25th October 1664 he added: “We shall certainely have warre with the false Dutch, and the Duke of Yorke is presently going himselfe to sea with the gallantest ffleete that ever England set forth.”^[222]

Sancroft, as we know, was to see many startling changes in Church and State, and to experience in his own person many vicissitudes, but they were no greater than such as fell on Edward Hyde.^[223]

Several reasons, as previously stated, could be given for Clarendon’s steadily increasing unpopularity and for his final disgrace, but in 1667 he was for the second time impeached. Among the articles of this second accusation of high treason were “The taking money for the King’s marriage with Portugall,” “The marrying his daughter to the Duke of Yorke,” “The obstructing all other marriages for the King.”^[224]

As regards the second of the indictments we know that Hyde was entirely innocent from first to last. The third seems to point at the often suggested plan of a divorce from Catherine. The King himself wrote privately to Ormonde that his real reason for parting with his old servant was “the Chancellor’s intolerable temper,”^[225] but it is also said that he deeply resented the latter’s action in counteracting a divorce by bringing about the stolen marriage of “La Belle Stuart” to the Duke of Richmond, seeing that he (Charles) at one time contemplated getting rid of his wife to marry the lovely, wild, childish girl who, for the moment, imprisoned his vagrant fancy.^[226] His covert irritation and impatience were diligently fanned by those about him, headed by Buckingham, who used his great gifts and entire want of scruple, with deadly effect, to compass the undoing of his foe. It is possible that Clarendon had at first displayed his personal influence too openly, for though Charles from sheer indolence would allow himself to be governed with fatal facility, he was nevertheless, like many people of a like temperament, very unwilling that the fact should be known. As to the charge of bribery urged so often, and with such bitter pertinacity, there is absolutely no proof of any kind of its truth. Clarendon was accused of receiving bribes right and left, of knowing that the needy spendthrift King received them from his astute cousin Louis XIV. Of all this, it must be repeated, Hyde’s enemies could bring no proof, and at any rate his fall certainly heralded the worst period of the reign of Charles II. “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” followed fast upon each other. Clarendon’s old friend, Lord Southampton, one of the best and wisest of his generation, had died not long before. In August the King sent for the Seals to be delivered up, and a few days later the faithful Evelyn came to visit the disgraced minister, and “found him in his bedchamber very sad.” “He was my particular kind friend on all occasions,” adds the diarist loyally, and one can fancy that his presence may have brought a little momentary comfort to the bruised heart. There was a yet heavier blow to fall, and the cup of sorrow to be filled to the brim. On 8th December, some months later, Pepys records that he saw the Duchess of York at Whitehall “in a fine dress of second mourning for her mother, being black edged with ermine.” To Clarendon himself the loss of the faithful wife who had shared his poverty and exile beyond the sea, as well as his short-lived prosperity, came as a crushing misfortune among all the other burdens pressing upon him on every side. A few pathetic words written in July from Clarendon House allude to this sorrow as impending: “Being in noe good disposition the last weeke, by reason of my Wife’s great Sicknesse.”^[227]

We see Evelyn again visiting his friend about this time, and finding “him in his garden at his new-built palace, sitting in his gowt wheel chayre and seeing the gates setting up towards the north and the fields. He looked and spoke very disconsolately.” It was no wonder. Everything was crumbling round him like the wall of a falling house. The fortune he had built up through so many strenuous years was toppling over, honour and reputation were smitten, and he sat—alone. The “new-built palace” could yield him now but little solace, and forth from it he must go, like Wolsey, “naked to his enemies.” Truly he must have said to himself, as he looked round him in utter loneliness: “Vanity of vanities.”

Meanwhile in the ancient palace at the foot of the hill, not many hundred yards away, sorrow of another kind was brooding.

To the Duchess of York herself, this year was especially marked by grief and misfortune. In one direction there was the keen mortification caused by the Duke’s short-lived passion for Lady Denham, whose tragic and mysterious death has been already recorded; in another the blow inflicted by the disgrace and final exile of her father—and this of itself must have been a sore trouble, considering the close affection between them. Sadder still came the death of her mother and of her young children. Andrew Marvell’s unsparing pen was again busy, and surely no crueller couplet was ever written:

Among the many pictures of the time which its history unfolds before us, there is one which stands out here in sombre relief.^[229]

Across the Park, which he has already done much to improve, having laid out the Mall and planted avenues, comes King Charles at his usual swift pace. He has been, according to his custom, feeding the ducks, of which he is very fond. Two or three courtiers keep up with him as best they may, and a crowd of little dogs run and dance round him, snapping at each other. Now and then the King throws a careless word or two to his attendants, who laugh dutifully, or try to cap them, as the case may be. Down another path from the direction of Spring Gardens,^[230] where he now lives—it used to be in the Barbican^[231]—advances a tall figure carrying himself with a certain stately swing. Those keen quick eyes and high aquiline features can only belong to Prince Rupert, fresh perhaps from some of his experiments, the transmuting of silver, and the like. As he takes off his wide plumed hat in a sweeping salute and bows profoundly, the King nods cheerfully, glad of the meeting, glad of any distraction. A few desultory words—he has shot a duck, it seems, and one of the dogs retrieved it; then he seems suddenly to remember that his brother’s boys are ailing. “Let’s go and see Cambridge and Kendal,” he says with a stifled yawn, as he passes his arm through that of his cousin. It reads callously, but Charles is a man of strange and unexpected reserves, and he may feel more than he allows to be seen. So the pair walk on under the spreading trees, while the King’s attendants fall back to a more respectful distance. The Prince Palatine somehow always inspires something like awe. It is but a little way, and they come to the ancient grave palace, above which the standard with the leopards and lilies, and the crescent for difference, hangs its heavy folds in the still air.

Another and greater King is entering the door unseen—for two dying children lie under that goodly roof. Kendal and Cambridge are indeed “riding post” to the edge of the dark river into whose waters those small feet are already almost plunged, and over them, tearless for all her bleeding heart, hangs the mother. Is it for sin of hers—is it a judgment on ambition—that no living son of her blood may carry on the line of English royalty? Can she give nothing, do nothing, to avert the coming doom?^[232]

Someone, no doubt, tells the King that his errand is vain. The frail little lives are passing out of sight, and he turns away silent. He is moved and sorry. He is good-natured, even kind-hearted, when he remembers to be, but Prince Rupert’s noble face is clouded and the luminous eyes are misty, for no sorrow appeals to him in vain.

But worse evils are coming on England than even the loss of the seed-royal. The Dutch fleet is in the river, and coming up to Gravesend, intent on vengeance.

Charles II. has been unsparingly blamed for this disaster, but he was not altogether guilty. After the terrible visitations of the Plague and the Fire, he greatly impoverished himself to help the many destitute sufferers, refusing to press the Parliament to pay the sums voted for supplies, when those disastrous years made them fall short.^[233] This led to the necessity of laying up ships which should have been kept in commission, contrary to the advice of the Duke of York and the emphatic warnings of Prince Rupert. No doubt the King had also yielded to the persuasions of Louis XIV., backed by Henrietta Maria, whose advice was always unlucky, and France was at this time but too ready to pull the strings in the background. Meanwhile another division of the Dutch, advancing up the Medway, had forced the boom laid across it for protection, and had actually burnt three men-of-war.

In the great palace of Whitehall all is in uproar, and wild confusion is reigning.^[234] Rumours of fire and sword lose nothing by transmission from one to another. Some of the maids of honour believe anything and everything, even an immediate sack of London. Beautiful, brazen Castlemaine, carefully dishevelled like a Bacchante, is bewailing herself and hysterically protesting that she will be the first to be torn in pieces. Probably the person most unmoved by the clamour and its cause is the King himself, looking on cynically from the outside, as it were, with the quality of aloofness which has always stood him in good stead. And now, as we know, the mob, always prejudiced, always fickle, just because the Dutch are in the Thames, streams off tumultuously to Clarendon House and breaks the windows with great enthusiasm. To the builder and owner of that ill-omened mansion such an incident was probably but a slight and momentary aggravation. Clarendon himself writes from Whitehall on 14th June: “I had writt this farr, the case is much altred by the Dutch Fleete entring into the Ryver and tryumphing there to our great damage and how farr it may extend farther we yett know not; the particulars I leave to others (but upon the whole) matters not though a peace may be bought deare and usually when an unreasonable price asked for it it is an infallible sign that it is not to be had yet a peace in this conjunction would be very reasonable.”^[235] This letter was originally partly written in cypher. The Chancellor’s signature is very tremulous, testifying possibly to agitation of mind easily conceivable.

Thus for the Chancellor the end had truly come. A career of singular if varying brilliance was closing, alas! ingloriously. At his impeachment, his son-in-law, the Duke of York, who had never failed to stand by him since their connection, and who now wished to soften the blow, sent his old friend Bishop Morley to the fallen minister to say that the King wished him to leave the country. It needed only this. He over whose youth Edward Hyde had watched so faithfully, to the utmost of his power, had done with him. He did not want to see his face any more, and he never did see it. Clarendon bent his head to the storm, and submitted. Perhaps his strong heart broke then, and nothing else mattered very much. At any rate he obeyed the royal mandate, the last he was to receive, and before the year was out he had left England, as it proved, for ever.

He went first to Calais, then to Rouen, covering ground that must have been very familiar to him in earlier days. At Evreux, where he stayed for a time, his life was actually attempted by some English sailors, on the grounds that he had sold his country and robbed them of their pay.^[236] This danger he escaped, and later, with the restlessness born of despondency and lack of occupation, he wandered south to Montpellier, proceeding thence to Moulins. Finally, however, he retraced his steps to Rouen. It was nearer, after all, to England; and there, at no great distance from the country he loved so well, he died in December 1673.^[237]

It is a pitiful story. Whether Clarendon was entirely blameless of all the accusations against him, it is useless to speculate, but at least it must be conceded that from the first he had set before him high ideals, and if he fell short of these, it was no more than many—nay most—had done. It was an age, pre-eminently, when it was said that every man had his price. If so, then Edward Hyde’s was a very high one; but it is much pleasanter and indeed more reasonable to believe in his innocence, as such belief is far more consonant with his character as it is presented to us by his contemporaries. And at least he knew heavy griefs. Estranged more and more as time went on from the daughter he loved so deeply, severed altogether from her and from his sons, driven in disgrace from his country to spend in exile a lonely old age, the close of Clarendon’s story presents a very sorrowful picture, and if one were inclined to moralise, preaches an eloquent sermon on the vanity of human greatness. But it is not likely that the ex-Chancellor himself needed any such reminders. He had seen too much of the mutability of all things here, to be quite unprepared for vicissitudes, and he had at last learnt how to face with dignity the trials which he was destined to suffer. For one thing we certainly owe him a debt of gratitude, namely, for his “History of the Rebellion.” In that noble record he has painted for us, as no other hand could have done it, the actors in that great drama, perhaps the greatest ever presented on the stage of English history, and has made them live for all time to his readers.

This great and important work Clarendon wrote at a house in Swallowfield in Berkshire, which was the home of his eldest son’s second wife, Flower, the widow of Sir William Buckhouse. Lord Cornbury’s first wife had been Theodosia, the daughter of the gallant and hapless Arthur, Lord Capel, one of the most perfect heroes of a time which produced not a few such.^[238]

As before said, if Clarendon was indeed guilty of himself receiving bribes, or of the knowledge that the King’s hands were not clean in this respect, there exists no proof of either, and if he needed or desired any revenge for his disgrace and broken fortunes, he might have found it in the decadence of the government of his country which immediately followed. He had at least one satisfaction—that his royal son-in-law had voted against his sentence of banishment, but it was probably only an aggravation of his trials that Bishop Morley, whom he had been wont to call “the best man alive,” was involved in his disgrace. On this account the bishop was removed from his post of spiritual director to the Duchess of York, an office which he had filled with little intermission since the Flemish days when he had found a shelter under Hyde’s hospitable roof.^[239] But such a reverse was inevitable. The great tree in its fall was destined to drag down with it the lesser ones whose roots were twisted with its own. “None of us liveth to himself,” are words which hold good of more than Clarendon and his friends.

So Edward Hyde passes out of the arena of his day and country, a conspicuous figure through many stormy years, and his place knows him no more. His rival, Buckingham, remains to hold the stage a little longer, and in some eyes he may be all-sufficient, since Reresby can call him “the finest gentleman of person and wit I think I ever saw”; and King Louis, against whose judgment there can surely be no appeal, pronounces him “the only English gentleman” he had ever seen. In the light of such shining attributes, the sombre colours wherein Chancellor Hyde is invested retire altogether into the shade; yet perhaps when the two figures are placed side by side in the estimation of a later age, opinions may be reversed as to which is after all the finer gentleman. The blood of the Hydes was to the full as ancient as that of the Villiers, and for the rest who can doubt which served with the stancher devotion God and the king, or lived the more blameless and unstained life? Many great names stand out from the record of the England of that day, names of which she has reason to be proud—Falkland, Hopton, Bevil Grenville, Southampton, Capel—yet to his honour it may be said that Edward Hyde is not unworthy of a place among them.