There is, after all, something to be said for the birth of Anne Hyde.

Edward Hyde, the famous Chancellor and historian of the Great Rebellion, though the first peer of his name, could still, quite honestly, boast of long and honourable descent.

The Hydes of Norbury, in the county of Cheshire, celebrated by Camden in his “Britannia,” had handed down that possession from father to son since the far-back days before the Norman Conquest, but the first of the race with whom we need concern ourselves is the grandfather of the future Chancellor.^[3]

Laurence, the seventh son of Robert Hyde of Norbury, could claim, naturally, but a small provision from the paternal resources, but his mother seems to have looked carefully to his education, as the best chance for his future, and he was placed as a clerk in one of the auditors’ offices of the Exchequer.

Thence he was employed in the affairs of Sir Thomas Thynne, who under Protector Somerset in a short time raised a great estate, and was the first of his name to possess Longleat.

Laurence Hyde, however, held the post little more than a year—and gained nothing by it—but soon afterwards he married Anne, widow of Matthew Colthurst of Claverton, near Bath, who brought him a fair fortune, and by this marriage he had four sons and four daughters, the sons being Robert, Laurence, Henry and Nicholas. He bought, at the time of his marriage, the manor of West Hatch in the county of Wilts, but at his death he left the greater part of his estate to his widow.

Of the four sons above mentioned, the second, named also Laurence, became eventually “a lawyer of great name and practice,” being attorney to Queen Anne of Denmark, and obtaining knighthood in due course. His next brother, by name Henry, was at the time of his father’s death already entered at the Middle Temple, being a good scholar and a Master of Arts of Oxford. He was supposed (probably by his brothers and sisters) to be his mother’s favourite, and perhaps it was because he was the “spoilt child,” that he stoutly announced that “he had no mind to the law” but wished to enlarge his mind by travel. Having with some difficulty, as may be conjectured, extracted his mother’s unwilling consent, he went joyfully off on the Grand Tour, going through Germany from Spa to Italy. There he visited Florence, Siena and Rome, which, by the way, was then inhibited to the subjects of Elizabeth, and he somehow managed to obtain the protection of Cardinal Allen, probably a very necessary precaution. However, in due time Henry Hyde came safely back from what was then, and for long afterwards, considered a perilous undertaking, and was of course on his return persuaded forthwith to marry.

The wife who was chosen was Mary, one of the daughters and heirs of Edward Longford of Trowbridge, and Henry Hyde appears from this time to have settled down peaceably in his native county. He served as burgess for some neighbouring boroughs in many parliaments, and moreover, like his father before him, had a numerous family of four sons and five daughters.

Of his sons, the third, Edward, lived to be the Lord Chancellor.

Edward Hyde was born at his father’s house of Dinton, Wilts, on 18th February 1609, and as a child was taught by a schoolmaster to whom his father presented the living.

After the fashion of those days, which peopled both the universities with mere children, the boy was sent at the age of thirteen to Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and thereafter entered at the Middle Temple by his uncle, Nicholas Hyde, afterwards Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench.^[4]

In his early youth there came to Edward Hyde an experience which seems to us to embody a brief and sad romance. He married in 1629 the daughter of Sir George Ayliffe of Gretenham in his own county of Wilts, but before six months were past, the poor young bride was smitten by smallpox, that scourge of the seventeenth century, and died. He says of himself that “he bore her Loss with so great Passion and Confusion of spirit that it shook all the frame of his Resolutions.”

However, in 1632, when he was but twenty-four, the young widower repaired his loss by a second marriage with Frances, daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, a union which proved to be a very happy one. With reference to this marriage Sir Bernard Burke, in his “Romance of the Aristocracy,” gives a curious tradition respecting the descent of Frances Aylesbury.

Some time early in the seventeenth century, a barefooted and destitute girl arrived one day at a roadside tavern in the village of Chelsea, and being kindly welcomed there, told the landlord that she was tramping to London, hoping to take service there. As it happened, the situation of “pot-girl” was then vacant at the Blue Dragon, and “Anne” forthwith stepped into the place. A rich brewer was in the habit of coming every day for his evening draught, and being attracted by the girl’s manner and appearance, married her within three months. Before long he died, leaving “Anne” a wealthy widow, to whom came many suitors. From among these she chose Sir Thomas Aylesbury, Master of Requests and the Mint, who moreover possessed lands in Buckinghamshire.

After many years there arose a dispute as to the property of the late brewery, and Lady Aylesbury was recommended to employ a young barrister, by name Edward Hyde, who was destined thereafter to become her son-in-law.

From this tale was drawn the obvious conclusion that the two queens of England, Mary and Anne, were great-granddaughters of a beggar maid.

Fortunately Burke merely gives the romantic story for what it is worth, and suggests that very probably it was coined after the Restoration by some one of Hyde’s numerous enemies, who were envious of his steady ascent to rank and distinction, and found a theory of obscure connections very comforting to their own souls.

In February 1634 we find young Hyde appointed one of the managers of a masque presented before the King by the Inns of Court, as a protest against Prynne’s furious attack on the drama.

Thither came King Charles, stately and gracious, forgetting perhaps for a brief moment the heavy clouds now gathering low on his horizon to cover the sky as with a pall: with dreaming, melancholy eyes intent for a little space on the scene which the masquers unfolded before him; where, a little before, Ben Jonson had brought many beautiful and dainty fancies to such rare perfection—but on this occasion it was “The Triumph of Peace,” by James Shirley.

Here, on that winter evening, in that great and splendid hall, shone all the glitter and pageantry and poetic thought so soon to be for long years eclipsed, leaving a pathetic memory to be cherished through many weary seasons of strife and disaster by those who had seen it.^[5]

Whether young Hyde at this time attracted the King’s special attention or not, we have no record, but his progress was a steady one.

As to what manner of man he was, we have his own words. In the curious sententious method of introspection and self-analysis employed by the thinkers of that age, Hyde speaks of himself as “in his nature inclined to Pride and Passion, and to a humour between Wrangling and Disputing very troublesome”^[6]; but he certainly possessed the art of attracting the friendship of some of the finest spirits of that stormy age, which, like all periods of stress, produced many such to shine like lamps in their time. There were the poets Carew and Cotton, the elder Godolphin, Evelyn, who extols Hyde’s “great and signal merits,” and greatest and noblest of all, Lucius Carey, Lord Falkland.

If, as has been said, a man is known by his friends, then it may surely be counted to Edward Hyde for righteousness that he had eyes to discern the shining of that “steadfast star” too early extinguished. There is nothing more inspiring in English literature than the words in which he chronicles the going out of that light, the death of his hero on the red field which gave that pure spirit the peace it craved so earnestly. “Thus,” says the historian, “fell that incomparable young man in the four and thirtieth year of his age, having so much despatched the business of life that the oldest rarely attain to that immense knowledge, and the youngest enters not into the world with more innocence, and whosoever leads such a life need not care upon how short warning it be taken from him.”^[7]

Edward Hyde’s link with the great Villiers family procured for him powerful interest, and prompted him to vindicate the detested memory of the first Duke of Buckingham. This Villiers connection was due partly to Hyde’s first marriage, as there seems to have been a relationship with the Ayliffes of Gretenham, and partly to his father-in-law, Sir Thomas Aylesbury. He, being a distinguished mathematician, had been secretary first to the Earl of Nottingham, Lord High Admiral of England, and then to the latter’s successor, Buckingham. To the influence of the powerful favourite he owed his posts of Master of Requests and of the Mint. Anthony Wood says that Sir Thomas sat for a short time in Parliament in the former capacity, and as a matter of form at Oxford in 1643 after the beginning of the Rebellion.

His Cavalier sympathies procured for him the sentence of banishment from England, and he died at Breda at the age of eighty-one. His son, who at the instance of Charles I. had translated Davila’s “History of the Civil Wars in France,” was for a time tutor to the second Duke of Buckingham and his young brother Lord Francis Villiers, who in his turn merits one word at least. Nothing in the history of the great strife has been chronicled more heroic nor more pathetic than the fate of that boy—for he was no more—at Kingston-on-Thames. A true Villiers, “prodigal of his person,” he fiercely rejected quarter, and with his back against a tree fought valiantly till he went down under the swords of the Roundheads, “nine wounds in his beautiful face and body.”^[8] Yet it was better so—better to die in the flush of chivalrous, unstained youth, than to live out such a life as his brother’s, a life blackened by degrading vice, gasped out alone, in the “worst inn’s worst room,” as Pope declared (though this has been denied), the last male of his race.

To return to the Aylesbury tutor of the Villiers brothers; he lived abroad in exile for a time, and having been obliged to return to England in 1650, he again left the country, and died six years later in Jamaica, being then secretary to Major-General Sedgwick.

Another of Edward Hyde’s friends was Sir Edmund Verney, “of great courage and generally beloved,”^[9] that gallant standard-bearer who was destined to fall at Edgehill at the beginning of the war, but who as long as he lived, with Hyde and Falkland, might be considered to represent the moderate or constitutional loyalists. Having in 1634 been appointed keeper of writs and rolls of Common Pleas, we find Hyde later emerging into the arena of public life. In 1640 he organised the royal party in the Commons, and on the eve of the outbreak drew up the state papers for the Royalist press.^[10] With Colepepper, afterwards famous as a general, and his friend Falkland, Hyde joined the King at York. At this time he was member for Wotton Basset in his own county of Wilts, having been also called to serve for Shaftesbury, which however he declined. At the dissolution of the Short Parliament in 1640 he was again, in the constitution of the Long Parliament, returned for his own constituency. At some time he also seems to have represented Saltash. At any rate, from the date above referred to, he gave up his practice at the Bar, and devoted himself to “public business.”

We have it under his hand that as late as 1639 the “three kingdoms” were “flourishing in entire Peace and universal Plenty,” yet we cannot but think that any one so far-seeing and sagacious as Edward Hyde must have detected the first low mutterings of the gathering storm by that time. His personal enmity to Cromwell began early, and at the beginning of the Long Parliament he was attacked by the bitter Puritan Fiennes for his steady attachment to the Church.^[11] It was then that he was first sent for by the King, who wished to thank him personally for his defence both of himself and of the Church, and from this date begins his close association with Charles. With Prince Rupert, loyal nephew and gallant soldier as he showed himself to be, Hyde was never on good terms, neither were his two colleagues,^[12] and the trio before mentioned, whether for good or evil, steadily opposed the sometimes headlong counsels of the brilliant Prince Palatine.

One of Hyde’s first actions after his election was to secure the suppression of the Earl Marshal’s Court, while soon after his dispute with Fiennes, the King wished to appoint him Solicitor-General, though Hyde declined the post. The triumvirate, Colepepper, Falkland and Hyde himself, steadfast, upright and loyal, constantly met to consult on the King’s affairs, in the hope—a vain one as it proved—of stemming the incoming tide of misfortune. At the beginning of 1643, Hyde was sworn of the Privy Council, and made Chancellor of the Exchequer, but in common with many other of the King’s most faithful and wisest servants, we find him deploring the Queen’s unbounded influence over her husband, who, since Buckingham’s untimely and tragic death from the dagger of Felton, had had no supreme adviser. Before Henrietta left for Holland on her expedition to procure supplies with the jewels she pledged there, she exacted from the King two utterly preposterous promises: first, to receive no one who had ever “disserved him” into favour, and secondly, not to make peace without her consent. After the fatal loss of Falkland at Newbury fight in this year, the King was anxious to make Hyde Secretary of State, but the latter declined this office also, and it was conferred on Digby.^[13] But early in the succeeding year the Chancellor received a proof of his master’s absolute confidence, as he was entrusted with the care of the Prince of Wales.

On the 4th March 1644, though neither master nor servant was to know it, Edward Hyde parted from King Charles for the last time on earth, and set out for the west of England with the boy whose life for the next sixteen years was to be one of weary and ceaseless wandering.

From Pendennis in Cornwall they went to Scilly and on to Jersey. Here Hyde himself stayed for two years with Sir George Carteret, remaining after the Prince left the island for Paris in 1646, both Capel and Hopton having gone before him.

The Queen’s mischievous jealousy of Hyde, which had begun early, had not abated, and she still wrote to the harassed and almost despairing King letters calculated to prejudice him still further against the former. Charles, in this case, does not seem to have been really influenced by them, for he wrote to the Chancellor that he wished him to join his son as soon as he left France, and even Henrietta herself must have been seized with some compunction, for she sent for Hyde in 1648. As soon as he received the summons the latter went to Caen, then to Rouen, and hearing the Prince was to go to Holland he went to Dieppe to wait, glad probably of an excuse to avoid the unwelcome interview with the Queen. Thence he joined Lord Cottington in a frigate going to Dunkirk, but they were taken by pirates, who, however, did no worse than convey them to Ostend, whence the Chancellor was able to join the Prince of Wales at the Hague.

It was at this time that Hyde came into contact with one of the greatest and noblest of his king’s servants, but one who was yet the object of bitter jealousy at the hands of many of his own party, no less than at those of his enemies.

Montrose was then in Holland, after the disaster of Philiphaugh, hoping, plotting, working, with the restless, passionate, indomitable energy which had achieved so much in the past, yet which was destined to fail so utterly in the future. At a village near The Hague the two met, the grave lawyer and the hot soldier, to confer on the state of Scotland and the prospects therein of the master whom they both served with whole-hearted and ungrudging devotion.

There they parted, and Montrose came back to his distracted country to raise anew the standard, to fight his last fight, to be betrayed by the basest of traitors, to die a dishonoured death, as his enemies called it, which was to earn for him, nevertheless, imperishable fame; and Hyde was to toil on steadfastly for long strenuous years, destined to bring him fame and place and wealth, and to bring him likewise fresh exile and bitter disillusion in his age.

After Hyde’s mission as ambassador to Spain with his friend Lord Cottington was accomplished, he was at last able to send for his wife and children to join him in the Low Countries, but before he met them at Antwerp he made a journey to Paris to see the widowed queen, for by this time the tragedy at Whitehall had been consummated, and Hyde’s young charge was king de jure if not de facto. Henrietta seems to have been still possessed with the idea that the Chancellor’s influence with her son was adverse to her interests, but she received him civilly on this occasion.

After the disastrous defeat of Worcester in 1651, and his own romantic escape, Charles II. bethought him of Hyde, and sent for him to Paris, keeping him chiefly with him in Flanders on their return there, until his own departure for Germany.^[14]

During this time, Mary, Princess Royal of England, and Dowager of Orange, showed herself a firm friend to her father’s old servant, and evinced great kindness to his family, providing them with a house rent free at Breda some time during the autumn of 1653, Breda being then in Spanish territory, and not under the States General.^[15]

Here, then, he lived, surrounded by those dearest to him, as far as one can judge a fairly contented life for the next few years. If, as we are told, his three principles were “a passionate attachment to the religion and polity of the Church of England, a determination to maintain what he considered the true ideal of the English constitution, and a desire for personal advancement,” this last attribute—ambition—could have had little to feed on during those years at Breda.