The History of the Rebellion by Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon and former advisor to Charles I and Charles II, is his account of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Originally published between 1702 and 1704 as The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, it was the first detailed account from a key player in the events it covered. [1]
Clarendon wrote the original History between 1646 and 1648, which only recorded events to March 1644. After his banishment, he wrote his autobiographical Life between 1668 and 1670. In 1671 he then revised the History by incorporating the Life into it and writing new sections covering events after March 1644. [2]
The title itself reflects the contemporary dispute over the nature and origins of the war. For Parliamentarians, the conflict was an attempt to restore the political balance between king and Parliament disrupted by the 1629 to 1640 Personal Rule. Royalists considered it an unlawful rebellion against their sovereign; in 1669, diarist and naval civil servant Samuel Pepys was asked by Duke of York to change a reference to "the late disruption between king and Parliament" to 'rebellion". [3]
The History is influenced by Clarendon's politics and subtly supports his own views of Royalist strategy. For example, he opposed those Royalists in Paris headed by the Queen, who urged Charles to agree to compromises over the Church of England to win support from the Presbyterian Scots Covenanters against Parliament. Clarendon argued that in so doing, Charles' advisers were destroying the cause for which they were fighting. He denigrates the logic for accepting such compromise by attributing widespread support for Puritan reforms to the church as simple disaffection by a wicked faction. [4] While his descriptions of the participants are often insightful, they can also be heavily biased.
The original publication of the History was sparked by the sensational success of Republican exile Edmund Ludlow's Memoirs in 1698–1699, which led to a spate of Civil War memoirs from the Whig perspective, especially from the printer John Darby. [5] The Tories responded in 1701 with those of the Royalist Sir Philip Warwick, followed in 1702 by those of Sir Thomas Herbert and the first volume of Clarendon's History. [6]
In the preface to the first volume of his father's work, Laurence Hyde referred to his time as "an age when so many memoirs, narratives, and pieces of history come out as it were on purpose to justify the taking up arms against that king, and to blacken, revile, and ridicule the sacred majesty of an anointed head in distress; and when so much of the sense of religion to God, and of allegiance and duty to the crown is so defaced". [7]
The second volume was published during the 1702 Tory push for the Occasional Conformity Bill that sought to undermine the Whigs by barring Nonconformists from office. This allowed individuals to comply with the Test Acts by attending Church of England service once or twice a year, a practice that persisted in both England and Ireland well into the mid-18th century. [8] In the preface addressed to his niece Queen Anne, Hyde warned the "Monarchy of England is not now capable of being supported but upon the principles of the Church of England". Like his father before him, he claimed the Dissenters were simply the latest "propagation of the rebellious principles of the last age". [9] He went on to suggest that only by adhering to the Tories could she avoid the same fate as her grandfather Charles I. [10]
On 21 October 1703, Anne wrote to her friend, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough;
Sir B. Bathurst sent me Ld Clarendons history last week, but haveing not quite made an end of ye first part, I did not unpack it, but I shall have that Curiosety now, to See this extraordinary dedication, which I should never have looked for in ye Second part of a book, & me thinks it is very wonderfull that people that dont want sense in some things, should be soe rediculous as to shew theire vanity. [10]
David Hume, in his The History of Great Britain (1756), provided a mixed assessment of Clarendon:
This age affords great materials for history; but did not produce any accomplished historian. Clarendon, however, will always be esteemed an entertaining writer, even independent of our curiosity to know the facts, which he relates. His style is prolix and redundant, and suffocates us by the length of its periods: But it discovers imagination and sentiment, and pleases us at the same time that we disapprove of it. He is more partial in appearance than in reality: For he seems perpetually anxious to apologize for the king; but his apologies are often well grounded. He is less partial in his relation of facts, than in his account of characters: He was too honest a man to falsify the former; his affections were easily capable, unknown to himself, of disguising the latter. An air of probity and goodness runs through the whole work; as these qualities did in reality embellish the whole life of the author. [11]
The republican Whig historian Catharine Macaulay believed the History to be "as faithful an account of facts as any to be found in those times. … The characters are described in strong if not just colours, but the style is disagreeably pompous". She also added that "the author's conclusions are so much at war with his facts that he is apt to disgust a candid reader with his prejudices and partiality". [12]
The debate over the Civil War continued into the 18th century, with Tory defences of the History against Whig criticisms appearing in 1716 by Henry Cantrell, in 1731 by Francis Atterbury, in 1732 by William Shippen and in 1739 by John Davys. In 1757, the former Whig Secretary of State Thomas Robinson claimed "the creed of those gentlemen was in the preface to Clarendon's History", i.e. that written by Laurence Hyde in 1701. [13]
The Whigs were a political faction and then a political party in the Parliaments of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Between the 1680s and the 1850s, the Whigs contested power with their rivals, the Tories. The Whigs merged into the Liberal Party with the Peelites and Radicals in the 1850s. Many Whigs left the Liberal Party in 1886 to form the Liberal Unionist Party, which merged into the Conservative Party in 1912.
Charles II was King of Scotland from 1649 until 1651, and King of England, Scotland and Ireland from the 1660 Restoration of the monarchy until his death in 1685.
Roundheads were the supporters of the Parliament of England during the English Civil War (1642–1651). Also known as Parliamentarians, they fought against King Charles I of England and his supporters, known as the Cavaliers or Royalists, who claimed rule by absolute monarchy and the principle of the divine right of kings. The goal of the Roundheads was to give to Parliament the supreme control over executive administration of the country/kingdom.
Sir Charles Lucas, 1613 to 28 August 1648, was a professional soldier from Essex, who served as a Royalist cavalry leader during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Taken prisoner at the end of the First English Civil War in March 1646, he was released after swearing not to fight against Parliament again, an oath he broke when the Second English Civil War began in 1648. As a result, he was executed following his capture at the Siege of Colchester in August 1648, and became a Royalist martyr after the 1660 Stuart Restoration.
Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, was an English statesman, lawyer, diplomat and historian who served as chief advisor to Charles I during the First English Civil War, and Lord Chancellor to Charles II from 1660 to 1667.
Edward Hyde, 3rd Earl of Clarendon, styled Viscount Cornbury between 1674 and 1709, was an English aristocrat and politician. Better known by his noble title Lord Cornbury, he was propelled into the forefront of English politics when he and part of his army defected from the Catholic King James II to support the newly arrived Protestant contender, William III of Orange. These actions were part of the beginning of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Cornbury's choice to support his cousin Anne instead of William after the rebellion cost him his military commission. However, Cornbury's support of King William's reign eventually earned him the governorship of the provinces of New York and New Jersey; he served between 1701 and 1708.
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The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, sometimes known as the British Civil Wars, were a series of intertwined conflicts fought between 1639 and 1653 in the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, then separate entities united in a personal union under Charles I. They include the 1639 to 1640 Bishops' Wars, the First and Second English Civil Wars, the Irish Confederate Wars, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland and the Anglo-Scottish war (1650–1652). They resulted in victory for the Parliamentarian army, the execution of Charles I, the abolition of monarchy, and founding of the Commonwealth of England, a unitary state which controlled the British Isles until the Stuart Restoration in 1660.
Henry Hyde, 4th Earl of Clarendon and 2nd Earl of Rochester, PC, styled Lord Hyde from 1682 to 1711, was an English Army officer and Tory politician who sat in the English and British House of Commons from 1692 until 1711 when he succeeded to the peerage as Earl of Rochester.
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