LADY THERESA LEWIS'S LIVES OF CLARENDON'S CONTEMPORARIES. * A CLEAR judgment,
an elegant taste, and considerable industry, stimulated by family associations to a course of historical and bio. graphical inquiry, are displayed in these biographies. The family circumstances which prompted the undertakins, have also facili- tated the labour ; the sister of the present Lord Clarendon having received assistance from historical houses, which might not have been so readily granted to other applicants. The three contemporaries of Clarendon whom Lady Theresa Lewis has selected for her pen were remarkable by character or fortune. Lord Falkland has been painted with such particularity and fondness by Clarendon—his merit and virtues have since been the theme of so many pens—that a species of halo surrounds his memory, though few who are familiar with his name and public career know much of his life properly speaking. The name of Arthur Capell Lord Capell is less familiar to the world : he is best remembered by the historical reader for his Roman-like death after the surrender of Colchester, under circumstances which may show harshness, severity, and probably illegality on the part of the Parliament, but involving, we conceive, no breach of faith as regards the capitulation. William Seymour Marquis of Hert- ford, created on the Restoration Duke of Somerset, was by nature a man of literary leisure rather than action, as Clarendon intimates by some of his nicest touches ; yet Fortune often placed him during his long career in positions he would not have chosen for himself. His clandestine marriage in very early life to the Lady Arabella Stuart—the rage of King James—the separate imprison- ment of the two lovers—their escape from prison—the capture of Lady Arabella, her close imprisonment and melancholy death— with the evasion of Seymour to the Low Countries—form a sub- ject for romance, which has not been neglected in our days, though historical inquiry throws doubts on the romance or sentiment of the actors. After Seymour's pardon, and succession through un- expected deaths to the honours and fortune of his house, the Earl of Hertford retired to his estates, passing his life in domestic pursuits and study till the age of fifty. By this time, according to Clarendon, " he loved and was even wedded so much to his ease that he loved his book above all exercises, and had even contracted such a ;laziness of mind, that he had no delight in an open and liberal conversation, and cared not to discuss and argue on those points which he understood very well, only for the trouble of con- tending." At the outbreak of the troubles he was summoned to York; and in spite of his long habits of leisure, and the hard dealing he had received from the Crown, he continued active and faithful to the last in the service of Charles, though suffering with other of the King's best friends from his weakness and nepo- tism. Lord Hertford was one of the four nobles who were per- mitted to attend the funeral ; and he, the Duke of Richmond, and the Earls Southampton and Lindsay, are said to have borne the coffin on their shoulders to the grave. He just lived to witness the Restoration, and to experience the first flush of Charles the Second's gratitude : he died in October 1660, in the seventy-third year of his . Theagelives exhibit industrious research, under the guidance of a discriminating taste, and a feminine clearness of style, diffusive without heaviness. With the exception of Lord Falkland, the subjects perhaps are of too little historical note to require the length at which they are displayed ; or rather, the biographical materials are too scanty to permit the lives to be fully exhibited. Hence Lady Lewis is driven to follow the prevailing custom of mixing up history with biography, and narrating as part of a life the events with which the subject had some connexion. This neces- sarily lessens both the historical and the biographical interest, yet leaves the history at all events incomplete. This mode of composition is defended by the authoress : but we conceive she would better have accomplished her object by avoiding so much of politics and political events, by a continuous presentment of biography, and by the introduction, as accessories or backgrounds, of local scenery connected with the actors, and a sprinkling of lifelike heraldry or family story. This, indeed, is as likely to overlay the main subject as history in unskilful hands ; but we speak of use, not abuse.
• Lives of the Friends and Contemporaries of Lord Chancellor Lewis Clarendon: illustrative of Portraits in his Gallery. By Lady Theresa Lewis. In three volumes. With Portraits. Published by Murray. Notwithstanding the " innocency of life " of which Clarendon makes such emphatic mention in the case of Falkland, the youth- ful Lucius Cary was thrown into the Fleet, for what some bio- graphers have called in general terms an act of youthful indis- ererrou. Careful research into the manuscript records of the time not only enables Lady Lewis to confirm the passing assertion of Chalmers, that it was a duel, but to produce "the correspondence." Sir Francis Willoughby had been appointed by the King to the com- pany which Cary, commanded ; and as Cary "could not strike at the hand, the Hing,] he must and would strike at the stone that lies lower ": so he sent a letter to Willoughby, and then a message by his friend Captaip Rainsford. The documents have been drawn from the State Paper Office, Ireland; and are all in the hand- writing of Willoughby—copies probably put in when the matter was investigated. This is the rather fiery challenge of a man whom general opinion deems mildness itself. Sir Lucius Caries Letter to me.
"Sir—Yf I had known certainly afore the other daye that youe had my company, and afore yesterdaye where youre lodginge was, youe had afore nowe heard from me. Nowe I hears youe are toe goe towardes Ireland on Mundaye, to which I shal be a little Remora. I only desire youe toe excuse me that I send a servant of myne, and not a freind, on such a buisines, for it is toe short a tyme toe make a freind in, and I had none ready made. I doe confesse youe a brave gentleman, (and for myne owne sake I would not but have my adversary be soe) ; but 'I knowe nee reason why, therfore, youe showld have my.company, any more than why therfore you showld have my breeches, which yf every brave man showld have, I showld be Payne shortly toe begg trowses. I dowght not but youe will give me satisfaction with your sworde ; of which yf you will send me the lengthe, with tyme and place, youe shalbe sure (accordingly toe the appointment) toe meete Lucius CARY."
This sharpness of tongue stuck by him as long at least as he continued in opposition to the Court, or rather to the King, for to the Court he was always opposed. The following speech, on the conduct of the High Church might be applied to the present day ; but it would be considered strong now, though the strength is as much in the thought as the words. "'Mr. Speaker—He is a great stranger in Israel who knows not this kingdom hath long laboured under many and .great oppressions both in re- ligion and liberty; and his acquaintance here is not great, or his ingenuity less, who doth not both know and acknowledge that a great, if not a prin- cipal cause of both these have been some Bishops and their adherents. Mr. Speaker, a little search will serve to find them to have been the destruction of unity, under.pretence of uniformity—to have brought in superstition and scandal under the titles of reverence and decency—to have defiled our Church by adorning our churches—to have slackened the strictness of that union which was formerly between us and those of our religion beyond the sea : an action as impolitic as ungodly. We shall find them to have tithed mint and anise, and have left undone the weightier works of the law.' . . . . 'It hath been more dangerous for men to go to some neighbour's parish when they had no sermon in their own than to be obstinate and perpetual recusants ; while masses have been said in security, a conventicle bath been a crime ; and, which is yet more, the conforming to ceremonies hath been more ex- acted than the conforming to Christianity.' . . . . We shall find them to be like the hen in .2Esop, which, laying every day an egg upon such a proportion of barley, her mistress increasing her proportion in hopes she would increase her eggs, she grew so fat upon that addition that she never laid more ; so, though at first their preaching were the occasion of their preferment, they after made their preferment the occasion of their not preaching. We shall find them to have resembled another fable, the dog in the manger—to have neither preached themselves, nor employed those that should, nor suffered
those that would.' • • •
" The truth, Mr. Speaker, is,' continued he, that, as some ill ministers in our state first took away our money from us, and after endeavoured to make our money not worth the taking, by turning it into brass by a kind of anti-philosopher's stone ; so these men used us in the point of preaching, first depressing it to their power, and next labourinr, to make it such as the harm had not been much if it had been depressed. labouring most frequent sub- jects even in the most sacred auditories being the jus divinum of bishops and tithes, the sacredness of the clergy, the sacrilege of impropriations, the de- molishing of Puritanism and propriety, the building of the prerogative at Paul's, the introduction of such doctrines as, admitting them true, the truth would not recompense the scandal, or such as were so far false, that, as Sir Thomas More says of the casuists, their business was not to keep men from sinning, but to confirm them--Quam props ad peccatum sine peccato liceat accedere; so it seemed their work was to try how much of a Papist might be brought in without Popery, and to destroy as much as they could of the gospel without bringing themselves into danger of being destroyed by the law.
" 'Mr. Speaker, to go yet further, some of them have so industriously la- boured to deduce themselves from Rome, that they have given great sus- picion that in gratitude they desire to return thither, or at least to meet it half-way. Some have evidently laboured to bring in an English though not a Roman Popery ; I mean not only the outside and dress of it, but equally absolute, a blind dependence of the people upon the clergy, and of the clergy upon themselves, and have opposed the Papacy beyond the seas that they might settle one beyond the water. [An allusion to Lambeth.] Nay, com- mon fame is more than ordinarily false if none of them have found a way to reconcile the opinions of Rome to the preferments of England, and to be so absolutely, directly, and cordially Papists, that it is all that fifteen hundred pound a year can do to keep them from confessing it.' " As an example of Lady. Lewis's own composition, ,n we will take some very judicious remarks on the conventional claptrap notions of the Cavaliers and Roundheads.
"The popular notion that on the side of the King was ranged a powerful aristocracy, that the ranks of his army were filled with gay cavaliers, that his court was adorned with the rich dresses that the pencil of Vandyke has rendered familar to posterity, that the joyous conviviality of the country nobility, and the careless morality of those of the town, stamped his service with the dignity and the charm that belong to high birth, to wealth, to ac- complished minds and graceful manners, has greatly tended with some to throw a romantic interest and a false brilliancy on the royalist party ; and is fondly contrasted with the low condition, the cold morality, the coarse elo- quence, the stern fanaticism, the sour looks, the mean attire, and the morose manners of the Puritans and Presbyterians who formed the strength of the popular party ; or whilst adopting in the main the same view of each, the spirit in which the two are regarded has been reversed. The royalists have been treated as the gay licentious followers of a despotic King, drawn toge- ther by the feudal feeling that taught them to serve the Sovereign as their liege lord, and to join with him in maintaining their own power by oppress- ing the people as mere vassals of the land, and forming a striking contrast to the sober, reasoning, thoughtful, pious, and decorous advocates of the just privileges to which they were entitled. "But such views, though popular, have but little more than a bare founda- tion of truth. The half dramatic, half crusading character with which the court of Charles has been invested, that mixture of gay cavaliers and honour- able knights, of waving plumes and flowing locks, that speak powerfully to the fancy, and those humorous descriptions of crop-eared orators, sly hypocrites, and nasal preachers, give but a very false and superficial view of those grave and honest men on either side who argued great constitutional questions, who upheld the Protestant Church against innovations that were leading to Popery, who fought for the safety of the Crown, or maintained the rights and privileges of Parliament. There were men of high honour, of high birth, of sincere piety, of great learning, of cultivated minds, and polished manners, on both sides—on each were often displayed the vices and follies that are incident to human nature, and which will equally appear, whatever may be the standard that is chosen to be followed i• but the com- batants on each side were Englishmen—there was no national distinction of character to be opposed and contrasted ; and if on the royalist side there is found less to captivate the imagination in the picture of a King poor and in distress, surrounded by grave counsellors, learned divines, sound lawyers, or veteran commanders, than in the more popular view, his court must gain in dignity, his cause in respect, his person in regard, and his misfortunes in sympathy when men like Lord Falkland, Lord Capell, Sir Edward Hyde, Sir Idwak Nicholas, Lord Culpepper., Lord Hopton, Lord Lindsay,.Lord Southampton, and the Marquis of Hertford, are found to have ranged them- selves on his side and been faithful to the end."
An appendix of original documents is added to each life, and an introduction contains an agreeable account of the history of the pictures and manuscripts of Clarendon, with a defence of the Chan- cellor from the charge of having corruptly obtained the works of art. There is also a general appendix, embracing a descriptive catalogue of the Clarendon Gallery ; in which a taste for art and biographical anecdote are very agreeably mingled.
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