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English Historical Review Vol. CXXV No. 517© The Author [2010]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

EHR, cxxv. 517 (Dec. 2010)

doi:10.1093/ehr/ceq344

Laurence Hyde and the Politics of Religion in Later Stuart England*

One of the most significant dimensions of the re-invigoration of later Stuart studies over the last 20 years has been the drive to place religion at the heart of political affairs.1 Where once 1660 marked the ‘experience of defeat’ for religious radicals, and the beginnings of the rise of deism, scepticism or outright atheism, much of the old ‘iron curtain’ of seventeenth-century historiography dividing the Restoration period off from earlier decades has been pulled down by recent scholarship.2 As a result, recovering different aspects of religious life, and their interactions with later Stuart politics, has become a major sub-set of early modern historiography. Nevertheless, with only a few distinguished exceptions, recent scholars of the later Stuart period have not tended to use individuals’ careers to illustrate their arguments about the close interplay between religion and politics with the same gusto as their colleagues working on the first half of the seventeenth century.

This article aims to contribute both to the specific trend in Restoration studies that emphasises the importance of religion in political life, and the wider tendency towards recognising the value of individual case-studies. It will do this via in-depth analysis of a particularly poorly known figure: Laurence Hyde, earl of Rochester.3 As a consequence of previous biographical neglect, the first sections will offer some account of Hyde’s life in order to contextualise the ensuing discussion of his religion. It will be argued that this religious position was a central aspect of Hyde’s political career, which was in turn of great importance within public life between the last years of Charles II and the reign of Anne. In particular, it will be suggested that a vital dimension of Hyde’s religious beliefs can be supplied by a detailed consideration of his family life. His

*I would like to thank D’Maris Coffman, Maya Evans, Katherine Halliday, Clive Holmes, John Morrill, Paul Seaward, Stephen Taylor, Catherine Wright and the referees for this journal for commenting on drafts of this article, and members of the ‘Religious History of Britain 1500–1800’ Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research for their searching questions. I am particularly grateful to George Southcombe for reading two different drafts, and to Bill Speck, who not only read an early draft but also generously allowed me access to then unpublished work. Lastly, I am happy to acknowledge vital financial assistance from both the Arts and Humanities Research Council (for graduate studentships) and the British Academy (for a Postdoctoral Fellowship). 1. T. Harris, P. Seaward and M. Goldie, eds., The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990); J. Gregory, ‘The Politics of Religion’, Parliamentary History, xii (1993), pp. 287–95; and M. Goldie, ‘Voluntary Anglicans’, Historical Journal, xlvi (2003), pp. 977–90. 2. C. Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (1984); R. Hutton, review of C. Holmes, Seventeenth-Century Lincolnshire, ante, xcviii (1983), p. 870. 3. For the sake of consistency, I shall refer to ‘Hyde’ throughout this article, even with regard to the years after his creation as earl of Rochester in 1682.

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father’s example, his sister’s conversion, a series of early deaths and his relationships with his brother-in-law—James II—and nieces—Mary II and Anne—all combined to define Hyde’s public status. The interplay of these factors would lead to acute crisis in the winter of 1686/7 and chronic discontent thereafter until his death in 1711.

Hyde was baptised in March 1642, five months before the beginning of England’s wars of religion. Family connections, political circumstances and personal belief would combine to keep religion at the heart of his career thereafter. He was born the second son of Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, Charles II’s first lord chancellor and a major architect of the reconstruction of the old regime—including the Church of England—after 1660. In middle age, he was James II’s lord treasurer until he was removed from office for failing to convert to catholicism in late 1686. Finally, in the decade before his death in 1711, he was one of the most prominent of those who argued during the reign of Anne that the Church of England was put in danger by the influence of protestant nonconformists. Yet despite these formidable claims to status, and the obvious prominence of spiritual and ecclesiastical matters within them, little has been written about Hyde’s religion. In part, this is a function of the wider lack of biographical work about him; indeed, it is tempting to say that Hyde is the most significant late Stuart politician not to have received a published biography.4

Why have historians offered so little discussion of Hyde’s life and career? W.A. Speck’s recent Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article provides a good deal of welcome detail, as well as some intriguing analysis, but it also emphasises the wider lacuna. Lack of evidence has obviously inhibited many scholars. Although a two-volume collection of letters and diaries written by Hyde and his older brother Henry, the second earl of Clarendon, was published in 1828, there is a severe imbalance of material in the latter’s favour.5 This is no doubt largely due to the fire which destroyed Hyde’s Middlesex house, New Park, Petersham, in 1721, ten years after his death.6 The likely impact of this fire on his personal papers may have been very significant indeed bearing in mind the powerful drive to record the events of their own lives that ran through several generations of the Hyde family.7 Tantalising and

4. For a well-written compendium of information from printed sources, see J. Biggs-Davison, Tory Lives from Falkland to Disraeli (1952), pp. 30–62. 5. S.W. Singer, ed., The Correspondence of Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon and of His Brother Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester . . . (hereafter Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence) (2 vols., 1828), passim. 6. W.A. Speck, ‘Hyde, Laurence, first earl of Rochester (bap. 1642, d. 1711)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 7. Besides the first earl of Clarendon’s monumental History and Life, see Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. pp. 141–332 (the second earl’s diary for 1687–91); Mary Stuart, Memoirs of Mary Queen of England (1689–1693) . . ., ed. R. Doebner (1886).

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1416 LAURENCE HYDE AND THE POLITICS

fragmentary diaries kept by Hyde survive elsewhere only for the 1670s, before his rise to the highest offices of state.8

But lack of evidence has not been the only factor inhibiting historical research into Hyde’s life. His career has failed to inspire modern scholars, many of whom have additionally been repelled by his apparently unpleasant personality.9 Even the one doctoral thesis devoted to Hyde’s political life—written by M.F. Yates in the 1930s—begins on an apologetic note by arguing that it was not solely about Hyde since it would then represent only ‘the study of a politician of the second or even third rank’.10 His hard drinking and explosive temper have often been emphasised,11 while his politics have also been characterised in pejorative terms. As a minister under Charles II, Hyde has been described by Ronald Hutton as ‘an aboriginal Tory’, and Geoffrey Holmes noted that in later life he became perhaps the most cantankerous of ‘the old High Tory chiefs’.12 Such descriptive language is hardly enticing. Neither a Whig theorist nor a Jacobite, Hyde does not readily fit into many of the concerns of recent students of the long eighteenth century.

Taking into account these problems, two things can nevertheless be said about the shape of Hyde’s career preparatory to a more extended discussion of the powerful role of religion within it. First, his was a notably long and varied career. Hyde sat in every parliament and convention from 1660 to 1711, first as an MP, and then, from 1685, as a peer. He undertook diplomatic work in the Low Countries and Poland, albeit with a striking lack of achievement. He enjoyed preferment at Court, acting as Master of the Robes (1662–78), a significant office thanks to its responsibility for the king’s own clothing.13 Here his success clearly built on a youthful suave style: Burnet described him as the ‘smoothest’ man at Court.14 For most of the period 1679–86, he

8. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. pp. 589–632, 637–41; B[ritish] L[ibrary], Add. MS 17016 fos. 25-6v. Singer’s edition is largely based on BL, Add. MSS 15892–8. 9. For Hyde’s ‘thwarted ambition’, see G. Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (1967), p. 275; W.R. Ward, Georgian Oxford: University Politics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1958), p. 41. For his ‘natural arrogance’, see A.W. Ward, ‘Laurence Hyde’, Dictionary of National Biography. 10. M.F. Yates, ‘The Political Career of Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, as It Illustrates Government Policy and Party Groupings under Charles II and James II’ (Univ. of London Ph.D. thesis, 1935 for 1934), p. iv. For other unpublished theses, see my ‘The Life and Career of Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, c.1681–c.1686’ (Univ. of Cambridge M.Phil. thesis, 1999), and K.P. Shephard, ‘The Political Career of Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, During the Reign of Queen Anne, 1702–1711’, (Univ. of Wales Aberystwyth M.A. thesis, 1980). 11. Notably by Macaulay and Sir Keith Feiling, relying on character sketches by Sir John Reresby and Roger North, respectively: T.B. Macaulay, History of England, ed. C.H. Firth (6 vols., 1913), ii. p. 723; K. Feiling, A History of the Tory Party, 1640–1714 (Oxford, 1924), p. 191. 12. R. Hutton, Charles II: King of England, Scotland and Ireland (Oxford, 1989), p. 405; Holmes, British Politics, p. 169. 13. G.E. Aylmer, The Crown’s Servants: Government and Civil Service under Charles II, 1660–1685 (Oxford, 2002), p. 21. 14. [Gilbert Burnet], Burnet’s History [of My Own Time], ed. O. Airy (2 vols., Oxford, 1897–1900), i. p. 463.

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OF RELIGION IN LATER STUART ENGLAND

dominated the administration of royal finances as first lord of the treasury and then lord treasurer. In these roles, he consolidated and extended the work of Danby in stabilising the Stuarts’ financial position, notably by championing direct collection of taxation in the place of inefficient and corrupt revenue farms.15 Much of this was achieved by sheer hard work and relentless application, Hyde ‘being observed to be always early plodding at the scrutiny of accounts and estimates before the other lords [of the Treasury] came’.16 The political consequences of such fiscal spade-work were immense: shoring up the royal finances removed one of the major sources of monarchical weakness and political tension with parliament that had bedevilled the English polity throughout the Stuart period. In recognition of his role, John Dryden lauded him as Hushai, ‘the friend of David in distress’, in Absalom and Achitophel.17 Above and beyond financial administration, Hyde was also the minister chosen by Charles to manage negotiations with the French for a subsidy in early 1681. This success helped to nerve the king for the stormy third Exclusion Parliament at Oxford in March 1681 and for its abrupt dissolution. It certainly ensured heavy criticism of Hyde by later historians writing in the Whig tradition and predisposed to criticise political actions that allowed monarchs to avoid calling parliament.18

Unfortunately for Hyde, these achievements appear to have gone to his head: ‘he grew both violent and insolent’.19 The combination of holding the government’s purse strings and high-handed dealings with other ministers ultimately undermined his position with Charles II. The king tolerated a lengthy and increasingly bitter assault on Hyde by the marquess of Halifax, who in 1684 succeeded in having him ‘kicked upstairs’ to the more senior but less important post of lord president of the council.20 (He would return to the same post in 1710–11.) Worse still—from his own perspective—he endured two brief spells as lord lieutenant of Ireland, in 1684/5 and 1700–2. He was a Privy Councillor for a quarter of a century (1679–89, 1692–1707, 1710–11). Outside of royal service, he was also High Steward of the University of Oxford, taking over the role from his older brother after the latter’s death in 1709.

15. C.D. Chandaman, The English Public Revenue 1660-1688 (Oxford, 1975), pp. 69–75, 102–9, 247–55, 276; S.B. Baxter, The Development of the Treasury 1660–1702 (1957), pp. 117–18. 16. Roger North, The Lives of the Norths, ed. A. Jessopp (3 vols., 1890), i. p. 302. 17. Quoted in Speck, ‘Hyde, Laurence’, ODNB. 18. According to A.W. Ward, this negotiation was ‘the worst political act’ of Hyde’s life: ‘Laurence Hyde’. 19. Burnet’s History, ed. Airy, i. p. 463. The earl of Dartmouth claimed that Hyde’s temper led to his creating as many enemies ‘as any man of his time’. Ibid., n.3. 20. [Sir John Reresby], Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, ed. A. Browning (2nd edn., with a new preface and notes by M.K. Geiter and W.A. Speck, 1991), esp. pp. 288–300, 318–24, 329–31, 334–5, 340–1, 344; Burnet’s History, ed. Airy, ii. pp. 340–2, 435–6. The dispute was satirised by Thomas Shadwell in The Protestant Satire (1684), in G. de F. Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714 (7 vols., 1963–75), iii. pp. 511–40.

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A second characteristic of Hyde’s career is that it was dominated by his familial relations to a degree unusual even amongst the tightly-knit ranks of the early modern English political elite. He owed his youthful rise in parliament and at Court to his status as one of Clarendon’s sons. Even more significant was the fact that his sister, Anne Hyde, married James, duke of York in 1660. As will become clear, her subsequent conversion to catholicism made a deep impact on Hyde. But alongside religious trauma went political success: Hyde became one of James’s most loyal and prominent clients. The heir to the throne exerted influence in Hyde’s choice of wife, and was subsequently a decisive force in the marriage negotiations for one of Hyde’s daughters to the grandson of the pre-eminent Irish grandee James Butler, duke of Ormond.21 Hyde’s rise to the most powerful office of state—lord treasurer—in February 1685 was one of the more predictable of James’s early acts. Thanks to the longevity and closeness of his relationship with James, his fall in 1686/7 represented one of the most decisive psychological and symbolic blows to the king’s catholicising campaign. Despite taking the oaths to William and Mary in 1689, Hyde’s relations with his nieces, James II’s daughters Mary II and Anne, were deeply troubled throughout the 1690s and 1700s. Mary’s relations with Hyde were complicated by the fact that her husband, William III, loathed Hyde on the basis of their diplomatic contacts in the 1670s and 1680s.22 For her part, the young Princess Anne bitterly resented Hyde’s unwillingness as lord treasurer to do more to increase the size of her courtly establishment in the mid 1680s.23 In later years, his over-bearing personality and relentless attempts to trade on their family ties did not endear him to Anne as queen.24 Alongside Daniel Finch, earl of Nottingham, Hyde in old age has been described as one of ‘the Olympian figures in the [House of ] Lords’ and his death was one of a number in the early 1710s that marked a generational change in English political life.25

What can be said about the role of religion within this long and varied political career? Even if limited materials render a full-scale biography of Hyde difficult, there still exists an admittedly small and fissiparous body of evidence from which some discussion of Hyde’s religious beliefs can be drawn. This is the more necessary as these beliefs were not only

21. H[istorical] M[anuscripts] C[ommission], Second Report, p. 12; Bodl[eian Library, Oxford], MS Carte 50 fos. 283, 291; HMC, Ormonde, NS, vi. p. 405. 22. For example, N. Japikse, ed., Correspondentie van Willem III en van Hans Willem Bentinck . . . (RGP, Kleine Serie, xxvii), p. 603 (no. dxc), pp. 724–5 (no. dcciii). 23. E. Gregg, Queen Anne (new edn., New Haven, 2001), pp. 38–40. Anne ‘cordially disliked’ Hyde’s wife, Lady Henrietta (d. 1687), who had held office in her Court: ibid., p. 18. 24. Ibid., pp. 157–68. 25. C. Jones and G. Holmes, eds., The London Diaries of William Nicolson Bishop of Carlisle 1702–1718 (Oxford, 1985), p. 64; H. Horwitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics in the Reign of William III (Manchester, 1977), p. 324; H.T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke (1970), p. 20.

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a central part of his life and career; they are also ripe for historical re-evaluation. Scholars writing between the 1920s and 1950s lambasted Hyde for what they saw as his insincere rhetoric, flabby conscience, and ‘flimsy’ protestantism, or else treated him more as a label—‘High Churchman’—than a three-dimensional historical figure.26 More recently W.A. Speck has argued that Hyde was a ‘court politician’ before the Glorious Revolution and only really a ‘high church tory’ after it.27 By contrast, the remainder of this article will adumbrate the view that Hyde’s anglican beliefs were significant from an early age; that they created opportunities for him in Restoration political life; but were ultimately to prove an insuperable barrier to royal favour.

Almost no direct evidence for Hyde’s life between his baptism in 1642 and the Restoration exists, but he shared in his family’s exile in Europe during the interregnum, often in straitened circumstances, living for some time in Antwerp and Breda.28 Although Hyde made tantalising reference in a diary written in 1677, during one of his diplomatic sojourns in the United Provinces, to a visit he made to the school that he and his brother had once attended, no firm details are known of any religious education that he received in the 1650s.29 A biographical essay published immediately after Hyde’s death in 1711 suggested that Clarendon ‘took especial Care to give his Son Education suitable to his Quality’, but this can only readily be substantiated in terms of the Hyde brothers’ knowledge of French and the classical world.30

What is known is that Clarendon’s chaplain until his fall in 1667 was Dr Robert South, one of the leading anglican preachers and writers of the Restoration period, and that South fulfilled a second role as Hyde’s tutor.31 Even here, though, evidence for the interaction of tutor and

26. For a sample, see Feiling, Tory Party, pp. 208, 213; D. Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III (Oxford, 1955), p. 170; G. Every, The High Church Party 1688–1718 (1956), p. 112; G. Davies, ‘Tory Churchmen and James II’, in id. Essays on the Later Stuarts (San Marino, CA, 1958), p. 41 n.2. Of these, Davies was perhaps the most nuanced: see ibid., p. 64. 27. Speck, ‘Hyde, Laurence’, ODNB. 28. Much of what there is can be seen in Yates, ‘Political Career’, pp. 1–4. The whole field of Clarendon’s domestic life is poorly documented: T.H. Lister, Life and Administration of Edward, First Earl of Clarendon (3 vols., 1837–8), ii. p. 529; I. Green, ‘The Publication of Clarendon’s Autobiography and the Acquisition of his Papers by the Bodleian Library’, Bodleian Library Record, x (1982), p. 352; P. Seaward, ‘Hyde, Edward, first earl of Clarendon (1609-1674)’, ODNB. 29. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. p. 625. Though see recently, A. Hughes and J. Sanders, ‘Gender, Geography and Exile: Royalists and the Low Countries in the 1650s’, in J. McElligott and D.L. Smith, eds., Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum (Manchester, 2010), pp. 138–9. 30. [Anon.], An Essay Towards the Life of Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester; Late Lord President of Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council . . . (1711), p. 4; Yates, ‘Political Career’, pp. 2–3. 31. Robert South, Posthumous Works of the Late Reverend Robert South, D.D. (1717), p. 20. For South, see B. Griggs, ‘South, Robert (1634–1716)’, ODNB; G. Reedy, Robert South (1634–1716): An Introduction to His Life and Sermons (Cambridge, 1992). For the claim of the Jersey resident, C. Le Couteur, to have been Henry Hyde’s tutor during the family’s years of exile, see Bodl., MS Tanner 37, fo. 132v.

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pupil is sparse. That the two ultimately did not enjoy easy relations is clear from Hyde’s diary of his trip to Poland as ambassador in 1676: at one point Hyde wrote of South ‘feeding up on his own ill-natured spleen for four days together’.32 Nevertheless, the fact that Hyde took South on the mission, two years after his father’s death, is indicative of his sense of filial respect, a theme to which I will return. Perhaps more important than South’s immediate attentions as tutor was Hyde’s position within his father’s milieu as lord chancellor, and a pillar of the Church of England interest in the early Restoration. When the bishop of Salisbury, John Earle, wrote to Clarendon in 1664 he sent his ‘most hearty prayers’ to the lord chancellor’s family, and particular blessing to ‘Mr Lau[rence]’.33

From the early 1660s, Hyde formed an amicable bond with that bastion of Restoration anglicanism, the University of Oxford. Following his father’s election as Chancellor, Hyde and his brother were granted MAs, Hyde gaining a life-long attachment to Christ Church, soon to emerge as one of the most influential of the collegiate bases for anglican renewal under the redoubtable John Fell.34 This connection was most visible in his election as MP (despite being under age) for the University of Oxford in the Cavalier Parliament, from 1661 to 1679.35 In later years, the marriage between Hyde’s daughter, Anne and the grandson of the first duke of Ormond displayed his alliance with one of his father’s friends, and a fellow stalwart of the Church of England interest in government, who also served as Chancellor of Oxford.36 The two were seen to co-operate in the University’s interest politically,37 and after Ormond’s death Hyde was quick to support the second duke’s election as Chancellor of Oxford in order to forestall James intruding a catholic or a catholic sympathiser in 1688.38 Members of the Hyde family would act as stewards of the university until 1753.

32. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. p. 622. See also ibid., i. p. 609. 33. Cal[endar of the] Clar[endon] S[tate] P[apers Preserved in the Bodleian Library . . .], ed. O. Ogle et al. (5 vols., Oxford, 1869–1970), v. p. 405. For Clarendon’s role as patron to Earle, see K.G. Feiling, ‘Clarendon and the Act of Uniformity, 1662–3’, ante, xliv (1929), p. 290 and the sources listed in n.9. 34. G.V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 1688-1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury (Oxford, 1975), pp. 20, 26, 30; R.A. Beddard, ‘Restoration Oxford and the Remaking of the Protestant Establishment’, in N. Tyacke, ed., The History of the University of Oxford, IV. Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford, 1997), p. 833 and n.189. 35. Beddard, ‘Restoration Oxford’, p. 831; An Essay Towards the Life of Lawrence Hyde, p. 5; Speck, ‘Hyde, Laurence’, ODNB; B.D. Henning, ed., The House of Commons, 1660–1690 (3 vols., 1983), ii. p. 628. 36. E. O’Keeffe, ‘The Family and Marriage Strategies of James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormonde, 1658-1688’ (Univ. of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 2001), pp. 104, 108–12. 37. BL, Stowe MS 746 fo. 73v. 38. HMC, Ormonde, NS, vii. pp. 313–14; Bodl., MS Carte 69 fo. 497; Bodl., MS Rawlinson letters 98 fo. 215; Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. p. 183; R.A. Beddard, ‘James II and the Catholic Challenge’, in Tyacke, ed., Seventeenth-Century Oxford, pp. 952–4; G.H. Jones, Convergent Forces: Immediate Causes of the Revolution of 1688 in England (Ames, IA, 1990), p. 54.

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Signs of Hyde’s religious and aesthetic interests in his thirties are visible in the diaries he wrote during diplomatic appointments to Poland and the United Provinces in 1676–7.39 Both states offered very different religious environments to the anglican church-state that Hyde knew in England. During his time in Poland in particular, he took a lively interest in the diverse religious life evident there, visiting armenian, jesuit, bernardine and dominican churches and chapels—as well as the roman catholic cathedral and a jewish synagogue—and avidly commenting on their architecture and furnishings.40 But in his diary, he displayed most interest in the Greek orthodox Church he saw, providing a long account of its decorations, altars and ceremonies.41 He was clearly sufficiently intrigued to discuss the Greek orthodox Church’s eucharistic beliefs with a theatine father despatched by the Pope to instruct the local armenians in the Roman faith.42

Intellectual interest and a drive to record what he had seen did not, of course, necessarily signal real impact on Hyde, any more than it did for many other English travellers in the period. But the religious diversity did provide a topic for discussion among the diplomats and local dignitaries in Poland. One day Hyde recorded that:

the Treasurer [of Poland] told me he had been of my religion, and that he had changed upon the pure motives of conscience, and upon a clear understanding that he had been in the wrong . . . . I told him I wished he could understand English, that I might give him a book, (I meant Chillingworth,) where he would see a man of our Church, of great learning and piety, of no interest or passion, to have changed three times, and giving the reasons every time for so doing.

Having ascertained that the Polish Treasurer could read English, Hyde ‘told him if he would read the book, I would for his soul’s sake send it to him when I came into England’.43 The intertwined issues of conscience and conversion would return to haunt Hyde in later years. Nor did Hyde confine himself to discussions of private conscience. When the French ambassador and the Polish Treasurer contrasted the

39. For Hyde’s diplomatic activity, see N. Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland (2 vols., Oxford, 1981), i. pp. 402–4; K.H.D. Haley, ‘The Anglo-Dutch Rapprochement of 1677’, ante, lxxiii (1958), pp. 614–48, esp. pp. 635–7; A. Browning, Thomas Osborne Earl of Danby and Duke of Leeds 1632–1712 (3 vols., Glasgow, 1951), ii. pp. 570–95. 40. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. pp. 604, 607, 608, 616. 41. For such interest in an earlier period, see W.B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 6; H. Trevor-Roper, From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (1992), ch. 5. 42. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. pp. 606, 610. 43. Ibid., i. p. 597. The book was presumably Chillingworth’s hugely popular and influential The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation first published in 1638 and reprinted several times in the Restoration period.

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wealth of Polish bishops with the extent to which English bishops had lost their privileges and revenues since the Reformation, he argued that ‘they had lost some of their revenues, but retained still very great ones; and all their dignities’.44

Hyde’s comments may have been no more than patriotic platitudes designed to disarm the criticisms of catholic foreigners. But knowledge of his father’s views suggests that they were also likely to reflect a more deep-seated regard for the rights and properties of the Church of England. Although a lawyer by profession, in the 1640s Clarendon had expressed very different views on the character and significance of the sin of sacrilege than other leading legal thinkers like John Selden and the judge John Fountaine.45 In his Of Sacrilege, written in early 1648, Clarendon had followed Joseph Mede and other clerical authors in a vehement criticism of individuals and groups—notably victorious Parliamentarians—denuding Church property. In his view, the deep sin of sacrilege infected England like ‘Leprosy’. The predatory activity of many noble and gentry families from the dissolution of the monasteries onwards had called down God’s judgement on England in the form of civil war, just as surely as other confiscations had provoked divine wrath in central Europe in the guise of the Thirty Years War. So seriously did Clarendon take this problem that the year before writing Of Sacrilege he had emphasised the point at length in his ‘last Will and Profession’ (3 April 1647). In this extraordinary document, he charged all his children:

as they hope for blessing from God Almighty, that they be never corrupted by covetousness, or induced by persuasion, or by any other means prevailed with, to receive by purchase, gift, or any other way, any of the lands, leases or perquisites due to the Church, and taken away from it by this power that oppresses it; no, though the King should be induced (which I hope he will never be) to consent to the alienation of those lands. For I am persuaded, that the same is sacrilege, by what power soever done, and that it will draw the judgment of God upon the authors and gainers by it.

Clarendon went so far as to insist that even if his children should subsequently come to be persuaded that acquiring such properties or revenues was not sacrilegious, ‘I still require and charge them, to acquiesce in this command of mine’.46

Far from resenting their father’s peremptory commands, both Laurence and Henry Hyde clearly developed an enduring veneration for their father’s memory and example. Historians have long recognised

44. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. pp. 596–7. 45. Here I rely on M. Dzelzainis’s superb essay, ‘“Undoubted Realities”: Clarendon on Sacrilege’, Historical Journal, xxxiii (1990), pp. 515–40. 46. State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon (3 vols., Oxford, 1767–86), ii. p. 359.

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that Hyde inherited ‘a special relationship with the anglican church and clergy’ from his father, just as his contemporary, Daniel Finch, earl of Nottingham, did from his father, another of Charles II’s lord chancellors.47 But this has often been presented in cynical terms, as an early political asset which then became an inescapable mill-stone during James II’s reign, when Hyde ‘could not shake off his family attachment to the Church of England’ in radically changed political and religious circumstances.48 In reality, Hyde and his brother invoked their father’s name to each other in private correspondence as a clinching point in arguments, and to nerve each other for difficult decisions.49 Hyde also sought to pass on such high regard for Clarendon to the next generation. He impressed his father’s example and the lustre he had added to the family name on his young son in a letter of advice in 1682. Written when Hyde was made earl of Rochester and his son became Lord Hyde, the letter urged the boy to follow his grandfather’s example and ‘to be known for an honest Man, a Religious man to God, [and] an Obedient subject to the King’.50

Memories of Clarendon were particularly strong in a religious context. Hyde’s positive reference to the works of Chillingworth during his stay in Poland surely provides a clear link with a significant part of his father’s milieu: William Chillingworth had been a prominent member of the Great Tew circle.51 And in 1675, Hyde wrote an extensive set of unfinished but powerful ‘Meditations on the Anniversary Day of Lord Chancellor Clarendon’s Death’ which were suffused with filial respect and affection.52 In them he wrote that Clarendon was53

the best of fathers, and the kindest and wisest friend I ever met with: according to whose counsels I pray God I may regulate my actions, and live and die according to his practice, in imitation of his virtue and honesty towards man, his integrity and duty to the King (though mistaken and rejected by him), and his piety and resignation to God Almighty, in those accidents of his life . . .

47. J.R. Jones, Country and Court: England, 1658–1714 (1978), p. 23. 48. J.R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution: The English State in the 1680s (1972), 87; J.R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in England (1972), p. 85; J.P. Kenyon, Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, 1641–1702 (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 138–9. 49. For example, Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. pp. 18–19. 50. BL, Add. MS 75373 fo. 20v (copy). 51. W. Chernaik, ‘Chillingworth, William (1602–1644)’, ODNB. (I am grateful to Paul Seaward for emphasising this link to me.) Dzelzainis has, however, convincingly suggested that Clarendon’s churchmanship was not constrained by his experience of Great Tew, ‘belonging more obviously to the mainstream of anglican tradition’: ‘“Undoubted Realities”’, p. 538. 52. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. pp. 645–50. 53. Ibid., i. p. 645. Clarendon clearly reciprocated these warm feelings: Lister, Life and Administration of Edward , iii. p. 481.

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As such a beginning would suggest, the ‘Meditations’ are a combination of bitter resentment about his father’s political fall in 1667 and the elevation of Clarendon to an almost other-worldly sense of religious virtue. According to Hyde, Clarendon had ‘preferred his integrity alone before all the favour and fortune of the world’, and had stood as a religious touchstone for the nation:54

Of so vast importance is it, to have one man in a nation, for whose probity the greatest part of the rest have so much awe and reverence as to have a fear of discovering those sins before him, which have since broken out like boils and diseases upon them; and to have one such righteous man, for whose sake God would preserve at least for some time, though not spare a nation.

It is difficult to read these passages without feeling that Hyde perceived his father in terms analogous to Job, a servant of God whose integrity had remained ‘unshaken’ despite the gravest trials.55 In this, he had been an apt pupil of his father’s views. As Clarendon wrote at the end of his short 1674 will, his were ‘children of a Father who never committed fault against his Majesty’.56 Hyde certainly accepted without reservation Clarendon’s self-image as a truly conscientious man during periods of exile. In 1647, Clarendon wrote that the envy and malice of his enemies was ‘the more supportable to me, being in my conscience, I thank God, free from any fault that might deserve it’.57 In 1674, he told his elder son that he retained a sense of confidence ‘that God Almighty will give me some signal vindication, even in this world, from all the reproaches I have been unjustly charged with’.58

This sense of a clean conscience inviting providential deliverance may have been a shared frame of reference within his family, but it did also create some problems for Hyde. The ‘Meditations’ he wrote on the anniversary of his father’s death are shot through with a sense of guilt at the fact that his own political fortunes had improved after his father’s fall. Although Clarendon had had ‘the support of a good conscience and the most unspotted innocency’, Hyde railed against the fair-weather friends who had turned on his father in 1667. He then went on to reproach himself for counselling his father to flee in the first place, and for acquiescing in the subsequent act of banishment, the shame of which he believed to have hastened his father to his grave.59 Such

54. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. pp. 646–7. 55. Especially Book of Job 2:3–8. 56. State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, iii. supplement, xlvi. 57. Ibid., ii. p. 358. 58. Clarendon to Cornbury, Moulins, 17 Mar. 1673/4, ibid., iii. supplement, xlii. 59. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. pp. 648–50.

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comments suggest a deep and abiding self-criticism beneath the superficially powerful public persona.60

Hyde’s discomfort was not limited to his own conduct during the short-term political storm that had destroyed his father’s career. In his view, the exile of his father from England resulted in a decline in the quality of government for the public,61 and a catastrophe within the private sphere of his family. In February 1671 Clarendon, trapped in exile in France, dedicated his Contemplations and Reflexions upon the Psalms of David to his children, and warned them particularly against the Church of Rome.62 This was scarcely an idle admonition. At the time he wrote, Clarendon can have been in little doubt that his daughter, Anne, had converted to catholicism: rumours strong enough to have led him to write letters both to her and her husband, the duke of York, had been circulating since at least 1668.63 She would die shortly after the dedication was written. Both Clarendon and Hyde wrote of their regret that Clarendon’s exile had rendered him unable to talk to his daughter and satisfy her doubts. In his ‘Meditations’ on his father’s death, Hyde argued that in their father’s absence his sister had been:64

seduced by degrees to have an ill opinion of the religion she was born and bred in, and overborne by arguments she could not answer herself, and an unwearied application of those of the Romish Church to gain her, and almost deserted and betrayed by the most stupid negligence, and coolness, carelessness, and unconcernedness of most of our own Church . . .

Even his own efforts to get an anglican divine to her deathbed had proved fruitless.65 The loss of his sister to Rome, despite her father’s admonitions, would continue to preoccupy Hyde for years to come. Although no direct evidence can be brought to bear, it seems unlikely that this harrowing experience would not have been in Hyde’s mind when James put severe pressure on him to convert to catholicism in 1686.

60. The ‘meditations’ end painfully and abruptly: ‘I have further to reproach myself, that during the time of his banishment . . .’: ibid., p. 650. 61. Allusive comments suggest criticism of the Declaration of Indulgence (1672), and the earl of Danby (who both Hyde brothers regarded as an enemy of their father): ibid., p. 648; Speck, ‘Henry Hyde, second earl of Clarendon (1638–1709)’, ODNB; Browning, Thomas Osborne, i. p. 153 and n.1. 62. Edward Hyde, The Miscellaneous Works of the Right Honourable Edward, Earl of Clarendon . . . (2nd edn., 1751), p. 376 (a mistake for p. 356). 63. State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, iii, supplement, xxxvii-xl. Abstracts of these letters are given in Cal. Clar. SP, v. 631–2, and they clearly gained a wide scribal circulation, to judge by the number of extant manuscript copies listed on the BL online catalogue alone. For Anne Hyde’s conversion, see J.R. Henslowe, Anne Hyde, Duchess of York (1915), ch. 7; F.C. Turner, James II (1948), pp. 107–8; J. Miller, James II (new edn., New Haven, 2000), pp. 58–9; J. Callow, The Making of King James II: The Formative Years of a Fallen King (Stroud, 2000), pp. 143–7, 153–4; Cal. Clar. SP, v. 635. 64. Cal. Clar. SP, v. 647. 65. Turner, James II, p. 108. Compare Henslowe, Anne Hyde, pp. 293, 295. A much less active role is attributed to Hyde in Callow, Making of King James II, p. 154.

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Long before that crisis, it was his close relationship with the heir to the throne that brought Hyde his most acute difficulties as James’s catholicism became the central political problem of the 1670s. Hyde had been a member of James’s household from the earliest years of the Restoration, holding the titles of Groom of the Stole and Gentleman of the Bedchamber when he was sent as part of an embassy to congratulate Louis XIV on the birth of the Dauphin in 1661.66 It was James who recommended Hyde to Charles II in 1679 as one of a group of young ‘able statesmen’, and was clearly recognised by Hyde as his outstanding patron.67 In return Hyde was a client zealous for his master’s rights, going so far as to threaten a Whig-dominated House of Commons with civil war in the event of it passing a bill of Exclusion.68 James evidently trusted his former brother-in-law implicitly, enclosing letters open to Hyde which he was to use only if an Exclusion Bill was passed.69

Even without knowledge of Hyde and James’s personal correspondence, contemporaries recognised that Hyde was ‘too nearly related to the Duke of York’ and that he was ‘sure to suffer’ with James in any political misfortune.70 In 1678, Hyde was rendered incandescent with rage by a libellous pamphlet purporting to be a translation of the Latin speech he had made to the King of Poland whilst ambassador there 18 months earlier. The key passage imputed to Hyde was that:71

The King my Master is truly sensible of the great misfortune of those Princes whose power must be bounded, and Reason regulated by the Fantastic humours of their Subjects. Till Princes come to be free’d from these inconveniences, the King my Master sees no probable prospect of Establishing The most Holy Apostolic Roman Catholic Religion.

Hyde was in no doubt that the pamphlet’s aim was to excite fears of popery and arbitrary government within England, and vehemently

66. Biographica Britannica (6 vols. in 7 parts, 1747–66), iv. p. 2738; Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. xiv. 67. John Verney to Sir Ralph Verney, 20 Nov. 1679, HMC, Seventh Report, 477b; duke of York to Hyde, 14 Dec. 1680, Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. p. 49. 68. Anchitell Grey, Debates of the House of Commons . . . (10 vols., 1769), vii. p. 402; An Essay Towards the Life of Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, p. 13. Hyde’s comments came in November 1680, but were recalled by his parliamentary opponents in Dec. 1680 and Mar. 1681: Grey, Debates, viii. pp. 152, 328. 69. Duke of York to Hyde, 2 & 28 May 1679, Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. pp. 43–4. See also Life of James II, ed. J.S. Clarke (2 vols., 1816), i. pp. 682, 697–9. The content of these intriguing letters is not known. 70. [A breviat of James Harris’ information against William Raddon, 24 Oct. 1682], Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1682, 494; earl of Dartmouth to Hyde, Tangier, 29 Dec. 1683, Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. p. 93. 71. An Inscription Intended to Be Set up for the E-l of R-r, When by the Happy Effects of his Ministry, the Chapel of St Stephen’s Is Become a Chapel to the Jesuites . . . ([1701]), ‘Translation of the L-d H-s Speech, now E. of R-r, to the King of Poland 1677’, pp. 6–7, at p. 6. For manuscript copies, see National Archives of Ireland, Wyche MS 1/1/7; T[he] N[ational] A[rchives], P[ublic] R[ecord] O[ffice] 30/24/6A; BL, Sloane MS 3516 fos. 49–50.

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denied that he had ever in his life called roman catholicism ‘the most holy Catholic religion’.72 Such furious indignation prefigured the House of Commons’ accusation in 1680 that Hyde was ‘popishly affected’, a charge which reduced him to tears and an emphatic denial.73 The jibes must have been particularly galling to Hyde since he frequently urged James to return to the fold of the Church of England in the late 1670s and early 1680s, despite his patron’s increasingly angry refusals.74

The story of Hyde’s religious and political life in the years between the dissolution of Charles’s last parliament at Oxford in 1681 and his fall from office in the winter of 1686/7 is central to national events. Hyde was widely seen by contemporaries as a leading minister in Charles’s last years,75 as ‘the premier Minister’ after James’s succession, and, at least retrospectively, ‘the head of the cabinet’.76 Hyde’s relationship with James remained crucial to his political fortunes77; indeed it has been argued that he was at the head of a reversionary interest in Charles’s last years, particularly as a result of his membership of the Commission for Ecclesiastical Promotions from 1681 to 1684.78 Whether this commission really acted as a thoroughgoing ‘instrument for tory reaction’, dominated by a caucus of Hyde and Sancroft, is debateable.79 But there is no doubt that Hyde’s status attracted a number of requests for ecclesiastical patronage. In England, one of the rising stars of the ecclesiastical firmament, Francis Turner, regularly invoked Hyde’s name in letters to Archbishop Sancroft in connection to his own meteoric rise and clerical protégés.80 Turner and Hyde would later be the guiding forces behind

72. Hyde to Clarendon, 7/17 May 1678, Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. p. 14. 73. Grey, Debates, viii. p. 283; Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, ed. Browning, p. 224; Gilbert Burnet, History of His Own Time, ed. M.J. Routh (6 vols., Oxford, 1823), ii. p. 249. Rumours that Hyde would be impeached in a future Whig-dominated parliament were still circulating in December 1681: HMC, Ormonde, NS, vi. p. 263. 74. Life of James II, ed. Clarke, i. pp. 584, 700–1; Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. pp. 45, 51. 75. Pearse Street Library, Dublin, Gilbert MS 109, p. 32; HMC, Ormonde, NS, vi. p. 141; National Library of Scotland, MS 14405 fo. 21v. Charles explicitly refuted rumours that Hyde would be made lord treasurer to Halifax: Hutton, Charles II, p. 419. 76. James Fraser to [unknown], 10 Feb. 1685, HMC, Egmont, ii. p. 149; Thomas Bruce, Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, ed. W.E. Buckley (2 vols., 1890), i. p. 98. 77. Notably when James maintained his support for Hyde during Halifax’s prolonged assault on his client over the probity of his financial work in connection with the Hearth Tax. See Pearse Street Library, Dublin, Gilbert MS 109, p. 32; BL, Add. MS 63057B fo. 67v; BL, Add. MS 75363 (unfol.), 31 Jan. 1682/3; HMC, Ormonde, NS, vi. p. 302. 78. R.A. Beddard, ‘The Commission for Ecclesiastical Promotions, 1681-84: An Instrument of Tory Reaction’, Historical Journal, x (1967), pp. 11–40. 79. I intend to publish a separate article on this commission. For now, see the cautionary remarks in D.R. Hirschberg, ‘The Government and Church Patronage in England, 1660–1670’, Journal of British Studies, xx (1980–1), pp. 122–3; J. Miller, After the Civil Wars: English Politics and Government in the Reign of Charles II (Harlow, 2000), p. 292 n.77. 80. Bodl., MS Tanner 34 fos. 142, 173. See also Bodl., MS Rawlinson letters 93 fo. 290 and Thomas Comber, The Autobiographies and Letters of Thomas Comber, Sometime Precentor of York and Dean of Durham, ed. C.E. Whiting (Surtees Soc., pp. 156–7, 1946–7 for 1941–2), i. p. 17 for other clergymen using Turner to influence Hyde.

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attempts to maintain political support for James in December 1688. Nevertheless, Turner was not Hyde’s first choice for preferment, and the wily cleric used his help mainly as an auxiliary force or as a safety precaution against being stymied.81 Although no direct evidence can be marshalled to prove the point conclusively, it may be that Turner’s wariness around Hyde was a result of the fact that he had once been Anne Hyde’s anglican chaplain: her conversion to catholicism can hardly have been a feather in Turner’s professional cap.

Hyde was often mentioned in partnership with his brother. If the siblings’ direct ecclesiastical patronage was slight, limited to a couple of benefices in Wiltshire,82 Clarendon was nevertheless a supporter of leading anglican propagandists in the 1680s like John Nalson and George Hickes. Both of these men championed the necessity of prosecuting dissenters, and Hickes at least also had connections with Hyde.83 As well as cooperating with his brother, Hyde worked in conjunction with the duke of Ormond in regard to both English and Irish clerical appointments.84 He was also credited as having a unique degree of influence over the lord chancellor, Heneage Finch, and his huge reserves of patronage.85 Nevertheless, we should be wary about over-confident assignments of vast influence to Hyde alone.86 Within the commission for ecclesiastical promotions, he sometimes worked with Halifax, before the political tension between the two led to a severing of friendly relations,87 and the former leading presbyterian peer John Robartes, earl of Radnor.88

Although the links between Hyde and his older brother remained strong in this period, he suffered other family traumas that combined to maintain his vivid awareness of his father’s example and a looming sense of dynastic tragedy. His younger brother James died in a shipwreck in 1682 while accompanying the duke of York to Scotland.89 After years of ill health, his wife died in 1687. But his sense of divine punishment, and a fear that much of it was the result of his own actions, seems to have

81. Bodl., MS Tanner 34 fos. 58r-v; ibid., 32 fo. 37. 82. Clarendon appointed to the rectory of Blundeston in 1684, and Hyde to the vicarage of Wootton Bassett in 1691. TNA, PRO, IND/17008, pp. 343, 362. I am grateful to Andrew Barclay for directing me to these indexes of the institution books. 83. Bodl., MS Tanner 34 fos. 79, 132; ibid., p. 32 fo. 168v; T. Harmsen, ‘Hickes, George (1642–1715)’, ODNB. 84. For example, HMC, Ormonde, NS, vi. p. 494. 85. BL, Add. MS 75355 (unfol.), 16 May [1681 or 1682]. 86. For contemporary perceptions of Hyde’s influence, or requests for favour, see Humphrey Prideaux, Letters of Humphrey Prideaux, Sometime Dean of Norwich, to John Ellis . . ., ed. E.M. Thompson, Camden Society, new series, xv (1875), pp. 144–5; Bodl., MS Tanner 30 fo. 145; Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. pp. 146, 385. 87. HMC, Ormonde, NS, vi. p. 294. 88. Bodl., MS Tanner 41 fo. 84. 89. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. pp. 67–73.

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been most actuated by the death of his daughter, Anne. He composed another set of ‘Meditations’ in January 1685 in the wake of her death, in which he wrote that he had ‘drawn down this untimely death upon my innocent child’ as a result of failing sufficiently to acknowledge God’s favour. Even after the disgrace and exile of his father ‘I had been preserved in his Majesty’s favour and countenance, that I seemed to be like a tree planted by the water side, whose leaf does not wither, and whatsoever I did seemed to prosper’.90 Coming 10 years after his meditations on his father’s death, these comments reveal how raw memories of the mid-1670s remained, and once again point to Hyde’s private habit of intense introspection and continuing feelings of guilt.

The meditations on his daughter’s death are particularly significant since they were penned less than a month before the accession of James II as England’s first catholic ruler since Mary. During the Exclusion Crisis, Hyde had staunchly defended his father’s reputation in government: ‘I know not any Minister the King has had since, that has done so well to keep out Popery and preserve the Protestant Religion’.91 Yet for all his own prominence in Church of England circles, Hyde’s protestant faith was heavily tainted, in the eyes of both his contemporaries and later historians, by his actions between 1685 and 1688. The change of monarch reversed Hyde’s political decline in the last 18 months of Charles II’s life. But it also left him in the ultimately untenable position of being the protestant chief minister of a catholic king. For some historians, Hyde’s career at this time serves as a straightforward example of the politician’s craven determination to cling on to power for as long as possible. Writing in the 1930s, M.F. Yates consistently presented examples of Hyde’s religious scruples under James as political miscalculations, rather than as signs of deeply held beliefs.92 In the light of the foregoing discussion, this seems unhelpfully reductionist: a key dimension of this crucial minister’s thinking throughout James’s turbulent reign was that of his family’s past and present confessional identity.

Hyde gained some credit for the auspicious start to the reign, with James’s much publicised commitment to maintain the Church of England as by law established.93 But despite these happy beginnings, in which Hyde’s appointment as lord treasurer had been ‘one of the first things his Majesty thought of after his comeing to the Crown’,94 things

90. Ibid., i. p. 173. (Hyde’s phraseology closely follows Psalm 1:3.) See also Bodl., MS Carte 217 fo. 111; O’Keeffe, ‘Family and Marriage Strategies of James Butler’, p. 111. 91. Grey, Debates, vii. p. 401 (1 Nov. 1680). 92. For example, Yates, ‘Political Career’, pp. 373, 382, 409, 423–4. 93. Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, ed. Buckley, i. p. 98. 94. Life of James II, ed. Clarke, ii. p. 63. See also Burnet, History of His Own Time, ed. Routh, iii. p. 8.

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rapidly went awry. The French ambassador, Paul Barillon, saw Hyde as a powerful barrier to any programme of catholicising policies, and worked to undermine the lord treasurer accordingly.95 The removal of his old rival Halifax from government in October 1685 paradoxically left Hyde increasingly vulnerable as a protestant figurehead whilst at the nominal height of his power and prestige.96 Although he was the main channel for protestant clergy such as Sir Jonathan Trelawny and William Lloyd, bishop of St Asaph, seeking preferment from James for themselves or their friends,97 his prominent isolation also allowed the skilful earl of Sunderland gradually to subvert and supplant him at court. Hyde’s links with James’s protestant mistress Catherine Sedley, created countess of Dorchester, proved particularly damaging. This was ironic, since although Hyde had had a good relationship with Nell Gwyn, the self-proclaimed ‘protestant whore’,98 he had also attracted criticism in Charles II’s reign for his associations with one of the king’s catholic mistresses, Barbara Palmer, duchess of Cleveland.99 Now James’s second wife, Mary of Modena, took against him,100 and Hyde’s wife’s position in the queen’s household was not sufficient to protect him from Sunderland’s assault.101 When he eventually fell from office in December 1686/January 1687, the event marked ‘the definite victory of the catholic cabal’.102

Before his fall, Hyde committed a number of actions which would stain his reputation. As early as June 1685, he authorised in his capacity as lord treasurer a warrant to stop process against recusants’ ‘Lands, Goods, and Chattels’.103 In 1686, Hyde was forced by James severely to reprimand Dr William Sherlock and to stop his pension as a punishment for his anti-catholic preaching.104 He also had to badger Archbishop Sancroft for the payment of first fruits owing to the Crown even though he must have known that, in the words of an anonymous writer, ‘the first fruits and tenths will pinch our Churchmen severely, and all the

95. Kenyon, Robert Spencer, p. 122. 96. Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, ed. Browning, pp. 393, 395–6; Davies, ‘Tory Churchmen’, p. 52; H.C. Foxcroft, The Life and Letters of Sir George Savile, Bart., First Marquis of Halifax (2 vols., 1898), i. pp. 448–57; Yates, ‘Political Career’, p. 397. See also Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, ed. Buckley, i. pp. 121, 124. 97. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. 146; Bodl., MS Tanner 30 fo. 145. 98. J.H. Wilson, Nell Gwyn, Royal Mistress (1952), pp. 237–8. For examples of Hyde’s financial work on Gwyn’s behalf, see W.A. Shaw, ed., Calendars of Treasury Books (32 vols., 1904–57), vii, pt. 2, 1110, 1348; viii, pt. 1, 263. 99. HMC, Sixth Report, 477b; HMC, Ninth Report, 455a–b. 100. For the Sedley affair, see Yates, ‘Political Career’, pp. 410–12; Turner, James II, pp. 297–31; HMC, Stuart, vi. 4; Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. pp. 493–4, 577; ii. p. 66. 101. Letters and Diplomatic Instructions of Queen Anne, ed. B.C. Brown (1935), p. 30. 102. Feiling, Tory Party, p. 216. 103. HMC, Fourteenth Report, appendix, pt. ix. p. 274. 104. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. p. 258.

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artful ways taken that may be to bring them low’.105 On each occasion, it was Hyde’s financial office—once the source of his power and influence—which he now found to be a trap from which it was difficult to escape.

At Easter 1686, Hyde, Jeffreys and Sunderland retired to their own houses in order to escape attendance at court, and the inevitable demand to attend Mass with James. As one contemporary writer sardonically observed, they did so ‘either for the private satisfaction in their consciences, or to avoid showing in town whether they had any or no’.106 The cynical edge to this comment has been followed by modern historians, notably M.F. Yates, who has argued from a syntactically confusing passage in John Evelyn’s diary that Hyde urged Evelyn to ignore his conscience and, in his capacity as a commissioner for the privy seal, to affix the seal to a licence for the printing of catholic books.107 This is most likely a misreading of the text: Evelyn reports Hyde telling him that he did not think there would be any other ‘hazard’ (presumably legal issues) ‘if in Conscience I could dispence with it’ (i.e. his objection to acting). In other words, Hyde was proceeding in a deliberately casuistical way, making the case for compliance, but only if Evelyn’s conscience allowed him to proceed, a condition he would have known to be highly improbable for the scrupulous churchman. Disregarding conscience would also have been an unlikely argument for Hyde to have made bearing in mind his emphasis on the clear conscience of the father whose memory he revered. Certainly within a few months time, he would trumpet his own conscience as a crucial impediment in the way of converting to catholicism.108

More obviously damaging to his reputation was the fact that Hyde agreed to sit on James’s infamous Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes, established by the king to control the Church of England now that her supreme governor was a roman catholic.109 J.P. Kenyon has suggested that the practical actions of the commission bore more resemblance to its disciplinarian laudian predecessor than to an instrument of catholic

105. Hyde to archbishop of Canterbury, 30 Oct. 1686, Bodl., MS Tanner 127 fo. 218; [anon.] to John Ellis, 13 July 1686, The Ellis Correspondence (1686–8), ed. G.A.E. Ellis [Lord Dover] (2 vols., 1829), i. pp. 141–2. 106. [Anon.] to John Ellis, 6 Apr. 1686, Ellis Correspondence, ed. Ellis, i. p. 91. 107. Yates, ‘Political Career’, p. 417; John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E.S. de Beer (6 vols., Oxford, 1955), iv. p. 512 (see also ibid., i. pp. 31–2); Beddard, ‘James II and the Catholic Challenge’, esp. pp. 925–6. (Evelyn was acting as one of the three commissioners discharging the office of lord privy seal while his friend Clarendon was lord lieutenant in Ireland.) 108. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. pp. 88, 91. For sensible remarks on the complex interplay of forces underpinning individual decisions to change religion, see M.C. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996), esp. ch. 3. 109. Life of James II, ed. Clarke, ii. p. 89.

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despotism.110 Hyde’s successor on the commission, Theophilus Hastings, earl of Huntingdon, certainly laid weight on Hyde’s participation in its activities as showing that ‘hee owned the extent of itt’, in terms of disciplining clerics in their administrative and legal capacities.111 Nevertheless it was the commission’s high-profile early actions against Bishop Compton—who had refused to crack-down on anti-catholic preaching by the London clergy, or to recognise the commission’s jurisdiction—which must have most influenced the public mind. Clarendon was sufficiently anxious at the news of the commission to write from Dublin in an unusually forthright tone to his brother:112

I know not how to wish you joy of your new place in the church affairs: though we have forty abstracts of the Commission, yet I do not understand it; and I confess I am naturally no friend to new judicatures. God send those who contrived it are friends to our religion! For God’s sake let me beg you to be careful how you act, and be not prevailed upon to hurt the best church in the world, and which, notwithstanding all the calamities she is now under, will yet flourish and be triumphant, even in this world. You will pardon me for my zeal.

The lord treasurer’s defence for his actions—as described by Thomas Sprat, bishop of Rochester, as part of an apologia for his own complicity in the commission—was two-fold. First, that two judges had agreed to sit on the commission, and they could be assumed to know what was lawful and what was not. And, secondly, that he acted ‘with a purpose of doing as much Good as we were able, and of hindering as much Evil, as we possibly could, in that Unfortunate Juncture of Affairs’.113

Although the latter is, of course, a classic extenuating argument after any revolution has rendered a prior regime odious,114 it needs to be supplied with a broader context. Whilst there seems little doubt that

110. J.P Kenyon, ‘The Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes 1686-1688: A Reconsideration’, Historical Journal, xxxiv (1991), pp. 727–36. For contemporary disquiet at the new commission, see Ellis Correspondence, ed. Ellis, i. pp. 144–8, 165; Sir John Bramston, The Autobiography of Sir John Bramston of Skreens, ed. R.G. Braybrooke, Camden Society, xxxii (1845), p. 234. 111. Bodl., MS Carte 239 fo. 305. (See also ibid., fos. 304a r-v; W. Gibson, James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 57.) Huntingdon’s aim was, of course, to exonerate himself from blame. 112. Clarendon to Hyde, 27 July 1686, Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. pp. 511–12. See Autobiography of Sir John Bramston, ed. Braybrooke, p. 240, for an account of Hyde’s refusal to agree to Compton’s request for more time to prepare his case. 113. Thomas Sprat, A Letter from the Bishop of Rochester, to the Right Honourable the Earl of Dorset and Middlesex . . . Concerning His Sitting in the Late Ecclesiastical Commission (1688/9), pp. 5–7. (Hyde had acted as one of Sprat’s patrons in 1683–4: Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. p. 91.) For Hyde’s efforts to protect John Sharp, dean of Norwich, at this time, see A.T. Hart, The Life and Times of John Sharp Archbishop of York (1949), pp. 95–6. 114. Clarendon repeated this defence of his brother to a critical Halifax in November 1688: Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. p. 203.

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Hyde was indeed extremely reluctant to do anything that might risk him losing the office of lord treasurer that he had sought for so long, we should not be too cynical about the desire of both Hyde brothers to maintain themselves in government in order to be able to offer James good counsel.115 In June 1686, the Spanish ambassador argued that Hyde was ‘in danger, because he will not moderate his view [on catholicism]. I think that as he will have to do so in the end, he should do it soon’.116 What seemed to Ronquillo to be Hyde’s immoderate views were seen in precisely the opposite way by a protestant English writer in the previous month. Halifax’s brother, Henry Savile, reported—although he could hardly believe the rumour—that Lord Chancellor Jeffreys ‘being a little frightened with the brisk proceedings here, is leaving my Lord President [Sunderland] for my Lord Treasurer [Hyde], to join with him in moderating counsells’: in other words, moderating the king’s drive for catholicising policies. The Scottish Parliament’s hostile reaction to such policies north of the Border had been a ‘rebuke that frightens one half [of the catholics], and encourages the other. And though some care be taken to secure them against insults at their City Chapel, very few of them expose themselves to the hazard of being ill us’d, so that their congregation is small and liker a Conventicle than the Church Triumphant’.117 Hyde was thus still seen as presenting a robustly protestant input into government, and from a position that did not yet seem as hopeless to contemporaries as it does to us in retrospect. Loyal Tory anglicans, mentally weighed down with years of exalting the crown, could still have hoped that James might be influenced to the good.

As 1686 wore on, however, the pressure on Hyde mounted, culminating in the royal demand that he become a member of the Church of Rome. The precise sequence and nature of the religious conferences which presaged his fall are difficult to recover accurately due to the strong but differing biases of the main sources,118 and the

115. For Clarendon’s discussion with Hyde about the need to offer good counsel to James, see Tapsell, ‘Life and Career of Laurence Hyde’, pp. 64–5. 116. Don Pedro de Ronquillo to Sir William Trumbull, 12 June 1686, HMC, Downshire, i. p. 182. 117. [Henry Savile] to [marquess of Halifax], Windsor, 29 May 1686, BL, Add. MS 75375 fo. 7v. For the context, see C. Jackson, Restoration Scotland, 1660-1690: Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 157–62. 118. Simon Patrick, The Autobiography of Symon Patrick, Bishop of Ely, ed. J.H. Parker (Oxford, 1839), pp. 106–20; A Relation of a Conference before His Majesty, and the Earl of Rochester, Lord High-Treasurer, Concerning the Real Presence and Transubstantiation, Nov. 30. 1686 . . . (1722); The Life of James II, ed. Clarke, ii. pp. 98–102; and Hyde’s own ‘minutes’, in Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. pp. 87–9, 90–1, 116–18.

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extent to which James attempted to keep a veil of secrecy over events.119 From the outset, it should be said that Hyde fell purely on account of his refusal to convert. James took pains to argue the contrary in public after removing Hyde from office, motivated, no doubt, both by an unwillingness to emphasise the way in which catholic truth had failed to open Hyde’s eyes and a continuing regard for his former brother-in-law’s long-time service and loyalty. Instead he claimed that he found the office of lord treasurer too great a burden for one man. This was a curious argument as he had trumpeted the superiority of a lord treasurer over a treasury commission less than two years earlier, since the latter ‘looked too like Commonwealth government’.120 But contemporary observers viewed Hyde’s fall in straightforward confessional terms. As the powerful regional magnate, the duke of Beaufort was informed, James had urged Hyde ‘to consider well of his religion’ as early as the Exclusion Crisis, ‘for w[oul]d he change, all things w[oul]d turn to his wishes’. In December 1686, the king reiterated the same message, but Hyde replied that ‘he must make ye same ans[we]r yt his conscience w[oul]d not suffer him to alter’ his religion.121 The presbyterian intelligencer, Roger Morrice, heard that the king told Hyde it was fit he should hear reasons to join the Roman Catholic Church as during the previous reign Hyde had pressed James to hear reasons why he should return to the Church of England.122 The king’s zeal prompted an extended series of conferences which placed Hyde under immense pressure to convert.123

In the face of James being ‘so urgent’ in pressing him ‘very much to change his religion’, Hyde consented to hear a catholic divine, Bonaventura Giffard, in mid-November. Giffard tried—and failed—to convince Hyde that since all men ought to base their faith on ‘the ancient, primitive, Apostolical Church’, he should become a member of the Church of Rome.124 In reply, Hyde affirmed that he ‘had been taught that the Protestant Church was the ancient Church, and that it now teaches the same doctrine which the Church taught in the five first ages, and that the Roman Church had separated from that Ancient

119. Autobiography of Symon Patrick, ed. Parker, p. 116. Despite rumours in London about a religious conference involving Hyde, one newsletter writer apologised to his employer that he could give no account of it as it was spoken of so ‘darkly’: Bulstrode newsletters, 20 Dec. 1686, Austin, Texas, H[arry] R[ansom] H[umanities] R[esearch] C[enter]. See also N. Johnston to Sir John Reresby, 21 Dec. 1686, Leeds, West Yorkshire Archive Service, MX/R/46/23. 120. Autobiography of Sir John Bramston, ed. Braybrooke, p. 258. 121. Extracts of letters to duke of Beaufort, 30 Dec. 1686/3 Jan. 1687, Bodl., MS Carte 130 fo. 23v. 122. R. Morrice, The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691, ed. M. Goldie (7 vols., Woodbridge, 2007–9), iii. pp. 325–6. 123. Macaulay’s account of Hyde’s slow-motion fall from power remains the fullest in print, even though its value is vitiated by his extreme dislike for the dismissed minister: History of England, ed. Firth, ii. pp. 797–806. 124. Autobiography of Symon Patrick, ed. Parker, pp. 106–7; Bonaventure Giffard to Hyde, 15 Nov. 1686, Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. p. 63.

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Church, by bringing in these errors, transubstantiation, praying to saints, praying for the dead, &c’.125 Such a response points directly to Hyde’s engagement with a major theme in anglican apologetic: its maintenance of the best traditions of the early church.126 Giffard’s response was to challenge Hyde to find anglican divines who could maintain these positions.127 This formed the agenda for the conference before James on 30 November. Before that Hyde met with William Jane and Simon Patrick, the two anglican divines then in attendance at the royal chapel,128 after which Jane—himself a product of Christ Church, Oxford—wrote a reply to Giffard’s letter which was submitted to both Hyde and James.129

The conference which took place in the king’s chamber on 30 November was attended only by James, Hyde and the four divines (Giffard and Thomas Godden for the catholics, Jane and Patrick for the anglicans), and lasted between three and a half and four and a quarter hours.130 It consisted of the gruelling trading of examples from patristic texts, and rival accusations of ignorance offered by the catholic and protestant divines, who mostly spoke in English but occasionally lapsed into Greek and Latin. Hyde’s fate was bound up in the outcome and there is no reason to suppose that he sat, completely uncomprehending, whilst such lengthy and erudite claims to his soul were made. Though by his own admission he may not have understood all that was said, his intellectual curiosity about different christian confessions during his diplomatic trips to Europe has already been stressed, and he would ask for written copies of the evidence used by the divines. The pressure exerted on the minds of Hyde and his clerical ‘champions’ by the presence of James must have been intense. The king even went so far as to disagree openly with their arguments, and to tolerate a last minute ‘harangue’ by Giffard for Hyde immediately to declare his agreement with the catholics. Instead, Hyde requested and was granted more time to think about all that had been said.131

125. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. p. 63. 126. E. Duffy, ‘Primitive Christianity Revived; Religious Renewal in Augustan England’, Studies in Church History, xiv (1977), pp. 287–300; R.D. Cornwall, ‘The Search for the Primitive Church: The Use of Early Church Fathers in the High Church Anglican Tradition, 1680–1745’, Anglican and Episcopal History, lix (1990), pp. 303–29. Clarendon had recommended Dr Otway, the bishop of Ossory, to Hyde as ‘a person of true primitive piety’ earlier in the year: Clarendon to Hyde, 14 Feb. 1685/6, Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, i. p. 253. 127. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. p. 63. 128. James had objected to Hyde’s original choice of Tillotson and Stillingfleet as too blatantly anti-catholic. (Burnet, History of His Own Time, ed. Routh, iii. p. 116.) I can find no evidence to support South’s claim that he was originally one of Hyde’s choices: South, Posthumous Works, p. 111. 129. Autobiography of Symon Patrick, ed. Parker, 109. For the preference that anglican clergy held for written exchanges with catholics, rather than verbal conferences, see Bodl., MS Rawlinson letters 98 fos. 85r-v. 130. Autobiography of Symon Patrick, ed. Parker, pp. 107, 113; A Relation, ed. Clarke, p. 36. 131. Autobiography of Symon Patrick, ed. Parker, p. 116.

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Although the next day he stated to his own chaplain, Dr Charles Hickman, ‘the satisfaction he had in our religion’,132 and to Jane and Patrick that the conference had ‘much confirmed him in his religion’,133 he consented to another meeting with Giffard and Jane at his house on 11 December, and subsequently asked for a copy of passages concerning transubstantiation.134 Hyde had already received a visit from Barillon, the French ambassador, on 3 December, who had refused to say unequivocally that he knew Hyde would be removed if he did not change his religion, but had left little doubt that this was the likely outcome.135 In response Hyde stated that ‘whether I became Catholic or no, it shall be by the conviction of my conscience, and not for my place . . . I added, as we went down [to the door], that I knew the King, and I knew he knew me, and I feared nobody’.136

For all the parting bravado, Hyde must by now have known that he would fall if he did not convert. In an emotional meeting with James on 4 December, Hyde again emphasised that he would not change his religion simply to save his career, a stance which James commended.137 Yet at their final meeting on 19 December, James declared—in Hyde’s account almost hysterically and in tears—‘that he found it absolutely necessary for the good of his affairs, that no man must be at the head of his affairs that was not of his opinion . . . that it was impossible to keep a man in so great a trust, in so eminent a station, where there was so much dependence, that was of an interest so contrary to that which he must support and own and advance’.138 Hyde refused to convert, and was duly removed.139 Burnet recorded that ‘Rochester was looked on as a man lost to us’ as a result of the pressure which James put him under, and whilst there were differing accounts of Hyde’s motivation, ‘yet the conclusion of it was, that Rochester stood firm’.140

132. Ibid., pp. 114–15. It seems unlikely to have been a coincidence that Hickman had preached a sermon on 21 Nov. 1686 that, taking as its text Prov. 30: 8, 9, dwelt on the superiority of poverty with the free exercise of ‘Vertue and Religion’ over ‘a turbulent, dangerous and unprofitable greatness’. Charles Hickman, A Sermon Preach’d before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen, at the Guild-hall Chapel, Nov. 21. 1686 (1687), pp. 1, 4–5. 133. This phrase came to be Hyde’s persistent gloss on the events which had taken place: Letters and Diplomatic Instructions of Queen Anne, ed. Brown, p. 21. 134. Autobiography of Symon Patrick, ed. Parker, p. 116. 135. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. pp. 87–9. 136. Ibid., ii. pp. 88–9. 137. Ibid., ii. pp. 90–1. 138. Ibid., ii. pp. 116–17. For James’s later bitter perspective in exile on Hyde’s actions, see Life of James II, ed. Clarke, ii. p. 101. 139. I find it difficult to incorporate into the above framework the unique record in Patrick’s account of a meeting on 23 December at Hyde’s house, where Patrick faced not only Giffard but also three other catholics, including ‘a lawyer, no less man than Judge Allabon’, and at which Hyde refuted the catholic argument that truth was better conveyed over time by word of mouth than by writing: “it was the strangest proposition that ever he heard”’. (Autobiography of Symon Patrick, ed. Parker, pp. 116–19.) 140. H.C. Foxcroft, ed., A Supplement to Burnet’s History of My Own Time (Oxford, 1902), p. 224.

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James’s vehement and persistent pursuit of the goal of converting Hyde showed many things: the depth of his attachment to his favourite; the power which he believed the catholic message had to move men to change their opinions (based on his own experiences) and his determination to have a catholic and catholicising government in his own image. When Hyde wrote to his brother in Dublin of his removal from office, Clarendon—himself on the verge of being dismissed from office—replied in terms which again show how potent their father’s shade remained:141

poor as I am, I hope God will give both you and me the grace to beg, rather than that we should falter in the religion wherein we have been bred, and for his steady adhering to which my father was ruined, which can never be forgotten by me. I am so full at present that I cannot say any more. God Almighty preserve the King.

Clarendon thanked God for the strength that ‘he has given you to persevere in the right, and to tread the steps my father went before us’.142 ‘With faith and holy resolution crown’d’, in the words of a sympathetic poet, Hyde could ponder the parallels between his own fall from political favour and that of his father whilst tending to his garden in Twickenham after his dismissal took formal effect on 4 January 1687.143

Others were left discussing the significance of the lord treasurer’s political demise. Coinciding with his brother’s dismissal as lord lieutenant of Ireland, Hyde’s fall was certainly recognised at the time as being crucially important—the two brothers were the ‘Visible heads’ of the Church of England interest.144 Though other ministers had been approached about their religion, the seniority of his position and proximity to James meant that ‘the person that was the most considered, was the earl of Rochester’, and his decision to keep firm to his religion meant that ‘he goeth off with honour and applause’.145 The wider message of these events was stark. In the days between the news that a conference had been held, and Hyde’s formal surrender of his staff, the talk in London was that ‘if his lordship cannot support himself with all that mighty stock of interest and relacion, what is to be expected from

141. Clarendon to Hyde, 30 Dec. 1686, Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. pp. 126–7. 142. Ibid., ii. p. 132. 143. An Elogy (1687), l. 9, in De F. Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs of State, iv. p. 99; Autobiography of Sir John Bramston, ed. Braybrooke, p. 253. 144. Goldie, ed., Entring Book of Roger Morrice, iii. p. 345. For Barillon’s view, see Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. p. 126. 145. Burnet, History of His Own Time, ed. Routh, iii. pp. 114–15; [anon.] to John Ellis, 1 Jan. 1687, Ellis Correspondence, ed. Ellis, i. p. 219. For more cynical verdicts, see Autobiography of Sir John Bramston, ed. Braybrooke, p. 259; WYAS, MX/R/46/23; Burnet, History of His Own Time, ed. Routh, iii. pp. 116–17.

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other men who want those advantages?’.146 The answer to that question would become increasingly clear during the next 18 months.

Although dismissed from office by James, the lengthy relationship that had existed between patron and client was not utterly destroyed at the time of Hyde’s removal. His fall from office was sweetened with a substantial pension, and kind words from James at the council table about his loyal service.147 In the autumn of 1687, he was appointed lord lieutenant of Hertfordshire and had to tender the ‘three questions’ to local gentry to gauge their willingness to support James’s pro-tolerationist agenda.148 Hyde has been denounced for co-operating with the ‘three questions’, in particular by Macaulay, in whose opinion Hyde’s actions signalled a deplorable lack of moral backbone and willingness to defend the Church of England. Macaulay relied primarily on two letters by William of Orange’s Scottish agent, James Johnstone, for his claim that Hyde went further than simply executing a royal command, and harangued the local gentry with ‘offensive warmth’—a mild embellishment of ‘more zealous . . . then was necessary’ in the original.149 Unfortunately Hertfordshire is one of two English counties for which no official records relating to the ‘three questions’ campaign survive rendering the report difficult to substantiate.150

Had Hyde offered the kind of heavy-handed support for the ‘three questions’ described by Macaulay his action would have been at variance with the overall tenor of his politics of religion described here. It cannot entirely be discounted: the pressure on many leading figures to please an implacable royal master was obviously intense in 1687/8. Hyde was one of fifteen protestant peers who did not resign their lieutenancies when

146. Charles Bertie to his niece, the Countess of Rutland, 30 Dec. 1686, HMC, Rutland, ii. p. 111 (Macaulay offered the same analysis: Macaulay, History of England, ed. Firth, ii. p. 810). For other references to the likely repercussions of the Hydes’ fall, see Ellis Correspondence, ed. Ellis, i. pp. 215, 223; Diary of John Evelyn, ed. de Beer, iv. pp. 535–6. 147. Bulstrode newsletters, 10 Jan. 1687, HRHRC. 148. Relying on a posthumous panegyric on Hyde, Speck states that in the summer of 1687 Hyde had gone to the Netherlands on the king’s business, and that it was on his return from this diplomatic mission that he was made lord lieutenant. This seems unlikely. Recovering from his wife’s death, Hyde certainly went to the Spa, but his failure to visit William of Orange at that time caused deep offence to the prince, as Hyde came to realise: Speck, ‘Hyde, Laurence’, ODNB; National Library of Ireland, MS 36 fo. 638; Japikse, ed., Correspondentie (RGP, Kleine Serie, xxviii), p. 34. 149. Macaulay, History of England, ed. Firth, ii. pp. 976–7 and n.1. (The letters he used are now BL, Add. MS 34515 fos. 33v, 38.) Macaulay also emphasised Hyde’s need to maintain royal favour in order to keep the substantial pension he had been awarded at the time of his dismissal from office. 150. G. Duckett, ed., Penal Laws and Test Act: Questions Touching their Repeal Propounded in 1687–8 by James II (2 vols., 1882–3), ii. p. 301. The most detailed account of this campaign is now S. Sowerby, ‘James II’s Revolution: Remaking Religious Toleration in an Age of Persecution, 1685–1689’ (Harvard Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2006), ch. 3 (I am grateful to Dr Sowerby for allowing me access to his doctoral work).

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asked to appoint catholics as deputy lieutenants in their counties, and in November was one of a number of peers thought by the French envoy, Bonrepaux, to be sympathetic to the agenda suggested by the ‘three questions’.151 It is nevertheless striking, as W.A. Speck has recently noted, that the episode was not dredged up and used in evidence against Hyde after the Revolution.152 It is at least as striking that several contemporary chroniclers did not present Hyde’s actions in this particular light. Narcissus Luttrell merely recorded that the Hertfordshire gentry had given in their answer to Hyde, ‘that they were not for taking of[f ] the penal lawes and test’.153 Roger Morrice added the statement that Hyde sent the ‘three questions’ into Hertfordshire within a letter affirming:

that he still was as he <alwaies> pretended to be a true son of the Church of England which was rightly understood by those he Writt to, and a great incouragement for them to refuse And also by the Court, and he is thereby fallen under their further displeasure, but they are reported generally not to Concur.

If Hyde really had attempted to overawe the Hertfordshire gentry, it seems likely that Morrice would have taken the opportunity to excoriate Hyde, just as he did other leading high churchmen, or ‘hierarchists’.154 Instead, Morrice’s description suggests that Hyde pursued a policy of coded discourse designed to encourage resistance. Even less revealing is another harsh critic of Hyde, Gilbert Burnet. He does not mention the Hertfordshire example at all in his account of the ‘three questions’, simply noting that ‘In most of the counties the lords lieutenants put those questions in so careless a manner, that it was plain they did not desire they should be answered in the affirmative’. Particularly in light of Morrice’s account, such casuistical tactics sound most plausible for Hyde, rather than the reportedly blunter obstructionism of the earl of Northampton (Bishop Compton’s brother) in Warwickshire, who told the gentry that ‘he did not design to comply with any one’ of the questions himself.155

151. Sowerby, ‘James II’s Revolution’, pp. 107–8; D. Hosford, ‘The Peerage and the Test Act: A List, c. November 1687’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xlii (1969), pp. 116–20. 152. Speck, ‘Hyde, Laurence’, ODNB. 153. Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714 (6 vols., Oxford, 1857), i. p. 422. 154. Goldie, ed., Entring Book of Roger Morrice, iv. pp. 177–8, xxv. Morrice’s phrasing indicates that Hyde was not actually present in Hertfordshire to deal with the gentry in person. 155. Burnet, History of His Own Time, ed. Routh, iii. p. 193 and n.h (Dartmouth’s recollections). Other protestant peers who tendered the ‘three questions’ included the dukes of Beaufort and Newcastle, and the earls of Bath and Craven, whilst the earls of Abingdon, Gainsborough and Scarsdale, and Lord Ferrers were removed from their lieutenancies for refusing to pose them: Sowerby, ‘James II’s Revolution’, pp. 103–5.

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Whatever the precise nature of Hyde’s activity in November 1687, he had certainly not chosen to make an overt martyr of himself for the protestant cause once more. Unlike Northampton and many others, he was not immediately removed from his lord lieutenancy. But he did have to face up to a controversy that reflected on his whole family’s honour and position. In December, catholics at James’s court generated rumours casting doubt on the validity of the king’s first marriage, to Hyde’s sister in 1660, thus ‘bastardizing the two daughters’, Mary and Anne. Hyde had to move rapidly to defend the legitimacy of his sister’s marriage to James by finding the cleric who had conducted the service, and obtaining his signed evidence about its validity.156

Surprisingly little is known about Hyde’s activities during the first 9 months of the critical year, 1688. The impression given by a few shards of information is that of nervous isolation.157 In the spring, he learned that William of Orange and Mary were ‘very angry with him’, and rushed to vindicate himself to Princess Anne, professing ignorance of the grounds of their displeasure. Expressing her scorn for her uncle, Anne painted a picture for her sister of a deeply anxious man: the ‘pitifulness of his spirit’ was what motivated his expressions of loyalty to his nieces at a time of deepening concern about Mary of Modena’s pregnancy. Should she give birth to a male heir, Mary and Anne would be demoted down the line of succession, and fears for the future of English protestantism would grow. Hyde assured his nieces that he would not be ‘so ungrateful’ to his sister’s memory ‘as to do anything wilfully to displease her children’.158 In changed political circumstances, his failure to visit William whilst staying at the Spa the previous summer must have appeared a major miscalculation. In June, he was not closely involved in the seven bishops crisis: although his brother acted as one of the bishops’ most visible supporters, Hyde did not attend their trial having chosen to stay at Bath during the confrontation.159 Despite all his care not overtly to antagonise the king, he does not seem to have returned to significant favour. James attempted to use Hyde as a conduit to the bishops in September, but their old intimacy was clearly gone.160 In October, he was reduced to displaying his weakness to a long-term ministerial rival, the earl of Dartmouth, claiming with mild hyperbole that ‘he has not had the happiness of being once spoken to by the King

156. Goldie, ed., Entring Book of Roger Morrice, iv. p. 196; Gibson, James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops, p. 71. 157. A passing reference in January 1688 to a continuing ‘Rochesterian faction in the court’, lacks support: Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. p. 153. 158. Anne to Mary, The Cockpit, 20 Mar. 1688, Letters and Diplomatic Instructions of Queen Anne, ed. Brown, p. 35. 159. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. p. 179; Sowerby, ‘James II’s Revolution’, p. 293; Gibson, Trial of the Seven Bishops, via index, sub Clarendon. 160. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. pp. 191–2. Clarendon only records his brother attending on the king twice in 1688 before September: ibid., ii. p. 162 (14 Feb.), 183 (26 July).

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in any kind’ for some time.161 The former lord treasurer found himself out in the political cold.

Hyde thereafter suffered swings of fortune in the remainder of 1688 as severe as any other significant politician. Thanks to the ‘anglican revolution’ of the autumn, he once more appeared likely to be a powerful figure as James attempted to veer back to his old Tory friends in order to shore up his monarchy in the face of an imminent Dutch invasion.162 But the Indian summer of a Hyde-influenced Tory government rapidly faded to nothing after William of Orange’s fleet landed at Tor Bay on 5 November. His vehement efforts to persuade James to call a parliament as ‘the only remedy in our present circumstances’ were resented by the king, and even more so by the queen.163 Yet his sincere zeal for James’s kingly rights deeply alienated William and Mary. In tandem with Francis Turner, bishop of Ely, Hyde led efforts to save James, and even after the king had fled the country he was a leading supporter of a regency rather than the wholesale transfer of the throne to William and Mary.164 As early as 5 December, Clarendon learned from Gilbert Burnet that William ‘had a very ill opinion of my brother’.165 When Clarendon took Hyde to Windsor to meet William on 16 December, the prince received Hyde ‘very coldly’, and deliberately snubbed him by pointedly inviting only Clarendon to dinner.166 Having failed to persuade the archbishop of Canterbury to lend his support to the loyalist cause by attending the Convention, both brothers spoke passionately in the crucial debates on 6 February that resulted in the throne being declared vacant, and the declaration of William and Mary as king and queen. Clarendon’s friend, John Evelyn, recorded the general opinion that Clarendon’s ‘vehemence . . . put him by all preferment’ from the new monarchs, and Hyde ‘overshot himselfe by the same carriage and stiffnesse’. Friendly observers ‘thought they might well have spared’ the extent of their efforts ‘when they saw how it was like to be overrul’d’.167 Although William would subsequently allow Hyde to kiss his hand as king, Mary took longer to be mollified, initially refusing to see either Hyde or his children.168

161. Hyde to earl of Dartmouth, 6 Oct. 1688, Whitehall, HMC, Dartmouth, i. p. 146. 162. M. Goldie, ‘The Political Thought of the Anglican Revolution’, in R. Beddard, ed., The Revolutions of 1688 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 102–36, esp. pp. 108–9. 163. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. pp. 205, 206, 209. 164. The pre-eminent interpreter of this period remains R. Beddard: see esp. ‘The Loyalist Opposition in the Interregnum: A Letter of Dr Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely, on the Revolution of 1688’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xl (1967), pp. 101–9; ‘The Guildhall Declaration of 11 December 1688 and the Counter-Revolution of the Loyalists’, Historical Journal, xi (1968), pp. 403–20; A Kingdom Without a King: The Journal of the Provisional Government in the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 9–65; ‘The Unexpected Whig Revolution of 1688’, in id. ed., Revolutions of 1688, pp. 11–101. 165. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. p. 217. 166. Ibid., ii. pp. 226–7. 167. Diary of John Evelyn, ed. de Beer, iv. p. 626. 168. Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. p. 264.

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Despite all his aggressive endeavours to save James, and the political fall-out of that decision, Hyde nevertheless took the oath of allegiance to William and Mary in 1689. His older brother did not, inflexibly telling Gilbert Burnet on 11 January 1689 that ‘I should preserve my allegiance’, and startling William’s adviser, Dyckvelt, on 14 January with the argument that ‘our religion did not allow of the deposing of Kings’.169 The division of opinion between the siblings, who had previously been so close in their political and religious opinions, is impossible to explain definitively without more of Hyde’s personal papers. At a general level, the non-jurors were never numerous, even if they were vocal: in taking the oath of allegiance Hyde was travelling with the Tory majority. The profound sense of responsibility for family fortunes and dynastic continuity that imbued the English elite may also have played a role in Laurence and Henry’s different decisions. The Hydes were not the only family to be sundered politically by the consequences of 1688, even if personal relationships continued. While Hyde’s key clerical supporter in December 1688, Francis Turner, bishop of Ely, refused to abandon his allegiance to James II, his brother Thomas, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford took the new oaths.170 Hedging bets provided Francis Turner with an Oxford base in which to hide for part of the 1690s. If this is what happened with the Hydes, it helped to maintain their dynastic fortunes into the eighteenth century: Henry’s son, Edward, the third earl of Clarendon, was appointed governor-general of New York and New Jersey in 1702. Although his record of ‘seasonable service’ as an early defector to William during the Revolution was probably a more significant factor than the actions of his uncle,171 Hyde’s willingness to serve in government under a man his brother regarded as a usurper threw a protective cover over the family as a whole. It certainly allowed him to speak out in efforts during 1691 to save his brother from the consequences of Jacobite plotting, and to retain the wherewithal secretly to purchase his brother’s country residence, Cornbury, around 1697, when Clarendon’s financial position was in crisis.172 Ultimately, Clarendon’s rigid view that the Church of

169. Ibid., ii. pp. 264, 266. 170. P. Hopkins, ‘Francis Turner’, and C. Butler, ‘Thomas Turner’, ODNB; G.V. Bennett, ‘Loyalist Oxford and the Revolution’, in L.S. Sunderland and L.G. Mitchell, eds., The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. V: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1986), p. 23. 171. P.U. Bonomi, ‘Edward Hyde’, ODNB. For Clarendon’s mortification at the news that his son had proved himself a ‘rebel’, see Singer, ed., Clarendon Correspondence, ii. pp. 204, 205, 213, 215, 250. 172. A.W. Ward, ‘Henry Hyde’, DNB; Speck, ‘Henry Hyde’. Clarendon’s eldest son and his wife were said to be ‘starving’ at this time: E. Cruickshanks, S. Handley and D.W. Hayton, eds., The House of Commons, 1690–1715 (5 vols., Cambridge, 2002), iv. p. 462. For the tensions between the brothers arising from Hyde’s substantial financial support of Clarendon, see T. Lewis, Lives of the Friends and Contemporaries of Lord Chancellor Clarendon: Illustrative of Portraits in his Gallery (3 vols., 1852), i. pp. 45*–6*.

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England could not countenance the replacement of James with William and Mary was one rejected by many otherwise conscientious Tories, notably the earls of Nottingham and Danby.173 Hyde’s support for James until 6 February 1689, and willingness to offer his allegiance to the new regime thereafter, was an acutely uncomfortable experience that most Tories were nevertheless willing to endure in order to maintain their voice in government on the issues they cared about.174

In the decades after the revolution, the most important of those issues was the character and status of the Church of England. This was the key facet of the Tory crisis in church and state that destabilised political life.175 W.A. Speck has argued that it was only during this last phase of his life that Hyde became a committed high church Tory, having previously acted primarily as a court politician.176 This perceived shift is, however, in large part an optical illusion based on the widespread scholarly neglect of his pre-1688 career. In reality, the continuities across the 1688 divide are more striking than the inevitable changes inflicted by the development of a new political world, one in which William’s determination to avoid becoming the pawn of any single group of English politicians forced Tories to re-evaluate their relations with central government.

Although he was sufficiently rehabilitated to be reappointed to the privy council in 1692, Hyde’s return to significant political office was delayed until 1700.177 During the 1690s, he had proved a vocal and determined opponent of William’s policy of consistent English involvement in continental warfare, trumpeting instead a ‘blue water’ policy of reliance on the navy that would be cheaper, and would also lessen the patronage opportunities for William and his predominantly Whig ministers.178 But as ‘an informed and convinced Calvinist’,179 William’s ambivalence towards Hyde was at least as much due to the latter’s prominence as a champion of the Church of England’s rights in the wake of the Toleration Act.180 Hyde’s influence was buttressed

173. H. Horwitz, Revolution Politicks: The Career of Daniel Finch, Second Earl of Nottingham, 1647–1730 (Cambridge, 1968), ch. 5; Browning, Thomas Osborne, i. ch. 18. 174. For criticism of Hyde as a ‘Judas’, see A Letter to the Lady Osbourne (1688), l. 60, in De F. Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs of State, v. p. 81. 175. Bennett, Tory Crisis, passim. 176. Speck, ‘Hyde, Laurence’, ODNB . 177. For Hyde’s mixed relations with William in the 1690s, see Horwitz, Parliament , pp. 67, 77, 99, 132, 260, 276. 178. Ibid., pp. 103–4, 279. Hyde’s views on limited military involvement on the continent would continue in Anne’s reign, not least as a result of his hostility to Marlborough: Holmes, British Politics, pp. 72–4; Gregg, Queen Anne, pp. 157–60, 166; H.L. Snyder, ed., The Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence (3 vols., Oxford, 1975), i. pp. 87, 99, 156, 203, 251, 259, 453; ii. pp. 695, 699, 801, 1172. 179. G.V. Bennett, ‘King William III and the Episcopate’, in G.V. Bennett and J.D. Walsh, eds., Essays in Modern English Church History in Memory of Norman Sykes (1966), p. 111. 180. J. Spurr, ‘The Church of England, Comprehension and the Toleration Act of 1689’, ante, civ (1989), pp. 927–46.

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because of his relationships amongst the clerical establishment in Oxford, connections that pre-dated 1688 and provide some of the key threads tying his career together. His lengthy associations with Christ Church were particularly significant. It was the Christ Church man William Jane, the Regius Professor of Divinity, who had acted as one of Hyde’s anglican champions during the conferences in late 1686 over the lord treasurer’s religion. And it was Jane who would be elected prolocutor of the lower house of Convocation in November 1689, almost certainly with Hyde’s support.181 This fractious assembly wrecked dissenting and Court hopes of ‘comprehension’ for many nonconformists within the state church. Hyde was a frequent visitor to Christ Church at this time, and would continue to be so during the 1690s, when the University of Oxford became a major source of clerical opposition to William’s religious policies.182

In particular, Oxford men were often the most vociferous critics of ‘that abominable Hypocrisie, that inexcusable immorality of Occasional Conformity’.183 Hyde stood at the head of this assault on nonconformists’ success in vitiating the sacramental test impeding their access to public office. In pursuit of this campaign, Hyde successfully demanded that William recall convocation as the price of his return to office in 1700, the year in which both he and his son were made DCLs at Oxford.184 Hyde’s house became an important meeting place for leading clergy during the convocation of 1701, and he told Francis Atterbury that he was ‘very much pleased’ with the second edition of the latter’s The Rights, Powers, and Priviledges of an English Convocation, especially its attack on the leading Whig bishop, Gilbert Burnet.185 Convocation thereafter formed a key dimension of ‘the rage of party’ during Anne’s reign, and the lower house’s zeal to outlaw the practice of occasional conformity a central aspect of Hyde’s political character. His willingness bluntly to assert that the church was in danger during House of Lords’ debates, even when Anne chose to attend, deeply offended the queen.186

181. Bennett, ‘Loyalist Oxford’, pp. 26–7; G.J. Schochet, ‘The Act of Toleration and the Failure of Comprehension: Persecution, Nonconformity, and Religious Indifference’, in D. Hoak and M. Feingold, eds., The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–89 (Stanford, CA, 1996), pp. 184–5. 182. Bennett, ‘Loyalist Oxford’, pp. 27–9; id. ‘Against the Tide: Oxford under William III’, in Sutherland and Mitchell, eds., The Eighteenth Century, pp. 31–60. 183. William Bromley to Arthur Charlett, 22 Oct. 1702, Bodl., MS Ballard 38, f. 137, qu. in Bennett, ‘Against the Tide’, p. 51. Bromley’s campaign to continue as one of the university’s MPs was approved by Hyde: G.V. Bennett, ‘The Era of Party Zeal 1702–1714’, in Sutherland and Mitchell, eds., The Eighteenth Century, p. 62. 184. Horwitz, Parliament, p. 278; J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1500–1714 (Early ser., 4 vols., Oxford, 1891–2), ii. p. 782a; Ward, Georgian Oxford, p. 41. 185. Bennett, ‘William III and the Episcopate’, pp. 128–9; M. Greig, ‘Heresy Hunt: Gilbert Burnet and the Convocation Controversy of 1701’, Historical Journal, xxxvii (1994), p. 579. For Hyde’s influence during the election of a prolocutor of the lower house in this convocation, see Francis Atterbury, The Epistolary Correspondence . . . of . . . Francis Atterbury, D.D. Lord Bishop of Rochester (2nd edn., 4 vols., 1789–90), i. p. 76. 186. Jones and Holmes, eds., The London Diaries , pp. 311–12, 320; Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 214.

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Such intemperate anti-dissenting activity was part of his wider self-identification as a leading member of ‘the High Church Party’, whose dream was a return to the established church’s strength during the last years of Charles II.187 Hyde courted controversy by visiting the ultra-High Tory Oxford cleric, Henry Sacheverell, when the latter was in custody after preaching his inflammatory assault on nonconformists, The Perils of False Brethren, in 1709, and went on to present Sacheverell’s petition for bail.188

All of this activity was closely interwoven with a post-revolutionary politics of memory that was deeply inflected with religious concerns. Sacheverell’s vehement comparison between modern-day non-conformists and the religious zealots who had executed Charles I on 30 January 1649 was mirrored in Hyde’s prominent attendance at 30 January sermons into the eighteenth century.189 But it was in his capacity as keeper of his father’s flame that Hyde most powerfully connected history, memory, family and religion. Hyde and his brother had kept close control over their father’s papers since his death, including the manuscript of his titanic History of the Rebellion, permitting only close associates like William Sancroft access.190 In the 1690s, Hyde supervised the lengthy process by which that manuscript would eventually be published during the next decade. This process involved Hyde co-opting the help of his clerical clients, notably Bishop Thomas Sprat, and the Dean of Christ Church, Henry Aldrich, and very frequent visits to Oxford.191 It would ultimately bring to fruition a project Hyde had been involved in even while his father was still writing his works: he carried relevant papers to the exiled Clarendon in 1671 and 1673.192

Besides presenting Clarendon as a uniquely loyal and able minister of the crown, Hyde took the opportunity of connecting the publication of the History to his political and religious agenda. Even if Hyde did not personally write every word of the unsigned prefaces that accompanied the first three volumes into print in 1702–4, it is inconceivable that they

187. G. Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (1973), p. 43; C. Roberts, ‘The Fall of the Godolphin Ministry’, Journal of British Studies, xxii (1982), pp. 87–8; G. Holmes, Religion and Party in Late Stuart England (1975), p. 5. 188. Holmes, Trial, pp. 95, 104. Hyde’s son voted in the House of Commons against Sacheverell’s impeachment: House of Commons 1690–1715, iv. p. 464, and Hyde himself was satirised for his prominent support: The Save-Alls. Or, the Bishops Who Voted for Dr Sacheverell, ll. 17–18, in De F. Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs of State, vii. p. 424. 189. Jones and Holmes, eds., London Diaries of William Nicolson, p. 413. 190. Seaward, ‘Hyde, Edward’, ODNB. 191. W.G. Hiscock, Henry Aldrich of Christ Church 1648-1710 (Oxford, 1960), pp. 60–8; Green, ‘Publication of Clarendon’s Autobiography’, pp. 353–5; Bennett, ‘Loyalist Oxford’, pp. 26–7. Hyde had secured a canonry of Christ Church cathedral for Aldrich, and treated him as ‘a kind of domestic chaplain’: Bennett, ‘Against the Tide’, pp. 40–3. 192. C.H. Firth, ‘Clarendon’s “History of the Rebellion”: Part III.—The “History of the Rebellion”’, ante, xix (1904), p. 464.

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could have appeared without his total approbation, and were certainly understood by contemporaries as expressing his views.193 The preface to the first volume included extended praise for the Act of Uniformity (1662)—claimed as a Clarendonian achievement194—which ‘redeemed’ the Church of England ‘from the oppressions it had lain under’, and re-established its ‘decency in worship, without affectation, superstition, or ostentation’. It also featured a sideswipe at the irrationality of catholic notions of papal infallibility which chimed with views that Hyde had expressed since at least the 1670s.195 The preface to the second volume (1703) prefigured Sacheverell’s rhetoric by blaming the regicide squarely on those who were no friends to ‘true religion’, and argued that ‘the Monarchy of England is not now capable of being supported but upon the principles of the Church of England’.196 And, the following year, the preface to the third volume explicitly claimed that evil-minded contemporaries would learn from the mistakes of their forbears in the 1650s in their quest to ensure greater and longer lasting success in the future. For good measure, readers were led to High Church conclusions by closely proximate discussions of the regicide and the emergence in the 1690s and 1700s of dissenting academies, educating the next generation of nonconformists.197 In this way, Clarendon was made into ‘a prophet as well as an historian’, by sons who ‘have found themselves as well the better Christians as the better men for the afflicted, as well as prosperous, parts of their father’s life’.198 Thanks to the close interaction of history and current affairs in the prefaces, the published History stood as the finale of a long-term dialogue between Hyde and his father.

Hyde’s religion was critical to his political career. Bearing in mind his prominence within highly partisan contests over many years, it is hardly surprising that perspectives on the nature of that religion should have been sharply polarised. Aside from the dramatic crisis surrounding the attempts to convert him, James II had recognised his brother-in-law to

193. Hiscock, Henry Aldrich, pp. 60–2; Seaward, ‘Hyde, Edward’; Speck, ‘Hyde, Laurence’, ODNB. For the offence Anne took at the prefaces, see Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 168. 194. For a more detached view of Clarendon’s religious policy in the early Restoration years, see P. Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–1667 (Cambridge, 1989), ch. 7. 195. Edward Hyde, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641, ed. W.D. Macray (6 vols., Oxford, 1888), i. xxx; BL, Egerton MS 3324 fos. 94r-v (a sardonic account to Danby in 1678 of Capuchins being forced to plant cabbages upside down in order to demonstrate their irrational obedience to their superiors). 196. Hyde, History, ed. Macray, i. xlii. 197. Ibid., i. xliii, liii–liv. 198. Ibid., i. xliii, xxxviii.

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be ‘a zealous Protestant’.199 In 1700, Hyde’s chaplain, Charles Hickman, praised him for displaying ‘an immovable Zeal for the true Religion’ and an ‘unconquerable Affection for the Establish’d Church . . . even in the worst of Times’, a view shared by the poet William Shippen in 1704: recalling the pressures on Hyde to convert in 1686, he praised ‘The firm Resolves of his unbyass’d Soul,/True to his Conscience, as the Needle to the Pole’.200 Finally, in the literature published immediately after his death in 1711, Hyde was described as ‘a true Vindicator of the Church of England, truly Religious’, and as having been ‘a good Protestant’.201

Others poured scorn on such pretensions to religious zeal and constancy. His activities while enjoying the office of lord treasurer in James’s reign could always be exhumed to his discredit. During the parliamentary debates of 1705 surrounding the church in danger controversy, the Whig peer Lord Wharton was merciless in recalling past events, sarcastically noting that when Hyde and others had been ‘in Ecclesiastical Commission to suspend and deprive the Bishops and Clergy . . . then the Church was very safe’.202 Some of the laudatory pamphlets produced after Hyde’s death were prompted by the republication in 1711 of a brutally satirical piece, The True Patriot Vindicated, designed to demolish the religious claims made by Hyde’s chaplain in 1700.203 This account dwelt lovingly on both Hyde’s willingness to sit on James’s ecclesiastical commission, and also his unwillingness after 1688 to discuss the conferences designed to secure his conversion in 1686. With a snide reference to his father’s non-noble birth, the author of the satire informed his readers that ‘every one knows how extremely well bred the noble E[arl] is, and peradventure he might think it Rude to put the [Catholic] Priests out of Countenance’.204

However cruelly intentioned, such a reference to Clarendon reminds us that Hyde’s contemporaries viewed him in terms powerfully framed

199. Life of James II, ed. Clarke, ii. p. 63. (The phrase is not, however, one of the passages directly imputed to James by the authors of the Life. See E. Gregg, ‘New Light on the Authorship of the Life of James II’, ante, cviii (1993), pp. 947–65 for a discussion of the complexities of this source.) ‘Zealous protestant’ was used rather more sardonically by Anthony Wood: The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–95, Described by Himself, ed. A. Clark (5 vols., Oxford Historical Society, xix, xxi, xxvi, xxx, xl, Oxford, 1891–1900), iii. p. 206. 200. Charles Hickman, Fourteen Sermons Preach’d at St James’s Church in Westminster (1700), sig. [A4v]; William Shippen, Faction Display’d (1704), ll. 442–3, in De F. Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs of State, vi. p. 670. Hyde secured Hickman’s appointment as bishop of Derry in 1703. 201. [Anon.], The Life and Glorious Character of the Right Honourable Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester . . . (1711), p. 6; An Essay Towards the Life of Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, p. 10. 202. C. Jones, ‘Debates in the House of Lords on “The Church in Danger”, 1705, and on Dr Sacheverell’s Impeachment, 1710’, Historical Journal, xix (1976), p. 768; Jones and Holmes, eds., London Diaries of William Nicolson, p. 323. 203. The True Patriot Vindicated, or a Justification of His Excellency, The Earl of Rochester . . .(1701; repr. 1711). 204. Ibid.

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1448by his family. So should we. The minutiae of Hyde’s day-to-day private faith remain elusive, albeit occasionally illuminated by the various ‘meditations’ that he penned. For all his interest in foreign church architecture, next to nothing is known about his preferences within England.205 He also had some superficially puzzling links with the Quaker leader William Penn, though in reality this says more about Penn’s privileged background—including a spell at Christ Church—and his skills as a courtier, than any shared religious affinities.206 No engagement with later Stuart politics as long as Hyde’s could display complete consistency. In particular, attempting to maintain his footing amidst the earthquakes in public affairs during the reign of James II placed Hyde in a series of uncomfortable positions that would haunt him ever after. But we can nevertheless see that family concerns, duties and wider connexion transcended the great caesura of 1688/9, and connected the young court politician with the old High Churchman. In Roger Morrice’s mordant judgement, the Hyde brothers’ fall proved that they had made the same mistake as their father in thinking that a close relationship with the crown would be enough to protect them against the intrigues of catholics at court.207 It can have surprised no one that in 1711 Hyde chose to be buried in Westminster, ‘near to the Graves of his Father and Brother both Earls of Clarendon’.208

University of St Andrews GRANT TAPSELL

205. Early eighteenth-century alterations to the church of St Batholomew and All Saints in Wootton Bassett, Wilts., may have been funded by Hyde as lord of the manor, but little evidence remains: Victoria County History of Wiltshire, ix. p. 202; W.F. Parsons, ‘Wootton Bassett Notes’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, xxix (1896–7), p. 193. 206. A.G. Olson, ‘William Penn, Parliament and Proprietary Government’, William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, xviii (1961), p. 180; A.T. Hart, William Lloyd 1627–1717: Bishop, Politician, Author and Prophet (1952), pp. 42–3; M.K. Geiter, William Penn (Harlow, 2000), pp. 28, 29, 31, 35–6, 38, 46, n.10. For another intriguing reference to Hyde assisting a Quaker in need, see Lloyd, Quaker Social History, p. 102. 207. Goldie, ed., Entring Book of Roger Morrice, iii. p. 345. 208. C.E. Doble et al., eds., Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne (11 vols., Oxford Historical Society, ii, vii, xiii, xxxiv, xlii, xliii, xlviii, l, lxv, lxvii, lxx, Oxford, 1885–1921), iii. p. 160. Hyde died intestate: Lewis, Lives, i. p. 47*.

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