Characters from the Histories & Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century Part 23

ll. 22-30. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) brought out his _De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres_ at Paris in 1625. Towards the end of the dedication to Louis XIII Grotius says: 'Pertaesos discordiarum animos excitat in hanc spem recens contracta inter te & sapientissimum pacisque illius sanctae amantissimum Magnae Britanniae Regem amicitia & auspicatissimo Sororis tuae matrimonio federata.'

17.

Clarendon, MS. History, p. 59; _History_, Bk. III, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 203-4; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 340-2.

Page 62, l. 23. Thomas Savile (1590-1658), created Viscount Savile, 1628, Privy Councillor, 1640, Controller and then Treasurer of the Household. 'He was', says Clarendon, 'a man of an ambitious and restless nature, of parts and wit enough, but in his disposition and inclination so false that he could never be believed or depended upon.

His particular malice to the earl of Strafford, which he had sucked in with his milk, (there having always been an immortal feud between the families, and the earl had shrewdly overborne his father), had engaged him with all persons who were willing, and like to be able, to do him mischieve' (_History_, Bk. VI, ed. Macray, vol. ii, p. 534).

Page 63, l. 25. _S'r Harry Vane_. See p. 152, ll. 9 ff.

l. 26. _Plutarch recordes_, Life of Sylla, last sentence.

18.

Memoires of the reigne of King Charles I, 1701, pp. 109-13.

Page 65, l. 21. Warwick was member for Radnor in the Long Parliament from 1640 to 1644. The Bill of Attainder pa.s.sed the Commons on April 21, 1641, by 204 votes to 59 (Clarendon, ed. Macray, vol. i, p. 306; Rushworth, _Historical Collections_, third part, vol. i, 1692, p.

225). The names of the minority were posted up at Westminster, under the heading 'These are Straffordians, Betrayers of their Country'

(Rushworth, _id._, pp. 248-9). There are 56 names, and 'Mr. Warwick'

is one of them.

19.

Clarendon, MS. History, p. 398; _History_, Bk. VI, ed. 1703, vol. ii, pp. 115-6; ed. Macray, vol. ii, pp. 477-8.

Page 68, l. 5. _Et velut aequali_. The source of this quotation is not yet found.

l. 15. _the Standard was sett up_, at Nottingham, on August 22, 1642.

l. 17. Robert Greville (1608-43), second Baron Brooke, cousin of Sir Fulke Greville, first Baron (p. 23, l. 4). See Clarendon, ed. Macray, vol. ii, pp. 474-5.

l. 27. _all his Children_. Compare Warwick's account of 'that most n.o.ble and stout Lord, the Earle of Northampton', _Memoires_, pp.

255-7: 'This may be said of him, that he faithfully served his Master, living and dead; for he left six eminent sons, who were all heirs of his courage, loyalty, and virtue; whereof the eldest was not then twenty.'

20.

Clarendon, MS. History, pp. 477-8; _History_, Bk. VII, ed. 1703, vol.

ii, pp. 269-70; ed. Macray, vol. iii, pp. 177-8.

Carnarvon's character has much in common with Northampton's. Though separated in the _History_, they are here placed together as companion portraits of two young Royalist leaders who fell early in the Civil War.

Page 70, l. 21. Dorchester and Weymouth surrendered to Carnarvon on August 2 and 5, 1643. They were granted fair conditions, but on the arrival of the army of Prince Maurice care was not taken 'to observe those articles which had been made upon the surrender of the towns; which the earl of Carnarvon (who was full of honour and justice upon all contracts) took so ill that he quitted the command he had with those forces, and returned to the King before Gloster' (Clarendon, vol. iii, p. 158).

21.

Clarendon, MS. History, pp. 478-81; _History_, Bk. VII, ed. 1703, vol.

ii, pp. 270-7; ed. Macray, vol. iii, pp. 178-90.

Clarendon wrote two characters of Falkland, the one in 1647 in the 'History' and the other in 1668 in the 'Life'. Both are long, and both are distinguished by sustained favour of affection and admiration as well as by wealth of detail. He was aware that the earlier character was out of scale in a history, but he would not condense it. He even thought of working it up into a book by itself, wherein he would follow the example of Tacitus who wrote the _Agricola_ before the _Annals_ and _Histories_. He corresponded about it with John Earle (see No. 50). From two of the letters the following extracts are taken:

'I would desire you (at your leisure) to send me that discourse of your own which you read to me at Dartmouth in the end of your contemplations upon the Proverbs, in memory of my Lord Falkland; of whom in its place I intend to speak largely, conceiving it to be so far from an indecorum, that the preservation of the fame and merit of persons, and deriving the same to posterity, is no less the business of history, than the truth of things. And if you are not of another opinion, you cannot in justice deny me this a.s.sistance' (March 16, 1646-7: _State Papers_, 1773, vol. ii, p. 350).

'I told you long since, that when I came to speak of that unhappy battle of Newbury, I would enlarge upon the memory of our dear friend that perished there; to which I conceive myself obliged, not more by the rights of friendship, than of history, which ought to transmit the virtue of excellent persons to posterity; and therefore I am careful to do justice to every man who hath fallen in the quarrel, on which side soever, as you will find by what I have said of Mr. Hambden himself. I am now past that point; and being quickened your most elegant and political commemoration of him, and from hints there, thinking it necessary to say somewhat for his vindication in such particulars as may possibly have made impression in good men, it may be I have insisted longer upon the argument than may be agreeable to the rules to be observed in such a work; though it be not much longer than Livy is in recollecting the virtues of one of the Scipios after his death. I wish it were with you, that you might read it; for if you thought it unproportionable for the place where it is, I could be willingly diverted to make it a piece by itself, and inlarge it into the whole size of his life; and that way it would be sooner communicated to the world. And you know Tacitus published the life of Julius Agricola, before either of his annals or his history. I am contented you should laugh at me for a fop in talking of Livy or Tacitus; when all I can hope for is to side Hollingshead, and Stow, or (because he is a poor Knight too, and worse than either of them) Sir Richard Baker' (December 14, 1647, _id._ p. 386).

Page 71, l. 22. _Turpe mori_. Lucan, ix. 108.

l. 26. His mother's father, Sir Lawrence Tanfield, Chief Baron of the Exchequer. He died in May 1625. See p. 87, ll. 21 ff.

Page 72, l. 3. _His education_. See p. 87, ll. 6-13. His father, Henry Carey, first Viscount, was Lord Deputy of Ireland from 1622 to 1629, when he was recalled. He died in 1633.

l. 30. _his owne house_, at Great Tew, 16 miles NW. of Oxford; inherited from Sir Lawrence Tanfield. The house was demolished in 1790, but the gardens remain.

PAGE 74, l. 14. _two large discources_. See p. 94, ll. 10-15.

Falkland's _Of the Infallibilitie of the Church of Rome ... Now first published from a Copy of his owne hand_ had appeared at Oxford in 1645, two years before Clarendon wrote this pa.s.sage. It is a short pamphlet of eighteen quarto pages. It had been circulated in ma.n.u.script during his lifetime, and he had written a _Reply_ to an _Answer_ to it. The second 'large discource' may be this _Reply_. Or it may be his _Answer to a Letter of Mr. Mountague, justifying his change of Religion, being dispersed in many Copies_. Both of these were first published, along with the _Infallibilitie_, in 1651, under the editorship of Dr. Thomas Triplet, tutor of the third Viscount, to whom the volume is dedicated. The dedication is in effect a character of Falkland, and dwells in particular on his great virtue of friendship. A pa.s.sage in it recalls Clarendon. 'And your blessed Mother', says Triplet, 'were she now alive, would say, she had the best of Friends before the best of Husbands. This was it that made _Tew_ so valued a Mansion to us: For as when we went from _Oxford_ thither, we found our selves never out of the Universitie: So we thought our selves never absent from our own beloved home'.

l. 25. He was Member for Newport in the Isle of Wight in The Short Parliament, and again in The Long Parliament.

Page 75, l. 5. His father was Controller of the Household before his appointment as Lord Deputy of Ireland. Cf. p. 91, ll. 3, 4.

l. 18. _L'd Finch_, Sir John Finch (1584-1660), Speaker, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and Lord Keeper, created Baron Finch, 1640. He was impeached in 1640 and fled to Holland. 'The Lord Falkland took notice of the business of ship-money, and very sharply mentioned the lord Finch as the princ.i.p.al promoter of it, and that, being then a sworn judge of the law, he had not only given his own judgement against law, but been the solicitor to corrupt all the other judges to concur with him in their opinion; and concluded that no man ought to be more severely prosecuted than he' (Clarendon, vol. i, p. 230).

Page 77, l. 26. _haud semper_, Tacitus, _Agricola_, ix.

Page 78, l. 17. _in republica Platonis_, Cicero, _Epis. ad Attic.u.m_, ii. 1.

l. 20. _it_, i.e. his avoiding them.

l. 30. Sir Harry Vane, the elder, was dismissed from the Secretaryship of State in November 1641. In an earlier section of the _History_ (vol. i, p. 458) Clarendon claims responsibility for Falkland's acceptance of the Secretaryship: 'It was a very difficult task to Mr. Hyde, who had most credit with him, to persuade him to submit to this purpose of the King cheerfully, and with a just sense of the obligation, by promising that in those parts of the office which required most drudgery he would help him the best he could, and would quickly inform him of all the necessary forms. But, above all, he prevailed with him by enforcing the ill consequence of his refusal', &c.

Page 80, l. 19. _in tanto viro_, Tacitus, _Agricola_, ix.

l. 20. _Some sharpe expressions_. See the quotation by Fuller, p.

105, ll. 14, 15. Clarendon refers to Falkland's speech 'Concerning Episcopacy' in the debate on the bill for depriving the bishops of their votes, introduced on March 30, 1641: 'The truth is, Master Speaker, that as some ill Ministers in our state first tooke away our mony from us, and after indeavoured to make our mony not worth the taking, by turning it into bra.s.se by a kind of _Antiphilosophers-stone_: so these men used us in the point of preaching, first depressing it to their power, and next labouring to make it such, as the harme had not beene much if it had beene depressed, the most frequent subjects even in the most sacred auditories, being the _Jus divinum_ of Bishops and t.i.thes, the sacrednesse of the clergie, the sacriledge of impropriations, the demolishing of puritanisme and propriety, the building of the prerogative at _Pauls_, the introduction of such doctrines, as, admitting them true, the truth would not recompence the scandall; or of such as were so far false, that, as Sir _Thomas More_ sayes of the Casuists, their businesse was not to keepe men from sinning, but to enforme them _Quam prope ad peccatum sine peccato liceat accedere_: so it seemed their worke was to try how much of a Papist might bee brought in without Popery, and to destroy as much as they could of the Gospell, without bringing themselves into danger of being destroyed by the Law.'--_Speeches and Pa.s.sages of This Great and Happy Parliament: From the third of November, 1640 to this instant June, 1641_, p. 190.

The speech is reprinted in Lady Theresa Lewis's _Lives of the Friends of Clarendon_, 1852, vol. i, pp. 53-62.

Page 82, ll. 23-6. See p. 90, ll. 6-13.

Page 83, l. 2. Falkland's partic.i.p.ation in 'the Northern Expedition against the Scots', 1639, was the subject of a eulogistic poem by Cowley:

Great is thy _Charge_, O _North_; be wise and just, _England_ commits her _Falkland_ to thy trust; Return him safe: _Learning_ would rather choose Her _Bodley_, or her _Vatican_ to loose.

All things that are but _writ_ or _printed_ there, In his unbounded Breast _engraven_ are, &c.

It was the occasion also of Waller's 'To my Lord of Falkland'.