THE father of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, was Henry Hyde, of Dinton, in Wiltshire, who was the third son of Lawrence Hyde, of Westhatch, younger son of Robert Hyde, of Norbury and Hyde, in the county of Chester. Clarendon's own account, in what is called his Life, is, that the estate of Norbury had been in the family, and had descended from father to son, from before the Conquest, and that that of Hyde had been long afterwards acquired by marriage; but it appears that Hyde was the original family estate, and that the other was acquired in the reign of Henry III., by the marriage of Sir Robert Hyde, knight, son of Matthew de Hyde, to Agnes de Herdislee, cousin and heiress of Thomas de Norbury. Robert Hyde, of Norbury and Hyde, the great-grandfather of Lord Clarendon, was the eighth in descent from this Sir Robert Hyde.*

* See note in Lister's Life of Clarendon, vol. i. p. 2.

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Lawrence Hyde, who was a clerk in the office of the Auditor of the Exchequer, and had purchased the estate of Westhatch, left four sons and four daughters, who all, his descendant tells us, lived above forty years after the death of their father. Henry, the third son, had been educated at Oxford, and was a student of the Middle Temple when his father died; but being the favourite of his mother, who had been left very rich, and having no mind to the practice of the law, but a great inclination to travel beyond the seas, which," says his son, "in that strict time of Elizabeth was not usual, except to mer- chants and such gentlemen who resolved to be soldiers," he prevailed on his mother to let him go to the Spa for his health, whence he made his way first to Florence and eventually to Rome, where, under the protection of Cardinal Allen, he remained without molestation for some months. On his return home, his mother purchased for him, for his life, from his elder brother, the estate or impropriate rectory of Dinton; and, having married Mary, one of the daughters and heirs of Edward Langford, of Trowbridge, with whom he obtained a good fortune, "from that time," says his son, "he lived a private life at Dinton aforesaid, with great cheerfulness and content, and with a general reputation throughout the whole country; being a person of great knowledge and reputation, and of so great esteem for integrity that most persons near him referred all matters of contention and difference which did arise amongst them to his determination; by which that part of the country lived in more peace and quietness than many of their neighbours. During the time of Queen Elizabeth he served as a burgess for some neighbour boroughs in many parliaments; but from the death of Queen Elizabeth he never was in London, though he lived above thirty years after; and his wife, who was married to him above forty years, never was in London in her life, the wisdom and frugality of that time being such that few gentlemen made journeys to London, or any other expensive journeys, but upon important business, and their wives never; by which providence they enjoyed and improved their

estates in the country, and kept good hospitality in their houses, brought up their children well, and were beloved by their neighbours. And in this rank and this reputation this gentleman lived till he was seventy years of age; his younger brother, the Chief Justice (Sir Nicholas Hyde, Chief Justice of the King's Bench), dying some years before him, and his two elder brothers outliving him. The great affection between the four brothers, and towards their sisters, of whom all enjoyed plenty and contentedness, was very notorious throughout the country, and of credit to them all.”

Henry Hyde had a family of four sons and five daughters; but of the four sons only Edward, the third, survived their father. Edward was born at Dinton, which is about six miles from the city of Salisbury, on the 18th of February, 1609.

He was educated, he tells us, in his father's house, "under the care of a schoolmaster, to whom his father had given the vicarage of that parish, who, having been always a schoolmaster, had bred many good scholars ;" but it was "principally," he adds, "by the care and conversation of his father, who was an excellent scholar, and took pleasure in conferring with him, and contributed much more to his education than the school did," that he was made fit, as was thought, to be sent to the University at the even then unusually early age of thirteen. His elder brother Henry was already at Oxford; and Edward was admitted at Magdalen Hall in 1622, in the expectation that he would be elected a demy (or scholar) of Magdalen College, it being designed that he should take orders, and, as was customary with younger sons, make his fortune in the church. He was not elected the first year, it being pretended that he had been too late in presenting himself, although he brought a special letter of recommendation from the king to the president of the college; but he was the next year, and his name placed at the head of the list for the first vacancy. It so happened, however, to quote his own relation, that "that whole year passed without any avoidance of a demy's place, which was never known before in any man's me

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mory; and that year King James died, and, shortly after, Henry, his elder brother; and thereupon his father, having now no other son, changed his former inclination, and resolved to send his son Edward to the Inns of Court." This account may remind the reader of the similar narrow escape from the clerical profession made by another distinguished Lord Chancellor, the late Earl of Eldon.

he says,

It appears, though he does not himself mention the circumstance, that Hyde had before this been an unsuccessful candidate for a Wiltshire Fellowship in Exeter College. He took his degree of B.A. on the 14th of February, 1626, and then left the University, "rather," "with the opinion of a young man of parts and pregnancy of wit than that he had improved it much by industry; the discipline of that time being not so strict as it hath been since, and as it ought to be, and the custom of drinking being too much introduced and practised; his elder brother having been too much corrupted in that kind, and so having at his first coming given him some liberty, at least some example, towards that licence, insomuch as he was often heard to say, that it was a very good fortune to him that his father so soon removed him from the University, though he always reserved a high esteem of it." So he made a double escape, from becoming both a clergyman and a drunkard.

Although he was entered of the Middle Temple, of which society his uncle was then treasurer, in the earlier part of the year 1625, he did not go up to London till the beginning of Michaelmas term, the town during the summer months having been infested by the plague. But on the evening of the day he arrived, having gone to prayers in the Temple Church, he was suddenly seized with a violent fit of ague, which forced him to go back to the country, and his studies were interrupted for a year. "When he returned," he tells us, "it was without great application to the study of the law for some years, it being then a time when the town was full of soldiers, the king having then a war both with Spain and France, and the business of the Isle of Rhé shortly followed; and he bad gotten into the acquaintance of many of those officers,

But,

which took up too much of his time for one year. as the war was quickly ended, so he had the good fortune quickly to make a full retreat from that company, and from any conversation with any of them, and without any hurt or prejudice; insomuch, as he used often to say, that, since it pleased God to preserve him whilst he did keep that company (in which he wonderfully escaped from being involved in many inconveniences), and to withdraw him so soon from it, he was not sorry that he had some experience in the conversation of such men, and of the licence of those times, which was very exorbitant. Yet, when he did indulge himself that liberty, it was without any signal debauchery, and not without some hours every day, at least every night, spent amongst his books. Yet he would not deny that, more than to be able to answer his uncle, who almost every night put a case to him in law, he could not bring himself to an industrious pursuit of the law study, but rather loved polite learning and history, in which, especially in the Roman, he had been always conversant."

He had only ridden the Norfolk circuit once (in 1628),* when he fell in love with a young lady whom he describes "as very fair and beautiful,' and with his father's consent married her in 1629. But in six months after her marriage she was carried off by small-pox; a loss which so affected her husband that, as he tells us, "it shook all the frame of his resolutions, and nothing but his entire duty and reverence to his father kept him from giving over all thoughts of books, and transporting himself beyond the seas to enjoy his own melancholy." This marriage, however, brought consequences which influenced the course of his life. Mrs. Hyde, a daughter of Sir George Ayliffe, of Gretenham, in the county of Wilts, was through her mother Anne, daughter of Sir John St. John, of Lydiard Tregoze, Cornwall, nearly allied to many noble families. In particular, Barbara,

* Lord Campbell (Lives of the Chancellors, iii. 112) says, we do not know upon what authority, that his uncle the Chief Justice appointed him on this occasion to ride the circuit as his marshal