Characters from the Histories & Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century Part 24

l. 14. _et in luctu_, Tacitus, _Agricola_, xxix.

l. 15. _the furious resolution_, pa.s.sed on November 24, 1642, after the battle at Brentford: see Clarendon, vol. ii, pp. 395-9.

Page 84, l. 9. _adversus malos_, Tacitus, _Agricola_, xxii.

ll. 11-28. The date of this incident is uncertain. Professor Firth believes it to have happened when the House resolved that Colonel Goring 'deserved very well of the Commonwealth, and of this House', for his discovery of the army plot, June 9, 1641 (_Journals of the House of Commons_, vol. ii, p. 172).

Page 85, l. 18. _the leaguer before Gloster_. The siege of Gloucester was raised by the Earl of Ess.e.x on September 8, 1643. Clarendon had described it (vol. iii, pp. 167 ff.) just before he came to the account of Falkland.

Page 86, l. 1. _the battell_, i.e. of Newbury, September 20, 1643. How Falkland met his death is told in Byron's narrative of the fight: 'My Lord of Falkland did me the honour to ride in my troop this day, and I would needs go along with him, the enemy had beat our foot out of the close, and was drawne up near the hedge; I went to view, and as I was giving orders for making the gap wide enough, my horse was shott in the throat with a musket bullet and his bit broken in his mouth so that I was forced to call for another horse, in the meanwhile my Lord Falkland (more gallantly than advisedly) spurred his horse through the gapp, where both he and his horse were immediately killed.' See Walter Money, _The Battles of Newbury_, 1884, p. 52; also p. 93.

A pa.s.sage in Whitelocke's _Memorials_, ed. 1682, p. 70, shows that he had a presentiment of his death: 'The Lord _Falkland_, Secretary of State, in the morning of the fight, called for a clean s.h.i.+rt, and being asked the reason of it, answered, _that if he were slain in the Battle, they should not find, his body in foul Linnen_. Being diswaded by his friends to goe into the fight, as having no call to it, and being no Military Officer, he said _he was weary of the times, and foresaw much misery to his own Countrey, and did beleive be should be out of it ere night_, and could not be perswaded to the contrary, but would enter into the battle, and was there slain.'

22.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 51-4; _Life_, ed. 1759, pp. 19-23.

This is Falkland in his younger days, amid the hospitable pleasures of Tew, before he was overwhelmed in politics and war.

Page 86, l. 20. _he_, i.e. Clarendon.

Page 88, l. 2. _the two most pleasant places_, Great Tew (see p. 72, l. 30) and Burford, where Falkland was born. He sold Burford in 1634 to William Lenthall, the Speaker of the Long Parliament: see p. 91, l.

5.

Page 89, l. 2. He married Lettice, daughter of Sir Richard Morrison of Tooley Park, Leicesters.h.i.+re. His friends.h.i.+p with her brother Henry is celebrated in an ode by Ben Jonson, 'To the immortall memorie, and friends.h.i.+p of that n.o.ble paire, Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir H. Morison'

(_Under-woods_, 1640, p. 232).

Page 91, ll. 17-20. So in the MS. The syntax is confused, but the sense is clear.

Page 92, ll. 21, 22. Gilbert Sheldon (1598-1677), Archbishop of Canterbury, 1663; Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and builder of the Sheldonian Theatre there.

George Morley (1597-1684), Bishop of Worcester, 1660.

Henry Hammond (1605-60), chaplain to Charles I.

Clarendon has given short characters of Sheldon and Morley in his _Life_. For his characters of Earle and Chillingworth, see Nos. 50 and 52.

Page 94, l. 11. See note p. 74, l. 14.

Page 95, l. 3. Cf. p. 78, l. 17.

l. 17. It is notable that Clarendon nowhere suggests that Falkland was also a poet. Cowley gives his verses the highest praise in his address to him on the Northern Expedition (see p. 83, l. 2, note); and they won him a place in Suckling's _Sessions of the Poets_:

He was of late so gone with Divinity That he had almost forgot his Poetry, Though to say the truth (and _Apollo_ did know it) He might have been both his Priest and his Poet.

His poems were collected and edited by A.B. Grosart in 1871.

23.

Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 55; _Life_, ed. 1759, p. 24.

This very pleasing portrait of G.o.dolphin serves as a pendant to the longer and more elaborate description of his friend. Clarendon wrote also a shorter character of him in the _History_ (vol. ii, pp. 457-8).

Page 96, l. 2. _so very small a body_. He is the 'little Cid' (i.e.

Sidney) of Suckling's _Sessions of the Poets_.

PAGE 97, l. 1. He was member for Helston from 1628 to 1643.

l. 6. In the character in the _History_ Clarendon says that he left 'the ignominy of his death upon a place which could never otherwise have had a mention to the world'. The place was Chagford.

24.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 69-70; _History_, Bk. I, ed. 1702, vol. i, pp. 69-73; ed. Macray, vol. i, pp. 119-25.

The three characters of Laud here given supplement each other. They convey the same idea of the man.

Page 97, l. 20. George Abbott (1562-1633), Archbishop of Canterbury, 1611. In the preceding paragraph Clarendon had written an unfavourable character of him. He 'considered Christian religion no otherwise than as it abhorred and reviled Popery, and valued those men most who did that most furiously': 'if men prudently forbore a public reviling and railing at the hierarchy and ecclesiastical government, let their opinions and private practice be what it would, they were not only secure from any inquisition of his, but acceptable to him, and at least equally preferred by him': his house was 'a sanctuary to the most eminent of that factious party'. Cf. p. 100, ll. 21-7.

Page 101, l. 2. In the omitted portion Clarendon dealt with the 'Arminianism', as it was then understood in England: 'most of the popular preachers, who had not looked into the ancient learning, took Calvin's word for it, and did all they could to propagate his opinions in those points: they who had studied more, and were better versed in the antiquities of the Church, the Fathers, the Councils, and the ecclesiastical histories, with the same heat and pa.s.sion in preaching and writing, defended the contrary. But because in the late dispute in the Dutch churches, those opinions were supported by Jacobus Arminius, the divinity professor in the university of Leyden in Holland, the latter men we mentioned were called Arminians, though many of them had never read a word written by Arminius'. Arminius (the name is the Latinized form of Harmens or Hermans) died in 1609.

25.

The Church-History of Britain, 1648, Bk. XI, pp. 217-9.

Page 104, l. 15. Canterbury College was founded at Oxford in 1363 by Simon Islip, Archbishop of Canterbury. It was incorporated in Christ Church, Wolsey's foundation, and so 'lost its name'; but the name survives in the Canterbury quadrangle.

Page 105, l. 13. _Lord F._, i.e. Lord Falkland: see p. 80, l. 20 note.

26.

Memoires of the reigne of King Charles I, 1701, pp. 78-82, 89-93.

Page 107, l. 27. _cleansed it by fire_. Perhaps a reminiscence of Dryden's _Annus Mirabilis_, 1667, stanza 276:

The daring Flames peep't in, and saw from far The awful Beauties of the Sacred Quire: But since it was prophan'd by Civil War, Heav'n thought it fit to have it purg'd by fire.

l. 29. _too too_, so in the original; perhaps but not certainly a misprint.

27.

Memoires, 1701, pp. 93-6.