were to be learned from their errors; they would be ‘the wiser for knowing the most secret truths’.  At first he looked on his work as containing the materials of a ‘perfect story’, but as he proceeded his ambitions grew.  He had begun to introduce characters; and when in the spring of 1647 he was about to write his first character of Lord Falkland, he had come to the view 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’.[6] He gave much thought to the character of Falkland, ’whom the next age shall be taught’, he was determined, ’to value more than the present did.’[7] Concurrently with the introduction of characters he paid more attention to the literary, as distinct from the didactic, merits of his work.  We find him comparing himself with other historians, and considering what Livy and Tacitus would have done in like circumstances.  By the spring of 1648 he had brought down his narrative to the opening of the campaign of 1644.  Earlier in the year he had been commanded by the King to be ready to rejoin Prince Charles, and shortly afterwards he received definite instructions from the Queen to attend on her and the Prince at Paris.  He left Jersey in June, and with his re-entry into active politics his History was abruptly ended.  The seven years of retirement which he had anticipated were cut down by the outbreak of the Second Civil War to two; and within a year the King for whose benefit he had begun this History was led to the scaffold.  Not for twenty years was Clarendon again to have the leisure to be an historian.  When in 1668 he once more took up his pen, it was not a continuation of the first work, but an entirely new work, that came in steady flow from the abundance of his knowledge.

Clarendon returned to England as Lord Chancellor in 1660, and for seven years enjoyed the power which he had earned by ceaseless devotion to his two royal masters.  The ill success of the war with the Dutch, jealousy of his place and influence, the spiteful opposition of the King’s chief mistress, and the King’s own resentment at an attitude that showed too little deference and imprudently suggested the old relations of tutor and pupil, all combined to bring about his fall.  He fled from England on November 30, 1667, and was never to set foot in England again.  Broken in health and spirit, he sought in vain for many months a resting-place in France, and not till July 1668 did he find a new home at Montpelier.  Here his health improved, and here he remained till June 1671.  These were busy years of writing, and by far the greater portion of his published work, if his letters and state papers be excluded, belongs to this time.  First of all he answered the charge of high treason brought against him by the House of Commons in A Discourse, by Way of Vindication of my self, begun on July 24, 1668; he wrote most of his Reflections upon Several