The studied detachment that Clarendon tried to cultivate when writing about his political enemies is nowhere shown better than in the character of Hampden.  ‘I am careful to do justice’, he claimed, ’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’ (see No. 21, note).  The absence of all enthusiasm makes the description of Hampden’s merits the more telling.  But there is a tail with a sting in it.

The last sentence, it must be admitted, is not of a piece with the rest of the character.  There was some excuse for doubting its authenticity.  But doubts gave place to definite statements that it had been interpolated by the Oxford editors when seeing the History through the press.  Edmund Smith, the author of Phaedra and Hippolytus, started the story that while he was resident in Christ Church he was ‘employ’d to interpolate and alter the Original’, and specially mentioned this sentence as having been ‘foisted in’; and the story was given a prominent place by Oldmixon in his History of England, during the Reigns of the Royal House of Stuart (see Letters of Thomas Burnat to George Duckett, ed.  Nichol Smith, 1914, p. xx).  A controversy ensued, the final contribution to which is John Burton’s Genuineness of L’d Clarendon’s History Vindicated, 1744.  Once the original manuscript was accessible, all doubt was removed.  Every word of the sentence is there to be found in Clarendon’s hand.  But it is written along the margin, to take the place of a deleted sentence, and is evidently later than the rest of the character.  This accounts for the difference in tone.

Page 129, ll. 22 ff.  Compare Warwick, Memoires, p. 240:  ’He was of a concise and significant language, and the mildest, yet subtillest, speaker of any man in the House; and had a dexterity, when a question was going to be put, which agreed not with his sense, to draw it over to it, by adding some equivocall or sly word, which would enervate the meaning of it, as first put.’

At the beginning of this short character of Hampden, Warwick says that ’his blood in its temper was acrimonious, as the scurfe commonly on his face shewed’.

Page 131, l. 4. this that was at Oxforde, i.e. the overture, February and March 1643:  Clarendon, vol. ii, pp. 497 ff.

ll. 24-6. Erat illi, &c.  Cicero, Orat. in Catilinam iii. 7.  ‘Cinna’ should be ‘Catiline’.

34.

Clarendon, MS. History, pp. 525-7; History, Bk.  VII, ed. 1703, vol. ii, pp. 353-5; ed.  Macray, vol. iii, pp. 321-4.

The character of Pym does not show the same detachment as the character of Hampden.  Clarendon has not rejected unauthenticated Royalist rumour.

Page 132, ll. 7-9.  This rumour occasioned the publication of an official narrative of his disease and death, ’attested under the Hands of his Physicians, Chyrurgions, and Apothecary’, from which it appears that he died of an intestinal abscess.  See John Forster’s John Pym (’Lives of Eminent British Statesmen’, vol. iii), pp. 409-11.