When at last the political upheaval of this century compelled men to leave, whether in histories, or memoirs, or biographies, a record of what they had themselves experienced, the character attained to its full importance and excellence.  ’That posterity may not be deceaved by the prosperous wickednesse of these tymes, into an opinyon, that lesse then a generall combination and universall apostacy in the whole Nacion from their religion and allegiaunce could in so shorte a tyme have produced such a totall and prodigious alteration and confusion over the whole kingdome, and so the memory of those few who out of duty and conscience have opposed and resisted that Torrent which hath overwhelmed them, may loose the recompence dew to ther virtue, and havinge undergone the injuryes and reproches of this, may not finde a vindication in a better Age’—­in these words Clarendon began his History of the Rebellion.  But he could not vindicate the memory of his political friends without describing the men who had overcome them.  The history of these confused and difficult years would not be properly understood if the characters of all the chief actors in the tragic drama were not known.  For to Clarendon history was the record of the struggle of personalities.  When we are in the midst of a crisis, or view it from too near a distance, it is natural for us to think of it as a fight between the opposing leaders, and the historians of their own time are always liable to attribute to the personal force of a statesman what is due to general causes of which he is only the instrument.  Of these general causes Clarendon took little account.  ‘Motives which influenced masses of men’, it has been said, ’escape his appreciation, and the History of the Rebellion is accordingly an account of the Puritan Revolution which is unintelligible because the part played by Puritanism is misunderstood or omitted altogether’.[7] But the History of the Rebellion is a Stuart portrait gallery, and the greatest portrait gallery in the English language.

[Footnote 1:  Book II, ed.  Aldis Wright, pp. 92-5.]

[Footnote 2:  ’Historae nostrae particulam quidam non male:  sed qui totum corpus ea fide, eaque dignitate scriptis complexus sit, quam suscepti operis magnitudo postularet, hactenus plane neminem extitisse constat....  Nostri ex faece plebis historici, dum maiestatem tanti operis ornare studuerunt, putidissimis ineptiis contaminarunt.  Ita factum est nescio qua huiusce insulae infoelicitate, ut maiores tui, (serenissima Regina) viri maximi, qui magnam huius orbis nostri partem imperio complexi, omnes sui temporis reges rerum gestarum gloria facile superarunt, magnorum ingeniorum quasi lumine destituti, iaceant ignoti, & delitescant.’]

[Footnote 3:  Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed.  Spingarn, vol. i, pp. 82-115.]

[Footnote 4:  See also Camden Society Publications, No. 7, 1840.]

[Footnote 5:  Roger Ascham in his Scholemaster divides History into ‘Diaria’, ‘Annales’, ‘Commentaries’, and ’Iustam Historiam’.]