The history of the Rebellion : a new selection /

Edward Hyde (later Earl of Clarendon) was a gifted lawyer who supported the parliamentarian campaign to limit the royal prerogative until the assault on the Church of England and episcopacy led him to join the royalists. He became the most effective propagandist for the doomed Charles I, whom he revered even as he acknowledged the king's faults. As tutor, adviser in exile, and ultimately lord chancellor to the restored Charles II, Clarendon extolled prudence as the chief virtue of a statesman even as he mismanaged the Second Dutch War. (He composed most of the History in his forced retirement on the Continent.) Paul Seaward here has excerpted about one-sixth of The History of the Rebellion, an epic work that displays wit, sympathy, detachment, and a Tacitean irony. For Clarendon, the English Civil War proceeded from the "folly and the forwardness, from the weakness and the willfulness, the pride and the passion, of particular persons." The obsession with denouncing the wickedness of a Cromwell and extolling the virtue of a Falkland reveals Clarendon's chief failing as a historian: assigning blame ultimately explains very little about these great events. Summing Up: Recommended. General collections. D. R. Bisson Belmont University