King Charles II Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    Into this hornets’ nest stepped the Prince of Wales and his Council. In spite of Grenville’s record – and in spite of the fact that he had also recently been wounded – the Council immediately appointed him as commander of the new army of the Western Association.
    It was probably a blunder in the first place, although Grenville did at least show himself a stern disciplinarian towards his own troops, and had the advantage of being a proper Cornishman. But the mistake was rendered fatal when the King immediately wrote off from Oxford nullifying the appointment and setting up Goring instead. Throughout the summer the rival commanders battled for the acknowledgement of their claims.
    The authority of Prince Rupert – the one man in the West who could have imposed some kind of unified command – was unintentionally undermined by the presence of the Prince of Wales and his Council, since many of the western gentry preferred to address themselves to this gentler fount of authority.
    The character of Charles’ puppet master, Sir Edward Hyde, also came into further prominence in the West. Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon, is a central figure in the story of Charles, in youth, early manhood and the first years of his restored kingship. The relationship drew to a close nearly twenty-five years after this western foray. It ended with Clarendon telling a middle-aged monarch ‘twenty times a day’ that he was lazy and not fit to govern. 2 It ended with an ageing statesman dismissed by an apparently ungrateful king. There are many comparisons to be made for the dismissal of an old friend and servant by hisascendant master, of which the most famous is that of Falstaff and Prince Hal. All these comparisons are unflattering to the master. It is worth noticing that, in the case of Charles and Hyde, part of the trouble between them existed from the first and was temperamental.
    The temperament concerned was that of Hyde rather than Charles.
    Sir Edward Hyde, with his neat little mouth and sharp straight nose, his upright Anglicanism, his unwavering political principles in a wavering age, was a man for whom the phrase ‘generation gap’ might actually have been invented. A world of experience separated him from his young charge, a fact he never attempted to conceal. He was in his thirties when he went to Bristol, over twenty years older than Charles. In Hyde’s case they had been a long and active twenty years. Hyde was constitutionally incapable of playing the tolerant old retainer, the Colonel Sapp to Charles’ King Rudolf of Ruritania. Besides, Hyde was not an old retainer: he was a brilliant and shrewd statesman; he did not exactly expect to find old heads on young shoulders, but he did expect those young shoulders to bow before the weight of advice given by the old on all occasions.
    Originally a lawyer, in 1640 Hyde was to be found attacking prerogative courts, royal judges and Laudian bishops. He even voted for Strafford’s attainder. Later Hyde became an advocate for a new kind of Royalism, based on an Anglican Church, both liberated and strengthened, and as such was transformed into not only a defender but also a firm friend of King Charles I . Throughout the difficult days of 1642 Hyde had constantly pressed the King to base his claim on those ancient rights which were his under the law; this would have the effect of emphasizing that it was Parliament, not the King, which represented a new type of arbitrary tyranny. Hyde’s reliance on purely constitutional expedients from the first distinguished him from another whole section of the King’s advisers, headed by his wife, who could not see the use of appealing to the law of the land, when they regarded the King himself as embodying this law. Rex est lex – as one saying had it.
    This rift in royal circles widened into a chasm as the warproceeded. Hyde, for example, had been instrumental in persuading the King to summon his Oxford Parliament. But naturally the