Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon (1609–74,) was an English statesman and historian. He was minister to Charles I, chief adviser to Charles II, and Chancellor of Oxford University 1660–67. He was the maternal grandfather of two monarchs, Queen Mary II (1662–94) and Queen Anne (1665–1714.)
Born in Dinton, Wiltshire, Hyde sat in the Short Parliament of 1640 and the Long Parliament, where he criticized King Charles I’s unconstitutional actions and defended the impeachment of the Earl of Strafford. In 1641, Hyde broke with the revolutionaries and became a royal adviser. When the Civil War broke out, Hyde followed the monarch to Oxford.
In 1646, Hyde joined Prince Charles (later Charles II) in Jersey after Charles I’s defeat. In 1651 he became chief counsel to Charles II in exile, and upon the Restoration, Hyde was established the Earl of Clarendon. He further expanded his influence by marrying his daughter Anne to the Duke of York in 1660.
Hyde introduced the ‘Clarendon Code’ to secure the supremacy of the Church of England, but the extremists protested his moderate policies. He criticized Charles II’s private life and lost his confidence. The disasters of 1667 and the Dutch Raid on the Medway confirmed his downfall. He was exiled to Rouen, where he died, but was buried in London’s Westminster Abbey.
Hyde’s well-known works include History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (published posthumously 1702–04.) Brian Harvey Goodwin Wormald’s Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion, 1640–1660 (1951) is a remarkable study in the historiography of Hyde’s actions.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Counsel and conversation are a second education, which improve all the virtue, and correct all the vice of the first, and of nature itself.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
The seat of pride is in the heart, and only there; and if it be not there, it is neither in the look, nor in the clothes.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Pride
They who are most weary of life, and yet are most unwilling to die, are such who have lived to no purpose; who have rather breathed than lived.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Life
If envy, like anger, did not burn itself in its own fire, and consume and destroy those persons it possesses before it can destroy those it wishes worst to, it would set the whole world on fire, and leave the most excellent persons the most miserable.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Envy
The law is the standard and guardian of our liberty; it circumscribes and defends it; but to imagine liberty without a law, is to imagine every man with his sword in his hand to destroy him, who is weaker than himself; and that would be no pleasant prospect to those who cry out most for liberty.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Law
If we do not weigh and consider to what end life is given us, and thereupon order and dispose it aright, pretend what we will as to arithmetic, we do not, and cannot number our days in the narrowest and most limited signification.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Life
The disesteem and contempt of others is inseparable from pride. It is hardly possible to overvalue ourselves but by undervaluing our neighbors.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Pride
Pride, as it is compounded of the vanity and ill nature that dispose men to admire themselves, and contemn other men, retains its vigor longer than any other vice, and rarely expires but with life itself. Without the sovereign influence of God’s grace, men very rarely put off all the trappings of their pride till they who are about them put on their winding-sheet.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Pride
Anger is the most impotent of passions.—It affects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Passion, Anger
Because discretion is always predominant in true friendship, it works and prevails least upon fools. Wicked men are often reformed by it, weak men seldom.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Friendship
The laboring man and the artificer knows what every hour of his time is worth, and parts not with it but for the full value: they are only noblemen and gentlemen, who should know best how to use it, that think it only fit to be cast away; and their not knowing how to set a true value upon this, is the true cause of the wrong estimate they make of all other things.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Value of a Day, Time, Time Management
God hath not taken all that pains in forming, framing, furnishing, and adorning this world, that they who were made by him to live in it, should despise it; it will be well enough if they do not love it so immoderately as to prefer it before him who made it.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: World
There is no art or science that is too difficult for industry to attain to; it is the gift of tongues, and makes a man understood and valued in all countries, and by all nations; it is the philosopher’s stone, that turns all metals, and even stones, into gold, and suffers no want to break into its dwellings; it is the northwest passage, that brings the merchant’s ships as soon to him as he can desire: in a word, it conquers all enemies, and makes fortune itself pay contribution.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Industry
Few men have done more harm than those who have been thought to be able to do the least; and there cannot be a greater error than to believe a man whom we see qualified with too mean parts to do good, to be, therefore, incapable of doing hurt. There is a supply of malice, of pride, of industry, and even of folly, in the weakest, when he sets his heart upon it, that makes a strange progress in wickedness.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Weakness
If he had sat still, the enemy’s army would have mouldered to nothing.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Friendship hath the skill and observation of the best physician, the diligence and vigilance of the best nurse, and the tenderness and patience of the best mother.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Friendship
If our credit be so well built, so firm that it is not easy to be shaken by calumny or insinuation, envy then commends us, and extols us beyond reason to those upon whom we depend, till they grow jealous, and so blow us up when they cannot throw us down.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Envy
If we did not take great pains to corrupt our nature, our nature would never corrupt us.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Nature
He that loves not books before he comes to thirty years of age, will hardly love them enough afterward to understand them.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Books
It is not the quantity of the meat, but the cheerfulness of the guests, which makes the feast.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
We cannot make a more lively representation and emblem to ourselves of hell, than by the view of a kingdom in war.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: War
No man is so insignificant as to be sure his example can do no hurt.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
Topics: Example
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