Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/261

Rh historian. Whether for strictly scientific history it is such an advantage may be questioned, but it certainly lends to an historian's work a personal note and an interest in individual men which heightens the human and literary value. A poignant personal note runs through all Clarendon's great work, begun in Jersey (1646-48) with the treble purpose of providing an historical narrative, guidance for the future, and a vindication of the king, and completed twenty years later with the additional purpose of defending his own career and conduct. Though it did not seem so to Sir Edmund Verney, Clarendon's position was a harder one than that of those whose judgment was on one side while their loyalty and gratitude forced them to espouse the other, for the issue was to Clarendon, as to Falkland, more complex. A constitutionalist and a loyal Churchman, he had to choose between a king whose unconstitutional conduct he had condemned and resisted, and a parliament whose love for the constitution was never so strong as their hatred of bishops. He chose his part: he gave the king, when his violence had left him isolated, a policy and party; and he wrote an account of the war, its causes and leading actors, which remained the accepted one until modified and corrected by the researches of the historians of the later nineteenth century.

Clarendon's reverence for law, "that great and admirable mystery," was inspired not a little by the study of Hooker, and his style perhaps owed something to the same influence. His sentences are cast in the same long and complex mould, tending at times