Hatred of him by now was so widespread and vocal,
that his friends, fearing that soon it would pass
from words to deeds, urged him to take precautions,
advised the wearing of a shirt of mail for greater
safety.
But he laughed sneeringly, ever arrogant and scornful.
“It needs not. There are no Roman spirits
left,” was his contemptuous answer.
He was mistaken. One morning after breakfast,
as he was leaving the house in the High Street, Portsmouth,
where he lodged whilst superintending the final preparations
for that unpopular expedition, John Felton, a self-appointed
instrument of national vengeance, drove a knife to
the hilt into the Duke’s breast.
“May the Lord have mercy on your soul!”
was the pious exclamation with which the slayer struck
home. And, in all the circumstances, there seems
to have been occasion for the prayer.
The Fall of Lord Clarendon
Tight-wrapped in his cloak against the icy whips of
the black winter’s night, a portly gentleman,
well advanced in years, picked his way carefully down
the wet, slippery steps of the jetty by the light
of a lanthorn, whose rays gleamed lividly on crushed
brown seaweed and trailing green sea slime. Leaning
heavily upon the arm which a sailor held out to his
assistance, he stepped into the waiting boat that
rose and fell on the heaving black waters. A
boathook scraped against the stones, and the frail
craft was pushed off.
The oars dipped, and the boat slipped away through
the darkness, steering a course for the two great
poop lanterns that were swinging rhythmically high
up against the black background of the night.
The elderly gentleman, huddled now in the stern-sheets,
looked behind him—to look his last upon
the England he had loved and served and ruled.
The lanthorn, shedding its wheel of yellow light upon
the jetty steps, was all of it that he could now see.
He sighed, and settled down again to face the poop
lights, dancing there above the invisible hull of
the ship that was to carry Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon,
lately Lord Chancellor of England, into exile.
As a dying man looks down the foreshortened vista
of his active life, so may Edward Hyde—whose
career had reached a finality but one degree removed
from the finality of death—have reviewed
in that moment those thirty years of sincere endeavour
and high achievement since he had been a law student
in the Temple when Charles I. was King.
That King he had served faithfully, so faithfully
that when the desperate fortunes of the Royalist party
made it necessary to place the Prince of Wales beyond
the reach of Cromwell, it was in Sir Edward Hyde’s
care that the boy was sent upon his travels.
The present was not to be Hyde’s first experience
of exile. He had known it, and of a bitter sort,
in those impecunious days when the Second Charles,
