Note 136 — Chapter VIII · (continued 2)

It is curious to contrast the inconsistent and feeble apologies for the prerogative we read in Clarendon's History, with his speech before the Lords, on impeaching the judges for their decision in the case of ship-money. In this he speaks very strongly as to the illegality of the proceedings of the judges in Rolls and Vassal's cases, though in his History he endeavours to insinuate that the king had a right to tonnage and poundage; he inveighs also against the decision in Bates's case, which he vindicates in his History. Somers Tracts, iv. 302. Indeed the whole speech is irreconcilable with the picture he afterwards drew of the prosperity of England, and of the unreasonableness of discontent.

The fact is, that when he sat down in Jersey to begin his History, irritated, disappointed, afflicted at all that had passed in the last five years, he could not bring his mind back to the state in which it had been at the meeting of the long parliament; and believed himself to have partaken far less in the sense of abuses and desire to redress than he had really done. There may, however, be reason to suspect that he had, in some respects, gone farther in the first draught of his History than appears at present; that is, I conceive, that he erased himself some passages or phrases unfavourable to the court. Let the reader judge from the following sentence in a letter to Nicholas relating to his work, dated Feb. 12, 1647: "I will offer no excuse for the entertaining of Con, who came after Panzani, and was succeeded by Rosetti; which was a business of so much folly, or worse, that I have mentioned it in my prolegomena (of those distempers and exorbitances in government which prepared the people to submit to the fury of this parliament), as an offence and scandal to religion, in the same degree that ship-money was to liberty and property." State Papers, ii. 336. But when we turn to the passage in the History of the Rebellion, p. 268, where this is mentioned, we do not find a single expression reflecting on the court, though the catholics themselves are censured for imprudence. This may serve to account for several of Clarendon's inconsistencies; for nothing renders an author so inconsistent with himself, as corrections made in a different temper of mind from that which actuated him in the first composition.