stout an enemy to the repeal, came round-right round about, and carried the grand measure through Parliament, as it was said, 'triumphantly,' to the no small benefit of the empire, if not to the immortal renown of the senate or its leaders. So will such men yield again, if the people desire it; perhaps they will even volunteer the measure of reform, in order to keep their places a little longer; and they are surely well worth having at such a price. Religious liberty, received as a fine upon renewing the lease of office one year; law reform for the next year; reform of Parliament for a year longer-never sure did landlord make a better bargain, or poor tenant pay more handsomely! It will not be hard to find some fourth fine fit to be exacted when this third year shall be out.

what it was more mischievous to give than to refuse. What could induce any man to do it? What right had any man to act so? It won't do to say that circumstances were altered-for that is saying that the question is safer given than refused; and he declares his opinion to be unaltered, and that the mischiefs preponderate. What then can Sir Robert Peel have meant? We know very well that his enemies say, he means only that he preferred giving up his opinion to giving up his place. We believe no such thing; and we mean no such thing; but we cannot comprehend what he means, and we believe he had no distinct meaning when he made the very incomprehensible statement. At all events, he must now allow, and he ought in a manly way to say, that he was wrong from the first. For his argument was that the emancipation was full of danger and risk; these are prospective words, and they mean that the measure would lead to mischief if carried. Carried it has been; what was the future is now the past; no mischief whatever has ensued. Five or six members in England, and as many in Ireland, are Catholics; there's the whole evil we have encountered to pacify Ireland! Does Sir Robert Peel say that the evil may yet arrive? Then he should tell us at least how, if not when; or he is like the Jew who waits for the Messiah, (and ought, therefore, says this statesmanlike reasoner, to be excluded from Parliament and from office,) or the Portuguese who is looking for the return of King Sebastian from Africa. Had he not far better admit, what most men now see, and all men of candour believe he sees, that he was in error from the first? He put himself at the head of a party in church and state which wanted a leader, and had in those days much more power than they now have. And he took their creed with the command. He afterwards found he had paid too dear for the station, and abandoned both, to the great benefit of the country, and his own great and lasting honour. His way of doing so is another matter; so is his wholly inexplicable opposition to Mr Canning in 1827. These are the dark parts of his conduct; and these, we take it, never can be cleared up, although further services and new sacrifices of prejudice may tend to efface them from our memory.

ART. II.-A Narrative, by John Ashburnham, of his attendance on King Charles I. from Oxford to the Scotch Army, and from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight, never before published; to which is prefixed, a Vindication of his Character and Conduct from the Misrepresentations of Lord Clarendon. By his lineal descendant and present representative (The Earl of Ashburnham.) 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1830.

TH

HE groundwork of this publication is a narrative by John Ashburnham, groom of the bedchamber to Charles I., of his attendance on that monarch from Oxford to the Scottish camp before Newark, and of the assistance he subsequently rendered his royal master in his flight from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight. To this narrative is prefixed a short account of the author, by his editor and representative, the present Earl of Ashburnham, and appended to it are various documents in confirmation of its truth. There is, besides, a preliminary volume by the editor, in justification of his ancestor from the injurious aspersions of his fame, propagated, if not invented, by the Earl of Clarendon.

Whether we view this performance as a vindication of John Ashburnham, or consider it in the light of a minute and critical dissection of Lord Clarendon's character as a man, and of his accuracy and fidelity as an historian, it is a work of no inconsiderable merit. It is written, indeed, in a careless, discursive manner, with little regard to style or method; but it displays much acuteness of argument and patience of research, and throws a new, and very probable, light on many obscure transactions of the times. It is full of wit, sarcasm, and allusion, and rather prodigal in the use of irony and banter. Readers indifferent to the reputation of John Ashburnham may peruse it with pleasure and instruction.

By comparing Lord Clarendon's history, and his biographical account of himself, with the state papers and other documents, erroneously described as the materials and authorities for these works, Lord Ashburnham has shown, that in many instances the noble historian has suppressed or disguised the truth; that he has frequently given a false colour to the transactions he relates; that, writing for effect and trusting to his memory, he has been often betrayed into inconsistencies and inaccuracies; and that in his representations of individuals, he has been biassed, by his prejudices and resentments, to distort the characters he delineates. These charges, be it observed, are made by one who partakes in the political sentiments of Lord Clarendon, and who ofesses, and indeed proves himself, to have been at one time

a blind admirer of his virtues. They are brought forward by the editor, not for the invidious purpose of lowering the repu❤ tation of the High Church and Tory historian, but from anxiety to vindicate the fame of his ancestor from the hints, surmises, and insinuations, with which Lord Clarendon has laboured, and not unsuccessfully, to blacken the memory of that gentleman. If, in the discharge of this pious duty, Lord Ashburnham has overstepped the boundaries of defensive warfare, and carried hostilities into the quarters of the enemy; if he shows Lord Clarendon to have been greedy of money, not at all scrupulous or delicate in his modes of acquiring it, and when questioned on the subject, defending himself by equivocations tantamount to falsehood; if he exhibits him as not unwilling to profit by the roguery of his inferiors, though careful not to seem conscious of the transaction or participant in the fraud; if he finds him blaming severely, in other persons, acts of which he had himself been guilty, studious of his ease and pleasure, at the expense of his public duties, employing the agency of others to obtain ends, which he was ashamed openly to avow, disguising from his most intimate friends the real motives of his conduct, professing to reject what he desired, and contriving to have honours and emoluments forced on him apparently against his will; if he represents him forgetful of kindnesses, but tenacious of resentments -vain, peevish, and presumptuous-haughty to his inferiors, and obsequious to those above him-flattering in letters, that were never meant for the public eye, those he has abused in his works-mean in his professions of service, and protestations of devotion, where he passes himself for a blunt, boorish, uncompromising stoic;-let it be remembered, that Lord Ashburnham was led to these detections by a natural and laudable desire to rescue his ancestor from unmerited reproach, and that, by exposing them to the public, he has taken from the accusations against John Ashburnham their efficacy and sting, by unveiling the duplicity, disregard of truth, and systematic hypocrisy of the statesman and historian, from whose character, credit, and authority, they derived their force and venom. But let us hear Lord Ashburnham's vindication in his own words.

It may be objected,' says his lordship,

that there is here

an attack on Lord Clarendon, rather than a defence of John • Ashburnham. The answer submitted is, that in cases where no positive facts have been adduced in proof, and where none in disproof are now adducible, where the charge is raised solely on unsubstantial allegations, and unauthenticated deposi

* I. 105.

tions; these are entitled to our belief no further than the ascertained characters of the accusers or deponents are deserving of our deference and respect.' After reminding his readers that it is from Lord Clarendon's own words-from his con'fidential, and even confessionary, communicativeness;' from 'a cento of passages collected from his writings,' that he exhibits him as one who had outwitted his contemporaries, and duped his two successive sovereigns;' Lord Ashburnham indignantly exclaims, 'Twas strange, 'twas passing strange, [and is it not pitiful-wondrous pitiful?] thus to read, not in the tone of contrite confession, but of boastful avowal, these (Lord Clarendon's!) self-applauding reminiscences,-to be told of repeat'ed derelictions of the most sacred duties to the King, and con'sequently to the country, as if they were but the venial vagaries ' of a truant schoolboy, and of personal advantages and unim'parted benefits, meanly secured by the hazardous agency of others, without risking his own, as though such were the laugh'ably mischievous tricks of wanton, yet harmless childhoodto behold him, with exulting complacency, pointing out the • contrasted discordance between the ostensible objects, and the 'real motives, of his own ministerial counsels; at one time with⚫ out a blush unveiling his own deceit; at another, shamelessly exposing his own duplicity; and thus, unconsciously, holding himself out to the world, a warning spectacle, to show how 'self-injurious is the indulged pruriency of an overweening self'conceit-how suicidal the uncurbed license of garrulous ego'tism.'* 'Let it be remembered,' adds his lordship, that in all 'courts of justice, as it is allowed to the advocate, so it is his bounden duty, to avail himself of the two most powerfully 'efficacious pleas, which can be urged to the invalidation, if not to the rejection, of the testimony against the accused, by establishing the existence of a particular enmity, or general laxity ' of adherence to truth, in prosecutor or witness.'t

That Clarendon entertained a private animosity against Ashburnham, is apparent from many passages of his works. When he mentions the name of that gentleman, there is commonly annexed to it some slighting or disparaging expression. He seldom relates an action of Ashburnham, without insinuating somewhat to the prejudice of his honesty or capacity. He declares, indeed, that if obliged to deliver his opinion of the conduct of Ashburnham, in the escape of the King from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight, he must acquit him of 'premeditated trea'chery, corruption, or disaffection.' But the apparent candour

of this declaration receives an abatement, when it is considered that the charge itself has no other foundation than his own misstatements and insinuations. If he applies a balsam to the wound, it is to a wound of his own inflicting;—if he furnishes an antidote to the poison, it is to a poison of his own concocting ;—if he acts the part of the good Samaritan, it is by relieving the traveller he had previously robbed. One fact alone shows the inveteracy of his dislike to Ashburnham, and proves, at the same time, that Ashburnham was neither conscious of his aversion, nor deserving of it. On the disgrace of Lord Clarendon at court, and his threatened impeachment by the Commons, the sycophants, who had adored his fortune, deserted him in his adversity. Ashburnham, though in the service of the King, was one of the few who showed him respect in his misfortune. For this anecdote we are indebted to a casual notice in Evelyn's Diary. But, notwithstanding this mark of honourable and disinterested regard, it is in the pages subsequently written during his exile, that Clarendon has committed to paper some of the passages most injurious to Ashburnham's fame.

The causes of this implacable antipathy, which neither time, nor his own calamities, nor the attentions of Ashburnham, could soften, are in part accounted for by the present editor, in a manner not very creditable to Lord Clarendon. From a passage in Clarendon's biographical account of himself, it appears that, before the commencement of the civil wars, Ashburnham befriended Sir John Colepepper, and employed his means of intercourse with the King for the advancement of that gentleman. Colepepper and Clarendon were new men at court, and owed their introduction to their abandonment of the popular party. They were competitors for royal favour, and at first Colepepper had the advantage; which Clarendon seems to have attributed to the influence of Ashburnham on the King's mind. At a subsequent period, he accuses Colepepper of aiding and abetting Ashburnham in what he chooses to call an invasion of his office as Chancellor of the Exchequer. However slight these grounds of offence, they seem to have rankled in the breast of Clarendon, and in a mind retentive of anger to have settled in a fixed aversion towards Ashburnham. He could not forgive the man, who, possessing, as he repeatedly tells us, the entire confidence of their master, served his rival in preference to himself; and, though the alleged invasion of his office tended to the immediate service of the King, he tells us himself that he took it very 'heavily,' and hints that it left in his mind a permanent jealousy and coldness' towards Ashburnham and Colepepper.

An incident that occurred after the Restoration rekindled and