mon with other great historians, he affected for minute accuracy in trifles, which led to negligence in matters of higher importance. We wish Mr Lister could have added, that in his reflections, and apparently casual observations on the subordinate persons who acted with him in the same cause, Lord Clarendon had not suffered his pen to be often directed, and sometimes envenomed by wounded vanity, private pique, and personal resentment.

The candour and impartiality of Mr Lister have provoked the indignation of the idolatrous worshippers of Clarendon. They who have slumbered in quiet repose for years under the sharp and stinging lash of Lord Ashburnham, have been roused to anger by the measured praise and moderate censure of Mr Lister. The Tory Lord has been suffered, without challenge or reply, to decry the character of Lord Clarendon in every possible relation of life. The Whig Commoner has been vilified and abused for exposing some inaccuracies in his history which had not before been noticed; and for censuring (though more gently than it deserved) his real or affected want of natural affection as a parent, or,-what is worse, his sacrificing, or pretending a wish to sacrifice, the honour and happiness of his child to the fears and interested calculations of his ambition.

*

To the personalities and vulgar insinuations levelled against him, Mr Lister has replied with suitable disdain; and to the specific criticisms on his book, he has given answers as full and satisfactory as the trivial and unimportant nature of the objections merited or required. We should, indeed, have thought it unnecessary to notice this controversy at all, if we had not found ourselves involved in it. In a review we published some years ago of Lord Ashburnham's work, we happened to expose and bring to light, for the first time, a monstrous fabrication of Lord Clarendon, which had till then escaped detection. Mr Lister has admitted our conclusions; though, with his usual tenderness for the noble author, he has abstained from the expressions which, in the first burst of our indignation, we had applied to him. The reviewer of Mr Lister, in the Quarterly Review, undertakes to answer us both, and attempts a defence of Clarendon, which seems to us weak and untenable. Mr Lister has demolished entirely the frail edifice set up by our adversary; but, as there were other matters that had equal claims on his attention, he has not entered fully into the subject. Were it a mere dispute on some isolated point between two Reviewers, we should not pursue it further; but, as it leads to the examination of a great histori

Edinburgh Review, No. CIII.

cal question, in which our countrymen have, in our opinion, been foully traduced, and by none in less measured terms than by the Quarterly Reviewer, we trust we shall be excused for stating at length what we have collected, and what has occurred to us in vindication of their conduct.

Clarendon pretends that Montrevil's engagement to the King was prepared in the Scots camp at Newark; seen and approved of by the men of highest trust in their army; and afterwards sent to Oxford. This is not the fact. The engagement published as Montrevil's, in Clarendon's history, was written at Oxford before Montrevil's departure to the Scottish camp. This is placed beyond a doubt by the document itself, which is dated, signed, and sealed, on the 1st of April; two days before Montrevil left Oxford. That it was written and signed at Oxford is confirmed by Ashburnham, who states that he and Secretary Nicholas, who were both with the King at Oxford, had witnessed the signature of Montrevil;* and, if further corroboration were necessary, the counterpart of the engagement-which was a promise from the King that none should accompany him to the Scottish army besides his two nephews and Ashburnham-is attested by Montrevil, as a document delivered to him by the King at Oxford, on the 1st of April, 1646. The circumstantial story told by Clarendon, that Montrevil, finding the Scots before Newark more favourably disposed towards the King than their countrymen in London, prepared the engagement after his arrival in their camp,-submitted it to the leaders of their army, and received it back from them with their approbation of its contents before he sent it to the King at Oxford,-is an invention of the noble historian, destitute of truth; and at variance with the documents from which he drew, or professed to draw, the materials of his history.

There is no way of escaping from this conclusion but by the bold hypothesis, that when Clarendon speaks of Montrevil's engagement, and of the negotiations that led to it, he means something different from the paper published as that engagement in his history; and, accordingly, the Quarterly Reviewer of Mr Lister's "Life of Clarendon,' in his anxiety to vindicate the noble author from this foul stain on his honour and truth, has suggested that the paper of which Clarendon has given so circumstantial an account, was not the engagement published in his history, but something else; and having found among the Clarendon papers, which relate to this transaction, a scrap addressed to the King from London,

* Ashburnham's Narrative, 83.

containing an assurance from the Scotch deputies there, that they will not fail to send their Horse to meet his Majesty, as soon as they know the day of his intended departure from Ox-. ford; and that they will receive him in their army as had been promised, and will not force his conscience; he fastens with eagerness on this document, and asks whether it may not have been the engagement intended by Clarendon for insertion in his History; and whether the engagement, which actually appears there, has not been inserted by the mistake of his first editors, who filled up the blank he had left in his MS. with a wrong paper. But this desperate conjecture, for which there is not a shadow of reason, except the necessity of devising some excuse for Clarendon, will not bear examination. In the first place, the engagement, the progress and completion of which are so minutely described by Clarendon, was to have been signed by Montrevil; but the proposed substitute is not signed by him. Secondly, not only is it not signed by him, but it manifestly was not even written by him. It is dated à Londres, 16 Avril; but on the 16th April, Montrevil was in the Scotch camp before Newark, and not in London. It makes mention of Montrevil twice in the third person, and then proceeds to say, 'Jay ordres des deputés d'Ecosse,' &c. plainly showing, whoever wrote it, that he was a different person from Montrevil. As it is in French, we may presume it was written by a Frenchman; and as Sabran, who was at that time the Resident from France in England, had been in communication with Montrevil before the latter left London, we think it probable that the writer was Sabran. The purport of the note was to explain why difficulties had been made at Newark to the plan concerted in London, of sending forward a detachment of Horse from the Scottish camp to protect the King's escape from Oxford, and to assure his Majesty that these difficulties had been surmounted; and that he should be received in the army as had been promised, and no force done to his conscience. Not only was this note neither signed, nor written by Montrevil, but there is reason to believe that it was never seen by him. It is dated from London on the 16th of April; and on the 24th of the same month we have a letter from Secretary Nicholas to Montrevil, who was then at Newark, communicating to him the most important parts of it, as intimations received from London; which, most assuredly, the secretary would not have done if the note in its way from London to Oxford had passed through the hands of Montrevil. In the third place, we cannot allow that any mistake has, in this respect, been, committed by Clarendon's editors; because we find, in Ashburnham's narrative, that the engagement they have printed is the one appealed to by the King at Newcastle, as the ground on

which he went to the Scottish army. And, fourthly, what still more unequivocally proves that the scrap selected and ostentatiously brought forward by the Reviewer, is not the paper intended by Clarendon for insertion in the blank space left in his MS., is the fact, that it is actually printed (the material parts of it, at least) in the very next page of his History (as remarked by Mr Lister in his reply); and cannot, therefore, have been intended for insertion in the preceding page.

That this last circumstance should have escaped the Reviewer would have surprised us, if, amidst the pretensions he makes to scrupulous exactness and minute research, we had not met with several other instances of his extreme carelessness, and slovenly inattention, to the books that lay before him. In relating a message from the King to the Scotch Commissioners in London, he substitutes the words treat on for meet us, which makes the passage nonsense. In copying from Hudson's examination the assurances said to have been given to Montrevil by the Scots, he makes them engage to receive the King on his person, instead of secure the King in his person. In giving an account of the King's journey from Oxford to the Scottish camp before Newark, he tells us that Downham, in Norfolk, was the place where it was resolved to send Hudson to Montrevil, though Hudson himself, from whom his account is taken, has stated that he quitted the King and Ashburnham at Graveley, in Hertfordshire, before they reached Baldock. A very gross mistake in the days of the month, which runs through the greater part of Hudson's examination, as published by Seck, has escaped his notice; though he has thought it worth his while, on the strength of it, to hazard a smart remark at the expense of Lister and Co.'* If he will try his hand on no very difficult calculation-or what may be surer and easier for him-consult the journals of either House for 1646, he will find that, in that year, the 3d, and not the 2d of April, fell on a Friday.

But these are innocent blunders, in comparison with the freedom he has used with a letter of Montrevil, where, by the slight substitution of one tense for another, he has contrived that the Frenchman should say, in English, the reverse of what he had said in French, and express hopes where he was bewailing disappointments. In Montrevil's letter of the 16th of April, after repeating what he had written in a former letter of the unfavourable disposition he had found in the Scotch Commissioners with the army, 'he adds,' says the Reviewer, that he had now hopes that,

* Quarterly Review, 528, note.

9

in consequence of an interview which had taken place in the previous week at Royston, between the Chancellor of Scotland and the Earl of Dunfermline and all that his Majesty had desired, and that I had promised him, should be executed.' Mr Lister calls this a gross misrepresentation and a false trans-, lation' of the original, nor can we deny the justness of his censure. Instead of saying that he had now some hopes, Montrevil tells the King that he had had such hopes; and then relates, in doleful terms, to what degree these hopes had been disappointed. The letter is curious. It shows what was the footing on which the King went to the Scottish army, what were the expectations held out to him, and how little ground the Royalists have to complain that promises had been made to him which were not afterwards fulfilled. We shall, therefore, translate at length, without omission, all the parts of the letter that are of importance. It is dated la nuit du 15 ou 16 d'Avril, 1646, and is addressed, as usual, to Secretary Nicholas.

The first person I sent to you at Oxford came back two days ago, after making his escape from those who had detained him, so that you cannot have been informed of the reception they gave me here (nor) of the strict methods they took to deprive me of all means of warning the King not to leave Oxford. I was very glad that you had not received that letter, because it must have deterred his Majesty from all thoughts of coming to this place, for I had some thoughts that things might mend, and that in consequence of the interview of the Chancellor of Scotland, the Earl of Dunfermline, and — -, at Royston, all his Majesty desired, and that I had promised him, might have been done. But after much delay, they have at length informed me from the committee, which has been sitting all day, that they will despatch a strong party to Burton-on-Trent to meet his Majesty, but that they can go no further, though they will send forward some straggling horse to Bosworth, which is half-way from Burton to Harborough. The King must send word on what day he will expect them, and they will not fail to be there. When they meet his Majesty, be must say he is on his way to Scotland, in which case they will allow him to go to their army, instead of proceeding farther. I am not sure that this will be agreeable to his Majesty, but they say it cannot be otherwise. without having a quarrel with the English Parliament, and making it impossible for them to keep the King in their quarters. As to the other conditions, see to what they are reduced! They will have no junction with any forces that have served under the King, and (what is unreasonable) they will not even allow the cavalry that escorts him to accompany hin to their army. They have at length consented that the two Princes and Ashburnham may follow the King, with such of his other servants as are not excepted from pardon; and that these three persons should remain with him till demanded by the English Parliament, in which case they cannot refuse to deliver them up, but they will give them opportunities to escape beforehand out of the kingdom. They cannot allow