← Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Cincinnatus" to "Cleruchy" / Volume 6, Slice 4
Chapter 2
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Cincinnatus" to "Cleruchy" (part 2)
What is true of England in this regard is of course true in greater or less measure of all other countries. Everywhere, thanks to the new mechanisms that increase industrial efficiency, there has been an increasing tendency to specialization; and since the manufacturer must often find his raw materials in one part of the world and his markets in another, this implies an ever-increasing intercommunication and interdependence between the nations. This spirit is obviously fostered by the new means of transportation by locomotive and steamship, and by the electric communication that enables the Londoner, for example, to transact business in New York or in Tokio with scarcely an hour’s delay; and that puts every one in touch at to-day’s breakfast table with the happenings of the entire world. Thanks to the new mechanisms, national isolation is no longer possible; globe-trotting has become a habit with thousands of individuals of many nations; and Orient and Occident, representing civilizations that for thousands of years were almost absolutely severed and mutually oblivious of each other, have been brought again into close touch for mutual education and betterment. The Western mind has learned with amazement that the aforetime Terra Incognita of the far East has nurtured a gigantic civilization having ideals in many ways far different from our own. The Eastern mind has proved itself capable, in self-defence, of absorbing the essential practicalities of Western civilization within a single generation. Some of the most important problems of world-civilization of the immediate future hinge upon the mutual relations of these two long-severed communities, branched at some early stage of progress to opposite hemispheres of the globe, but now brought by the new mechanisms into daily and even hourly communication.
While the new conditions of the industrial world have thus tended to develop a new national outlook, there has come about, as a result of the scientific discoveries already referred to, a no less significant broadening of the mental and spiritual horizons. Here also the trend is away from the narrowly egoistic and towards the cosmopolitan view. About the middle of the 19th century Dr Pritchard declared that many people debated whether it might not be permissible for the Australian settlers to shoot the natives as food for their dogs; some of the disputants arguing that savages were without the pale of human brotherhood. To-day the thesis that all mankind are one brotherhood needs no defence. The most primitive of existing aborigines are regarded merely as brethren who, through some defect or neglect of opportunity, have lagged behind in the race. Similarly the defective and criminal classes that make up so significant a part of the population of even our highest present-day civilizations, are no longer regarded with anger or contempt, as beings who are suffering just punishment for wilful transgressions, but are considered as pitiful victims of hereditary and environmental influences that they could neither choose nor control. Insanity is no longer thought of as demoniac possession, but as the most lamentable of diseases.
The changed attitude towards savage races and defective classes affords tangible illustrations of a fundamental transformation of point of view which doubtless represents the most important result of the operation of new scientific knowledge in the course of the 19th century. It is a transformation that is only partially effected as yet, to be sure; but it is rapidly making headway, and when fully achieved it will represent, probably, the most radical metamorphosis of mental view that has taken place in the entire course of the historical period. The essence of the new view is this: to recognize the universality and the invariability of natural law; stated otherwise, to understand that the word “supernatural” involves a contradiction of terms and has in fact no meaning. Whoever has grasped the full import of this truth is privileged to sweep mental horizons wider by far than ever opened to the view of any thinker of an earlier epoch. He is privileged to forecast, as the sure heritage of the future, a civilization freed from the last ghost of superstition—an Age of Reason in which mankind shall at last find refuge from the hosts of occult and invisible powers, the fearsome galaxies of deities and demons, which have haunted him thus far at every stage of his long journey through savagery, barbarism and civilization. Doubtless here and there a thinker, even in the barbaric eras, may have realized that these ghosts that so influenced the everyday lives of his fellows were but children of the imagination. But the certainty that such is the case could not have come with the force of demonstration even to the most clear-sighted thinker until 19th-century science had investigated with penetrating vision the realm of molecule and atom; had revealed the awe-inspiring principle of the conservation of energy; and had offered a comprehensible explanation of the evolution of one form of life from another, from monad to man, that did not presuppose the intervention of powers more “supernatural” than those that operate about us everywhere to-day.
The stupendous import of these new truths could not, of course, make itself evident to the generality of mankind in a single generation, when opposed to superstitions of a thousand generations’ standing. But the new knowledge has made its way more expeditiously than could have been anticipated; and its effects are seen on every side, even where its agency is scarcely recognized. As a single illustration, we may note the familiar observation that the entire complexion of orthodox teaching of religion has been more altered in the past fifty years than in two thousand years before. This of course is not entirely due to the influence of physical and biological science; no effect has a unique cause, in the complex sociological scheme. Archaeology, comparative philology and textual criticism have also contributed their share; and the comparative study of religions has further tended to broaden the outlook and to make for universality, as opposed to insularity, of view. It is coming to be more and more widely recognized that all theologies are but the reflex of the more or less faulty knowledge of the times in which they originate, that the true and abiding purpose of religion should be the practical betterment of humanity—the advancement of civilization in the best sense of the word; and that this end may perhaps be best subserved by different systems of theology, adapted to the varied genius of different times and divers races. Wherefore there is not the same enthusiastic desire to-day that found expression a generation ago, to impose upon the cultured millions of the East a religion that seems to them alien to their manner of thought, unsuited to their needs and less distinctly ethical in teaching than their own religions.
Such are but a few of the illustrations that might be cited from many fields to suggest that the mind of our generation is becoming receptive to a changed point of view that augurs the coming of a new ethnic era. If one may be permitted to enter very tentatively the field of prophecy, it seems not unlikely that the great revolutionary invention which will close the third period of civilization and usher in a new era is already being evolved. It seems not over-hazardous to predict that the air-ship, in one form or another, is destined to be the mechanism that will give the new impetus to human civilization; that the next era will have as one of its practical ideals the conquest of the air; and that this conquest will become a factor in the final emergence of humanity from the insularity of nationalism to the broad view of cosmopolitanism, towards which, as we have seen, the tendencies of the present era are verging. That the gap to be covered is a vastly wide one no one need be reminded who recalls that the civilized nations of Europe, together with America and Japan, are at present accustomed to spend more than three hundred million pounds each year merely that they may keep armaments in readiness to fly at one another’s throats should occasion arise. Formidable as these armaments now seem, however, the developments of the not very distant future will probably make them quite obsolete; and sooner or later, as science develops yet more deadly implements of destruction, the time must come when communal intelligence will rebel at the suicidal folly of the international attitude that characterized, for example, the opening decade of the 20th century. At some time, after the first period of cosmopolitanism shall be ushered in as a tenth ethnic period, it will come to be recognized that there is a word fraught with fuller meanings even than the word patriotism. That word is humanitarianism. The enlightened generation that realizes the full implications of that word will doubtless marvel that their ancestors of the third period of civilization should have risen up as nations and slaughtered one another by thousands to settle a dispute about a geographical boundary. Such a procedure will appear to have been quite as barbarous as the cannibalistic practices of their yet more remote ancestors, and distinctly less rational, since cannibalism might sometimes save its practiser from starvation, whereas warfare of the civilized type was a purely destructive agency.
Equally obvious must it appear to the cosmopolite of some generation of the future that quality rather than mere numbers must determine the efficiency of any given community. Race suicide will then cease to be a bugbear; and it will no longer be considered rational to keep up the census at the cost of propagating low orders of intelligence, to feed the ranks of paupers, defectives and criminals. On the contrary it will be thought fitting that man should become the conscious arbiter of his own racial destiny to the extent of applying whatever laws of heredity he knows or may acquire in the interests of his own species, as he has long applied them in the case of domesticated animals. The survival and procreation of the unfit will then cease to be a menace to the progress of civilization. It does not follow that all men will be brought to a dead level of equality of body and mind, nor that individual competition will cease; but the average physical mental status of the race will be raised immeasurably through the virtual elimination of that vast company of defectives which to-day constitutes so threatening an obstacle to racial progress. There are millions of men in Europe and America to-day whose whole mental equipment—despite the fact that they have been taught to read and write—is far more closely akin to the average of the Upper Period of Barbarism than to the highest standards of their own time; and these undeveloped or atavistic persons have on the average more offspring than are produced by the more highly cultured and intelligent among their contemporaries. “Race suicide” is thereby prevented, but the progress of civilization is no less surely handicapped. We may well believe that the cosmopolite of the future, aided by science, will find rational means to remedy this strange illogicality. In so doing he will exercise a more consciously purposeful function, and perhaps a more directly potent influence, in determining the line of human progress than he has hitherto attempted to assume, notwithstanding the almost infinitely varied character of the experiments through which he has worked his way from savagery to civilization.
All these considerations tend to define yet more clearly the ultimate goal towards which the progressive civilization of past and present appears to be trending. The contemplation of this goal brings into view the outlines of a vastly suggestive evolutionary cycle. For it appears that the social condition of cosmopolite man, so far as the present-day view can predict it, will represent a state of things, magnified to world-dimensions, that was curiously adumbrated by the social system of the earliest savage. At the very beginning of the journey through savagery, mankind, we may well believe, consisted of a limited tribe, representing no great range or variety of capacity, and an almost absolute identity of interests. Thanks to this community of interests,—which was fortified by the recognition of blood-relationship among all members of the tribe,—a principle which we now define as “the greatest ultimate good to the greatest number” found practical, even if unwitting, recognition; and therein lay the germs of all the moral development of the future. But obvious identity of interests could be recognized only so long as the tribe remained very small. So soon as its numbers became large, patent diversities of interest, based on individual selfishness, must appear, to obscure the larger harmony. And as savage man migrated hither and thither, occupying new regions and thus developing new tribes and ultimately a diversity of “races,” all idea of community of interests, as between race and race, must have been absolutely banished. It was the obvious and patent fact that each race was more or less at rivalry, in disharmony, with all the others. In the hard struggle for subsistence, the expansion of one race meant the downfall of another. So far as any principle of “greatest good” remained in evidence, it applied solely to the members of one’s own community, or even to one’s particular phratry or gens.
Barbaric man, thanks to his conquest of animal and vegetable nature, was able to extend the size of the unified community, and hence to develop through diverse and intricate channels the application of the principle of “greatest good” out of which the idea of right and wrong was elaborated. But quite as little as the savage did he think of extending the application of the principle beyond the bounds of his own race. The laws with which he gave expression to his ethical conceptions applied, of necessity, to his own people alone. The gods with which his imagination peopled the world were local in habitat, devoted to the interests of his race only, and at enmity with the gods of rival peoples. As between nation and nation, the only principle of ethics that ever occurred to him was that might makes right. Civilized man for a long time advanced but slowly upon this view of international morality. No Egyptian or Babylonian or Hebrew or Greek or Roman ever hesitated to attack a weaker nation on the ground that it would be wrong to do so. And few indeed are the instances in which even a modern nation has judged an international question on any other basis than that of self-interest. It was not till towards the close of the 19th century that an International Peace Conference gave tangible witness that the idea of fellowship of nations was finding recognition; and in the same recent period history has recorded the first instance of a powerful nation vanquishing a weaker one without attempting to exact at least an “indemnifying” tribute.
But the citizen of the future, if the auguries of the present prove true, will be able to apply principles of right and wrong without reference to national boundaries. He will understand that the interests of the entire human family are, in the last analysis, common interests. The census through which he attempts to estimate “the greatest good of the greatest number” must include, not his own nation merely, but the remotest member of the human race. On this universal basis must be founded that absolute standard of ethics which will determine the relations of cosmopolite man with his fellows. When this ideal is attained, mankind will again represent a single family, as it did in the day when our primeval ancestors first entered on the pathway of progress; but it will be a family whose habitat has been extended from the narrow glade of some tropical forest to the utmost habitable confines of the globe. Each member of this family will be permitted to enjoy the greatest amount of liberty consistent with the like liberty of every other member; but the interests of the few will everywhere be recognized as subservient to the interests of the many, and such recognition of mutual interests will establish the practical criterion for the interpretation of international affairs.
But such an extension of the altruistic principle by no means presupposes the elimination of egoistic impulses—of individualism. On the contrary, we must suppose that man at the highest stages of culture will be, even as was the savage, a seeker after the greatest attainable degree of comfort for the least necessary expenditure of energy. The pursuit of this ideal has been from first to last the ultimate impelling force in nature urging man forward. The only change has been a change in the interpretation of the ideal, an altered estimate as to what manner of things are most worth the purchase-price of toil and self-denial. That the things most worth the having cannot, generally speaking, be secured without such toil and self-denial, is a lesson that began to be inculcated while man was a savage, and that has never ceased to be reiterated generation after generation. It is the final test of progressive civilization that a given effort shall produce a larger and larger modicum of average individual comfort. That is why the great inventions that have increased man’s efficiency as a worker have been the necessary prerequisites to racial progress. Stated otherwise, that is why the industrial factor is everywhere the most powerful factor in civilization; and why the economic interpretation is the most searching interpretation of history at its every stage. It is the basal fact that progress implies increased average working efficiency—a growing ratio between average effort and average achievement—that gives sure warrant for such a prognostication as has just been attempted concerning the future industrial unification of our race. The efforts of civilized man provide him, on the average, with a marvellous range of comforts, as contrasted with those that rewarded the most strenuous efforts of savage or barbarian, to whom present-day necessaries would have been undreamed-of luxuries. But the ideal ratio between effort and result has by no means been achieved; nor will it have been until the inventive brain of man has provided a civilization in which a far higher percentage of citizens will find the life-vocations to which they are best adapted by nature, and in which, therefore, the efforts of the average worker may be directed with such vigour, enthusiasm and interest as can alone make for true efficiency; a civilization adjusted to such an economic balance that the average man may live in reasonable comfort without heart-breaking strain, and yet accumulate a sufficient surplus to ensure ease and serenity for his declining days. Such, seemingly, should be the normal goal of progressive civilization. Doubtless mankind in advancing towards that goal will institute many changes that could by no possibility be foretold, but (to summarize the views just presented) it seems a safe augury from present-day conditions and tendencies that the important lines of progress will include (1) the organic betterment of the race through wise application of the laws of heredity; (2) the lessening of international jealousies and the consequent minimizing of the drain upon communal resources that attends a military régime; and (3) an ever-increasing movement towards the industrial and economic unification of the world.
(H. S. WI.)
Authorities.—A list of works dealing with the savage and barbarous periods of human development will be found appended to the article ANTHROPOLOGY. Special reference may here be made to E.B. Tylor’s Early History of Mankind (1865), Primitive Culture (1871) and Anthropology (1881); Lord Avebury’s Prehistoric Times (new edition, 1900) and Origin of Civilization (new edition, 1902); A.H. Keane’s Man Past and Present (1899); and Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877). The earliest attempt at writing a history of civilization which has any value for the 20th-century reader was F. Guizot’s in 1828-1830, a handy English translation by William Hazlitt being included in Bohn’s Standard Library under the title of The History of Civilization. The earlier lectures, delivered at the Old Sorbonne, deal with the general progress of European civilization, whilst the greater part of the work is an account of the growth of civilization in France. Guizot’s attitude is somewhat antiquated, but this book still has usefulness as a storehouse of facts. T.H. Buckle’s famous work, The History of Civilization in England (1857-1861), though only a gigantic unfinished introduction to the author’s proposed enterprise, holds an important place in historical literature on account of the new method which it introduced, and has given birth to a considerable number of valuable books on similar lines, such as Lecky’s History of European Morals (1869) and Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe (1865). J.W. Draper’s History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (1861) undertook, from the American stand-point, “the labour of arranging the evidence offered by the intellectual history of Europe in accordance with physiological principles, so as to illustrate the orderly progress of civilization.” Its objective treatment and wealth of learning still give it great value to the student. Since the third quarter of the 19th century it may be said that all serious historical work has been more or less a history of civilization as displayed in all countries and ages, and a bibliography of the works bearing on the subject would be coextensive with the catalogue of a complete historical library. Special mention, however, may be made of such important and suggestive works as C.H. Pearson’s National Life and Character (1893); Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution (1894) and Principles of Western Civilization (1902); Edward Eggleston’s Transit of Civilization (1901); C. Seignobos’s Histoire de la civilisation (1887); C. Faulmann’s Illustrirte Culturgeschichte (1881); G. Ducoudray’s Histoire de la civilisation (1886); J. von Hellwald’s Kulturgeschichte (1896); J. Lippert’s Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit (1886); O. Henne-am-Rhyn’s Die Kultur der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft (1890); G. Kurth’s Origines de la civilisation moderne (1886), &c. The vast collection of modern works on sociology, from Herbert Spencer onwards, should also be consulted; see bibliography attached to the article Sociology. The historical method on which practically all the articles of the present edition of the Ency. Brit. are planned, makes the whole work itself in essentials the most comprehensive history of civilization in existence.
CIVIL LAW, a phrase which, with its Latin equivalent jus civile, has been used in a great variety of meanings. Jus civile was sometimes used to distinguish that portion of the Roman law which was the proper or ancient law of the city or state of Rome from the jus gentium, or the law common to all the nations comprising the Roman world, which was incorporated with the former through the agency of the praetorian edicts. This historical distinction remained as a permanent principle of division in the body of the Roman law. One of the first propositions of the Institutes of Justinian is the following:—“Jus autem civile vel gentium ita dividitur. Omnes populi qui legibus et moribus reguntur partim suo proprio, partim communi omnium hominum jure utuntur; nam quod quisque populus ipsi sibi jus constituit, id ipsius civitatis proprium est, vocaturque jus civile quasi jus proprium ipsius civitatis. Quod vero naturalis ratio inter omnes homines constituit, id apud omnes peraeque custoditur, vocaturque jus gentium quasi quo jure omnes gentes utuntur.” The jus gentium of this passage is elsewhere identified with jus naturale, so that the distinction comes to be one between civil law and natural or divine law. The municipal or private law of a state is sometimes described as civil law in distinction to public or international law. Again, the municipal law of a state may be divided into civil law and criminal law. The phrase, however, is applied par excellence to the system of law created by the genius of the Roman people, and handed down by them to the nations of the modern world (see Roman Law). The civil law in this sense would be distinguished from the local or national law of modern states. The civil law in this sense is further to be distinguished from that adaptation of its principles to ecclesiastical purposes which is known as the canon law (q.v.).
CIVIL LIST, the English term for the account in which are contained all the expenses immediately applicable to the support of the British sovereign’s household and the honour and dignity of the crown. An annual sum is settled by the British parliament at the beginning of the reign on the sovereign, and is charged on the consolidated fund. But it is only from the reign of William IV. that the sum thus voted has been restricted solely to the personal expenses of the crown. Before his accession many charges properly belonging to the ordinary expenses of government had been placed on the civil list. The history of the civil list dates from the reign of William and Mary. Before the Revolution no distinction had been made between the expenses of government in time of peace and the expenses relating to the personal dignity and support of the sovereign. The ordinary revenues derived from the hereditary revenues of the crown, and from certain taxes voted for life to the king at the beginning of each reign, were supposed to provide for the support of the sovereign’s dignity and the civil government, as well as for the public defence in time of peace. Any saving made by the king in the expenditure touching the government of the country or its defence would go to swell his privy purse. But with the Revolution a step forward was made towards the establishment of the principle that the expenses relating to the support of the crown should be separated from the ordinary expenses of the state. The evils of the old system under which no appropriation was made of the ordinary revenue granted to the crown for life had been made manifest in the reigns of Charles II. and James II.; it was their control of these large revenues that made them so independent of parliament. Moreover, while the civil government and the defences suffered, the king could use these revenues as he liked. The parliament of William and Mary fixed the revenue of the crown in time of peace at £1,200,000 per annum; of this sum about £700,000 was appropriated towards the “civil list.” But from this the sovereign was to defray the expenses of the civil service and the payment of pensions, as well as the cost of the support of the royal household and his own personal expenses. It was from this that the term “civil list” arose, to distinguish it from the statement of military and naval charges. The revenue voted to meet the civil list consisted of the hereditary revenues of the crown and a part of the excise duties. Certain changes and additions were made in the sources of revenue thus appropriated between the reign of William and Mary and the accession of George III., when a different system was adopted. Generally speaking, however, the sources of revenue remained as settled at the Revolution.
Anne had the same civil list, estimated to produce an annual income of £700,000. During her reign a debt of £1,200,000 was incurred. This debt was paid by parliament and charged on the civil list itself. George I. enjoyed the same revenue by parliamentary grant, in addition to an annual sum of £120,000 on the aggregate fund. A debt of £1,000,000 was incurred, and discharged by parliament in the same manner as Anne’s debt had been. To George II. a civil list of £800,000 as a minimum was granted, parliament undertaking to make up any deficiency if the sources of income appropriated to its service fell short of that sum. Thus in 1746 a debt of £456,000 was paid by parliament on the civil list. On the accession of George III. a change was made in the system of the civil list. Hitherto the sources of revenue appropriated to the service of the civil list had been settled on the crown. If these revenues exceeded the sum they were computed to produce annually, the surplus went to the king. George III., however, surrendered the life-interest in the hereditary revenues and the excise duties hitherto voted to defray the civil list expenditure, and any claim to a surplus for a fixed amount. The king still retained other large sources of revenue which were not included in the civil list, and were free from the control of parliament. The revenues from which the civil list had been defrayed were henceforward to be carried into, and made part of, the aggregate fund. In their place a fixed civil list was granted—at first of £723,000 per annum, to be increased to £800,000 on the falling in of certain annuities to members of the royal family. From this £800,000 the king’s household and the honour and dignity of the crown were to be supported, as well as the civil service offices, pensions and other charges still laid on the list.
During the reign of George III. the civil list played an important part in the history of the struggle on the part of the king to establish the royal ascendancy. From the revenue appropriated to its service came a large portion of the money employed by the king in creating places and pensions for his supporters in parliament, and, under the colour of the royal bounty, bribery was practised on a large scale. No limit was set to the amount applicable to the pensions charged on the civil list, so long as the sum granted could meet the demand; and there was no principle on which the grant was regulated. Secret pensions at the king’s pleasure were paid out of it, and in every way the independence of parliament was menaced; and though the more legitimate expenses of the royal household were diminished by the king’s penurious style of living, and though many charges not directly connected with the king’s personal expenditure were removed, the amount was constantly exceeded, and applications were made from time to time to parliament to pay off debts incurred; and thus opportunity was given for criticism. In 1769 a debt of £513,511 was paid off in arrears; and in spite of the demand for accounts and for an inquiry into the cause of the debt, the ministry succeeded in securing this vote without granting such information. All attempts to investigate the civil list were successfully resisted, though Lord Chatham went so far as to declare himself convinced that the funds were expended in corrupting members of parliament. Again, in 1777, an application was made to parliament to pay off £618,340 of debts; and in view of the growing discontent Lord North no longer dared to withhold accounts. Yet, in spite of strong opposition and free criticism, not only was the amount voted, but also a further £100,000 per annum, thus raising the civil list to an annual sum of £900,000.
In 1779, at a time when the expenditure of the country and the national debt had been enormously increased by the American War, the general dissatisfaction found voice in parliament, and the abuses of the civil list were specially singled out for attack. Many petitions were presented to the House of Commons praying for its reduction, and a motion was made in the House of Lords in the same sense, though it was rejected. In 1780 Burke brought forward his scheme of economic reform, but his name was already associated with the growing desire to remedy the evils of the civil list by the publication in 1769 of his pamphlet on “The Causes of the Present Discontent.” In this scheme Burke freely animadverts on the profusion and abuse of the civil list, criticizing the useless and obsolete offices and the offices performed by deputy. In every department he discovers jobbery, waste and peculation. His proposal was that the many offices should be reduced and consolidated, that the pension list should be brought down to a fixed sum of £60,000 per annum, and that pensions should be conferred only to reward merit or fulfil real public charity. All pensions were to be paid at the exchequer. He proposed also that the civil list should be divided into classes, an arrangement which later was carried into effect. In 1780 Burke succeeded in bringing in his Establishment Bill; but though at first it met with considerable support, and was even read a second time, Lord North’s government defeated it in committee. The next year the bill was again introduced into the House of Commons, and Pitt made his first speech in its favour. The bill was, however, lost on the second reading.
In 1782 the Rockingham ministry, pledged to economic reform, came into power; and the Civil List Act 1782 was introduced and carried with the express object of limiting the patronage and influence of ministers, or, in other words, the ascendancy of the crown over parliament. Not only did the act effect the abolition of a number of useless offices, but it also imposed restraints on the issue of secret service money, and made provision for a more effectual supervision of the royal expenditure. As to the pension list, the annual amount was to be limited to £95,000; no pension to any one person was to exceed £1200, and all pensions were to be paid at the exchequer, thus putting a stop to the secret pensions payable during pleasure. Moreover, pensions were only to be bestowed in the way of royal bounty for persons in distress or as a reward for merit. Another very important change was made by this act: the civil list was divided into classes, and a fixed amount was to be appropriated to each class. The following were the classes:—
1. Pensions and allowances of the royal family.
2. Payment of salaries of lord chancellor, speaker and judges.
3. Salaries of ministers to foreign courts resident at the same.
4. Approved bills of tradesmen, artificers and labourers for any article supplied and work done for His Majesty’s service.
5. Menial servants of the household.
6. Pension list.
7. Salaries of all other places payable out of the civil list revenues.
8. Salaries and pensions of treasurer or commissioners of the treasury and of the chancellor of the exchequer.
Yet debt was still the condition of the civil list down to the end of the reign, in spite of the reforms established by the Rockingham ministry, and notwithstanding the removal from the list of many charges unconnected with the king’s personal expenses. The debts discharged by parliament between 1782, the date of the passing of the Civil List Act, and the end of George III.’s reign, amounted to £2,300,000. In all, during his reign £3,398,061 of debt owing by the civil list was paid off.
With the regency the civil list was increased by £70,000 per annum, and a special grant of £100,000 was settled on the prince regent. In 1816 the annual amount was settled at £1,083,727, including the establishment of the king, now insane; though the civil list was relieved from some annuities payable to the royal family. Nevertheless, the fund still continued charged with such civil expenses as the salaries of judges, ambassadors and officers of state, and with pensions granted for public services. Other reforms were made as regards the definition of the several classes of expenditure, while the expenses of the royal household were henceforth to be audited by a treasury official—the auditor of the civil list. On the accession of George IV. the civil list, freed from the expenses of the late king, was settled at £845,727. On William IV. coming to the throne a sum of £510,000 per annum was fixed for the service of the civil list. The king at the same time surrendered all the sources of revenue enjoyed by his predecessors, apart from the civil list, represented by the hereditary revenues of Scotland—the Irish civil list, the droits of the crown and admiralty, the 4½% duties, the West India duties, and other casual revenues hitherto vested in the crown, and independent of parliament. The revenues of the duchy of Lancaster were still retained by the crown. In return for this surrender and the diminished sum voted, the civil list was relieved from all the charges relating rather to the civil government than to the support of the dignity of the crown and the royal household. The future expenditure was divided into five classes, and a fixed annual sum was appropriated to each class. The pension list was reduced to £75,000. The king resisted an attempt on the part of the select committee to reduce the salaries of the officers of state on the grounds that this touched his prerogative, and the ministry of Earl Grey yielded to his remonstrance.
The civil list of Queen Victoria was settled on the same principles as that of William IV. A considerable reduction was made in the aggregate annual sum voted, from £510,000 to £385,000, and the pension list was separated from the ordinary civil list. The civil list proper was divided into the following five classes, with a fixed sum appropriated to each:—
Privy purse £60,000
Salaries of household 131,260
Expenses of household 172,500
Royal bounty, &c. 13,200
Unappropriated 8,040
In addition the queen might, on the advice of her ministers, grant pensions up to £1200 per annum, in accordance with a resolution of the House of Commons of February 18th, 1834, “to such persons as have just claims on the royal beneficence or who, by their personal services to the crown, by the performance of duties to the public, or by their useful discoveries in science and attainments in literature and art, have merited the gracious consideration of the sovereign and the gratitude of their country.” The service of these pensions increased the annual sum devoted to support the dignity of the crown and the expenses of the household to about £409,000. The list of pensions must be laid before parliament within thirty days of 20th June. Thus the civil list was reduced in amount, and relieved from the very charges which gave it its name as distinct from the statement of military and naval charges. It now really only dealt with the support of the dignity and honour of the crown and the royal household. The arrangement was most successful, and during the last three reigns there was no application to parliament for the discharge of debts incurred on the civil list.
The death of Queen Victoria rendered it necessary that a renewed provision should be made for the civil list; and King Edward VII., following former precedents, placed unreservedly at the disposal of parliament his hereditary revenues. A select committee of the House of Commons was appointed to consider the provisions of the civil list for the crown, and to report also on the question of grants for the honourable support and maintenance of Her Majesty the Queen and the members of the royal family. The committee in their conclusions were guided to a considerable extent by the actual civil list expenditure during the last ten years of the last reign, and made certain recommendations which, without undue interference with the sovereign’s personal arrangements, tended towards increased efficiency and economy in the support of the sovereign’s household and the honour and dignity of the crown. On their report was based the Civil List Act 1901, which established the new civil list. The system that the hereditary revenues should as before be paid into the exchequer and be part of the consolidated fund was maintained. The amount payable for the civil list was increased from £385,000 to £470,000. In the application of this sum the number of classes of expenditure to which separate amounts were to be appropriated was increased from five to six. The following was the new arrangement of classes:—1st class, Their Majesties’ privy purse, £110,000; 2nd class, salaries of His Majesty’s household and retired allowances, £125,800; 3rd class, expenses of His Majesty’s household, £193,000; 4th class, works (the interior repair and decoration of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle), £20,000; 5th class, royal bounty, alms and special services, £13,200; 6th class, unappropriated, £8000. The system relating to civil list pensions, established by the Civil List Act 1837, continued to apply, but the pensions were not regarded as chargeable on the sum paid for the civil list. The committee also advised that the mastership of the Buckhounds should not be continued; and the king, on the advice of his ministers, agreed to accept their recommendation. The maintenance of the royal hunt thus ceased to be a charge on the civil list. The annuities of £20,000 to the prince of Wales, of £10,000 to the princess of Wales, and of £18,000 to His Majesty’s three daughters, were not included in the civil list, though they were conferred by the same act. Other grants made by special acts of parliament to members of the royal family were also excluded from it; these were £6000 to the princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, £6000 to the princess Louise (duchess of Argyll), £25,000 to the duke of Connaught, £6000 to the duchess of Albany, £6000 to the princess Beatrice (Henry of Battenberg), and £3000 to the duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.
It may be interesting to compare with the British civil list the corresponding figures in other countries. These are as follows, the figures being those, for convenience, of 1905. Spain, £280,000, exclusive of allowances to members of the royal family; Portugal, £97,333, in addition to £1333 to the queen-consort—total grant to the royal family, £116,700; Italy, £602,000, from which was deducted £16,000 for the children of the deceased Prince Amedeo, duke of Aosta, £16,000 to Prince Tommaso, duke of Genoa, and £40,000 to Queen Margherita; Belgium, £140,000; Netherlands, £50,000, with, in addition, £4000 for the maintenance of the royal palaces; Germany, £770,500 (Krondotations Rente), the sovereign also possessing large private property (Kronfideikommiss und Schatullgüter), the revenue from which contributed to the expenditure of the court and the members of the royal family; Denmark, £55,500, in addition to £6600 to the heir-apparent; Norway, £38,888; Sweden, £72,700; Greece, £52,000, which included £4000 each from Great Britain, France and Russia; Austria-Hungary, £941,666, made up of £387,500 as emperor of Austria out of the revenues of Austria, and £554,166 as king of Hungary out of the revenues of Hungary; Japan, £300,000; Rumania, £47,000, in addition to revenues from certain crown lands; Servia, £48,000; Bulgaria, £40,000, besides £30,000 for maintenance of palaces, &c.; Montenegro, £8300; Russia had no civil list, the sovereign having all the revenue from the crown domains (actual amount unknown, but supposed to amount to over £4,000,000); the president of the French Republic had a salary of £24,000 a year, with a further £24,000 for expenses; and the president of the United States had a salary of $50,000 (from 1909, $75,000).
CIVIL SERVICE, the generic name given to the aggregate of all the public servants, or paid civil administrators and clerks, of a state. It is the machinery by which the executive, through the various administrations, carries on the central government of the country.
British Empire.—The appointments to the civil service until the year 1855 were made by nomination, with an examination not sufficient to form an intellectual or even a physical test. It was only after much consideration and almost years of discussion that the nomination system was abandoned. Various commissions reported on the civil service, and orders in council were issued. Finally in 1855 a qualifying examination of a stringent character was instituted, and in 1870 the principle of open competition was adopted as a general rule. On the report of the Playfair Commission (1876), an order in council was issued dividing the civil service into an upper and lower division. The order in council directed that a lower division should be constituted, and men and boy clerks holding permanent positions replaced the temporary assistants and writers. The “temporary” assistant was not found to be advantageous to the service. In December 1886 a new class of assistant clerks was formed to replace the men copyists. In 1887 the Ridley Commission reported on the civil service establishment. In 1890 two orders in council were issued based on the reports of the Ridley Commission, which sat from 1886 to 1890. The first order constituted what is now known as the second division of the civil service. The second order in council concerned the officers of the 1st class; and provision was made for the possible promotion of the second division clerks to the first division after eight years’ service.
The whole system is under the administration of the civil service commissioners, and power is given to them, with the approval of the treasury, to prescribe the subjects of examination, limits of age, &c. The age is fixed for compulsory retirement at sixty-five. In exceptional cases a prolongation of five years is within the powers of the civil service commissioners. The examination for 1st class clerkships is held concurrently with that of the civil service of India and Eastern cadetships in the colonial service. Candidates can compete for all three or for two. In addition to the intellectual test the candidate must fulfil the conditions of age (22 to 24), must present recommendations as to character, and pass a medical examination. This examination approximates closely to the university type of education. Indeed, there is little chance of success except for candidates who have had a successful university career, and frequently, in addition, special preparation by a private teacher. The subjects include the language and literature of England, France, Germany, Italy, ancient Greece and Rome, Sanskrit and Arabic, mathematics (pure and applied), natural science (chemistry, physics, zoology, &c.), history (English, Greek, Roman and general modern), political economy and economic history, mental and moral philosophy, Roman and English law and political science. The candidate is obliged to reach a certain standard of knowledge in each subject before any marks at all are allowed him. This rule was made to prevent success by mere cramming, and to ensure competent knowledge on the basis of real study.
The maximum scale of the salaries of clerks of Class I. is as follows:—3rd class, £200 a year, increasing by £20 a year to £500; 2nd class, £600, increasing by £25 a year to £800; 1st class, £850, increasing by £50 a year to £1000. Their pensions are fixed by the Superannuation Act 1859, 22 Vict. c. 26:—
“To any person who shall have served ten years and upwards, and under eleven years, an annual allowance of ten-sixtieths of the annual salary and emoluments of his office:
“For eleven years and under twelve years, an annual allowance of eleven-sixtieths of such salary and emoluments:
“And in like manner a further addition to the annual allowance of one-sixtieth in respect of each additional year of such service, until the completion of a period of service of forty years, when the annual allowance of forty-sixtieths may be granted; and no additions shall be made in respect of any service beyond forty years.”
The “ordinary annual holidays allowed to officers” (1st class) “shall not exceed thirty-six week-days during each of their first ten years of service and forty-eight week-days thereafter.” Order in Council, 15th August 1890.
“Within that maximum heads of departments have now, as they have hitherto had, an absolute discretion in fixing the annual leave.”
Sick leave can be granted on full salary for not more than six months, on half-salary for another six months.
The scale of salary for 2nd division clerks begins at £70 a year, increasing by £5 to £100; then £100 a year, increasing by £7, 10s. to £190; and then £190 a year, increasing by £10 to £250. The highest is £300 to £500. Advancement in the 2nd division to the higher ranks depends on merit, not seniority. The ordinary annual holiday of the 2nd division clerks is 14 working days for the first five years, and 21 working days afterwards. They can be allowed sick leave for six months on full pay and six months on half-pay. The subjects of their examination are: (1) handwriting and orthography, including copying MS.; (2) arithmetic; (3) English composition; (4) précis, including indexing and digest of returns; (5) book-keeping and shorthand writing; (6) geography and English history; (7) Latin; (8) French; (9) German; (10) elementary mathematics; (11) inorganic chemistry with elements of physics. Not more than four of the subjects (4) to (11) can be taken. The candidate must be between the ages of 17 and 20. A certain number of the places in the 2nd division were reserved for the candidates from the boy clerks appointed under the old system. The competition is severe, only about one out of every ten candidates being successful. Candidates are allowed a choice of departments subject to the exigencies of the services.
There is also a class of boy copyists who are almost entirely employed in London, a few in Dublin and Edinburgh, and, very seldom, in some provincial towns. The subjects of their examination are: Obligatory—handwriting and orthography, arithmetic and English composition. Optional—(any two of the following): (1) copying MS.; (2) geography; (3) English history; (4) translation from one of the following languages—Latin, French or German; (5) Euclid, bk. i. and ii., and algebra, up to and including simple equations; (6) rudiments of chemistry and physics. Candidates must be between the ages of 15 and 18. They have no claims to superannuation or compensation allowance. Boy copyists are not retained after the age of 20.
Candidates for the civil service of India take the same examination as for 1st class clerkships. Candidates successful in the examination must subsequently spend one year in England. They receive for that year £150 if they elect to live at one of the universities or colleges approved by the secretary of state for India. They are submitted to a final examination in the following subjects—Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure, the principal vernacular language of the province to which they are assigned, the Indian Evidence Act (these three subjects are compulsory), either Hindu and Mahommedan Law, or Sanskrit, Arabic or Persian, Burmese (for Burma only). A candidate may not take Arabic or Sanskrit both in the first examination and in the final. They must also pass a thorough examination in riding. On reaching India their salary begins at 400 rupees a month. They may take, as leave, one-fourth of the time on active service in periods strictly limited by regulation. After 25 years’ service (of which 21 must be active service) they can retire on a pension of £1000 a year. The unit of administration is the district. At the head of the district is an executive officer called either collector-magistrate or deputy-commissioner. In most provinces he is responsible to the commissioner, who corresponds directly with the provincial government. The Indian civilian after four years’ probation in both branches of the service is called upon to elect whether he will enter the revenue or judicial department, and this choice as a rule is held to be final for his future work.
Candidates for the Indian Forest Service have to pass a competitive examination, one of the compulsory subjects being German or French. They have also to pass a severe medical examination, especially in their powers of vision and hearing. They must be between the ages of 18 and 22. Successful candidates are required to pass a three years’ course, with a final examination, seven terms of the course at an approved school of forestry, the rest of the time receiving practical instruction in continental European forests. On reaching India they start as assistant conservators at 380 rupees a month. The highest salary, that of inspector-general of forests, in the Indian Forest Service is 2650 rupees a month.
The Indian Police Service is entered by a competitive examination of very much the same kind as for the forest service, except that special subjects such as German and botany are not included. The candidates are limited in age to 19 and 21. They must pass a riding examination. A free passage out is given them. They are allotted as probationers, their wishes being consulted as far as possible as to their province. A probationer receives 300 rupees a month. A district superintendent can rise to 1200 rupees a month, while there are a few posts with a salary of 3000 rupees a month in the police service. The leave and pension in both these departments follow the general rules for Indian services.
The civil service also includes student interpreterships for China, Japan and Siam, and for the Ottoman dominions, Persia, Greece and Morocco. Both these classes of student interpreters are selected by open competition. Their object is to supply the consular service in the above-named countries with persons having a thorough knowledge of the language of the country in which they serve.
In the first case, China, Japan, &c., they learn their language in the country itself, receiving £200 as probationers. Then they become assistants in a consulate. The highest post is that of consul-general. In the case of student interpreters for the Ottoman dominions, Persia, Greece and Morocco, the successful candidates learn their languages at Oxford. Turkish is taught gratuitously, but they pay the usual fees for other languages. At Oxford they receive £200 a year for two years. On leaving Oxford they become assistants under the embassy at Constantinople, the legations at Teheran, Athens or Morocco, or at one of H.B.M. consulates. As assistants they receive £300 a year. The consuls, the highest post to which they can reach, receive in the Levant from £500 to £1600 a year. The civil services of Ceylon, Hong-Kong, the Straits Settlements, and the Malay Peninsula are supplied by the Eastern cadetships. The limits of age for the examination are 18 and 24. The cadets are required to learn the native language of the colony or dependency to which they are assigned. In the case of the Straits Settlements and Malay cadets they may have to learn Chinese or Tamil, as well as the native language. The salaries are: passed cadets, 3500 rupees per annum, gradually increasing until first-class officers receive from 12,000 to 18,000 rupees per annum. They are allowed three months’ vacation on full pay in two years, and leave of absence on half-pay after six years’ service, or before that if urgently needed. They can retire for ill-health after ten years with fifteen-sixtieths of their annual salary. Otherwise they can add one-sixtieth of their annual salary to their pension for every additional year’s service up to thirty-five years’ service.
In spite of the general rule of open competition, there are still a few departments where the system of nomination obtains, accompanied by a severe test of knowledge, either active or implied. Such are the foreign office, British Museum, and board of education.
The employment of women in the civil service has been principally developed in the post office. Women are employed in the post office as female clerks, counter clerks, telegraphists, returners, sorters and post-mistresses all over the United Kingdom. The board of agriculture, the customs and the India office employ women. The department of agriculture, the board of education generally, the local government board, all to a certain extent employ women, whilst in the home office there are an increasing number of women inspectors of workshops and factories.
In 1881 the postmaster-general took a decided step in favour of female employment, and with the consent of the treasury instituted female clerkships. Female clerks do not come in contact with the public. Their duties are purely clerical, and entirely in the accountant-general’s department at the savings bank. Their leave is one month per annum; their pension is on the ordinary civil service scale. The examination is competitive; the subjects are handwriting and spelling, arithmetic, English composition, geography, English history, French or German. Candidates must be between the ages of 18 and 20. Whether unmarried or widows they must resign on marriage. The class of girl clerks take the same subjects in a competitive examination. They must be between the ages of 16 and 18; they serve only in the Savings Bank department. If competent they can pass on later to female clerkships. The salaries of the female clerkships range from £200 to £500 in the higher grade, £55 to £190 in the 2nd class, whilst girl clerks are paid from £35 to £40, with the chance of advancement to higher posts.
United States.—Civil service reform, like other great administrative reforms, began in America in the latter half of the 19th century. Personal and partisan government, with all the entailed evils of the patronage system, culminated in Great Britain during the reign of George III., and was one of the efficient causes of the American revolution. Trevelyan characterizes the use of patronage to influence legislation, and the giving of colonial positions as sinecures to the privileged classes and personal favourites of the administration, by saying, “It was a system which, as its one achievement of the first order, brought about the American War, and made England sick, once and for all, of the very name of personal government.” It was natural that the founders of the new government in America, after breaking away from the mother-country, should strive to avoid the evils which had in a measure brought about the revolution. Their intention that the administrative officers of the government should hold office during good behaviour is manifest, and was given thorough and practical effect by every administration during the first forty years of the life of the government. The constitution fixed no term of office in the executive branch of the government except those of president and vice-president; and Madison, the expounder of the constitution, held that the wanton removal of a meritorious officer was an impeachable offence. Not until nine years after the passage of the Four Years’ Tenure of Office Act in 1820 was there any material departure from this traditional policy of the government. This act (suggested by an appointing officer who wished to use the power it gave in order to secure his own nomination for the presidency, and passed without debate and apparently without any adequate conception of its full effect) opened the doors of the service to all the evils of the “spoils system.” The foremost statesmen of the time were not slow to perceive the baleful possibilities of this legislation, Jefferson, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Benton and many others being recorded as condemning and deploring it in the strongest terms. The transition to the “spoils system” was not, however, immediate, and for the next nine years the practice of reappointing all meritorious officers was practically universal; but in 1829 this practice ceased, and the act of 1820 lent the sanction of law to the system of proscriptions which followed, which was a practical application of the theory that “to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.” In 1836 the provisions of this law, which had at first been confined mainly to officers connected with the collection of revenue, were extended to include also all postmasters receiving a compensation of $1000 per annum or more. It rapidly became the practice to regard all these four years’ tenure offices as agencies not so much for the transaction of the public business as for the advancement of political ends. The revenue service from being used for political purposes merely came to be used for corrupt purposes as well, with the result that in one administration frauds were practised upon the government to the extent of $75,000,000. The corrupting influences permeated the whole body politic. Political retainers were selected for appointment not on account of their ability to do certain work but because they were followers of certain politicians; these “public servants” acknowledged no obligation except to those politicians, and their public duties, if not entirely disregarded, were negligently and inefficiently performed. Thus grew a saturnalia of spoils and corruption which culminated in the assassination of a president.
Acute conditions, not theories, give rise to reforms. In the congressional election of November 1882, following the assassination of President Garfield as an incident in the operation of the spoils system, the voice of the people commanding reform was unmistakable. Congress assembled in December 1882, and during the same month a bill looking to the improvement of the civil service, which had been pending in the Senate for nearly two years, was finally taken up and considered by that body. In the debate upon this bill its advocates declared that it would “vastly improve the whole civil service of the country,” which they characterized as being at that time “inefficient, expensive and extravagant, and in many instances corrupt.” This bill passed the Senate on the 27th of December 1882, and the House on the 4th of January 1883, and was signed by the president on the 16th of January 1883, coming into full operation on the 16th of July 1883. It is now the national civil service law. The fundamental principles of this law are:—(1) selection by competitive examination for all appointments to the “classified service,” with a period of probationary service before absolute appointment; (2) apportionment among the states and territories, according to population, of all appointments in the departmental service at Washington; (3) freedom of all the employees of the government from any necessity to contribute to political campaign funds or to render political services. For putting these principles into effect the Civil Service Commission was created, and penalties were imposed for the solicitation or collection from government employees of contributions for political purposes, and for the use of official positions in coercing political action. The commission, in addition to its regular duties of aiding in the preparation of civil service rules, of regulating and holding examinations, and certifying the results thereof for use in making appointments, and of keeping records of all changes in the service, was given authority to investigate and report upon any violations of the act or rules. The “classified” service to which the act applies has grown, by the action of successive presidents in progressively including various branches of tne service within it, from 13,924 positions in 1883 to some 80,000 (in round numbers) in 1900, constituting about 40% of the entire civil service of the government and including practically all positions above the grade of mere labourer or workman to which appointment is not made directly by the president with the consent of the Senate. A very large class to which the act is expressly applicable, and which has been partly brought within its provisions by executive action, is that of fourth-class postmasters, of whom there are between 70,000 and 80,000 (about 15,000 classified in 1909).
In order to provide registers of eligibles for the various grades of positions in the classified service, the United States Civil Service Commission holds annually throughout the country about 300 different kinds of examinations. In the work of preparing these examinations and of marking the papers of competitors in them the commission is authorized by law to avail itself, in addition to its own corps of trained men, of the services of the scientific and other experts in the various executive departments. In the work of holding the examinations it is aided by about 1300 local boards of examiners, which are its local representatives throughout the country and are located at the principal post offices, custom houses and other government offices, being composed of three or more Federal employees in those offices. About 50,000 persons annually compete in these examinations, and about 10,000 of those who are successful receive appointments through regular certification. Persons thus appointed, however, must serve six months “on probation” before their appointment can be made absolute. At the end of this probation, if his service has not been satisfactory, the appointee is simply dropped; and the fact that less than 1% of those appointed prove thus deficient on trial is high testimony to the practical nature of the examinations held by the commission, and to their aptness for securing persons qualified for all classes of positions.
The effects of the Civil Service Act within the scope of its actual operation have amply justified the hopes and promises of its advocates. After its passage, absentee holders of lucrative appointments were required to report for duty or to sever their connexion with the service. Improved methods were adopted in the departments, and superfluous and useless work was no longer devised in order to provide a show of employment and a locus standi for the parasites upon the public service. Individual clerks were required, and by reason of the new conditions were enabled, to do more and better work; and this, coupled with the increase in efficiency in the service on account of new blood coming in through the examinations, made possible an actual decrease in the force required in many offices, notwithstanding the natural growth in the amount of work to be done. Experience proves that the desire to create new and unnecessary positions was in direct proportion to the power to control them, for where the act has taken away this power of control the desire had disappeared naturally. There is no longer any desire on the part of heads of departments to increase the number or salaries of classified positions which would fall by law within the civil service rules and be subject to competitive examinations. Thus the promises of improvement and economy in the service have been fulfilled.
The chief drawback to the full success of the act within its intended scope of operation has been the withholding of certain positions in the service from the application of the vital principle of competition. The Civil Service Act contemplated no exceptions, within the limits to which it was made applicable, to the general principle of competition upon merit for entrance to the service. In framing the first civil service rules, however, in 1883, the president, yielding to the pressure of the heads of some of the departments, and against the urgent protest of the Civil Service Commission, excepted from the requirement of examination large numbers of positions in the higher grades of the service, chiefly fiduciary and administrative positions such as cashiers, chief clerks and chiefs of division. These positions being thus continued under the absolute control of the appointing officer, the effect of their exception from examination was to retain just that much of the old or “spoils” system within the nominal jurisdiction of the new or “merit” system. Even more: under the old system, while appointments from the outside had been made regardless of fitness, still those appointments had been made in the lower grades, the higher positions being filled by promotion within the service, usually of the most competent, but under the new system with its exceptions, while appointments to the lower grades were filled on the basis of merit, the pressure for spoils at each change of administration forced inexperienced, political or personal favourites in at the top. This blocked promotions and demoralized the service. Thus, while the general effect of the act was to limit very greatly the number of vicious appointments, at the same time the effect of these exceptions was to confine them to the upper grades, where the demoralizing effect of each upon the service would be a maximum. By constant efforts the Civil Service Commission succeeded in having position after position withdrawn from this excepted class, until by the action of the president, on the 6th of May 1896, it was finally reduced almost to a minimum. By subsequent presidential action, however, on the 29th of May 1899, the excepted class was again greatly extended.
A further obstacle to the complete success of the merit system, and one which prevents the carrying forward of the reform to the extent to which it has been carried in Great Britain, is inherent in the Civil Service Act itself. All postmasters who receive compensation of $1000 or more per annum, and all collectors of customs and collectors of internal revenue, are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and are therefore, by express provision of the act, not “required to be classified.” The universal practice of treating these offices as political agencies instead of as administrative business offices is therefore not limited by the act. Such officers are active in political work throughout the country, and their official position adds greatly to their power to affect the political prospects of the leaders in their districts. Accordingly the Senate, from being, as originally intended, merely a confirming body as to these officers, has become in a large measure, actually if not formally, a nominating body, and holds with tenacity to the power thus acquired by the individual senators. Thorough civil service reform requires that these positions also, and all those of fourth-class postmasters (partly classified by order of 1st Dec. 1908), be made subject to the merit system, for in them is the real remaining stronghold of the spoils system. Even though all their subordinates be appointed through examination, it will be impossible to carry the reform to ultimate and complete success so long as the officers in charge are appointed mainly for political reasons and are changed with every change of administration.
The purpose of the act to protect the individual employees in the service from the rapacity of the “political barons” has been measurably, if not completely, successful. The power given the Civil Service Commission, to investigate and report upon violations of the law, has been used to bring to light such abuses as the levying of political contributions, and to set the machinery of the law in motion against them. While comparatively few actual prosecutions have been brought about, and although the penalties imposed by the act for this offence have been but seldom inflicted, still the publicity given to all such cases by the commission’s investigations has had a wholesome deterrent effect. Before the passage of the act, positions were as a general rule held upon a well-understood lease-tenure, the political contributions for them being as securely and as certainly collected as any rent. Now, however, it can be said that these forced contributions have almost entirely disappeared. The efforts which are still made to collect political funds from government employees in evasion of the law are limited in the main to persuasion to make “voluntary” contributions, and it has been possible so to limit and obstruct these efforts that their practical effect upon the character of the service is now very small.
The same evils that the Federal Civil Service Act was designed to remedy exist to a large degree in many of the state governments, and are especially aggravated in the administration of the local governments of some of the larger cities. The chief, if not the only, test of fitness for office in many cases has been party loyalty, honesty and capacity being seldom more than secondary considerations. The result has been the fostering of dishonesty and extravagance, which have brought weakness and gross corruption into the administration of the local governments. In consequence of this there has been a constantly growing tendency, among the more intelligent class of citizens, to demand that honest business methods be applied to local public service, and that appointments be made on the basis of intelligence and capacity, rather than of party allegiance. The movement for the reform of the civil service of cities is going hand in hand with the movement for general municipal reform, those reformers regarding the merit system of appointments as not merely the necessary and only safe bulwark to preserve the results of their labours, but also as the most efficient means for bringing about other reforms. Hence civil service reform is given a leading position in all programmes for the reform of state and municipal governments. This has undoubtedly been due, in the first instance, at least, to the success which attended the application of the merit system to the Federal service, municipal and state legislation following in the wake of the national civil service law. In New York an act similar to the Federal Civil Service Act was passed on the 4th of May 1883, and in 1894 the principles of the merit system were introduced by an amendment into the state constitution, and made applicable to cities and villages as well. In Massachusetts an act was passed on the 3rd of June 1884 which in its general features was based upon the Federal act and the New York act. Similar laws were passed in Illinois and Wisconsin in 1895, and in New Jersey in 1908; the laws provide for the adoption of the merit system in state and municipal government. In New Orleans, La., and in Seattle, Wash., the merit system was introduced by an amendment to the city charter in 1896. The same result was accomplished by New Haven, Conn., in 1897, and by San Francisco, Cal., in 1899. In still other cities the principles of the merit system have been enacted into law, in some cases applying to the entire service and in others to only a part of it.
The application of the merit system to state and municipal governments has proved successful wherever it has been given a fair trial. As experience has fostered public confidence in the system, and at the same time shown those features of the law which are most vulnerable, and the best means for fortifying them, numerous and important improvements upon the pioneer act applying to the Federal service have been introduced in the more recent legislation. This is particularly true of the acts now in force in New York (passed in 1899) and in Chicago. The power of the commission to enforce these acts is materially greater than the power possessed by the Federal commission. In making investigations they are not confined to taking the testimony of voluntary witnesses, but may administer oaths, and compel testimony and the production of books and papers where necessary; and in taking action they are not confined to the making of a report of the findings in their investigations, but may themselves, in many cases, take final judicial action. Further than this, the payment of salaries is made dependent upon the certificate of the commission that the appointments of the recipients were made in accordance with the civil service law and rules. Thus these commissions have absolute power to prevent irregular or illegal appointments by refractory appointing officers. Their powers being so much greater than those of the national commission, their action can be much more drastic in most cases, and they can go more directly to the heart of an existing abuse, and apply more quickly and effectually the needed remedy.
Upon the termination of the Spanish-American War, the necessity for the extension of the principles of the merit system to the new territories, the responsibility for whose government the results of this war had thrown upon the United States, was realized. By the acts providing for civil government in Porto Rico (April 12th, 1900) and Hawaii (April 30th, 1900), the provisions of the Civil Service Act and Rules were applied to those islands. Under this legislation the classification applies to all positions which are analogous to positions in the Federal service, those which correspond to positions in the municipal and state governments being considered as local in character, and not included in the classification.
On the 19th of September 1900 the United States Philippine Commission passed an act “for the establishment and maintenance of an efficient and honest civil service in the Philippine Islands.” This act, in its general features, is based upon the national civil service law, but includes also a number of the stronger points to be found in the state and municipal law mentioned above. Among these are the power given the civil service board to administer oaths, summon witnesses, and require the production of official records; and the power to stop payment of salaries to persons illegally appointed. Promotions are determined by competitive examinations, and are made throughout the service, as there are no excepted positions. A just right of preference in local appointments is given to natives. The president of the Philippine commission in introducing this bill said: “The purpose of the United States government ... in these islands is to secure for the Filipino people as honest and as efficient a government as may be possible.... It is the hope of the commission to make it possible for one entering the lowest ranks to reach the highest, under a tenure based solely upon merit.” Judging by past experience it is believed that this law is well adapted to accomplish the purpose above stated.
For fuller information upon the details of the present workings of the merit system in the Federal service, recourse should be had to the publications of the U.S. Civil Service Commission, which are to be found in the public libraries in all the principal cities in the United States, or which may be had free of charge upon application to the commission. The Manual of Examinations, published semi-annually, gives full information as to the character of the examinations held by the commission, together with the schedule of dates and places for the holding of those examinations. The Annual Reports of the commission contain full statistics of the results of its work, together with comprehensive statements as to the difficulties encountered in enforcing the law, and the means used to overcome them. In the Fifteenth Report, pp. 443-485, will be found a very valuable historical compilation from original sources, upon the “practice of the presidents in appointments and removals in the executive civil service, from 1789 to 1883.” In the same report, pp. 511-517, is a somewhat comprehensive bibliography of “civil service” in periodical literature in the 19th century, brought down to the end of 1898. See also C.R. Fish, The Civil Service and the Patronage (New York, 1905).
In most European countries the civil service is recruited on much the same lines as in the United Kingdom and the United States, that is, either by examination or by nomination or by both. In some cases the examination is purely competitive, in other cases, as in France, holders of university degrees get special privileges, such as being put at the head of the list, or going up a certain number of places; or, as in Germany, many departmental posts are filled by nomination, combined with the results of general examinations, either at school or university. In the publications of the United States Department of Labour and Commerce for 1904-1905 will be found brief details of the systems adopted by the various foreign countries for appointing their civil service employees.
See letter to Monroe, November 29th, 1820, Jefferson’s Writings, vii. 190. A quotation from this letter is given at p. 454 of the Fifteenth Report of the U.S. Civil Service Commission.
See Senate Report No. 576, 47th Congress, 1st session; also U.S. Civil Service Commission’s Third Report, p. 16 et seq., Tenth Report, pp. 136, 137, and Fifteenth Report, pp. 483, 484.
The progressive classification of the executive civil service, showing the growth of the merit system, is discussed, with statistics, in the U.S. Civil Service Commission’s Sixteenth Report, pp. 129-137. A revision of this discussion, with important additions, appears in the Seventeenth Report.
For details justifying these statements, see U.S. Civil Service Commission’s Fourteenth Report, pp. 12-14.
For the scope of these exceptions, see Civil Service Rule VI., at p. 57 of the U.S. Civil Service Commission’s Fifteenth and Sixteenth Reports. A statement of the number of positions actually affected by this action of the president appears in the Seventeenth Report.
In the U.S. Civil Service Commission’s Fifteenth Report, pp. 489-502, the “growth of the civil service reform in states and cities” is historically treated, briefly, but with some thoroughness.
CIVITA CASTELLANA (anc. Falerii, q.v.), a town and episcopal see of the province of Rome, 45 m. by rail from the city of Rome (the station is 5 m. N.E. of the town). Population (1901) 5265. The cathedral of S. Maria possesses a fine portico, erected in 1210 by Laurentius Romanus, his son Jacobus and his grandson Cosmas, in the cosmatesque style, with ancient columns and mosaic decorations: the interior was modernized in the 18th century, but has some fragments of cosmatesque ornamentation. The citadel was erected by Pope Alexander VI. from the designs of Antonio da Sangallo the elder, and enlarged by Julius II. and Leo X. The lofty bridge by which the town is approached belongs to the 18th century. Mount Soracte lies about 6 m. to the south-east.
CIVITA VECCHIA, a seaport town and episcopal see of Italy, in the province of Rome, 50 m. N.W. by rail and 35 m. direct from the city of Rome. Pop. (1871) 8143; (1901) 17,589. It is the ancient Centum Cellae, founded by Trajan. Interesting descriptions of it are given by Pliny the Younger (Epist. vi. 31) and Rutilius Namat. i. 237. The modern harbour works rest on the ancient foundations, and near it the cemetery of detachments of the Classes Misenensis and Ravennas has been found (Corp. Inscr. Lat. vol. xi., Berlin, 1888, pp. 3520 seq.). Remains of an aqueduct and other Roman buildings are preserved; the imperial family had a villa here. Procopius mentions it in the 6th century as a strong and populous place, but it was destroyed in 813 by the Saracens. Leo IV. erected a new city for the inhabitants on the site where they had taken refuge, about 8 m. N.N.E. of Civita Vecchia towards the hills, near La Farnesina, where its ruins may still be seen; the city walls and some of the streets and buildings may be traced, and an inscription (which must have stood over one of the city gates) recording its foundation has been discovered. It continued to exist under the name Cencelle as a feudal castle until the 15th century. In the meantime, however, the inhabitants returned to the old town by the shore in 889 and rebuilt it, giving it the name Civitas Vetus, the modern Civita Vecchia (see O. Marucchi in Nuovo Bullettino di archeologia cristiana, vi., 1900, p. 195 seq.). In 1508 Pope Julius II. began the construction of the castle from the designs of Bramante, Michelangelo being responsible for the addition of the central tower. It is considered by Burckhardt the finest building of its kind. Pius IV. added a convict prison. The arsenal was built by Alexander VII. and designed by Bernini. Civita Vecchia was the chief port of the Papal State and has still a considerable trade. There are cement factories in the town, and calcium carbide is an important article of export. The principal imports are coal, cattle for the home markets, and fire-bricks from the United Kingdom. Three miles N.E. were the Aquae Tauri, warm springs, now known as Bagni della Ferrata: considerable remains of the Roman baths are still preserved. About 1 m. W. of these are other hot springs, those of the Ficoncella, also known in Roman times.
CLACKMANNAN, the county town of Clackmannanshire, Scotland. Pop. 1505. It lies near the north bank of the Forth, 2 m. E. of Alloa, with two stations on the North British railway. Among the public buildings are the parish church, the tower of which, standing on a commanding eminence, is a conspicuous landmark. Clackmannan Tower is now a picturesque ruin, but at one time played an important part in Scottish history, and was the seat of a lineal descendant of the Bruce family after the failure of the male line. The old market cross still exists, and close to it stands the stone that gives the town its name (Gaelic, clach, stone; Manann, the name of the district). A large spinning-mill and coalpits lend a modern touch in singular contrast with the quaint, old-world aspect of the place. About 1 m. to the S.E. is Kennet House, the seat of Lord Balfour of Burleigh, another member of the Bruce family.
CLACKMANNANSHIRE, the smallest county in Scotland, bounded S.W. by the Forth, W. by Stirlingshire, N.N.E. and N.W. by Perthshire, and E. by Fifeshire. It has an area of 35,160 acres, or about 55 sq. m. An elevated ridge starting on the west, runs through the middle of the county, widening gradually till it reaches the eastern boundary, and skirting the alluvial or carse lands in the valleys of the Forth and Devon. Still farther to the N. the Ochil hills form a picturesque feature in the landscape, having their generally verdant surface broken by bold projecting rocks and deeply indented ravines. The principal summits are within the limits of the shire, among them Ben Cleuch (2363 ft.), King’s Seat (2111 ft.), Whitewisp (2110 ft.), the Law (above Tillicoultry, 2094 ft.) and Blairdenon (2072 ft.), on the northern slope, in which the river Devon takes its rise. The rivers of importance are the Devon and the Black or South Devon. The former, noted in the upper parts for its romantic scenery and its excellent trout-fishing, runs through the county near the base of the Ochils, and falls into the Forth at the village of Cambus, after a winding course of 33 m., although as the crow flies its source is only 5¼ m. distant. The Black Devon, rising in the Cleish Hills, flows westwards in a direction nearly parallel to that of the Devon, and falls into the Forth near Clackmannan. It supplies motive power to numbers of mills and collieries; and its whole course is over coal strata. The Forth is navigable as far as it forms the boundary of the county, and ships of 500 tons burden run up as far as Alloa. The only lake is Gartmorn, 1 m. long by about 1⁄3 of a mile broad, which has been dammed in order to furnish water to Alloa and power to mills. The Ochils are noted for the number of their glens. Though these are mostly small, they are well wooded and picturesque, and those at Menstrie, Alva, Tillicoultry and Dollar are particularly beautiful.
Geology.—This county is divided geologically into two areas, the boundary line skirting the southern margin of the Ochils and running westwards from a point north of Dollar by Alva in the direction of Airthrev in Stirlingshire. The northern portion forms part of the volcanic range of the Ochils which belongs to the Old Red Sandstone period, and consists of a great succession of lavas—basalts and andesites—with intercalations of tuff and agglomerate. As the rocks dip gently towards the north and form the highest ground in the county they must reach a great thickness. They are pierced by small intrusive masses of diorite, north of Tillicoultry House. The well-marked feature running E. and W. along the southern base of the Ochils indicates a line of fault or dislocation which abruptly truncates the Lower Old Red volcanic rocks and brings down an important development of Carboniferous strata occupying the southern part of the county. These belong mainly to the Coal-measures and comprise a number of valuable coal-seams which have been extensively worked. The Clackmannan field is the northern continuation of the great Lanarkshire basin which extends northwards by Slamannan, Falkirk and the Carron Ironworks to Alloa. Along the eastern margin between Cairnmuir and Brucefield the underlying Millstone Grit, consisting mainly of false-bedded sandstones, comes to the surface. Close to the river Devon south of Dollar the Vicars Bridge Limestone, which there marks the top of the Carboniferous Limestone series, rises from beneath the Millstone Grit. The structure of the Clackmannan field is interesting. The strata are arranged in synclinal form, the highest seams being found near the Devon ironworks, and they are traversed by a series of parallel east and west faults each with a downthrow to the south, whereby the coals are repeated and the field extended. During mining operations evidence has been obtained of the existence of a buried river-channel, filled with boulder clay and stratified deposits along the course of the Devon, which extends below the present sea-level and points to greater elevation of the land in pre-glacial time. An excellent example of a dolerite dyke trending slightly north of west occurs in the north part of the county where it traverses the volcanic rocks of Lower Old Red Sandstone age.
Industries.—The soil is generally productive and well cultivated, though the greater part of the elevated range which is interposed between the carse lands on the Forth and the vale of Devon at the base of the Ochils on the north consists of inferior soils, often lying upon an impervious clay. Oats are the chief crop, but wheat and barley are profitably grown. Sheep-farming is successfully pursued, the Ochils affording excellent pasturage, and cattle, pigs and horses are also raised. There is a small tract of moorland in the east, called the Forest, bounded on its northern margin by the Black Devon. Iron-ore (haematite), copper, silver, lead, cobalt and arsenic have all been discovered in small quantity in the Ochils, between Alva and Dollar. Ironstone—found either in beds, or in oblate balls embedded in slaty clay, and yielded from 25 to 30% of iron—is mined for the Devon iron-works, near Clackmannan. Coal has been mined for a long period. The strata which compose the field are varieties of sandstone, shale, fire-clay and argillaceous ironstone. There is a heavy continuous output of coal at the mines at Sauchie, Fishcross, Coalsnaughton, Devonside, Clackmannan and other pits. The spinning-mills at Alloa, Tillicoultry and Alva are always busy, Alloa yarns and fingering being widely famous. The distilleries at Glenochil and Carsebridge and the breweries in Alloa and Cambus do a large export business. The minor trades include glass-blowing, pottery, coopering, tanning, iron-founding, electrical apparatus making, ship-building and paper-making.
The north British railway serves the whole county, while the Caledonian has access to Alloa.
Population and Government.—The population was 33,140 in 1891 and 32,029 in 1901, when 170 persons spoke Gaelic and English and one person Gaelic only. The county unites with Kinross-shire in returning one member to parliament. Clackmannan (pop. 1505) is the county town, but Alloa (14,458), Alva (4624), and Tillicoultry (3338) take precedence in population and trade. Menstrie (pop. 898) near Alloa has a large furniture factory and the great distillery of Glenochil. To the north-east of Alloa is the thriving mining village of Sauchie. Clackmannan forms a sheriffdom with Stirling and Dumbarton shires, and a sheriff-substitute sits at Alloa. Most of the schools in the shire are under school-board control, but there are a few voluntary schools, besides an exceptionally well-equipped technical school in Alloa and a well-known academy at Dollar.
See James Wallace, The Sheriffdom of Clackmannan: a Sketch of its History (Edinburgh, 1890); D. Beveridge, Between the Ochils and the Forth (Edinburgh, 1888); John Crawford, Memorials of Alloa (1885); William Gibson, Reminiscences of Dollar, Tillicoultry,
CLACTON-ON-SEA, a watering-place in the Harwich parliamentary division of Essex, England; 71 m. E.N.E. from London by a branch from Colchester of the Great Eastern railway; served also by steamers from London in the summer months. Pop. of urban district (1901) 7456. Clay cliffs of slight altitude rise from the sandy beach and face south-eastward. In the neighbourhood, however, marshes fringe the shore. The church of Great Clacton, at the village 1½ m. inland, is Norman and later, and of considerable interest. Clacton is provided with a pier, promenade and marine parade; and is the seat of various convalescent and other homes.
CLADEL, LÉON (1835-1892), French novelist, was born at Montauban (Tarn-et-Garonne) on the 13th of March 1835. The son of an artisan, he studied law at Toulouse and became a solicitor’s clerk in Paris. He made a reputation in a limited circle by his first book, Les Martyrs ridicules (1862), a novel for which Charles Baudelaire, whose literary disciple Cladel was, wrote a preface. He then returned to his native district of Quercy, where he produced a series of pictures of peasant life in Eral le dompteur (1865), Le Nommé Qouael (1868) and other volumes. Returning to Paris he published the two novels which are generally acknowledged as his best work, Le Bouscassié (1869) and La Fête votive de Saint Bartholomée Porte-glaive (1872). Une Maudite (1876) was judged dangerous to the public morals and cost its author a month’s imprisonment. Other works by Cladel are Les Va-nu-pieds (1873), a volume of short stories; N’a qu’un œil (1882), Urbains et ruraux (1884), Gueux de marque (1887), and the posthumous Juive errante (1897). He died at Sèvres on the 20th of July 1892.
See La Vie de Léon Cladel (Paris, 1905), by his daughter Judith Cladel, containing also an article on Cladel by Edmond Picard, a complete list of his works, and of the critical articles on his work.
CLAFLIN, HORACE BRIGHAM (1811-1885), American merchant, was born in Milford, Massachusetts, on the 18th of December 1811. He was educated at Milford Academy, became a clerk in his father’s store in Milford, and in 1831, with his brother Aaron and his brother-in-law Samuel Daniels, succeeded to his father’s business. In 1832 the firm opened a branch store in Worcester, Mass., and in 1833 Horace B. Claflin and Daniels secured the sole control of this establishment and restricted their dealing to dry goods. In 1843 Claflin removed to New York City and became a member of the firm of Bulkley & Claflin, wholesale dry goods merchants. In 1851 and in 1864 the firm was reorganized, being designated in these respective years as Claflin, Mellin & Company and H.B. Claflin & Company. Under Claflin’s management the business increased so rapidly that the sales for a time after 1865 probably exceeded those of any other mercantile house in the world. Though the firm was temporarily embarrassed at the beginning of the Civil War, on account of its large business interests in the South, and during the financial panic of 1873, the promptness with which Mr Claflin met these crises and paid every dollar of his liabilities greatly increased his reputation for business ability and integrity. He died at Fordham, New York, on the 14th of November 1885.
CLAIRAULT (or Clairaut), ALEXIS CLAUDE (1713-1765), French mathematician, was born on the 13th or 7th of May 1713, at Paris, where his father was a teacher of mathematics. Under his father’s tuition he made such rapid progress in mathematical studies that in his thirteenth year he read before the French Academy an account of the properties of four curves which he had then discovered. When only sixteen he finished a treatise, Recherches sur les courbes à double courbure, which, on its publication in 1731, procured his admission into the Academy of Sciences, although even then he was below the legal age. In 1736, together with Pierre Louis Maupertuis, he took part in the expedition to Lapland, which was undertaken for the purpose of estimating a degree of the meridian, and on his return he published his treatise Théorie de la figure de la terre (1743). In this work he promulgated the theorem, known as “Clairault’s theorem,” which connects the gravity at points on the surface of a rotating ellipsoid with the compression and the centrifugal force at the equator (see Earth, Figure of the). He obtained an ingenious approximate solution of the problem of the three bodies; in 1750 he gained the prize of the St Petersburg Academy for his essay Théorie de la lune; and in 1759 he calculated the perihelion of Halley’s comet. He also detected singular solutions in differential equations of the first order, and of the second and higher degrees. Clairault died at Paris, on the 17th of May 1765.
CLAIRON, LA (1723-1803), French actress, whose real name was Claire Joseph Hippolyte Leris, was born at Condé sur l’Escaut, Hainaut, on the 25th of January 1723, the natural daughter of an army sergeant. In 1736 she made her first stage appearance at the Comédie Italienne, in a small part in Marivaux’s Île des esclaves. After several years in the provinces she returned to Paris. Her life, meanwhile, had been decidedly irregular, even if not to the degree indicated by the libellous pamphlet Histoire de la demoiselle Cronel, dite Frétillon, actrice de la Comédie de Rouen, écrite par elle-même (The Hague, 1746), or to be inferred from the disingenuousness of her own Mémoires d’Hippolyte Clairon (1798); and she had great difficulty in obtaining an order to make her début at the Comédie Française. Succeeding, however, at last, she had the courage to select the title-rôle of Phèdre (1743), and she obtained a veritable triumph. During her twenty-two years at this theatre, dividing the honours with her rival Mlle Dumesnil, she filled many of the classical rôles of tragedy, and created a great number of parts in the plays of Voltaire, Marmontel, Saurin, de Belloy and others. She retired in 1766, and trained pupils for the stage, among them Mlle Raucourt. Goldsmith called Mlle Clairon “the most perfect female figure I have ever seen on any stage” (The Bee, 2nd No.); and Garrick, while recognizing her unwillingness or inability to make use of the inspiration of the instant, admitted that “she has everything that art and a good understanding with great natural spirit can give her.”
CLAIRVAUX, a village of north-eastern France, in the department of Aube, 40 m. E.S.E. of Troyes on the Eastern railway to Belfort. Clairvaux (Clara Vallis) is situated in the valley of the Aube on the eastern border of the Forest of Clairvaux. Its celebrity is due to the abbey founded in 1115 by St Bernard, which became the centre of the Cistercian order. The buildings (see Abbey) belong for the most part to the 18th century, but there is a large storehouse which dates from the 12th century. The abbey, suppressed at the Revolution, now serves as a prison, containing on an average 800 inmates, who are employed in agricultural and industrial occupations. Clairvaux has iron-works of some importance.
CLAIRVOYANCE (Fr. for “clear-seeing”), a technical term in psychical research, properly equivalent to lucidity, a supernormal power of obtaining knowledge in which no part is played by (a) the ordinary processes of sense-perception or (b) supernormal communication with other intelligences, incarnate, or discarnate. The word is also used, sometimes qualified by the word telepathic, to mean the power of gaining supernormal knowledge from the mind of another (see Telepathy). It is further commonly used by spiritualists to mean the power of seeing spirit forms, or, more vaguely, of discovering facts by some supernormal means.
Lucidity.—Few experiments have been made to test the existence of this faculty. If communications from discarnate minds are regarded as possible, there are no means of distinguishing facts obtained in this way from facts obtained by independent clairvoyance. In practice no evidence has been obtained pointing to the possession by a discarnate spirit of knowledge not possessed by any living person (see Medium). As explanation of the few successful experiments in independent clairvoyance we have the choice of three explanations: (1) lucidity; (2) telepathy from living persons; (3) hyperaesthesia. The second possibility was overlooked in Richet’s diagram experiments; it cannot be assumed that a picture put into an envelope and not consciously recalled has been in reality forgotten. Similarly the clairvoyant diagnosis of diseases may depend on knowledge gained telepathically from the patient, who may be subliminally aware of diseased states of the body. The most elaborate experiments are by Prof. Richet with a hypnotized subject who succeeded in naming twelve cards out of sixty-eight. But no precautions were taken against hyperaesthesia further than enclosing the card in a second envelope. There is a power possessed by a certain number of people, of naming a card drawn by them or held in the hand face downwards, so that there is no normal knowledge of its suit and number. Few thorough trials have been made; but it seems to point to some kind of hyperaesthesia rather than to clairvoyance; in the Richet experiments even if the envelopes excluded hyperaesthesia of touch on the part of the medium, there may have been subliminal knowledge on Prof. Richet’s part of the card which he put in the envelope. The experience known as the déjà vu has sometimes been explained as due to clairvoyance.
Telepathic Clairvoyance.—For a discussion of this see Telepathy and Crystal-gazing. It may be noted here that some curious relation seems to exist between apparently telepathic acquisition of knowledge and the arrival of a letter, newspaper, &c, from which the same knowledge could be directly gained. We are confronted with a similar problem in attempting an explanation of the power of mediums to state correctly facts relating to objects placed in their hands. Of a somewhat different character is retrocognition (q.v.), where the knowledge in many cases, if telepathic, must be derived from a discarnate mind.
Clairvoyance, as a term of spiritualism, with its correlative clairaudience, is the name given to the power of seeing and hearing discarnate spirits of dead relatives and others, with whom the living are said to be surrounded. More vaguely it includes the power of gaining knowledge, either through the spirit world or by means of psychometry (i.e. the supernormal acquisition of knowledge about owners of objects, writers of letters, &c). Some evidence for these latter powers has been accumulated by the Society for Psychical Research, but in many cases the piecing together of normally acquired knowledge, together with shrewd guessing, suffices to explain the facts, especially where the investigator has had no special training for his task.
See Richet, Experimentelle Studien (1891); also in Proc. S.P.R. vi. 66. For a criticism see N.W. Thomas, Thought Transference, pp. 44-48. For Clairvoyance in general see F.W.H. Myers, Human Personality, and in Proc. S.P.R. xi. 334 et seq. For a criticism of the evidence see Mrs Sidgwick in Proc. S.P.R. vii. 30, 356.
(N. W. T.)
CLAMECY, a town of central France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Nièvre, at the confluence of the Yonne and Beuvron and on the Canal du Nivernais, 46 m. N.N.E. of Nevers on the Paris-Lyon railway. Pop. (1906) 4455. Its principal building is the church of St Martin, which dates chiefly from the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. The tower and façade are of the 16th century. The chevet, which is surrounded by an aisle, is rectangular—a feature found in few French churches. Of the old castle of the counts of Nevers, vaulted cellars alone remain. A church in the suburb of Bethlehem, dating from the 12th and 13th centuries, now serves as part of an hotel. The public institutions include the sub-prefecture, tribunals of first instance and of commerce and a communal college. Among the industrial establishments are saw-mills, fulling-mills and flour-mills, tanneries and manufactories of boots and shoes and chemicals; and there is considerable trade in wine and cattle and in wood and charcoal, which is conveyed principally to Paris, by way of the Yonne.
In the early middle ages Clamecy belonged to the abbey of St Julian at Auxerre; in the 11th century it passed to the counts of Nevers, one of whom, Hervé, enfranchised the inhabitants in 1213. After the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1188, Clamecy became the seat of the bishops of Bethlehem, who till the Revolution resided in the hospital of Panthenor, bequeathed by William IV., count of Nevers. On the coup d’état of 1851 an insurrection broke out in the town, and was repressed by the new authorities with great severity.
CLAN (Gaelic clann, O. Ir. cland, connected with Lat. planta, shoot or scion, the ancient Gaelic or Goidelic substituting k for p), a group of people united by common blood, and usually settled in a common habitat. The clan system existed in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland from early times. In its strictest sense the system was peculiar to those countries, but, in its wider meaning of a group of kinsmen forming a self-governing community, the system as represented by the village community has been shown by Sir H. Maine and others to have existed at one time or another in all lands.
Before the use of surnames and elaborate written genealogies, a tribe in its definite sense was called in Celtic a tuath, a word of wide affinities, from a root tu, to grow, to multiply, existing in all European languages. When the tribal system began to be broken up by conquest and by the rise of towns and of territorial government, the use of a common surname furnished a new bond for keeping up a connexion between kindred. The head of a tribe or smaller group of kindred selected some ancestor and called himself his Ua, grandson, or as it has been anglicized O’, e.g. Ua Conchobair (O’ Conor), Ua Suilleabhain (O’Sullivan). All his kindred adopted the same name, the chief using no fore-name however. The usual mode of distinguishing a person before the introduction of surnames was to name his father and grandfather, e.g. Owen, son of Donal, son of Dermot. This naturally led some to form their surnames with Mac, son, instead of Ua, grandson, e.g. MacCarthaigh, son of Carthach (MacCarthy), MacRuaidhri, son of Rory (Macrory). Both methods have been followed in Ireland, but in Scotland Mac came to be exclusively used. The adoption of such genealogical surnames fostered the notion that all who bore the same surname were kinsmen, and hence the genealogical term clann, which properly means the descendants of some progenitor, gradually became synonymous with tuath, tribe. Like all purely genealogical terms, clann may be used in the limited sense of a particular tribe governed by a chief, or in that of many tribes claiming descent from a common ancestor. In the latter sense it was synonymous with síl, siol, seed e.g. Siol Alpine, a great clan which included the smaller clans of the Macgregors, Grants, Mackinnons, Macnabs, Macphies, Macquarries and Macaulays.
The clan system in the most archaic form of which we have any definite information can be best studied in the Irish tuath, or tribe. This consisted of two classes: (1) tribesmen, and (2) a miscellaneous class of slaves, criminals, strangers and their descendants. The first class included tribesmen by blood in the male line, including all illegitimate children acknowledged by their fathers, and tribesmen by adoption or sons of tribeswomen by strangers, foster-sons, men who had done some signal service to the tribe, and lastly the descendants of the second class after a certain number of generations. Each tuath had a chief called a ríg, king, a word cognate with the Gaulish ríg-s or rix, the Latin reg-s or rex, and the Old Norse rik-ir. The tribesmen formed a number of communities, each of which, like the tribe itself, consisted of a head, ceann fine, his kinsmen, slaves and other retainers. This was the fine, or sept. Each of these occupied a certain part of the tribe-land, the arable part being cultivated under a system of co-tillage, the pasture land co-grazed according to certain customs, and the wood, bog and mountains forming the marchland of the sept being the unrestricted common land of the sept. The sept was in fact a village community.
What the sept was to the tribe, the homestead was to the sept. The head of a homestead was an aire, a representative freeman capable of acting as a witness, compurgator and bail. These were very important functions, especially when it is borne in mind that the tribal homestead was the home of many of the kinsfolk of the head of the family as well as of his own children. The descent of property being according to a gavel-kind custom, it constantly happened that when an aire died the share of his property which each member of his immediate family was entitled to receive was not sufficient to qualify him to be an aire. In this case the family did not divide the inheritance, but remained together as “a joint and undivided family,” one of the members being elected chief of the family or household, and in this capacity enjoyed the rights and privileges of an aire. Sir H.S. Maine directed attention to this kind of family as an important feature of the early institutions of all Indo-European nations. Beside the “joint and undivided family,” there was another kind of family which we might call “the joint family.” This was a partnership composed of three or four members of a sept whose individual wealth was not sufficient to qualify each of them to be an aire, but whose joint wealth qualified one of the co-partners as head of the joint family to be one.
So long as there was abundance of land each family grazed its cattle upon the tribe-land without restriction; unequal increase of wealth and growth of population naturally led to its limitation, each head of a homestead being entitled to graze an amount of stock in proportion to his wealth, the size of his homestead, and his acquired position. The arable land was no doubt applotted annually at first; gradually, however, some of the richer families of the tribe succeeded in evading this exchange of allotments and converting part of the common land into an estate in sevralty. Septs were at first colonies of the tribe which settled on the march-land; afterwards the conversion of part of the common land into an estate in sevralty enabled the family that acquired it to become the parent of a new sept. The same process might, however, take place within a sept without dividing it; in other words, several members of the sept might hold part of the land of the sept as separate estate. The possession of land in sevralty introduced an important distinction into the tribal system—it created an aristocracy. An aire whose family held the same land for three generations was called a flaith, or lord, of which rank there were several grades according to their wealth in land and chattels. The aires whose wealth consisted in cattle only were called bó-aires, or cow-aires, of whom there were also several grades, depending on their wealth in stock. When a bó-aire had twice the wealth of the lowest class of flaith he might enclose part of the land adjoining his house as a lawn; this was the first step towards his becoming a flaith. The relations which subsisted between the flaiths and the bó-aires formed the most curious part of the Celtic tribal system, and throw a flood of light on the origin of the feudal system. Every tribesman without exception owed ceilsinne to the ríg, or chief, that is, he was bound to become his ceile, or vassal. This consisted in paying the ríg a tribute in kind, for which the ceile was entitled to receive a proportionate amount of stock without having to give any bond for their return, giving him service, e.g. in building his dun, or stronghold, reaping his harvest, keeping his roads clean and in repair, killing wolves, and especially service in the field, and doing him homage three times while seated every time he made his return of tribute. Paying the “calpe” to the Highland chiefs represented this kind of vassalage, a colpdach or heifer being in many cases the amount of food-rent paid by a free or saer ceile. A tribesman might, however, if he pleased, pay a higher rent on receiving more stock together with certain other chattels for which no rent was chargeable. In this case he entered into a contract, and was therefore a bond or daer ceile. No one need have accepted stock on these terms, nor could he do so without the consent of his sept, and he might free himself at any time from his obligation by returning what he had received, and the rent due thereon.
What every one was bound to do to his ríg, or chief, he might do voluntarily to the flaith of his sept, to any flaith of the tribe, or even to one of another tribe. He might also become a bond ceile. In either case he might renounce his ceileship by returning a greater or lesser amount of stock than what he had received according to the circumstances under which he terminated his vassalage. In cases of disputed succession to the chiefship of a tribe the rival claimants were always anxious to get as many as possible to become their vassals. Hence the anxiety of minor chieftains, in later times in the Highlands of Scotland, to induce the clansmen to pay the “calpe” where there happened to be a doubt as to who was entitled to be chief.
The effect of the custom of gavel-kind was to equalize the wealth of each and leave no one wealthy enough to be chief. The “joint and undivided family” and the formation of “joint families,” or gilds, was one way of obviating this result; another way was the custom of tanistry. The headship of the tribe was practically confined to the members of one family; this was also the case with the headship of a sept. Sometimes a son succeeded his father, but the rule was that the eldest and most capable member of the geilfine, that is, the relatives of the actual chief to the fifth degree, was selected during his lifetime to be his successor—generally the eldest surviving brother or son of the preceding chief. The man selected as successor to a chief of a tribe, or chieftain of a sept, was called the tanist, and should be “the most experienced, the most noble, the most wealthy, the wisest, the most learned, the most truly popular, the most powerful to oppose, the most steadfast to sue for profits and (be sued) for losses.” In addition to these qualities he should be free from personal blemishes and deformities and of fit age to lead his tribe or sept, as the case may be, to battle. So far as selecting the man of the geilfine who was supposed to possess all those qualities, the office of chief of a tribe or chieftain of a sept was elective, but as the geilfine was represented by four persons, together with the chief or chieftain, the election was practically confined to one of the four. In order to support the dignity of the chief or chieftain a certain portion of the tribe or sept land was attached as an apanage to the office; this land, with the duns or fortified residences upon it, went to the successor, but a chief’s own property might be gavelled. This custom of tanistry applied at first probably to the selection of the successors of a ríg, but was gradually so extended that even a bó-aire had a tanist.
A sept might have only one flaith, or lord, connected with it, or might have several. It sometimes happened, however, that a sept might be so broken and reduced as not to have even one man qualified to rank as a flaith. The rank of a flaith depended upon the number of his ceiles, that is, upon his wealth. The flaith of a sept, and the highest when there was more than one, was ceann fine, or head of the sept, or as he was usually called in Scotland, the chieftain. He was also called the flaith geilfine, or head of the geilfine, that is, the kinsmen to the fifth degree from among whom should be chosen the tanist, and who, according to the custom of gavel-kind, were the immediate heirs who received the personal property and were answerable for the liabilities of the sept. The flaiths of the different septs were the vassals of the ríg, or chief of the tribe, and performed certain functions which were no doubt at first individual, but in time became the hereditary right of the sept. One of those was the office of maer, or steward of the chief’s rents, &c.; and another that of aire tuisi, leading aire, or taoisech, a word cognate with the Latin duc-s or dux, and Anglo-Saxon here-tog, leader of the “here,” or army. The taoisech was leader of the tribe in battle; in later times the term seems to have been extended to several offices of rank. The cadet of a Highland clan was always called the taoisech, which has been translated captain; after the conquest of Wales the same term, tywysaug, was used for a ruling prince. Slavery was very common in Ireland and Scotland; in the former slaves constituted a common element in the stipends or gifts which the higher kings gave their vassal sub-reguli. Female slaves, who were employed in the houses of chiefs and flaiths in grinding meal with the hand-mill or quern, and in other domestic work, must have been very common, for the unit or standard for estimating the wealth of a bó-aire, blood-fines, &c., was called a cumhal, the value of which was three cows, but which literally meant a female slave. The descendants of those slaves, prisoners of war, forfeited hostages, refugees from other tribes, broken tribesmen, &c., gathered round the residence of the ríg and flaiths, or squatted upon their march-lands, forming a motley band of retainers which made a considerable element in the population, and one of the chief sources of the wealth of chiefs and flaiths. The other principal source of their income was the food-rent paid by ceiles, and especially by the daer or bond ceiles, who were hence called biathachs, from biad, food. A flaith, but not a ríg, might, if he liked, go to the house of his ceile and consume his food-rent in the house of the latter.
Under the influence of feudal ideas and the growth of the modern views as to ownership of land, the chiefs and other lords of clans claimed in modern times the right of best owing the tribe-land as turcrec, instead of stock, and receiving rent not for cattle and other chattels as in former times, but proportionate to the extent of land given to them. The turcrec-land seems to have been at first given upon the same terms as turcrec-stock, but gradually a system of short leases grew up; sometimes, too, it was given on mortgage. In the Highlands of Scotland ceiles who received turcrec-land were called “taksmen.” On the death of the chief or lord, his successor either bestowed the land upon the same person or gave it to some other relative. In this way in each generation new families came into possession of land, and others sank into the mass of mere tribesmen. Sometimes a “taksman” succeeded in acquiring his land in perpetuity, by gift, marriage or purchase, or even by the “strong hand.” The universal prevalence of exchangeable allotments, or the rundale system, shows that down to even comparatively modern times some of the land was still recognized as the property of the tribe, and was cultivated in village communities.
The chief governed the clan by the aid of a council called the sabaid (sab, a prop), but the chief exercised much power, especially over the miscellaneous body of non-tribesmen who lived on his own estate. This power seems to have extended to life and death. Several of the flaiths, perhaps, all heads of septs, also possessed somewhat extensive powers of the same kind.
The Celtic dress, at least in the middle ages, consisted of a kind of shirt reaching to a little below the knees called a lenn, a jacket called an inar, and a garment called a brat, consisting of a single piece of cloth. This was apparently the garb of the aires, who appear to have been further distinguished by the number of colours in their dress, for we are told that while a slave had clothes of one colour, a rég tuatha, or chief of a tribe, had five, and an ollamh and a superior king six. The breeches was also known, and cloaks with a cowl or hood, which buttoned up tight in front. The lenn is the modern kilt, and the brat the plaid, so that the dress of the Irish and Welsh in former times was the same as that of the Scottish Highlander.
By the abolition of the heritable jurisdiction of the Highland chiefs, and the general disarmament of the clans by the acts passed in 1747 after the rebellion of 1745, the clan system was practically broken up, though its influence still lingers in the more remote districts. An act was also passed in 1747 forbidding the use of the Highland garb; but the injustice and impolicy of such a law being generally felt it was afterwards repealed.
(W. K. S.)
The following account of the Irish clan-system differs in some respects from that in the article on Brehon Laws (q.v.); but it is retained here in view of the authority of the writer and the admitted obscurity of the whole subject.
(ED. E. B.)
The explanation here given of geilfine is different from that given in the introduction to the third volume of the Ancient Laws of Ireland, which was followed by Sir H.S. Maine in his account of it in his Early History of Institutions, and which the present writer believes to be erroneous.
It should also be mentioned that illegitimacy was not a bar. The issue of “handfast” marriages in Scotland were eligible to be chiefs, and even sometimes claimed under feudal law.
This office is of considerable importance in connexion with early Scottish history. In the Irish annals the ríg, or chief of a great tribe (mor tuath), such as of Ross, Moray, Marr, Buchan, &c., is called a mor maer, or great maer. Sometimes the same person is called king also in these annals. Thus Findlaec, or Finlay, son of Ruadhri, the father of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, is called king of Moray in the Annals of Ulster, and mor maer in the Annals of Tighernach. The term is never found in Scottish charters, but it occurs in the Book of the Abbey of Deir in Buchan, now in the library of the university of Cambridge. The Scotic kings and their successors obviously regarded the chiefs of the great tribes in question merely as their maers, while their tribesmen only knew them as kings. From these “mor-maerships,” which corresponded with the ancient mor tuatha, came most, if not all, the ancient Scottish earldoms.
CLANRICARDE, ULICK DE BURGH (Bourke or Burke), 1st Earl of (d. 1544), styled MacWilliam, and Ne-gan or Na-gCeann (i.e. “of the Heads,” “having made a mount of the heads of men slain in battle which he covered up with earth”), was the son of Richard or Rickard de Burgh, lord of Clanricarde, by a daughter of Madden of Portumna, and grandson of Ulick de Burgh, lord of Clanricarde (1467-1487), the collateral heir male of the earls of Ulster. On the death of the last earl in 1333, his only child Elizabeth had married Lionel, duke of Clarence, and the earldom became merged in the crown, in consequence of which the de Burghs abjured English laws and sovereignty, and chose for their chiefs the sons of Sir William, the “Red” earl of Ulster’s brother, the elder William taking the title of MacWilliam Eighter (Uachtar, i.e. Upper), and becoming the ancestor of the earls of Clanricarde, and his brother Sir Edmond that of MacWilliam Oughter (Ochtar, i.e. Lower), and founding the family of the earls of Mayo. In 1361 the duke of Clarence was sent over as lord-lieutenant to Ireland to enforce his claims as husband of the heir general, but failed, and the chiefs of the de Burghs maintained their independence of English sovereignty for several generations. Ulick de Burgh succeeded to the headship of his clan, exercised a quasi-royal authority and held vast estates in county Galway, in Connaught, including Loughry, Dunkellin, Kiltartan (Hilltaraght) and Athenry, as well as Clare and Leitrim. In March 1541, however, he wrote to Henry VIII., lamenting the degeneracy of his family, “which have been brought to Irish and disobedient rule by reason of marriage and nurseing with those Irish, sometime rebels, near adjoining to me,” and placing himself and his estates in the king’s hands. The same year he was present at Dublin, when the act was passed making Henry VIII. king of Ireland. In 1543, in company with other Irish chiefs, he visited the king at Greenwich, made full submission, undertook to introduce English manners and abandon Irish names, received a regrant of the greater part of his estates with the addition of other lands, was confirmed in the captainship and rule of Clanricarde, and was created on the 1st of July 1543 earl of Clanricarde and baron of Dunkellin in the peerage of Ireland, with unusual ceremony. “The making of McWilliam earl of Clanricarde made all the country during his time quiet and obedient,” states Lord Chancellor Cusake in his review of the state of Ireland in 1553. He did not live long, however, to enjoy his new English dignities, but died shortly after returning to Ireland about March 1544. He is called by the annalist of Loch Cé “a haughty and proud lord,” who reduced many under his yoke, and by the Four Masters “the most illustrious of the English in Connaught.”
Clanricarde married (1) Grany or Grace, daughter of Mulrone O’Carroll, “prince of Ely,” by whom he had Richard or Rickard “the Saxon,” who succeeded him as 2nd earl of Clanricarde (grandfather of the 4th earl, whose son became marquess of Clanricarde), this alliance being the only one declared valid. After parting with his first wife he married (2) Honora, sister of Ulick de Burgh, from whom he also parted. He married (3) Mary Lynch, by whom he had John, who claimed the earldom in 1568. Other sons, according to Burke’s Peerage, were Thomas “the Athlete,” shot in 1545, Redmond “of the Broom” (d. 1595), and Edmund (d. 1597).
See also Annals of Ireland by the Four Masters (ed. by O. Connellan, 1846), p. 132 note, and reign of Henry VIII.; Annals of Loch Cé (Rerum Brit. Medii Aevi Scriptores) (54) (1871); Hist. Mem. of the O’Briens, by J.O. Donoghue (i860), pp 159, 519; Ireland under the Tudors, by R. Bagwell, vol. i.; State Papers, Ireland, Carew MSS. and Gairdner’s Letters and Papers of Henry VIII.; Cotton MSS. Brit. Mus., Titus B xi. f. 388.
(P. C. Y.)
Cal. of State Pap., Carew MSS. 1515-1574, p. 246.
CLANRICARDE, ULICK DE BURGH (Bourke or Burke), Marquess of (1604-1657 or 1658), son of Richard, 4th earl of Clanricarde, created in 1628 earl of St Albans, and of Frances, daughter and heir of Sir Francis Walsingham, and widow of Sir Philip Sidney and of Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, was born in 1604. He was summoned to the House of Lords as Lord Burgh in 1628, and succeeded his father as 5th earl in 1635. He sat in the Short Parliament of 1640 and attended Charles I. in the Scottish expedition. On the outbreak of the Irish rebellion Clanricarde had powerful inducements for joining the Irish—the ancient greatness and independence of his family, his devotion to the Roman Catholic Church, and strongest of all, the ungrateful treatment meted out by Charles I. and Wentworth to his father, one of Elizabeth’s most stanch adherents in Ireland, whose lands were appropriated by the crown and whose death, it was popularly asserted, was hastened by the harshness of the lord-lieutenant. Nevertheless at the crisis his loyalty never wavered. Alone of the Irish Roman Catholic nobility to declare for the king, he returned to Ireland, took up his residence at Portumna, kept Galway, of which he was governor, neutral, and took measures for the defence of the county and for the relief of the Protestants, making “his house and towns a refuge, nay, even a hospital for the distressed English.” In 1643 he was one of the commissioners appointed by the king to confer with the Irish confederates, and urged the wisdom of a cessation of hostilities in a document which he publicly distributed. He was appointed commander of the English forces in Connaught in 1644, and in 1646 was created a marquess and a privy councillor. He supported the same year the treaty between Charles I. and the confederates, and endeavoured after its failure to persuade Preston, the general of the Irish, to agree to a peace; but the latter, being advised by Rinuccini, the papal nuncio, refused in December. Together with Ormonde, Clanricarde opposed the nuncio’s policy; and the royalist inhabitants of Galway having through the latter’s influence rejected the cessation of hostilities, arranged with Lord Inchiquin in 1648, he besieged the town and compelled its acquiescence. In 1649 he reduced Sligo. On Ormonde’s departure in December 1650 Clanricarde was appointed deputy lord-lieutenant, but he was not trusted by the Roman Catholics, and was unable to stem the tide of the parliamentary successes. In 1651 he opposed the offer of Charles, duke of Lorraine, to supply money and aid on condition of being acknowledged “Protector” of the kingdom. In May 1652 Galway surrendered to the parliament, and in June Clanricarde signed articles with the parliamentary commissioners which allowed his departure from Ireland. In August he was excepted from pardon for life and estate, but by permits, renewed from time to time by the council, he was enabled to remain in England for the rest of his life, and in 1653 £500 a year was settled upon him by the council of state in consideration of the protection which he had given to the Protestants in Ireland at the time of the rebellion. He died at Somerhill in Kent in 1657 or 1658 and was buried at Tunbridge.
The “great earl,” as he was called, supported Ormonde in his desire to unite the English royalists with the more moderate Roman Catholics on the basis of religious toleration under the authority of the sovereign, against the papal scheme advocated by Rinuccini, and in opposition to the parliamentary and Puritan policy. By the author of the Aphorismical Discovery, who represents the opinion of the native Irish, he is denounced as the “masterpiece of the treasonable faction,” “a foe to his king, nation and religion,” and by the duke of Lorraine as “a traitor and a base fellow”; but there is no reason to doubt Clarendon’s opinion of him as “a person of unquestionable fidelity. . . and of the most eminent constancy to the Roman Catholic religion of any man in the three kingdoms,” or the verdict of Hallam, who describes him “as perhaps the most unsullied character in the annals of Ireland.”
He married Lady Anne Compton, daughter of William Compton, 1st earl of Northampton, but had issue only one daughter. On his death, accordingly, the marquessate and the English peerages became extinct, the Irish titles reverting to his cousin Richard, 6th earl, grandson of the 3rd earl of Clanricarde. Henry, the 12th earl (1742-1797), was again created a marquess in 1789, but the marquessate expired at his death without issue, the earldom going to his brother. In 1825 the 14th earl (1802-1874) was created a marquess; he was ambassador at St Petersburg, and later postmaster-general and lord privy seal, and married George Canning’s daughter. His son (b. 1832), who achieved notoriety in the Irish land agitation, succeeded him as 2nd marquess.
Bibliography.—See the article “Burgh, Ulick de,” in the Dict. of Nat. Biography, and authorities there given; Hist. of the Irish Confederation, by R. Bellings, ed. by J.T. Gilbert (1882); Aphorismical Discovery (Irish Archaeological Society, 1879); Memoirs of the Marquis of Clanricarde (1722, repr. 1744); Memoirs of Ulick, Marquis of Clanricarde, by John, 11th earl (1757); Life of Ormonde, by T. Carte (1851); S.R. Gardiner’s Hist. of the Civil War and of the Commonwealth; Thomason Tracts (Brit. Mus.) E 371 (11), 456 (10); Cal. of State Papers, Irish, esp. Introd. 1633-1647 and Domestic; Hist. MSS. Comm., MSS. of Marq. of Ormonde and Earl of Egmont.
(P. C. Y.)
Hist. MSS. Comm.: MSS of Earl of Egmont, i. 223.
CLANVOWE, SIR THOMAS, the name of an English poet first mentioned in the history of English literature by F.S. Ellis in 1896, when, in editing the text of The Book of Cupid, God of Love, or The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, for the Kelmscott Press, he stated that Professor Skeat had discovered that at the end of the best of the MSS. the author was called Clanvowe. In 1897 this information was confirmed and expanded by Professor Skeat in the supplementary volume of his Clarendon Press Chaucer (1894-1897). The beautiful romance of The Cuckoo and the Nightingale was published by Thynne in 1532, and was attributed by him, and by successive editors down to the days of Henry Bradshaw, to Chaucer. It was due to this error that for three centuries Chaucer was supposed to be identified with the manor of Woodstock, and even painted, in fanciful pictures, as lying
“Under a maple that is fair and green,
Before the chamber-window of the Queen
At Wodëstock, upon the greenë lea.”
But this queen could only be Joan of Navarre, who arrived in 1403, three years after Chaucer’s death, and it is to the spring of that year that Professor Skeat attributes the composition of the poem. Sir Thomas Clanvowe was of a Herefordshire family, settled near Wigmore. He was a prominent figure in the courts of Richard II. and Henry IV., and is said to have been a friend of Prince Hal. He was one of those who “had begun to mell of Lollardy, and drink the gall of heresy.” He was one of the twenty-five knights who accompanied John Beaufort (son of John of Gaunt) to Barbary in 1390.
The date of his birth is unknown, and his name is last mentioned in 1404. The historic and literary importance of The Cuckoo and the Nightingale is great. It is the work of a poet who had studied the prosody of Chaucer with more intelligent care than either Occleve or Lydgate, and who therefore forms an important link between the 14th and 15th centuries in English poetry. Clanvowe writes with a surprising delicacy and sweetness, in a five-line measure almost peculiar to himself. Professor Skeat points out a unique characteristic of Clanvowe’s versification, namely, the unprecedented freedom with which he employs the suffix of the final -e, and rather avoids than seeks elision. The Cuckoo and the Nightingale was imitated by Milton in his sonnet to the Nightingale, and was rewritten in modern English by Wordsworth. It is a poem of so much individual beauty, that we must regret the apparent loss of everything else written by a poet of such unusual talent.
See also a critical edition of the Boke of Cupide by Dr Erich Vollmer (Berlin, 1898).
(E. G.)
CLAPARÈDE, JEAN LOUIS RENÉ ANTOINE ÉDOUARD (1832-1870), Swiss naturalist, was born at Geneva on the 24th of April 1832. He belonged to a French family, some members of which had taken refuge in that city after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In 1852 he began to study medicine and natural science at Berlin, where he was greatly influenced by J. Müller and C.G. Ehrenberg, the former being at that period engaged in his important researches on the Echinoderms. In 1855 he accompanied Müller to Norway, and there spent two months on a desolate reef that he might obtain satisfactory observations. The latter part of his stay at Berlin he devoted, along with J. Lachmann, to the study of the Infusoria and Rhizopods. In 1857 he obtained the degree of doctor, and in 1862 he was chosen professor of comparative anatomy at Geneva. In 1859 he visited England, and in company with W.B. Carpenter made a voyage to the Hebrides; and in 1863 he spent some months in the Bay of Biscay. On the appearance of Darwin’s work on the Origin of Species, he adopted his theories and published a valuable series of articles on the subject in the Revue Germanique (1861). During 1865 and 1866 ill-health rendered him incapable of work, and he determined to pass the winter of 1866-1867 in Naples. The change of climate produced some amelioration, and his energy was attested by two elaborate volumes on the Annelidae of the gulf. He again visited Naples with advantage in 1868; but in 1870, instead of recovering as before, he grew worse, and on the 31st of May he died at Siena on his way home. His Recherches sur la structure des annélides sédentaires were published posthumously in 1873.
CLAPPERTON, HUGH (1788-1827), Scottish traveller in West-Central Africa, was born in 1788 at Annan, Dumfriesshire, where his father was a surgeon. He gained some knowledge of practical mathematics and navigation, and at thirteen was apprenticed on board a vessel which traded between Liverpool and North America. After having made several voyages across the Atlantic he was impressed for the navy, in which he soon rose to the rank of midshipman. During the Napoleonic wars he saw a good deal of active service, and at the storming of Port Louis, Mauritius, in November 1810, he was first in the breach and hauled down the French flag. In 1814 he went to Canada, was promoted to the rank of lieutenant, and to the command of a schooner on the Canadian lakes. In 1817, when the flotilla on the lakes was dismantled, he returned home on half-pay.
In 1820 Clapperton removed to Edinburgh, where he made the acquaintance of Walter Oudney, M.D., who aroused in him an interest in African travel. Lieut. G.F. Lyon, R.N., having returned from an unsuccessful attempt to reach Bornu from Tripoli, the British government determined on a second expedition to that country. Dr Oudney was appointed by Lord Bathurst, then colonial secretary, to proceed to Bornu as consul with the object of promoting trade, and Clapperton and Major Dixon Denham (q.v.) were added to the party. From Tripoli, early in 1822, they set out southward to Murzuk, and from this point Clapperton and Oudney visited the Ghat oasis. Kuka, the capital of Bornu, was reached in February 1823, and Lake Chad seen for the first time by Europeans. At Bornu the travellers were well received by the sultan; and after remaining in the country till the 14th of December they again set out for the purpose of exploring the course of the Niger. At Murmur, on the road to Kano, Oudney died (January 1824). Clapperton continued his journey alone through Kano to Sokoto, the capital of the Fula empire, where by order of Sultan Bello he was obliged to stop, though the Niger was only five days’ journey to the west. Worn out with his travel he returned by way of Zaria and Katsena to Kuka, where he again met Denham. The two travellers then set out for Tripoli, reached on the 26th of January 1825. An account of the travels was published in 1826 under the title of Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in the years 1822-1824.
Immediately after his return Clapperton was raised to the rank of commander, and sent out with another expedition to Africa, the sultan Bello of Sokoto having professed his eagerness to open up trade with the west coast. Clapperton landed at Badagry in the Bight of Benin, and started overland for the Niger on the 7th of December 1825, having with him his servant Richard Lander (q.v.), Captain Pearce, R.N., and Dr Morrison, navy surgeon and naturalist. Before the month was out Pearce and Morrison were dead of fever. Clapperton continued his journey, and, passing through the Yoruba country, in January 1826 he crossed the Niger at Bussa, the spot where Mungo Park had died twenty years before. In July he arrived at Kano. Thence he went to Sokoto, intending afterwards to go to Bornu. The sultan, however, detained him, and being seized with dysentery he died near Sokoto on the 13th of April 1827.
Clapperton was the first European to make known from personal observation the semi-civilized Hausa countries, which he visited soon after the establishment of the Sokoto empire by the Fula. In 1829 appeared the Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa, &c, by the late Commander Clapperton, to which was prefaced a biographical sketch of the explorer by his uncle, Lieut.-colonel S. Clapperton. Lander, who had brought back the journal of his master, also published Records of Captain Clapperton’s Last Expedition to Africa . . . with the subsequent Adventures of the Author (2 vols., London, 1830).
CLAQUE (Fr. claquer, to clap the hands), an organized body of professional applauders in the French theatres. The hiring of persons to applaud dramatic performances was common in classical times, and the emperor Nero, when he acted, had his performance greeted by an encomium chanted by five thousand of his soldiers, who were called Angustals. The recollection of this gave the 16th-century French poet, Jean Daurat, an idea which has developed into the modern claque. Buying up a number of tickets for a performance of one of his plays, he distributed them gratuitously to those who promised publicly to express their approbation. It was not, however, till 1820 that a M. Sauton seriously undertook the systematization of the claque, and opened an office in Paris for the supply of claqueurs. By 1830 the claque had become a regular institution. The manager of a theatre sends an order for any number of claqueurs. These people are usually under a chef de claque, whose duty it is to judge where their efforts are needed and to start the demonstration of approval. This takes several forms. Thus there are commissaires, those who learn the piece by heart, and call the attention of their neighbours to its good points between the acts. The rieurs are those who laugh loudly at the jokes. The pleureurs, generally women, feign tears, by holding their handkerchiefs to their eyes. The chatouilleurs keep the audience in a good humour, while the bisseurs simply clap their hands and cry bis! bis! to secure encores.
CLARA, SAINT (1194-1253), foundress of the Franciscan nuns, was born of a knightly family in Assisi in 1194. At eighteen she was so impressed by a sermon of St Francis that she was filled with the desire to devote herself to the kind of life he was leading. She obtained an interview with him, and to test her resolution he told her to dress in penitential sackcloth and beg alms for the poor in the streets of Assisi. Clara readily did this, and Francis, satisfied as to her vocation, told her to come to the Portiuncula arrayed as a bride. The friars met her with lighted candles, and at the foot of the altar Francis shore off her hair, received her vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and invested her with the Franciscan habit, 1212. He placed her for a couple of years in a Benedictine convent in Assisi, until the convent at St Damian’s, close to the town, was ready. Her two younger sisters, and, after her father’s death, her mother and many others joined her, and the Franciscan nuns spread widely and rapidly (see Clares, Poor). The relations of friendship and sympathy between St Clara and St Francis were very close, and there can be no doubt that she was one of the truest heirs of Francis’s inmost spirit. After his death Clara threw herself wholly on the side of those who opposed mitigations in the rule and manner of life, and she was one of the chief upholders of St Francis’s primitive idea of poverty (see Franciscans). She was the close friend of Brother Leo and the other “Companions of St Francis,” and they assisted at her death. For forty years she was abbess at St Damian’s, and the great endeavour of her life was that the rule of the nuns should be purged of the foreign elements that had been introduced, and should become wholly conformable to St Francis’s spirit. She lived just long enough to witness the fulfilment of her great wish, a rule such as she desired being approved by the pope two days before her death on the 11th of August 1253.
The sources for her life are to be found in the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum on the 11th of August, and sketches in such Lives of the Saints as Alban Butler’s. See also Wetzer und Welte, Kirchen-lexicon (2nd ed.), art. “Clara.”
(E. C. B.)
CLARE, the name of a famous English family. The ancestor of this historic house, “which played,” in Freeman’s words, “so great a part alike in England, Wales and Ireland,” was Count Godfrey, eldest of the illegitimate sons of Richard the Fearless, duke of Normandy. His son, Count Gilbert of Brionne, had two sons, Richard, lord of Bienfaite and Orbec, and Baldwin, lord of Le Sap and Meulles, both of whom accompanied the Conqueror to England. Baldwin, known as “De Meulles” or “of Exeter,” received the hereditary shrievalty of Devon with great estates in the West Country, and left three sons, William, Robert and Richard, of whom the first and last were in turn sheriffs of Devon. Richard, known as “de Bienfaite,” or “of Tunbridge,” or “of Clare,” was the founder of the house of Clare.
Richard derived his English appellation from his strongholds at Tunbridge and at Clare, at both of which his castle-mounds still remain. The latter, on the borders of Essex and Suffolk, was the head of his great “honour” which lay chiefly in the eastern counties. Appointed joint justiciar in the king’s absence abroad, he took a leading part in suppressing the revolt of 1075. By his wife, Rohese, daughter of Walter Giffard, through whom great Giffard estates afterwards came to his house, he left five sons and two daughters. Roger was his heir in Normandy, Walter founded Tintern Abbey, Richard was a monk, and Robert, receiving the forfeited fief of the Baynards in the eastern counties, founded, through his son Walter, the house of FitzWalter (extinct 1432), of whom the most famous was Robert FitzWalter, the leader of the barons against King John. Of this house, spoken of by Jordan Fantosme as “Clarreaus,” the Daventrys of Daventry (extinct 1380) and Fawsleys of Fawsley (extinct 1392) were cadets. One of Richard’s two daughters married the famous Walter Tirel.
Gilbert, Richard’s heir in England, held his castle of Tunbridge against William Rufus, but was wounded and captured. Under Henry I., who favoured the Clares, he obtained a grant of Cardigan, and carried his arms into Wales. Dying about 1115, he left four sons, of whom Gilbert, the second, inherited Chepstow, with Nether-Gwent, from his uncle, Walter, the founder of Tintern, and was created earl of Pembroke by Stephen about 1138; he was father of Richard Strongbow, earl of Pembroke (q.v.). The youngest son Baldwin fought for Stephen at the battle of Lincoln (1141) and founded the priories of Bourne and Deeping on lands acquired with his wife. The eldest son Richard, who was slain by the Welsh on his way to Cardigan in 1135 or 1136, left two sons Gilbert and Roger, of whom Gilbert was created earl of Hertfordshire by Stephen.
It was probably because he and the Clares had no interests in Hertfordshire that they were loosely and usually styled the earls of (de) Clare. Dying in 1152, Gilbert was succeeded by his brother Roger, of whom Fitz-Stephen observes that “nearly all the nobles of England were related to the earl of Clare, whose sister, the most beautiful woman in England, had long been desired by the king” (Henry II.). He was constantly fighting the Welsh for his family possessions in Wales and quarrelled with Becket over Tunbridge Castle. In 1173 or 1174 he was succeeded by his son Richard as third earl, whose marriage with Amicia, daughter and co-heir of William, earl of Gloucester, was destined to raise the fortunes of his house to their highest point. He and his son Gilbert were among the “barons of the Charter,” Gilbert, who became fourth earl in 1217, obtained also, early in 1218, the earldom of Gloucester, with its great territorial “Honour,” and the lordship of Glamorgan, in right of his mother; “from this time the house of Clare became the acknowledged head of the baronage.” Gilbert had also inherited through his father his grandmother’s “Honour of St Hilary” and a moiety of the Giffard fief; but the vast possessions of his house were still further swollen by his marriage with a daughter of William (Marshal), earl of Pembroke, through whom his son Richard succeeded in 1245 to a fifth of the Marshall lands including the Kilkenny estates in Ireland. Richard’s successor, Gilbert, the “Red” earl, died in 1295, the most powerful subject in the kingdom.
On his death his earldoms seem to have been somewhat mysteriously deemed to have passed to his widow Joan, daughter of Edward I.; for her second husband, Ralph de Monthermer, was summoned to parliament in right of them from 1299 to 1306. After her death, however, in 1307, Earl Gilbert’s son and namesake was summoned in 1308 as earl of Gloucester and Hertford, though only sixteen. A nephew of Edward II. and brother-in-law of Gaveston, he played a somewhat wavering part in the struggle between the king and the barons. Guardian of the realm in 1311 and regent in 1313, he fell gloriously at Bannockburn (June 24th, 1314), when only twenty-three, rushing on the enemy “like a wild boar, making his sword drunk with their blood.”
The earl was the last of his mighty line, and his vast possessions in England (in over twenty counties), Wales and Ireland fell to his three sisters, of whom Elizabeth, the youngest, wife of John de Burgh, obtained the “Honour of Clare” and transmitted it to her son William de Burgh, 3rd earl of Ulster, whose daughter brought it to Lionel, son of King Edward III., who was thereupon created duke of Clarence, a title associated ever since with the royal house. The “Honour of Clare,” vested in the crown, still preserves a separate existence, with a court and steward of its own.
Clare College, Cambridge, derived its name from the above Elizabeth, “Lady of Clare,” who founded it as Clare Hall in 1347.
Clare County in Ireland derives its name from the family, though whether from Richard Strongbow, or from Thomas de Clare, a younger son, who had a grant of Thomond in 1276, has been deemed doubtful.
Clarenceux King of Arms, an officer of the Heralds’ College, derives his style, through Clarence, from Clare.
See J.H. Round’s Geoffrey de Mandeville, Feudal England, Commune of London, and Peerage Studies; also his “Family of Clare” in Arch. Journ. lvi., and “Origin of Armorial Bearings” in Ib. li.; Parkinson’s “Clarence, the origin and bearers of the title,” in The Antiquary, v.; Clark’s “Lords of Glamorgan” in Arch. Journ. xxxv.; Planche’s “Earls of Gloucester” in Journ. Arch. Assoc. xxvi.; Dugdale’s Baronage, vol. i., and Monasticon Anglicanum; G.E. C[okayne]’s Complete Peerage.
(J. H. R.)
CLARE, JOHN (1793-1864), English poet, commonly known as “the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet,” the son of a farm labourer, was born at Helpstone near Peterborough, on the 13th of July 1793. At the age of seven he was taken from school to tend sheep and geese; four years later he began to work on a farm, attending in the winter evenings a school where he is said to have learnt some algebra. He then became a pot-boy in a public-house and fell in love with Mary Joyce, but her father, a prosperous farmer, forbade her to meet him. Subsequently he was gardener at Burghley Park. He enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with gipsies, and worked as a lime burner in 1817, but in the following year he was obliged to accept parish relief. Clare had bought a copy of Thomson’s Seasons out of his scanty earnings and had begun to write poems. In 1819 a bookseller at Stamford, named Drury, lighted on one of Clare’s poems, The Setting Sun, written on a scrap of paper enclosing a note to his predecessor in the business. He befriended the author and introduced his poems to the notice of John Taylor, of the publishing firm of Taylor & Hussey, who issued the Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820. This book was highly praised, and in the next year his Village Minstrel and other Poems were published. He was greatly patronized; fame, in the shape of curious visitors, broke the tenor of his life, and the convivial habits that he had formed were indulged more freely. He had married in 1820, and an annuity of 15 guineas from Lord Exeter, in whose service he had been, was supplemented by subscription, and he became possessed of £45 annually, a sum far beyond what he had ever earned, but new wants made his income insufficient, and in 1823 he was nearly penniless. The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827) met with little success, which was not increased by his hawking it himself. As he worked again on the fields his health temporarily improved; but he soon became seriously ill. Lord Fitzwilliam presented him with a new cottage and a piece of ground, but Clare could not settle in his new home. Gradually his mind gave way. His last and best work, the Rural Muse (1835), was noticed by “Christopher North” alone. He had for some time shown symptoms of insanity; and in July 1837 he was removed to a private asylum, and afterwards to the Northampton general lunatic asylum, where he died on the 20th of May 1864. Clare’s descriptions of rural scenes show a keen and loving appreciation of nature, and his love-songs and ballads charm by their genuine feeling; but his vogue was no doubt largely due to the interest aroused by his humble position in life.
See the Life of John Clare, by Frederick Martin (1865); and Life and Remains of John Clare, by J.L. Cherry (1873), which, though not so complete, contains some of the poet’s asylum verses and prose fragments.
CLARE, JOHN FITZGIBBON, 1st Earl of (1749-1802), lord chancellor of Ireland, was the second son of John Fitzgibbon, who had abandoned the Roman Catholic faith in order to pursue a legal career. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was highly distinguished as a classical scholar, and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated in 1770. In 1772 he was called to the Irish bar, and quickly acquired a very lucrative practice; he also inherited his father’s large fortune on the death of his elder brother. In 1778 he entered the Irish House of Commons as member for Dublin University, and at first gave a general support to the popular party led by Henry Grattan (q.v.). He was, however, from the first hostile to that part of Grattan’s policy which aimed at removing the disabilities of the Roman Catholics; he endeavoured to impede the Relief Bill of 1778 by raising difficulties about its effect on the Act of Settlement. He especially distrusted the priests, and many years later explained that his life-long resistance to all concession to the Catholics was based on his “unalterable opinion” that “a conscientious Popish ecclesiastic never will become a well-attached subject to a Protestant state, and that the Popish clergy must always have a commanding influence on every member of that communion.” As early as 1780 Fitzgibbon began to separate himself from the popular or national party, by opposing Grattan’s declaration of the Irish parliament’s right to independence. There is no reason to suppose that in this change of view he was influenced by corrupt or personal motives. His cast of mind naturally inclined to authority rather than to democratic liberty; his hostility to the Catholic claims, and his distrust of parliamentary reform as likely to endanger the connexion of Ireland with Great Britain, made him a sincere opponent of the aims which Grattan had in view. In reply, however, to a remonstrance from his constituents Fitzgibbon promised to support Grattan’s policy in the future, and described the claim of Great Britain to make laws for Ireland as “a daring usurpation of the rights of a free people.”
For some time longer there was no actual breach between him and Grattan. Grattan supported the appointment of Fitzgibbon as attorney-general in 1783, and in 1785 the latter highly eulogized Grattan’s character and services to the country in a speech in which he condemned Flood’s volunteer movement. He also opposed Flood’s Reform Bill of 1784; and from this time forward he was in fact the leading spirit in the Irish government, and the stiffest opponent of all concession to popular demands. In 1784 the permanent committee of revolutionary reformers in Dublin, of whom Napper Tandy was the most conspicuous, invited the sheriffs of counties to call meetings for the election of delegates to attend a convention for the discussion of reform; and when the sheriff of the county of Dublin summoned a meeting for this purpose Fitzgibbon procured his imprisonment for contempt of court, and justified this procedure in parliament, though Lord Erskine declared it grossly illegal. In the course of the debates on Pitt’s commercial propositions in 1785, which Fitzgibbon supported in masterly speeches, he referred to Curran in terms which led to a duel between the two lawyers, when Fitzgibbon was accused of a deliberation in aiming at his opponent that was contrary to etiquette. His antagonism to Curran was life-long and bitter, and after he became chancellor his hostility to the famous advocate was said to have driven the latter out of practice. In January 1787 Fitzgibbon introduced a stringent bill for repressing the Whiteboy outrages. It was supported by Grattan, who, however, procured the omission of a clause enacting that any Roman Catholic chapel near which an illegal oath had been tendered should be immediately demolished. His influence with the majority in the Irish parliament defeated Pitt’s proposed reform of the tithe system in Ireland, Fitzgibbon refusing even to grant a committee to investigate the subject. On the regency question in 1789 Fitzgibbon, in opposition to Grattan, supported the doctrine of Pitt in a series of powerful speeches which proved him a great constitutional lawyer; he intimated that the choice for Ireland might in certain eventualities rest between complete separation from England and legislative union; and, while he exclaimed as to the latter alternative, “God forbid that I should ever see that day!” he admitted that separation would be the worse evil of the two.
In the same year Lord Lifford resigned the chancellorship, and Fitzgibbon was appointed in his place, being raised to the peerage as Baron Fitzgibbon. His removal to the House of Lords greatly increased his power. In the Commons, though he had exercised great influence as attorney-general, his position had been secondary; in the House of Lords and in the privy council he was little less than despotic. “He was,” says Lecky, “by far the ablest Irishman who had adopted without restriction the doctrine that the Irish legislature must be maintained in a condition of permanent and unvarying subjection to the English executive.” But the English ministry were now embarking on a policy of conciliation in Ireland. The Catholic Relief Bill of 1793 was forced on the Irish executive by the cabinet in London, but it passed rapidly and easily through the Irish parliament. Lord Fitzgibbon, while accepting the bill as inevitable under the circumstances that had arisen, made a most violent though exceedingly able speech against the principle of concession, which did much to destroy the conciliatory effect of the measure; and as a consequence of this act he began persistently to urge the necessity for a legislative union. From this date until the union was carried, the career of Fitzgibbon is practically the history of Ireland. True to his inveterate hostility to the popular claims, he was opposed to the appointment of Lord Fitzwilliam (q.v.) as viceroy in 1795, and was probably the chief influence in procuring his recall; and it was Fitzgibbon who first put it into the head of George III. that the king would violate his coronation oath if he consented to the admission of Catholics to parliament. When Lord Camden, Fitzwilliam’s successor in the viceroyalty, arrived in Dublin on the 31st of March 1795, Fitzgibbon’s carriage was violently assaulted by the mob, and he himself was wounded; and in the riots that ensued his house was also attacked. But as if to impress upon the Catholics the hopelessness of their case, the government who had made Fitzgibbon a viscount immediately after his attack on the Catholics in 1793 now bestowed on him a further mark of honour. In June 1795 he was created earl of Clare. On the eve of the rebellion he warned the government that while emancipation and reform might be the objects aimed at by the better classes, the mass of the disaffected had in view “the separation of the country from her connexion with Great Britain, and a fraternal alliance with the French Republic.” Clare advocated stringent measures to prevent an outbreak; but he was neither cruel nor immoderate, and was inclined to mercy in dealing with individuals. He attempted to save Lord Edward Fitzgerald (q.v.) from his fate by giving a friendly warning to his friends, and promising to facilitate his escape from the country; and Lord Edward’s aunt, Lady Louisa Conolly, who was conducted to his death-bed in prison by the chancellor in person, declared that “nothing could exceed Lord Clare’s kindness.” His moderation and humanity after the rebellion was extolled by Cornwallis. He threw his great influence on the side of clemency, and it was through his intervention that Oliver Bond, when sentenced to death, was reprieved; and that an arrangement was made by which Arthur O’Connor, Thomas Emmet and other state prisoners were allowed to leave the country.
In October 1798 Lord Clare, who since 1793 had been convinced of the necessity for a legislative union if the connexion between Great Britain and Ireland was to be maintained, and who was equally determined that the union must be unaccompanied by Catholic emancipation, crossed to England and successfully pressed his views on Pitt. In 1799 he induced the Irish House of Lords to throw out a bill for providing a permanent endowment of Maynooth. On the 10th of February 1800 Clare in the House of Lords moved the resolution approving the union in a long and powerful speech, in which he reviewed the history of Ireland since the Revolution, attributing the evils of recent years to the independent constitution of 1782, and speaking of Grattan in language of deep personal hatred. He was not aware of the assurance which Cornwallis had been authorized to convey to the Catholics that the union was to pave the way for emancipation, and when he heard of it after the passing of the act he bitterly complained that Pitt and Castlereagh had deceived him. After the union Clare became more violent than ever in his opposition to any policy of concession in Ireland. He died on the 28th of January 1802; his funeral in Dublin was the occasion of a riot organized “by a gang of about fourteen persons under orders of a leader.” His wife, in compliance with his death-bed request, destroyed all his papers. His two sons, John (1792-1851) and Richard Hobart (1793-1864), succeeded in turn to the earldom, which became extinct on the death of the latter, whose only son, John Charles Henry, Viscount Fitzgibbon (1829-1854), was killed in the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava.
Lord Clare was in private life an estimable and even an amiable man; many acts of generosity are related of him; the determination of his character swayed other wills to his purpose, and his courage was such as no danger, no obloquy, no public hatred or violence could disturb. Though not a great orator like Flood or Grattan, he was a skilful and ready debater, and he was by far the ablest Irish supporter of the union. He was, however, arrogant, overbearing and intolerant to the last degree. He was the first Irishman since the Revolution to hold the office of lord chancellor of Ireland. “Except where his furious personal antipathies and his ungovernable arrogance were called into action, he appears to have been,” says Lecky, “an able, upright and energetic judge”; but as a politician there can be little question that Lord Clare’s bitter and unceasing resistance to reasonable measures of reform did infinite mischief in the history of Ireland, by inflaming the passions of his countrymen, driving them into rebellion, and perpetuating their political and religious divisions.
See W.E.H. Lecky, History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (5 vols., London, 1892); J.R. O’Flanagan, The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal in Ireland (2 vols., London, 1870); Cornwallis Correspondence, ed. by C. Ross (3 vols., London, 1859); Charles Phillips, Recollections of Curran and some of his Contemporaries (London, 1822); Henry Grattan, Memoirs of the Life and Times of the Right Honble. Henry Grattan (5 vols., London, 1839-1846); Lord Auckland, Journal and Correspondence (4 vols., London, 1861); Charles Coote, History of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1802).
(R. J. M.)
CLARE, a county in the province of Munster, Ireland, bounded N. by Galway Bay and Co. Galway, E. by Lough Derg, the river Shannon, and counties Tipperary and Limerick, S. by the estuary of the Shannon, and W. by the Atlantic Ocean. The area is 852,389 acres, or nearly 1332 sq. m. Although the surface of the county is hilly, and in some parts even mountainous, it nowhere rises to a great elevation. Much of the western baronies of Moyarta and Ibrickan is composed of bog land. Bogs are frequent also in the mountainous districts elsewhere, except in the limestone barony of Burren, the inhabitants of some parts of which supply themselves with turf from the opposite shores of Connemara. Generally speaking, the eastern parts of the county are mountainous, with tracts of rich pasture-land interspersed; the west abounds with bog; and the north is rocky and best adapted for grazing sheep. In the southern part, along the banks of the Fergus and Shannon, are the bands of rich low grounds called corcasses, of various breadth, indenting the land in a great variety of shapes. They are composed of deep rich loam, and are distinguished as the black corcasses, adapted for tillage, and the blue, used more advantageously as meadow land. The coast is in general rocky, and occasionally bold and precipitous in the extreme, as may be observed at the picturesque cliffs of Moher within a few miles of Ennistimon and Lisdoonvarna, which rise perpendicularly at O’Brien’s Tower to an elevation of 580 ft. The coast of Clare is indented with several bays, the chief of which are Ballyvaghan, Liscannor and Malbay; but from Black Head to Loop Head, that is, along the entire western boundary of the county formed by the Atlantic, there is no safe harbour except Liscannor Bay. Malbay takes its name from its dangers to navigators, and the whole coast has been the scene of many fatal disasters. The county possesses only one large river, the Fergus; but nearly 100 m. of its boundary-line are washed by the river Shannon, which enters the Atlantic Ocean between this county and Kerry. The numerous bays and creeks on both sides of this great river render its navigation safe in every wind; but the passage to and from Limerick is often tedious, and the port of Kilrush has from that cause gained in importance. The river Fergus is navigable from the Shannon to the town of Clare, which is the terminating point of its natural navigation, and the port of all the central districts of the county.
There are a great number of lakes and tarns in the county, of which the largest are Loughs Muckanagh, Graney, Atedaun and Dromore; but they are more remarkable for beauty than for size or utility, with the exception of the extensive and navigable Lough Derg, formed by the river Shannon between this county and Tipperary. The salmon fishery of the Shannon, both as a sport and as an industry, is famous; the Fergus also holds salmon, and there is much good trout-fishing in the lakes for which Ennis is a centre, and in the streams of the Atlantic seaboard. Clare is a county which, like all the western counties of Ireland, repays visitors in search of the pleasures of seaside resorts, sport, scenery or antiquarian interest. Yet, again like other western counties, it was long before it was rendered accessible. Communications, however, are now satisfactory.
Geology.—Upper Carboniferous strata cover the county west of Ennis, the coast-sections in them being particularly fine. Shales and sandstones alternate, now horizontal, as in the Cliffs of Moher, now thrown into striking folds. The Carboniferous Limestone forms a barren terraced country, often devoid of soil, through the Burren in the north, and extends to the estuary of the Fergus and the Shannon. On the east, the folding has brought up two bold masses of Old Red Sandstone, with Silurian cores. Slieve Bernagh, the more southerly of these, rises to 1746 ft. above Killaloe, and the hilly country here traversed by the Shannon is in marked contrast with the upper course of the river through the great limestone plain.
Minerals.—Although metals and minerals have been found in many places throughout the county, they do not often show themselves in sufficient abundance to induce the application of capital for their extraction. The principal metals are lead, iron and manganese. The Milltown lead mine in the barony of Tulla is probably one of the oldest mines in Ireland, and formerly, if the extent of the ancient excavations may be taken as a guide, there must have been a very rich deposit. Copper pyrites occurs in several parts of Burren, but in small quantity. Coal exists at Labasheeda on the right bank of the Shannon, but the few and thin seams are not productive. The nodules of clay-ironstone in the strata that overlie the limestone were mined and smelted down to 1750. Within half a mile of the Milltown lead mine are immense natural vaulted passages of limestone, through which the river Ardsullas winds a singular course. The lower limestone of the eastern portion of the county has been found to contain several very large deposits of argentiferous galena. Flags, easily quarried, are procured near Kilrush, and thinner flags near Ennistimon. Slates are quarried in several places, the best being those of Broadford and Killaloe, which are nearly equal to the finest procured in Wales. A species of very fine black marble is obtained near Ennis; it takes a high polish, and is free from the white spots with which the black Kilkenny marble is marked.
The mineral springs, which are found in many places, are chiefly chalybeate. That of Lisdoonvarna, a sulphur spa, about 8 m. from Ennistimon, has been celebrated since the 18th century for its medicinal qualities, and now attracts a large number of visitors annually. It lies 9 m. by road N. of Ennistimon. There are chalybeate springs of less note at Kilkishen, Burren, Broadfoot, Lehinch, Kilkee, Kilrush, Killadysart, and near Milltown Malbay. Springs called by the people “holy” or “blessed” wells, generally mineral waters, are common; but the belief in their power of performing cures in inveterate maladies is nearly extinct.
Watering-places.—The Atlantic Ocean and the estuary of the Shannon afford many situations admirably adapted for summer bathing-places. Among the most frequented of these localities are Milltown Malbay; with one of the best beaches on the western coast; and the neighbouring Spanish Point (named from the scene of the wreck of two ships of the Armada); Lehinch, about 2 m. from Ennistimon on Liscannor Bay, and near the interesting cliffs of Moher, has a magnificent beach. Kilkee is the most fashionable watering-place on the western coast of Ireland; and Kilrush on the Shannon estuary is also favoured.
Industries.—The soil and surface of the county are in general better adapted for grazing than for tillage, and the acreage devoted to the former consequently exceeds three times that of the latter. Agriculture is in a backward state, and not a fifth of the total area is under cultivation, while the acreage shows a decrease even in the principal crops of oats and potatoes. Cattle, sheep, poultry and pigs, however, all receive considerable attention. Owing to the mountainous nature of the county nearly one-seventh of the total area is quite barren.
There are no extensive manufactures, although flannels and friezes are made for home use, and hosiery of various kinds, chiefly coarse and strong, is made around Ennistimon and other places. There are several fishing stations on the coast, and cod, haddock, ling, sole, turbot, ray, mackerel and other fish abound, but the rugged nature of the coast and the tempestuous sea greatly hinder the operations of the fishermen. Near Pooldoody is the great Burren oyster bed called the Red Bank, where a large establishment is maintained, from which a constant supply of the excellent Red Bank oysters is furnished to the Dublin and other large markets. Crabs and lobsters are caught on the shores of the Bay of Galway in every creek from Black Head to Ardfry. In addition to the Shannon salmon fishery mentioned above, eels abound in every rivulet, and form an important article of consumption.
The Great Southern & Western railway line from Limerick to Sligo intersects the centre of the county from north to south. From Ennis on this line the West Clare railway runs to Ennistimon on the coast, where it turns south and follows the coast by Milltown Malbay to Kilkee and Kilrush. Killaloe in the east of the county is the terminus of a branch of the Great Southern & Western railway.
Population and Administration.—The population (126,244 in 1891; 112,334 in 1901; almost wholly Roman Catholic and rural) shows a decrease among the most serious of the Irish counties, and the emigration returns are proportionately heavy. The principal towns, all of insignificant size, are Ennis (pop. 5093, the county town), Kilrush (4179), Kilkee (1661) and Killaloe (885); but several of the smaller settlements, as resorts, are of more than local importance. The county, which is divided into 11 baronies, contains 79 parishes, and includes the Protestant diocese of Kilfenora, the greater part of Killaloe, and a very small portion of the diocese of Limerick. It is within the Roman Catholic dioceses of Killaloe and Limerick. The assizes are held at Ennis, and quarter sessions here and at Ennistimon, Killaloe, Kilrush and Tulla. The county is divided into the East and West parliamentary divisions, each returning one member.
History.—This county, together with part of the neighbouring district, was anciently called Thomond, that is, North Munster, and formed part of the monarchy of the celebrated Brian Boroihme, who held his court at Kincora near Killaloe, where his palace was situated on the banks of the Shannon. The site is still distinguished by extensive earthen ramparts. Settlements were effected by the Danes, and in the 13th century by the Anglo-Normans, but without permanently affecting the possession of the district by its native proprietors. In 1543 Murrogh O’Brien, after dispossessing his nephew and vainly attempting a rebellion against the English rule, proceeded to England and submitted to Henry VIII., resigning his name and possessions. He soon received them back by an English tenure, together with the title of earl of Thomond, on condition of adopting the English dress, manners and customs. In 1565 this part of Thomond (sometimes called O’Brien’s country) was added to Connaught, and made one of the six new counties into which that province was divided by Sir Henry Sidney. It was named Clare, the name being traceable either to Richard de Clare (Strongbow), earl of Pembroke, or to his younger brother, Thomas de Clare, who obtained a grant of Thomond from Edward I. in 1276, and whose family for some time maintained a precarious position in the district. Towards the close of the reign of Elizabeth, Clare was detached from the government of Connaught and given a separate administration; but at the Restoration it was reunited to Munster.
Antiquities.—The county abounds with remains of antiquities, both military and ecclesiastical, especially in the north-western part. There still exist above a hundred fortified castles, several of which are inhabited. They are mostly of small extent, a large portion being fortified dwellings. The chief of them is Bunratty Castle, built in 1277, once inhabited by the earls of Thomond, 10 m. W. of Limerick, on the Shannon. Those of Ballykinvarga, Ballynalackan and Lemaneagh, all in the north-west, should also be mentioned. Raths or encampments are to be found in every part. They are generally circular, composed either of large stones without mortar or of earth thrown up and surrounded by one or more ditches. The list of abbeys and other religious houses formerly flourishing here (some now only known by name, but many of them surviving in ruins) comprehends upwards of twenty. The most remarkable are—Quin, considered one of the finest and most perfect specimens of ancient monastic architecture in Ireland; Corcomroe; Ennis, in which is a very fine window of uncommonly elegant workmanship; and those on Inniscattery or Scattery Island, in the Shannon, said to have been founded by St Senan (see Kilrush). Kilfenora, 5 m. N.E. of Ennistimon, was until 1752 a separate diocese, and its small cathedral is of interest, with several neighbouring crosses and a holy well. The ruined churches of Kilnaboy, Nouhaval and Teampul Cronan are the most noteworthy of many in the north-west. Five round towers are to be found in various stages of preservation—at Scattery Island, Drumcliffe, Dysert O’Dea, Kilnaboy and Inniscaltra (Lough Derg). The cathedral of the diocese of Killaloe is at the town of that name. Cromlechs are found, chiefly in the rocky limestone district of Burren in the N.W., though there are some in other baronies. That at Ballygannor is formed of a stone 40 ft. long and 10 broad.
See papers by T.J. Westropp in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy—“Distribution of Cromlechs in County Clare” (1897); and “Churches of County Clare, and Origin of Ecclesiastical Divisions” (1900).
CLAREMONT, a city of Sullivan county, New Hampshire, U.S.A., situated in the W. part of the state, bordering on the Connecticut river. Pop. (1890) 5565; (1900) 6498 (1442 foreign-born); (1910) 7529. Area, 6 sq. m. It is served by two branches of the Boston & Maine railway. In Claremont is the Fiske free library (1873), housed in a Carnegie building (1904). The Stevens high school is richly endowed by the gift of Paran Stevens, a native of Claremont. The city contains several villages, the principal being Claremont, Claremont Junction and West Claremont. Sugar river, flowing through the city into the Connecticut and falling 223 ft. within the city limits, furnishes good water-power. Among the manufactures are woollen and cotton goods, paper, mining and quarrying machinery, rubber goods, linens, shoes, wood trim and pearl buttons. The first settlement here was made in 1762, and a township was organized in 1764; in 1908 Claremont was chartered as a city. It was named from Claremont, Lord Clive’s country place.
CLARENCE, DUKES OF. The early history of this English title is identical with that of the family of Clare (q.v.), earls of Gloucester, who are sometimes called earls of Clare, of which word Clarence is a later form. The first duke of Clarence was Lionel of Antwerp (see below), third son of Edward III., who was created duke in 1362, and whose wife Elizabeth was a direct descendant of the Clares, the “Honour of Clare” being among the lands which she brought to her husband. When Lionel died without sons in 1368 the title became extinct; but in 1412 it was revived in favour of Thomas (see below), the second son of Henry IV. The third creation of a duke of Clarence took place in 1461, and was in favour of George (see below), brother of the King Edward IV. When this duke, accused by the king, was attainted and killed in 1478, his titles and estates were forfeited. There appears to have been no other creation of a duke of Clarence until 1789, when William, third son of George III., was made a peer under this title. Having merged in the crown when William became king of Great Britain and Ireland in 1830, the title of duke of Clarence was again revived in 1890 in favour of Albert Victor (1864-1892), the elder son of King Edward VII., then prince of Wales, only to become extinct for the fifth time on his death in 1892.
Lionel of Antwerp, duke of Clarence (1338-1368), third son of Edward III., was born at Antwerp on the 29th of November 1338. Betrothed when a child to Elizabeth (d. 1363), daughter and heiress of William de Burgh, 3rd earl of Ulster (d. 1332), he was married to her in 1352; but before this date he had entered nominally into possession of her great Irish inheritance. Having been named as his father’s representative in England in 1345 and again in 1346, Lionel was created earl of Ulster, and joined an expedition into France in 1355, but his chief energies were reserved for the affairs of Ireland. Appointed governor of that country, he landed at Dublin in 1361, and in November of the following year was created duke of Clarence, while his father made an abortive attempt to secure for him the crown of Scotland. His efforts to secure an effective authority over his Irish lands were only moderately successful; and after holding a parliament at Kilkenny, which passed the celebrated statute of Kilkenny in 1367, he threw up his task in disgust and returned to England. About this time a marriage was arranged between Clarence and Violante, daughter of Galeazzo Visconti, lord of Pavia (d. 1378); the enormous dowry which Galeazzo promised with his daughter being exaggerated by the rumour of the time. Journeying to fetch his bride, the duke was received in great state both in France and Italy, and was married to Violante at Milan in June 1368. Some months were then spent in festivities, during which Lionel was taken ill at Alba, where he died on the 7th of October 1368. His only child Philippa, a daughter by his first wife, married in 1368 Edmund Mortimer, 3rd earl of March (1351-1381), and through this union Clarence became the ancestor of Edward IV. The poet Chaucer was at one time a page in Lionel’s household.
Thomas, duke of Clarence (c. 1388-1421), who was nominally lieutenant of Ireland from 1401 to 1413, and was in command of the English fleet in 1405, acted in opposition to his elder brother, afterwards King Henry V., and the Beauforts during the later part of the reign of Henry IV.; and was for a short time at the head of the government, leading an unsuccessful expedition into France in 1412. When Henry V., however, became king in 1413 no serious dissensions took place between the brothers, and as a member of the royal council Clarence took part in the preparations for the French war. He was with the English king at Harfleur, but not at Agincourt, and shared in the expedition of 1417 into Normandy, during which he led the assault on Caen, and distinguished himself as a soldier in other similar undertakings. When Henry V. returned to England in 1421, the duke remained in France as his lieutenant, and was killed at Beaugé whilst rashly attacking the French and their Scottish allies on the 22nd of March 1421. He left no legitimate issue, and the title again became extinct.
George, duke of Clarence (1449-1478), younger son of Richard, duke of York, by his wife Cicely, daughter of Ralph Neville, 1st earl of Westmorland, was born in Dublin on the 21st of October 1449. Soon after his elder brother became king as Edward IV. in March 1461, he was created duke of Clarence, and his youth was no bar to his appointment as lord-lieutenant of Ireland in the following year. Having been mentioned as a possible husband for Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold, afterwards duke of Burgundy, Clarence came under the influence of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, and in July 1469 was married at Calais to the earl’s elder daughter Isabella. With his father-in-law he then acted in a disloyal manner towards the king. Both supported the rebels in the north of England, and when their treachery was discovered Clarence was deprived of his office as lord-lieutenant and fled to France. Returning to England with Warwick in September 1470, he witnessed the restoration of Henry VI., when the crown was settled upon himself in case the male line of Henry’s family became extinct. The good understanding, however, between Warwick and his son-in-law was not lasting, and Clarence was soon secretly reconciled with Edward. The public reconciliation between the brothers took place when the king was besieging Warwick in Coventry, and Clarence then fought for the Yorkists at Barnet and Tewkesbury. After Warwick’s death in April 1471 Clarence appears to have seized the whole of the vast estates of the earl, and in March 1472 was created by right of his wife earl of Warwick and Salisbury. He was consequently greatly disturbed when he heard that his younger brother Richard, duke of Gloucester, was seeking to marry Warwick’s younger daughter Anne, and was claiming some part of Warwick’s lands. A violent quarrel between the brothers ensued, but Clarence was unable to prevent Gloucester from marrying, and in 1474 the king interfered to settle the dispute, dividing the estates between his brothers. In 1477 Clarence was again a suitor for the hand of Mary, who had just become duchess of Burgundy. Edward objected to the match, and Clarence, jealous of Gloucester’s influence, left the court. At length Edward was convinced that Clarence was aiming at his throne. The duke was thrown into prison, and in January 1478 the king unfolded the charges against his brother to the parliament. He had slandered the king; had received oaths of allegiance to himself and his heirs; had prepared for a new rebellion; and was in short incorrigible. Both Houses of Parliament passed the bill of attainder, and the sentence of death which followed was carried out on the 17th or 18th of February 1478. It is uncertain what share Gloucester had in his brother’s death; but soon after the event the rumour gained ground that Clarence had been drowned in a butt of malmsey wine. Two of the duke’s children survived their father: Margaret, countess of Salisbury (1473-1541), and Edward, earl of Warwick (1475-1499), who passed the greater part of his life in prison and was beheaded in November 1499.
On the last-named see W. Stubbs, Constitutional History, vol. iii. (Oxford, 1895); Sir J.H. Ramsay, Lancaster and York (Oxford, 1892); C.W.C. Oman, Warwick the Kingmaker (London, 1891). On the title generally see G.E. C(okayne), Complete Peerage (1887-1898).
CLARENDON, EDWARD HYDE, 1st Earl of (1609-1674), English historian and statesman, son of Henry Hyde of Dinton, Wiltshire, a member of a family for some time established at Norbury, Cheshire, was born on the 18th of February 1609. He entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in 1622 (having been refused a demyship at Magdalen College), and graduated B.A. in 1626. Intended originally for holy orders, the death of two elder brothers made him his father’s heir, and in 1625 he entered the Middle Temple. At the university his abilities were more conspicuous than his industry, and at the bar his time was devoted more to general reading and to the society of eminent scholars and writers than to the study of law treatises. This wandering from the beaten track, however, was not without its advantages. In later years Clarendon declared “next the immediate blessing and providence of God Almighty” that he “owed all the little he knew and the little good that was in him to the friendships and conversation ... of the most excellent men in their several kinds that lived in that age.” These included Ben Jonson, Selden, Waller, Hales, and especially Lord Falkland; and from their influence and the wide reading in which he indulged, he doubtless drew the solid learning and literary talent which afterwards distinguished him.
In 1629 he married his first wife, Anne, daughter of Sir George Ayliffe, who died six months afterwards; and secondly, in 1634, Frances, daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, Master of Requests. In 1633 he was called to the bar, and obtained quickly a good position and practice. His marriages had gained for him influential friends, and in December 1634 he was made keeper of the writs and rolls of the common pleas; while his able conduct of the petition of the London merchants against Portland earned Laud’s approval. He was returned to the Short Parliament in 1640 as member for Wootton Bassett. Respect and veneration for the law and constitution of England were already fundamental principles with Hyde, and the flagrant violations and perversions of the law which characterized the twelve preceding years of absolute rule drove him into the ranks of the popular party. He served on numerous and important committees, and his parliamentary action was directed chiefly towards the support and restoration of the law. He assailed the jurisdiction of the earl marshal’s court, and in the Long Parliament, in which he sat for Saltash, renewed his attacks and practically effected its suppression. In 1641 he served on the committees for inquiring into the status of the councils of Wales and of the North, distinguished himself by a speech against the latter, and took an important part in the proceedings against the judges. He supported Stafford’s impeachment, and did not vote against the attainder, subsequently making an unsuccessful attempt through Essex to avert the capital penalty. Hyde’s allegiance, however, to the church of England was as staunch as his support of the law, and was soon to separate him from the popular faction. In February 1641 he opposed the reception of the London petition against episcopacy, and in May the project for unity of religion with the Scots, and the bill for the exclusion of the clergy from secular office. He showed special energy in his opposition to the Root and Branch Bill, and, though made chairman of the committee on the bill on the 11th of July in order to silence his opposition, he caused by his successful obstruction the failure of the measure. In consequence he was summoned to the king’s presence, and encouraged in his attitude, and at the beginning of the second session was regarded as one of the king’s ablest supporters in the Commons. He considered the claims put forward at this time by parliament as a violation and not as a guarantee of the law and constitution. He opposed the demand by the parliament to choose the king’s ministers, and also the Grand Remonstrance, to which he wrote a reply published by the king.
He now definitely though not openly joined the royal cause, and refused office in January 1642 with Colepeper and Falkland in order to serve the king’s interests more effectually. Charles undertook to do nothing in the Commons without their advice. Nevertheless a few days afterwards, without their knowledge and by the advice of Lord Digby, he attempted the arrest of the five members, a resort to force which reduced Hyde to despair, and which indeed seemed to show that things had gone too far for an appeal to the law. He persevered, nevertheless, in his legal policy, to which Charles after the failure of his project again returned, joined the king openly in June, and continued to compose the king’s answers and declarations in which he appealed to the “known Laws of the land” against the arbitrary and illegal acts of a seditious majority in the parliament, his advice to the king being “to shelter himself wholly under the law,... presuming that the king and the law together would have been strong enough for any encounter.” Hyde’s appeal had great influence, and gained for the king’s cause half the nation. It by no means, however, met with universal support among the royalists, Hobbes jeering at Hyde’s love for “mixed monarchy,” and the courtiers expressing their disapproval of the “spirit of accommodation” which “wounded the regality.” It was destined to failure owing principally to the invincible distrust of Charles created in the parliament leaders, and to the fact that Charles was simultaneously carrying on another and an inconsistent policy, listening to very different advisers, such as the queen and Digby, and resolving on measures (such as the attempt on Hull) without Hyde’s knowledge or approval.
War, accordingly, in spite of his efforts, broke out. He was expelled the House of Commons on the 11th of August 1642, and was one of those excepted later from pardon. He showed great activity in collecting loans, was present at Edgehill, though not as a combatant, and followed the king to Oxford, residing at All Souls College from October 1642 till March 1645. On the 22nd of February he was made a privy councillor and knighted, and on the 3rd of March appointed chancellor of the exchequer. He was an influential member of the “Junto” which met every week to discuss business before it was laid before the council. His aim was to gain over some of the leading Parliamentarians by personal influence and personal considerations, and at the Uxbridge negotiations in January 1645, where he acted as principal manager on the king’s side, while remaining firm on the great political questions such as the church and the militia, he tried to win individuals by promises of places and honours. He promoted the assembly of the Oxford parliament in December 1643 as a counterpoise to the influence and status of the Long Parliament. Hyde’s policy and measures, however, all failed. They had been weakly and irregularly supported by the king, and were fiercely opposed by the military party, who were jealous of the civil influence, and were urging Charles to trust to force and arms alone and eschew all compromise and concessions. Charles fell now under the influence of persons devoid of all legal and constitutional scruples, sending to Glamorgan in Ireland “those strange powers and instructions inexcusable to justice, piety and prudence.”
Hyde’s influence was much diminished, and on the 4th of March 1645 he left the king for Bristol as one of the guardians of the prince of Wales and governors of the west. Here the disputes between the council and the army paralysed the proceedings, and lost, according to Hyde, the finest opportunity since the outbreak of the war of raising a strong force and gaining substantial victories in that part of the country. After Hopton’s defeat on the 16th of February 1646, at Torrington, Hyde accompanied the prince, on the 4th of March, to Scilly, and on the 17th of April, for greater security, to Jersey. He strongly disapproved of the prince’s removal to France by the queen’s order and of the schemes of assistance from abroad, refused to accompany him, and signed a bond to prevent the sale of Jersey to the French supported by Jermyn. He opposed the projected sacrifice of the church to the Scots and the grant by the king of any but personal or temporary concessions, declaring that peace was only possible “upon the old foundations of government in church and state.” He was especially averse to Charles’s tampering with the Irish Romanists. “Oh, Mr Secretary,” he wrote to Nicholas, “those stratagems have given me more sad hours than all the misfortunes in war which have befallen the king and look like the effects of God’s anger towards us.” He refused to compound for his own estate. While in Jersey he resided first at St Helier and afterwards at Elizabeth Castle with Sir George Carteret. He composed the first portion of his History and kept in touch with events by means of an enormous correspondence. In 1648 he published A Full answer to an infamous and traiterous Pamphlet..., a reply to the resolution of the parliament to present no more addresses to the king and a vindication of Charles.
On the outbreak of the second Civil War Hyde left Jersey (26th of June 1648) to join the queen and prince at Paris. He landed at Dieppe, sailed from that port to Dunkirk, and thence followed the prince to the Thames, where Charles had met the fleet, but was captured and robbed by a privateer, and only joined the prince in September after the latter’s return to the Hague. He strongly disapproved of the king’s concessions at Newport. When the army broke off the treaty and brought Charles to trial he endeavoured to save his life, and after the execution drew up a letter to the several European sovereigns invoking their assistance to avenge it. Hyde strongly opposed Charles II.’s ignominious surrender to the Covenanters, the alliance with the Scots, and the Scottish expedition, desiring to accomplish whatever was possible there through Montrose and the royalists, and inclined rather to an attempt in Ireland. His advice was not followed, and he gladly accepted a mission with Cottington to Spain to obtain money from the Roman Catholic powers, and to arrange an alliance between Owen O’Neill and Ormonde for the recovery of Ireland, arriving at Madrid on the 26th of November 1649. The defeat, however, of Charles at Dunbar, and the confirmation of Cromwell’s ascendancy, influenced the Spanish government against them, and they were ordered to leave in December 1650. Hyde arrived at Antwerp in January 1651, and in December rejoined Charles at Paris after the latter’s escape from Worcester. He now became one of his chief advisers, accompanying him in his change of residence to Cologne in October 1654 and to Bruges in 1658, and was appointed lord chancellor on the 13th of January 1658. His influence was henceforth maintained in spite of the intrigues of both Romanists and Presbyterians, as well as the violent and openly displayed hostility of the queen, and was employed unremittingly in the endeavour to keep Charles faithful to the church and constitution, and in the prevention of unwise concessions and promises which might estrange the general body of the royalists. His advice to Charles was to wait upon the turn of events, “that all his activity was to consist in carefully avoiding to do anything that might do him hurt and to expect some blessed conjuncture.” In 1656, during the war between England and Spain, Charles received offers of help from the latter power provided he could gain a port in England, but Hyde discouraged small isolated attempts. He expected much from Cromwell’s death. The same year he made an alliance with the Levellers, and was informed of their plots to assassinate the protector, without apparently expressing any disapproval. He was well supplied with information from England, and guided the action of the royalists with great ability and wisdom during the interval between Cromwell’s death and the Restoration, urged patience, and advocated the obstruction of a settlement between the factions contending for power and the fomentation of their jealousies, rather than premature risings.
The Restoration was a complete triumph for Hyde’s policy. He lays no stress on his own great part in it, but it was owing to him that the Restoration was a national one, by the consent and invitation of parliament representing the whole people and not through the medium of one powerful faction enforcing its will upon a minority, and that it was not only a restoration of Charles but a restoration of the monarchy. By Hyde’s advice concessions to the inconvenient demands of special factions had been avoided by referring the decision to a “free parliament,” and the declaration of Breda reserved for parliament the settlement of the questions of amnesty, religious toleration and the proprietorship of forfeited lands.
Hyde entered London with the king, all attempts at effecting his fall having failed, and immediately obtained the chief place in the government, retaining the chancellorship of the exchequer till the 13th of May 1661, when he surrendered it to Lord Ashley. He took his seat as speaker of the House of Lords and in the court of chancery on the 1st of June 1660. On the 3rd of November 1660 he was made Baron Hyde of Hindon, and on the 20th of April 1661 Viscount Cornbury and earl of Clarendon, receiving a grant from the king of £20,000 and at different times of various small estates and Irish rents. The marriage of his daughter Anne to James, duke of York, celebrated in secret in September 1660, at first alarmed Clarendon on account of the public hostility he expected thereby to incur, but finding his fears unconfirmed he acquiesced in its public recognition in December, and thus became related in a special manner to the royal family and the grandfather of two English sovereigns.
Clarendon’s position was one of great difficulties, but at the same time of splendid opportunities. In particular a rare occasion now offered itself of settling the religious question on a broad principle of comprehension or toleration; for the monarchy had been restored not by the supporters of the church alone but largely by the influence and aid of the nonconformists and also of the Roman Catholics, who were all united at that happy moment by a common loyalty to the throne. Clarendon appears to have approved of comprehension but not of toleration. He had already in April 1660 sent to discuss terms with the leading Presbyterians in England, and after the Restoration offered bishoprics to several, including Richard Baxter. He drew up the royal declaration of October, promising limited episcopacy and a revised prayer-book and ritual, which was subsequently thrown out by parliament, and he appears to have anticipated some kind of settlement from the Savoy Conference which sat in April 1661. The failure of the latter proved perhaps that the differences were too great for compromise, and widened the breach. The parliament immediately proceeded to pass the series of narrow and tyrannical measures against the dissenters known as the Clarendon Code. The Corporations Act, obliging members of corporations to denounce the Covenant and take the sacrament according to the Anglican usage, became law on the 20th of December 1661, the Act of Uniformity enforcing the use of the prayer-book on ministers, as well as a declaration that it was unlawful to bear arms against the sovereign, on the 19th of May 1662, and these were followed by the Conventicle Act in 1664 suppressing conventicles and by the Five-Mile Act in 1665 forbidding ministers who had refused subscription to the Act of Uniformity to teach or reside within 5 m. of a borough. Clarendon appears to have reluctantly acquiesced in these civil measures rather than to have originated them, and to have endeavoured to mitigate their injustice and severity. He supported the continuance of the tenure by presbyterian ministers of livings not held by Anglicans and an amendment in the Lords allowing a pension to those deprived, earning the gratitude of Baxter and the nonconformists. On the 17th of March 1662 he introduced into parliament a declaration enabling the king to dispense with the Act of Uniformity in the case of ministers of merit. But once committed to the narrow policy of intolerance, Clarendon was inevitably involved in all its consequences. His characteristic respect for the law and constitution rendered him hostile to the general policy of indulgence, which, though the favourite project of the king, he strongly opposed in the Lords, and in the end caused its withdrawal. He declared that he could have wished the law otherwise, “but when it was passed, he thought it absolutely necessary to see obedience paid to it without any connivance.” Charles was greatly angered. It was believed in May 1663 that the intrigues of Bennet and Buckingham, who seized the opportunity of ingratiating themselves with the king by zealously supporting the indulgence, had secured Clarendon’s dismissal, and in July Bristol ventured to accuse him of high treason in the parliament; but the attack, which did not receive the king’s support, failed entirely and only ended in the banishment from court of its promoter. Clarendon’s opposition to the court policy in this way acquired a personal character, and he was compelled to identify himself more completely with the intolerant measures of the House of Commons. Though not the originator of the Conventicle Act or of the Five-Mile Act, he has recorded his approval, and he ended by taking alarm at plots and rumours and by regarding the great party of nonconformists, through whose co-operation the monarchy had been restored, as a danger to the state whose “faction was their religion.”
Meanwhile Clarendon’s influence and direction had been predominant in nearly all departments of state. He supported the exception of the actual regicides from the Indemnity, but only ten out of the twenty-six condemned were executed, and Clarendon, with the king’s support, prevented the passing of a bill in 1661 for the execution of thirteen more. He upheld the Act of Indemnity against all the attempts of the royalists to upset it. The conflicting claims to estates were left to be decided by the law. The confiscations of the usurping government accordingly were cancelled, while the properly executed transactions between individuals were necessarily upheld. There can be little doubt that the principle followed was the only safe one in the prevailing confusion. Great injustice was indeed suffered by individuals, but the proper remedy of such injustice was the benevolence of the king, which there is too much reason to believe proved inadequate and partial. The settlement of the church lands which was directed by Clarendon presented equal difficulties and involved equal hardships. In settling Scotland Clarendon’s aim was to make that kingdom dependent upon England and to uphold the Cromwellian union. He proposed to establish a council at Whitehall to govern Scottish affairs, and showed great zeal in endeavouring to restore episcopacy through the medium of Archbishop Sharp. His influence, however, ended with the ascendancy of Lauderdale in 1663. He was, to some extent at least, responsible for the settlement in Ireland, but, while anxious for an establishment upon a solid Protestant basis, urged “temper and moderation and justice” in securing it. He supported Ormonde’s wise and enlightened Irish administration, and in particular opposed persistently the prohibition of the import of Irish cattle into England, incurring thereby great unpopularity. He showed great activity in the advancement of the colonies, to whom he allowed full freedom of religion. He was a member of the council for foreign plantations, and one of the eight lords proprietors of Carolina in 1663; and in 1664 sent a commission to settle disputes in New England. In the department of foreign affairs he had less influence. His policy was limited to the maintenance of peace “necessary for the reducing [the king’s] own dominions into that temper of subjection and obedience as they ought to be in.” In 1664 he demanded, on behalf of Charles, French support, and a loan of £50,000 against disturbance at home, and thus initiated that ignominious system of pensions and dependence upon France which proved so injurious to English interests later. But he was the promoter neither of the sale of Dunkirk on the 27th of October 1662, the author of which seems to have been the earl of Sandwich, nor of the Dutch War. He attached considerable value to the possession of the former, but when its sale was decided he conducted the negotiations and effected the bargain. He had zealously laboured for peace with Holland, and had concluded a treaty for the settlement of disputes on the 4th of September 1662. Commercial and naval jealousies, however, soon involved the two states in hostilities. Cape Corso and other Dutch possessions on the coast of Africa, and New Amsterdam in America, were seized by squadrons from the royal navy in 1664, and hostilities were declared on the 22nd of February 1665. Clarendon now gave his support to the war, asserted the extreme claims of the English crown over the British seas, and contemplated fresh cessions from the Dutch and an alliance with Sweden and Spain. According to his own account he initiated the policy of the Triple Alliance, but it seems clear that his inclination towards France continued in spite of the intervention of the latter state in favour of Holland; and he took part in the negotiations for ending the war by an undertaking with Louis XIV. implying a neutrality, while the latter seized Flanders. The crisis in this feeble foreign policy and in the general official mismanagement was reached in June 1667, when the Dutch burnt several ships at Chatham and when “the roar of foreign guns were heard for the first and last time by the citizens of London.”
The whole responsibility for the national calamity and disgrace, and for the ignominious peace which followed it, was unjustly thrown on the shoulders of Clarendon, though it must be admitted that the disjointed state of the administration and want of control over foreign policy were largely the causes of the disaster, and for these Clarendon’s influence and obstruction of official reforms were to some extent answerable. According to Sir William Coventry, whose opinion has weight and who acknowledges the chancellor’s fidelity to the king, while Clarendon “was so great at the council board and in the administration of matters, there was no room for anybody to propose any remedy to what was remiss ... he managing all things with that greatness which will now be removed.” He disapproved of the system of boards and committees instituted during the Commonwealth, as giving too much power to the parliament, and regarded the administration by the great officers of state, to the exclusion of pure men of business, as the only method compatible with the dignity and security of the monarchy. The lowering of the prestige of the privy council, and its subordination first to the parliament and afterwards to the military faction, he considered as one of the chief causes of the fall of Charles I. He aroused a strong feeling of hostility in the Commons by his opposition to the appropriation of supplies in 1665, and to the audit of the war accounts in 1666, as “an introduction to a commonwealth” and as “a new encroachment,” and by his high tone of prerogative and authority, while by his advice to Charles to prorogue parliament he incurred their resentment and gave colour to the accusation that he had advised the king to govern without parliaments. He was unpopular among all classes, among the royalists on account of the Act of Indemnity, among the Presbyterians because of the Act of Uniformity. It was said that he had invented the maxim “that the king should buy and reward his enemies and do little for his friends, because they are his already.” Every kind of maladministration was currently ascribed to him, of designs to govern by a standing army, and of corruption. He was credited with having married Charles purposely to a barren queen in order to raise his own grandchildren to the throne, with having sold Dunkirk to France, and his magnificent house in St James’s was nicknamed “Dunkirk House,” while on the day of the Dutch attack on Chatham the mob set up a gibbet at his gate and broke his windows. He had always been exceedingly unpopular at court, and kept severely aloof from the revels and licence which reigned there. Evelyn names “the buffoons and the misses to whom he was an eyesore.” He was intensely disliked by the royal mistresses, whose favour he did not condescend to seek, and whose presence and influence were often the subject of his reproaches. A party of younger men of the king’s own age, more congenial to his temperament, and eager to drive the old chancellor from power and to succeed him in office, had for some time been endeavouring to undermine his influence by ridicule and intrigue. Surrounded by such general and violent animosity, Clarendon’s only hope could be in the support of the king. But the chancellor had early and accurately gauged the nature and extent of the king’s attachment to him, which proceeded neither from affection nor gratitude but “from his aversion to be troubled with the intricacies of his affairs,” and in 1661 he had resisted the importunities of Ormonde to resign the great seal for the lord treasurership with the rank of “first minister,” “a title newly translated out of French into English,” on account of the obloquy this position would incur and the further dependence which it entailed upon the inconstant king. Charles, long weary of the old chancellor’s rebukes, was especially incensed at this time owing to his failure in securing Frances Stuart (la Belle Stuart) for his seraglio, a disappointment which he attributed to Clarendon, and was now alarmed by the hostility which his administration had excited. He did not scruple to sacrifice at once the old adherent of his house and fortunes. “The truth is,” he wrote Ormonde, “his behaviour and humour was grown so insupportable to myself and all the world else that I could no longer endure it, and it was impossible for me to live with it and do these things with the Parliament that must be done, or the government will be lost.” By the direction of Charles, James advised Clarendon to resign before the meeting of parliament, but in an interview with the king on the 26th of August Clarendon refused to deliver up the seal unless dismissed, and urged him not to take a step ruinous to the interests both of the chancellor himself and of the crown. He could not believe his dismissal was really intended, but on the 30th of August he was deprived of the great seal, for which the king received the thanks of the parliament on the 16th of October. On the 12th of November his impeachment, consisting of various charges of arbitrary government, corruption and maladministration, was brought up to the Lords, but the latter refused to order his committal, on the ground that the Commons had only accused him of treason in general without specifying any particular charge. Clarendon wrote humbly to the king asking for pardon, and that the prosecution might be prevented, but Charles had openly taken part against him, and, though desiring his escape, would not order or assist his departure for fear of the Commons. Through the bishop of Hereford, however, on the 29th of November he pressed Clarendon to fly, promising that he should not during his absence suffer in his honour or fortune. Clarendon embarked the same night for Calais, where he arrived on the 2nd of December. The Lords immediately passed an act for his banishment and ordered the petition forwarded by him to parliament to be burnt.
The rest of Clarendon’s life was passed in exile. He left Calais for Rouen on the 25th of December, returning on the 21st of January 1668, visiting the baths of Bourbon in April, thence to Avignon in June, residing from July 1668 till June 1671 at Montpellier, whence he proceeded to Moulins and to Rouen again in May 1674. His sudden banishment entailed great personal hardships. His health at the time of his flight was much impaired, and on arriving at Calais he fell dangerously ill; and Louis XIV., anxious at this time to gain popularity in England, sent him peremptory and repeated orders to quit France. He suffered severely from gout, and during the greater part of his exile could not walk without the aid of two men. At Evreux, on the 23rd of April 1668, he was the victim of a murderous assault by English sailors, who attributed to him the non-payment of their wages, and who were on the point of despatching him when he was rescued by the guard. For some time he was not allowed to see any of his children; even correspondence with him was rendered treasonable by the Act of Banishment; and it was not apparently till 1671, 1673 and 1674 that he received visits from his sons, the younger, Lawrence Hyde, being present with him at his death.
Clarendon bore his troubles with great dignity and fortitude. He found consolation in religious duties, and devoted a portion of every day to the composition of his Contemplations on the Psalms, and of his moral essays. Removed effectually from the public scene, and from all share in present politics, he turned his attention once more to the past and finished his History and his Autobiography. Soon after reaching Calais he had written, on the 17th of December 1667, to the university of Oxford, desiring as his last request that the university should believe in his innocence and remember him, though there could be no further mention of him in their public devotions, in their private prayers. In 1668 he wrote to the duke and duchess of York to remonstrate on the report that they had turned Roman Catholic, to the former urging “You cannot be without zeal for the Church to which your blessed father made himself a sacrifice,” adding that such a change would bring a great storm against the Romanists. He entertained to the last hopes of obtaining leave to return to England. He asked for permission in June 1671 and in August 1674. In the dedication of his Brief View of Mr Hobbes’s Book Leviathan he repeats “the hope which sustains my weak, decayed spirits that your Majesty will at some time call to your remembrance my long and incorrupted fidelity to your person and your service”; but his petitions were not even answered or noticed. He died at Rouen on the 9th of December 1674. He was buried in Westminster Abbey at the foot of the steps at the entrance to Henry VII.’s chapel. He left two sons, Henry, 2nd earl of Clarendon, and Lawrence, earl of Rochester, his daughter Anne, duchess of York, and a third son, Edward, having predeceased him. His male descendants became extinct on the death of the 4th earl of Clarendon and 2nd earl of Rochester in 1753, the title of Clarendon being revived in 1776 in the person of Thomas Villiers, who had married the granddaughter and heir of the last earl.
As a statesman Clarendon had obvious limitations and failings. He brought to the consideration of political questions an essentially legal but also a narrow mind, conceiving the law, “that great and admirable mystery,” and the constitution as fixed, unchangeable and sufficient for all time, in contrast to Pym, who regarded them as living organisms capable of continual development and evolution; and he was incapable of comprehending and governing the new conditions and forces created by the civil wars. His character, however, and therefore to some extent his career, bear the indelible marks of greatness. He left the popular cause at the moment of its triumph and showed in so doing a strict consistency. In a court degraded by licence and self-indulgence, he maintained his self-respect and personal dignity regardless of consequences, and in an age of almost universal corruption and self-seeking he preserved a noble integrity and patriotism. At the Restoration he showed great moderation in accepting rewards. He refused a grant of 10,000 acres in the Fens from the king on the ground that it would create an evil precedent, and amused Charles and James by his indignation at the offer of a present of £10,000 from the French minister Fouquet, the only present he accepted from Louis XIV. being a set of books printed at the Louvre. His income, however, as lord chancellor was very large, and Clarendon maintained considerable state, considering it due to the dignity of the monarchy that the high officers should carry the external marks of greatness. The house built by him in St James’s was one of the most magnificent ever seen in England, and was filled with a collection of portraits, chiefly those of contemporary statesmen and men of letters. It cost Clarendon £50,000, involved him deeply in debt and was considered one of the chief causes of the “gust of envy” that caused his fall. He is described as “a fair, ruddy, fat, middle-statured, handsome man,” and his appearance was stately and dignified. He expected deference from his inferiors, and one of the chief charges which he brought against the party of the young politicians was the want of respect with which they treated himself and the lord treasurer. His industry and devotion to public business, of which proofs still remain in the enormous mass of his state papers and correspondence, were exemplary, and were rendered all the more conspicuous by the negligence, inferiority in business, and frivolity of his successors. As lord chancellor Clarendon made no great impression in the court of chancery. His early legal training had long been interrupted, and his political preoccupations probably rendered necessary the delegation of many of his judicial duties to others. According to Speaker Onslow his decrees were always made with the aid of two judges. Burnet praises him, however, as “a very good chancellor, only a little too rough but very impartial in the administration of justice,” and Pepys, who saw him presiding in his court, perceived him to be “a most able and ready man.” According to Evelyn, “though no considerable lawyer” he was “one who kept up the fame and substance of things in the nation with ... solemnity.” He made good appointments to the bench and issued some important orders for the reform of abuses in his court. As chancellor of Oxford University, to which office he was elected on the 27th of October 1660, Clarendon promoted the restoration of order and various educational reforms. In 1753 his manuscripts were left to the university by his great-grandson Lord Cornbury, and in 1868 the money gained by publication was spent in erecting the Clarendon Laboratory, the profits of the History having provided in 1713 a building for the university press adjoining the Sheldonian theatre, known since the removal of the press to its present quarters as the Clarendon Building.
Clarendon had risen to high office largely through his literary and oratorical gifts. His eloquence was greatly admired by Evelyn and Pepys, though Burnet criticises it as too copious. He was a great lover of books and collected a large library, was well read in the Roman and in the contemporary histories both foreign and English, and could appreciate Carew, Ben Jonson and Cowley. As a writer and historian Clarendon occupies a high place in English literature. His great work, the History of the Rebellion, is composed in the grand style. A characteristic feature is the wonderful series of well-known portraits, drawn with great skill and liveliness and especially praised by Evelyn and by Macaulay. The long digressions, the lengthy sentences, and the numerous parentheses do not accord with modern taste and usage, but it may be observed that these often follow more closely the natural involutions of the thought, and express the argument more clearly, than the short disconnected sentences, now generally employed, while in rhythm and dignity Clarendon’s style is immeasurably superior. The composition, however, of the work as a whole is totally wanting in proportion, and the book is overloaded with state papers, misplaced and tedious in the narrative. In considering the accuracy of the history it is important to remember the dates and circumstances of the composition of its various portions. The published History is mainly a compilation of two separate original manuscripts, the first being the history proper, written between 1646 and 1648, with the advantage of a fresh memory and the help of various documents and authorities, and ending in March 1644, and the second being the Life, extending from 1609 to 1660, but composed long afterwards in exile and without the aid of papers between 1668 and 1670. The value of any statement, therefore, in the published History depends chiefly on whether it is taken from the History proper or the Life. In 1671 these two manuscripts were united by Clarendon with certain alterations and modifications making Books i.-vii. of the published History, while Books viii.-xv. were written subsequently, and, being composed for the most part without materials, are generally inaccurate, with the notable exception of Book ix., made up from two narratives written at Jersey in 1646, and containing very little from the Life. Sincerity and honest conviction are present on every page, and the inaccuracies are due not to wilful misrepresentation, but to failure of memory and to the disadvantages under which the author laboured in exile. But they lessen considerably the value of his work, and detract from his reputation as chronicler of contemporary events, for which he was specially fitted by his practical experience in public business, a qualification declared by himself to be the “genius, spirit and soul of an historian.” In general, Clarendon, like many of his contemporaries, failed signally to comprehend the real issues and principles at stake in the great struggle, laying far too much stress on personalities and never understanding the real aims and motives of the Presbyterian party. The work was first published in 1702-1704 from a copy of a transcript made by Clarendon’s secretary, with a few unimportant alterations, and was the object of a violent attack by John Oldmixon for supposed changes and omissions in Clarendon and Whitelocke compared (1727) and again in a preface to his History of England (1730), repelled and refuted by John Burton in the Genuineness of Lord Clarendon’s History Vindicated (1744). The history was first published from the original in 1826; the best edition being that of 1888 edited by W.D. Macray and issued by the Clarendon Press. The Lord Clarendon’s History ... Compleated, a supplement containing portraits and illustrative papers, was published in 1717, and An Appendix to the History, containing a life, speeches and various pieces, in 1724. The Sutherland Clarendon in the Bodleian library at Oxford contains several thousand portraits and illustrations of the History. The Life of Edward, earl of Clarendon ... [and the] Continuation of the History ... , the first consisting of that portion of the Life not included in the History, and the second of the account of Clarendon’s administration and exile in France, begun in 1672, was published in 1759, the History of the Reign of King Charles II. from the Restoration ..., published about 1755, being a surreptitious edition of this work, of which the latest and best edition is that of the Clarendon Press of 1857.
Clarendon was also the author of The Difference and Disparity between the Estate and Condition of George, duke of Buckingham and Robert, earl of Essex, a youthful production vindicating Buckingham, printed in Reliquiae Wottonianae (1672), i. 184; Animadversions on a Book entitled Fanaticism (1673); A Brief View ... of the dangerous ... errors in ... Mr Hobbes’s book entitled “Leviathan” (1676); The History of the Rebellion and Civil War in Ireland (1719); A Collection of Several Pieces of Edward, earl of Clarendon, containing reprints of speeches from the journals of the House of Lords and of the History of the Rebellion in Ireland (1727); A Collection of Several Tracts containing his Vindication in answer to his impeachment, Reflections upon several Christian Duties, Two Dialogues on Education and on the want of Respect due to age, and Contemplations on the Psalms (1727); Religion and Policy (1811); Essays moral and entertaining on the various faculties and passions of the human mind (1815, and in British Prose Writers, 1819, vol. i.); Speeches in Rushworth’s Collections (1692), pt. iii. vol. i. 230, 333; Declarations and Manifestos (Clarendon being the author of nearly all on the king’s side between March 1642 and March 1645, the first being the answer to the Grand Remonstrance in January 1642, but not of the answer to the XIX. Propositions or the apology for the King’s attack upon Brentford) in the published History, Rushworth’s Collections, E. Husband’s Collections of Ordinances and Declarations (1646), Old Parliamentary History (1751-1762), Somers Tracts, State Tracts, Harleian Miscellany, Thomasson Tracts (Brit. Mus.), E. 157 (14); and a large number of anonymous pamphlets aimed against the parliament, including Transcendent and Multiplied Rebellion and Treason (1645), A Letter from a True and Lawful Member of Parliament ... to one of the Lords of his Highness’s Council (1656), and Two Speeches made in the House of Peers on Monday 19th Dec. [1642] ... (Somers Tracts, Scott, vi. 576); Second Thoughts (n.d., in favour of a limited toleration) is ascribed to him in the Catalogue in the British Museum; A Letter ... to one of the Chief Ministers of the Nonconforming Party ... (Saumur, 7th May 1674) has been attributed to him on insufficient evidence.
Clarendon’s correspondence, amounting to over 100 volumes, is in the Bodleian library at Oxford, and other letters are to be found in Additional MSS. in the British Museum. Selections have been published under the title of State Papers Collected by Edward, earl of Clarendon (Clarendon State Papers) between 1767 and 1786, and the collection has been calendared up to 1657 in 1869, 1872, 1876. Other letters of Clarendon are to be found in Lister’s Life of Clarendon, iii.; Nicholas Papers (Camden Soc., 1886); Diary of J. Evelyn, appendix; Sir R. Fanshaw’s Original Letters (1724); Warburton’s Life of Prince Rupert (1849): Barwick’s Life of Barwick (1724); Hist. MSS. Comm. 10th Rep. pt. vi. pp. 193-216, and in the Harleian Miscellany.
Bibliography.—Clarendon’s autobiographical works and Letters enumerated above, and the MS. Collection in the Bodleian library. The Lives of Clarendon by T.H. Lister (1838), and by C.H. Firth in the Dict. of Nat. Biography (with authorities there collected), completely supersede all earlier accounts including that in Lives of All the Lord Chancellors (1708), in Macdiarmid’s Lives of British Statesmen (1807), and in the different Lives by Wood in Athenae Oxonienses (Bliss), iii. 1018; while those in J.H. Browne’s Lives of the Prime Ministers of England (1858), in Lodge’s Portraits, in Lord Campbell’s Lives of the Chancellors, iii. 110 (1845), and in Foss’s Judges, supply no further information. In Historical Inquiries respecting the Character of Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, various charges against Clarendon were collected by G.A. Ellis (1827) and answered by Lister, vol. ii. 529, and by Lady Th. Lewis in Lives of the Contemporaries of Lord Clarendon (1852), i. preface pt. i. For criticisms of the History see Gardiner’s Civil Wars (1893), iii. 121; Ranke’s Hist. of England, vi. 3-29; Die Politik Karls des Ersten ... und Lord Clarendon’s Darstellung, by A. Buff (1868); article in the Dict. of Nat. Biog. by C.H. Firth, and especially a series of admirable articles by the same author in the Eng. Hist. Review (1904). For description of the MS., Macray’s edition of the History (1888), Lady Th. Lewis’s Lives from the Clarendon Gallery, i. introd. pt. ii.; for list of earlier editions, Ath. Oxon. (Bliss) iii. 1017. Lord Lansdowne defends Sir R. Granville against Clarendon’s strictures in the Vindication (Genuine Works of G. Granville, Lord Lansdowne, i. 503 [1732]), and Lord Ashburnham defends John Ashburnham in A Narrative by John Ashburnham (1830). See also Notes at Meetings of the Privy Council between Charles II. and the Earl of Clarendon (Roxburghe Club. 1896); General Orders of the High Court of Chancery, by J. Beames (1815), 147-221; S.R. Gardiner’s Hist. of England, of the Civil War and of the Commonwealth; Lord Clarendon, by A. Chassant (account of the assault at Evreux) (1891); Annals of the Bodleian Library, by W.D. Macray (1868); Masson’s Life of Milton; Life of Sir G. Savile, by H.C. Foxcroft (1898); Cal. of St. Pap. Dom., esp. 1667-1668, 58, 354, 370; Hist. MSS. Comm. Series, MSS. of J.M. Heathcote and Various Collections, vol. ii.; Add. MSS. in the British Museum; Notes and Queries, 6 ser. v. 283, 9 ser. xi. 182, 1 ser. ix. 7; Pepys’s Diary; J. Evelyn’s Diary and Correspondence; Gen. Catalogue in British Museum; Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon (1909), a lecture delivered at Oxford during the Clarendon centenary by C.H. Firth.
(P. C. Y.)
Life, i. 25.
Hist. of the Rebellion, iii. 164, the account being substantially accepted by Gardiner, in spite of inaccuracies in details (Hist. ix. 341, note).
Clarendon St. Pap. ii. 337.
Ibid.
Hist. of the Rebellion, xiii. 140.
Clarendon State Papers, iii. 316, 325, 341, 343.
Hist. MSS. Comm.: MSS. of F.W. Leyborne-Popham, 227.
Anne Hyde (1637-1671), eldest daughter of the chancellor, was the mother by James of Queen Mary and Queen Anne, besides six other children, including four sons who all died in infancy. She became a Roman Catholic in 1670 shortly before her death, and was buried in the vault of Mary, queen of Scots, in Henry VII.’s chapel in Westminster Abbey.
See Hist. MSS. Comm.: Various Collections, ii. 118, and MSS. of Duke of Somerset, 94.
Continuation, 339.
Ib. 511, 776.
Lister’s Life of Clarendon, ii. 295; Hist. MSS. Comm.: Various Collections, ii. 379.
Continuation, 1170.
Hist. MSS. Comm.: MSS. of F.W. Leyborne-Popham, 250.
Continuation, 1066.
Macaulay’s Hist. of England, i. 193.
Pepys’s Diary, Sept. 2, 1667.
Hist. MSS. Comm., 7th Rep. 162.
Diary, iii. 95, 96.
Lives from the Clarendon Gallery, by Lady Th. Lewis, i. 39; Burnet’s Hist. of his own Times, i. 209.
Continuation, 88.
Lister’s Life of Clarendon, ii. 416.
Continuation, 1137.
Clarendon St. Pap. iii. Suppl. xxxvii.
Evelyn witnessed its demolition in 1683—Diary, May 19th, Sept. 18th; Lives from the Clarendon Gallery, by Lady Th. Lewis, i. 40.
Diary, July 14th, 1664.
Lister, ii. 528.
CLARENDON, GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK VILLIERS, 4th Earl of (in the Villiers line) (1800-1870), English diplomatist and statesman, was born in London on the 12th of January 1800. He was the eldest son of Hon. George Villiers (1750-1827), youngest son of the 1st earl of Clarendon (second creation), by Theresa, only daughter of the first Lord Boringdon, and granddaughter of the first Lord Grantham. The earldom of the lord chancellor Clarendon became extinct in the Hyde line by the death of the 4th earl, his last male descendant. Jane Hyde, countess of Essex, the sister of that nobleman (she died in 1724), left two daughters; of these the eldest, Lady Charlotte, became heiress of the Hyde family. She married Thomas Villiers (1709-1786), second son of the 2nd earl of Jersey, who served with distinction as English minister in Germany, and in 1776 the earldom of Clarendon was revived in his favour. The connexion with the Hyde family was therefore in the female line and somewhat remote. But a portion of the pictures and plate of the great chancellor was preserved to this branch of the family, and remains at The Grove, their family seat at Hertfordshire. The 2nd and 3rd earls were sons of the 1st, and, neither of them having sons, the title passed, on the death of the 3rd earl (John Charles) in 1838, to their younger brother’s son.
Young George Villiers entered upon life in circumstances which gave small promise of the brilliancy of his future career. He was well born; he was heir presumptive to an earldom; and his mother was a woman of great energy, admirable good sense, and high feeling. But the means of his family were contracted; his education was desultory and incomplete; he had not the advantages of a training either at a public school or in the House of Commons. He went up to Cambridge at the early age of sixteen, and entered St John’s College on the 29th of June 1816. In 1820, as the eldest son of an earl’s brother with royal descent, he was enabled to take his M.A. degree under the statutes of the university then in force. In the same year he was appointed attaché to the British embassy at St Petersburg, where he remained three years, and gained that practical knowledge of diplomacy which was of so much use to him in after-life. He had received from nature a singularly handsome person, a polished and engaging address, a ready command of languages, and a remarkable power of composition.
Upon his return to England in 1823 he was appointed to a commissionership of customs, an office which he retained for about ten years. In 1831 he was despatched to France to negotiate a commercial treaty, which, however, led to no result. On the 16th of August 1833 he was appointed minister at the court of Spain. Ferdinand VII. died within a month of his arrival at Madrid, and the infant queen Isabella, then in the third year of her age, was placed by the old Spanish law of female inheritance on her contested throne. Don Carlos, the late king’s brother, claimed the crown by virtue of the Salic law of the House of Bourbon which Ferdinand had renounced before the birth of his daughter. Isabella II. and her mother Christina, the queen regent, became the representatives of constitutional monarchy, Don Carlos of Catholic absolutism. The conflict which had divided the despotic and the constitutional powers of Europe since the French Revolution of 1830 broke out into civil war in Spain, and by the Quadruple Treaty, signed on the 22nd of April 1834, France and England pledged themselves to the defence of the constitutional thrones of Spain and Portugal. For six years Villiers continued to give the most active and intelligent support to the Liberal government of Spain. He was accused, though unjustly, of having favoured the revolution of La Granja, which drove Christina, the queen mother, out of the kingdom, and raised Espartero to the regency. He undoubtedly supported the chiefs of the Liberal party, such as Espartero, against the intrigues of the French court; but the object of the British government was to establish the throne of Isabella on a truly national and liberal basis and to avert those complications, dictated by foreign influence, which eventually proved so fatal to that princess. Villiers received the grand cross of the Bath in 1838 in acknowledgment of his services, and succeeded, on the death of his uncle, to the title of earl of Clarendon; in the following year, having left Madrid, he married Katharine, eldest daughter of James Walter, first earl of Verulam.
In January 1840 he entered Lord Melbourne’s administration as lord privy seal, and from the death of Lord Holland in the autumn of that year Lord Clarendon also held the office of chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster until the dissolution of the ministry in 1841. Deeply convinced that the maintenance of a cordial understanding with France was the most essential condition of peace and of a liberal policy in Europe, he reluctantly concurred in the measures proposed by Lord Palmerston for the expulsion of the pasha of Egypt from Syria; he strenuously advocated, with Lord Holland, a more conciliatory policy towards France; and he was only restrained from sending in his resignation by the dislike he felt to break up a cabinet he had so recently joined.
The interval of Sir Robert Peel’s great administration (1841-1846) was to the leaders of the Whig party a period of repose; but Lord Clarendon took the warmest interest in the triumph of the principles of free trade and in the repeal of the corn-laws, of which his brother, Charles Pelham Villiers (q.v.), had been one of the earliest champions. For this reason, upon the formation of Lord John Russell’s first administration, Lord Clarendon accepted the office of president of the Board of Trade. Twice in his career the governor-generalship of India was offered him, and once the governor-generalship of Canada;—these he refused from reluctance to withdraw from the politics of Europe. But in 1847 a sense of duty compelled him to take a far more laborious and uncongenial appointment. The desire of the cabinet was to abolish the lord-lieutenancy of Ireland, and Lord Clarendon was prevailed upon to accept that office, with a view to transform it ere long into an Irish secretaryship of state. But he had not been many months in Dublin before he acknowledged that the difficulties then existing in Ireland could only be met by the most vigilant and energetic authority, exercised on the spot. The crisis was one of extraordinary peril. Agrarian crimes of horrible atrocity had increased threefold. The Catholic clergy were openly disaffected. This was the second year of the Irish famine, and extraordinary measures were required to regulate the bounty of the government and the nation. In 1848 the revolution in France let loose fresh elements of discord, which culminated in an abortive insurrection, and for a lengthened period Ireland was a prey to more than her wonted symptoms of disaffection and disorder. Lord Clarendon remained viceroy of Ireland till 1852, and left behind him permanent marks of improvement. His services were expressly acknowledged in the queen’s speech to both Houses of Parliament on the 5th of September 1848—this being the first time that any civil services obtained that honour; and he was made a knight of the Garter (retaining also the grand cross of the Bath by special order) on the 23rd of March 1849.
Upon the formation of the coalition ministry between the Whigs and the Peelites, in 1853, under Lord Aberdeen, Lord Clarendon became foreign minister. The country was already “drifting” into the Crimean War, an expression of his own which was never forgotten. Clarendon was not responsible for the policy which brought war about; but when it occurred he employed every means in his power to stimulate and assist the war departments, and above all he maintained the closest relations with the French. The tsar Nicholas had speculated on the impossibility of the sustained joint action of France and England in council and in the field. It was mainly by Lord Clarendon at Whitehall and by Lord Raglan before Sevastopol that such a combination was rendered practicable, and did eventually triumph over the enemy. The diplomatic conduct of such an alliance for three years between two great nations jealous of their military honour and fighting for no separate political advantage, tried by excessive hardships and at moments on the verge of defeat, was certainly one of the most arduous duties ever performed by a minister. The result was due in the main to the confidence with which Lord Clarendon had inspired the emperor of the French, and to the affection and regard of the empress, whom he had known in Spain from her childhood.
In 1856 Lord Clarendon took his seat at the congress of Paris convoked for the restoration of peace, as first British plenipotentiary. It was the first time since the appearance of Lord Castlereagh at Vienna that a secretary of state for foreign affairs had been present in person at a congress on the continent. Lord Clarendon’s first care was to obtain the admission of Italy to the council chamber as a belligerent power, and to raise the barrier which still excluded Prussia as a neutral one. But in the general anxiety of all the powers to terminate the war there was no small danger that the objects for which it had been undertaken would be abandoned or forgotten. It is due entirely to the firmness of Lord Clarendon that the principle of the neutralization of the Black Sea was preserved, that the Russian attempt to trick the allies out of the cession in Bessarabia was defeated, and that the results of the war were for a time secured. The congress was eager to turn to other subjects, and perhaps the most important result of its deliberations was the celebrated Declaration of the Maritime Powers, which abolished privateering, defined the right of blockade, and limited the right of capture to enemy’s property in enemy’s ships. Lord Clarendon has been accused of an abandonment of what are termed the belligerent rights of Great Britain, which were undoubtedly based on the old maritime laws of Europe. But he acted in strict conformity with the views of the British cabinet, and the British cabinet adopted those views because it was satisfied that it was not for the benefit of the country to adhere to practices which exposed the vast mercantile interests of Britain to depredation, even by the cruisers of a secondary maritime power, and which, if vigorously enforced against neutrals, could not fail to embroil her with every maritime state in the world.
Upon the reconstitution of the Whig administration in 1859, Lord John Russell made it a condition of his acceptance of office under Lord Palmerston that the foreign department should be placed in his own hands, which implied that Lord Clarendon should be excluded from office, as it would have been inconsistent alike with his dignity and his tastes to fill any other post in the government. The consequence was that from 1859 till 1864 Lord Clarendon remained out of office, and the critical relations arising out of the Civil War in the United States were left to the guidance of Earl Russell. But he re-entered the cabinet in May 1864 as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster; and upon the death of Lord Palmerston in 1865, Lord Russell again became prime minister, when Lord Clarendon returned to the foreign office, which was again confided to him for the third time upon the formation of Mr Gladstone’s administration in 1868. To the last moment of his existence, Lord Clarendon continued to devote every faculty of his mind and every instant of his life to the public service; and he expired surrounded by the boxes and papers of his office on the 27th of June 1870. No man owed more to the influence of a generous, unselfish and liberal disposition. If he had rivals he never ceased to treat them with the consideration and confidence of friends, and he cared but little for the ordinary prizes of ambition in comparison with the advancement of the cause of peace and progress.
He was succeeded as 5th earl by his eldest son, Edward Hyde Villiers (b. 1846), who became lord chamberlain in 1900.
See also the article (by Henry Reeve) in Fraser’s Magazine, August 1876.
CLARENDON, HENRY HYDE, 2nd Earl of (1638-1709), English statesman, eldest son of the first earl, was born on the 2nd of June 1638. He accompanied his parents into exile and assisted his father as secretary, returning with them in 1660. In 1661 he was returned to parliament for Wiltshire as Lord Cornbury. He became secretary in 1662 and lord chamberlain to the queen in 1665. He took no part in the life of the court, and on the dismissal of his father became a vehement opponent of the administration, defended his father in the impeachment, and subsequently made effective attacks upon Buckingham and Arlington. In 1674 he became earl of Clarendon by his father’s death, and in 1679 was made a privy councillor. He was not included in Sir W. Temple’s council of that year, but was reappointed in 1680. In 1682 he supported Halifax’s proposal of declaring war on France. On the accession of James in 1685 he was appointed lord privy seal, but shortly afterwards, in September, was removed from this office to that of lord-lieutenant of Ireland. Clarendon was embarrassed in his estate, and James required a willing agent to carry out his design by upsetting the Protestant government and the Act of Settlement. Clarendon arrived in Dublin on the 9th of January 1686. He found himself completely in the power of Tyrconnel, the commander-in-chief; and though, like his father, a staunch Protestant, elected this year high steward of Oxford University, and detesting the king’s policy, he obeyed his orders to introduce Roman Catholics into the government and the army and upon the bench, and clung to office till after the dismissal of his brother, the earl of Rochester, in January 1687, when he was recalled and succeeded by Tyrconnel. He now supported the church in its struggle with James, opposed the Declaration of Indulgence, wrote to Mary an account of the resistance of the bishops, and visited and advised the latter in the Tower. He had no share, however, in inviting William to England. He assured James in September that the Church would be loyal, advised the calling of the parliament, and on the desertion of his son, Lord Cornbury, to William on the 14th of November, expressed to the king and queen the most poignant grief. In the council held on the 27th, however, he made a violent and unseasonable attack upon James’s conduct, and on the 1st of December set out to meet William, joined him on the 3rd at Berwick near Salisbury, and was present at the conference at Hungerford on the 8th, and again at Windsor on the 16th. His wish was apparently to effect some compromise, saving the crown for James. According to Burnet, he advised sending James to Breda, and according to the duchess of Marlborough to the Tower, but he himself denies these statements. He opposed vehemently the settlement of the crown upon William and Mary, voted for the regency, and refused to take the oaths of the new sovereigns, remaining a non-juror for the rest of his life. He subsequently retired to the country, engaged in cabals against the government, associated himself with Richard Graham, Lord Preston, and organizing a plot against William, was arrested on the 24th of June 1690 by order of his niece, Queen Mary, and placed in the Tower. Liberated on the 15th of August, he immediately recommenced his intrigues. On Preston’s arrest on the 31st of December, a compromising letter from Clarendon was found upon him, and he was named by Preston as one of his accomplices. He was examined before the privy council and again imprisoned in the Tower on the 4th of January 1691, remaining in confinement till the 3rd of July. This closed his public career. In 1702, on Queen Anne’s accession, he presented himself at court, “to talk to his niece,” but the queen refused to see him till he had taken the oaths. He died on the 31st of October 1709, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
His public career had been neither distinguished nor useful, but it seems natural to ascribe its failure to small abilities and to the conflict between personal ties and political convictions which drew him in opposite directions, rather than, following Macaulay, to motives of self-interest. He was a man of some literary taste, a fellow of the Royal Society (1684), the author of The History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Winchester ... continued by S. Gale (1715), and he collaborated with his brother Rochester in the publication of his father’s History (1702-1704). He married (1) in 1660, Theodosia, daughter of Lord Capel, and (2) in 1670, Flower, daughter of William Backhouse of Swallowfield in Berkshire, and widow of William Bishopp and of Sir William Backhouse, Bart. He was succeeded by his only son, Edward (1661-1724), as 3rd earl of Clarendon; and, the latter having no surviving son, the title passed to Henry, 2nd earl of Rochester (1672-1753), at whose death without male heirs it became extinct in the Hyde line.
Hist. MSS. Comm.: MSS. of the Duke of Buccleuch, ii. 31.
Correspondence and Diary (1828), ii. 286.
CLARENDON, CONSTITUTIONS OF, a body of English laws issued at Clarendon in 1164, by which Henry II. endeavoured to settle the relations between Church and State. Though they purported to declare the usages on the subject which prevailed in the reign of Henry I. they were never accepted by the clergy, and were formally renounced by the king at Avranches in September 1172. Some of them, however, were in part at least, as they all purported to be, declaratory of ancient usage and remained in force after the royal renunciation. Of the sixteen provisions the one which provoked the greatest opposition was that which declared in effect that criminous clerks were to be summoned to the king’s court, and from there, after formal accusation and defence, sent to the proper ecclesiastical court for trial. If found guilty they were to be degraded and sent back to the king’s court for punishment. Another provision, which in spite of all opposition obtained a permanent place in English law, declared that all suits even between clerk and clerk concerning advowsons and presentations should be tried in the king’s court. By other provisions appeals to Rome without the licence of the king were forbidden. None of the clergy were to leave the realm, nor were the king’s tenants-in-chief and ministers to be excommunicated or their lands interdicted without the royal permission. Pleas of debt, whether involving a question of good faith or not, were to be in the jurisdiction of the king’s courts. Two most interesting provisions, to which the clergy offered no opposition, were: (1) if a dispute arose between a clerk and a layman concerning a tenement which the clerk claimed as free-alms (frankalmoign) and the layman as a lay-fee, it should be determined by the recognition of twelve lawful men before the king’s justice whether it belonged to free-alms or lay-fee, and if it were found to belong to free-alms then the plea was to be held in the ecclesiastical court, but if to lay-fee, in the court of the king or of one of his magnates; (2) a declaration of the procedure for election to bishoprics and royal abbeys, generally considered to state the terms of the settlement made between Henry I. and Anselm in 1107.
Authorities.—J.C. Robertson, Materials for History of Thomas Becket, Rolls Series (1875-1885); Sir F. Pollock and F.W. Maitland, History of English Law before the Time of Ed. I. (Cambridge, 1898), and F.W. Maitland, Roman Canon Law in the Church of England (1898); the text of the Constitutions is printed by W. Stubbs in Select Charters (Oxford, 1895).
(G. J. T.)
CLARES, POOR, otherwise Clarisses, Franciscan nuns, so called from their foundress, St Clara (q.v.). She was professed by St Francis in the Portiuncula in 1212, and two years later she and her first companions were established in the convent of St Damian’s at Assisi. The nuns formed the “Second Order of St Francis,” the friars being the “First Order,” and the Tertiaries (q.v.) the “Third.” Before Clara’s death in 1253, the Second Order had spread all over Italy and into Spain, France and Germany; in England they were introduced c. 1293 and established in London, outside Aldgate, where their name of Minoresses survives in the Minories; there were only two other English houses before the Dissolution. St Francis gave the nuns no rule, but only a “Form of Life” and a “Last Will,” each only five lines long, and coming to no more than an inculcation of his idea of evangelical poverty. Something more than this became necessary as soon as the institute began to spread; and during Francis’s absence in the East, 1219, his supporter Cardinal Hugolino composed a rule which made the Franciscan nuns practically a species of unduly strict Benedictines, St Francis’s special characteristics being eliminated. St Clara made it her life work to have this rule altered, and to get the Franciscan character of the Second Order restored; in 1247 a “Second Rule” was approved which went a long way towards satisfying her desires, and finally in 1253 a “Third,” which practically gave what she wanted. This rule has come to be known as the “Rule of the Clares”; it is one of great poverty, seclusion and austerity of life. Most of the convents adopted it, but several clung to that of 1247. To bring about conformity, St Bonaventura, while general (1264), obtained papal permission to modify the rule of 1253, somewhat mitigating its austerities and allowing the convents to have fixed incomes,—thus assimilating them to the Conventual Franciscans as opposed to the Spirituals. This rule was adopted in many convents, but many more adhered to the strict rule of 1253. Indeed a counter-tendency towards a greater strictness set in, and a number of reforms were initiated, introducing an appalling austerity of life. The most important of these reforms were the Coletines (St Colette, c. 1400) and the Capucines (c. 1540; see Capuchins). The half-dozen forms of the Franciscan rule for women here mentioned are still in use in different convents, and there are also a great number of religious institutes for women based on the rule of the Tertiaries. By the term “Poor Clares” the Coletine nuns are now commonly understood; there are various convents of these nuns, as of other Franciscans, in England and Ireland. Franciscan nuns have always been very numerous; there are now about 150 convents of the various observances of the Second Order, in every part of the world, besides innumerable institutions of Tertiaries.
See Helyot, Hist. des ordres religieux (1792), vii. cc. 25-28 and 38-42; Wetzer and Welte, Kirchenlexikon (2nd ed.), art. “Clara”; Max Heimbucher, Orden und Kongregationen (1896), i. §§ 47, 48, who gives references to all the literature. For a scientific study of the beginnings see Lempp, “Die Anfänge des Klarissenordens” in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, xiii. (1892), 181 ff.
(E. C. B.)
CLARET (from the Fr. vin claret, mod. clairet, wine of a light clear colour, from Lat. clarus, clear), the English name for the red Bordeaux wines. The term was originally used in France for light-yellow or light-red wines, as distinguished from the vins rouges and the vins blancs; later it was applied to red wines generally, but is rarely used in French, and never with the particular English meaning (see Wine).
CLARETIE, JULES ARSÈNE ARNAUD (1840- ), French man of letters and director of the Théâtre Français, was born at Limoges on the 3rd of December 1840. After studying at the lycée Bonaparte in Paris, he became an active journalist, achieving great success as dramatic critic to the Figaro and to the Opinion nationale. He was a newspaper correspondent during the Franco-German War, and during the Commune acted as staff-officer in the National Guard. In 1885 he became director of the Théâtre Français, and from that time devoted his time chiefly to its administration. He was elected a member of the Academy in 1888, and took his seat in February 1889, being received by Ernest Renan. The long list of his works includes Histoire de la révolution de 1870-1871 (new ed., 5 vols., 1875-1876); Cinq ans après; l’Alsace et la Lorraine depuis l’annexion (1876); some annual volumes of reprints of his articles in the weekly press, entitled La Vie à Paris; La Vie moderne au théâtre (1868-1869); Molière, sa vie et son œuvre (1871); Histoire de la littérature française, 900-1900 (2nd ed. 1905); Candidat! (1887), a novel of contemporary life; Brichanteau, comédien français (1896); several plays, some of which are based on novels of his own—Les Muscadins (1874), Le Régiment de Champagne (1877), Les Mirabeau (1879), Monsieur le ministre (1883), and others; and the opera, La Navarraise, based on his novel La Cigarette, and written with Henri Cain to the music of Massenet. La Navarraise was first produced at Covent Garden (June 1894) with Mme Calvé in the part of Anita. His Œuvres complètes were published in 1897-1904.
CLARI, GIOVANNI CARLO MARIA, Italian musical composer, chapel-master at Pistoia, was born at Pisa about the year 1669. The time of his death is unknown. He was the most celebrated pupil of Colonna, chapel-master of S. Petronio, at Bologna. He became maestro di cappella at Pistoia about 1712, at Bologna in 1720, and at Pisa in 1736. He is supposed to have died about 1745. The works by which Clari distinguished himself pre-eminently are his vocal duets and trios, with a basso continuo, published between 1740 and 1747. These compositions, which combine graceful melody with contrapuntal learning, were much admired by Cherubini. They appear to have been admired by Handel also, since he did not hesitate to make appropriations from them. Clari composed one opera, Il Savio delirante, produced at Bologna in 1695, and a large quantity of church music, several specimens of which were printed in Novello’s Fitzwilliam Music.
CLARINA, a comparatively new instrument of the wood-wind class (although actually made of metal), a hybrid possessing characteristics of both oboe and clarinet. The clarina was invented by W. Heckel of Biebrich-am-Rhein, and has been used since 1891 at the Festspielhaus, Bayreuth, in Tristan und Isolde, as a substitute for the Holztrompete made according to Wagner’s instructions. The clarina has been found more practical and more effective in producing the desired tone-colour. The clarina is a metal instrument with the conical bore and fingering of the oboe and the clarinet single-reed mouthpiece. The compass of the instrument is as shown, and it stands in the key of B♭. Like the clarinet, the clarina is a transposing instrument, for which the music must be written in a key a tone higher than that of the composition. The timbre resulting from the combination of conical bore and single-reed mouthpiece has in the lowest register affinities with the cor anglais, in the middle with the saxophone, and in the highest with the clarinet. Other German orchestras have followed the example of Bayreuth. The clarina has also been found very effective as a solo instrument.
(K. S.)
CLARINET, or Clarionet (Fr. clarinette; Ger. Clarinette, Klarinett; Ital. clarinetto, chiarinetto), a wood-wind instrument having a cylindrical bore and played by means of a single-reed mouthpiece. The word “clarinet” is said to be derived from clarinetto, a diminutive of clarino, the Italian for (1) the soprano trumpet, (2) the highest register of the instrument, (3) the trumpet played musically without the blare of the martial instrument. The word “clarionet” is similarly derived from “clarion,” the English equivalent of clarino. It is suggested that the name clarinet or clarinetto was bestowed on account of the resemblance in timbre between the high registers of the clarino and clarinet. By adding the speaker-hole to the old chalumeau, J.C. Denner gave it an additional compass based on the overblowing of the harmonic twelfth, and consisting of an octave and a half of harmonics, which received the name of clarino, while the lower register retained the name of chalumeau. There is something to be said also in favour of another suggested derivation from the Italian chiarina, the name for reed instruments and the equivalent for tibia and aulos. At the beginning of the 18th century in Italy clarinetto, the diminutive of clarino, would be masculine, whereas chiarinetta or clarinetta would be feminine, as in Doppelmayr’s account of the invention written in 1730. The word “clarinet” is sometimes used in a generic sense to denote the whole family, which consists of the clarinet, or discant corresponding to the violin, oboe, &c; the alto clarinet in E; the basset horn in F (q.v.); the bass clarinet (q.v.), and the pedal clarinet (q.v.).
The modern clarinet consists of five (or four) separate pieces: (1) the mouthpiece; (2) the bulb; (3) the upper middle joint, or left-hand joint; (4) the lower middle joint, or right-hand joint; (5) the bell; which (the bell excepted) when joined together, form a tube with a continuous cylindrical bore, 2 ft. or more in length, according to the pitch of the instrument. The mouthpiece, including the beating or single-reed common to the whole clarinet family, has the appearance of a beak with the point bevelled off and thinned at the edge to correspond with the end of the reed shaped like a spatula. The under part of the mouthpiece (fig. 2) is flattened in order to form a table for the support of the reed which is adjusted thereon with great nicety, allowing just the amount of play requisite to set in vibration the column of air within the tube.
Fig. 1.—Clarinet (Albert Model).
The mouthpiece, which is subject to continual fluctuations of dampness and dryness, and to changes of temperature, requires to be made of a material having great powers of resistance, such as cocus wood, ivory or vulcanite, which are mostly used for the purpose in England. A longitudinal aperture 1 in. long and ½ in. wide, communicating with the bore, is cut in the table and covered by the reed. The aperture is thus closed except towards the point, where, for the distance of 1⁄3 to ¼ in., the reed is thinned and the table curves backwards towards the point, leaving a gap between the ends of the mouthpiece and of the reed of 1 mm. or about the thickness of a sixpence for the B flat clarinet. The curve of the table and the size of the gap are therefore of considerable importance. The reed is cut from a joint of the Arundo donax or sativa, which grows wild in the regions bordering on the Mediterranean. A flat slip of the reed is cut, flattened on one side and thinned to a very delicate edge on the other. At first the reed was fastened to the table by means of many turns of a fine waxed cord. The metal band adjusted by means of two screws, known as the “ligature,” was introduced about 1817 by Ivan Müller. The reed is set in vibration by the breath of the performer, and being flexible it beats against the table, opening and closing the gap at a rate depending on the rate of the vibrations it sets up in the air column, this rate varying according to the length of the column as determined by opening the lateral holes and keys. A cylindrical tube played by means of a reed has the acoustic properties of a stopped pipe, i.e. the fundamental tone produced by the tube is an octave lower than the corresponding tone of an open pipe of the same length, and overblows a twelfth; whereas tubes having a conical bore like the oboe, and played by means of a reed, speak as open pipes and overblow an octave. This forms the fundamental difference between the instruments of the oboe and clarinet families. Wind instruments depending upon lateral holes for the production of their scale must either have as many holes pierced in the bore as they require notes, or make use of the property possessed by the air-column of dividing into harmonics or partials of the fundamental tones. Twenty to twenty-two holes is the number generally accepted as the practical limit for the clarinet; beyond that number the fingering and mechanism become too complicated. The compass of the clarinet is therefore extended through the medium of the harmonic overtones. In stopped pipes a node is formed near the mouthpiece, and they are therefore only able to produce the uneven harmonics, such as the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, &c, corresponding to the fundamental, and the diatonic intervals of the 5th one octave above, and of the 3rd and 7th two octaves above the fundamental. By pressing the reed with the lip near the base where it is thicker and stiffer, and increasing the pressure of the breath, the air-column is forced to divide and to sound the harmonics, a principle well understood by the ancient Greeks and Romans in playing upon the aulos and tibia. This is easier to accomplish with the double reed than with the beating reed; in fact with a tube of wide diameter, such as that of the modern clarinet, it would not be possible by this means alone to do justice to the tone of the instrument or to the music now written for it. The bore of the aulos was very much narrower than that of the clarinet.
Fig. 2.—Clarinet Mouthpiece. a, the mouthpiece showing the position of the bore inside; b, the single or beating reed.
In order to facilitate the production of the harmonic notes on the clarinet, a small hole, closed by means of a key and called the “speaker,” is bored near the mouthpiece. By means of this small hole the air-column is placed in communication with the external atmosphere, a ventral segment is formed, and the air-column divides into three equal parts, producing a triple number of vibrations resulting in the third note of the harmonic series, at an interval of a twelfth above the fundamental. In a wind instrument with lateral holes the fundamental note corresponding to any particular hole is produced when all the holes below that hole are open and it itself and all above it are closed, the effective length of the resonating tube being shortened as each of the closed holes is successively uncovered. In order to obtain a complete chromatic scale on the clarinet at least eighteen holes are required. This series produces with the bell-note a succession of nineteen semitones, giving the range of a twelfth and known as the fundamental scale or chalumeau register, so called, no doubt, because it was the compass (without chromatic semitones) of the more primitive predecessor of the clarinet, known as the chalumeau, which must not be confounded with the shawm or schalmey of the middle ages.
The fundamental scale of the modern clarinet in C extends from The next octave and a half is obtained by opening the speaker key, whereby each of the fundamental notes is reproduced a twelfth higher; the bell-note thus jumps from E to B♮, the first key gives instead of F its twelfth C♯, and so on, extending the compass to , which ends the natural compass of the instrument, although a skilful performer may obtain another octave by cross-fingering. The names of the holes and keys on the clarinet are derived not from the notes of the fundamental scale, but from the name of the twelfth produced by overblowing with the speaker key open; for instance, the first key near the bell is known not as the E key but as the B♮. The use of the speaker key forms the greatest technical difficulty in learning to play the clarinet, on account of the thumb having to do double duty, closing one hole and raising the lever of the speaker key simultaneously. In a clarinet designed by Richard Carte this difficulty was ingeniously overcome by placing the left thumb-hole towards the front, and closing it by a thumb-lever or with a ring action by the first or second finger of the left hand, thus leaving the thumb free to work the speaker key alone.
There is good reason to think that the ancient Greeks understood the advantage of a speaker-hole, which they called Syrinx, for facilitating the production of harmonics on the aulos. The credit of the discovery of this interesting fact is due to A.A. Howard, of Harvard University; it explains many passages in the classics which before were obscure (see Aulos). Plutarch relates that Telephanes of Megara was so incensed with the syrinx that he never allowed his instrument-makers to place one on any of his auloi; he even went so far as to absent himself, principally on account of the syrinx, from the Pythian games. Telephanes was a great virtuoso who scorned the use of a speaker-hole, being able to obtain his harmonics on the aulos by the mere control of lips and teeth.
The modern clarinet has from thirteen to nineteen keys, some being normally open and others closed. In order to understand why, when once the idea of adding keys to the chalumeau had been conceived, the number rose so slowly, keys being added one or two at a time by makers of various nationalities at long intervals, it is necessary to consider the effect of boring holes in the side of a cylindrical tube. If it were possible to proceed from an absolute theoretical basis, there would be but little difficulty; there are, however, practical reasons which make this a matter of great difficulty. According to V. Mahillon, the theoretical length of a B♭ clarinet (French pitch diapason normal A = 435 vibrations), is 39 cm. when the internal diameter of the bore measures exactly 1.4 cm. Any increase in the diameter of the cylindrical bore for a given length of tube raises the pitch proportionally and in the same way a decrease lowers it. A bore narrow in proportion to the length facilitates the production of the harmonics, which is no doubt the reason why the aulos was made with a very narrow diameter, and produced such deep notes in proportion to its length. In determining the position of the holes along the tube, the thickness of the wood to be pierced must be taken into consideration, for the length of the passage from the main bore to the outer air adds to the length of the resonating column; as, however, the clarinet tube is reckoned as a closed one, only half the extra length must be taken into account. When placed in its correct theoretical position, a hole should have its diameter equal to the diameter of the main bore, which is the ideal condition for obtaining a full, rich tone; it is, however, feasible to give the hole a smaller diameter, altering its position by placing it nearer the mouthpiece. These laws, which were likewise known to the Greeks and Romans, had to be rediscovered by experience in the 18th and 19th centuries, during which the mechanism of the key system was repeatedly improved. Due consideration having been given to these points, it will also be necessary to remember that the stopping of the seven open holes leaves only the two little fingers (the thumb of the right hand being in the ordinary clarinet engaged in supporting the instrument) free at all times for key service, the other fingers doing duty when momentarily disengaged. The fingering of the clarinet is the most difficult of any instrument in the orchestra, for it differs in all four octaves of its compass. Once mastered, however, it is the same for all clarinets, the music being always written in the key of C.
The actual tonality of the clarinet is determined by the diatonic scale produced when, starting with keys untouched and finger and thumb-holes closed, the fingers are raised one by one from the holes. In the B flat clarinet, the real sounds thus produced are
being part of the scale of B flat major. By the closing of two open keys, the lower E flat and D are added.
The following are the various sizes of clarinets with the key proper to each:
E flat, a minor third above the C clarinet.
B flat, a tone below the C clarinet.
The high F, 4 tones above the C clarinet.
The D, 1 tone above the C clarinet.
The low G, a fourth below the C clarinet.
The A, a minor third below the C clarinet.
The B♮ 1 semintone below the C clarinet.
The alto clarinet in E♭, a fifth below the B♭ clarinet.
The tenor or basset horn, in F, a fifth below the C clarinet.
The bass clarinet in B♭, an 8ve below that in B♭.
The pedal clarinet in B♭, an 8ve below the bass clarinet.
The clarinets in B♭ and A are used in the orchestra; those in C and E♭ in military bands.
History.—Although the single beating-reed associated with the instruments of the clarinet family has been traced in ancient Egypt, the double reed, characteristic of the oboe family, being of simpler construction, was probably of still greater antiquity. An ancient Egyptian pipe found in a mummy-case and now preserved in the museum at Turin was found to contain a beating-reed sunk 3 in. below the end of the pipe, which is the principle of the drone. It would appear that the double chalumeau, called arghoul (q.v.) by the modern Egyptians, was known in ancient Egypt, although it was not perhaps in common use. The Musée Guimet possesses a copy of a fresco from the tombs at Saqqarah (executed under the direction of Mariette Bey) assigned to the 4th or 5th dynasty, on which is shown a concert with dancing; the instruments used are two harps, the long oblique flute “nay,” blown from the end without any mouthpiece or embouchure, and an instrument identified as an arghoul from its resemblance to the modern instrument of the same name. This is believed to be the only illustration of the ancient double chalumeau yet found in Egypt, with the single exception of a hieroglyph occurring also once only, i.e. the sign read As-it, consisting of a cylindrical pipe with a beak mouthpiece bound round with a cord tied in a bow. The bow is taken to indicate the double parallel pipes bound together; the same sign without the bow occurs frequently and is read Ma-it, and is considered to be the generic name for reed wind instruments. The beating-reed was probably introduced into classic Greece from Egypt or Asia Minor. A few ancient Greek instruments are extant, five of which are in the British Museum. They are as nearly cylindrical as would be the natural growing reed itself. The probability is that both single and double reeds were at times used with the Greek aulos and the Roman tibia. V. Mahillon and A.A. Howard of Harvard have both obtained facsimiles of actual instruments, some found at Pompeii and now deposited in the museum at Naples, and others in the British Museum. Experiments made with these instruments, whose original mouthpieces have perished, show that with pipes of such narrow diameter the fundamental scale and pitch are the same whether sounded by means of a single or of a double reed, but the modern combination of single reed and cylindrical tube alone gives the full pure tone quality. The subject is more fully discussed in the article Aulos. The Roman tibia, if monuments can be trusted, sometimes had a beak-shaped mouthpiece, as for instance that attached to a pipe discovered at Pompeii, or that shown in a scene on Trajan’s column. It is probable that when, at the decline of the Roman empire, instrumental music was placed by the church under a ban—and the tibia more especially from its association with every form of licence and moral depravity—this instrument, sharing the common fate, survived chiefly among itinerant musicians who carried it into western Europe, where it was preserved from complete extinction. An instrument of difficult technique requiring an advanced knowledge of acoustics was not, however, likely to flourish or even to be understood among nations whose culture was as yet in its infancy.
The tide of culture from the Byzantine empire filtered through to the south and west, leaving many traces; a fresh impetus was received from the east through the Arabs; and later, as a result of the Crusades, the prototype of the clarinet, together with the practical knowledge necessary for making the instrument and playing upon it, may have been re-introduced through any one or all of these sources. However this may be, the instrument was during the Carolingian period identified with the tibia of the Romans until such time as the new western civilization ceased to be content to go back to classical Rome for its models, and began to express itself, at first naively and awkwardly, as the 11th century dawned. The name then changed to the derivatives of the Greek kalamos, assuming an almost bewildering variety of forms, of which the commonest are chalemie, chalumeau, schalmey, scalmeye, shawm, calemel, kalemele. The derivation of the name seems to point to a Byzantine rather than an Arab source for the revival of the instruments which formed the prototype of both oboe and clarinet, but it must not be forgotten that the instruments with a conical bore—more especially those played by a reed—are primarily of Asiatic origin. At the beginning of the 13th century in France, where the instrument remained a special favourite until it was displaced by the clarinet, the chalumeau is mentioned in some of the early romances:—“Tabars et chalemiaux et estrumens sonner” (Aye d’Avignon, v. 4137); “Grelles et chelimiaus et buisines bruians” (Gui de Bourgogne, v. 1374), &c. By the end of the 13th century, the German equivalent Schalmey appears in the literature of that country,—“Pusûnen und Schalmeyen schal moht niemen da gehoeren wal” (Frauendienst, 492, fol. 5, Ulrich von Lichtenstein). The schalmey or shawm is frequently represented in miniatures from the 13th century, but it must have been known long before, since it was at that period in use as the chaunter of the bag-pipe (q.v.), a fully-developed complex instrument which presupposes a separate previous existence for its component parts.
We have no reason to suppose that any distinction was drawn between the single and double reed instruments during the early middle ages—if indeed the single reed was then known at all—for the derivatives of kalamos were applied to a variety of pipes. The first clear and unmistakable drawing yet found of the single reed occurs in Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle (p. 282), where the primitive reed pipe is shown with the beating-reed detached from the tube of the instrument itself, by making a lateral slit and then splitting back a little tongue of reed towards a knot. Mersenne calls this the simplest form of chalumeau or wheat-stalk (tuyau de blé). It is evident that no significance was then attached to the form of the vibrating reed, whether single or double, for Mersenne and other writers of his time call the chaunters of the musette and cornemuse chalumeaux whether they are of cylindrical or of conical bore. The difference in timbre produced by the two kinds of reeds was, however, understood, for Mersenne states that a special kind of cornemuse was used in concert with the hautbois de Poitou (an oboe whose double reed was enclosed in an air chamber) and was distinguished from the shepherd’s cornemuse by having double reeds throughout, whereas the drones of the latter instrument were furnished with beating reeds. It is therefore evident that as late as 1636 (the date at which Mersenne wrote) in France the word “chalumeau” was not applied to the instrument transformed some sixty years later into the clarinet, nor was it applied exclusively to any one kind of pipe except when acting as the chaunter of the bagpipe, and that independently of any structural characteristics. The chaunter was still called chalumeau in 1737. Of the instrument which has been looked upon as the chalumeau, there is but little trace in Germany or in France at the beginning of the 17th century. A chalumeau with beak mouthpiece and characteristic short cylindrical tube pierced with six holes figures among the musical instruments used for the triumphal procession of the emperor Maximilian I., commemorated by a fine series of plates, engraved on wood by Hans Burgkmair, the friend and colleague of A. Dürer. On the same plate (No. 79) are five schalmeys with double reeds and five chalumeaux with single-reed beak mouthpieces; the latter instruments were in all probability made in the Netherlands, which excelled from the 12th century in the manufacture of all musical instruments. No single-reed instrument, with the exception of the regal (q.v.), is figured by S. Virdung, M. Agricola or M. Praetorius.
(From Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie.)
Fig. 3. Chalumeau, 1767.
(a) Front,
(b) Back view.
A good idea of the primitive chalumeau may be gained from a reproduction of one of the few specimens from the 16th or 17th century still extant, which belonged to Césare Snoeck and was exhibited at the Royal Military Exhibition in London in 1890. The tube is stopped at the mouthpiece end by a natural joint of the reed, and a tongue has been detached just under the joint; there are six finger-holes and one for the thumb. An instrument almost identical with the above, but with a rudimentary bell, and showing plainly the detached tongue, is figured by Jost Amman in 1589. A plate in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie shows a less primitive instrument, outwardly cylindrical and having a separate mouthpiece joint and a clarinet reed but no keys. A chalumeau without keys, but consisting apparently of three joints—mouthpiece, main tube and bell,—is figured on the title-page of a musical work dated 1690; it is very similar to the one represented in fig. 3, except that only six holes are visible.
In his biographical notice of J. Christian Denner (1655-1707), J.G. Doppelmayr states that at the beginning of the 18th century “Denner invented a new kind of pipe, the so-called clarinet, which greatly delighted lovers of music; he also made great improvements in the stock or rackett-fagottos, known in the olden time and finally also in the chalumeaux.” It is probable that the improvements in the chalumeau to which Doppelmayr alludes without understanding them consisted (a) in giving the mouthpiece the shape of a beak and adding a separate reed tongue as in that of the modern clarinet, unless this change had already taken place in the Netherlands, the country which the unremitting labours of E. van der Straeten have revealed as taking the lead in Europe from the 14th to the 16th century in the construction of musical instruments of all kinds; (b) in the boring of two additional holes for A and B near the mouthpiece and covering them with two keys; (c) in replacing the long cylindrical mouthpiece joint by a bulb, thus restoring one of the characteristic features of the tibia, known as the ὅλμος. There are a few of these improved chalumeaux in existence, two being in the Bavarian national museum at Munich, the one in high A, in a bad state of preservation, the second in C, marked J.C. Denner, of which V. Mahillon has made a facsimile for the museum of the Brussels Conservatoire. There are two keys and eight holes; the first consists of two small holes on the same level giving a semitone if only one be closed. If the thumb-key be left open, the sounds of the fundamental scale (shown in the black notes below) rise a twelfth to form the second register (the white notes).
This early clarinet or improved chalumeau has a clarinet mouthpiece, but no bulb; it measures 50 cm. (20 in.), whereas the one in A mentioned above is only 28 cm. in length, the long cylindrical tube between mouthpiece and key-joint, afterwards turned into the bulb, being absent. Mahillon was probably the first to point out that the so-called invention of the clarinet by J.C. Denner consisted in providing a device—the speaker-key—to facilitate the production of the harmonics of the fundamental. Can we be sure that the same result was not obtained on the old chalumeau before keys were added, by partially uncovering the hole for the thumb?
The Berlin museum possesses an early clarinet with two keys, marked J.B. Oberlender, derived from the Snoeck collection. Paul de Wit’s collection has a similar specimen by Enkelmer. The Brussels Conservatoire possesses clarinets with two keys by Flemish makers, G.A. Rottenburgh and J.B. Willems; the latter, with a small bulb and bell, is in G a fifth above the C clarinet. The next improvements in the clarinet, made in 1720, are due to J. Denner, probably a son of J.C. Denner. They consisted in the addition of a bell and in the removal of the speaker-hole and key nearer the mouthpiece, involving the reduction of the diameter of the hole. The effect of this change of position was to turn the B♮ into B♭, for J. Denner introduced into the hole, nearly as far as the axis of the bore, a small metal drainage tube for the moisture of the breath. In the modern clarinet, the same result is attained by raising this little tube slightly above the surface of the main tube, placing a key on the top of it, and bending the lever. In order to produce the missing B♮, J. Denner lengthened the tube and pierced another hole, the low E, covered by an open key with a long lever which, when closed, gives the desired B as its twelfth, thus forming a connexion between the two registers. A clarinet with three keys, of similar construction (about 1750), marked J.W. Kenigsperger, is preserved in the Bavarian national museum, at Munich. Another in B♭ marked Lindner belongs to the collection at Brussels. About the middle of the 18th century, the number of keys was raised to five, some say by Barthold Fritz of Brunswick (1697-1766), who added keys for C♯ and D♯. According to Altenburg the E♭ or D♯ key is due to the virtuoso Joseph Beer (1744-1811). The sixth key was added about 1790 by the celebrated French virtuoso Xavier Lefébure (or Lefèvre), and produced G♯. Anton Stadler and his brother, both clarinettists in the Vienna court orchestra and instrument-makers, are said to have lengthened the tube of the B♭ clarinet, extending the compass down to C (real sound B♭). It was for the Stadler brothers that Mozart wrote his quintet for strings, with a fine obbligato for the clarinet in A (1789), and the clarinet concerto with orchestra in 1791.
This, then, was the state of the clarinet in 1810 when Ivan Müller, then living in Paris, carried the number of keys up to thirteen, and made several structural improvements already mentioned, which gave us the modern instrument and inaugurated a new era in the construction and technique of the clarinet. Müller’s system is still adopted in principle by most clarinet makers. The instrument was successively improved during the 19th century by the Belgian makers Bachmann, the elder Sax, Albert and C. Mahillon, whose invention in 1862 of the C♯ key with double action is now generally adopted. In Paris the labours of Lefébure, Buffet-Crampon, and Goumas are pre-eminent. In 1842 H.E. Klosé conceived the idea of adapting to the clarinet the ingenious mechanism of movable rings, invented by Boehm for the flute, and he entrusted the execution of this innovation to Buffet-Crampon; this is the type of clarinet generally adopted in French orchestras. From this adaptation has sprung the erroneous notion that Klosé’s clarinet was constructed according to the Boehm system; Klosé’s lateral divisions of the tube do not follow those applied by Boehm to the flute.
Fig. 4.—Clarinet (Boehm model, Klussmann’s patent).