Clarendon's virtues
Sir: Noel Malcolm's jaundiced account of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (Books, 12 September) is a pity.
The Restoration Settlement still defines the framework of the state in these islands: Clarendon was its principal architect. Toryism is still the dominant political tradition in England: Clarendon first and most nobly articulated it. Constitutional- ism is still the rule by which our system of government lives: Clarendon was one of its earliest and greatest exponents. He de- serves better than Mr Malcolm's faint praise, and the neglect of the past hundred years.
And what a comment on the author of The History of the Great Rebellion that his prose style is 'one part Ciceronian to two parts Civil Servant'. I wish that any of the civil servants I know wrote like Clarendon!
Above all Mr Malcolm misses the under- lying reasons for what seems to be a revival of interest in Clarendon — of which Richard 011ard's book is welcome evi- dence. The receding tide of Empire has shrunk England to her 17th-century sta- ture. At the same time the Whig-Marxist certainties which dominated our historical writing for a century have dissoved. This is the context in which — if Mr Macolm will let us — we should listen with growing attention to the voice of Clarendon: that of one of our most considerable philosopher- statesmen, who succeeded, at a time of profound national division and weakness, in defining the essential virtues of the English tradition in politics.
Robert Jackson
House of Commons, London, SW1
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