(Edward), earl of Clarendon, and lord high chancellor of England, was descended from an ancient family in Cheshire, and born at Dinton near Hindon, in Wiltshire, in 1608. He was entered of Magdalen-hall, Oxford, where, in 1625, he took the degree of A.B. and afterwards studied the law in the Middle-Temple. In the parliament which began at Westminster April 10, 1640, he served for Wotton-Basset in Wiltshire. But that parliament being soon after dissolved, he was chosen for Saltash in Cornwall in the long parliament. His abilities were much taken notice of, and he was employed in several committees to examine into divers grievances; but at last being disfurnished with the proceedings in the parliament, he retired to the king, and was made chancellor of the exchequer, a privy-counsellor, and knight. Upon the declining of the king's cause, he went to France, where, after the death of king Charles I., he was sworn of the privy council to Charles II. In 1649, he and the lord Cottington were sent ambassadors extraordinary into Spain, and in 1657 he was constituted lord high chancellor of England. The year before the restoration, the duke of York fell in love with Mrs Anne Hyde, the lord chancellor's eldest daughter, but carefully concealed the amour both from the king and chancellor. As it was by a promise of marriage, however, that he had gained upon her, he was afterwards induced to fulfil his engagement, and the ceremony was performed after the restoration. Upon the restoration, her father was chosen chancellor of the university of Oxford; and soon after created baron Hindon, in Wiltshire, viscount Cornbury in Oxfordshire, and earl of Clarendon in Wiltshire; and on the death of Henry lord Falkland, was made lord lieutenant of Oxfordshire. He took care neither to load the king's prerogative, nor encroach upon the liberties of the people; and therefore would not set aside the petition of right, nor endeavour to raise the star-chamber or high-commission courts again; nor did he attempt to repeal the bill for triennial parliaments; and when he might have obtained two millions for a standing revenue, he asked but one million two hundred thousand pounds per annum, which he thought would still put the king upon the necessity of having recourse to his parliament. In this just conduct he is said to have been influenced by the following incident, which happened some years before. When he first began to grow eminent in the law, he went down to visit his father in Wiltshire; who, one day as they were walking in the fields together, observed to him, that men of his profession were apt to stretch the prerogative too far, and to injure liberty; but charged him, if ever he came to any eminence in his profession, never to sacrifice the laws and liberty of his country to his own interest or the will of his princes; he repeated his advice twice; and immediately falling into a fit of an apoplexy, died in a few hours; and this circumstance had a lasting influence upon him. In 1662, he opposed a proposal for the king's marriage with the infanta of Portugal, and the sale of Dunkirk; however, the following year, articles of high treason were exhibited against him by the earl of Bristol; but they were rejected by the house of lords. In 1664, he opposed the war with Holland. In August 1667, he was removed from his post of lord chancellor; and in November following impeached of high treason and other crimes and misdemeanors by the house of commons; upon which he retired into France, when a bill was passed for banishing him from the king's dominions. See BRITAIN, n. 211, 217. He resided at Rouen in Normandy; and dying there in 1674, his body was brought to England and interred in Westminster-abbey. He wrote, 1. A history of the rebellion, 3 vols folio, and 6 vols octavo; a second part of which was lately bequeathed to the public by his lordship's descendant the late lord Hyde and Cornbury. 2. A letter to the duke of York, and another to the duchess of York, upon occasion of their embracing the Roman religion. 3. An answer to Hobbes's Leviathan. 4. A history of the rebellion and civil wars in Ireland, octavo; and some other works.

The reverend Mr Granger, in his Biographical History of England, observes, that "the virtue of the earl of Clarendon was of too stubborn a nature for the age of Charles II. Could he have been content (says he) to have enslaved millions, he might have been more a monarch than an unprincely king. But he did not only look upon himself as the guardian of the laws and liberties of his country, but had also a pride in his nature that was above vice; and chose rather to be a victim himself, than to sacrifice his integrity. He had only one part to act, which was that of an honest man. His enemies allowed themselves a much greater latitude; they loaded him with calumnies, blamed him even for their own errors and misconduct, and helped to ruin him by such buffooneries as he despised. He was a much greater, perhaps a much happier, man, alone and in exile, than Charles the Second upon his throne."

And the following character of this nobleman is given by Mr Walpole. "Sir Edward Hyde (says he), who opposed an arbitrary court, and embraced the party of an afflicted one, must be allowed to have acted conscientiously. A better proof was his behaviour on the restoration, when the torrent of an infatuated nation intreated the king and his minister to be absolute. Had Clarendon fought nothing but power, his power had never ceased. A corrupted court and a blinded populace were less the causes of the chancellor's fall, than an ungrateful king, who could not pardon his lordship's having refused to accept for him the slavery of his country. Like justice herself, he held the balance between the necessary power of the supreme magistrate and the interests of the people. This never-dying obligation his contemporaries were taught to overlook and clamour against, till they removed the only man, who, if he could, would have corrected his master's evil government. Almost every virtue of a minister made his character venerable. As an historian, he seems more exceptionable. His majesty and eloquence, his power of painting characters, his knowledge of his subject, rank him in the first class of writers; yet he has both great and little faults. Of the latter, his stories of ghosts and omens are not to be defended. His capital fault is his whole work being a laboured justification of king Charles. If he relates faults, some palliating epithet always slides in; and he has the art of breaking his darkest shades with gleams of light that take off all impression of horror. One may pronounce on my lord Clarendon, in his double capacity of statesman and historian, that he acted for liberty, but wrote for prerogative."

Hyde (Dr Thomas), professor of Arabic at Oxford, and one of the most learned writers of the 17th century, was born in 1636; and studied first at Cambridge, and afterwards at Oxford. Before he was 18 years of age, he was sent from Cambridge to London to assist Mr Brian Walton in the great work of the Polyglot Bible; and about that period undertook to transcribe the Persian Pentateuch out of the Hebrew characters, which archbishop Usher, who well knew the difficulty of the undertaking, pronounced to be an impossible task to a native Persian. After he had happily succeeded in this, he assisted in correcting several parts of Mr Walton's work, for which he was perfectly qualified. He was made archdeacon of Gloucester, canon of Christ-church, head keeper of the Bodleian library, and professor both of Hebrew and Arabic, in the university of Oxford. He was interpreter and secretary of the Oriental languages, during the reigns of Charles II., James II., and William III.; and was perfectly qualified to fill this post, as he could converse in the languages which he understood. There never was an Englishman in his situation of life who made so great a progress; but his mind was so engrossed by his beloved studies, that he is said to have been but ill qualified to appear to any advantage in common conversation. Of all his learned works (the very catalogue of which, as observed by Anth. Wood, is a curiosity), his Religio Veterum Perfarum is the most celebrated. Dr Gregory Sharpe, the late learned and ingenious matter of the Temple, has collected several of his pieces formerly printed, and republished them, with some additional dissertations, and his life prefixed, in two elegant volumes quarto. This great man died on the 18th of February, 1702. Among his other works are, 1. A Latin translation of Ulug Beig's observations on the longitude and latitude of the fixed stars; and, 2. A catalogue of the printed books in the Bodleian library.