Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon (1609-1674) of a Cheshire family, was educated at Magdalen Hall, in Oxford, and proceeded to the Middle Temple. He inherited his family's property, was distinguished for his legal knowledge, sat in Parliament when the strife between the King and the Parliament began, and took part in preparing the indictment against the great Strafford. None the less, when a general attack was made on the order of Bishops, he came over to the King's party, in 1641; and in 1646 accompanied the young Prince of Wales in his flights and wanderings, in March, to the Scilly Isles (where he began his History), and presently to Jersey. He remained with Charles II after the death of Charles I, and, if he and Montrose had been heard, the young King would never have disgraced himself by signing the Covenant; and consequently his Cause would never have been defeated at Dunbar, nor his very life imperilled after Worcester fight. Clarendon, seven years after the Restoration, was banished by the influence of faction, as Thucydides was exiled at an early period of the war which he chronicles. It is not conceivable that histories written in such circumstances should be free from partisanship and bias: in fact no historians are exempt from prejudice. Clarendon's history was, in the making, somewhat of a patchwork. What he wrote far away from books and papers, in 1646-1648, depends much on his memory: the book improves when he obtains contemporary narratives and letters. In exile, in 1668-1670 he wrote a Life of himself, which he later interwove with his "History of the Rebellion". Clarendon's heirs did not permit the publication of his History till 1704, from regard to the feelings of the descendants of the King's opponents. The book, in one respect, resembles the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Much of it was written during the actual course of the events by one who bore a great part in them. Whether in favour or in exile, Clarendon was too loyal to say all that he knew and thought about Charles I and Charles II. But when we look at his pages "touching the Scottish Canons," which preceded the despotic introduction of the Liturgy, the cause of "the Bishops' wars" (1639), we perceive, the fairness of Clarendon. He makes it perfectly clear that these Canons could only be accepted by a people inclined tamely to endure the worst excesses of tyranny. But, on Scottish affairs, Clarendon is not always trustworthy; for example he dislocates the dates as to the General Assembly of 1638, permitted (though he does not say so) by the King, and the subscribing of the Covenant, which he places _after_ the Assembly. Mr. Gardiner, a fair historian, speaks of Clarendon's "usual habit of blundering". In his remarks on the Catholics, too, under Charles I, Clarendon can scarcely be acquitted of unfairness; considering how bitterly, in Scotland at least, they were persecuted under Charles I, and how loyally they stood by him.