1660 to 1667
After the Stuart Restoration in 1660, he returned to England and became even closer to the royal family through the marriage of his daughter Anne to the King's brother James, Duke of York. Contemporaries naturally assumed that Hyde had arranged the royal marriage of his daughter, but modern historians, in general, accept his repeated claims that he had no hand in it, and that indeed it came as an unwelcome shock to him. He is supposed to have told Anne that he would rather see her dead than to so disgrace her family.
There were good reasons for his opposition, since he may have hoped to arrange a marriage for James with a foreign princess, and he was well aware that nobody regarded his daughter as a suitable royal match, a view Clarendon shared. On the personal level, he seems to have disliked James, whose impulsive attempt to repudiate the marriage can hardly have endeared him to his father-in-law. Anne enforced the rules of etiquette governing such marriages with great strictness, and thus caused her parents some social embarrassment: as commoners, they were not permitted to sit down in Anne's presence, or to refer to her as their daughter. As Cardinal Mazarin remarked, the marriage damaged Hyde's reputation as a politician, whether he was responsible for it or not. On 3 November 1660, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Hyde, of Hindon in the County of Wiltshire, and on 20 April the next year, at the coronation, he was created Viscount Cornbury and Earl of Clarendon. He served as Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1660 to 1667.
As effective chief minister in the early years of the reign, he accepted the need to fulfil most of what had been promised in the Declaration of Breda, which he had partly drafted. In particular, he worked hard to fulfil the promise of mercy to all the King's enemies, except the regicides, and this was largely achieved in the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. Most other problems he was content to leave to Parliament, and in particular to the restored House of Lords; his speech welcoming the Lords' return shows his ingrained dislike of democracy.
He played a key role in Charles' marriage to Catherine of Braganza, with ultimately harmful consequences to himself. Clarendon liked and admired the Queen, and disapproved of the King's openly maintaining his mistresses. The King, however, resented any interference with his private life. Catherine's failure to bear children also was damaging to Clarendon, given the nearness of his own grandchildren to the throne, although it is most unlikely, as was alleged, that Clarendon had planned deliberately for Charles to marry an infertile bride. He and Catherine remained on friendly terms; one of his last letters thanked her for her kindness to his family.
As Lord Chancellor, it is commonly thought that Clarendon was the author of the "Clarendon Code", designed to preserve the supremacy of the Church of England. In reality, he was not very heavily involved with its drafting and actually disapproved of much of its content. The "Great Tew Circle" of which he had been a leading member prided itself on tolerance and respect for religious differences. The code was thus merely named after him as chief minister.
In 1663, he was one of eight Lords Proprietor given title to a huge tract of land in North America which became the Province of Carolina. Shortly after this, an attempt was made to impeach him by George Digby, 2nd Earl of Bristol, a longstanding political opponent from the Civil War. He was accused of arranging for Charles to marry a woman he knew to be barren in order to secure the throne for the children of his daughter Anne, while Clarendon House, his palatial new mansion in Piccadilly, was cited as evidence of corruption. He was also blamed for the Sale of Dunkirk, and the cost of supporting the colony of Tangiers, acquired along with Bombay as part of Catherine's dowry. The windows of Clarendon House were broken, and a placard fixed to the house blaming Hyde for "Dunkirk, Tangiers and a barren Queen".
While these allegations were not taken seriously, and ended by damaging Bristol more than Hyde, he became increasingly unpopular with the public and with Charles, whom he subjected to frequent lectures on his shortcomings. His contempt for Charles' mistress Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, earned him her enmity, and she worked with the future members of the Cabal ministry to destroy him.
His authority was weakened by increasing ill-health, in particular attacks of gout and back pain that became so severe that he was often incapacitated for months on end: Samuel Pepys records that early in 1665 Hyde was forced to lie on a couch during Council meetings. Even neutrals began to see him as a liability, and when attempts to persuade him to retire failed, some spread false reports that he was anxious to step down. These included Sir William Coventry who later admitted to Samuel Pepys that he was largely responsible for these reports; he claimed this was because Clarendon's dominance of policy and refusal to consider alternatives made even their discussion impossible. In his memoirs, Clarendon makes clear his bitterness against Coventry for what he regarded as betrayal, which he contrasted with the loyalty shown by his brother Henry.
Above all, the military setbacks of the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665 to 1667, together with the disasters of the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London, led to his downfall, and the successful Dutch raid on the Medway in June 1667 was the final blow to his career. Despite having opposed the war, unlike many of his accusers, he was removed from office; as he left Whitehall, Barbara Villiers shouted abuse at him, to which he replied with simple dignity: "Madam, pray remember that if you live, you will also be old".
At almost the same time he suffered a great personal blow when his wife died after a short illness: in a will drawn up the previous year, he described her as "my dearly beloved wife, who hath accompanied and assisted me in all my distresses". Clarendon was impeached by the House of Commons for blatant violations of Habeas Corpus, for having sent prisoners out of England to places like Jersey and holding them there without benefit of trial. He was forced to flee to France in November 1667. The King made it clear that he would not defend him, and this betrayal of his old and loyal servant harmed Charles's reputation. Efforts to pass an Act of Attainder against him failed, but an act providing for his banishment, the Earl of Clarendon Act 1667 (19 & 20 Cha. 2. c. 2), was passed in December and received the royal assent. Apart from the Duke of York (Clarendon's son-in-law) and Henry Coventry, few spoke in his defence. Clarendon was accompanied to France by his private chaplain and ally William Levett, later Dean of Bristol.
