By the Rev. W. H. Jones. 



289 



those belonging to them may have been compelled to submit not 

 only to great privations, but even to fill menial offices. Lord 

 Clarendon, we know, at times endured much distress. " We are 

 all," he writes from Brussels, " without a dollar, and have been 

 long, and they who have neither money nor credit are likely to 

 keep a cold Christmas." He adds that his wife, in the immediate 

 expectation of becoming a mother, was in want of common neces- 

 saries. Sir Thomas Aylesbury, driven from his home, sold his 

 library to relieve his distresses, and died in want and obscurity at 

 Breda. His son William, after struggling long with difficulties, 

 in 1657, when Cromwell fitted out a fleet to go on an expedition 

 to the West Indies to carry a supply to the Island of Jamaica, 

 from pure necessity engaged himself to the governor, and died in 

 the island soon afterwards. What more probable, than that, under 

 the pressure of such exigencies, some one, perhaps more of the 

 female members of their families may have been forced to sub- 

 mit to humiliating employment for the purpose of obtaining 

 means of subsistence. And Jacobite spleen might soon, from such 

 a fact, contrive a tale, the object of which would be to throw a blot 

 on their escutcheon. Such a tale would find too many among the 

 exiled Court at St. Germain's willing to believe it ; and Mary of 

 Modena, smarting under the indignity formerly offered to her in the 

 doubts thrown on the legitimacy of her own son, by the absurd 

 yet too readily believed story of a strange child being conveyed to 

 the Queen's chamber in a warming-pan, and passed off as the real 

 Prince of Wales, would draw from it no pleasing contrast between 

 the supposed low condition of some of the immediate ancestors of 

 Mary and Ann, daughters of Ann Hyde, and her own proud line 

 of descent. And Italian jealousy and pride would add no little 

 fuel to the flame kindled with such materials and under such 

 circumstances. 



We might indeed find motives enough, in the feeling entertained 

 against Lord Clarendon in his own country, for the ready credence 

 of any story that might tarnish the fame of the great Chancellor. 

 He had many enemies in England. The exalted position to which 

 his daughter was raised when she became the wife of James, Duke 



