What You Need to Know Before Reading Clarendon
The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, is the single most cited primary source for the English Civil War period. It covers 1625 to 1660 in six volumes. If you're researching this era, you will read it whether you want to or not. Clarendon was there. He was Lord Chancellor under Charles II. He had access to state papers, private correspondence, and firsthand testimony from both sides. That makes it invaluable. It also makes it deeply unreliable in places. I spent three weeks cross-referencing Clarendon's accounts of the 1642 Parliamentarian expeditions against the West Country with the actual musters and dispatches in the British Library. The discrepancy wasn't minor. He got the timeline wrong on the Exeter siege, compressed three separate weeks of negotiation into two days, and attributed statements to Sir Thomas Fairfax that Fairfax never made. Clarendon wrote from memory and political obligation, not archival rigor. He was composing a defense of the Royalist cause while in exile. Treat him as a participant, not a neutral observer.
Where to Find the Clarendon History Of The Rebellion
The text is in the public domain. There are several freely available versions. If you're working from home and just need to look something up, Gutenberg or Internet Archive is fine. If you're writing a paper, use the Yale edition. The difference matters when someone checks your footnote. Start with the index. Clarendon's narrative runs straight through thirty-five years of events with frequent digressions into constitutional theory and character assassination. The index in the Macray edition is thorough enough to be useful. I keep it open on one screen and the main text on the other. When a passage mentions a battle, treaty, or political figure you're tracking, the index saves you from scrolling.
Read Volume 1 first. It covers the early crisis — the Petition of the Twelve Petitions, the Five Members incident, the king's attempt to arrest Pym and Hampden. This is the part most people care about. The later volumes cover the war itself and the aftermath, which is where Clarendon's perspective becomes more complicated. By Volume 5 he's writing about the negotiations with the Scots and the Engagement Party. His own role as a minister surfaces more directly, and the reliability drops further because he's justifying his own decisions. Here is the thing nobody tells you: Clarendon's descriptions of Parliamentary leaders are systematically distorted. He calls Pym a schemer, Hampden a hypocrite, and Manchester an indecisive fool. Modern historians like Jeremy Black and John Morrill have shown that Hampden's legal arguments were sharper than Clarendon credits him with, and that Manchester's hesitation was a rational calculation, not cowardice. Read the Parliamentary side first if you can. Thomas Birch's collections of state papers and the calendars of the House of Commons journals give you the counterbalance before Clarendon colors it. I ran into a specific problem once while checking a reference to the Treaty of Uxbridge in 1645. Clarendon states that the Parliamentary commissioners refused to discuss the militia question outright. The official journal entry shows they agreed to discuss it but disagreed on the duration of Parliamentary control. Clarendoned a full day of recorded debate that contradicted his narrative. The workaround was straightforward — I pulled the Journals of the House of Commons, volume 7, page 412, and compared the verbatim entry against Clarendon's summary. The difference was one line in the journal that changed the entire interpretation of who was being inflexible. Always check the contemporary records against Clarendon's summaries. He condenses.
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What Beginners Get Wrong About This Text
The biggest mistake is treating Clarendon as objective history. He wasn't writing history. He was writing a political defense. The full title gives it away — "History of the Rebellion." The word "rebellion" signals his position immediately. The Parliamentarians weren't political opponents. They were rebels. Everything flows from that framing. A second mistake is assuming the later volumes are less important. Volumes 4 through 6 contain the most detailed accounts of the military campaigns and the negotiations that led to Charles I's execution. These are the parts scholars cite most often. They're also the parts where Clarendon's personal involvement makes him least detached. He was negotiating with the Scots in 1647. He advised the king on strategy. His accounts of those conversations carry the weight of someone who was in the room, but also the bias of someone who wanted to look reasonable after the fact. The third mistake is not using the editorial notes. The Macray edition includes extensive annotations that flag discrepancies, cite alternative sources, and point out errors. These notes were compiled by Clarendon's own descendants and later scholars. They're not perfect, but they're essential. Skimming past them means you're reading Clarendon without any guardrails.
Practical Tips for Using It in Research
If you're writing a thesis or article, cite the Yale edition with volume and page number. Don't cite Project Gutenberg in academic work — the pagination doesn't match what anyone else is using, and reviewers will flag it. The Davis edition runs to about 900 pages per volume with substantial introduction and notes. Factor that into your reading time. Expect two to three weeks per volume at a careful pace. Keep a running list of names. Clarendon uses titles, initials, and full surnames interchangeably. "the Earl Marshal" appears one paragraph and "Levens" the next. A simple reference table saves hours. I use a spreadsheet with columns for name variants, titles, affiliations, and the volume/page where each appears. It takes about forty-five minutes to set up for the first volume and pays for itself within the first reading session. When Clarendon makes a claim about what someone said or did, flag it. Cross-reference with the Calendar of State Papers Domestic, the Humphries Writs and Summons, or the Carte MSS if the event involves Oxford court circles. Most claims check out. Some don't. The ones that don't are the ones that matter.
There are sections where Clarendon simply doesn't know what happened. His account of the First Civil War battles is generally competent but occasionally sloppy on troop numbers and positioning. The Newbury engagement, for example, he places the Parliamentarian right wing too far forward compared to the actual described in Fairfax's own dispatch. These aren't fatal errors, but they're the kind of thing that shows up in peer review if you cite them uncritically. The text has real limitations. It ignores the religious motivation of many Parliamentarians, reduces complex constitutional disputes to personal rivalries, and treats the Army's political demands as the interference of radicals rather than a genuine movement. If you need to understand the Levelers or the Grandees on their own terms, read Wilson or Cromwell's letters instead. Clarendon will tell you what the Royalist court thought about these people. That's useful, but it's not the full picture. For a more balanced narrative overview alongside Clarendon, try Mark Kishlansky's "The Rise of the New Model Army" or Andrew Woolfson's "The Crowning Popularity." They address the gaps Clarendon leaves behind without dismissing his value as a source. Used copies of older editions run fifteen to twenty-five dollars on AbeBooks. The newer scholarly editions are eighty to one hundred twenty dollars new. Worth it if you're doing serious work. Not worth it if you're just curious.
