f the land, by that passion for building to which he
owns "he was naturally too much inclined," and perhaps by other
circumstances, among which was the opportunity of purchasing the stones
which had been designed for the rebuilding of St. Paul's; but the envy
it drew on him, and the excess of the architect's proposed expense, had
made his life "very uneasy, and near insupportable." The truth is, that
when this palace was finished, it was imputed to him as a state-crime;
all the evils in the nation, which were then numerous, pestilence,
conflagration, war, and defeats, were discovered to be in some way
connected with Clarendon House, or, as it was popularly called, either
Dunkirk House, or Tangier Hall, from a notion that it had been erected
with the golden bribery which the chancellor had received for the sale
of Dunkirk and Tangiers.[119] He was reproached with having profaned the
sacred stones dedicated to the use of the church. The great but
unfortunate master of this palace, who, from a private lawyer, had
raised himself by alliance even to royalty, the father-in-law of the
Duke of York, it was maliciously suggested, had persuaded Charles the
Second to marry the Infanta of Portugal, knowing (but how Clarendon
obtained the knowledge his enemies have not revealed) that the
Portuguese princess was not likely to raise any obstacle to the
inheritance of his own daughter to the throne. At the Restoration, among
other enemies, Clarendon found that the royalists were none of the least
active; he was reproached by them for preferring those who had been the
cause of their late troubles. The same reproach was incurred on the
restoration of the Bourbons. It is perhaps more political to maintain
active men, who have obtained power, than to reinstate inferior talents,
who at least have not their popularity. This is one of the parallel
cases which so frequently strike us in exploring political history; and
the _ultras_ of Louis the Eighteenth were only the _royalists_ of
Charles the Second. There was a strong popular delusion carried on by
the wits and the _Misses_ who formed the court of Charles the Second,
that the government was as much shared by the Hydes as the Stuarts. We
have in the state-poems, an unsparing lampoon, entitled "Clarendon's
House-warming;" but a satire yielding nothing to it in severity I have
discovered in manuscript; and it is also remarkable for turning chiefly
on a pun of the family name of the Earl of Clar