ABSTRACT
To write history, Clarendon thought, one needed to have made it. 'There was never yet a good History written but by Men conversant in Business, and of the best and most liberal Education', he wrote in his digression on the historian's art in the essay 'On an Active and on a Contemplative Life', composed during the last part of his life in exile in France after 1667. Clarendon's 'Life' of the late 1660s is the first autobiography written by an English politician of real significance. There was no home-grown model for writing political memoir. Hyde wrote plentifully of himself elsewhere. His papers from Jersey include the personal act of vindication appended to the will he wrote in April 1647. Hyde later wrote that he thought of the first period of exile as an opportunity to reflect on his own life and experience, a 'retirement' or 'recess' that would become a powerful theme of his writing.
