CLARENDON, HENRY HYDE, 2ND EARL OF (1638 1709), English statesman, eldest son of the historian, was born on June 2, 1638, and succeeded to the title on his father's death in 1674. James II. made him lord-lieutenant of Ireland (Sept. 1685) with a commission to carry out his design of replacing Protestants in high positions in Ireland by Roman Catholics. He was recalled in Jan. 1687. At the time of the revolution he played a vacillating part, but opposed the settlement of the crown on William and Mary, and remained a non-juror all his life. On June 24, 169o, he was arrested, by order of his niece Queen Mary, on a charge of plotting against William, and though liberated for a time, was again imprisoned in Jan. 1691 on the evidence of Richard Graham, Lord Preston. He was released in July of that year, and from that time until his death, on Oct. 31, 1709, lived in retirement.
His public career had been neither distinguished nor useful, but it seems natural to ascribe its failure to small abilities and to the conflict between personal ties and political cony ictions which drew him in opposite directions, rather than, following Macaulay, to motives of self-interest. He was a man of some literary taste, a fellow of the Royal Society (1684), the author of The History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church . . . continued by S. Gale (1715), and he collaborated with his brother Rochester in the publication of his father's History (17o2—o4).
He was succeeded by his only son, Edward (1661-1724), as 3rd earl of Clarendon; and, the latter having no surviving son, the title passed to Henry, 2nd earl of Rochester (1672-1753), at whose death without male heirs it became extinct in the Hyde line. (For the other Clarendon line, see above.)