BIRTHPLACE   OF   LORD   CORNBURY,   OXFORDSHIRE.
 

CHAPTER   II

THE   ADMINISTRATION   OF   LORD    CORNBURY
1702-1708
 

HARLES READE begins one of his entertaining stories
with the following sentence: " In Charles the Second's
day, the ' Swan' was denounced by the dramatists as a
house where unfaithful wives and mistresses met their
gallants." In this same " Swan" Inn, a "rakehelly" of London con¬
cocted treason against his relative and king, James II. This man
was Edward, Viscount Cornbury, afterward colonial governor of New-
York ; and that he should have been at home amid such vile surround¬
ings is typical of his entire subsequent career.

Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, was the grandson of the first
Earl of Clarendon, prime minister and lord chancellor of Charles II.,
and a son of the Earl of Clarendon, the brother-in-law of James II.
He was therefore the own cousin of the Princess Anne, afterward
queen, and the nephew by marriage of her father the king. He was
educated at Geneva, and in 1688 married a daughter of Lord O'Brian.
He was a young man, says Macaulay, " of abilities so slender as
almost to verge on intellectual imbecility"; of loose principles, and
of an arrogant and violent temper. " He had been early taught,"
continues that same writer, " to consider his relationship to the
Princess Anne as the groundwork of his fortunes, and had been ex¬
horted to pay her assiduous court." Thus it happened that the first
act which brought him into notice was, under the instructions of
Churchill (afterward Duke of Marlborough), to lead over into the
camp of William of Orange, on the latter's approach to Salisbury,