Our book today is The Life and Times of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, a sturdy hardcover by J. A. R. Marriott put out by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1907, when King Edward was on the throne of England and John Marriott was a professor of history at Oxford and Lucius Cary, the second Viscount Falkland, was two centuries in his grave.

I found the book on a sunny summer afternoon at the outdoor carts of my beloved Brattle Bookshop in Boston (where gift certificates in my name can be cheerfully provided to any caller with a valid credit card …), and I plucked it instantly from the profusion on offer there. I couldn’t fail to be interested in the young man Matthew Arnold referred to as “the martyr of lucidity of mind and largeness of temper in a strife of imperfect intelligences and tempers illiberal” – this young man who died fighting for his king during the English Civil War and who’s praised so soundly in the History of the Rebellion by our old friend Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. About Falkland, Arnold wrote, “He and his friends, by their heroic and hopeless stand against the inadequate ideals dominant in their time, kept open their communications with the future, lived with the future.” How can you not be interested in someone who could inspire such Grade-A rhetorical fertilizer?

Falkland interested Marriott too, who took up the subject with the honest zest so typical of the Edwardian era, proudly staking his researches against the set dogma of the biographical tradition:

For nearly two hundred years the fame of Falkland suffered complete eclipse, or, at best, suggested an opportunity for a passing sneer at a character compounded of genial amiability and political ineffectiveness. Horace Walpole was remarkable rather for incisive malignity than for profundity of historical research. But the sketch of Falkland in his Royal and Noble Authors is important as having struck the note of historical criticism for several generations. Walpole bluntly suggests … that nothing but the literary skill of a partial friend [Clarendon] had rescued the memory of an undistinguished but amiable nobleman from well-deserved oblivion. Royal and Noble Authors has fallen into deserved neglect, but a passage which apparently inspired the judgment of not Hallam only, but Carlyle and Macaulay may perhaps justify quotation …

And then he quotes from Walpole (the neglect of whose Royal and Noble Authors is most certainly not deserved – I’d snatch it up just as quick as Marriott’s book, if it ever crossed my path at the Brattle):

There never was a stronger instance of what the magic of words and the art of an Historian can effect, than in the character of this Lord, who seems to have been a virtuous, well-meaning Man with a moderate understanding, who got knocked on the head early in the civil war, because it boded ill: and yet by the happy solemnity of my Lord Clarendon’s diction, Lord Falkland is the favourite personage of that noble work … That Lord Falkland was a weak man, to me appears indubitable.

It wasn’t so indubitable to his many friends, especially the lively informal literary salon he gathered about him at his country estate in the Cotswolds village of Great Tew (a salon which included Ben Jonson, no middling judge of intellect). Falkland wrote tracts of moderate readability today, and he married and produced a little Falkland, and when civil war came, he remained loyal to his king rather than to the ring-leading Parliamentary usurpers. It was no less a figure than bestselling Victorian man of letters Lord Lytton (talk about undeserved neglect!) who best characterized the man, in a truly masterful long essay for The Quarterly Review:

Falkland, from the first to the last, was a lover of Liberty, but Liberty as her image would present itself to the mind of a scholar and the heart of a gentleman. It is no proof of apostacy from the cause of Liberty if he thought that a time had come when Liberty was safer on the whole with King Charles than with “King Pym.

Falkland is credited with one of the great quips of all time, “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” He was a fan of settled order and a steadfast enemy of blind, heedless change – he’s celebrated for this kind of temperance time and again in Clarendon’s great work, and this pleases Marriott in very obvious ways. Indeed, the mentions seem to please the good professor more than the great work does, although I guess even qualified praise is better than the complete oblivion that has now swallowed Clarendon’s book (more eclipses in this post than in an astronomy blog):

Much may be said in criticism of the History of the Rebellion. A great lawyer is perhaps constitutionally unfitted to be the impartial chronicler of such a period, nor could one who played a leading part in the drama be expected to view with impartiality its successive scenes, culminating in the great tragedy of 1649 … but its merits and defects alike contribute to its perennial fascination. As an analysis of the causes of the Rebellion it is wholly inadequate; as a gallery of contemporary portraits it is interesting and valuable beyond all verbal computation.

Viscount Falkland in the end grew as tired of the strife of his times as he did of the actual fighting. There’s always been a strong little tradition that he intended to get

himself killed on the battlefield rather than face the bitter days into which his life had led … in fact, he started the tradition himself, and most historians haven’t challenged it (although they haven’t exactly been lining up to study Falkland in any case). Marriott, however, is not most historians, and his Edwardian ebullience prompts him to defend his hero against any hint of contemplating suicide. For Marriott, Falkland’s death at the First Battle of Newbury in 1643 was the product of youthful valor, not resigned surrender, and who’s to say for certain that he’s wrong?

He makes many studied judgement calls in the pages of The Life and Times of Lucious Cary, Viscount Falkland, taking readers from the Viscount’s ghastly nouveau riche parents and even-worse grandparents to his own family to his grand Parliamentary speeches, here produced in full. Marriott writes the whole thing so robustly and engagingly that you hurry to turn the pages and keep gulping down this larger-than-life life story. But time, as Falkland knew quite well, works in unpredictable twists and turns – demonstrated in this case by the fact that the pages of that old copy I found at the Brattle didn’t turn: they were still uncut. And later in the evening, on the couch gently cutting the pages, I realized that time had not treated it as it might have expected. The book was moderately popular upon publication in the UK and US; it inspired some critical conversations and garnered a couple of good blurbs before it vanished into jumble sales and basement boxes. No doubt the brand-new hardcover was bought for some older male relative whose taste in reading matter perhaps ran more to detective thrillers than the giver knew. In any case, the book spent its entire life going from recipient to recipient – and probably from used bookshop to used bookshop – not only unread but unexamined, as if to dramatically illustrate the “eclipse” Marriott mentions.

At least now it’s found a home. And it’s available in full online, as well!