offering to hand over to him his estate, he left England to take
service in the Dutch army, but soon returned. In 1633, by the
death of his father, he became Viscount Falkland. His mother
had embraced the Roman Catholic faith, to which it was now
sought to attract Falkland himself, but his studies and reflections
led him, under the influence of Chillingworth, to the interpretation
of religious problems rather by reason than by tradition
or authority. At Great Tew he enjoyed a short but happy
period of study, and he assembled round him many gifted and
learned men, whom the near neighbourhood of the university
and his own brilliant qualities attracted to his house. He was
the friend of Hales and Chillingworth, was celebrated by Jonson,
Suckling, Cowley and Waller in verse, and in prose by Clarendon,
who is eloquent in describing the virtues and genius of the
“incomparable” Falkland, and draws a delightful picture of
his society and hospitality.
Falkland’s intellectual pleasures, however, were soon interrupted by war and politics. He felt it his duty to take part on the king’s side as a volunteer under Essex in the campaign of 1639 against the Scots. In 1640 he was returned for Newport in the Isle of Wight to the Short and Long Parliaments, and took an active part on the side of the opposition. He spoke against the exaction of shipmoney on the 7th of December 1640, denouncing the servile conduct of Lord Keeper Finch and the judges.[1] He supported the prosecution of Strafford, at the same time endeavouring on more than one occasion to moderate the measures of the Commons in the interests of justice, and voted for the third reading of the attainder on the 21st of April 1641. On the great question of the church he urged, in the debate of the 8th of February 1641, that the interference of the clergy in secular matters, the encroachments in jurisdiction of the spiritual courts, and the imposition by authority of unnecessary ceremonies, should be prohibited. On the other hand, though he denied that episcopacy existed jure divino, he was opposed to its abolition; fearing the establishment of the Presbyterian system, which in Scotland had proved equally tyrannical. Triennial parliaments would be sufficient to control the bishops, if they meditated any further attacks upon the national liberties, and he urged that “where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” Even Hampden still believed that a compromise with the episcopal principle was possible, and assured Falkland that if the bill taken up to the Lords on the 1st of May 1641, excluding the bishops from the Lords and the clergy from secular offices, were passed, “there would be nothing more attempted to the prejudice of the church.” Accordingly the bill was supported by Falkland. The times, however, were not favourable to compromise. The bill was lost in the Lords, and on the 27th of May the Root and Branch Bill, for the total abolition of episcopacy, was introduced in the House of Commons. This measure Falkland opposed, as well as the second bill for excluding the bishops, introduced on the 21st of October. In the discussion on the Grand Remonstrance he took the part of the bishops and the Arminians. He was now opposed to the whole policy of the opposition, and, being reproached by Hampden with his change of attitude, replied “that he had formerly been persuaded by that worthy gentleman to believe many things which he had since found to be untrue, and therefore he had changed his opinion in many particulars as well as to things as to persons.”[2]
On the 1st of January 1642, immediately before the attempted arrest of the five members, of which, however, he was not cognizant, he was offered by the king the secretaryship of state, and was persuaded by Hyde to accept it, thus becoming involved directly in the king’s policy, though evidently possessing little influence in his counsels. He was one of the peers who signed the protestation against making war, at York on the 15th of June 1642. On the 5th of September he carried Charles’s overtures for peace to the parliament, when he informed the leaders of the opposition that the king consented to a thorough reformation of religion. The secret correspondence connected with the Waller plot passed through his hands. He was present with the king at Edgehill and at the siege of Gloucester. By this time the hopelessness of the situation had completely overwhelmed him. The aims and principles of neither party in the conflict could satisfy a man of Falkland’s high ideals and intellectual vision. His royalism could not suffer the substitution, as the controlling power in the state, of a parliament for the monarchy, nor his conservatism the revolutionary changes in church and state now insisted upon by the opposite faction. The fatal character and policy of the king, the most incapable of men and yet the man upon whom all depended, must have been by now thoroughly understood by Falkland. Compromise had long been out of the question. The victory of either side could only bring misery; and the prolongation of the war was a prospect equally unhappy. Nor could Falkland find any support or consolation in his own inward convictions or principles. His ideals and hopes were now destroyed, and he had no definite political convictions such as inspired and strengthened Strafford and Pym. In fact his sensitive nature shrank from contact with the practical politics of the day and prevented his rise to the place of a leader or a statesman. Clarendon has recorded his final relapse into despair. “Sitting amongst his friends, often, after a deep silence and frequent sighs (he) would with a shrill and sad accent ingeminate the word Peace, Peace, and would passionately profess that the very agony of the war, and the view of the calamities and desolation the kingdom did and must endure, took his sleep from him and would shortly break his heart.” At Gloucester he had in vain exposed himself to risks. On the morning of the battle of Newbury, on the 20th of September 1643, he declared to his friends, who would have dissuaded him from taking part in the fight, that “he was weary of the times and foresaw much misery to his own Country and did believe he should be out of it ere night.”[3] He served during the engagement as a volunteer under Sir John Byron, and, riding alone at a gap in a hedge commanded by the enemy’s fire, was immediately killed.
His death took place at the early age of 33, which should be borne in mind in every estimate of his career and character. He was succeeded in the title by his eldest son Lucius, 3rd Viscount Falkland, his male descent becoming extinct in the person of Anthony, 5th viscount, in 1694, when the viscounty passed to Lucius Henry (1687–1730), a descendant of the first viscount, and the present peer is his direct descendant.
Falkland wrote a Discourse of Infallibility, published in 1646 (Thomason Tracts, E 361 [1]), reprinted in 1650, in 1651 (E 634 [1]) ed. by Triplet with replies, and in 1660 with the addition of two discourses on episcopacy by Falkland. This is a work of some importance in theological controversy, the general argument being that “to those who follow their reason in the interpretation of the Scriptures God will either give his grace for assistance to find the truth or his pardon if they miss it. And then this supposed necessity of an infallible guide (with the supposed damnation for the want of it) fall together to the ground.” Also A Letter ... 30 Sept. 1642 concerning the late conflict before Worcester (1642); and Poems, in which he shows himself a follower of Ben Jonson, edited by A. B. Grosart in Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies Library, vol. iii. (1871).
The chief interest in Falkland does not lie in his writings or in the incidents of his career, but in his character and the distinction of his intellectual position, in his isolation from his contemporaries seeking reformation in the inward and spiritual life of the church and state and not in its outward and material form, and as the leader and chief of rationalism in an age dominated by violent intolerance and narrow dogmatism. His personal appearance, according to Clarendon, was insignificant, “in no degree attractive or promising. His stature was low and smaller than most men; his motion not graceful ... but that little person and small stature was quickly found to contain a great heart ... all mankind could not but admire and love him.”[4]
Authorities.—There is a Life and Times by J. A. R. Marriott (1907); see also S. R. Gardiner’s Hist, of England; Hist. of the Civil War; the same author’s article in the Dict. of Nat. Biography
