The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, Begun in the Year 1641: With the Precedent Passages, and Actions, That Contributed Thereunto, and the Happy End, and Conclusion Thereof by the King's Blessed Restoration, and Return upon the 29th of…

xxv, 288, [2], 289-720; [viii], [1]-466, [2], 467-752; xiv, 364, [2], 365-773, [73] pp. Volume 1 is a 1705 printing, volumes 2 & 3 are 1706. Engraved frontispiece portrait of author. Immense index follows text of third volume. ESTC T53940, N9850, T147811. An account of the English Civil War, the first comprehensive work on the topic, written by one of its key players who was subsequently banished. Originally written from 1646 to 1648, the author later combined it with his autobiography and updated it to include events since 1644. David Hume provided a critical but ultimately positive review of the work some fifty years after its initial publication from 1702-1704: "This age affords great materials for history; but did not produce any accomplished historian. Clarendon, however, will always be esteemed an entertaining writer, even independent of our curiosity to know the facts, which he relates. His style is prolix and redundant, and suffocates us by the length of its periods: But it discovers imagination and sentiment, and pleases us at the same time that we disapprove of it. He is more partial in appearance than in reality: For he seems perpetually anxious to apologize for the king; but his apologies are often well grounded. He is less partial in his relation of facts, than in his account of characters: He was too honest a man to falsify the former; his affections were easily capable, unknown to himself, of disguising the latter. An air of probity and goodness runs through the whole work; as these qualities did in reality embellish the whole life of the author." (The History of Great Britain, 1756)