English statesman, eldest son of the 1st Earl of Clarendon and a Royalist who opposed the accession of William and Mary.

As Viscount Cornbury he became a member of Parliament in 1661 and, in 1674, succeeded to the earldom on his father's death. James II made him lord lieutenant of Ireland (September 1685), where he became an unwilling instrument of the King's desire to replace Protestants in high positions by Roman Catholics. He was recalled in January 1687. At the time of the Revolution of 1688–89 he played a vacillating part but opposed the settlement of the crown on William and Mary and remained a nonjuror all his life. On June 24, 1690, 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 January 1691 on the evidence of Richard Graham, Lord Preston. He was released in July of that year, and from that time until his death, in 1709, lived in retirement.

He was a man of some literary taste, a fellow of the Royal Society (1684), and the author of The History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church at Winchester, Continued by S. Gale (1715).