Edward Hyde, 3rd Earl of Clarendon

Edward Hyde, 3rd Earl of Clarendon, also known by the courtesy title of Lord Cornbury (November 28, 1661 - March 31, 1723) was Governor of New York and New Jersey and perhaps best known for the claims of him being a transvestite while in office.

Reputation

Cornbury came to be regarded in the historical literature as a moral profligate, sunk in corruption: possibly the worst governor Britain ever imposed on an American colony. The early accounts claim he took bribes and plundered the public treasury. Nineteenth century historian George Bancroft said that Cornbury illustrated the worst form of the English aristocracy's "arrogance, joined to intellectual imbecility". Later historians characterize him as a "degenerate and pervert who is said to have spent half of his time dressed in women's clothes", a "fop and a wastrel". He is said to have delivered a "flowery panegyric on his wife's ears" after which he invited every gentleman present to feel precisely how shell-like they were; to have misappropriated £1500 meant for the defense of New York Harbor, and, scandalously, to have dressed in women's clothing and lurked "behind trees to pounce, shrieking with laughter, on his victims".

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Patricia U. Bonimi, in her book The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America re-examined these assertions, and states them to be questionable and based on very little evidence. Three colonials, all members of a faction opposed to Cornbury, wrote four letters between 1707 and 1709 discussing a rumor that Governor Cornbury wore women's clothes. There are also some early documents that might be cited to support charges of having taken bribes or misappropriated government funds, but there the contemporary evidence ends.

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Some of the other tales (The ears buisiness, and that Cornbury had vowed to wear women's clothes one month a year), were written fifty years after the supposed events had occurred, and some of the suppositions that were made to justify them (e.g. that he dressed as a woman because he was the Queen's representative) were likely wholly untrue.

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Another frequently cited piece of evidence is that portrait claimed to be of Lord Cornbury dressed in women's clothes hangs today in the New York Historical Society. Very little is known about this portrait though, its date is unknown, its subject is unknown, the subject's sex is unknown, the artist is unknown, and the provenance is unknown.

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